ONE WOMAN’S NOVEL APPROACH TO MUSIC

What is a musical novelist?

Among several possibilities, he or she could be any novelist who is interested in music and to a greater or lesser extent enjoys playing or listening to it. Or a musical novelist could be one who writes about music or musical concerns. Or one who uses musicians for characters, or places the story against a musical background.

Audrey Peterson has claims on all three categories.

She recently had published three mystery novels: “The Nocturne Murder” (Arbor House: $14.95), “Murder in Burgundy” and “Death in Wessex” (both Pocket Books paperbacks).

The binding thread of these works, and the thing that brings them to our attention, is that the principal characters are either musicians or more or less closely identified with music. In “The Nocturne Murder,” the victim, perhaps justly, is a London music critic whose fame partly derives from the fact that he is the son of a famous British conductor. Peterson describes the critic as a “very clever, quite brilliant, but erratic.” Also amorous, one might add.

Despite the British locale of all her novels, Peterson is a native of Southern California.

“I was born in Los Angeles--in an undisclosed year,” she said. “I went through elementary school there and graduated from Citrus High School in the San Gabriel Valley, between Azusa and Glendora.

“All the time I was studying piano at the now-long-defunct Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, an institution that once boasted a rather notable faculty, including Rosina Lhevinne during the summer sessions. No, I never really had any professional ambitions in music. I just loved it, constantly attended opera and concerts in Los Angeles.”

Peterson received both her B.A. and M.A. degrees from UCLA, with a major in English and a minor in music. After a number of years devoted to raising a family--three daughters, two grandchildren--she entered graduate school at USC and took her Ph.D. in English literature. Her doctoral dissertation was a study of Thomas Hardy and his Wessex novels, a milieu to which she returned in her own third novel.

In 1966 Peterson joined the English faculty of Cal State Long Beach, where she has taught ever since--she is now on half-time early retirement, with options to teach. In view of her success at getting her novels published, it seems unlikely that she will soon return to teaching.

During her years at Cal State Long Beach, she published numerous scholarly studies, bearing such formidable academic titles as “George Eliot: Brain Fever in 19th-Century Fiction--Literal or Figurative?” Her publications also include studies of A. Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, and of the American novelist Wallace Stegner.

Peterson did not take the plunge into mystery writing without some trepidation.

“Although I gave courses in writing of mystery stories, I never took such a course from anyone. I had wanted to try my hand at it for a long time, but I knew I could never do it while I was still teaching. Hence the early retirement.

“I worked on ‘The Nocturne Murder’ every day for a year, taking only a little time off when I needed a rest.

“After the first draft was finished, there was a long period of rewriting and polishing. When it came time to look for a publisher, I found that I had to have an agent. Just sending the manuscript around from publisher to publisher did not accomplish anything.

“At the same time, I found that my earlier scholarly publications counted in my favor. They made the publishers less wary because I was offering a first novel. But it was not until Michell Hamilburg accepted me as a client that I began to be taken seriously. . . .”

Peterson not only strives for unity in her novels by giving each one a musical background, she also employs a standard device in carrying characters from one novel to another. In her three novels, she utilizes the services of the same two co-detectives.

“One of these characters is named Andrew Quintet,” she said. “He is a professor at an unnamed California university. The other is Jane Winfield, a young graduate student working on her dissertation in music history. She goes to London to research an imaginary composer named Marius Hart. He is supposed to be a long-forgotten contemporary of Chopin, who composed in similar Romantic style.

“The music of one of Hart’s pieces, a nocturne, is found clutched in the hand of the murdered man, which gives rise to all kinds of clues, leading and misleading.”

The conversation naturally veered to discussion of earlier novels with a musical background. Some were familiar through their musical titles, such as Victor Hugo’s “The Phantom of the Opera” and Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata.” With some thought we dredged up Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells,” which could be considered related to music. But there was no question as to Dorothy Sayers’ mystery “The Nine Tailors,” which deals with the ancient English art of bell pealing.

“Probably the most famous of early musical novels is Henry Handel Richardson’s ‘Maurice Guest,’ published in 1908,” Peterson said.

“H. H. Richardson was a nom de plume for an Australian writer whose real name was Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson. When she was 18, her mother took her to the Gewandhaus Conservatory in Leipzig to study piano. When the young lady found there was little hope of ever becoming a concert pianist, she turned to writing. Other than ‘Maurice Guest,’ her best-known work is a trilogy called ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney.’ But it never earned the acceptance of ‘Maurice Guest.’ ”

Lengthy as is “Maurice Guest,” it is surpassed in that respect by Romain Rolland’s once widely read “Jean Christophe,” based on a composer of the Beethoven type. The original French version was in 10 volumes. It came out in English translation in two massive volumes.

“One does not primarily regard Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ as a musical novel,” said Peterson, “but music plays an important part in its structure. Proust was an ardent proponent of Wagner and used as a literary device a pattern of repetition based on the leitmotif system of Wagner. Proust constantly refers to a musical phrase from a composition by a fictional composer named Vinteuil, in the manner of a recurring Wagnerian leitmotif.

“Neither does Thomas Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure’ depend solely on music, yet there is an important episode in which Jude visits a composer whose religious music had stirred him. The idealistic Jude was bitterly disillusioned when he discovered the composer to be crassly commercial and interested only in the money his music could bring him.”

Other titles came to mind. Thomas Mann’s “Doktor Faustus” aroused controversy because Mann had chosen for his protagonist an avant-garde composer who had invented a style of composition based on Arnold Schonberg’s 12-tone system. Schonberg took violent exception to Mann’s comparisons and inferences, and a lively controversy ensued, carried on mainly in the letters column of the New York Times.

Peterson nominated Somerset Maugham’s long short story “The Alien Corn” as possibly the most moving work of musical fiction. It relates the story of the young son of a prominent British family who is determined to become a concert pianist.

The parents invite a pianist, obviously designed to resemble Dame Myra Hess, to hear him and evaluate his talent. Her verdict is negative. She informs the parents that the son has not a chance of a successful pianistic career. A few days later, the son accidentally kills himself while cleaning his rifle. Maugham’s final line is to the effect that one often reads of such accidents in the newspapers.

Peterson had never heard of a novel called “The First Violin,” written in the early years of the century by Jessie Fothergill. It was the sentimental story of the concertmaster of a German symphony orchestra, designed to evoke tears from sympathetic readers. One chapter was headed by a few measures of Schumann’s “Traumerei” in musical notation. That brief excerpt served as one critic’s introduction to the music of Robert Schumann.