The Phantom of the Opera newspaper articles and interviews relating to the Paris Opera House, and the character Erik (the phantom) who fills the roles of the "mad genius", disfigured monster, and one of three in a love triangle all at once. Fitzpatrick argues that all of these elements make the book good for light reading. Myers agrees that the novel makes for a good "airplane read", but says that it fails in terms of being a good mystery novel. She claims that one of the book's downfalls is that one of the important characters - the mysterious Persian - is introduced too late in
The Phantom of the Opera (1986 musical) Puccini charged in a lawsuit that a recurring two-bar passage in "Music of the Night" closely resembled a similar phrase first heard in the aria "Quello che tacete" from Puccini's opera "Girl of the Golden West". The litigation was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. In 1990 a Baltimore songwriter named Ray Repp filed a lawsuit alleging that the title song from "Phantom" was based on a song that he wrote in 1978 called "Till You". After eight years of litigation – including an unsuccessful countersuit by Lloyd Webber claiming that "Till You" was itself a plagiarism of