The grand ceremonial staircase leading to the performance hall, salons and foyers of the Paris Opera • WIKIMEDIACOMMONS In September 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Gaulois publishes the first episode of a soap opera entitled The Phantom of the Opera . The author, Gaston Leroux, who had not yet left the profession of journalist, claims to have investigated a succession of strange events that occurred at the Palais Garnier, the Paris Opera, and that the purpose of his novel is to deliver the result of this investigation. During the five months that the publication of episodes in Le Gaulois lasts , readers are captivated by the story of a ghost wandering behind the scenes and causing the death of anyone who dares to look at him. Desperate love In reality, the ghost is a tormented man, whose deformed face at birth gives him the appearance of a real ghost. Leroux presents him as a genius of architecture, magic and music, but also as a living dead who has taken up residence in the basements of the Opera. The creature falls in love with a young soprano, Christine Daaé, gives her singing lessons and tries by all means to keep her by his side, going so far as to kidnap her and keep her prisoner in her lair. The story is punctuated with dramatic scenes:traps in the underground passages, the fall of the chandelier from the majestic auditorium, revenge, deaths... Eventually, Erik – such is the name of the protagonist – agrees, in an act of redemption, to let Christine go with her childhood sweetheart, Viscount Raoul de Chagny. In the novel's epilogue, Leroux recounts the end of the ghost who, alone and desperate, plagued by his frustrations, but having caught a glimpse of the glimmer of love he longed for so much, ends his life by isolating himself from the outside world in the basements of the Opera. Also read:The shadow of the golem hangs over the Prague ghetto Leroux is a pioneer of the popular detective novel. In 1907, with The Mystery of the Yellow Room , he began a series centered on the amateur detective Rouletabille, which he successfully continued until the 1920s. The Phantom of the Opera also captivated readers, and very quickly also spectators, with several cinematographic adaptations (including that of 1925 with Lon Chaney in the main role) and, more recently, a musical comedy which gained worldwide recognition. The hidden lake under the stage From the first episode of the soap opera, Gaston Leroux affirms loud and clear that what he is about to tell in several chapters is based on real facts. “The Phantom of the Opera existed. It was not, as was long believed, an inspiration of artists, a superstition of managers. And in fact, like other legends, that of the Phantom of the Opera is based on truthful elements, from which the author shapes a hybrid story, between literature and reality. A first source of inspiration for the story of the ghost is provided by the Opera itself, built on the initiative of Emperor Napoleon III, who wanted a temple of music embodying the symbol of his power. When work began in 1862, an unforeseen obstacle emerged from the depths:an old tributary of the Seine threatened the stability of the building, which was to be erected on marshy ground. To consolidate the foundations, the architect, Charles Garnier, designed an artificial lake isolated by walls in order to strengthen the building and prevent water infiltration. Nowadays, the firefighters of Paris drain the lake twice a year to prevent the level of the water table from rising and to protect the fish that live there. Between this large cistern and ground level, five floors of underground galleries have been built to prevent landslides. All this suggests to Leroux the idea of a character, Erik, hired by Garnier as an assistant, who takes advantage of the construction period of the building - almost 15 years - to design his personal lair, a refuge to isolate himself from the genre. human. Canned music It is in this same place that the opening scene of the novel takes place, taken from a real event that Leroux witnessed. In 1907, a group of men led by the director of the French Gramophone Company, Alfred Clark, and the director of the Opera, Pedro Gailhard, team up to carry out an almost secret mission. Clark donated several recordings of opera singers of the day to the National Academy of Music, on one condition:to keep these recordings sealed in metal urns and not to open them until 100 years had passed. Gailhard chooses to store this treasure in the basement of the Opera, near the underground artificial lake, a place sheltered from the sun and the curious – the urns were opened in 2007, and the recordings were published on three CDs entitled Les Urnes de l'Opéra . Also read:Frankenstein, the birth of a literary monster Leroux picks up the event by adding that when the workers begin to break through one of the walls of the underground to make the safe, this wall collapses revealing a fully furnished apartment; what's more, the room contains a decomposing corpse. According to Leroux, the Opera wanted to hide this unexpected find and had the body thrown into a mass grave. But the novelist conducts an in-depth investigation and finds that the skeleton of the deceased shows signs of malformation. He claims that the man, whoever he may be, would have locked himself up voluntarily with the sole purpose of dying within these walls. In reality, we know that the Paris Opera has never contained a mysterious skeleton, which did not prevent it from being said later that it was the corpse of a communard who would have participated to the popular uprising in Paris in 1871. Concerning this last point, the only proven fact is that, during the siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1870, the building served as a refuge and as an ammunition and supply depot. On the other hand, several years after the Commune, the remains of thousands of communards victims of the 1871 repression appeared in different places in the capital. The real Christine The female protagonist, Christine Daaé, is the other element of the story mixing reality and fiction. The resemblances between this fictional character and a singer of the time are more than obvious. It seems that Leroux was inspired by the life of Christina Nilsson to imagine his own soprano. Both were born in Sweden and are daughters of peasants; their mother died when they were children, and they accompanied their father from village to village playing the violin and singing popular melodies. When their father died, they were adopted by patrons who not only took care of them like their own daughters, but also opened the doors to the Parisian opera world. Finally, both marry a man from the aristocracy; in Nilsson's case, it was a Spanish aristocrat, the Count of Casa Miranda. And the ghost? It is true that when Leroux wrote his novel, there was much talk of ghosts in Paris. Thus, in 1905 the physiologist Charles Richet, Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1913, caused a sensation by publishing a report describing the appearance of specters in Algeria, with supporting photographs. But Leroux was impervious to such beliefs and, in his novel, Erik is not a real ghost:he is a man of flesh and blood, who uses the fear and superstitions of others to against spirits. From the novel to the cinema The Phantom of the Opera is serialized for the first time in the newspaper Le Gaulois , from September 1909 to January 1910. The work was then adapted several times for the cinema and the theatre. The most famous of these adaptations is Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, which premiered in 1986. The adventures of a construction The new palace of the Paris Opera was to be the jewel in Napoleon III's crown. It was the project of a young architect, Charles Garnier, who won the public competition launched in 1861. Garnier designed a majestic building, characterized by luxury and opulence, and equipped with a magnificent grand staircase in white marble which connects all levels of the theatre. Work was interrupted by the war between France and Prussia, then by the insurrection of the Commune in 1871, and did not resume until 1873. The building was inaugurated two years later, but without the presence of the former emperor, who died, nor of the architect, ousted by the new power. Watch out for the chandelier! One of the scenes major part of Leroux's novel is the one in which the phantom of the Opera, wanting to frighten the rival of his beloved, causes the great chandelier in the hall to fall at the feet of this singer. A similar event took place on May 20, 1896. During a performance of an opera by Floquet, Hellé , the large crystal chandelier – more specifically a huge chandelier counterweight – falls on spectators, killing a woman seated in the fourth row and injuring several other people. This incident held the police in check, who even ended up considering the possibility of an attack.
