ARIAS OF THE UNDEAD - A candlelit concert in Kensal Green Cemetery

Enter the cemetery at sundown, pause for a morale boosting Hendrick's gin cocktail and proceed at your peril to this candlelit concert amidst the headstones of Kensal Green.

Gothic Opera presents a selection of rarely-heard devilish and ghostly-inspired music that celebrates the supernatural, including excerpts from The Medium by Menotti, La Nonne sanglante (The Bloody Nun) by Gounod, Rip van Winkle by Planquette and Les Mystères d'Udolphe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) by Clapisson.

Gothic Opera was founded in 2019 by sopranos Beatrice de Larragoiti, Charlotte Osborn and Alice Usher. The company specialises in performances of rarely-seen 19th-century operatic works that take inspiration from the fantastical, uncanny and eerie atmosphere of Gothic fiction.

During the 19th century, all over Europe, singular, mysterious and spine-chilling operatic works were composed, influenced by the flourishing of Gothic literature that was initiated in 1764 by Horace Walpole with The Castle of Otranto. Walpole's story introduced Gothic traits such as threatening mysteries and ancestral curses, enigmatic medieval hidden passages and delicate fainting heroines.

These themes were further developed by writers like William Beckford (Vathek, 1782), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ lurid tale of monastic debauchery showcasing depraved monks and spectral nuns, The Monk (1796).

Gothic fiction reached its peak during the summer of 1816, when Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the first text popularising the theme of the vampire in literature. In the same year, Mary Shelley wrote what would become the first ever science-fiction novel, Frankenstein.

All the themes that made for the success of the Gothic genre (romantic medieval scenery, abandoned castles, chapels in ruin, melancholic moonlit cemeteries, ancestral curses, ghosts, depraved nuns, bloodthirsty vampires, pure and delicate young heroines, pacts signed with the devil…) were explored to varying degrees in operas throughout the 19th Century.

Gothic Opera bring these dark, eerie works to life, performing one of them every year during the Halloween period, embracing their inventive spirit and faded desuetude in spooky and atmospheric venues across London.

Tickets £20 including a delightful gin cocktail. 

PLEASE NOTE - In order to comply with social distancing regulations, these candlelit concerts can only have a very limited audience.