Humour me, for a moment, and imagine these highly improbable courtroom proceedings:
— ‘Detective Constable Green, explain to the court, if you will, how you came to the somewhat boldconclusion that Mrs Christie was possessed of a more than passing acquaintance with what is commonly described, I believe, as “classical” music.’
— ‘Well, Mr Peabody, Sir… I’d taken to perusing Mrs Christie’s crime mysteries to enhance my professional expertise in the matter of detection. And, being of a musical frame of mind, I observed that in Death in the Clouds one possible murder weapon is a flute.’
— ‘Hardly convincing evidence, DC Green… It could have been seen merely as a handy metallic implement.’
— ‘Just so, Sir, but this led me to investigate other musical clues. For example, in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words are played on the piano.’
— ‘Somewhat “popular” in taste?’
— ‘Quite correct, Sir. But then what of They Do It with Mirrors? While searching for clues at the murder location, Inspector Curry happens to spy, upon a piano, music by Shostakovich and Hindemith.’
— ‘Shosta…?’
— ‘Shostakovich and Hindemith. Composers, Sir. Of a more… “refined” appeal, if one may venture the opinion.’
Agatha Christie... a profound love of classical music
OK, enough tomfoolery. But DC Green, bless him, is on the right lines. Agatha Christie indeed had a profound love of classical music. Green would likely have gone on to cite other clues – especially the range of (usually passing) mentions of operas scattered around Christie volumes. We encounter the likes of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (in The Sittaford Mystery), Rienzi (The Call of Wings) and Siegfried (Passenger to Frankfurt). Then Gounod’s Faust (Cat Among the Pigeons), Bizet’s Carmen (Lord Edgware Dies) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). And so on.
Elsewhere, Christie enjoys using the fine detail of musical expression marks. In Dead Man’s Folly, the butler rings the gong for dinner in ‘a most artistic performance, crescendo, forte, diminuendo, rallentando’. In The Moving Finger, a convalescent is told by his doctor, ‘You’ve got to take life slowly and easily. The tempo is marked legato.’
The classical music references across Christie’s vast output may be mainly fleeting, but taken collectively they surely confirm a more than casual interest. OK, Christie’s famed serial bloodhounds, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, can’t match author Dorothy Sayers’s super sleuth Peter Wimsey when it comes to musical dexterity. Wimsey is an accomplished keyboard player, while Marple and Poirot seem only to be modestly music-aware – she attends opera, while he is only momentarily depicted singing (although he does once play with the idea of having a rose between his lips to resemble Bizet’s Carmen). However, Christie’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, confirms her deep engagement with classical music. This was ‘anything but skin-deep’, he says. ‘She had a huge passion for classical music throughout her life. I cannot emphasise too strongly how much it meant to her.’
Agatha Christie... a musical childhood
At the family home in Torquay, the young Agatha Miller had the encouragement of witnessing her mother’s playing of classical piano repertoire – including, we might note, those Songs Without Words. Whereas many a child of any era balks at the idea of regular piano practice, the future novelist ‘enjoyed music lessons enormously’, she said in the posthumously published An Autobiography. The house ‘resounded with scales [and] arpeggios’. It can be no accident that a copy of Czerny’s famous keyboard exercises was found in the They Do It with Mirrors piano stool (alongside the Chopin Preludes volume upon which the murder weapon rests). ‘The discipline Agatha exercised over music practice demonstrates the deeply conscientious side to her nature,’ observes Christie’s biographer, Laura Thompson. ‘This was immensely useful when it came to regularly turning out her novels – this wonderful ability simply to get on with it.’
Agatha loved ‘Schumann’s delicate little tunes’, from which she progressed to Grieg, whose piano music she loved ‘passionately’, and on to much else, from Beethoven sonatas to French delicacies. She wrote piano pieces, and even had one published. In her upstairs piano room, she also explored her adored musical comedies: ‘Mother often used to go to bed early… After she had had about two-and-a-half hours of me thumping a piano… and singing at the top of my voice, she could bear it no longer, and used to take a long pole… and rap frantically on the ceiling with it.’
Agatha Christie... ambitions to become an opera singer
Ah yes, singing. In her youth, Agatha tackled part songs and oratorio extracts in a girls’ choir. She enthusiastically took the role of Colonel Fairfax in an all-girl staging of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard. A lifelong love-affair with Wagner opera was stirred (in her late teens) by the 1909 Covent Garden production of Die Walküre conducted by Hans Richter. Could Agatha dare to think of becoming an opera singer?
Singing (and piano) studies were accelerated during time spent in Paris before World War I. What especially fired Agatha were visits to the Opéra Comique for a host of productions, Massenet’s Werther being her favourite. Such experiences, she said, ‘opened a new world to me, a world in which I’ve been able to live ever since’. Singing lessons with one Monsieur Boué introduced her to repertoire in various genres. Eventually she was allowed to tackle classic Puccini arias, not least the famed ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca.
So, could that dream of becoming an opera singer be fulfilled? The notion was extinguished at a stroke when it was arranged for Agatha to sing to a woman with connections to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. In Agatha’s account, she was told, ‘Your voice is not strong enough for opera, and never will be.’ Having no interest in being a concert singer, Agatha immediately dropped the idea of a performing career. ‘I put wishful thinking aside.’ You have to bet it hurt.
Agatha Christie... opera in her novels
And so, Agatha fell into a different profession, well-prepared by her voracious appetite for reading. According to Laura Thompson, ‘It can be argued that Christie developed her writing because she failed to make music her career. When at the age of 63 she was asked what she would have wanted to be “if not yourself”, she replied “An opera singer.” In old age, she reiterated that thought, so the feeling went pretty deep.’
Not surprising, then, that opera is the musical dimension most featured in Christie’s books. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Flora reckons an item of jewellery thrown into a pond is perhaps ‘a crown like the one Mélisande saw in the water’ (referencing Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande). In Cat Among the Pigeons, a party of schoolgirls are ‘taken to Covent Garden to hear Faust’. Meanwhile, in Pale Horse, Hermia waxes lyrical about going to the opera at Glyndebourne: ‘I can’t imagine it other than perfection.’ Hermia goes on to relate how ‘smoked salmon sandwiches at Covent Garden in the intervals are never enough to stay the pangs’.
When Christie on rare occasions builds music into the structure of a narrative, opera is again very much to the fore. The short story Swan Song is the eye-popping tale of how a world-famous, full-of-herself diva – Paula Nazorkoff – carries out her plan (spoiler alert) to go far beyond merely simulating the on-stage stabbing of Scarpia in a performance of Puccini’s Tosca. Revenge for a past wrong, of course. Meanwhile, in the late Passenger to Frankfurt, the famous horn motif from Wagner’s Siegfried is a major musical thread – a sinister identifier for an international neo-Nazi group headed by a charismatic individual dubbed, well, ‘Young Siegfried’.
Giants' Bread... full of musical references
However, Giants' Bread (published in 1930 under Christie’s pseudonym, Mary Westmacott) is, says Mathew Prichard, ‘the most obvious example of Agatha’s knowledge of and passion for classical music. The novel begins with the first performance of a work – The Giant – by a new composer, at the Royal Opera House. Not only are we given a detailed description of the atmosphere surrounding the concert – the audience, the lighting, the conductor, the critics – but then we’re wrapped in the very essence of the unusual music itself. As we step back in time, the protagonist’s relationship with music is examined, from childhood through to the present.’ Vernon Deyre’s bizarre compositional language surely reflects post-World War I avant-gardism. His love interest, Jane Harding, may be a successful soprano, but opera wrecks her voice. Echoes of something?
Agatha Christie... an opera fan all her life
Literary allusions aside, what everyday interest in music did Christie sustain across her life? According to Prichard, his grandmother went to ‘countless concerts and operas in London and all over Europe, including Bayreuth and Salzburg. As she very kindly took me on many occasions, I can attest to the great impact music, in its various forms, had on her. I can vouch for how gripped she was when she took her husband Max and me to Bayreuth in the early 1960s, where we heard Wagner’s Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal.’ On one Bayreuth visit, Christie was taken backstage by a member of the Wagner family. Who was the more starstruck?
One later-life sortie took Christie to the US, where she was hugely impressed by the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. At home, she kept up piano playing on her treasured Steinway. ‘She used to play every day after breakfast when we stayed at Greenway House, her holiday home in Devon,’ Prichard recalls. ‘The piano’s still there, with her sheet music in the seat of the stool behind it.’ All this plus a love for listening to music on her gramophone.
Music continued to sustain Christie’s spirits into old age, until her death in January 1976. She specified the music to be played at her funeral – Bach’s famous ‘Air on the G String’ and Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations. That year saw the centenary of the first Wagner performances at Bayreuth, treasures from which source were exhibited at the Royal Festival Hall. How Christie would have enjoyed that. Hopefully, the strains of anniversary soundings of Siegfried’s famed horn call were received loud and clear in the writers’ quarter of Valhalla.
