The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

First published in the year 1909, celebrated French writer Gaston Leroux’s fictional work ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ is a gothic novel. The novel is partly inspired by historical events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century and an apocryphal tale concerning the use of a former ballet pupil’s skeleton in Carl Maria von Weber’s 1841 production of Der Freischütz.