Undoubtedly, one of the most famous pieces of musical theater is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. This is a hill that I will firmly stand on. I’ll be honest, there have been times where I have dug deep into Broadway and West End shows (Phantom included) and explored their history, but no show has piqued my interest more than the origins of Phantom. From late September of 1909 to early January of 1910, French writer Gaston Leroux published a series of stories in a newspaper. This series, titled “Le Fantôme de l’Opéra”, would later be published as a novel in March of 1910.
Earlier this week, a friend and I were fangirling over the stage production and I explored a little more of the book’s history. I very quickly found out that Leroux’s work was inspired by true events at the Palais Garnier, one of Paris’ opera houses. So yes, a chandelier’s counterweight really did fall mysteriously from the ceiling and there is a lake beneath the floor of the Palais Garnier. And most importantly, there was rumored to be a phantom lurking in the shadows, within the curtains and behind the walls of the opera house.
Gaston Leroux was born on May 6, 1868 in Paris, France and led a very normal childhood. As Leroux pursued a career as a clerk in a law office, his father died in 1889, leaving him with a handsome inheritance. Leroux took a break from working and wasted most of the money away by grambling, drinking, and partying. When the money was nearly gone, Leroux knew two things: 1) he needed to get serious about a career and 2) he did not want to return to law. Leroux chose to pursue a career in journalism. He became a theater critic and a courtroom reporter, where his experience as a clerk came in handy as he covered some of the biggest legal cases in France at the time. Leroux also became an international correspondent for a Parisian newspaper, even going to Russia to cover the Russian Revolution of 1905.
However, Leroux got tired of writing non-fiction and decided to purely focus on fiction. He wrote many novels and he became a sensation in France. Throughout Paris in the late 1890s, there were rumors going around about a ghost, or a phantom, that loomed the opera. These suspicions were confirmed in 1896 when a counterweight for the Garnier’s house chandelier broke through the ceiling, injuring many and killing one. The Daily Telegraph says that the crash was caused by a fire that started and melted the wire that held the counterweight to the chandelier. Even then, the start of the fire remains a mystery, if there was even a fire at all. However, I’ve done a lot of digging around and half the sources I found say a counterweight to the chandelier fell, and the other half say the chandelier itself fell (the counterweight makes the most sense, as the chandelier weighted nearly 17,000 pounds – and for it to only kill one person would’ve been miraculous, but the chandelier falling fits they mystery of the phantom – it’s your choice on what to believe). Beneath the Palais Garnier lies a “lake”, one could say. During construction of the building in 1861, workers realized that they would be building on top of a reservoir, architect Charles Garnier used a concrete foundation to keep the water there, are draining it would’ve been impossible. This “artificial” lake would also help the moisture levels of the opera house. The mysteriousness of the lake made a perfect hiding place for a mysterious ghost to hide, and the idea of that stuck.
As for the phantom himself, no one knows how his story came about, but it is highly likely that Leroux used a tragedy from 1873 as his inspiration. The Salle Le Peletier was the original location of the Paris Opera, it was destroyed in 1873 from a fire. In this fire, a ballerina died. Her fiancé, the venue’s pianist, was able to make it out alive, but his face was left severely disfigured from the fire’s burns, some even calling him “faceless.”
It is rumored that people saw him seek refuge at the Palais Garnier, living in the very lake that lies beneath the opera house. And there, he died. Is he the ghost the lurks within the Garnier? No one knows. Mind you, the phantom is merely hearsay, some claiming that if there was a ghost, it was an old woman, someone who died in a duel, or a prisoner from decades before. Nevertheless, Leroux did not doubt that there was a ghost within the Palais Garnier, and he spent most of his life trying to prove this.
Some sources claim Leroux to be the French equivalent of Agatha Christie, though his detective fiction only ever stayed within France. The Phantom of the Opera caught the eye of Universal Studios and he sold a copy of his work. In 1925 a silent film under the same title was published, and The Phantom of the Opera became a sensation. Multiple film adaptations would occur over the decades, but none more famous that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage adaption, putting Phantom on the world stage, creating history, and putting Leroux’s novel into the limelight. Although Christine Daaé, other characters, and the plot are purely fictional, the inspiration is nothing short of true.
The Phantom of the Opera is classic in French gothic literature. That’s no question. But the real question: do you believe in the phantom of the opera?
“No, he is not a ghost; he is a man of Heaven and earth, that is all.”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
