The magic's in the music and the music's in me...

No more memories, no more silent tears,
No more gazing across the wasted years...
--Christine Daae in The Phantom of the Opera, by Andrew Lloyd-Webber

Practically everybody has them...songs that define chapters of their lives. They come on the radio and transport their time and their place up to you in the present, packing a lot of emotional punch into three or four minutes. If you close your eyes while one is playing, you can practically smell the past. I used to find that aroma intoxicating. Now it just seems musty.

As a composer who has lived his life around music (and not just popular music, either), my hit parade is considerably longer than most, and when it starts up it still detours most of the traffic in my brain and slows it to a crawl. Put a name from some point in my past to me and chances are I can immediately give you eight or ten songs that bring her (it's almost always a her, although my close male friends have some songs all their own) into sharp relief.
In some cases, the hit parade float encompasses an entire musical. I will forever associate Les Miserables with my first engagement, because I saw the play with her by my side, and because our relationship ended, well, miserably. I lived by the lyrics from something called Chess for about three years--everybody and his sister had a song in that one.
And then there's Phantom of the Opera.
Ask my wife: when something catches my interest, I tend to get a little obsessed with it. After seeing the movie Titanic, I went out and bought four related CDs and over thirty books, and eventually could quote you sections of the frigging cargo manifest. Why I do this, I have no clue--I just feel compelled, somehow.
Phantom was my Titanic at the age of seventeen. I identified pretty strongly with the titular character--I felt myself just as unappreciated, almost as as shunned, and at least as lonely. And I wrote music, although hopefully nothing half as discordant as his. Music was, in fact, pretty much my sole companion through most of high school.
And I had my Christine, too. A succession of lesser lights circled her in my mind, occasionally taking a turn in the spotlight if she was treating me badly that day, but one innocent smile from her and all thought of anyone else would vanish.
Most teens go through this sort of thing at least once, I think, although I also think it's far more common among teen girls. My 'love' for this woman went a fair ways past the bounds of rational. If you went back through my daily diary, 1988 and 1989 editions and counted up the instances I'd written her name, you'd recoil in horror: it worked out to more than once a day for two years. Even as late as 1997, five years after I had last seen The Object Of My Obsession, I would still dream of her on occasion and wake up singing snatches of an aria from Phantom:

And though it's clear, though it was always clear
That this was never meant to be
If you ever spare a moment
Stop and think of me.

No, this should mark the intersection of two obsessions: I bought the sheet music, worked harder at it than I had any other music in my life, eventually memorized the entire play, taped myself playing it, and presented TOOMO with the tape. Somewhere in the world there exists a tape of me playing the score of Phantom of the Opera with so much affection it's comical. And pathetic, come to that.

My parents got me (and my then-girlfriend) tickets to the production of Phantom that played at the Pantages theatre in Toronto. Second row. Too close, for such a wide stage: it was almost impossible to follow all the action. And when the chandelier came down, so help me, I ducked. I felt the wind.
It wasn't the first time or the last that I was emotionally unfaithful to that girl--with that other girl, either, come to that. From curtain rise to curtain fall, I was completely unaware of the audience around me. Even as I drank in the scene, in the Paris opera house of my mind I was up on stage, playing the Phantom and Raoul as it suited, and TOOMO was playing Christine and all was right with the world...

Yup. Pathetic.

Fast forward some sixteen years. I just saw the movie production of Phantom of the Opera yesterday. My quick review, since if its box office was any indication, very few of you out there care: Christine and Carlotta were perfect, Raoul slightly less so, and the Phantom was a disappointment, not fit to hold the mask of Michael Crawford.
And yes, the movie did bring my teenaged geeky self crawling up from whatever hindbrain hiding spot he'd found. I even felt a wisp of nostalgia for TOOMO. .

And then I felt dirty, and embarrassed, and more than a little disgusted with that remnant of myself. I shooed him away and back into the hindbrain he crawled. Whereupon I found myself singing the number I first thought of when I met the woman who eventually became my wife. This one's also by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, but it's from Aspects of Love:

Love, love changes everything
Hands and faces, earth and sky
Love, love changes everything
How you live and how you die
Love, love can make the summer fly
Or a night seem like a lifetime
Yes love, love changes everything
Now I tremble at your name
Nothing in the world will ever be the same.

Thank heaven for that.