Today I accompanied the 1925 Phantom of the Opera at the Plaistow Public Library. It got a good audience for a small-town library, and I got a lot of compliments. I really want to write down some of the musical tricks I used to improvise the music. It may lose everyone reading this; if you’re confused, just skip it and go on to the next post. I’m going to dive into technical musical language, because it’s the only way to explain some of the points.

My instrument is a Roland EX-50 keyboard. It has lots of sound settings, which can be combined as overlays or keyboard splits. There are eight banks that can save four settings each, letting me switch among those four with the push of a button. I set up a woodwind sound, an organ, deep brass, and a mixed orchestral sound.

One of my cardinal rules was not to sound like Andrew Lloyd Webber. No chromatic runs of parallel chords.

Spoilers for the movie follow.

The movie opens mysteriously, with the Phantom’s shadow passing by twice in an underground passage. I used quiet, mysterious music here, introducing the “Phantom” leitmotif.

This shifts abruptly to the Paris Opera, which I introduced with a fanfare-like passage, continuing into a waltz for the ballet on stage. The scene moves to the sale of the opera house, accompanied by neutral music until the sellers mention the Phantom — only after the sale is closed, of course.

When the ballerinas chatter about the Phantom, they get light music. Joseph Buquet gives a more sober description of him, and I returned to the Phantom leitmotif with darker music.

Carlotta’s mother is full of swagger, and I threw in a hint of the Queen of the Night’s second-act aria.

The opera being presented is Gounod’s Faust, and I sprinkled the music with suggestions of the opera. Christine first appears as Marguerite in the final scene of the opera, her spirit rising to Heaven. I used the organ sound and a loose approximation to the angels’ chorus which ends the opera.

After the opera, we see Raoul and Christine together for the first time, and I introduced the “Love” leitmotif, based on a rising arpeggio. When she says she can never marry him, the music deflected into minor. After he leaves her room, the Phantom speaks to her through a wall. For this, I used an unaccompanied melody in the horn voice, bringing the “Phantom” music into a major key because he seems benevolent for the moment. I think that technique worked especially well.

The movie returns to the opera with Carlotta singing the role of Marguerite, and she’s obviously singing the “Mirror Aria.” I settled for a rough approximation. Not only would learning the actual tune and accompaniment be a lot of work, it wouldn’t have fit the timing. I suggested coloratura singing with lots of jumps and runs and high C-sharps.

Then the lights start to flicker, and Carlotta bravely keeps singing. Here I really had fun. While keeping the coloratura melody in A major in the right hand, the left hand shifted from major to minor and went outside the key, delivering heavy chords that were dissonant with her tune. As the chandelier collapses, her melody is finally lost to audibility.

Back in Christine’s room, she hears the Phantom’s voice again, and I use the same unaccompanied-melody technique as before. She goes through a secret door, we see the Phantom (masked) for the first time. As he takes her in a boat across an underground lake, I aimed for a gently rocking feeling similar to Mendelssohn’s “Venetian Boat Songs.”

When the Phantom played the organ, I used the organ sound, of course. Then Christine sneaks up on him and unmasks him.

That was the moment I lived for. Phantom leitmotif, fortissimo! Pile on the dissonances! Use the deep brass sound! With a modern audience, the unmasking by itself isn’t enough to shock. The music hopefully helped.

The masked ball scene was an occasion for more waltz music. I tried to make this waltz sound Viennese rather than French; the difference may not have come through. The Phantom enters costumed as the Red Death. Here I used a waltz version of the German filk song, “Die Flagge des Roten Todes.” I’m sure absolutely no one got it. Oh, well.

The rooftop scene let me get back to the Love leitmotif. The Phantom is spying on Raoul and Christine, and there’s lots of cross-cutting, which is always hard to handle musically. I kept the focus on the love music, punctuated by dark chords each time the Phantom reacted. When he returns to the ball, now very angry, I used a fiercer version of the “Roter Tod” tune.

When Buquet is found murdered, I introduced a three-note motif to indicate the rage of his brother and friends. It got a lot of use from here to the end.

Back to the opera stage. Christine as Marguerite is at a spinning wheel, so the song must be “The King of Thule.” Again, I played a rough approximation of it. The Phantom abducts Christine, and from here things move fast. An undercover policeman shows Raoul how to get through the secret passage, and I used stealthy-sounding music with a distinctive beat to mark their progress. The same beat served for the Phantom’s intruder alarm.

The final scenes have lots of cross-cutting among the Phantom’s lair, Raoul and the cop’s nearby presence, his brother’s unfortunate fate, and the mob hunting the Phantom. Again, it’s tricky. The three-note “Vengeance” motif let me mark the quick cuts to the mob.

When the Phantom hijacks a coach and the mob pursues him, it’s chase music all the way, getting faster till he takes a turn too fast and the coach rolls over. He tries one final bluff, and the music stops dead for it. Then the crowd closes on him, and the music shifted from minor to major as he’s thrown into the river.

There were short closing credits at the end of the DVD, and in a nod to modern tradition, I played a mix of the main leitmotifs to wrap up.

General note: If you make a mistake, do it again. That makes it sound intentional.

Is anyone still reading this? Thanks.