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Musical fiction,
Phantom of the Opera (Fictitious character)
Lloyd Webber has changed this to Don Juan Triumphant , an opera entirely composed by the Phantom himself.) The lights suddenly failed, plunging the theatre into pitch-darkness, and when they went up again, she was gone. Now this cannot be done with 900 gas globes.
True, a mysterious saboteur who knew his way around could pull the master lever shutting off the gas supply to this host of globes. But they would extinguish in sequence as the gas supply ran out and after much spluttering and popping. Worse, as automatic reignition was not known then, they could only be relit by someone going round with a taper. That was what the humble profession of lamplighter was all about. The only way to produce utter darkness at the pull of a switch, and illumination again in another millisecond is to operate the master control of a fully electric lighting system. This puts the date rather later than some would have it.
Leroux appears also to have made an error with the position, appearance and intelligence of Madame Giry, an error corrected in the Lloyd Webber musical. This lady appears in the original book as a half-witted cleaner. She was in fact the mistress of the chorus and the corps de ballet who hid behind the veneer of a starchy martinet (necessary to control a corps of excitable girls) a most courageous and compassionate nature.
One must forgive Leroux for this, for he was relying on human memory, that of his informants, and they were clearly describing another woman. But any policeman or court reporter will happily confirm that witnesses in court, honest and upright people, have some difficulty agreeing with each other and recalling with precision the events they witnessed last month, let alone eighteen years ago.
In a much more glaring error, Leroux describes a moment when the Phantom in another fit of pique causes the entire chandelier above the auditorium to crash down upon the audience, killing a single woman sitting beneath. That this lady turns out to be the woman hired to replace the Phantom’s dismissed friend Mme Giry is a lovely storyteller’s touch. But he then goes on to say that the chandelier weighed 200,000 kilograms. That happens to be 200 tonnes, enough to bring it and half the ceiling down every night. The chandelier weighs seven tonnes; it did when it went up, it is still there and it still does!
But far and away the most bizarre departure by Leroux from even the most basic rules of investigation and reporting is his end-of-book seduction by a mysterious character known only as ‘the Persian’. This strange mountebank is briefly mentioned twice in the first two-thirds of the story, and in a most passing manner. Yet after the abduction of the soprano from centre stage Leroux allows this man to take over the whole narrative and tell the entire story through his own eyes for the last third of the book. And what an implausible story it is.
Yet Leroux never attempts to cross-check his allegations. Although the young Vicomte Raoul de Chagny was supposed to have been present at every stage of the events described by the Persian, Leroux claims he could not find the vicomte later to check the story. Of course he could have!
We will never know why the Persian had such a loathing of the Phantom but he produced a character assassination of the man that blackened him to the very gates of hell. Prior to the intervention of the Persian, Leroux the writer and most readers might have felt some human sympathy for the Phantom. Clearly he was monstrously disfigured in a society that too often equates ugliness with sin, but that was not his fault. He was evidently filled with hatred of society but, rejected and an exile, he must have had a truly appalling life. Until the Persian, we can see Erik as the Beast to the singer Christine’s Beauty, but not intrinsically evil.
The Persian, however, paints him as a raging sadist; a serial killer and strangler for pleasure; one who delights in designing torture chambers and spying