Agatha Christie and music

Siân Thomas and Tim McInnerny are the readers in a programme marking fifty years since Agatha Christie's death, aged 85, on January 12 1976.

In her autobiography, Agatha Christie describes practicing Schumann's The Merry Peasant and Czerny's exercises; appearing with a local family in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeoman of the Guard, which was 'one of the highlights of my existence'; and her hopes of becoming a professional performer after training in Paris. But her 'cherished secret fantasy to do something in music' was ended by her teachers' assessment of her talents, and the stories she had already begun writing became her focus: 'If the thing you want beyond anything cannot be, it is much better to recognise it and go forward, instead of dwelling on one’s regrets and hopes'.

Music features in the plots of some her novels from Death on the Nile and A Caribbean Mystery to Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Mrs McGinty's Dead and Elephants Can Remember, and you find in her writing quotations of poetry by Tennyson, Shakespeare, William Blake and nursery rhymes, as well as poetic inspirations for some of her book titles, so this Words and Music celebrates the poetic and musical world of the woman who became known as the 'Queen of Crime'.

Producer: Robyn Read

Readings from
Agatha Christie An Autobiography
Shakespeare's Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Othello
Elephants Can Remember
Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Dead Man's Folly
They Do It With Mirrors
Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott
Mrs McGinty's Dead
Death on the Nile
A Caribbean Mystery
William Blake's Song of Innocence
Poirot's Last Case