'The Phantom of the Opera': Ghosts of a love affair

As 'The Phantom of the Opera' becomes Broadway's longest-running show, Michael Coveney reveals how it was inspired by its composer's obsessive love

Next Monday, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical The Phantom of the Opera (with lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe) becomes the longest-running musical in Broadway history, overtaking Lloyd Webber's Cats, which itself eclipsed New York's previous longest-runners A Chorus Line, Fiddler on the Roof and My Fair Lady.

A Broadway fixture since 1988, Phantom still does the box-office business in a theatre town that can support five or six hit musicals running concurrently, but not usually much beyond several years.

The show is still running in London - it opened at Her Majesty's Theatre in October 1986 - as well as in Budapest, Tokyo, Brazil and Seoul. Box-office revenues worldwide - more than £1.7bn - exceed those of any film or show in history, including Titanic and Star Wars.

This is a phenomenon that not even the huge video sales of Joel Schumacher's lusciously relentless film version - so different in weight and atmosphere from Hal Prince's whiplash, speedy and beguiling stage production - can explain. Nor can we simply fall back on the excuse of romantic, operatic melodrama to justify Phantom's imperishably popular appeal.

No. While the jaunty, vaudevillian dance musical Cats was a genuine freak hit, something more soulful and tenacious lies at the heart of Phantom's success. It is Lloyd Webber's most personal score - his best may well be revealed this year to be Evita in the Michael Grandage revival - because it is about his obsessive love affair with his second wife, Sarah Brightman, who played and sang Christine in London and New York.

Lloyd Webber is like the Phantom himself, haunting the theatre and bending the theatre managers and their singers to his will, driven by his enslavement to Christine's voice, enthralled by her beauty and embarrassed by his own beastliness. Lloyd Webber was first taken by Brightman (who had appeared in the chorus role of Jemima in Cats) when he saw her, at the end of 1982, in a children's opera, Nightingale, at the Lyric, Hammersmith, where she was decorating the soaring melodic lines in Charles Strouse's score with spectacular coloratura trills.

Their subsequent friendship in effect ended his first marriage to Sarah Hugill, the mother of his first two children and loyal partner through the early, difficult years of his career. The two wives became known as Sarah One and Sarah Two, with the second effortlessly fulfilling the scarlet-woman role and bringing a more rock'n'roll element to the party; Sarah Two had been in the dance group Hot Gossip and had a chart-topping pop success with "I Was Married to a Starship Trooper".

Sarah Two had already been married (to Andrew Graham-Stewart, a record executive with Virgin) and was deeply involved with a married property developer. Lloyd Webber had never really played around all that much and indeed had been constantly critical (and perhaps jealous) of his lyric-writing partner Tim Rice's fabled lady-killing successes. Sarah Two was a free spirit and gave off the unmistakeable scent of forbidden fruit. Lloyd Webber was lost.

By the time he came to write Phantom, Lloyd Webber was married to Sarah Two but not fully reconciled to her flightiness, or perhaps proliferating sexiness. One of the most interesting things ever said on the subject was the late Maria Bjornson's observation - she designed Phantom, brilliantly, to Hal Prince's specifications of drapes, black-outs and dark Turkish corners - that the composer knew all about unrequited love: "Sarah never gave him the whole of herself and I'm sure that is what also bred this need to write this musical. If they had been truly happy, we would never have had Phantom."

There was another element of pathos embedded in the score, which is on constant switchback between the surface sunshine of romantic opera and the heart of darkness in the Phantom's lair: the angel of music figure who sits on Christine's shoulder and represents her dead father. Lloyd Webber's father, the composer William Lloyd Webber, had died in 1982 an embittered alcoholic, a brilliant musician whose style in composition was out of step with the times.

Sarah Brightman's talent and his own father's admonitory failure exerted a dual pressure on Lloyd Webber's appropriation of the story and became its creative engine-room. Whereas in Gaston Leroux's novel the Phantom insists on Christine singing Marguerite in Gounod's Faust, Lloyd Webber made the Phantom's own opera the work to be performed in the second act. The Phantom needs Christine to be his singing alter ego, and his title song becomes a journey of seduction in which she beings vocalising strangely at his behest. Brightman's top register expressed the weird, orgasmic side of his bestial act of possession, summarised in his insistence that she yields her darker side to the power of his music.

Looking back, one can see that Lloyd Webber only possessed Brightman for as long as she was in Phantom. His third wife, Madeleine Gurdon, whom he met through his horse-loving neighbours in Watership Down, and with whom he has three more children, now says that Sarah Two really should have been a jolly nice short fling and have done with it. But she needled away at Lloyd Webber's heart, even if the British public never stopped thinking of her as a Jezebel. There were rumours of extramarital affairs. More importantly, nothing would ever come between her and her career. She never wanted children.

Lloyd Webber married Madeleine in February 1991, and Brightman re-built her career, first by performing her ex-husband's music all over the world in concerts. After becoming a huge star in Germany, she returned to Britain in 1997 on tour and with a sell-out concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Their friendship continues and is memorialised in perpetuity in a show you could say was written as her wedding mass.