Erik, the Phantom of the Opera

Erik is the titular character in Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. He is also the antagonist of many film adaptations of the novel, notably the 1925 film adaptation starring Lon Chaney, Sr., and Andrew Lloyd Webber's West End musical. In the original novel, few details are given regarding Erik's past, although there is no shortage of hints and implications throughout the book. Erik himself laments the fact that his mother was h... more

Erik is the titular character in Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. He is also the antagonist of many film adaptations of the novel, notably the 1925 film adaptation starring Lon Chaney, Sr., and Andrew Lloyd Webber's West End musical. In the original novel, few details are given regarding Erik's past, although there is no shortage of hints and implications throughout the book. Erik himself laments the fact that his mother was horrified by his appearance and that his father, a master mason, never saw him. It is also revealed that "Erik" was not, in fact, his birth name, but one that was given or found "by accident", as Erik himself says in the novel. In the novel, Leroux sometimes calls him "the man's voice;" Erik also refers to himself as "The Opera Ghost", "The Angel of Music" and attends a masquerade as the Red Death. Most of Erik's history is revealed by a mysterious figure, known through most of the novel as The Persian or the daroga, who had been a local police... less