Leroux’s novel would go on to be adapted many times, including into a legendary 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s legendary musical. In a feverish three months, often scribbling down images from his nightmares, he completed what would be his most memorable work. Leroux saw in the Opera House a mirror of the Belle Époque society that passed through its halls: beautiful, stately and refined on the outside, with an undercurrent of secrecy and horror lurking just below the surface. His reporter’s instincts aroused, Leroux studied the Opera House, exploring it from the pinnacles of its rooftops to the slimy underground caverns. The Opera House had already had its share of mysterious accidents when, on, a counterweight of the seven-tonne chandelier had fallen into the audience, killing a concierge. Several unexplainable deaths had been attributed to this spectre, and backstage gossip only fuelled the story. intertwining The Phantom of the Opera, Romeo and Juliet, and a 1930s ' film. In the early 1900s, during one of his frequent visits to the Paris Opera House, journalist and novelist Gaston Leroux began to hear rumours of a ghost that haunted the old building. Director Ronny Yu sets Phantom Lover ( literally Midnight Song ) in Peking.

Phantom of the opera music sheet