If, on the other hand, you've continued this far, you may have a bit of the Halloween spirit - the spirit that looks at death, decay, and our intimations of another world, and reacts not with awe and solemnity, but with extravagance and humor.

Every year, this spirit possesses normal hard-working adults to change their normal garb for witches' robes and mummy wrappings. They spend their money on vampire fangs and phony blood, decorate their front yards to look like graveyards, and rig up "haunted houses" full of peeled grapes (for eyeballs), cold spaghetti (for innards), and Jell-O molds in the form of brains.

What does all this have to do with classical music?
Quite a bit, apparently, since that same spirit prompts them to call up radio stations, every October 29 or so, to ask, Can you recommend some pieces of Halloween music? Some real scary ones? And so in that spirit, from the world of classical music, we bring you a passel of quirky, ghoulish and upsetting lore about the people who created it.

But be warned.
There are no peeled grapes here. Everything you will read here is, as far as can be ascertained, quite true. If you prefer to think of Beethoven as a master musician who made important advances in the treatment of symphonic form, you may want to turn back at this point. But if you're curious who got hold of his skull in 1888. . . .

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