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

The strangest detective story in music, inspired by a true incident.

London, 1933. Dabbling in the once-fashionable "glass game" - a Ouija board - the famous Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi is amazed to receive a message supposedly from the spirit of the great composer Robert Schumann, asking her to find and play his long-suppressed violin concerto. Jelly, formerly muse to many composers, hesitates to pursue this strange summons, eager to devote herself to charity concerts for the unemployed of the Depression. But soon her sister Adila and her friend Erik Palmstierna, both avid spiritualists, hear of the incident and the die is cast. Having lost the love of her life in World War I and now facing the death of another close friend, Jelly sets out to find not only a missing concerto, but also a form of redemption.

But news of the concerto's existence spreads to Berlin, where the manuscript is held, and the higher echelons of the Third Reich quickly conceive of a propaganda use for the work. Jelly, trapped in a race to the first performance, must confront forces that threaten her own state of mind.

Facing a world slipping into the insanity of fascism and war, a composer who suffered a terrible breakdown just after he wrote the concerto, and her own life and career sliding out of control, for Jelly saving the concerto comes to mean saving herself.

"Schumann's wonderful violin concerto has a tragic history unlike any other piece of music. In this splendid new novel Jessica Duchen manages to find the fine balance between facts and fiction. Her book reads like a thriller, yet it's also a tribute to great music and musicians." -- Sir András Schiff

Jessica is a versatile author with a musical bias. Her output includes novels, biographies, plays, words&music projects, poetry for musical setting, music journalism and more. Born in London, she studied music at Cambridge and piano with Joan Havill. Her novels often focus on the cross-currents between family generations, with music a recurring theme. The latest, GHOST VARIATIONS, is "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's biographies of the composers Gabriel Faure and Erich Wolfgang Korngold for Phaidon's 20th Century Composers series have met with wide acclaim. Her writing has appeared in in The Independent, The Guardian and The Sunday Times, as well as BBC Music Magazine and Opera News, among other publications. Her music blog "JDCMB", http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com, has attracted more than 2.5m readers. She has recently written an opera libretto, SILVER BIRCH, for the composer Roxanna Panufnik - a commission for Garsington Opera 2017. Her play A WALK THROUGH THE END OF TIME often pops up at music festivals to introduce Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time and has been performed by actor teams including Harriet Walter & Henry Goodman and Janet Suzman & Michael Pennington. Jessica lives in London with her violinist husband and two big fluffy cats. She loves long walks, cooking, ballet, theatre and scouring second-hand bookshops for out-of-print musical gems. Special passions include Russian literature and Nordic Noir.