Richard Morrison How the ghosts of past traditions and personalities haunt the classical world
Since Christmas is traditionally a time for telling ghost stories, I have been thinking about the extent to which ghosts dominate the classical music world. I don’t mean the sort of flitting-through-closed-doors ghosts that are said to haunt old halls and theatres, though there are enough tales around of spectral figures lurking backstage in places such as the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Nor do I mean operas famously featuring ghosts, such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and, of course, John Corigliano’s 1991 extravaganza The Ghosts of Versailles – in which the entire cast is dead from start to finish.
No, I mean the ghosts in our heads. Uniquely among the art forms, classical music is enmeshed in the past. We are always recreating pieces written centuries ago. In doing so, we find ourselves drawn into the minds, social worlds and personalities of the long dead: the composers who wrote these masterpieces. We prize modern-day interpreters who come closest, in our view, to providing ‘what the composer actually wanted’. A lot of music making today, in fact, is a bit like a Victorian séance: we sit in expectant silence, waiting for a voice from ‘the other side’ to communicate.
And the spirits aren’t just composers. Young performers are constantly aware of, and challenged by, the legacy of the dead. To play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto without knowing how it was played by Huberman, Oistrakh or Menuhin would be regarded as a grave dereliction of duty. What Isaac Newton famously said about scientific progress is also true of classical music interpretation: you stand on the shoulders of giants. But that means those giants constantly haunt our thoughts. It’s as if they never left the concert halls.
There’s another sense, too, in which music summons ghosts. For all of us, certain pieces trigger memories – of places, memorable moments in our lives and loved ones no longer with us. I find that Christmas music in particular sets up such resonances, perhaps because I associate that music with those times when my parents and siblings were all together and at their happiest.
Indeed, I find it poignant that the bidding prayer in the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, broadcast each Christmas Eve from King’s College, Cambridge, specifically invites us to remember those who ‘rejoice, but upon another shore and in a greater light’. When that sentence was first uttered, at the inaugural Nine Lessons service in 1918, the reference was clearly to the millions of young men
