By Maria Mitchell
Phantom of the Opera , composed and conducted by Misha Segal, 1989.
Many film soundtracks have music that is repetitive since a score has to compliment the film. This is why, when heard separately from the film, a soundtrack can sometimes feel boring. It’s really not. It’s interesting because of the subtle switches in mood and tone that occur in the nuances of the music. Orchestral soundtracks explore emotion in many different ways as a means of musically crafting character, mood, plot, and resolution.
This particular score is a mature, positive aspect to a film that is, otherwise, over the top. It’s disappointing that this version was billed as being based on the original book by Gaston Leroux since, to date, the only film versions of Phantom of the Opera that present faithful adaptations to the book are the original silent movie with Lon Chaney and an obscure cartoon version released in 1987. The cartoon version relies mostly on original text from the book to craft its dialogue.
This version is a gory horror adaptation, which packs no surprises and few actual frights. Consequently, the score isn’t particularly suspenseful. It relies on the main orchestral string theme to gracefully carry out the bulk of the scenes with a brass sub theme to herald moments of monstrousness perpetrated by the title character. As aforementioned, not a suspenseful score, just an elegantly arranged series of cues stitched together to create a soundtrack which evokes feelings of regret, desolation, isolation, and the idea of a labour of love lost. That last point is what makes the score really interesting. Phantom of the Opera, I believe, isn’t really a love story. I’ve often thought of it as Leroux’s sly jab at the entertainment industry: some ridiculously naïve person blindly follows the example of someone they don’t know. They eventually receive the success they crave at a price they could never afford.
Yet, Segal’s score tells a different story. It tells the story of a person who sacrificed nothing but his own arrogance and received that arrogance back in the form of losing the music he traded his life for, making the point that if a pursuit was ridiculous in the first place, then it won’t find a better incarnation in another time or context, making the theme of a labour of love lost less a tragedy and more of a cyclical joke. There is almost a humorous irony to the score as the lovely main theme is repeated in the film to the point of nausea. It was as if Segal was trying to say this Phantom is one-note.
One-note Phantom aside, this score is one of the more interesting scores of the numerous film versions of this story. Other interesting score versions of Phantom include a campy, sassy, fun score for Phantom of the Paradise, released in 1974. Misha Segal’s score, however, in tone and execution, is the one that would best match the original tone of Leroux’s story because of its beauty being woven intricately into its nausea.
Maria Mitchell is a writer of dark fiction who reviews film scores that pulse with a beat to match.
The soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera is available through Amazon.com.