It’s always fascinating to search for the inspiration of a creative work, and that’s certainly true of The Phantom of the Opera. I tried to read the original 1909 novel by Gaston Leroux after seeing a performance of the musical some years ago, but I found it to be pretty much impenetrable. (And I just took a look at it again before writing this post; it hasn’t changed.) To me there were two questions I wanted to answer: 1) What is the reason for the Phantom’s physical disfigurement? And 2) What so-called “real events” gave rise to the legend of the Phantom in the first place?
There doesn’t seem to be any reason given for the Phantom’s horrible face in the original novel, which describes it as a “noseless, lipless, sunken-eyed face which resembles a skull dried up by the centuries, covered in yellowed dead flesh.” It is simply the way the child, christened Erik, was born. The epilogue of the novel gives a brief synopsis of Erik’s early life, saying that his own mother couldn’t stand the sight of him and he therefore ran away from home as soon as he could, with the intriguing tidbit that his father (who died before the Phantom’s birth) was a master builder. While I couldn’t get into the original version by Leroux, I found the1990 novel Phantom by Susan Kay to be utterly compelling. If you’d like to read a re-telling of the Phantom story told with great empathy from several points of view I’d recommend this book. Kay adds some intriguing twists to the story at the end, but I won’t tell you what they are! In a couple of film versions there are specific reasons given for the deformity: an acid attack and an accident with a record presser. (That second one is set within the cutthroat world of the early music industry.)
All that being said, there are a couple of historical facts that seem to have inspired Leroux. First, there is really a “lake” (actually a reservoir or cistern) underneath the Paris Opera House, and this feature is used by the Phantom as the secret route to his hidden lair. There are also tunnels, arches, passages, etc., that could give rise to the idea that someone lived down there. In reality, though, these structures were put in place because the Opera House was built on very marshy, swampy ground, and the architects had to deal with all that water. The fall of the huge chandelier that occurs in the novel during an opera performance, or at least its equally huge counterweight, actually happened, although not during a performance, and a workman was killed. And there was the usual legend, common in big buildings that have lots of weird-but-normal creaks and groans, that the place was haunted.
Leroux took all these elements and wove them together into his novel, which was first serialized in 1909 and then published as a stand-alone book in 1910. The story uses the Opera House legends as a base and then develops it along the same lines as the classic fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” (which ends happily for both girl and monster) and Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (which doesn’t). The monster falls in love with the beautiful girl (in this case a young woman in the opera chorus named Christine) and uses her love of music to draw her to himself. He gives her singing lessons and manipulates the opera house management to get her starring roles. Most discussions of Leroux’s novel cite a not-very-well-known-today 1894 work titled Trilby by George du Maurier, in which a young tone-deaf girl, Trilby, is hypnotized by a rogue named Svengali and enabled to sing beautifully. He keeps her under his spell and she becomes a great singer, La Svengali. But her career ends when Svengali is stricken with a heart attack during a performance and can’t produce the spell; she is hooted off the stage. That novel was the most popular book of its time and was made into an extremely successful play. Today it’s pretty much forgotten, but two cultural references remain. We still refer to an older man who has great influence over a younger woman, especially in her career, as a “Svengali.” And the name of the girl, Trilby, got transferred to a type of hat worn by the actress in the famous play. Leroux took the idea of the Phantom’s giving Christine singing lessons but left out the tone-deaf part. (And the hat.)
Leroux’s work has been completely overshadowed by the many adaptations that have been made of it over the years. Until Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, the most famous of those remakes was the 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney. To quote Wikipedia again, “The movie remains most famous for Chaney’s ghastly, self-devised make-up, which was kept a studio secret until the film’s premiere.” Dialogue and sound effects were later added to the film. I had thought that this movie was the inspiration for Webber’s musical, but according to the official website that’s not the case. In 1984 Webber came across a review of a stage adaptation of Phantom and contacted the director about the possibility of turning it into a musical. The next year Webber was in New York and discovered a copy of the original novel in a second-hand bookstore, buying it for a dollar, and was completely entranced. Well, it could have happened that way, I guess. As I was writing this paragraph I was reminded of the origin story for the musical Hamilton; there are several versions of the sequence of events that led Lin-Manuel Miranda to write his masterpiece. In the end, what really matters is the finished work.
“Masquerade,” a selection from the musical that’s well suited for choral performance, takes place within the context of a masked ball/gala at the Opera House. If you’re alert you’ll notice the line “Six months of relief, of delight, of Elysian peace,” which refers to the length of time elapsed since the Phantom’s last appearance. He will show up at the end of this number, an event that is hinted at in the selection’s final “Ah!”
Here’s a great choir performance:
© Debi Simons
