Songfacts®:

• Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote this romantic piano ballad with Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe for his smash musical The Phantom Of The Opera. The song is performed at the end of Act I when a frightened Christine confides in her childhood friend Raoul about her encounter with the Phantom. Raoul promises to protect her, and Christine, wanting freedom from the shroud of darkness that lingers around her, asks him to love her and bring her into the light.
  
  Sarah Brightman and Steve Barton originated their respective roles of Christine and Raoul on stage and debuted the song, but the popular English singer Cliff Richard was Brightman's duet partner for the 1986 single.
• After overhearing Christine and Raoul's passionate conversation, the vengeful Phantom (Michael Crawford) joins them on the reprise, ending with a warning to Christine:
  
  You will curse the day you did not do
  All that the Phantom asked of you!
• Andrew Lloyd Webber is a great admirer of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the theatrical songwriting team behind iconic Broadway musicals of the '40s and '50s, such as Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King And I, and The Sound Of Music. Webber always wanted to write a romantic duet in the vein of the famous duo, but none of his productions up to that point - Cats, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, etc. - warranted one.
  
  "So I was a little bit stymied," he told Graham Norton in 2018, "and of course what appealed to me about The Phantom Of The Opera story was it was hokum, it is hokum, but it's high high romance, and there was my moment to do my first big love duet. And so I suppose the memory I have of it was the first time it really came in front of an audience. It's written to not have an applause point there because I wanted the applause to be the Phantom at the end of the first act, but I remember it taking the roof off the building that night. And it was a moment, really, I did have a bit of a tear."
• Barbra Streisand recorded this for Till I Loved You, her 1988 concept album that follows a relationship from its beginning to end. She did sing the title duet with her then-boyfriend, Don Johnson, but she chose to do "All I Ask Of You" solo.
  
  In a 2005 interview with Barbra Archives founder Matt Howe, Phil Ramone, the song's producer, spoke about re-working the duet:
  
  "It's an interesting concept - messing with Andrew Lloyd Webber stuff. It's not easy. Barbra's always approached music from both a lyrical point of view and a sensibility of, 'why can't I sing this? Why wouldn't I sing this? Why wouldn't I sing this to him?' You know, it's established for too long that it's a duet. You can take a song and re-voice it or change keys. But this song is written as a duet. I don't know, we just took a shot... We worked on it so it could be a meaningful song, as it is."
• Streisand's version peaked at #77 in the UK. In the US, it went to #15 on the Adult Contemporary chart. A few years, she teamed up with Phantom portrayer Michael Crawford on a duet version of "The Music of the Night," another famous song from the musical, for her 1993 album, Back To Broadway.
• The English rock group The Shadows (Cliff Richard's former backing group) recorded an instrumental version for their 1989 album, Steppin' To The Shadows.
• Emmy Rossum and Patrick Wilson sang this in the 2004 film adaptation, with Gerard Butler as the Phantom on the reprise.