In Search of Lost Sounds

In this evocative essay, Emre Aracı steps into the gilded Ballroom of Buckingham Palace to uncover a forgotten thread of musical history. What begins with a gold-embossed concert programme from 1896 unfolds into the brief yet radiant life of Clement Harris—Wagner devotee, friend of Siegfried Wagner, and companion of Oscar Wilde—whose Paradise Lost symphonic poem and heroic death in the Greco-Turkish War at twenty-five left behind a luminous fragment of idealism. Through Harris’s story, Aracı entwines Victorian splendour, Romantic yearning, and Proustian reverie, reminding us that the only true paradise may indeed be the one that is lost. The first time I beheld the magnificent Ballroom of Buckingham Palace, I felt as though I had stepped into one of those state occasions I had for years glimpsed only on television screens or across the pages of broadsheet newspapers. Between gilded columns where the splendour of a bygone age still seemed to draw breath, the light cascading from crysta...