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Although never featured explicitly in adaptations of this much-adapted text, the opening gambit of Gaston Leroux’s novel is fundamental not only to his enterprise but to that of many attempts to render it as cinema. In an atmospheric Avant-propos the narrator describes his discovery of the Phantom’s remains in the depths of the Paris Opéra in 1907, about twenty-five years after the events he is about to relate.1 A natural, if macabre, development of a familiar trope of gothic style (the story pieced together from surviving physical sources), this is also the beginning of a meditation on the nature of musical inspiration that will be sustained in different forms throughout the narrative. The circumstance is the real historical interment of a time capsule containing recordings of contemporary stars of the lyric stage, due to be opened a century later,2 but what Leroux may be read as taking from this act of operatic reification is not so much the commemoration of a stable repertory and performance practice as the question of how to choose exactly what is worth commemorating: the difference, in other words, between what is merely representative and what is transcendent. During the course of the novel Leroux pursues this mainly in the area of vocal and dramatic artistry, but the narrative potential of the Phantom’s compositional gifts—which the novel would have us believe are extraordinary and which are themselves reified in the shape of the score of his unfinished masterpiece Don Juan Triumphant, frustratingly still to be located as the novel ends—is never far from the surface. Don Juan Triumphant is the piece that the Phantom has been working on for twenty years; he is convinced he will finish it only in his last days on earth. It is a much darker score than Mozart’s opera buffa—music that burns, as he tells the heroine Christine Daaé, “music that consumes all those who come near it.” Later she describes the music in question, which she has overheard the Phantom playing to himself, and sure enough it is an overwhelming, painfully enlightening experience: “a long, terrible, and magnificent sob.”3

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