Abstract
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. Over the years, the musical has outshone the novel in its immediacy to exert a direct influence on the audience. The overall popularity of the musical points to the successful use of music supported by visual feast and narration. 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. It is self-evident that music constitutes the fundamental unit of musical theatres. 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.
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Notes
The lyrics are written by Richard Stilgoe and Charles Hart.
Patricia Drumright argues that “between 1986 and 2011, there were at least thirty more productions including twenty other stage versions. Another four movies were filmed. One television mini-series, two cartoons, and two parodies or knock-offs were made, and two different radio productions were broadcast. In addition, Leroux’s character has inspired the creation of scores of prequels, sequels, and rewrites as well as dozens of other derivations including children’s works, comics, graphic novels, non-fiction books, translations, and songs (‘Adaptations’)” (Drumright 2012, pp. 9–10).
“Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was golden as the sun’s rays and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes. She wheedled her mother, was kind to her doll, took great care of her frock and her little red shoes and her fiddle, but most of all loved, when she went to sleep to hear the Angel of Music” (Leroux 2007, p. 52).
In a confrontation with Raoul, Christine’s suitor, Madame Giry reveals that the Phantom was a circus freak born with a deformity. However, the sequence did not catch as much as attention as it deserves because it was spoken in an almost “all-sung show” (Sternfeld 2015).
“The ghost is a man” (Leroux 2007. p. 45).
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Funding was provided by Edith Cowan University Higher Degree by Research Scholarship.
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Karali, S.N. Musical affect and the emotion–cognition interaction in The Phantom of the Opera. Neohelicon 47, 249–263 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00525-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00525-2