Synopsis (of Les Miserables)

In 1815, France, convict Jean Valjean is released on parole by prison guard Javert after serving a 19-year sentence in jail for stealing a loaf of bread and repeated his attempts to escape. After several months of drifting around France, Valjean is offered food and shelter by the saintly Bishop of Digne. Touched by the Bishop’s love, grace and generosity, Valjean breaks his parole and vows to start an honest life and a new identity.

Eight years later in 1823, Valjean has become a wealthy factory owner and mayor of the small town of Montreuil. A young woman named Fantine, one of the workers, is caught sending money to his illegitimate daughter, Cossette, who lives with unscrupulous Thénardiers and their daughter Éponine, and is dismissed by the foreman. Left with no alternative, Fantine resorts to prostitution. During an argument with an abusive customer, Fantine is arrested by Javert, now a police inspector, but Valjean intercedes and rescued her. Fantine dies of tuberculosis, and Valjean promises to raise Cossette. Valjean escapes from Javert and redeems Cosette from Thénardiers, promising to be like a father to her. Valjean is again in disguise and lives a quiet life in Paris with Cossette, his “daughter”.

Nine years later, in June of 1832, general Jean Maximilien Lamarque, the only government official sympathetic toward the poor, is nearing death. Students Marius and Enjolras, together with street urchin Gavroche, discuss fomenting a revolution to overthrow the government. Later Marius falls in love with Cosette at the first glimpse. Meanwhile, despite Cosette’s questioning, Valjean refuses to tell her anything about the past.

Éponine, now Marius’s friend, leads him to Cosette, where the two profess their love for one another. Lamenting that her secret love for Marius will never be reciprocated, Éponine fatalistically joins the revolution. Later, Valjean mistakenly believe that Javert has discovered him, so he flees with Cosette. As they leave, Enjolras rallies the Parisians to revolt, and Cosette sends a farewell letter to Marius.

The next day, the students interrupt Lamarque’s funeral procession and begin their assault. Javert infiltrates into the rebels, but is quickly exposed by Gavroche and captured. During the ensuing gunfight, Éponine saves Marius at the cost of her own life. Valjean, intercepting a letter from Marius to Cosette, goes to the barricade to protect Marius. After saving Enjolras from snipers, he is allowed to execute Javert. However, when the two are alone, Valjean chooses to free Javert instead and fires his gun to fake the execution.

Everyone is killed by government troops in the final assault on the street barricades except Marius being saved by Valjean. On the way, Javert threatens to shoot Valjean if he refuses to surrender, but Valjean ignores him. Unable to reconcile the conflict between his civil and moral duties, two things which he always considered the same, Javert commits suicide.

Having revealed his past to Marius and enjoined him from telling Cosette, Valjean leaves before they get married to keep them safe. At the wedding, Thénardiers tries to blackmail Marius, only to unwittingly reveal the truth that it is Valjean who saved Marius from the barricade that night. Marius and Cosette rush to Valjean after being told his location by Thénardiers.

As Valjean sits dying in a local convent from his long-term heart condition, he perceives the spirit of Fantine appearing to take him to Heaven. Valjean hands Cosette his confession of his past life, and the spirits of Fantine and the Bishop guide him to paradise, where he joins the spirits of Enjolras, Éponine, Gavroche, and the other rebels at the Barricade on the rue Soufflot.

Comment

“Les Miserables” is an epic theatre piece about history, faith, and humanity.

THEME: Underneath the surface, woven through its various themes, the show is about perpetual motion—the inevitable flow of history, Jean Valjean’s continual flight from the pursuit of Inspector Javert, the quest for freedom. In “Les Miserables,” these musical and philosophical themes are closely connected in the manner of Wagnerian leitmotifs. The major characters all have motifs that recur occasionally in the orchestra and their vocal music. There also are motifs associated with types of stage action: social injustice and exploitation, police interrogation, identity crisis, revolutionary aspirations, disappointed hopes and cynical opportunism. The repeated use of these motifs gives depth and complexity to the show. And the dominant theme is the value of love.

LYRICS: Les Misérables projects its huge tragic language and subject matter from the first notes. Over the course of the show, we see great social injustice, a single mother reduced to prostitution, star-crossed lovers, war (on a small scale), the death of major characters, suicide, social reform, marriage—all within the framework of a single musical. Because of its epic scope, the lyrics in this show are unlike most musical theatre lyrics. They are bigger, more formal, more extreme, more tragic, more melodramatic.

COMPOSITION: Beyond its ingenious uses of musical texture for dramatic purposes, the score of “Les Miserables” also has a freshness, vitality and variety that show the excellent level of an expert composer. The love ballads such as sorrowful “On My Own” and sweet “A Heart Full of Love”; the march “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” is powerful and beautifully formed and keeps a haunting presence in the memory. Two excellent novelty numbers stand out from the score: Gavroche’s “Little People” and “Master of the House”, the motif of the comic-sinister villains, the Thenardiers. Cosette’s “Castle on a Cloud,” the “Red and Black” sequence that contrasts the pangs of love with revolutionary rhetoric, Javert’s credo in “Stars” and the unabashedly sentimental death scenes of Fantine, Eponine and Valjean impress me deeply as well.

The following is an analysis of some of the SONGS.

  1. “Do you hear the people sing?” & the revolution The ghosts of students who died in an abortive revolution are singing softly a march – that was sung loudly in Act 1 with violent, angry words: “Do you hear the people sing?/ Singing the songs of angry men?/ It is the music of a people/ Who will not be slaves again/ When the beating of your heart/ Echoes the beating of the drums/ There is a life about to start/ When tomorrow comes.” While this time the harmonies are gentler and the tempo is slower. And the lyrics have also changed; they are now nonviolent and inspirational: “Do you hear the people sing/ Lost in the valley of the night?/ It is the music of a people/ Who are climbing to the light./ For the wretched of the earth/ There is a flame that never dies./ Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” The tension between the two different appearances of the same song “Do you hear the people sing?” implies a constellation of statements on violence vs. nonviolence – one of the most striking moral comments in the show.
  2. “Stars” & Javert Inspector Javert, Valjean’s nemesis and the embodiment of law and order, lacks that kind of flexibility when his view of reality is upset by Valjean’s mercy in sparing his life. Javert’s world, his convictions, the rules by which he’s lived his entire life, are called into question, which is unbearable for him. He echoes Valjean’s words of self-liberation from the prologue: “I’ll escape now from that world/ From the world of Jean Valjean.” But for Javert, unable to change, the only escape is through suicide. His sin lies in his extremism. He sees the world in black and white. He sees the divinity in the world and believes it is his duty to preserve it. In his song “Stars,” he sees the night sky as a symbol of the immutability of the universe. The stars represent God and the natural order of things, “filling the darkness with order and light.” Thus, at the beginning and end of the show, its two towering symbolic figures are brought together, paralleled and contrasted, and their characters explored in moral explanation of their decisions. The fact that both soliloquies use the same music and that there is parallel wording at the climactic points – the resolution of each identity crisis – increases the power of the scenes.

In a word, “Les Miserables” is nothing less than a masterpiece and a score for the age.