The Musician from Baker Street

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 732, 24 July 1953, Page 7

The Musician from Baker Street

And now, Doctor, we've done ‘our work, So it’s time we had some play. A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin land, where all is sweetness, and delicacy, and harmony, and there are no red-headed + clients to vex us with their conundrums. -The Red-Headed League. AKER STREET Irregulars B living in New Zealand will be familiar with that scholarly monograph, Sherlock. Holmes and Music, written by Guy Warrack, lately conductor of the BBC Scottish Orchestra and Chairman of the

ae es -- ee — Composers’ Guild of Great Britain, and at present examiner in New Zealand for the Royal Schools of Music. The Listener, having a mere than nodding acquaintance with the Great Detective since his mysterious visit to Wellington a few years ago. decided to interview

Mr. Warrack on the subject of his investigations into Sherlock Holmes’s musical gifts and tastes. Holmes’s passion for music was one of the outstanding characteristics of his complex personality, and in the career of no cther ‘criminologist, not even Lord Peter Wimsey, has music played such a large part. Mr. Warrack explained that he was a foundation member cf the Sher'ock Holmes Society of London, a group of enthusiasts who meet periodically to .discuss various points in the Baker Street canon. At one meeting, he re.membered, the BBC commentator Wyn_ford Vaughan Thomas had read a puper on the subject of "Sherlock Holmes and Wine"; at another meeting a paper on "Sherlock Holmes and Tobacco" had been read; he himself*had contributed a brief study of Holmes’s disguises. He remembered anvuther time when the Baritsu Chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars in Tokio had _ provided a plaque outside the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly Circus to commemcrate the meeting there of Dr. Watson and Young Stamford, which had led to the great collaboration between Holmes and his biographer. The plaque was unveiled by ex-Chief Inspector Fabian of Scotland Yard, and proceedings were | considerably stimulated by the atrival of a hansom cab containing Holmes in person-who turned out to be none other than the well-known actor Carleton Hobbs in disguise. The first conclusion he had come to as a result of his musical studies, Mr.

Warrack said, was that Hoimes was a schizophrenic who used music as an "escape," in the psycholegical sense, from his primary business of detecting criminals. He had other interests such as Early English Charters, Philology and Apiculture, but music was (apart from cocaine and shag tobacc.») his main relief. Mr. Warrack backs up this conclusion with numerous quotctions from Watson’s accounts of Holmes, The most convincing is that in which Watson describes Holmes in 1890, nine years after their first meeting, listening to Sarasate in St. James’s Hall: All the afternoon he sat in the Stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness,» gently waving his long thin fingers time to the music, while his gently ‘smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes the~ sleuth-hound, Holmes the relentless, keen-witted, ceadyhanded criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive. In his singular character ‘the dual nature alternately asserted itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his neture took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so _ truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his arm-chair amid his improvisations and his black-lettcr editions. . . When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music at St. James’ Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom he had set himself to hunt down. Of Holmes as a performer Watson first says that "he plays the viclin well." A few years later he notes, "My friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very capable performer, but a compose: of no ordinary merit." Unfortunately. this is the only reference to Holmes as a composer, and there is no record of his ever having committed any of his works to paper. Watson records in A Study in Scarlet, that when left to himself, Holmes "would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognised air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evenin2z, he

would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his k ie. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasiunally they were fantastic and cheerful, Clearly they reflected the thoughts which yossessed him..." Watson also teils us that Holmes’s instrument was a Stradivari worth 500 _ guineas. which he was lucky enough to get from a pawnbroker in Toitenham Court Read for 55 shillings. At the end of The Red Circle case Holmes took Watson off to a Wagner night at Cevent Garden. He was also fond of Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Offenbach, and the artists he admired. besides Sarasate, included the vir-

tuoso Norman Neruda. It is significant, too, that Iloimes’s great and admired enemy, the besutiful Trene Adler, had been a contralto singer at La Scala in Milan, and prima donna at the Imperial Opera in Warsaw. Another woman of his acquaintance, Violet Smith, whom Watson describes in The Solitary Cyclist as being "tall, graceful and queenly," was a teacher of piano. It might be noted, too, that Parker: the garrater of The Erapty House, was a "remarkable performer on the jew’s harp." ; The section of his book which had aroused most criticism from enthusiasts, Mr. Warrack said, was that in which he declared that Sherluck Ho.mes could never have written his famous mono-

graph on "The Polyphonic Motets a Lassus." The existence of this work hai never been proved, Mr. Warrack claims and there are other ceps in the study of Holmes as musician. From: whom dig he learn the violin, fer instance? Did he always play by ear? And who’ were the experts mentioned in The Bruce~ Parkington Plans, who proclaimed the problematical monograph on de Lassus to be "the last word on the subject?" These questions may never be answered unless, perhaps, in some attic in Baker Street, scholars may one day discover yet unpublished accounts by Dr. Watson of his long friendsh:p with England’s most famous detective.