The thesis presents a part of an ongoing curatorial research, which in this iteration assumes the shape of a classical sonata. This exercise in writing seeks to address the contemporary crises of European music institutions, along with the body of theoretical knowledge surrounding them, through a form reflective of the mode of thought that historically shaped these institutions. The work initially draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of horror and Mark Fisher’s concept of the eerie. Piercing through the institutional crisis of modernity, the argument lands on a concept of The Ceremony by Sylvya Wynter. According to Wynter, the phenomenon of a ceremony is viewed here as an attempt to subsump and mediate life-death transitions, or, in other words, as a tool to overcome the fear of death. The work examines the nature of the relationships between European opera institutions and modern political, economic, and social power through the metaphor of the figures of the Undead. This analysis is situated within the fields of phenomenology (particularly the analysis of horror and the undead), anthropology (through analyses of symbolic meaning of social ritual), historical sociology (with a focus on the history of power exercised by and through cultural institutions), and music theory (through analyses of musical genres and contemporary works). The long-standing argument that 'classical music is dead' is revisited here through the lens of a curatorial approach. This work tends to look at the institutions and pieces performed within them, considering the historical meaning labeled to them over the centuries. The thesis aims to make readers look at the scores, to ground theoretical knowledge in the decaying and blooming flesh of the notes. To dig out the Leviathan, and to face the grost of the opera not as a fleshless metaphor, but as an undead creature staring at us through the window of every day cultural practice. What forms the skeleton of this undead is a mode of thinking theorized and codified through forms such as the Classical sonata, which became one of the key signifiers of the movement toward the canonization of musical theory, the European aesthetic canon, and their corresponding traditions and structures.