It will give you goose-bumps

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4CQK-ML_KA

I love music. It is the one media that never ceases to give me goose-bumps. In this piece from The Phantom of the Opera called The Music of the Night, there is extreme romanticism in action with the tone and shape of the music and the words being said.

The rhetoric of words being said is a combination of true love, being with that true love forever, and overcoming great obstacles to achieve that solidarity of love. If you haven’t seen the play or the movie, the main plot is the Phantom, who is a disfigured musical genius and lives in a Paris Opera House, falls in love with Christine, the main actress of the opera company, who he has trained in secret, and then proceeds to “terrorize” the opera company for the affection of Christine. Thus the main point of the plot is the love that needs to be acquired. The words lure you in with tales of beauty, mystery, adventure and freedom (with the Phantom). But the underlying message is one of possession and abandoning your life for a new one, which in some aspects could be considered escapism; there is a looming darkness that is in between the words.

The music itself contributes to the overall feeling of the piece. With the dark, rich sound of Gerard Butler’s voice mixed with the deep tones of the brass and the sweltering, moving, and dramatic influxes of the strings and percussion the music depicts a scene of mystery and wonder and an underlying sense of warmth. The rise and fall, the swells!, of the score help define the beauty the words are conveying. The overall affect of the music and the lyrics tug on your heart strings and make you wish you had someone that close and intimate to you that you could just leave everything behind and be free.

The position the piece makes you feel is that everyone finds their true love, their soul mate: “You alone can make my soul take flight”, even a disfigured musical genius. But the argument I want to make is the underlying message that the romantic’s covers up: that of kidnapping and possibly losing oneself being okay if it’s for true love. Don’t get me wrong I love this play/movie, but there are some fundamental aspects not addressed on the surface. The song lyrics contain the message of leaving behind everything and being ‘free’, but then belonging to someone else; with the tone of the music this message is pushed under the romantic’s and is lost on the audience. The main argument is anything is okay if it’s in the name of true love. Is the possibility of losing oneself in the process a dignified loss if you achieve true love? Maybe yes, maybe no… but what do your goose-bumps tell you? *To see what those goose-bumps may mean here’s an extra article about the romanticism in connection with ones brain: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/relationships/2011/06/the-neuroscience-of-romanticized-love-part-1-emotional-taboos/