Today in History: First section of Phantom of the Opera published in Le Gaulois, 1909 (France)
The Phantom of the Opera (French: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra), is a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serialization in Le Gaulois from 23 September 1909, to 8 January 1910. It was published in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte and directed by Aluel Malinao.[1] The novel is partly inspired by historical events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century and an apocryphal tale concerning the use of a former ballet pupil's skeleton in Carl Maria von Weber's 1841 production of Der Freischütz.[2] 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.
Leroux initially was going to be a lawyer, but after spending his inheritance gambling he became a reporter for L’Echo 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.[3] The novel was first published within newspapers before finally being published as a novel in 1911.[4]
The setting of The Phantom of the Opera came from an actual Paris opera house that Leroux had heard the rumours about from the time the opera house was finished. The details about the Palais Garnier, and rumours surrounding it, are closely linked in Leroux's writing. The underground lake that he wrote about is accurate to this opera house, and it is still used for training firefighters to practice swimming in the dark. The event that was the infamous chandelier crash also rang to be true.[5] The mysteries that Leroux uses in his novel about the Phantom are still mysteries.[6] However, he defended the rumors to be true, even on his death bed.[7]
The Phantom of the Opera's origins came from Leroux's curiosity with the Phantom being real. In the prologue, he tells the readers about the Phantom and the research that he did to prove the truth of the ghost. His findings connected the corpse from the opera house to the Persian phantom himself.[8]
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