Dueling Correspondences: An Introduction to The Ghost Sonata 

By Kevin Landis

Speaking through one of his fictional alter egos, the great Swedish auteur/director Ingmar Bergman observed, “everything represents, nothing is.” No doubt, in this he was channeling his artistic hero, the playwright, August Strindberg. Strindberg, in turn, was often under the influence of the teachings of the 18th century Swedish theologian, Emmanuel Swedenborg, who challenged senses of earthly understanding and insisted that the human mind, especially in dream states, connected to a higher realm, beyond the bounds of the planet. Nothing is as it seems. He wrote, “Everything in the material world is an effect. The causes of all effects lie in the spiritual world.” 

If we approach Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata with this understanding, we can stand on stronger ground in taking in its mysteries. Everything represents; nothing is. This material world in which we live is an effect, and the cause exists elsewhere. 

This poses a challenge in 2026. As readers and viewers, we are drawn to coherent narrative form and graspable comprehension in the here and now. When we go to the theater, we expect to understand, to learn, perhaps, and grow from that learning. August Strindberg saw something different in the analytic and cognitive goals for his later works, which he referred to as chamber plays. These are intimate performances and their relationship to small-ensemble chamber music is essential. The Ghost Sonata, specifically, is tightly connected to sonata form, with its three-part structure consisting of an exposition followed by thematic development, and concluding with a recapitulation of the central themes. And just as we wouldn't feel obligated to narratively understand all details of an evening of music, Strindberg creates plays that do not demand perfect clarity, but rather a hope that the audience will dream into the piece. Or, in terms more appropriate to his era, “swoon” into a deeper understanding. 

If it all sounds like surrealism, with associated dream analysis, there is good reason. The play was written less than a decade after Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, but a decade before Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term surrealism, and fifteen years before Andre Breton wrote his famous manifesto on the subject. As is often the case with August Strindberg, his feverish writings became the foundation for artistic movements that were to come long after his death in 1912. He was both an enthusiastic student of the artistic and intellectual trends of his time, and also a man before his time, inventing and creating at an astonishing pace. Arising out of the bombast of the Romantic movement, he played aggressively with symbolism, wrote some of the best naturalist plays of all time, and then, late in his life, virtually invented expressionism in the theatre. At the same time, his friend, Edvard Munch, found expressionism on the canvas. One can look at works like The Scream or Anxiety and see many parallels with Strindberg’s chamber plays. 

With all of those -isms, theories and nineteenth century intellectual-centrism, it is tempting as contemporary consumers of theatre to give up on Strindberg and write off his works as random dreamscapes without coherent meaning. That would be a mistake. His later plays, of which The Ghost Sonata, in my view, is the finest example, strive for a coherence that can only exist in myriad correspondences between seemingly unrelated events. In fact, every moment (or movement) in The Ghost Sonata is connected in some way to a grander story; some of it he fully explained in his writings and some of it is simply left to the directors and actors who attempt to put these stories on stage. He was a mad genius because he imbued every line and almost every word with significance. Everything represents, and like dreams, anything is plausible. Later, for the symbolist painter Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images (Ceci, n’est pas une pipe), addressed similar conundrums of perception. 

Strindberg suffered from psychological disorders and paranoia, memorialized in his 1897 autobiography, The Inferno. The Ghost Sonata belongs to a collection of works now known as his post-Inferno plays, written after he had recovered and was able to capture his feeling in a new, semi-narrative form. His interest in mysticism, Eastern spirituality and theosophy are in evidence on every page of The Ghost Sonata, but the plot simple. Three scenes, in lieu of acts, and a running time of about 75 minutes. Scene one: a student meets a mysterious milk maid in the town square in front of a beautiful house. He is approached by an old man who seems to know quite a lot about him, his past, and perhaps his future. The old man tells the student that he should go to a performance of The Valkyrie that afternoon so he can meet a young lady who lives in the house, and gain access to a supper to be taken later that evening. Scene two: hours later, the student and old man enter the house. The student falls in love with the young lady while the old man joins the Colonel and several strange guests for a “ghost supper” where secrets are revealed. Scene three: the student and young lady sit in a room filled with hyacinth flowers and talk. Soon, the student realizes that the young lady, like the other inhabitants of the house, is filled with darkness, sickness and decay. 

The basic plot belies a complexity that can only be scratched at in one viewing or reading of The Ghost Sonata. As alluded to, each moment is significant and each story that is told reveals years of history, deep grudges and huge emotional tumult. A few of the secrets I will reveal here, but rest assured, it is really impossible to spoil an experience of the play since it is unique to each observer. 

One of the first stage directions instructs that we are to hear a ship’s horn. Strindberg is here telling us that we are about to embark on a journey across a vast water, with a destination to be revealed only at the end of the play. It is, perhaps, a reference to the crossing is of the River Styx, signaling that the play is about the journey of the soul in the immediate aftermath of life. We may be tempted to read this then as a journey through purgatory where our souls are judged to then be cast to hell or ascended to heaven. While this basically is the case, a surface reading of Strindberg's symbols is not quite enough. Remember, Strindberg was interested in Eastern spirituality and, importantly, theosophy. Theosophy, a religious fad of the time, attempted to blend western mysticism with Buddhism and Hinduism, to create what some view as an occultist religious dogma. For the sake of an understanding of this play, it’s best to just say that Strindberg was interested in comparative religion and spirituality, such that no single religious viewpoint could properly explain the happenings of the play. In that way, he would never say that the boat was crossing the River Styx nor that the play took place in purgatory, as those ideas are far too associated with western religious concepts, and thus miss a spiritual universality that his play approaches. In fact, the subtitle of his first edition of the play was a Kama Loka, which in Sanskrit means “place of desire.” 

But it goes deeper. Broadly speaking, the Kama Loka is defined as a theosophic realm after death that resembles life and where people and personalities are purged of earthly desires in preparation for the next level of existence. Strindberg blended his understanding of the concept with Swedenborg’s referencing, in his book Heaven and Hell, to a similar state he called “the world of spirits” where the desires of the natural world gradually fall away. In typical Strindbergian form, his take on this process involved a more aggressive purgation, where the masks that people had used in life would be forcefully ripped away, often in humiliating and degrading ways. This is called a vastation and, as popularized by Swedenborg, it is a violent purification or “laying waste” of someone or something before a potential salvation. For vastation to occur, another person or entity has to act as the vastating agent, there to help draw out and separate the evil from the good. 

With that in mind, many argue that the entirety of The Ghost Sonata is an expression of vastation. Scene one illustrates a state of being after death that resembles the natural world, in which masks are still worn, and deception and power struggles are carried out. In the ghost supper of scene two, the mysterious guests are stripped bare, exposed for who they truly are so that their souls can be sent to heaven or hell. Scene three is best left to be experienced, since it features the two “innocents” of the play, the young lady and the idealistic student. It is enough to say here, that the pessimism that Strindberg is known for is in abundance in the final movement of the play. The audience is left to sort out if innocence is completely lost or if our heroes are saved from the horror of their earthly existence and are thus, themselves, allowed to transcend. 

Lest the description of the inner workings of August Strindberg render a negative verdict on the potential for “entertainment” in watching The Ghost Sonata, it is important to offer that Strindberg’s often pessimistic view of humankind is tempered with humor—there are some truly very funny moments in the play. In addition, it is not necessary to know all that has been described here to find meaning and beauty in the story. Remember, in the simplest terms, Strindberg saw—or more appropriately, heard—his latter plays through the patterns and rhythms of music. We may dwell on the exact meanings and influences on this singular playwright because they are complex, beg for inquiry and can be fun to explore. But at the level of the play in practice, The Ghost Sonata is exactly that, a musical sonata about ghosts. 

An audience is encouraged to really hear this work of art, and our version will be underscored by a trio of professional musicians who have carefully curated a selection of music from Bach, Beethoven, Shostakovich and others. The music combines with the story to create a dreamscape of images and feelings such that full understanding becomes unnecessary. The joy of The Ghost Sonata is its narrative impossibility. If executed correctly, the play and its associated elements pass over and through the viewers like a strong gust of wind, temporarily transporting them to a different astral plain. 

-Kevin Landis