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Reading Selection sourced from:
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7
Dorota Babilas
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Paris Opera as an Edifice and a Literary Haunted House

Dorota Babilas

Abstract
Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910) is as complex and
controversial as its architectural counterpart - Charles Garnier’s splendid Opera
house in Paris. The chapter explores the connections between the architectural
creation and the novel which it inspired. For Garnier, the Opera was a case of
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, harmoniously combining many forms of artistic
expression through ‘architectural empathy’. Leroux’s book was created as an
homage paid to the architect and his most famous edifice. Leroux completes
the ‘totality’ of Garnier’s creation by providing it with a myth – in a similar way
Victor Hugo had given it to Notre-Dame de Paris. The opera house replaces the
cathedral as the inner sanctum of a modern city, just as art in the nineteenth century
was gradually encroaching upon the cultural territory reserved hitherto for religion.
Leroux’s novel offers one of literature’s great city-scapes located between the
reality of the nineteenth-century Paris and the ghostly realm of Gothic imagination.
This Gothic romance with some elements of a rational detective story, set against a
colourful background of the operatic performances, links the reality of theatre life
with the fictitiousness of the spectacle. On the one hand, the story is devoid of any
supernatural elements, the supposed haunting explained as a clever sleight of hand
by an entirely human perpetrator. On the other, Erik, the title anti-hero, is a larger-
than-life character related to great operatic and literary villains. His fictitious life is
also an eclectic mingle of some biographies of Leroux’s real contemporaries that
all add up to a palimpsest of meanings, combining the images of a musician, an
illusionist, a freak, and an architect.

Key Words: Charles Garnier, Paris Opera, architecture, Gaston Leroux, The
Phantom of the Opera, roman à clef.

*****

We owe our present notions of city life to the nineteenth century. Whereas
before that time most cities had been drab places with no sewers, no paving
and few public buildings, the vast demographic and economical changes of the
century’s later years resulted in the thorough reorganisation of urban living.
With the continuing developments initiated by the Industrial Revolution, cities
grew immensely, and with them grew the need for new buildings to fulfil