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Media type:
E-Article
Title:
Politics and the Reception of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera"
Contributor:
WINKLER, AMANDA EUBANKS
imprint:
Cambridge University Press, 2014
Published in:Cambridge Opera Journal
Language:
English
ISSN:
0954-5867;
1474-0621
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
<p>This article analyses the complicated and conflicted critical response to Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera within the political, economic and cultural context of the Thatcher/Reagan era. British critics writing for Conservative-leaning broadsheets and tabloids took nationalist pride in Lloyd Webber's commercial success, while others on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that Phantom was tasteless and crassly commercial, a musical manifestation of a new Gilded Age. Broader issues regarding the relationship between the government and 'elite' culture also affected the critical response. For some, Phantom forged a path for a new kind of populist opera that could survive and thrive without government subsidy, while less sympathetic critics heard Phantom's 'puerile' operatics as sophomoric jibes against an art form they esteemed.</p>