Before Emmy delighted us in the movie, before Sarah thrilled us with her voice on the Broadway stage, and even before Lon Chaney freaked us out in the old black and white picture, there was the novel by Gaston Leroux. This is where it all began. Translated from the French, the language is sometimes odd, but the story – ah, the story.
Gaston Leroux was born in Paris in 1868 and lived a thrilling life as a journalist, playwright, and writer of detective thrillers. He began his career as a crime reporter and traveled the world, visiting such places as North Africa, where he disguised himself as an Arab. While he wrote several stories starring the character Joseph Rouletabille, called “among the finest examples of the detective stories we possess,” he will long be remembered for his novel, “The Phantom of the Opera.” He said that the ideas for this story came to him in his sleep, and he would get out of bed and scribble them down by candlelight. The story does have a dream-like quality about it, at times very much like a nightmare.
The story is much the same as told in the musical. Christine Daae is a chorus girl at the Paris Opera House, longing for more, to express herself musically. Already a talented dancer, she has a place on stage whenever a ballet is called for, but what she truly wants is to sing. She is approached by a man whose face she cannot see, and she takes him up on his offer: he will teach her how to sing. Before he died, her father told her that the Angel of Music would come and visit her, and when Christine hears the voice in the shadows, she assumes that it is the Angel, coming to fulfill her father’s prophecy.
Raoul is Christine’s childhood playmate, and he comes to the opera one night, the very night that the star has been put out of commission by the mysterious owner of the voice, and Christine has stepped in to fill the role. She sings gloriously, captivating the audience and bringing Raoul to his feet. He seeks her out, they continue their friendship, but it quickly turns to love, much to the anger of the Angel of Music, also known as the Opera Ghost. His demands become larger and larger, his temper more volatile, until finally he takes Christine down into his lair and Raoul must come save her.
While the basic gist of the story is told in the stage production of the Lloyd Webber musical, I found that the recently made movie starring Emmy Rossum was much more authentic to the book, in that you get more of the story. Where did the Phantom come from, is he really magic, how are his tricks performed – more of these questions are answered in the movie. But in order to know the real story, I recommend reading the book. There is so much detail to the story, so many secrets revealed, that could never be fit into a film and can only be answered by immersing yourself in the pages of this thrilling novel.
(This book was first published back in 1911.)