Why "Love Never Dies" is a tragedy

[igenlode]

"Love Never Dies" is a tragedy -- and that's not inherently wrong (although tough on the fans, not to mention the characters); a lot of operas are tragedies. "The Phantom of the Opera" can be seen as a tragedy if you're looking at it and weeping over the poor heartbroken deserted Phantom.

But as I've said elsewhere, the problem with the plot is not necessarily the fact that Christine dies. It's not that Raoul gets tricked into abandoning his wife in the clutches of her adulterous (and murderous) lover, an act which results more or less directly in her death -- in the hands of a Puccini or a Verdi, that could be the stuff of the most heart-rending grief and remorse -- but that this is presented as being an act so self-evidently right and inevitable that it gets taken for granted and nobody ever mentions it again.

It's a tragedy... but it's not a tragedy that the Phantom gets Christine killed and then takes her son. It's a tragedy that when he thrusts his way by force majeure into the middle of a marriage that neither of the couple shows any indication of wanting to leave, for all their unhappiness with its current state, he then messes up the attempt at reconciliation prompted by his actions.

Basically, he destroys Christine's family -- a family that we see her making considerable efforts to hold together. And then in his own selfishness he destroys her, leaving the rest of that family devastated. And then we're told that he is the one we ought to be feeling sorry for, and whom Gustave should magically love...

Comments

[igenlode]

I feel there's a big 'show'/'tell' divide; LND keeps telling us that the Phantom is a tragic romantic figure, but from what it shows us of him we see mainly an unlikeable selfish character, who expresses contempt for his own shows (none of the 'cheap vaudeville trash' he has been writing can possibly equal the music he would create if Christine were in his possession) and performers, threatens Christine's child in order to blackmail her (Christine's child, who carries the blood of the woman he claims to adore -- but apparently that's irrelevant until he magically discovers that the boy might have his own unspeakably potent genes as well), betrays his one unselfish impulse within hours of making it (he consents to let Christine go free with the boy on condition that Gustave never finds out his secret, then almost immediately makes use of her promise to sing for him in order to trick Raoul into a bet with a foregone conclusion), and spends most of his time feeling sorry for himself despite the fact that he is now rich, famous, popular (by the end he even gets two women fighting over his favours!) and in total artistic control of his own performance space -- in other words he has succeeeded in getting practically everything he wanted in the previous musical.

But according to the way the musical presents it, the Phantom is always automatically in the right and anyone who opposes him -- Madame Giry complaining about their labours going unrewarded, Meg seeing her headline spot taken away from her unannounced, Christine telling him he lost all rights to any claim on her affections ten years ago, Raoul learning that Christine has lied to him about the Phantom's identity -- is automatically presented as being quite unreasonable.

The plot is not unworkable -- when considered as a tragedy. It's the moral it's attempting to draw that just doesn't convince.

And as I've remarked before, if you play the plot out from the point of view of Raoul's tragedy -- the miserable consciousness of having failed himself and her, the stimulus of the old enemy finally giving him the strength to confront his own demons and make the effort to bridge the gap, the vow of renewed love returned and the promise of a shared future, followed by Christine's response ("Hearts may get broken, love endures") condemning him in all innocence to a choice between heartbreak and dishonour, only for his attempt at renunciation to leave her unprotected when the Phantom's own faults come home to roost at the cost of her life... leaving him at the end of the play with no wife, no son, no patrimony, no honour, no hope, no future, and not even the past in which he had always believed -- it's an infinitely more interesting arc with a character who is presented as flawed but trying to struggle against those flaws, and who is doomed in the end (in a classic trope) by the tragic ignorance of his wife's actions: Christine has no idea that she is being asked to choose between leaving her marriage and breaking her word.

Meanwhile the Phantom's one big idea is that his music has some kind of hypnotic effect on Christine and that if he can get her to perform it then he will be able to reconquer her (despite everything she has undergone at his hands). Given her behaviour in "Phantom of the Opera" this belief may well be justified ;-) However, it's not a terribly admirable character trait...

[erimia]

I think with the music they aimed at good old "the Phantom can understand her in a way that Raoul can't cause they are both artists" and the Australian staging of the title song sorta hints at it, where you get the impression that this and not either of the men is her real passion. Except she never came off as someone for whom the music was the most important thing in the first musical? Though it would be interesting and they could have improved things if they developed this theme in LND.
LND IS a Raoul tragedy for me. It becomes so much stronger when Raoul is played in more sympathetic manner. But even then I just can't understand why tell this story at all. As it is, Raoul is made like this to make him less attractive and make the Phantom good in comparison. But if look at this from the point of Raoul being a sympathetic character and a central character and the Phantom being a jerk, what does this story serve for except maybe making Raoul and Meg more interesting characters? I surely love the theme of the loss of innocence and deterioration but what does it achieve here? If interpret LND as a Raoul tragedy, it kinda reminds me of those "whump" fics where authors make Raoul suffer because they just want to see him suffer beautifully.
By the way, apparently LND Raoul somewhat mirrors the biography of Gaston Leroux. He was born a rich privileged man but gambled/drank away his money and had to take writing as a job. I wonder if ALW was inspired by it when writing LND. Well, maybe Raoul will become an author of strange mistery novels to cope with his trauma? :D He certainly already has some material for this.

[igenlode]

The whole "Raoul doesn't understand/hates music" theme in fanfiction (and LND) doesn't make a lot of sense.
In the original novel, Raoul is explicitly described as responding to music on an artistic level -- "il était poète et aimait la musique dans ce qu'elle a de plus ailé" -- and in fact he is twice caught up in the same response to Erik's music as Christine, its intended target: once in the graveyard and once in her dressing-room during the masquerade. (Erik very nearly lures Raoul in unintentionally through the mirror along with Christine, which would have been highly awkward for all concerned!)
Indeed, they initially meet as children *not* because of her red scarf, but because the young Raoul was so attracted by Christine's singing that he insisted on dragging his governess on a long detour because he couldn't tear himself away :-p
And when he is an adult, it is of course the sound of her Erik-inspired singing -- when she finally reveals in public what she can do -- that causes him to admit to himself that he loves her, after trying to suppress it because he knows they won't be allowed to marry.

That's canon for the musical version as well: "He was bound to love you/When he heard you sing" -- even the Phantom admits it :-D

So the idea that Christine's music is a horrible noise that makes Raoul's head hurt, and that he tries to sabotage it is... weird.
You could justify it by all sorts of character development, e.g. Raoul now associates music with the traumatic events at the Opera, or Raoul feels that Christine's voice is the Phantom speaking through her, but -- as with most things Raoul-related in LND -- no attempt at explanation is even made. It's just generic "we need to make Raoul look like a bad choice in order to make adultery with the Phantom look even vaguely appealing".

The reason for "why tell this story at all" appears to be "in order to make the Phantom into a tragic romantic hero" (or "so that the author can have his cake and eat it": he can have the Phantom 'win' Christine without having to deal with the consequences). The idea is to make people sorry for the Phantom, while using minor characters like Raoul and Meg whom nobody much cares about in the original as a mechanism to achieve this aim.

I'm not sure I can call to mind many 'whump' fics where authors want Raoul to suffer beautifully (a phrase that always makes me think of Ivor Novello, whose screen roles specialised in it!)
I can think of just one that involved a third party kidnapping and torturing Raoul over many chapters for some kind of complicated dynastic reasons, but as it's not in my favourites I can't trace it ;-)

(I suppose you could categorise a couple of mine under that heading...)


So far as I remember, Gaston Leroux wasn't born wealthy; he inherited a large sum as a young man and spent it all very quickly!

[igenlode]

I'm not sure I can call to mind many 'whump' fics where authors want Raoul to suffer beautifully (a phrase that always makes me think of Ivor Novello, whose screen roles specialised in it!)
I can think of just one that involved a third party kidnapping and torturing Raoul over many chapters for some kind of complicated dynastic reasons, but as it's not in my favourites I can't trace it ;-)

I did eventually find it: https://vicomte-de-chagny.dreamwidth.org/12185.html
"Puzzle Pieces" by lourdesmont.