Phantom of the Opera, The, is a horror novel by the French author Gaston Leroux. The book was published in 1911. The melodramatic story tells about Erik, a mysterious and hideously deformed composer who lives in the sewers beneath the Paris Opera House. He secretly gives singing lessons to a beautiful young singer named Christine Daae and eventually abducts her.
The novel achieved only moderate success and did not gain widespread recognition until a silent motion picture was made of the story in 1925, starring Lon Chaney as the Phantom. The story was filmed several more times as a feature motion picture and as television movies. The various adaptations altered details about the Phantom, especially concerning his personality. The story gained perhaps its greatest fame as the subject of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera (1986), which was made into a motion picture in 2004. In 2006, Phantom became the longest-running show in Broadway history. The production closed on April 16, 2023, after 13,981 performances.
See also Lloyd Webber, Andrew.
