“What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber'sPhantom of the Operaand “High-Pop” Theatre

Abstract

Audiences in popular theater are much more prepared to surrender themselves to a composer going down the route of the opera. On 9 January 2006 Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera (1986) became the longest-running theatrical event in Broadway history. Reporting the fact, the BBC characterized The Phantom as the “most successful entertainment venture of all time,” observing that it had earned nearly three times more than the most lucrative film, James Cameron's Titanic (“Phantom musical surpasses record,” BBC News 2006). Lloyd Webber's earlier Cats (1981) ranks as the third most popular theatrical work ever written (behind Les Misérables), and several of his other musicals—Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Starlight Express—have also enjoyed phenomenal success. But despite unprecedented popular acclaim, or because of it, the development of a significant body of Lloyd Webber criticism has been remarkably slow. As recently as 2006 Jessica Sternfeld could state, with only slight exaggeration, that “Andrew Lloyd Webber … exists in a research vacuum” (5), contrasting that fact, as others had done, with the critical attention given to Lloyd Webber's American rival, Stephen Sondheim. The only serious critical book to appear in the decade of Lloyd Webber's greatest triumphs was Michael Walsh'sAndrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works (1989), and when that book—still unique as a full-length critical study—went into a second, expanded edition in 1997, Walsh ruefully noted that he had been “widely taken to task by critics for the effrontery of treating Lloyd Webber and his work seriously” (256). Only in the last few years has Lloyd Webber finally been treated “seriously,” in a manner befitting his amazing prominence in the modern cultural landscape, and several fine studies have emerged: Stephen Citron'sSondheim and Lloyd-Webber[sic]: The New Musical (2001), John Snelson'sAndrew Lloyd Webber (2004), and Sternfeld'sThe Megamusical (2006). These scholars agree that Lloyd Webber's works are much finer than his many detractors have allowed; but also that, qualitative issues aside, the popularity and influence of the musicals make them worthy of study. Lloyd Webber's critical reception has been fraught with contradictions. Like his most obvious British forbears, Henry Bishop (1786–1855) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900)—both knighted, incidentally, while Lloyd Webber has been made a Lord—he has been intent on bringing increased artistic respectability to popular theatre. In fact, Andrew Pinnock's astute comment on what Bishop was trying to achieve in the 1810s and 1820s exactly describes Lloyd Webber's career in the 1970s and 1980s: “Bishop understood his audience. He did nothing to shock them; he tried, over time, to widen their range of musical experience and to raise their expectations” (5). But the result of Lloyd Webber's reformist project was a series of works so popular that their artistic agenda was generally overlooked, and he has been repeatedly criticized, often in vituperative terms, for cynically pandering to the supposedly corrupted taste of what Michael Feingold specifies as “[t]he semi-educated middle-class world” (Village Voice, 2 February 1988; quoted in Sternfeld: 267). Of course, there are other ways of assessing such popularity. George Perry, an admirer, finds an “insight into prevailing tastes … met with offerings of impeccable quality,” and in this compares Lloyd Webber to the American filmmaker Steven Spielberg (81). Glancing in a different direction, Keita Asari, who was instrumental in popularizing Lloyd Webber's works in Japan, attributes the latter's “universal” success to the fact that he is a “genius who unfolds melodies through various modes that somewhere reverberate classical music” (quoted in Walsh, “Magician”: 58). From almost any critical point of view, Lloyd Webber's central opus is The Phantom of the Opera. It has proved, by a wide margin, his greatest success, and his ambition to “raise the expectations” of his audience is most clearly displayed here. More than any of his previous musicals, The Phantom came close to winning over the critical establishment, with even hostile critics immediately recognizing it as the key work in his career, the one on which his reputation would ultimately rest. “Mr. Lloyd Webber's esthetic has never been more baldly stated than in this show,” maintained the influential and generally negative Frank Rich, sensing that Lloyd Webber's career to that date had reached a logical conclusion in The Phantom. An artistic trajectory that began with Lloyd Webber hitching his wagon to late 1960s “progressive rock,” with its clear “classical” (for want of a better word) pretensions, that evolved through Evita (1976), boldly described as “an opera,” had now produced the most operatic musical ever heard. Early reviews repeatedly referred to The Phantom's operatic dimension, sometimes questioning whether it might be called an opera. Lloyd Webber himself suggested that it could, perhaps should be: “What do we mean by opera, anyway? And where does that put Phantom? Obviously there is a world of difference between Phantom and something like Sugar Babies. But there is no difference today between opera and serious musical theater” (quoted in Walsh, “Magician”: 60). Jerrold Hogle gets it right, I think, when he defines the Lloyd Webber Phantom as a “popular opera,” a work that embodies “many of the contradictions behind the deeply troubled forms of entertainment in middle-class Western culture” (203). He might, though, have said “world culture,” for The Phantom has fared exceptionally well outside the West: it has, for example, been running in Japan since 1988, and for many young Japanese defines what “theatre” is. Such an international impact sharply raises the questions of where the appeal of the show ultimately resides, and what sort of cultural work The Phantom does. The present article is an engagement with those questions. It would be impossible to write a definition of an opera that, while including all those works defined as such in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, somehow excluded The Phantom of the Opera. It is safe to assume, in fact, that those who reject the notion of The Phantom being an opera do so not because of concern about generic niceties, but on the assumption that a “true” opera could not possibly be so outrageously popular. But a “popular opera” (allowing, for the sake of argument, the possibility of such a thing) must, by definition, be popular; significantly, many of those “semi-educated middle-class” people who have embraced The Phantom understand it to be an opera. In April 2007, for example, a Yahoo! Canada discussion board addressed the question: “What is your favorite opera?” Many of the respondents made fairly predictable choices from the classical repertoire: Mozart's Nozze de Figaro and Don Giovanni, Verdi's La Traviata, and Puccini's La Bohème. But three people chose The Phantom of the Opera (making it the favorite of these favorites), and one chose Les Misérables. Internet searches reveal the same pattern: many bloggers, amateur reviewers, and participants in online discussions, from all around the world, make the claim that The Phantom (and rather less often Les Misérables) is their “favorite opera.”1 There is little to be gained from arguing that all these “ordinary” music lovers are mistaken in their understanding of what opera is, but a good deal to be obtained from the recognition that The Phantom satisfies a craving many people have for the experience of opera, or, more precisely, of liking opera. It is (at the least) a work of popular musical theatre that attempts to be as operatic as possible without, however, repelling an audience who would ordinarily consider the idea of “opera” intimidating. Cathleen Myers has described The Phantom as “an opera lovers' dream musical”: it would be more accurate to call it a musical lovers' dream opera. The suggestively titled collection High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment (2002) is useful in clarifying the cultural issues involved here. The book makes no mention of The Phantom of the Opera, or indeed of Lloyd Webber, but the writers establish a larger narrative of cultural shifts that valuably illuminates this musical's unprecedented success. That narrative starts with the “sacrilization of culture” (Collins 4) in the nineteenth century, sees that influentially challenged by the arrival of pop art in the mid twentieth century, with its “determination to move the popular into the world of legitimate culture” (6), and then presents “high-pop” as a “reversal of that flow … transforming Culture into mass entertainment” (6). “High-pop,” which is viewed as having started in the 1980s, before becoming fully visible in the 1990s, involves a wide range of interconnected phenomena: from lavish film adaptations of Shakespeare's plays and Jane Austen's novels, to “blockbuster” art exhibitions attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers, and the advent of bookstores with sofas and cafes. The book spells out and explores the contradictions: “high-pop” likes to present itself as offering “refined” cultural experience superior to that afforded by “mass” commercial culture, yet its products are aggressively branded and marketed, and it tends to become a form of “quality” consumerism. The cover illustration, a photograph of a number of T-shirts printed with Shakespeare's portrait, encapsulates some of these contradictions. One of the contributors to High-Pop writes specifically on opera, and his essay provides a useful context for the more operatic aspects of The Phantom of the Opera. John Storey's“‘Expecting Rain’: Opera as Popular Culture?” begins with the recognition that for many people opera is “the very embodiment of ‘high culture’,” but proceeds to argue that in recent years it has become “more and more a feature of everyday cultural life” (32). Storey points to the increasing use of opera extracts in films and advertising, the emergence of opera singers with pop-star status, and the proliferation of recordings (especially “highlights” collections) and introductory books (Teach Yourself Opera, Opera: A Crash Course, etc.). Much of this, he argues convincingly, is aimed squarely at the culturally aspirational instincts of the “high-pop” sensibility. For example, the 1997 publication Opera for Dummies has a cover blurb defining “Who You Are”: “For starters you're an intelligent person. We can sense it, and we're never wrong about such things. After all, you picked up this book, didn't you?” (quoted in Storey: 38). My conclusion from the evidence Storey presents, however, is that the desire to like opera is far stronger than actual opera appreciation. This has led to a great proliferation of what might be termed “entrance level” materials (“highlights” collections and so on), while making comparatively little difference to such “advanced” forms of opera appreciation as actually sitting through one. As Storey's figures show, opera attendance in Britain increased by less than 3% during the 1980s. Moreover, recent interest in opera, and advertisers' and filmmakers' willingness to make use of opera, does not apply to all opera, but is essentially concentrated on opera from Mozart to Puccini, or from about 1780 to 1930. These limits to the scale and scope of “high-pop” appetite for opera actually come close to defining the audience to which The Phantom of the Opera principally appeals. Lloyd Webber never presumes too much on his audience's desire for opera, and even offers his own little “crash course” in the art form from Mozart to Puccini. To get some purchase on these issues, it is useful to return to Lloyd Webber's previously quoted claim that “there is no difference today between opera and serious musical theater.” That statement is absurd if understood, with grammatical literalness, as meaning today's “serious musical theater” (i.e., works like The Phantom) is no different from today's opera. The Phantom of the Opera is stylistically a world apart from contemporary “serious” opera, such as the works of Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies in Britain, or of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Philip Glass elsewhere. What Lloyd Webber obviously meant is that serious musicals “today” (specifically the late 1980s) speak with the sort of voice opera used to employ when it was a popular art form. Hal Prince, who directed Phantom, had earlier made the same argument in relation to Evita: “opera is and always has been musical theater of its time in a form with limited dialogue. … Puccini and Verdi were pop composers of their era … those operas were the showbiz musicals of their times” (quoted in Walsh, Andrew Lloyd Webber: 105). Getting Opera: A Guide for the Cultured but Confused, one of the recent guides discussed by Storey, advised its readers: “don't be afraid of opera because some force has foolishly built it up as the ultimate in refinement. Opera has historically been a popular art form that aimed to entertain ordinary people” (quoted in Storey: 40). Opera scholars would want to qualify all these claims, but they are partly true, and essentially well-intended. As a “popular opera,”The Phantom of the Opera seeks to join—quite explicitly—that older tradition of popular operatic entertainment, one best exemplified, as Prince suggests, in the Italian tradition from Rossini to Puccini. As such, it employs a distinctly old-fashioned operatic sound, for which the story, set in the Paris Opera House in 1881, provides the perfect excuse: Lloyd Webber's operatic musical aligns itself with the glamour of opera in its most glamorous period. Puccini's death in 1924 has often been seen as marking the end of opera as “a popular art form.”Storey follows a number of American scholars in attributing the process by which “opera was transformed from entertainment enjoyed by the many into Culture to be appreciated by the few” (37) to the cultivation of exclusivity by operatic institutions. This argument seems more than problematic in the American context,2 and certainly makes no sense in Italy, and little in France or Britain. It is more the case that first operetta, then cinema, drew off much of the popular following opera had enjoyed in its heyday of broad appeal. At the same time, Wagner and the academically trained composers who followed him (many of whom had little practical experience of theatre) tended to introduce advanced music into their operas, thus establishing an increasing divide between “serious” opera and more popular forms of musical theatre. The Phantom of the Opera does not try to close that gap (in the way Michael Nyman's operas do, say), but rather returns to a reference point prior to the moment when that gap became a yawning gulf. In commercial terms, it bears the same sort of relation to “serious” opera that operetta bore a century ago, but while operetta became popular by consciously distancing itself from opera, The Phantom has courted popularity precisely by gravitating toward opera. In a sense, what operetta stole from opera— the “middle-brow” audience, the hummable tune—The Phantom of the Opera gives back, at the same time picking up just enough “elitist” glamour to satisfy “high-pop” aspiration. The Phantom of the Opera is not just “operatic”: it also plots its own relationship to opera, and in doing so invents a tradition for the modern “high-pop” musical. Gaston Leroux, who wrote the French novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (1910, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, 1911) on which the Lloyd Webber musical is based, worked for many years as a theatre critic, and knew a great deal about contemporary opera. His novel is accordingly (and appropriately) full of references to various composers and their operas, Charles-François Gounod's once hugely popular Faust (1859) being the most frequently mentioned. Ken Hill's musical Phantom of the Opera (in its second form, 1984), which first attracted Lloyd Webber's attention to the theatrical possibilities of the story, uses genuine opera music: there is, appropriately, a good deal from Faust, as well as cleverly selected numbers from operas by Bizet, Boito, Donizetti, Dvorak, Mozart, Offenbach, and Verdi. Lloyd Webber's Phantom includes very little in the way of “opera talk,” though, and does not borrow in any deliberate way from earlier operas. This artistic decision suggests that Lloyd Webber was not concerned with appealing to established opera lovers in the way Leroux and Hill were. Instead, he includes three little meta-theatrical fragments of imaginary operas that skillfully connect the foreground (the human drama) and background (the opera house) of the story. These have inspired some critical discussion, most of it descriptive and concerned with the question of which composers Lloyd Webber is burlesquing. Snelson's account of the musical styles of these fragments, and their dramatic function in the work as a whole, is unlikely to be surpassed. Nevertheless, my analysis departs considerably from his, for while Snelson locates the meaning of the fragments in their contribution to the larger musical retelling of Leroux's story, I trace a different, meta-theatrical set of meanings, in which these fragments comment on musical theatre itself, guiding and shaping the audience's feelings not only about opera, but about its modern “high-pop” offspring. After the overture, the curtain rises on the stage of the Paris Opéra in 1881 where a fictional opera, Hannibal, composed by a never-before-heard-of composer named Chalumeau, is in rehearsal. The subject is from ancient history, like any number of earlier (real) operas, and the treatment lavish and spectacular, with chorus, scantily clad dancing girls, and even a wooden elephant wheeled across the stage. Critics have repeatedly named Giacomo Meyerbeer as the opera composer burlesqued here, though, as Snelson says, “[t]he operatic pastiche is not sufficiently sharp to be pinned down to one specific composer” (108). In any case, “Meyerbeer” functions in operatic history as a sort of shorthand for French grand opéra, two examples of which are specifically named in Leroux's novel: Meyerbeer's Le prophète (1849) and (more frequently) Jacques Fromental Halévy's masterpiece La Juive (1835). More relevant, though, Lloyd Webber's target audience is unlikely to know anything about Meyerbeer. Frank Rich huffily dismissed Lloyd Webber's “three self-indulgently windy opera parodies … tiresome collegiate jokes at the expense of such less than riotous targets as Meyerbeer.” But this misses the point: the majority of the millions of people who have seen (and enjoyed) The Phantom of the Opera may well find this scene “tiresome”—such is Lloyd Webber's intention, I argue—but not because it makes fun of Meyerbeer. This mass audience, rather, registers the scene as a representation of the sort of opera that might have been seen in Paris in 1881. And what the scene initially establishes is that in the world of opera, particularly grand opéra, the (potentially) sublime and the (actually) ridiculous are often near allied. The part of Hannibal, the lover—absurdly—of “ELISSA, Queen of Carthage” (Perry 142)3 as well as the great general of history and legend, is played by a fat Italian singer, Piangi, who struggles to pronounce his words properly and finds it even harder to clamber onto the back of his elephant (the latter always provoking an audience laugh). As Jerry Fodor has recently written, defining the “preposterous” side of opera: “The performers often don't look right for the parts they sing and generally can't act. Even if you understand the language that they sing in, what they sing is not likely to be intelligible … And so on” (3). The “preposterousness,” or “tiresomeness,” of “old-fashioned” opera established, something happens that very probably dismays the few thousand lovers of Meyerbeer as much as it thrills the many million lovers of Lloyd Webber. One of the incoming managers requests Carlotta, the leading soprano, to sing Elissa's “rather fine aria in Act Three of ‘Hannibal’” (142). Carlotta then starts to sing: Think of me,think of me fondly,when we've saidgoodbye. (143) A few lines into the “aria” there is an interruption engineered by the Phantom, after which Carlotta storms off, refusing to sing any more. Christine, the heroine, one of the chorus girls, is then given the chance to sing the “aria” instead, and does so with such brilliance that she is given the chance to repeat the performance at that evening's gala (a clever scene shift allows her to start singing it backstage to the managers and finish it front stage before an appreciative audience). As often in Lloyd Webber's economically designed musicals, the “aria,” or song, does a good deal of dramatic work, effectively introducing Christine, setting up her rivalry with Carlotta, and establishing her relationship with Raoul de Chagny, who joins in singing to the same melody from his box. But at the level of style, the song is even more significant. Several critics have commented that it is not at all like Meyerbeerian grand opéra, and some have tried, pedantically, to tie it down to specific nineteenth-century models. Michael Feingold, for example, found it “a tacky 1850s-style parlor song of the Balfé[sic!]4 or Stephen Foster kind” (Village Voice 2 February 1988; quoted in Sternfeld: 418). Snelson, apparently the first critic to actually study the (unpublished) full score, found the song marked “(like Schubert!)” (109). But he is surely correct to argue that the song, whatever its inspiration, “must straddle that gap between the show's onstage operatic world and the offstage ‘real world’” (110). In other words, it carries the audience from the idiom of Meyerbeerian grand opéra to the idiom of Lloyd Webber's own “operatic” musical, and it is safe to assume that millions of people have relaxed at this point in the performance, with a sort of “yes, this is what we've come for” feeling. The almost annoyingly memorable “Think of Me” is indeed a very characteristic Lloyd Webber song, a fact that has paradoxically been more obvious to hostile critics. For the serious opera lover, then, this first scene of The Phantom of the Opera is rather absurd. On one hand, the fictional Hannibal is an acceptably accurate burlesque of nineteenth-century French grand opéra; on the other hand, it purportedly contains a lovely, musical-type song that seems quintessentially Lloyd Webberish. But the larger public for whom The Phantom was designed are less likely to be concerned about such anachronistic stylistic discordance than delighted that something so musically “alien” as Hannibal had seemed should turn out to contain such an enjoyable, accessible “aria.” In other words, this opening, meta-opera scene first appeals to an anti-opera prejudice that many musical audiences are likely to have (“its absurd and boring”), then leads them to question that prejudice (“but it contains beautiful arias”). The Phantom thus quickly establishes a perspective on opera likely to be shared by many members of the audience, while at the same time encouraging the idea that the “highlights” in opera are worth the longueurs. As noted already, the emerging “high-pop” trend saw many people tentatively approaching the world of opera precisely through the experience of “highlights.” Whatever opera lovers may say, the scene is skillfully designed to draw out the limited though not insignificant interest in opera that the large audience aimed at possesses. That audience starts to think that it might like to hear more of the fictitious Hannibal: what it gets instead is Lloyd Webber's own “popular opera” that picks up the most immediately attractive aspects of grand opéra—soaring “arias,” big choruses, lavish spectacle—and leaves the “boring” bits behind. But “Think of Me” does something else, too. By being, in fact, not a “real” opera “aria” but a slightly operaticized musical “song” it invents a tradition for the modern musical and connects it with the “high” culture of the past. In doing so, it appeals to the culturally aspirational instincts of the audience, discussed above. The musical is no longer a vulgar alternative to opera, but a modern development of it. A useful perspective on the cultural politics of Lloyd Webber's gesture here is obtained if one reflects on the fact that the most successful writer of British musicals in the 1960s, when Lloyd Webber was learning his trade, was Lionel Bart (1930–1999), best known as the composer of Oliver! (1960). Bart, so ignorant of the technical side of music that he could not read the simplest score, was steeped in the dying culture of the music halls and had made his reputation in the late 1950s with a handful of rock ’n’ roll songs. His musicals were unprecedentedly “popular” in the sense that their affiliation with the popular music of the masses was immediately evident. In other words, Bart enriched the British musical by connecting it more strongly to the “low” sounds of the music hall and rock ’n’ roll, and in a sense it can be said he too invented a tradition for it, encouraging his audiences to think that what they were experiencing was somehow rooted in spontaneous sing-alongs in the pubs of London's East End. One could hardly imagine a greater contrast with the plaintive melody emerging from Lloyd Webber's opulent Parisian opera house. The first act of The Phantom of the Opera begins with Hannibal and ends with the very different but equally fictional Il Muto, by an imaginary Italian composer named Albrizzio. Il Muto is easily recognizable as an opera buffa (“comic opera”), a quintessentially Italian genre that had developed in the 1700s and produced in Mozart's three Da Ponte operas (1786–1790) and Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) its most enduring triumphs. Little of the story of Il Muto is revealed, but the performance proceeds far enough for the audience to understand that it is about a certain Countess conducting a love affair with a page boy, Serafimo, who is disguised as her maid. Her cuckolded husband mistrusts her and announces that he has to travel to England “on affairs of State” (151), while actually planning to hide in the house to watch her. It has often been suggested that Il Muto is a parody of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), where again there is a page, Cherubino, who adopts female disguise and is in love with a Countess (both page roles are for women). Some critics have disputed the connection, for reasons that can only be considered excessively pedantic (Snelson 112–13; Sternfeld 237). The name chosen for the page deliberately establishes a connection with Le Nozze: “Serafimo” surely derives from “seraph” in the same way that “Cherubino” derives from “cherub.” As Le Nozze is one of the best-known operas in the classical repertoire, this is as close as Lloyd Webber comes to appealing to the knowledge of opera possessed by some members of his audience. Il Muto can be understood as a sort of feminist reworking of Beaumarchais's classic story: in Le Nozze the countess is the innocent victim of her husband's philandering, and Cherubino a garrulous boy; in Il Muto the countess is a sexual predator, while Serafimo is “the silent one” of the opera's title.5 But The Phantom as a whole is certainly not a story with a feminist agenda and the significance of this clever piece of pastiche lies elsewhere. As with the earlier Hannibal, the theatrical experience of The Phantom is undoubtedly enriched by knowledge of the operatic idiom burlesqued in Il Muto. But Lloyd Webber knows his audience too well to make the mistake of assuming that they know much about Mozartian opera. Rather, by simulating an eighteenth-century idiom he gives his audience some idea of how opera developed over time. Even audiences with little knowledge of operatic history probably assume, from the costumes and mannered style of singing, that Il Muto is an earlier opera than Hannibal. In any case, the Phantom libretto leaves them in no doubt, for André is made to say to his fellow-manager, “Nothing like the old operas!” (151). There is no suggestion that there are big, romantic “arias” and lavish spectacle in Il Muto, as there were in Hannibal, so keeping in mind the suggestion that Lloyd Webber is inventing an operatic tradition for the modern musical, the audience is left to infer that the clever, elegant artificiality of eighteenth-century opera evolved into the exotic magnificence of nineteenth-century opera that in turn evolved into the modern Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. There is considerable art in the way The Phantom of the Opera deftly sketches key moments in operatic history in just a few minutes. Opera lovers and opera critics would certainly regard the broad arc just gestured at, from Mozart to Meyerbeer to Lloyd Webber, as a downward one, but a counter argument might be made that it is an upward arc in terms of the size and social diversity of the audience for opera. Audiences adjusting to the “operatic” style of The Phantom of the Opera, which can be loosely characterized as Puccini tempered with progressive rock, might have been inclined to question why, if “opera” is this enjoyable, they had conceived a prejudice against the art form in the first place. In a sense, Lloyd Webber answers that question with the third of his operas-within-an-opera, Don Juan Triumphant. This is different from the others, in being much more integral to the story, and in being written by the Phantom himself, rather than a supposedly established opera composer. In Leroux's novel, the Phantom—there named Erik—is described as having worked for twenty years on an opera of that name. He refuses to play it to Christine in the course of her first visit to his underground lair, on the grounds that it is a new kind of music of an intensity she is not ready for: “there is some music