Any book is, in the best sense of the phrase, a mess magnificent: it offers us a dizzying array of potential entry points in terms of critique, and once we have got inside we seem to be faced with a labyrinthine profligacy of options as to what routes we might then take. To select a conceit as one's guide thus seems as valid, frankly, as any other mode of navigation. So in the name of a certain lopsided consistency, I thought I would start by drawing inspiration from a deliberate misreading of the title of the very book that I am attempting here to review: Mozart's Ghosts. For Mark Everist, in this elegantly written, meticulously researched, anecdotally rich, intellectually and ethically subtle piece of scholarship, the ghost, amongst many other things, is a trope for a rethinking of what constitutes reception. More than anything else, Mozart (the presence of his works, the authority of his name) is here the means by which the sites of this reception are identified. The truth about such things as ‘Mozart himself’ or ‘Mozart's works’ is not centrally what is at stake. In this, Everist seeks to distinguish himself from the general thrust of much Mozart reception history, which has ‘quite logically sought to disentangle truth from fiction, to set out clearly where the boundaries between evidence and interpretation lie’ (14). To illustrate, Everist quotes from William Stafford's 1991 The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment: ‘myths can be cleared away and the reality revealed. Above all it is necessary to adopt a critical attitude to the tradition, and the sources on which it is based’ (15).Footnote ¹ By contrast, for Everist, ‘any claims here to a ‘critical attitude’ are directed toward understanding the context of the stories that have been told about Mozart (whether within the domain of poetry or material culture, drama or performance) rather than debunking them’. Thus, ‘the stories themselves form the subject of the inquiry (regardless of their implicit or explicit falseness), and are examined here for evidence of what they reveal of the mentalités of those who uttered them or wrote them down’ (15). Mozart's Ghosts is not, therefore, a book about ghosts in Mozart, even though Mozart's most famous (although rather too solid) ‘ghost’, the Commendatore from Don Giovanni, does, by definition of the fact of how much that opera dominates Mozart reception history, nevertheless make a number of major appearances.

But what might be learnt about Mozart's ghosts (in Everist's sense) from first thinking about ghosts in Mozart? In a famous letter of 1780 to his father concerning his opera Idomeneo, which Mozart was then working on for its premiere in Munich, Mozart talks about the difficulties that he was having with a distinctively unnatural point of representation. In Act III, whilst the characters are gathered in the temple of Neptune, an oracular voice speaks from a subterranean space, pronouncing judgment. Mozart writes: ‘Tell me, don't you think that the speech of the subterranean voice is too long? Consider it carefully. Picture to yourself the theatre, and remember that the voice must be terrifying – must penetrate – that the audience must believe that it really exists.’ Mozart then goes on to talk about the ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet: ‘How can the effect [of the subterranean voice] be produced if the speech is too long, for in this case the listeners will become more and more convinced that it means nothing. If the speech of the Ghost in Hamlet were not so long, it would be far more effective. It is quite easy to shorten the speech of the subterranean voice and it will gain thereby more than it will lose.’Footnote ² Considering how highly we now venerate Shakespeare's play, it is amusing and informative (particularly in a review about a book concerning reception history) to note Mozart's nit picking – a symptom indicative of the sceptical attitude in which Shakespeare's tragedies could still be held even towards the end of the eighteenth century. It is also worth noting that Shakespeare's Hamlet has been the central authority from which the theme of hauntology came into being as a major theoretical field in the 1990s and subsequently from which it has continued to flourish academically. Jacques Derrida's justly famous, virtuosic analysis of the figure of Hamlet's ghost, in his 1993 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, was largely responsible for this development.Footnote ³ Everist does not engage with this body of work, and there is no pressing need why he should; he is a historian of impeccable credentials, and his arguments effortlessly support themselves. But Mozart's pragmatic theatrical concerns do resonate with themes in hauntology, which in turn can aid me in my attempts here to propose a broader historical and ideological frame in which Everist's book might be positioned. For Mozart in these famous letters is concerned with how something that in essence is neither present nor perhaps even real might nevertheless be made to appear as if it were. At the end of the eighteenth century, on the cusp of entry into the full problematic of modernity proper, he opens the door to what will become increasingly fraught anxieties regarding presence and absence, not only in the realm of the aesthetic, but also in the wider context of modernity itself, which, as Marx famously put it in the opening of The Communist Manifesto, is a place where potentially ‘all that is solid melts into air’, Mozart included.Footnote ⁴ To investigate the ongoing presence of the figure of Mozart in cultural discourse is therefore to capture inadvertently and from a refreshingly unexpected vantage point the instabilities of this modernity. And this, indeed, is ultimately how I found myself reading Everist's fine book.

Mozart's Ghosts easily encourages such wider historical and ideological speculations, for unlike so much reception history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical culture, it does not predominantly focus on journalism, but constantly shifts its gaze so that we are left with a set of richly detailed pictures from a diverse set of locations that amount at the book's most accomplished moments to a kind of flickering panorama. In the book's concluding gestures, Everist puts the issue more modestly, but we should be wary of being taken in by his discretion: ‘if this book has raised the question of the range of media that might serve as the basis for an investigation into the reception of works of music, then it will in part have served its purpose’ (276). Only one chapter is centred on journalism (chapter 7); it concerns the music writings of the important critic Blaze de Bury in the Revue des deux mondes, and offers an exceedingly interesting and important contribution to our scholarly understanding of the perennially popular association of Mozart with the painter Raphael. The other chapters focus on Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel Le fantôme de L'Opéra (chapter 2); Jacques Offenbach's 1856 production of Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor, as L'impresario (chapter 3); the plethora of keyboard arrangements of Don Giovanni that resulted from the three new productions of the opera that were staged in Paris in 1866 (chapter 4); the so-called ‘Twelfth Mass’, attributed to Mozart and one of his most popular works in the nineteenth century (chapter 5); the prima donna Pauline Viardot-Garcia's purchasing of the autograph of Don Giovanni, and the ritualistic cults that then developed around this object (chapter 6); a cross-historical intertextual dialogue between two fictional works, by E.T.A. Hoffman and George Bernard Shaw, respectively, both inspired by Don Giovanni (chapter 8); and the presence of the slow movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 in Bo Widerberg's 1967 film, Elvira Madigan, and its strange afterlife in films that followed (chapter 9).

As we have seen, Mozart, as a man of the theatre, understood that the effect of the presence of a ghost was the product of a careful set of techniques and aesthetic disciplines that were conceivably variable according to context. In 1780, talking of Hamlet, he argues that brevity is key to a convincing illusion of the supernatural. And yet by 1787, in Don Giovanni, he seems to have considered a more expansive temporal framework to be appropriate – the Commendatore's final scene, after all, is hardly terse. Likewise, in each of these different sites of reception, a different set of actions, placements and framings have to be practised in order to make the figure of Mozart function effectively as fuel for the mentalités that Everist claims as his main objects of elucidation. Mozart's Ghosts encourages, I found, a reading of culture in terms of the theatrical, and thus towards a view of any culture's fragility. By the time I had reached the end of this wonderful book, I had started to think of the word ‘Mozart’ as a marker of our aspirations and hopes: that, like a successful aesthetic spectacle – a lauded opera, a Broadway hit, a box-office success at the movies – we pray that we might be convincing, and that through the depth of the impression we then make on others, something of us might remain, a trace resistant to the melting dispersals so eloquently and harrowingly described by Marx. We might turn out to be a flop, however, destined only for obsolescence. If Mozart's Ghosts is, on the one hand, a testament to how strategically adaptive and resilient ‘Mozart’ has been – and thus perhaps an empowering tale of how to survive modernity – it is, of course, also riven through with anxieties.

Talking of Le fantôme de L'Opéra, Everist mentions three works composed by the protagonist, Erik: a messe des morts, a messe de marriage, and an opera Don Juan triomphant. He writes: ‘Mozart is never mentioned by name in any of these allusions, in exactly the same way he is never mentioned in much informal writing on music in French of the period: there is no question of the Requiem or the messe des morts being by any other composer, nor of any sort of Don Juan being by anyone else; even commentaries on Molière have to explain that it is not a question of Don Giovanni.’ And thus, by ‘projecting Erik as the composer of a requiem, a marriage mass, and an opera on the Don Juan legend, Leroux was pointing to an analogy with a single composer: Mozart’ (43). Here all a ghost needs to do is but rustle a curtain, or mildly chill a patch of a corridor in order to get the job done. There is a certain confidence to this. And yet in the case of the Don Giovanni autograph, Pauline Viardot had to part with enormous sums of money, have her own home remodelled to house the object in a side-chapel extension, and educate her visitors in modes of behaviour in relationship to the object that were redolent of those adopted by members of a religious cult. Everist is a consummate professional, and thus he holds his tune successfully throughout the entire book. But in this scene (chapter 6) he gives a particularly fine performance, drawing on his original skills as a medievalist to illuminate the reliquary nature of the codes of decorum in which this autograph was framed. There is the distinct whiff of fetishistic overdetermination in the Viardot circle's relationship to the Don Giovanni autograph, and thus its performance of faith is, like all great performances, walking on the thin ice of potential failure. Here the ghost is vast, noisy, bloated, too visible, distractingly tangible, and not unlike the ghost of the Commendetore in Don Giovanni itself. Too many special effects are being employed to mask the possibility that all this too will pass, that even a ghost can be lost. ‘Mozart’ is sign of survival and adaptation. In chapter 9, the slow movement of the K. 467 piano concerto (‘Elvira Madigan’) is said to have ‘moved effortlessly across cinematographic genres, encompassing psychodrama, teenage comedy, comedies of manners, ecodisaster blockbusters, the Bond franchise, and science fiction’ (268). And yet earlier in the chapter, the movement's status as an ideal vehicle for evoking ‘a mood of tranquillity that can be used to undercut various sorts of violence’ happens at a price: ‘the essentially tragic qualities with which the movement empathized in Elvira Madigen have to be suppressed, and it become generic classical music of a serene sort’ (251). Followed by: ‘as the movement's inclusion in the CD compilations of “Music for Meditation” and related recordings discussed earlier in this chapter testifies’ (251). The movement now starts to dissolve into the commodity sphere, where ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ And so if even being ‘Mozart’ cannot keep that threat at bay, then what hope is there for us?

Everist's book is to be highly praised for allowing us to glimpse, through the trope of the ghost, modernity's tremendous power to erase, dissolve, neutralize and eradicate. But at its final moments it retracts somewhat into the palliative. For example, Everist sees a series of comments as ‘proof not only of the longevity of so many of the tropes of Mozart reception but also of their continued impact on musical and artistic culture today’ (274). The sense of loss implicit in the fact that ‘all musical works are subject to variability in performance, in transmission, and in any type of use’ (275), is nevertheless counteracted by the fact the practice of history can nevertheless preserve our understanding of these losses. And so it is asserted that Mozart's Ghosts has ‘been at pains constantly to ground observations on the reception of Mozart in the precise configuration of a particular work at a particular time’ (275). Even though what has been documented are a series of ‘stories’ that have been told about Mozart, and thus, at their most extreme, fictions with no grounding in reality, Everist nevertheless reminds us, in the book's closing statement, ‘that “history” and “story” are cognates: they share the same etymological root, and both form the basis of the history of music that we continue to value as a central part of our culture’ (276). The implicit conclusion turns out to be somewhat surprising: the fact that we can still perceive that we live in a haunted house is a sign of hope. I admire this sentiment. Indeed, I find it profoundly touching. I confess, I am not sure if it is true, or just a story that we tell ourselves. But after having read Mozart's Ghosts, what I do know is that ‘Mozart’ is the name under which my equivocations can, at times, find welcome.