Newark’s work for his book Opera in the novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and was subsequently developed with support from the British Academy Small Research Grants scheme.

This project originally grew out of Prof. The impetus of the project is not only the need for interdisciplinary approaches to The Phantom of the Opera but also what a study of Phantom can offer to interdisciplinary music studies as a field more broadly. Nowhere is this more compellingly illustrated than in its screen adaptations-silent films and talkies, horror films and musicals, cartoons and telenovelas and more-that have been made in places as far apart as Hollywood, Brazil, and China between 1916 and today. More significantly, since the novel’s publication it has radically transcended historical-geographical specificity and become the object of constant creative reinterpretation all over the world. Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1909–10) is a unique record of the most important social and artistic institution in ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’, Paris. It seeks to understand how they evidence the close relationship between opera and film, interact with local sociocultural and political contexts, and transmit ideas about opera beyond the medium itself. This international, interdisciplinary research project maps the mechanisms and extent of cultural transfer represented by the 50+ film reinterpretations and rearticulations of Gaston Leroux’s novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra.

This project was funded by a Leverhulme Trust International Network Grant Project Aims Research Team: Annette Davison (University of Edinburgh) Giorgio Biancorosso (University of Hong Kong) Roberto Calabretto (Università degli Studi di Udine) John Snelson (Royal Opera House) Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes (Universidade de São Paulo) Jacqueline Avila (University of Tennessee), Timmy Chen Chih-Ting (Hong Kong Baptist University), Charlotte Gleghorn (University of Edinburgh), Clarice Greco (Universidade Paulista, São Paulo)

Phantom of the opera songs 1925