There have been dozens of film, television, theatrical adaptations and book spin-offs including Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock musical Phantom of the Paradise, and Terry Pratchett’s Maskerade.īy 1985, Lloyd Webber was showcasing the first act at the annual music festival he holds at his home in Sydmonton, England.Ī year later, with a team of creatives at the peak of their powers, The Phantom of the Opera premiered on the West End.

He then put himself in the long line of artists who’d used the book as a source material. He spent an afternoon reading it and was hooked. Six months later, Lloyd Webber came across Leroux’s novel in a second hand book shop in New York City. Josh Piterman (who will star as the Phantom in Opera Australia's 2021 season) and Kelly Mathieson in The Phantom of the Opera on the West End in 2019. Who’s to say whether this introduction wasn’t part of the novel's mystique, or a marketing ploy to bolster sales and titillate the press? In any case, the Phantom still has a box seat reserved expressly for him at the Opera Garnier, in Box 5, as per the original tale. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers… No, he existed in flesh and blood, though he assumed all the outward characteristics of a real phantom, that is to say, of a shade.” In an introduction he penned to the novelisation of the Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, Leroux claims (a claim he apparently stood by on his deathbed): He first became fascinated by the story of the ‘opera ghost’ after hearing the tale of a chandelier falling on an audience when the Paris Opera first opened. He filed stories from Russia, Africa and across Asia, but it was his own backyard that inspired him most. Leroux himself had a life worthy of a novel: a shipping heir, he blew through his inheritance and became an intrepid journalist. It’s difficult to know how entirely a product of Gaston Leroux’s imagination Le Fantôme de l’Opéra is.

The phantom of the opera 2004 musical