Audiobook · read by volunteers
Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux (1868–1927)
Read by Cori Samuel, Betsie Bush, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Jamey Osborne, Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Robin Cotter, Claire Goget, Kristin LeMoine, katyleah, Marlo Dianne · 28 chapters · 9 h 10
About the book
An old Paris opera house has changed hands, and strange things begin to happen. A box that must never be occupied. A voice with no body. A diva who loses her nerve and a young singer, Christine, who suddenly sings like an angel. Behind the scenes, the rumour spreads of a ghost, and then of a masked man with a terrifying mind and a heartbreaking need. As the new managers struggle with warnings and falling chandeliers, a young viscount fights to free the woman he loves from a fatal influence. Gaston Leroux's novel is a mixture of mystery, romance and gothic horror, told by a narrator who claims to have investigated the facts himself. Twenty-eight chapters and about nine hours of secrets, passions and dark cellars lie ahead.
Introduction
Gaston Leroux was born in 1868 and died in 1927. A French journalist who covered crime and court cases, he turned to fiction and became a prolific author of detective and adventure novels, among them The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which many consider a classic of the locked-room mystery. Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, published in 1910 and known in English as The Phantom of the Opera, is by far his most famous work.
The book was first serialised in a newspaper, and it has the energy of a serial: cliffhangers, sudden reversals and an almost reckless mixing of genres. Leroux presents it as a piece of journalistic research, and builds his story on the real Paris Opera, with its vast cellars, its underground lake and its gilded public rooms. The Phantom himself, at once menacing and pitiable, has become one of the best known figures in popular fiction, and the story has been adapted countless times for stage and screen.
This recording is the work of LibriVox volunteers and follows the novel's twenty-eight chapters, beginning with a prologue. The whole runs to roughly nine hours.
Leroux also fills the book with a real sense of place, from the chandelier hanging over the great auditorium to the labyrinth beneath the stage, so that the building seems alive. Why listen? Because the original is stranger and richer than most adaptations suggest. It rewards listening with its mixture of humour, terror and pathos, and it takes you to a theatre that is as much a character as the people in it.
Public domain
Gaston Leroux died in 1927: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text