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Those who have seen your face draw back in fear …
I am the mask you wear. My spirit, my voice in one combined.
The Phantom of the Opera is there … inside my mind …
—Christine Daae and the Phantom, The Phantom of the Opera
He often comes to her in her dreams at night, gently calling her name. She never actually sees him; she only hears his hauntingly beautiful voice speaking to her until, one evening, he quite unexpectedly materializes in the full-length mirror in her dressing room. As her father had promised her before he died, the Angel of Music had come to teach her to sing the music that she herself had inspired him to compose, the love story told in The Music of the Night. His face half-obscured by a white mask, he tells her to look at her face in the mirror and there she will see him inside. And he then invites her inside the mirror. As she enters, she is led by her ghostly guide and guardian through a gloomy maze of passages beneath the Paris opera house, across a great subterranean lake, and into the deepest and darkest regions of his inner world where she comes to know him and why he must hide behind his mask. And so begins the powerful and passionate story of The Phantom of the Opera, a journey into the wellsprings of desire and