An Opera Without a Phantom

“The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, of the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet . . . Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.” --Gaston Leroux, Phantom of the Opera (2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition[1];translator DeMattos, I think, though the different editions is a discussion in itself)

“He’s [the Phantom] got low self-esteem, and he’s deformed—but who isn’t in one way or another? He’s never been hugged or kissed. So he does all the things people do when they feel they’re not good enough. He overcompensates. He manifests his talents in ego. He becomes clever and codependent.” --Kevin Gray (Phantom actor, Broadway)

“When someone has denied his own needs for that long, then the first attempts at getting them met can take every ounce of courage that can be mustered. And then, not getting those needs met isn’t even an option—anything that gets in the way can cause some pretty irrational, explosive reactions. The vulnerability beneath the facade of the seductive ‘angel of music’ is intense. . . .
“And speaking of hateful, another important key to the character is his own self-loathing. [Hal Prince] said, ‘You exist in a world where everyone hates you, but no one hates you as much as you do.’ --Thomas James O’Leary (Phantom actor, Broadway)

For a book whose whole basis is the supernatural, the entirety of Phantom of the Opera (1910) is rationally explainable.

One has to remember that, at heart, Gaston Leroux was a newspaper reporter. That’s where he had cut his teeth, and his dabbling in the legal profession probably left its mark. I think he tended to regard morbidity with humor, probably because of the fatedness he saw in his own birth in 1868 in a train station—which later became a funeral parlor. “I sought a cradle where I found a grave.” His experience reporting in Persia of course gives us the Persian elements—was the truly perverse torture chamber his own invention or did he know of such a thing in Tehran? It’s hard to say. From my own research into Origins, I know when the first telegraph wires were laid out in Tehran (1858), but that’s about it.

The settings are real. I’ve had the good fortune now of seeing two of the main settings, the Garnier Opera House in Paris and Perros-Guirec in Brittany (though I couldn’t find the exact cemetery mentioned in the book, I think I did find the beach where Raoul and Christine met circa 1870). The Garnier Opera house, begun in 1861, interrupted by the Paris Commune in 1871, and finally completed in 1873, is an excellent setting for both the “above-ground” scenes of glittering Belle Époque society and the sinister, Gothic domain of the “ghost.” The Opera is one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen, inside and out. But its chequered past as a Commune prison and the fact that, yes, there are several levels below ground and there is an underground lake make Leroux’s leaps of imagination just believable. So, too, of course, any deserted theatre after dark is just a bit spooky. Leroux also took inspiration from an event in the 1890s when a chandelier counterweight fell and killed an audience member.

When a teenager, Leroux met the then-pushing-60 diva Christine Nilsson, the Countess Casi de Miranda, at a party. She is thought to be the inspiration for the Swedish ingénue Christine Daaé. Adelina Patti, the Italian diva with a Swansea connection (!) is said to have inspired La Carlotta. But from whom did Leroux derive his anti-hero ghost? Erik’s name is Scandinavian, but “he said that he had no name and no country and that he had taken the name of Erik by accident.” It is suspected that Leroux may have been influenced both by the Dreyfus Case (1894; Leroux was at the trial) and George DuMaurier’s Trilby (1894) in the character of Svengali. There were rumors, apparently, of a ghost during the construction of the opera house. Recent phans have tried to a) insist there was a worker on the opera house fitting Erik’s description; b) that an Erik can be found in the de Chagny family tree. It’s fun for the phiction writer to suppose these things, but frankly I don’t think they’re giving Leroux’s imagination enough credit!

What is certain, however, is that Erik is a human, not a supernatural manifestation, unlike, say, Dracula, who is clearly not human. “I am not an Angel, nor a spirit, nor a ghost . . . I am Erik!” It has been put forth in the past twenty years of literary criticism that Gothic horror comes in two types, the “male” wherein the horrors are real and the result is generally depressing and demoniacal, and the “female,” where the terrors are greatly exaggerated and often the products of an overactive imagination, where virtue triumphs and, like fairy tales, a moral lesson is proven. (They are so-named because the former is generally the domain of male writers like Louis Stevenson, Lewis, Stoker, and Wilde. The latter is mostly explained by Anne Radcliffe’s novels of the late eighteenth century.) Though written by a man, it is hard to say Phantom is “male” Gothic horror because all events—except the exceptions I’ll get to—can be rationally explained.

The ghost is not a ghost. From the beginning, the corps de ballet, the superstitious diva La Sorelli (who Leroux slyly hints is a tramp), firemen, the usher Madame Giry, and the unfortunate Joseph Buquet all attribute supernatural powers to the “phantom” or “ghost” (depending on your translation). This is because they hear him without seeing him, when they see him he looks inhuman, and since he is usually encountered underground, it seems unlikely anyone but a ghost could survive in such conditions. It is only until the end of the story that Leroux reveals all of Erik’s tricks (naturally so, otherwise, where’s the suspense??).

First of all, he has extraordinary abilities as a ventriloquist. In the rather ridiculous chapters “The Singular Attitude of a Safety-Pin” and “The Safety-Pin Again,” which seem to exist entirely to baffle and poke fun at opera management, we find the true extent of Erik’s impressive, but entirely human, powers. This is also how he seduces Christine, but instead of a ghost, the rather naïve ingénue believes the Voice comes from heaven. This explains, too, how he causes Carlotta to “croak,” by giving her a drug to make her lose her voice and then substituting his own. The exciting disappearances and legerdemain perfected by Erik are theatrical tricks, no more. Secondly, having built his home in the foundations of the Opera, Erik knows the entire above- and below-stage areas very well and even the rooftop! Thirdly, Erik is in physical appearance like a skeleton (contrary to acid-splashing and hunk-burn versions in the films). There are several theories as to exactly what medical condition Leroux was referring to (if any). The one I find most convincing is porphyria, which some say is responsible for myths of vampirism. Others have cited syphilis, since he has no nose![2]

Erik may not be a ghost, but he is probably a murderer. He is at least indirectly responsible for Joseph Buquet’s death. Joseph Buquet shows up hanging from some scenery early in the book, an apparent suicide. Erik’s nemesis the Daroga[3] thinks otherwise; he recognizes the handiwork of the “Punjab lasso.” Buquet stumbled into Erik’s ingenious but horrible torture chamber and died by suicide or was killed by Erik. The concierge who is killed by the chandelier is Erik’s responsibility as well, though he protests to the Daroga that the cables were “old.” Count Philippe, Raoul’s older brother, is killed while crossing the underground lake; this is one of the shady areas I will get to later. According to the Daroga, Erik killed many in Persia to entertain his patron the “little sultana.” At the height of madness brought on by betrayal and jealousy, Erik plots to kill the Daroga and Raoul, and it is only by Christine’s courage that he does not succeed.

These are Erik’s crimes. One has to wonder how much of his seduction of Christine was her naiveté and how much was his manipulating her. No doubt she truly wished to believe in the Angel of Music, but it was he who approached her through her dressing room mirror. To be fair, he did “help” her achieve greatness in the opera company. His tour-de-force is a violin serenade in a cemetery in Perros-Guirec, one of the creepiest and yet one of my favorite scenes from the book. Erik plays The Resurrection of Lazarus waltz while seeming to appear out of a mass of skulls. Even Raoul, who is, by his own admission, “a good Catholic,” is at a loss to explain this rationally: “She knelt down by her father’s grave, made the sign of the cross and began to pray. At that moment, it struck midnight. . . . if Christine’s Angel had existed, he could not have played better, that night, on the late musician’s violin. . ..
“Q: Did it not occur to you that the musician might be hiding behind that very heap of bones?
“A: It was the one thought that did occur to me . . . I saw a terrible death’s head . . .and in the presence of this unearthly apparition, my heart gave way, my courage failed me.”
In addition to everything else, Erik is an accomplished musician and singer.

The entire book is permeated with a vein of ultra-realism. The Prologue and Epilogue assert to the reader “The Opera Ghost really did exist.” The narrator got his story from the Daroga, who got it from the principal players of the story, bit by bit. There are official reports, interviews, letters, and other “documents” persuading us to believe the story is true. With so many rational explanations, how can we not? There are three things that cast a shade of the macabre and inexplicable “male” Gothic horror, and these are the rat-catcher, the siren, and the Shade.

The siren, it appears, is a defense mechanism employed by Erik around the underground lake; according to the Daroga: “Had I been inclined to superstition, I should have certainly thought that it had to do with some siren whose business it was to confound the traveler who should venture on the waters of the house on the lake. . . . But this invention was so perfect that, as I leaned out of the boat, I was impelled less by a desire to discover its trick than to enjoy its charm; and I leaned out, leaned out until I almost overturned the boat.” How exactly this works and whether it is mechanical or human (Erik himself) I’ve never been able to figure out, even through the original French and several translations. My best visualization is from the Lon Chaney version in the film from 1927.

Now, a rat-catcher would seem like a good idea. However, the way Leroux describes this entity is among the most surreal and frightening parts of the book: “A head of fire came toward them, at a man’s height, but with no body attached to it. the face shed fire, looked in the darkness, like a flame shaped as a man’s face.” As if that’s not bad enough: “And the little waves passed between their legs, climbing up their legs, irresistibly, and Raoul and the Persian could no longer restrain their cries of horror, dismay and pain. . . . ‘Don’t move! Don’t move! Whatever you do, don’t come after me! I am the rat-catcher! Let me pass, with my rats!’” If that doesn’t seem slightly supernatural, I don’t know what does. I wish they’d accomplished it a bit more terrifyingly in the stage play! (All of this is a bit like Orpheus descending into the Underworld!)

Finally, the most confusing of Leroux’s little winks at the reader: “ . . . A shadow that did not carry a lantern . . . a shadow in shadow passed . . .
“It came near enough to touch them.
“They felt, on their faces, the warmth of its body . . .
“They could see enough to distinguish a coat that enveloped the Shade from head to toe. It wore a hat of soft felt.
“It stretched, running its foot along the wall and sometimes, in the corners, kicking them” (my translation).
Leroux says: “The reader must try to guess for himself, for I promised . . . to keep secret regarding the extremely interesting and useful personality of the wandering, cloaked, Shade which, while condemning itself to live in the cellars of the Opera, rendered such immense services to those who, on gala evenings, for instance venture to stray away from the stage. I am speaking of state services; and upon my word of honor, I can say no more.” Why no one has ever written a book about this I don’t know.

So, as a ghost story, Phantom of the Opera is something of a failure! There are no ghosts in Leroux’s world. Why, then, does it not disappoint? I venture to say because the Gothic machinery is so richly imagined, from the Poe-like Red Death scenes at the Shrovetide Ball, to the Faustian overtones of Méphistophèles on stage and the Phantom in the wings. Its strange, almost convoluted (Andrew Lloyd Webber thought so) structure and narrative forms make it an oddity—is it an adventure story? A romance? A detective story? Who is the hero? Raoul? Erik? Christine? Listing all of Erik’s vices makes me slightly uncomfortable to declare that compassion for his character is the main reason for my obsession.

At the end of the story, Leroux gives his ghost origins, too—the son of a mason in Rouen, Erik’s mother rejected him from birth and made him his first mask. Exhibition in a freak show followed; Susan Kay in her “prequel” Phantom makes explicit the degradations and abuse suffered by the theoretical Erik as a certain outcast to humanity; think of the Elephant Man. But Joseph Merrick didn’t go around snapping people’s necks with the Punjab lasso: “Thinking himself beyond the pale of humanity, [Erik] was restrained by no scruples and he employed his extraordinary gifts of dexterity and imagination, which he had received by way of compensation for his extraordinary ugliness, to prey upon is fellow men.” Nevertheless, we are exhorted by the narrator to show pity: “Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be ‘some one,’ like everybody else. But he was too ugly! . . . He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world . . . Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera ghost.” It is easy, of course, to see the Opera ghost in one’s own self: the part that is, we think, too ugly to be loved.

He is a fascinating character, this fake ghost. As Kay makes explicit, what Erik suffers most from is not ostracization and abuse, but total lack of love, especially, we are led to believe, romantic love. The book is chock full of Christian imagery, from the Faustian overtones to the Lazarus references to the ultra-redeeming kiss of compassion he receives from Christine (on the forehead in the book; in the musical, it’s on the mouth, which is much more visually powerful). The musical capitalizes on all this, making the Phantom both pitiable and suave, sexy and damaged, musically lithe and, in the movie, something of a vigilante. Clearly this leads many viewers to be seduced, ironically in the same manner as Christine. I suppose I was.

For a failed ghost story, Phantom has proved massively resilient. Of course, it is based in some ways on a very, very old myth (Beauty and the Beast or, further back, Cupid and Psyche). The musical is huge, still going strong in London after twenty years, and breaking records on Broadway; there are new editions of the book coming out all the time. There have been plays and other musical spin offs, novels, comic books, not to mention the 10+ film versions. It recurs often in Doctor Who, especially when Robert Holmes is involved! So far, to my knowledge, the only analytical study of the book is by Jerrold Hogle, with whom I disagree on a number of key points, finding his analysis over-Freudian. However, it seems evident to me that if I can write a five-page paper off the top of my head on only some of its themes, it deserves to go up there in the canon with Dracula and The Castle of Otranto as multi-layered Gothic horror.

[1] All the following quotes are from this edition unless otherwise noted.
[2] In Chambéry, France, where I lived for five months, I saw a man with no nose. I am not sure if this was a medical condition or an injury related to accident or violence (George Perry suggests Leroux drew inspiration from World War I veterans who came back with reconstructed faces due to war wounds). So Leroux’s giving Erik these physical attributes is not as far-fetched as it initially sounds.
[3] Persian chief of police.