Ratings: 5/5
Synopsis: First published in French as a serial in 1909. The Phantom of the Opera is a riveting story that revolves around the young, Swedish Christine Daaé. Her father, a famous musician, dies, and she is raised in the aParis Opera House with his dying promise of a protective angel of music to guide her. After a time at the opera house, she begins hearing a voice, who eventually teaches her how to sing beautifully. All goes well until Christine's childhood friend Raoul comes to visit his parents, who as are patrons of the opera, and he sees Christine when she begins successfully singing on the stage. The voice, who is the deformed, murderous "ghost" of the opera house named Erik, however, grows violent in his terrible jealousy, until Christine suddenly disappears. The Phantom is in love, but it can only spell disaster
Review: It's no secret to bookworms, theatre buffs, or movie buffs what this tale is all about. Over the past hundred years, it's been adapted many times both for film and the musical stage, the latter bringing its greatest acclaim and fame. The greatest delight I take in the immortal Andrew Lloyd Webber production is its faithfulness to the source material. I am comfortable allowing for artistic license to be taken in an adaptation, so long as the film makers frame it with an amount of accuracy and ultimate respect.
There is a reason why it has liberally been replicated over and over. It's a classic tale, tragic, and tender of a deranged prodigy smitten as if dead by the sweet and beautiful innocent whose timbre is to him the voice of Deity. It is these stories, immortalised by sentiment, that people seem unable to get enough of. We thrive on them, and are pained by them, and in the end yearn for more, sometimes in spite of ourselves.
The Phantom, the book's enigma, is the reason for its continued retelling by whatever medium. Like many good villains' histories, most of his untold, left to the readers' imagination, for better or worse. Physically, the man is deformed beyond recognition, with two luminescent red beads where his eyes should be, racked with torment and humiliation from it al . But Erik also possesses gifts and ideas which at every turn appear not of this world. Having once studied mysterious arts in Persia, he has a knack for contraptions, inventions, and illusions of the most diabolical sorts. He possesses the deepest appreciation for music, trained in all its theories and techniques, frequently conjuring his own majestic - and also diabolical - manifestations. As for his singing voice it is so unspeakably divine that it can at will turn even the sturdiest minds to hypnosis.
It is the characters and the dialogues, the descriptions and the whole Gothic charade that make this novel an unforgettable delight, numbered among classics for reason far beyond what the greatest theatre production could depict.