Ghost Variations: The Strangest Detective Story in the History of Music

The strangest detective story in the history of music – inspired by a true incident.

A world spiralling towards war. A composer descending into madness. And a devoted woman struggling to keep her faith in art and love against all the odds.

1933. Dabbling in the fashionable “Glass Game” – a Ouija board – the famous Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi, one-time muse to composers such as Bartók, Ravel and Elgar, encounters a startling dilemma. A message arrives ostensibly from the spirit of the composer Robert Schumann, begging her to find and perform his long-suppressed violin concerto.

She tries to ignore it, wanting to concentrate instead on charity concerts. But against the background of the 1930s depression in London and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, a struggle ensues as the “spirit messengers” do not want her to forget.

The concerto turns out to be real, embargoed by Schumann’s family for fear that it betrayed his mental disintegration: it was his last full-scale work, written just before he suffered a nervous breakdown after which he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. It shares a theme with his Geistervariationen (Ghost Variations) for piano, a melody he believed had been dictated to him by the spirits of composers beyond the grave.

As rumours of its existence spread from London to Berlin, where the manuscript is held, Jelly embarks on an increasingly complex quest to find the concerto. When the Third Reich’s administration decides to unearth the work for reasons of its own, a race to perform it begins.

Though aided and abetted by a team of larger-than-life personalities – including her sister Adila Fachiri, the pianist Myra Hess, and a young music publisher who falls in love with her – Jelly finds herself confronting forces that threaten her own state of mind. Saving the concerto comes to mean saving herself.

In the ensuing psychodrama, the heroine, the concerto and the pre-war world stand on the brink, reaching together for one more chance of glory.

Jessica specialises in words for, with and about music. Her work includes novels, biographies, journalism, plays, words&music performances, poetry for musical setting, and the libretto for Roxanna Panufnik's opera SILVER BIRCH (Garsington Opera, 2017). Born in London, she studied music at Cambridge and piano with Joan Havill.

Her latest novel, GHOST VARIATIONS, tells "the strangest detective story in music", based on the true story of the bizarre rediscovery, and Nazi propaganda conscription, of Schumann's long-suppressed violin concerto.

Jessica often presents narrated concerts based on her novels, appearing at venues including the Wigmore Hall, the International Wimbledon Festival, the Buxton Festival, The Sage Gateshead and a number of music societies. Her play A WALK THROUGH THE END OF TIME has been staged many times to introduce Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, performed by actors including Harriet Walter & Henry Goodman and Janet Suzman & Michael Pennington.

Jessica's biographies of the composers Gabriel Fauré and Erich Wolfgang Korngold for Phaidon's 20th Century Composers series have met with wide acclaim. She was a classical music correspondent for The Independent from 2004 to 2016 and her journalism has also appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, BBC Music Magazine and other specialist publications. Her music blog "JDCMB", http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com, has attracted more than 2.8m readers.

Jessica lives in London with her violinist husband and two fluffy cats. She loves long walks, cooking, ballet, theatre and scouring second-hand bookshops for out-of-print musical gems.

Watch an interview with Jessica by Melanie Spanswick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vv_rTlnB-g

Watch a preview of the Schumann Violin Concerto in which Jessica tells its story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MqId5hqql0