Hugely. If you have a tune in the middle of nowhere, it will be beached like a whale, so it's really vital that there is a story to support it. It's no good just writing a song and say "I'm going to fit it into the story". If the story has a moment for a song you've written or an idea you've written before, then fine. But it's got to be the story first and the music will come from the story.

Because it's a superb meldramatic tragedy. It is a tragic story, and a triangle that involves emotion and love, well it isn't really a triangle as it invovles four people, if you include the butler, Max, and the two women Joe's life, and they all in some way interrelate. It's just a marvelous subject for a musical. It has operatic potetnial and it could have gone much more so that way. It's got marvelous diaglogue by Billy Wilder from the original film, so I felt reluctant to remove all the famous lines and have them sung.

What I was trying to do in this scene is to suggest that the Phantom is writing music that is completely out of his time. Whenever the Phantom plays any music in the show, he uses a lot of whole-tone scale, which would never have been around in an opera house at that time, or maybe it was just beginning, but it was basically music that was not of its own time, so that's what I was trying to do for the Phantom. So when he does 'Don Juan Triumphant', most of the audience will think it's cacophony - it's nonsense. There is one joke in the Phantom, which was in fact Lorin Maazel, which is the line about "after 7" because the Phantom writes in 7/8 time a lot of the time in my piece - it's a little musical joke.