These metareferential aspects are amplified in the 2004 film version, where the cinema audience is able to observe not only the ‘operas’, but also the opera ‘audience’ within the production. However, outside of the diegetic context of the musical’s story, they also possess extracompositional qualities which reference musical, historical, and dramatic events, as well as musical styles, repertoires, and even specific works. These fragments themselves play important intracompositional roles in the plot.
Departing from Gaston Leroux’s 1909–1910 novel, in which actual operas (notably Gounod’s Faust) function as important plot devices, Lloyd Webber and his librettists created three pastiche ‘operas’, parts of which are heard and seen in the course of the musical. A so-called megamusical, it is a popular musical theatre piece in which opera itself is a kind of character, and which refers on many levels to opera, operatic conventions, and specific operatic musical styles. Thus, the main analysis dwells on the intertwined relationship between music and affect studies in order to explain the underlying reason why Leroux’s literary work has taken a back seat to Webber’s musical theatre, though the former provides an undeniably rich source for the latter and originally frames the debate on consciousness and the mind-body problem.Īndrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera (London, 1986) presents an interesting case of metareference. It is self-evident that music constitutes the fundamental unit of musical theatres. The general effect of Phantom over the audience also contributes to the problematization of mind-body dualism in affect theory and literary criticism, which also surfaces in cognitive psychology as emotion–cognition interaction. The overall popularity of the musical points to the successful use of music supported by visual feast and narration. Over the years, the musical has outshone the novel in its immediacy to exert a direct influence on the audience.
This essay explores how the Broadway musical of The Phantom of the Opera blurs the traditional distinction between cognition and emotion with the use of operatic music and librettos.
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