I've been reading Gaston Leroux's original "The Phantom of the Opera" novel, as translated by Lowell Bair, for October. Originally published in 1910, it's got that sometimes-charming Victorian naivete so many books had before WW1 smashed the collective innocence of Europe, leaving it to deal with trauma on a scale never before conceived. It's not hard to imagine that a novel where the villain is really only the villain because he is horribly disfigured would not have been published after so many men came home horribly maimed from that terrible war. In the novel, the Phantom obsessively works composing his own musical piece, "Don Juan Triumphant", on the organ in his secret apartment beneath the Paris Opera. Johann Sebastian Bach's "Toccata & Fugue in D minor" is the popularly accepted stand-in for the Phantom's fictional score, and it's not hard to see why. It's a classic, haunting piece. Now more likely to be seen performed by an orchestra, but best on the organ.
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