Few would argue the power to music to stir powerful feelings,
but seldom do we think of the possibility of music's being a force for
evil. That's what J. Meade Falkner imagines, however, in The Lost
Stradivarius.
A young aristocrat, John Maltravers, is in his final year at Magdalen
College, Oxford. His friend William Gaskell returns from a trip to Italy
with suites of music by the 17th-century Italian composer Graziani. When
Sir John plays a set of dances called “L’Areopagita,” he senses that the
wicker chair in his room is occupied. The specter eventually points Sir
John to a hidden cupboard, where he finds a Stradivarius violin. By now
obsessed by the man who hid the violin as well as by the music, Sir John
learns that the instrument's owner was an occultist who had sought to
conjure the vision of absolute evil (“the Vision Malefica”). Sir John’s
obsession eventually destroys him.
The story is told by Sir John's sister Sophia, who is powerless to save
him, and Gaskell to give to Sir John’s son when he reaches maturity.
Written during the Victorian era, the book might be read as a caution
against overindulgence of the senses.
“We can scarcely doubt that as certain forms of music tend to raise us
above the sensuality of the animal, or the more degrading passion of
material gain, and to transport us into the ether of higher thought, so
other forms are directly calculated to awaken in us luxurious emotions,
and to whet those sensual appetites which it is the business of a
philosopher not indeed to annihilate or to be ashamed of, but to keep
rigidly in check," Falkner writes.
Or it can be simply read as a good ghost story.
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