“Inspiration”

A Mother’s Day greeting card art featuring a younger Meg watching her mother dancing in her prime. I went with a more painterly look with this one to convey a delicate and graceful quality.

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Christmas is coming, guys ;)

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Cram-it Daroga, I gotta see if Jonathan Harker is going to finally put 2 and 2 together here.

Far too many pics of the Palais Garnier (Part Two!)

In October of 2022, I had the extraordinary experience of getting to complete an 15+ year old dream of mine to visit the Palais Garnier. I took a metric fuckton of pictures and now I want to share them with you all, the PotO community!

Christina Nilsson: One of the Victorian era’s most famous divas.

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This is how it all began! On Thursday, 23 September, 1909, the first section of Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l'Opéra was printed on page 3 in the feuilleton section of the Parisian daily newspaper, Le Gaulois.

Le Fantôme de l'Opéra ran for 15 weeks, from 23 September, 1909, to 8 January, 1910, and was printed in 68 sections. To celebrate 105 years of Phantom in print, I will be posting all 68 sections of Leroux’s novel on each day that Phantom originally appeared in Le Gaulois.

This first section includes the text of the Avant-Propos (Foreword) from Leroux’s novel (I’ve included it as a single panel, and as two panels for easier reading). To read my translation of the Foreword, click here.

Click here to see the entire edition of Le Gaulois from 23 September, 1909. This link brings you to page 3 of the newspaper – Le Fantôme is at the bottom of the page. Click on the big green arrows towards the top of the webpage to turn the pages of the newspaper, and click on the magnifying glass icon at the top left to zoom.

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The Commune in Kay

I finished Susan Kay’s Phantom just a few months ago. I wanted to highlight Kay’s interpretation of Erik’s Commune experience as there is a lot I think she got right. And a lot she didn’t. 

I agree with Kay that Erik must have been in Paris at the time of the 1871 Paris Commune as the Palais Garnier was nearly a completed structure by this time. If Erik worked on the foundations, he must have been there from the beginning, in 1861. Kay writes that Erik is already living in the cellar when the Commune began. It made the perfect hideout. 

But I disagree with Kay that Erik would have stayed hidden for the entirety of the Commune. I think at the very least he would have come out to watch the fires at the end. I think Erik delights in chaos - which is why he is always creating it. I don’t think he would have cared about the Commune politically, but I think he would have been very much interested in the arson. 

Does Erik have a political worldview? For all the references to the Commune and anarchy that Leroux slipped into his character, Erik doesn’t seem to stand for anything other than himself. Or rather, he represents so much as to be a mess of a character. Leroux associates him with the Commune and with anarchic terrorism (the chandelier, the threat to explode the Opera) yet what Erik seems to desire most is to be part of the bourgeoisie. He crashes a fancy dinner party, he decorates his home with care, he yearns to be seen walking in the park with a pretty wife. These are not the desires of an anarchist. He is everything at once and therefore completely mysterious. Kay’s Erik’s singular focus seems to be his own internal angst. It makes sense that Kerik pretty much ignores the Commune. Except for that one Communard he kills in the cellar. 

Kay didn’t seem to do as much research on the Commune chapters as she did for some of the other sections of her novel. Although, at the time she wrote her story research was much harder; she didn’t have the luxury of the internet and Google translate. But it’s clear she didn’t find this topic interesting or important to her story. See the above excerpt. The Commune didn’t surrender. It was defeated, massacred. Many many people died. I can’t imagine that anyone was over the horror of it in a mere month. The city itself had suffered physical trauma that would take years to rebuild. But Kay moves her story forward quickly. Erik has a soprano to meet. 

The fact that Erik has something of both the anarchist and the bourgeois actually fits in very well with his character‘s dualism. Erik unites contradictions - he has great ugliness and sublime beauty, he is powerful yet vulnerable, murderous yet innocent, he is a bringer of life and a bringer of death. He is all the extremes in one. He tries to attain his bourgeois dream by resorting to anarchist methods. But in the end, he becomes neither.

Leroux confirms that Erik continued the construction work on his house alone and in secret during the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune:

[Notice how the text says „Philippe Garnier“ instead of Charles Garnier - I haven’t checked if that is a first edition error but this reprint also features other errors such as „rocher“ instead of „nocher“ so it is possible.]

It seems therefore that Erik was keeping to himself, staying away from most of the political developments. I do suspect though that he acquired the gunpowder he had stored away in the cellars during the time of the war, when it would have been readily available.

One aspect I view somewhat differently regarding Leroux’s Erik is that I do not think he enjoyed creating chaos as an end in itself. Erik is a rather purpose-driven character. He likes to prank, he likes to play people, but he does most of it with an underlying goal and motivation in mind. He asks for a salary because he needs the money for a wedding (and a house, presumably). He drops the chandelier on the concierge so that his ally, Mme Giry, will be reinstated, and to make the managers comply. He enjoys flexing his intellect with the delight (and often, the lack of morality) of a little child. But I don‘t think he is someone who likes to see the world burn as an end in itself. He is a Jack Sparrow - not a Joker.

From The Complete Phantom of the Opera by George Perry, 1987

The Introduction of The Phantom of the Opera is pure brilliance. Leroux writes in the first person, signs it G.L., his own initials. He intertwines details that are real, details that are convincing, and total fiction such that the reader cannot really tell what might actually exist under the Palais Garnier. 

Realizing that G.L. is not Leroux and that the Introduction is not an author’s note, but rather the beginning of the strange tale, was a revelation to me. Leroux begs us to actively disbelieve him. And we should.

Leroux’s style birthed a myth that continues to confound our sense of reality. We want to believe Erik was a real person. Or at least, that Leroux really did find a skeleton down there, didn’t he? And if the lake is real, then isn’t the Communard dungeon real too? The one where G.L. saw the initials R.C. scratched into the wall? It all really happened, didn’t it?

In the above page from The Complete Phantom of the Opera, author George Perry seems to believe that Leroux really did find a skeleton down there and that the body really was somehow connected to the Commune. But using Leroux as a reference to back-up Leroux’s own claims is treading on unstable ground. 

It is canon that there is a Communard dungeon beneath the Garnier. That doesn’t make it history. 

Reblogging a year later just to say a definitive no, there is no Communard dungeon beneath the Palais Garnier. The Communards didn’t keep prisoners at the unfinished opera house. Neither do I believe that anyone who found a skeleton under the Garnier in 1909 would have assumed it to be a victim of the Commune. Not when there were tens of thousands of Communard victims of the French Army. So many people died during the last week of the Commune that Parisians really did discover bodies years later. 

Cram-it Daroga, I gotta see if Jonathan Harker is going to finally put 2 and 2 together here.

Erik is sooo unhappy…

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An Interview on Phantom, with Susan Kay

Back in 1993 I wrote a fan letter to Susan Kay, and asked if she’d be willing to give me an interview for the Phantom Appreciation Society fanzine. So this is the interview she gave me, by letter, published in “Masquerade” issue 4, Spring 1994. (Masquerade and Beneath the Mask were the same zine, it just changed name on issue 5 as I discovered there was already a musicals zine called Masquerade.)

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN KAY

When and how did you first become interested in the story or the Phantom?

My first contact with the Phantom was a chance purchase of the soundtrack of the Lloyd Webber musical. The music took me to the London production and the show took me to the original Gaston Leroux novel, which I hoped would satisfy the immense appetite I had developed for further knowledge of the character. My reaction to the book was a mixture of disappointment and fascination. It told me so much less than I had hoped for, and yet the little there was intrigued me even further: the odd paragraph here, the throwaway line there which mentioned the Phantom’s earlier life. Increasingly the last two pages of Leroux’s book began to read to me like the plot of another story, a story which refused to go away and clamoured ever more incessantly to be written.

Do you think that Leroux’s novel was based on a true story?

It’s very tempting to think so.

How many times have you seen the Lloyd Webber show?

I’ve seen it ten times in all. Six times in London, twice in Los Angeles, and twice in Hamburg where I was the guest of the German Phantom, Thomas Schulze.

Do you still see it?

The last time I saw the musical in England was in London in April 1991. The following day “Phantom” was announced Romantic Novel of the Year at the RNA awards luncheon, so perhaps that particular show was a good omen for me.

Who is your favourite Phantom?

Michael Crawford was wonderful, and I found Dave Willetts very powerful. Anyone who has the opportunity should try to see Thomas Schulze in the Hamburg production.

How did you create the character of Erik in your book?

When I came to examine the character myself I came to the conclusion that the real tragedy of his life was not his disfigurement. but his complete inability to accept that his mother had ever loved him. This fatal belief warped his whole existence and rendered him incapable of recognizing love even when it was staring him in the face, whether it was the first infatuation of a young girl, the dark desire of an older woman, the affection of a friend, or the real admiration of those who came to work with or serve him in one capacity or another. This idea became central to the whole storyline, leading inexorably to one tragedy after another. Certainly his life was shaped by the rejection of society, horrific experience and some cruel twists of fate, but ultimately this was always a character relentlessly set on a course of self-destruction. I also felt that, in spite of the terrible crimes he commits during the course of his life, the Phantom was neither a psychopath nor an inherently evil man. In order to make that last act of self-sacrifice for the sake of love there must always have been an essential core of good within the character. Leroux himself allowed his Phantom certain traits of kindness, humour and civilized behaviour. I felt that essentially this was a fiercely proud man who came to desire his own human dignity to an almost insane degree and would go to any lengths to protect it. Couple this with the unstable temperament that often accompanies pure genius and you have a very dangerous man, a man capable of killing for a real or imagined slight even the people he most desperately loves. Those attracted to him are always rightly aware of an underlying fear, and I believe it is this mixture of attraction and fear which is responsible for his powerful sexuality. It’s what separates the Phantom from Raoul and all the other nice young boys like him who offer a safe mundane existence to a woman, but no thrills or chills.

What was the most difficult part of the book to write?

The first two sections dealing with his childhood were the most straight-forward. The sections from Rome through to the building of the Opera House were very demanding from the point of research, some of which was obscure and hard to obtain. But the section I found most hard to actually write was the part of the story which directly overlaps Leroux’s. It’s very difficult to trespass nonchalantly over someone else’s story, particularly when it has been adapted so many times in different mediums. I had to dispense with a lot of inhibitions, the chief of which was “"How can I ever dare to meddle with this?”

What would you have done if you were Christine?

I think I would have had to do what she did in the book, and go back that one last time to make things right. It would have been a terrible thing to live with otherwise: it would have destroyed both her and Raoul in the end.

See also: the original UK paperback cover art for Kay’s Phantom, and some nice tarot-style art from a magazine at the time.