The Phantom of the Opera

Something haunts the Paris Opera House. Stagehands whisper about a ghost in Box Five; the managers receive polite letters demanding a salary; and a young soprano named Christine Daaé suddenly sings like an angel, coached by a voice that speaks to her through the walls of her dressing room. When a chandelier crashes into the audience and Christine vanishes mid-performance, her childhood sweetheart Raoul descends into the cellars beneath the Opera, five levels down, past the underground lake, into the domain of the masked genius who built it all.

Leroux frames the tale as investigative journalism, complete with witness testimony and documents, which gives the melodrama a strange, delicious plausibility. And his Phantom (Erik, composer, architect, ventriloquist, monster) is a far stranger and sadder creature than any adaptation lets on. Gothic romance, mystery, and horror in one, with an ending more affecting than you expect.

At roughly 84,100 words, The Phantom of the Opera runs about 9½ hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

1. Install LoudReader on iPhone or iPad, or its iPad app on a compatible Apple Silicon Mac.
2. Search for “The Phantom of the Opera” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

Speech is generated locally without uploading the book for narration. Download the book and check your chosen voice before travelling offline. Available voices depend on your device; check the in-app voice list. Try every available voice for your first 8 hours of listening. Afterwards, keep a free English voice selection and unlimited book listening. No LoudReader account or word quota.