The Phantom of the Opera - Background Information

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Phantom of the Opera Background Information


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General Overview

The Phantom of the Opera (French: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra) is a novel by French author Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serial in Le Gaulois from September 23, 1909 to January 8, 1910, and was released in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte. The novel is partly inspired by historical events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century and by an apocryphal tale concerning the use of a former ballet pupil's skeleton in Carl Maria von Weber's 1841 production of Der Freischütz. It has been successfully adapted into various stage and film adaptations, most notable of which are the 1925 film depiction featuring Lon Chaney and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical.

History Behind the Novel

Leroux initially was going to be a lawyer, but after spending his inheritance gambling he became a reporter for L'Écho de Paris. At the paper, he wrote about and critiqued dramas, as well as being a courtroom reporter. With his job, he was able to travel frequently, but he returned to Paris where he became a writer. Because of his fascination with both Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he wrote a detective mystery entitled The Mystery of the Yellow Room in 1907, and four years later he published Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. The novel was first published in newspapers before finally being published as a book.

The setting of The Phantom of the Opera is the actual Paris opera house, the Palais Garnier. (https://www.operadeparis.fr/en/visits...) Leroux had heard the rumors about the time the opera house was finished, and these rumors became closely linked with the novel: Act One of the opera Hellé had just finished when a fire in the roof of the opera house melted through a wire holding a counterweight for the chandelier, causing a crash that injured several and killed one. Using this accident paired with rumors of a ghost in that same opera house, Leroux wrote Le Fantôme de l'Opéra and published it in 1910, which was later published in English as The Phantom of the Opera. The underground "lake" that he wrote about, in reality an enormous cistern, does exist beneath the opera house, and it is still used for training firefighters to swim in the dark.

The serialized version contains an entire chapter("L'enveloppe magique") that does not appear in the novel version—though much of its content was added in other chapters—and was not reprinted in English until 2014.

Major Themes

Music
Leroux uses the operatic setting in The Phantom of the Opera to use music as a device for foreshadowing. Mireille Ribière, translator, makes note that Leroux was once a theatre critic and his brother was a musician, so he was knowledgeable about music and how to use it as a framing device. She uses the example of how Leroux introduces Danse macabre which means "dance of death" in the gala scene which foreshadows the (view spoiler)[graveyard scene that comes later where the Phantom plays the fiddle for Christine and attacks Raoul when he tries to intervene. (hide spoiler)]

Patricia Drumright, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of English and Philosophy at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York points out that music is evident throughout the novel in that it is the basis for Christine and Erik's relationship. (view spoiler)[ Christine sees Erik as her Angel of Music that her father promised would come to her one day. The Phantom sees Christine as his musical protégé, and he uses his passion for music to teach her everything he knows. (hide spoiler)]

Mystery
The novel is styled as a mystery novel, as its frame is narrated by a detective acquiring his information through various investigations. The mystery under investigation is the identity and motive of 'the Phantom' who lurks through the opera house, seemingly appearing out of nowhere as if by magic in inaccessible places. But, it seems that the mystery novel frame story is a façade for the genre being more a Gothic romance.

Gothic horror
In his article, Sean Fitzpatrick, senior contributor to Crisis Magazine, compares the Phantom to other monsters featured in Gothic horror novels such as Frankenstein's monster, Dr. Jekyll, Dorian Gray, and Count Dracula. (view spoiler)[The Phantom has a torture chamber where he kidnaps and kills people, and the walls of the chapel in the graveyard are lined with human bones. (hide spoiler)] Drumright notes that The Phantom of the Opera checks off every trope necessary to have a Gothic novel according to the Encyclopedia of Literature's description which says, "Such novels were expected to be dark and tempestuous and full of ghosts, madness, outrage, superstition, and revenge."

Critical Reception

By the time Leroux published The Phantom of the Opera, he had already gained credibility as a crime mystery author in both French- and English-speaking countries. He had written six novels prior, two of which had garnered substantial popularity within their first year of publication: The Mystery of the Yellow Room and The Perfume of the Lady in Black. Although previous commentators have asserted that The Phantom of the Opera did not attain as much success as these previous novels, being particularly unpopular in France where it was first published, recent research into the novel's early reception and sales has indicated the contrary. One book review from the New York Times expressed disappointment in the way the phantom was portrayed, saying that the feeling of suspense and horror is lost once it is found out that (view spoiler)[the phantom is just a man. (hide spoiler)][15] The majority of the notability that the novel acquired early on was due to its publication in a series of installments in French, American, and English newspapers. This serialized version of the story became important when it was read and sought out by Universal Pictures to be adapted into a movie in 1925. Leroux did not live to see all the success from his novel and its subsequent critical re-evaluation; he died in April 1927.