It’s no surprise that so much music has aspired to the creation or depiction of spectral beings and encounters. Music itself is a kind of supernatural phenomenon, its simultaneous presence and evanescence, its existence in ectoplasmic vapours of the atmosphere and soundwaves that appear and disappear as aural apparitions of otherness. That could, possibly, be over-stated(!), but the point is that countless composers have used music’s evocative power to go to the dark side. And, so, as the Royal Opera House revive Tim Albery’s production of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, here is my top 10 of musical ghosts...

Wagner: The Flying Dutchman

... starting of course with Wagner’s music for the ghost captain cursed to roam the seas forever.

Carl Maria von Weber: Der Freischütz

But Wagner learned all of his orchestral spook-craft from Weber, and this moment above all, the solar plexus of romantic ghoulishness, the Wolf’s Glen scene from his opera Der Freischütz.



Monteverdi: Orfeo

The original operatic spirits are those of Monteverdi’s underworld, in one of the first operas ever to be written, as Orpheus journeys to Hades to try to save his Eurydice.



Tchaikovsky: Queen of Spades

By the late 19th century, opera’s ghostly encounters had assumed terrifying psychological veracity, as in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, as the ghost of the Countess torments Hermann into suicide.

Schoenberg: Erwartung

Not quite a ghost, but the heroine of Schoenberg’s psychodrama spends the whole piece in a nightmarish delirium searching for her lover – who turns up as a corpse.

Britten: The Turn of the Screw

Peter Quint and Mrs Jessel are two of 20th-century opera’s most disturbing creations, ghosts that haunt the children at the house of Bly, Miles and Flora. Creepiness incarnated on the operatic stage by Britten.

Beethoven: Piano Trio, “Ghost”

OK, so the name comes from Carl Czerny in 1842, 15 years after Beethoven’s death, but the nickname points to the weirdness of the slow movement, connected in Czerny’s mind with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and in Beethoven’s possibly with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, since the words “Macbett” and “Ende” are associated with his sketches for this music.

Dukas: L’apprenti sorcier

Dukas’s orchestral imaginarium goes beyond even what Disney conjured up in Fantasia – from those opening chords, you’re magicked into a world of fantastical musical sorcery.

Offenbach: Orpheus in the Underworld

To which the only possibly response to all of this high-minded spectralism, so to speak, is Offenbach’s wild parody of dancing ghouls, above all in the scurrilous Galop Infernal.

Mozart: Don Giovanni

Yet the most famous of all operatic ghosts is still the one that gives me the most shivers, Mozart’s Commendatore, sending Don Giovanni to eternal damnation in music that, for all its familiarity, still can have the power to terrify and transcend – as it does in Wilhelm Furtwängler’s performance from 1954.