Erik: Is he for real?!?!?!.......

Yes, we are slowly listing all items to prove Erik existed.

Let's have more.

Thank youGerardButlerisawsome01. Excellent addition to our evidence.

Well, aren't we looking for physical evidence or documented occurrences? I personally believe Leroux, but his word isn't enough for a lot of people.

There is a link to an article which I believe adds to the evidence. Anything like this helps.

Thank you for asking.

I just had a thought... A lot of people don't believe the story because there isn't any real evidence Christine Nilsson married a de Chany right? Well, if Philippe was really "Raoul" then he died, right? Soooo my point is: Christine would have never been able to marry a de Chany !

You're right. And there are so many holes gapping at us. Maybe Nilsson is not the model for Daae. That's why I'm trying to ge ladyghost to tell us about Leroux's greatgranddaughter. Did she ever ask her the burning questions we've been pondering?

ladyghost, where are you?

Maybe one of us should PM her to alert her of this discussion....

This is the surprise!
I'm really happy to announce this interview indeed.
I made it when I met my friend Veronique again in Paris this August and I'm sure you will enjoy it!
http://www.ladyghost.com/veronique.html
Ladyghost.

ladyghost's interview with Leroux's greatgranddaughter was merged with this topic by me as proof of the Erik's existance.

True we are all looking for documents, but I feel this is meaningful as well.

Thank you ladyghost for another fabulous interview. But you have never told us how you met her. There are so many things we would have sent you to ask her had we known you knew her.

I met her years ago at Paris and we became friends.
I made this interview in my Paris holidays this month at her restaurant which remains closed (her mother is very ill...), so you see, I made the interview in person, I can't send her any questions now...
I'm very glad if you like it!
Ladyghost.

I do hope her mother gets better please send her our best wishes.

This article from taken from this article: http://www.francetoday.com/features/phantoms.php

I've laid it out here in case it's taken down at some point.

********************************
April 2008

Phantoms of the Opera
By Michael Walsh

“The Opera Ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, the mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood...”

That’s pulp fiction, circa 1911, Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. But sometimes, buried beneath the surface of even the most blatant potboiler, lies a hidden world of untold riches. And voices.

I know, because I found them, and soon you will be
hearing them again—the voices of Enrico Caruso and such legendary divas as Emma Calvé, Nellie Melba and Adelina Patti along with more than a dozen lesser operatic lights of the early 20th century. All buried a century ago and found with a little help from clues buried in The Phantom of the Opera.

In late December last year, the Opéra National de Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France announced the unveiling of a major discovery: a musical time capsule. Not just one Opera Ghost but many, carefully packed away in glass and asbestos inside two large metal urns—24 shellac gramophone discs dating from 1907 and 1912. Entombed, like the lovers in Verdi’s Aida, beneath a great architectural monument, in this case the Paris Opéra Garnier. But unlike Radames and Aida, these ghosts were destined to be freed again, and live on.

In fact the long-forgotten urns had actually been discovered much earlier. I found them myself, some 20 years ago—or, at least, I found the room in which they were buried, in one of the Opera’s sub-sub-basements. I was looking for them, because Gaston Leroux had told me just where to look.

I have prayed over his mortal remains, that God might show him mercy notwithstanding his crimes. Yes, I am sure, quite sure, that I prayed beside his body the other day, when they took it from the spot where they were burying the honographic records. It was his skeleton. I did not recognize it by the ugliness of the head, for all men are ugly when they have been dead as long as that, but by the plain gold ring which he wore and which Christine Daäe had certainly slipped on his finger, when she came to bury him in accordance with her promise.

First published in 1910, Leroux’s novel is the source for both the classic 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 mega-musical; indeed, Phantom has commanded the attention of audiences for nearly a
century, and not just in France. Its archetypal story of a mad composer, Erik, and his beautiful protégé, Christine Daäe—itself based in part on George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby—continues to haunt the western imagination. Lon Chaney’s surpassing ugliness, coupled with his erotic desire for Mary Philbin, gave early movie audiences a special
frisson that has echoed down the decades via later versions starring Claude Raines (1943), Herbert Lom (1962), Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974), director Sam Raimi’s Darkman (1990), and Joel Schumacher’s film version of the Lloyd Webber musical (2004).

But whereas Du Maurier’s tale of Svengali and Trilby was a gothic horror, Leroux’s humanized his villain, turning Phantom into something more akin to Beauty and the Beast than Dracula. In whatever guise, we feel sympathy for Erik, and when his skeleton is found at the end of the book, wearing the ring that Christine gave him, we weep for him. It’s a
great story.

But what if it’s also true?

We’ve long known that at least parts of the story were based on real events. One of the most memorable episodes in both book and film comes when the enraged Phantom sends the Opera’s great chandelier crashing into the audience. And, in fact, the chandelier once did fall, killing an unfortunate
patron. Leroux was, after all, a well-known journalist and he kept his reporter’s eye for detail even when he was writing fiction. And in Charles Garnier’s magnificent Opera House he found the perfect setting for his strange story.

Construction of Garnier’s Opera began at the height of the Second Empire, in 1861, but owing to the vicissitudes of French history (including the Franco-Prussian War and
the uprising of the Paris Commune), the building was not completed until 1875. Some may agree that it resembles, in Debussy’s phrase, a cross between a railway station and a Turkish bath, but it remains one of the world’s great buildings.

Beyond the famous grand escalier, the red-velvet-and-gold auditorium and the stunning gallery bar, there is also the foyer de la danse, where 19th-century toffs and swains could gather to observe their dancing inamoratas, past, present
and prospective, warming up before the obligatory Act III ballet. There are also secret boudoirs located handily behind the aristocrats’ boxes, for whiling away any possible musical or dramatic longueurs. (Le roi must, as both Victor Hugo and Verdi knew, s’amuse.) And there are several layers of cellars, including the big underground lake-like reservoir that plays such an important role in The Phantom.

And so it was that, on a top-to-bottom tour of the Palais Garnier in October 1987, while working on a biography of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, I stumbled across a metal door with the dust-covered inscription that, once cleaned off, read: “Gift of M. Alfred Clark, 28 June, 1907. The room in which are contained the gramophone records.”

Surely, it couldn’t be a coincidence. There are two references to a room with phonographic records in The Phantom of the Opera, in the Prologue and Epilogue, including this one: It will be remembered that, later, when digging in the substructure of the Opera, before burying the phonographic records ... the workmen laid bare a corpse. But for decades, probably since the end of World War I, the room had been forgotten.

“No one is exactly sure what is in this room,” I wrote in my 1989 biography Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works,
“but it seems that the spot where [the Phantom] died… is a time capsule, not to be opened until 2007… it seems likely that that the sealed vault contains a representative sample of [Clark’s] company’s wares of the period.”

Alfred Clark was an American, a former associate of Thomas Edison and a pioneer in the transition of voice recording from wax cylinder to discs; his company, in 1907, was the
French branch of the Gramophone Company—one of the predecessors of today’s EMI Music. At the time the room was sealed, it turned out, Aristide Briand, then France’s Minister of Pubic Instruction, formally registered Clark’s wish that the room would not be opened for a hundred years, “in order to show the people of that era what had been the state of talking machines, and what were the voices of the principal singers of our times.”

Along with some other music critics, I immediately petitioned the Opera management to open the room, in case some of the recordings had been damaged and needed rescuing, but opera officials had decided that Clark’s 100-year embargo would be respected. But in 1989 workmen installing air conditioning came across the room once more. At that point, Jean-Jacques Beclier, the opera’s technical supervisor, ordered the room opened and, sure enough, noted some damage to two of the four urns contained therein—two dated 1907 and two 1912. The undamaged urns, both 1907, were then transferred to the custody of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

It’s now known that the urns do contain 24 phonographic discs donated by Alfred Clark and the Gramophone Company. The discs, separated by glass plates, were safeguarded with asbestos wrapping before being placed in their copper
urns. After being carefully extracted from their asbestos cushions, their contents will be transferred to compact discs and made commercially available by EMI Classics. When that happens, another ceremony is planned, like that of 1907, to seal away time capsules representative of contemporary music today.

Thus has Leroux come full circle, and one of Erik the Phantom’s great secrets given up to the world. I’m proud of the small part I played in this little drama, and look forward to the day when, like music lovers all over the world, I can enjoy those lost voices (and pianist Raoul Pugno, too) from the past.

Whatever happened to Erik’s skeleton, dug up when the urns were buried? Let’s let Leroux have the last word:

And, now, what do they mean to do with that skeleton? Surely they will not bury it in the common grave!...I say that the place of the skeleton of the Opera Ghost is in the archives of the National Academy of Music. It is no ordinary skeleton.

No, indeed.

Michael Walsh, the former music critic of Time Magazine, is a novelist and screenwriter.

Oh, wow. That was really interesting. I feel less crazy.

Good to see you snowmoccasin. We've been adding info everywhere. Please don't stay away too long.

Here is another piece of evidence supporting the existence of Erik. Even though ladyghost has an article on her site saying the chandelier actually crashed, this article supports what I'd heard from Carrie Hernandez's old site which is now defunct; it was a counterweight which fell not the entire chandelier.
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Opera's colorful history part of "Phantom" legend
DENNIS ADAMS, Packet columnist
Published Sunday, April 17, 2005

Having seen the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, "The Phantom of the Opera," I read reviews on the "Movie Review Query Engine" Web site (www.mrqe.com/lookup?, with 120 articles on this movie alone, within its ever-growing database of over 43,000 other film titles). James Verniere, in his December 22, 2004 Boston Herald critique, "This 'Opera' Is a Crashing Bore" (http://theedge.bostonherald.com/movieReviews/view.bg?articleid=587), mentioned "the famous scene in which the opera house chandelier crashes down on the audience (based on an actual event that occurred in the Opera Garnier in 1896)."

I couldn't let it go at that, and set out to learn more about the fatal "actual event."

The Opera Garnier was the Paris Opera at the time of the accident, and it was there that the original "Phantom" story began. French novelist Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) learned the secrets of the Paris Opera on his visits as drama critic. According to "Contemporary Authors Online," a web of corridors and stairs linked the building's 17 stories.

Emperor Napoleon III kept private suites well away from the horse stables, wardrobe cellars and dressing rooms for as many as 500 singers and dancers. An underground lake truly did lie far below, and operagoers told stories of a murderous backstage ghost. This opulent gloom inspired Leroux's 1910 novel, "Le Fantome de l'Opera."

The "Palais Garnier" ceased to be known as "the Paris Opera" in 1989, when the Opera Bastille was built as a new home for the institution. The France.com "Paris Opera" Web page (www.france.com/docs/542.html) said the neo-Baroque Opera Garnier was the 13th building to house the Paris Opera since Louis XIV commissioned the first one in 1669. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, the Palais Garnier was built by architect Jean Louis Charles Garnier between 1861 and 1875. "Fodor's Paris 2005" said the Opera Garnier was the backdrop of a number of Edgar Degas' famous ballet paintings.

Garnier's grand staircase, huge stage and spacious foyers left relatively little seating area for audiences. There are many lesser theaters that can seat more people. The Opera gave composer Claude Debussy the impression (joke intended) of a Turkish bath.

Joel Schumacher, director of the 2004 "Phantom" movie, didn't much like the building, either. Jorge Morales ("The Phantom Menace," Village Voice review of December 21, 2004 at www.villagevoice.com/film/0451,morales,59427,20.html) reported that Schumacher called the Opera Garnier "a huge municipal building with a bureaucratic feel" and built his own even larger "Opera Populaire" on a soundstage. Even the film's chandelier is bigger than the original.
It so happens that the "actual event" of the chandelier also was smaller than the huge crash in the movie. Although the French Web site "Histoire en Ligne" ("History Online," www.histoire-en-ligne.com/article.php3?id_article=115&artsuite=2) confirmed that the real Garnier chandelier weighs more than eight tons, the entire fixture did not fall from the ceiling on the evening of May 20, 1896. What did fall was a counterweight that had become detached from the chandelier. It killed one woman and wounded a number of spectators.
Far deadlier had been the fire at the Opera-Comique on May 25, 1887. In his "Man-Made Catastrophes: From the Burning of Rome to the Lockerbie Crash," Lee Davis said that after a gaslight set some canvas scenery ablaze, two singers rushed downstage to quell the panic in the audience. Because the stage crew failed to lower the iron fireproof curtain, however, the flames spread fast into the auditorium. Two hundred people died in their attempts to escape from the auditorium or after leaping from windows and ledges. Those who had made it to the roof fell back into the flames when the boards beneath them collapsed.

But to return to the "Phantom," he refuses to go away. Alan Riding (in "Mystery Music Stops Paris Opera," New York Times, Sept. 19, 2002) said that a shrill blast of recorded music interrupted a live performance at the Opera Garnier. No one could find the perpetrator or tell where the noise had come from.

You can read Gaston Leroux's complete "Phantom of the Opera" on the Internet at www.gutenberg.org/etext/175.
Dennis Adams is Information Services Coordinator for the Beaufort County Public Library System. He can be reached at denseatoms@earthlink.net.
___________________
This was the URL:

http://www.islandpacket.com/editorial/col/adams/story/4770477p-4394419c.htmlwww.mrqe.com/lookupwww.mrqe.com/lookupwww.mrqe.com/lookuphttp://theedge.bostonherald.com/movieReviews/view.bg?articleid=587

ooh, this is so exciting! Now I know I'm not crazy haha.

Alright, sorry for the double-posting, but I wanted to get this up again. I've been having my doubts about Erik's existence lately (probably from being on phantomoftheopera.com). I would love it if there was more evidence up here, and some of the new members may be able to help!

Very intresting Fay

could you please be more specific? The thread itself or someone's post?

you can read Gaston's complete book of Phantom of the Opera here

http://books.google.com/books?id=YSn9tbj5-EUC&pg=PR13&lpg=PR13&dq=proof+of+the+phantom+of+the+opera+existence&source=bl&ots=O8-vifIy5F&sig=Sq43aKOS4z_hHxkOeZUBCe3SO08&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPP1,M1

found this on facebook

The Phantom of the Opera (in French, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra) is a French novel by Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serialization in Le Gaulois from September 23, 1909 to January 8, 1910. Some believe it to have been inspired by George du Maurier's Trilby. Trilby is based on real events related to the Paris Opera House which Leroux investigated, initiated by stories of an opera house ghost.

About the Palai Garnier:
In 1896, one of the counter-weights for the chandelier fell, killing one. This, as well as the underground lake and other elements of the Opera House, inspired Gaston Leroux in 1910 to write his classic Gothic novel, The Phantom of the Opera.
It still has over 2,500 doors, which take the resident firemen more than two hours to check before they go home!


Gaston Leroux writes his novel as though he thoroughly believes that it is all true, starting in the introduction with:

"The Opera Ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants, or the concierge. No, he existed in flesh and blood, though he assumed all the outward characteristics of a real phantom, that is to say, of a shade."

His entire novel supports this notion and is backed up by extensive research on Leroux's part. When a person reads the book, they must decide whether Erik (the Phantom) existed, or if it is all fiction. The Opera Ghost is a real legend, still talked about in the Palais Garnier today. All legends start somewhere and all legends have a grain of truth. So, you decide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Daae

mentions Christine Nilsson

I aware of the existence of Christine Nilsson, but is there any actual proof that a skeleton was found under the Opera Garnier?

And, now, what do they mean to do with that skeleton? Surely they will not bury it in the common grave!...I say that the place of the skeleton of the Opera Ghost is in the archives of the National Academy of Music. It is no ordinary skeleton.And, now, what do they mean to do with that skeleton? Surely they will not bury it in the common grave!...I say that the place of the skeleton of the Opera Ghost is in the archives of the National Academy of Music. It is no ordinary skeleton.And, now, what do they mean to do with that skeleton? Surely they will not bury it in the common grave!...I say that the place of the skeleton of the Opera Ghost is in the archives of the National Academy of Music. It is no ordinary skeleton.And, now, what do they mean to do with that skeleton? Surely they will not bury it in the common grave!...I say that the place of the skeleton of the Opera Ghost is in the archives of the National Academy of Music. It is no ordinary skeleton.