It really is bucketloads of manpain, but then I was not only a teenage Phantom of the Opera fan but a teenage Anne Rice fan, compared to the abyssal depths of which all other manpain is but a shallow sea.
There seems to be a significant chunk of fandom who assumes victim (1) to be the Countess*, and I think that that was my first assumption, too, on the basis that Herbert has to come from somewhere, and that I read it as "genuine accident" unlike the other two victims. Though to be honest you can read it either way and I just like the one that ups the angst. It doesn't really fit with the portraits, but I'm not sure that the portraits fit with anything much. Should there be hereditary vampirism and the vampiric Countess still around I feel sure that she spends her summers on the vampire equivalent of the Mediterranean complaining about her husband to vampire wives in similar situations. Or possibly she's given up altogether and built a better-kept Schloss of her own on the other side of the mountains.
In theory I'm amused by the idea that he's faking it all anyway, but I agree there's a problem with the timing even if one wants to buy it. He'd have been much better off doing it to Alfred halfway through Act 1: "Oh young philosophy student, come and educate me in ethics and science so I can learn how wrong I have been!" or even just earlier in the evening. Also, the argument seems rather fatally hampered by none of the singers ever seeming to play it like that. Though presumably that's because if you're going to barnstorm through your big number (and that's basically what it's there for, I feel), ladelling on the angst is the obvious way to go.
*Now I want the fic in which he's not a count, it's a fake title he bought at some point in the seventeenth century. He's actually an ex-apothecary or farmer or something unexciting.
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There seems to be a significant chunk of fandom who assumes victim (1) to be the Countess*, and I think that that was my first assumption, too, on the basis that Herbert has to come from somewhere, and that I read it as "genuine accident" unlike the other two victims. Though to be honest you can read it either way and I just like the one that ups the angst. It doesn't really fit with the portraits, but I'm not sure that the portraits fit with anything much. Should there be hereditary vampirism and the vampiric Countess still around I feel sure that she spends her summers on the vampire equivalent of the Mediterranean complaining about her husband to vampire wives in similar situations. Or possibly she's given up altogether and built a better-kept Schloss of her own on the other side of the mountains.
In theory I'm amused by the idea that he's faking it all anyway, but I agree there's a problem with the timing even if one wants to buy it. He'd have been much better off doing it to Alfred halfway through Act 1: "Oh young philosophy student, come and educate me in ethics and science so I can learn how wrong I have been!" or even just earlier in the evening. Also, the argument seems rather fatally hampered by none of the singers ever seeming to play it like that. Though presumably that's because if you're going to barnstorm through your big number (and that's basically what it's there for, I feel), ladelling on the angst is the obvious way to go.
*Now I want the fic in which he's not a count, it's a fake title he bought at some point in the seventeenth century. He's actually an ex-apothecary or farmer or something unexciting.