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In the original novel of The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux spends a lot of time developing our perception of Erik as a near-superhuman genius. He establishes this in many ways, from explaining how his torture chamber worked to detailing all the havoc he could cause with a simple safety-pin trick. Another side to Erik's genius, however, is the view of him as an artist. His masterwork, Don Juan Triumphant, is described as a work of passion that bewitches those who hear it; and Erik therefore refuses to play it for Christine, the woman for whom he would do nearly anything including committing murder.
When Christine snatches off Erik's mask, though, she unleashes his darker side and, after terrifying her out of her wits, Erik returns to his room and begins playing Don Juan. The translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, which was the first English translation of the novel and still the most readily available, gives us this account of what Christine heard when the Phantom was thundering away at the organ:
"His Don Juan Triumphant (for I had not a doubt that he had rushed to his masterpiece to forget the horror of the moment) seemed to me at first one long, awful, magnificent sob. But, little by little, it expressed every emotion, every suffering of which mankind is capable." (p. 129)
A beautiful description, to be sure. But as I found out after reading the unabridged translation Lowell Bair published in 1990, this earlier version was incomplete. Bair's translation included the following paragraph:
"I remembered the notebook with red notes in it, and easily imagined that this music had been written in blood. It took me into all the details of martyrdom and into every part of the abyss inhabited by the ugly man; it showed me Erik banging his poor, hideous head against the grim walls of that hell, and avoiding being seen by people, so as not to frighten them. Gasping, overwhelmed, and compassionate, I listened to the swelling of gigantic chords in which sorrow was made divine. Then the sounds from the abyss suddenly came together in a prodigious, threatening flight, a swirling flock that seemed to rise into the sky like an eagle soaring toward the sun, and I heard such a triumphal symphony, seemingly setting the world ablaze, that I realized the work was ending and that ugliness, lifted on the wings of love, had dared to look beauty in the face." (p. 140)
What I take from that description is that Don Juan Triumphant wasn't just a general portrayal of the suffering of mankind as an abstraction. It was Erik's own pain and torment printed on that score, but ending with a gasp of hope that perhaps he could be loved and accepted for who he was.
Many of the adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera also portray Erik as a gifted composer and musician, but they tend to deviate from the novel a bit in terms of how Erik feels about his compositions. In the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, Erik freely and willingly plays his Don Juan for Christine, who unmasks him as he's playing. The 1943 and 1962 films both feature the Phantom starting out as a composer who wants to publish his music and, in the end, has the opera company above him perform his work, naturally with Christine in the main role. In Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, Winslow Leach similarly wants to publish his rock version of Faust, and ends up having to make a Faustian pact of his own to do it. The 1989 film starring Robert Englund took a similar tack; Erik Destler made a deal with the Devil to make people love him for his music. And the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber features a Phantom who writes his Don Juan Triumphant with the intent of making the opera company perform it.
I feel that the versions that feature Phantoms who want their music performed represent an interesting departure from Erik's characterization in Leroux's original novel. Of course, being different from the novel doesn't necessarily make those versions "wrong" or "bad;" far from it in most cases. What I interpret it as is that in the novel, Erik considers Don Juan to be an intensely personal work. Just like the face he keeps hidden behind a mask, he doesn't want anyone – even Christine – to be exposed to it. As we find out later, though, the composition is in a way connected with Erik's physical appearance. Once Christine has seen his face, he's so caught up in emotion that even shouting, threats, and physical abuse don't provide enough of an outlet; only his music functions as enough of a "safety valve" in that case.
Here I must digress for a bit and talk about my thoughts on one aspect of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. I've read comments from a few Phans who have said that they don't like how the Phantom runs to the organ and thunders out a chord on the line "This is the point of no return" in the final lair sequence. While I agree that for some actors, the blocking does seem a bit forced, I think the gesture itself represents one of the most true-to-Leroux moments in the musical. In this scene, the Phantom is so overwhelmed by emotion that even singing and threatening to kill Raoul aren't enough to express it; he must make himself and his feelings known through an even grander gesture, and that is his own Don Juan Triumphant.
Indeed, in every scene in which the Phantom plays the organ, he's playing sections of Don Juan – the "I Have Brought You" section after the title song, the part before "Stranger Than You Dreamt It" where he's composing his work, and the aforementioned lead-in to the "Point of No Return" reprise. In the first of these scenes, as well, he's consumed by emotion – in that case, arousal caused by Christine's singing – that needs an outlet which singing can't provide alone. That's one of the problems I had with the film version of the musical; at no point does Gerard Butler's Phantom actually play the organ, even though it dominates the area of his lair and he does sit at it when composing. I felt that removing those parts makes his Phantom a bit too "down-to-earth" and removes his connection to his own composition, as well as limiting his talents unnecessarily.
Back to the main point . . . When looking at different versions of the Phantom's story, it's interesting to see how different writers, composers, filmmakers, and actors interpret Erik's connection to his music. The Englund film took it in an especially interesting direction; at one point, a character mentions a legend that says the only way to kill the Phantom is to destroy his music. But of course, music cannot be destroyed as long as there's still someone who remembers it; as another quote from the film reminds us, "only love and music are forever."
Another interesting question Phans can ask themselves is, what would Erik's compositions have actually sounded like? Clearly, Leroux meant for it to be so powerful that humans could scarcely imagine it . . . but one wonders if the author who started the legend had some melody in his head when he wrote about what Christine heard. One topic on phantomoftheopera.com posed the question of what Erik's music might have sounded like, and one response posed an idea I hadn't thought of before: Since Erik spent much of his early adulthood in Persia, his music must have drawn from Middle-Eastern tradition as well as classical European themes. It would certainly have been like nothing that most people in 19th-century Paris would have heard.
And perhaps Erik's compositions would have drawn from even more different musical traditions; Asian music in particular used scales very different from the 12-tone scales that most musicians today are familiar with. Sounds that would seem out-of-tune or "wrong" to us were commonplace in the music of many other countries until fairly recently, and perhaps Erik made use of them in his works. After all, retuning a pipe organ to accommodate those new pitches would probably be an easy task for someone as musically and mechanically gifted as Erik.
Regardless of how we imagine Erik's music might have sounded or what motives he might have had for writing them, the Phantom's art represents another aspect of his character that many identify with. I think everyone has some kind of artistic potential within them, whether it's drawing, painting, singing, dancing, writing, sculpting, composing, acting, playing an instrument, cooking, or something else entirely. Most don't get the right opportunities to discover what kind of art works best for them and develop it to its full potential, but Erik gives us an interesting case study. Here we see a man who was cut off from society because of something he couldn't control; in this case, his physical appearance. And yet, perhaps because of his separation from those who might have hindered or distracted him, he was able to develop his skills and produce music so grand and so overwhelming that we can barely begin to imagine it. But in the end, the world wasn't ready to accept this gift, just as it wasn't ready to accept him as a human being. This, then, is the final tragedy of Don Juan Triumphant –- a society that couldn't accept Erik for who he was will never know the beauty, passion, sorrow, or splendor of the artwork he had created.
*******
I remain your obedient servant,
I.A.E.
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