In which I send y'all off on another wild goose chase...

[lynnzop[$]]

I'm looking for:

The title and/or composer of an organ piece that is more commonly known as "The Theme of the Phantom of the Opera" or something like that.

Dum
Dum de dum de dum dummm

dum dum dum dum dum dum dum

Then it goes into a tight, intense melody which progresses into several variations.

NOT "the" Phantom...no Andrew Lloyd Webber please. This is a piece of classical classical music.

Okay...jacked around long enough on google and in my brain and found it. Now let's see if you can guess what it was. Whoever wins gets to pick the next wild goose chase.

[emeleel]

(Only slightly off topic (but when has that ever stopped EA'er?!) did y'all know that ALW is writing a sequel to POTO? Originally it was based on Frederick Forsythe's "The Phantom of Manhattan" but it has moved away from that and is now only very loosed based on that awful book. About 3-4 months into the writing process last year, ALW's kitten got up and into his digital piano and erased the *entire* score up to that point. At this point the lead is a question between MoviePhantom aka Gerard Butler or John Barrowman, aka Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who and Torchwood, with ALW preferring John Barrowman.

I think ALW has lost his marble, personally. )

[conradd]

Are you thinking of Toccata et fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach?

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

The organist in my church used to refer to it as "the Geneva." The youth choir was the Geneva Choir and once a year he would let us into the pipe room - a room behind the organ where all the pipes were located, from the teeniest 1/4"-inch pipes to the two-storey tall ones as big around as two of us standing back-to-back. Anyway, we would go in there and he would play all this different music, but always this piece. I really miss him. So this piece and another he used to play a lot (Bach's Fugue in G Minor, aka The Little Fugue) are my favorite classical pieces.

[lynnzop[$]]

conradd said

Are you thinking of Toccata et fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach?

Aye. Toccata and Fugue in D minor is what finally found it's way through the recesses of my brain.

Great story, MJ!

My clearest muddled memory of this piece was a pizza place in Mpls that we'd go to (maybe it was in Edina???) that had a piano and organ in the restaurant. The guy who did entertainment on the weekends would put on a "Phantom" mask and play the Toccata on the organ and then morph it into "Ain't She Sweet" somehow. It always cracked us up...and we were in high school at the time! We'd beg our parents to let us go (it must have been fairly far away or we would have just gone ) for a treat.

[MrsNormanMaine[$]]

The first segment of the original 'Fantasia' uses the Tocotta and Fugue in D minor as its music. It's also become shorthand for 'scary silent movie motif' in lots of other film scores.

MNM