‘The Phantom of the Opera’ is the most famous work of French author Gaston Leroux. First published in French as a serial in 1909, the story revolves around the young, Swedish Christine Daaé. Her father, a famous musician, dies, and she is raised in the Paris Opera House with his dying promise of a protective angel of music to guide her. After a time at the opera house, she begins hearing a voice, who eventually teaches her how to sing beautifully. All goes well until Christine’s childhood friend Raoul comes to visit his parents, who are patrons of the opera, and he sees Christine when she begins singing successfully on the stage. The voice, who is the deformed, murderous ‘ghost’ of the opera house named Erik, however, grows violent in his terrible jealousy, until Christine suddenly disappears. The phantom is in love, but it can only spell disaster.
Part horror story, part historical romance, and part detective thriller, the timeless tale of a masked, disfigured musical genius who lives beneath the Paris Opera House is familiar to millions of readers, as well as to movie and theater-goers. At the heart of the story’s long-standing popularity lies its questioning of a universal theme: the relationship between outward appearance and the beauty or darkness of the human soul.
Despite finding little success in print after its 1911 publication, interest in and acclaim for Gaston Leroux’s ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ intensified as a result of numerous film and stage adaptations, most notably Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 stage adaptation.
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