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Suddenly, the dressing-room of Sorelli, one of the ballerinas, was invaded by half-a-dozen young ladies of the corps de ballet, just back from dancing Polyeucte.
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The very first chapter “The Ghost!” begins with a scene that could be a Degas painting: “The shadow that had followed them still clung to their heels, lying low on the roof, reaching with its black wings over the metal crossroads, stealing by the tanks, skirting silently round the domes but the trusting young lovers suspected nothing when at last they sat down under the mighty protection of Apollo thrusting his monumental lyre against the crimson sky with bronze grandeur.”Ī big part of grand opera was ballet. When the heroine Christine and her lover Raoul have a rooftop assignation, the scene would be recognizable to every Parisian: When the Phantom drops a chandelier on the crowd during a performance, it would have reminded the novel’s original readers of the time in 1896 when a heavy counterweight fell during a performance of the opera Hellé, killing a concierge. In the novel, for example, there is a lake under the opera house, in reality this is an enormous concrete cistern. Although Gaston Leroux invented some sections of the building, most of the descriptions are recognizable today. As in a cut-away drawing, the book provides a glimpse of the theater at every level, particularly the people and machinery working behind the scenes: the directors, the men who carried props, the female concierges, the little dancers, costumiers, rat-catchers, even the man who kept horses reserved for tricks on stage. The novel’s primary setting is the fabulously ornate Palais Garnier-seat of the Paris Opera from 1875. Even so, a new generation of French composers continued to produce works on the old grand scale: works like Jules Massenet’s Le roi de Lahore (1877) and Gounod’s Polyeucte (1878) and Ernest Reyer’s Sigurd (1884), all of which are mentioned in Le Fantôme.ĭegas’ Ballet of the Nuns (1876), which depicts a performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, one of the earliest sensations of Grand Opera. By the 1880s, when Le Fantôme de l’Opera is set, the form was yielding to verismo, a genre whose plots deal with ordinary people rather than gods and kings. Many of the most famous works of grand opera are no longer staged today because of their staggering scale, length and expense. It was an extravagant experience, each production divided into four or five acts and requiring huge casts, elaborate stage sets, beautiful costumes and at least one ballet interlude and a vast supporting staff. Grand Opera was extremely popular in Europe and America in the Victorian era. “Leroux’s novel reproduces in astonishing ways exactly that ‘ heure historique’ of the opera house of the Third Republic (1870-1940)…It is an extraordinary evocation of the fantasies that surrounded that space and that population of thousands of spectators, performers and workers who came together every day in central Paris to fabricate jointly a dream world of spectacle.” Jann Matlock, in (2011) introduction to the Penguin Classics English translation by Mireille Ribière, observes his recreation of the grand opera scene:
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The novel is crammed with allusions to particular dances, operas and arias that echo or foreshadow the novel’s own events, and the melodramatic plot is itself worthy of Eugène Scribe, the librettist behind some of the best known operas of the age.
#The phantom of the opera songs list full
Leroux’s novel is full of references to the operas, singers, rumors, lore, technical details and customs associated with the Paris Opera of the nineteenth century. He loved music and his brother Joseph (to whom Le Fantôme de l’Opera is dedicated), who was a singer. Before Gaston Leroux turned to writing fiction full time, he was a lawyer, an international correspondent and…a theater critic.
#The phantom of the opera songs list serial
Le Fantôme de l’Opera (first published as a serial 1909-1910) is not only a gothic horror story but also a paean to and a parody of grand opéra, the spectacle that was an important part of Parisian society for much of the nineteenth century.