In 1987 the heirs of Giacomo Puccini charged in a lawsuit that the climactic phrase in "Music of the Night" closely resembled a similar phrase in the sequence "Quello che tacete" from Puccini's opera Girl of the Golden West [REF].
Roger Waters has repeatedly claimed in interviews that the signature descending/ascending half-tone chord progression from Phantom's title song was plagiarised from the bass line of a track on the 1971 Pink Floyd album Meddle called "Echoes".