Before the music and the elaborate stage production, before Lon Chaney, Sr. frightened movie goers in the Roaring 20’s, The Phantom of the Opera was a book written by the French author Gaston Leroux in 1909 and 1910. Taking away nothing from the success of the musical or the movie or other less well known adaptions, it is a shame that the book proved so popular for adaptation, because it has been overshadowed by the musical and films. It’s a particular shame because the book by Leroux is a beautiful, poignant, suspenseful piece of art with a Gallic tone of love wrapped in danger, wrapped in tragedy, wrapped again in love that has seduced the English speaking world for centuries. Christine is the ingénue, who takes the stage of the Paris Opera and scores a brilliant success. Her former lover attends the performance, hears the beauty of her voice and falls in love again. The two plan to wed. On a subsequent night, as the prima donna, Carlotta, performs in Faust, the massive chandelier falls into the audience. In the ensuing confusion the Phantom, who until then was but an incorporeal presence, kidnaps Christine and takes her away to his hiding place in dark recesses deep beneath the Opera House. Having made himself known up to that time only through letters and malevolent acts, he becomes flesh and bone for Christine. He shows himself to her, and in time he will remove his mask and show her his face. The story is a love story in the deepest, most mysterious sense of the word. It portrays a love that is and is not dependent on superficial or surface gifts. Rather it portrays the many mansions within a single heart, with its consequent confusion of devotion, jealousy, possessiveness, passion, desire, and heat, mixed in their measure, contradictory and utterly human. (Summary by Michael Hogan)