Week 7- The Music of the Night

Night-time sharpens,
heightens each sensation
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination
Silently the senses abandon their defences ...

Slowly, gently night unfurls its splendour
Grasp it, sense it - tremulous and tender
Turn your face away
from the garish light of day,
turn your thoughts away
from cold, unfeeling light -
and listen to the music of the night ...

Close your eyes and surrender to your
darkest dreams!
Purge your thoughts of the life
you knew before!
Close your eyes,
let your spirit start to soar!
And you'll live
as you've never lived before ...

Softly, deftly,
music shall surround you ...
Feel it, hear it,
closing in around you ...
Open up your mind,
let your fantasies unwind,
in this darkness which
you know you cannot fight -
the darkness of the music of the night ...

Let your mind start a journey
through a strange new world!
Leave all thoughts
of the world you knew before!
Let your soul take you where you
long to be !
Only then can you belong to me ...

Floating, falling, sweet intoxication!
Touch me, trust me savour each sensation!
Let the dream begin,
let your darker side give in
to the power of the music that I write -
the power of the music of the night ...

You alone can make my song take flight -
help me make the music of the night . . .

I recently had a fascination to musicals, so I decided to write about the song based on The Phantom of the Opera called The Music of the Night. The song's audience is mostly generated to the character Christine as the phantom is trying to persuade her to be with him. He uses powerful sentence structure to persuade her such as "In this darkness that you know you cannot fight." In this phrase alone, the phantom is telling Christine that she can't resist him and helps lure her in by saying "trust me" and "you'll live as you've never lived...." Something interesting that phantom says that I haven't noticed before is how he is telling Christine to forget all thoughts and just "close your eyes" and embrace the darkness. "Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in" conveys in letting Christine just give into his temptations and abandon the entire outside world. The phantom practically wants her to forget all logic and just succumb to him.

A very powerful tool that the phantom uses is word choice. Many occasions in the song he just lists words that are very seductive and transpiring that can further persuade her to be with him. The phantom uses words that describe that appeal to the senses of feeling and verbs to "grasp" and "sense." The word choice the phantom uses strongly appeal to Christine by Not only is the word choice very powerful, but the pattern he uses them. He pairs words together that help emit different emotions that would help Christine embrace him. "Slowly, gently" and "softly, deftly" are very strong word pairs that would help drift her away into a world that would ignore any sense of logic, and just using emotion.

Something else that the phantom uses is organization. The first line to each stanza is all words that he wants her to feel. Once he tells her how to feel, he expounds on the idea on how she should give in to his enticement. He describes to her how she should feel these emotions around her, and slowly intertwining this idea with how she should ignore all thought and letting her "fantasies unwind." So basically I have learned from this song that the phantom is quite a scandalous person. I don't think I need to explain what he wants from her, due to the evidence found in the lyrics. I sill love this song, but I don't know if I can see this song in any form of appropriateness.