G.B.S On Music (edition 1962)

Shaw was the undisputed best music critic of his day. Eric Bentley has selected his major work for this publication.

George Bernard Shaw

Shaw on Music

Applause, Paperback, 2000.
8vo. ix+307 pp. Edited by Eric Bentley. Foreword by the editor [iii-v].

Contents*

Foreword by Eric Bentley

Part 1: The Point of View

Preface to London Music in 1888-89 as Heard by Corno di Bassetto [Mid-Atlantic, Sunday, 2nd June 1935]

Criticism and Suicide
Destructive Force
Personal Animosity
Technical Analysis
Simply Listen
Electioneering
My Impostorship
Funeral March
Ruskin on Music
My Stuff and Dr Stanford

Part 2: The Main Tradition

Gluck's Orfeo

Mozart
Don Giovanni
The Mozart Centenary, 1891
Tuneful Little Trifles?
His Gentleness
Mozart and Beethoven

Beethoven's Centenary
Rossini Centenary
Weber's Der Freischütz

Berlioz
The Damnation of Faust
The Trombone
The Art of Composition

Wagner
Das Rheingold
The Tone Poet
Bayreuth**

Verdi
Falstaff
A Word More about Verdi
Spoof Opera

Schönberg and Atonality***

Part 3: Musical Questions

More About Opera
Acting in Opera
Rigoletto
Directing Opera
Cavalleria Rusticana
Dramatic Singing
A Bad Opera
Opera Burlesqued
Opera Impresario
The New Italian School

Light Entertainment
Sturgis and Sullivan
Gilbert and Offenbach
Gilbert and Solomon
Gilbert and Celier
Gilbert, Sullivan & Others
Gilbert and Sullivan
Jane Annie
Music Hall
Christmas Pantomime
Bands
Comic Opera
Yvette Guilbert

Music and Religion
What Is Religious?
Handel's Messiah
The Messiah Again
Music in Church
Mendelssohn's Elijah
A Bad Oratorio

Miscellany
Richard III as Music
The Marsellaise
In the West Country
As Far as Greenwich
Diction
La Vie Parisienne
The Popular Dramatist
Incidental Music
Paderewski
A Recital Lecture
The Public

* All pieces first published in The World or The Star between 1888 and 1894, except otherwise indicated.

** There are two pieces here. The second one is dated ''8 August 1894'' and has a Postscript from 1931 in which Shaw explains that this was his last piece as a professional music critic.

*** This is actually a short letter to Nicholas Slonimsky.

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Musical criticism occupies, surprisingly perhaps, significant place in Bernard Shaw's long life and prodigious output. When he was in his thirties, still with his success as a playwright in the future, he served two terms as a regular music critic, writing reviews and other pieces more or less constantly: from 1888 to 1890 for The Star and from 1890 to 1894 for The World. In addition to the numerous pieces produced during these years, Bernard Shaw also wrote a short, but celebrated, book on Wagner - The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) - and many articles scattered over his whole career. That Shaw's productivity in the field of musical criticism really was astonishing is clearly shown by the fact that only the pieces from his two official tenures as music critic take four books: London Music in 1888-89 as Heard by Corno di Bassetto, a single volume, and Music in London 1890-94, a set of three volumes.

I have learned most of the above from the charming Foreword by Eric Bentley to a volume edited by him and titled simply Shaw on Music, first published as long ago as 1955; that is just five years after Shaw had died, aged 94. Since Mr Bentley's two-and-a-half pages long Foreword is a minor masterpiece I can't do better than quote from it. He certainly explains himself with rare combination of charm and clarity:

To make a selection from this body of work is to face the problems of the anthologist in any large and rich field: since he cannot possibly please everybody, his surest hope of pleasing somebody is to begin by pleasing himself. In making this selection, I have pleased myself, and, if I cannot do more for readers of this volume, I can at least do them the courtesy of explaining how I have pleased myself, of stating what kind of thing I have chosen from Shaw's musical essays and what I have left alone.

Further in this compelling Foreword there are many, many points of great interest, all of them worthy of serious reflection. First Mr Bentley makes it clear that he didn't try to present any complete picture of the musical life in London from the end of the XIX century; Shaw's musical criticism sure is an inexhaustible mine for historians or enthuastic admirers, but since they should read Shaw in toto, this little book is not for them. Here Mr Bentley has selected less than a quarter of everything the great playwright ever wrote on music especially for the benefit of the ordinary music lover. This sounds rather promising to me. Perhaps the most perceptive observation of Mr Bentley is the one concerned with Shaw's abilities as both music and drama critic, and especially with the fascinating difference that the latter has been recognised by later generations, whereas the former is still looked askance at; Shaw may have been a great playwright and drama critic, many would say, but he was no musician and really poor music critic for sure. But this does not seem to be case. Besides, Mr Bentley makes an excellent case why Shaw's musical criticism is actually more important than his drama one; he also has some powerful arguments, not against, but in favour of subjective criticism:

Now it is all very well to believe, as Shaw did, that all criticism is prejudiced, but, with Shaw's drama criticism, the prejudice is more important than anything else; much more than the essays that go under that title, the theatre reviews are prefaces to the plays of Shaw. This is a limitation, not a fault. My point is that the music criticism is not limited in any such way; for all Shaw's admissions of subjectivity, it is as dispassionate as any critical writing can be. It is entirely disinterested. It is inspired by pure joy at the good, pure rage at the bad, in the art under observation. Pure is indeed the word for it. Following up Mr. Auden's superlative with another, I would say that we have here some of the purest criticism - of any art whatsoever - in the language.

Beautifully put. It makes perfect sense: exactly because Shaw was not a musician, nor a professional music critic in general though he did know a good deal about the subject, he could judge music far more dispassionately - and with far greater benefit for his readers - than many so called ''objective'' critics. Similarly, because Shaw was no scientist, he could look at science without any prejudice whatsoever and certainly was blunt enough to say the bitter truth: ''Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more.'' Damn right!

Back to Shaw on Music, I may mention in passing that the gravest defect of the volume is that quote of Mr Auden that is referred to above. It is put on the front cover and it is the same the-greatest-who-ever-lived nonsense that W. H. Auden is so fond of attaching to anybody. So Wagner was perhaps the greatest genius and Shaw the greatest music critic who ever lived. This is a farrago of nonsense. If superlatives must be used, I should like to say that, so far as I personally am concerned, by far the greatest music critic who ever lived was Harold Schonberg; Bernard Shaw is a sure runner-up, but not nearly a close one. Is it a coincidence, by the way, that both these great men were highly opinionated, made no false pretences of being objective and had some of the most brilliant, perceptive, provocative and pugnacious prose as far as music criticism in English goes? Certainly not.

Back to Shaw on Music - again - I wish that Mr Bentley's editorial work had been more comprehensive that mere selection. Now he has done a beautiful job, not to mention that it must have been hard to select and organise these ''some hundred thousand words'' from a primary source four times as big as that, but Mr Bentley would have done a much greater service to his readers if he had supplied his book with copious notes. Many of Shaw's pieces reprinted here are reviews of actual performances - full of evaluations of singers, choirs, orchestras - that have long since fallen into complete oblivion of which it is next to impossible that they will ever emerge; only very few of the artists Shaw mentions have their names still spoken or written from time to time outside of the strict musicological circles. Furthermore, many of Shaw's pieces contain subtle allusions to social contexts, historical events or other arts than music which I am conscious that I often miss. Whether this is due to my ignorance or to the fact that many of these hints are obsolete or obscure, I do not know, but it would have been just great if a person of Mr Bentley's erudition had told us something about these matters. It surely would have taken a great deal of work to prepare such notes but I have no doubt that they would have improved greatly one's appreciation of Shaw's prose. An index might have been enormously helpful too; despite the fine thematic organisation of the contents, they are many important cross references as Shaw is always keen on making startling parallels.

No matter. The fact remains that Mr Bentley's selection is spectacular enough as to contain hardly a single piece with nothing fascinating inside and Shaw's prose is only very occasionally made incomprehensible, to me at least, by obscure allusions. That said, the whole book is wonderfully readable and tremendously enjoyable. Almost all of the pieces come from the period 1888-1894 and range in length between half page and ten pages, at most, yet each one is completely independent and can stand on its own; as for the musical range, as obvious from the table of contents, it is staggering: from Mozart to Gilbert and Sullivan, and from Händel to Schönberg. Bernard Shaw on these pages is the same Shaw as in The Perfect Wagnerite, the master of the three Ps: Provocative, Pugnacious and Perceptive, all of them often brought to extreme heights. Speaking of ''Holy Threes'', Shaw may well be described also as the master of the three Rs as well: Rude Ranting and Rambling. What continue to astonish me in these pieces is that Shaw, for all his apparently massive disadvantages, is not only an exhilarating fun to read but almost on every page he has something though-provoking, wise or profound to say. Occasionally, he does rant and he does ramble, but never without purpose, nor without substance. Personally, I relish it all. Sometimes he may well be long-winded or digress uncontrollably, sometimes he may even - no matter how strenuously he tries to avoid it - become severely technical, raving about ''thirds'', ''sixths'', ''diminished seventh'', ''B flat'', ''D sharp'', etc. No matter, really. Perhaps the best description of Shaw's unique prose would be a substantial quote. Here is one from the piece ''Personal Animosity'' which, I think, nicely illustrates all landmarks of Shaw's style:

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that a criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good and bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic. The artist who accounts for my disparagement by alleging personal animosity on my part is quite right: when people do less than their best, and do that less at once badly and self-complacently, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them limb from limb and strew them in gobbets around the stage or platform. (At the Opera, the temptation to go out and ask one of the sentinels for the loan of his Martini, with a round or two of ammunition, that I might rid the earth of an incompetent conductor or a conceited and careless artist, has come upon me so strongly that I have withheld only by my fear that, being no marksman, I might hit the wrong person and incur the guilt of slaying a meritorious singer.)

In the same way, really fine artists inspire me with the warmest personal regard, which I gratify in writing my notices without the smallest reference to such monstrous conceits as justice, impartiality, and the rest of ideals. When my critical mood is at its height, personal feeling is not the word: it is passion: the passion for artistic perfection - for the noblest beauty of sound, sight, and action - that rages in me. Let all young artists look to it, and pay no heed to the idiots who declare that criticism should be free from personal feeling. The true critic, I repeat, is the man who becomes your personal enemy on the sole provocation on a bad performance, and will only be appeased by good performances.

Stupendous prose! So stupendous indeed, that I sometimes wonder how on earth Shaw could get away with publishing it at all. Talent is certainly important for genius, but it may be that character is far more important a factor. Needless to say, the passage above may serve as the beginning of pretty endless discussion about art and criticism, artistry and performance practice, and probably a great deal more.

There is one piece in the book which is a rather striking exception in terms of length and contents. This is the preface to London Music in 1888-89 as Heard by Corno di Bassetto, written more than 40 years after the reviews that are reprinted in this volume. In this is very remarkable piece, to say the least, Shaw describes with spectacular candour a great deal of his childhood, his apparently entirely self-thought musical background and pokes lots of fun at his parents as well as at one Lee, by way of being a conductor, who was an essential extramarital relaxation for his mother. The irreverent wit of Bernand Shaw is all but legendary, and it has a feast in this preface all right (almost every page makes me laugh aloud), but what I am much more impressed with, yet again, in his stupendous candour and just about unlimited ability for dispassionate analysis of himself. He makes no bones that his first tenure as a music critic, between 1888 and 1890 under the catchy pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, was an apprentice work rife with lame pieces; he was learning his business, so to say. (This is more or less supported by the fact that most of his reviews in this volume are from his second job as music critic, between 1890 and 1894, and on the whole they are more substantial affairs, though there are gems among the older ones as well.) As a special bonus to numerous revealing insights into Shaw's childhood and personality, this preface also contains detailed explanation how Shaw got himself into writing musical criticism at all and what the heck his pen name means; just for the record, in Italian ''corno di bassetto'' simply means a basset horn, a type of clarinet completely obsolete nowadays, as it was even in Shaw's time indeed. The first piece of Shaw on Music alone is worth the price of the whole volume. And there's hell of a lot more to laugh at or ponder upon until one reaches the back cover.

When Shaw is wrong, he is usually very wrong: time certainly hasn't confirmed his harsh dismissing of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana (at least he knows the right pronunciation of the first word!) or Bizet's Carmen: both are still much performed and much loved, and rightly so. But when Shaw is right, his perspicacity is amazing. Perhaps the finest example of this comes in the piece The New Italian School in which Shaw discusses Leoncavallo, Mascagni and Puccini, casually mentioning that the last of these gentlemen is most likely to be Verdi's successor. Now, today this is so firmly established a fact that it may seem unbearably trite. But consider the date: May 23, 1894! When Shaw wrote that piece all of Puccini's great operas had not been written yet! Indeed, he made his prophetic remark on the basis only of magnificent analysis of Manon Lescaut - ironically, one of the most forgotten among Puccini's operas today. But no matter how spitefully some people may sneer that La Boheme is dismayingly sentimental, that Tosca is appallingly lurid, that Madama Butterfly is monstrously inane or that Turandot is ostentatiously grandiose, all these operas are constantly performed and recorded worldwide, quite as much as Verdi's most popular masterpieces. As for Leoncavallo and Mascagni, they remained in the standard repertoire with one one-act opera each. Obviously, more than a century after Shaw wrote, Puccini is by far the most successful among the generation of Italian composers after Verdi. To predict that, as Shaw brilliantly did, on the basis only of Manon Lescaut is downright bewildering. Harold Schonberg once remarked that the test of a great critic is not how many talents he has overpraised, but how many geniuses he has missed. In the case of Giacomo Puccini, Bernard Shaw passed the test splendidly. (Shaw's extolling the orchestration of Elgar is quite an excellent example of an overpraised talent. But he made me listen to Elgar's symphonies and overtures all the same.)

What keeps this book still in print more than half a century after it was first published, and more than a whole century after it was written - in other words, what makes it a classic - is the simple fact that vast portions of it are astonishingly relevant to present day. The examples are numerous and I give here but few of them which have made a strong impression on me. Even today, for instance, one may on occasion read some nonsense of the type that Wagner was an opera reformer that walked in the footsteps of Gluck, or that Aida was a kind of Wagnerised Verdi. Neither could possibly be further from the truth. As far as the former is concerned, Shaw's clarity and eloquence, not to mention the wit, cannot be bettered:

And here let me give a piece of advice to readers of books about Wagner. Whenever you come to a statement that Wagner was an operatic reformer, and in this capacity he was merely following in the footsteps of Gluck, who had anticipated some of his most important proposals, you may put your book in the waste-paper basket, as far as Wagner is concerned, with absolute confidence.
[...]
When Wagner came on the scene, exactly a hundred years later, he found that the reformed movement begun by Gluck had been carried to the utmost limits of possibility by Spontini, who told him flatly that after La Vestale, etc., there was nothing operatic left to be done. Wagner quite agreed with him, and never had the smallest intention of beginning the reform of opera over again at the very moment when it had just been finished. [...] Verdi and Gounod kept on trying to get beyond Spontini on operatic lines, without the least success, except on the purely musical side; and Gounod never gave up the attempt, though Verdi did.

Meanwhile, however, Wagner, to shew what he meant, abandoned operatic composition altogether, and took to writing dramatic poems, and using all the resources of orchestral harmony and vocal tone to give them the utmost reality and intensity of expression, thereby producing the new art form which he called ''music drama'', which is no more ''reformed opera'' than a cathedral is a reformed stone quarry.

And Shaw's idiosyncratic views are so often so refreshing. They just compel you to think again about what seemed like a closed case. Take the eternal, and highly artificial, battle between absolute music and one that serves some special purpose, such as dramatic action for example. I wouldn't think it a question worth reflecting much upon, for there is no such thing as ''absolute music'' as far any music lover is concerned, but Shaw has some thoroughly fascinating things to say. Chief here are his descriptions of Rossini as ''the most ''absolute'' of musicians'' and of Wagner as ''incapable to write a single note of absolute music''. This is subtle but those who love Wagner's music dramas or Rossini's overtures - as did Shaw - would know perfectly well what he means. At any rate, Shaw's points are worth considering: Rossini was apt to orchestrate his ravishing melodies without any regard for the physical limits of an instrument or of a player, and that's why we so often hear dismal performances of his lovely overtures; as for Wagner, Shaw reminds us - very sensibly indeed - that wordless music is by no means ''absolute'' music (my quotation marks), and that's why in Wagner's mature music dramas every orchestral episode is just as significant as any part of the singing; here Shaw makes uproariously funny comparison between Shakespear’s (his spelling) Romeo and Juliet and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. And he was perfectly right – we now know – that Wagner was an end in himself: he invented the music drama but spawned no twentieth-century school. The passage is remarkable for something else too. It contains one of the very few instances when Shaw came dangerously close to writing perfect nonsense of the type who’s-greater-than-whom – and he was only too well aware of that:

And, similarly, though the future fossiliferous critics of 1991, after having done their utmost, without success, to crush the twentieth-century music, will be able to shew that Wagner (their chief classic) made one or two experiments in this direction, yet the world will rightly persist in thinking of him as a characteristically nineteenth-century composer of the school of Beethoven, greater than Beethoven by as much as Mozart was greater than Haydn. And now I hope I have saved my reputation by saying something at which everybody will exclaim, ''Bless me! what nonsense!'' Nevertheless, it is true; and our would-be Wagners had better look to it; for all their efforts to exploit the apparently inexhaustible wealth of musical material opened up at Bayreuth only prove that Wagner used it up to the last ounce, and that secondhand Wagner is more insufferable, because usually more pretentious, than even secondhand Mozart used to be.

First I did just that: I exclaimed ''What nonsense!'' But on reflection I do see Shaw’s point. That Mozart is far greater than Haydn is obvious, but the matter of Beethoven and Wagner is rather more complicated. I completely disagree with Shaw here but if we take into consideration musical revolutions that spawn new schools or are complete end in itself, and we accept the former as a more authentic manifestation of greatness, than Wagner is indeed greater than Beethoven. Wagner’s imitators have fallen into total obscurity, but it is only fair to Beethoven to add that, though some of his imitators are rather fine composers (Brahms being the prime example), his symphonies have seldom been equalled and never surpassed.

Let's take a tad more accessible subject: Mozart and Beethoven, probably the two most famous classical composers there are, viewed separately or in comparison. As always, Shaw doesn't mince words, and his words are indeed strong, but the music buff is unwise, not to say foolish, to dismiss them lightly. In Beethoven's Centenary, one of the few pieces in the book that does not belong to the 1888-94 period, Shaw makes a most controversial parallel between the two great masters on the ground of the greatest difference in their outputs: the operas. It is well known that Beethoven ''was no dramatist'' but Shaw goes way further giving a provocative, but plausible, reason: ''moral versatility was to him revolting cynicism.'' This is a very tantalising speculation. After all, every great fan of Beethoven is bound ask why, why did he compose but one opera? He sure as heck had the musical genius to express every possible human emotion with unparalleled force. Shaw offers one powerful and probable hypothesis; needless to say, he is perfectly right that for success on the stage, opera or not, certain lack of moral scruples is essential. As for Mozart, lack of moral versatility certainly was not the case with him:

Beethoven had a moral horror of Mozart, who in Don Giovanni had thrown a halo of enchantment round an aristocratic blackguard, and then, with the unscrupulous moral versatility of a born dramatist, turned round to cast a halo of divinity round Sarastro, setting his words to the only music yet written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.

Nonetheless, Shaw is an appreciative admirer of Beethoven; indeed, Beethoven's Centenary, written in 1927, is a pure masterpiece which contains some of Shaw's most gorgeous rhetoric. So Beethoven was ''a temple of the most turbulent spirit that ever found expression in pure sound'', even though the spirits of Bach and Handel were mightier - a statement I'd disagree with any day. Nor would I agree about the ''uproariousness of his fun'' for this is precisely what I most miss in Beethoven's music, but Shaw certainly has a fine point about Beethoven's tremendous personality (of which Harold Schonberg wrote with great understanding too) and especially about his deliberate chaos, if I may put it so lamely. If I understand Shaw correctly, he thinks that what chiefly sets Beethoven apart from any other composer is that he was the first who used music for an expression of pure passion without much regard for form and pattern. This is of course debatable but worthy of some reflection. No matter how much he changed the sonata or the symphony, Beethoven never created a new genre; this is only too natural for even the greatest genius does have limitations. But that music on the whole was never the same after Beethoven's ''turbulence'' and ''deliberate disorder'' is beyond any doubt. Shaw was well aware of this, as shown in one of his most celebrated, and most amusing, passages:

But that Beethoven's spirit was the most turbulent is beyond all question. The impetuous fury of his strength, which could quite easily contain and control, but often would not, and the uproariousness of his fun, go beyond anything of the kind to be found in the works of other composers. Greenhorns write of syncopation now as if it were a new way of giving the utmost impetus to a musical measure; but the rowdiest jazz sounds like The Maiden's Prayer after Beethoven's third Leonora overture; and certainly no negro corobbery that I ever heard could inspire the blackest dancer with such diable au corps as the last movement of the Seventh Symphony. And no other composer has ever melted his hearers into complete sentimentality by the tender beauty of his music, and then suddenly turned on them and mocked them with derisive trumpet blasts for being such fools. Nobody but Beethoven could govern Beethoven; and when, as happened when the fit was on him, he deliberately refused to govern himself, he was ungovernable.

Those who have listened to the Beethoven's works just mentioned, especially the wild finale of the Seventh Symphony, would appreciate Shaw's point, no matter whether one agrees with his derisive opinion of this movement at other places. I wonder if Shaw, when wrote the part about the sentimentality and the trumpet blasts, didn't have in mind the third part of the Ninth symphony.

To finish with Beethoven, I would like to mention the piece Funeral March for it deals with the stupendous second part of Beethoven's Third Symphony (''Eroica''), in every aspect the most revolutionary single work he ever composed. Shaw has another fish to fry though. He amusingly tells us how his big family and therefore numerous funerals he had to attend in his youth have spoiled completely the part for him. Behind the facetious facade, however, Shaw raises a question of paramount importance, namely the highly personal and prejudiced perception of art we all - or at least most us - cannot but have. This is what I mean when I put the adjective ''absolute'' in quotation marks when it is used about music. There is no such thing. We experience everything through our own personalities with all their idiosyncrasies and kinks, passions and obsessions, fears and hopes. Whether this is how it should be, I do not know; but what I do know is that it cannot be otherwise. There is nothing wrong with such intimate experience of art. The problem starts only when one begins to think that his views are any more important than that of anybody else; this invariably leads to contempt and bitterness. If you entertain similar notions as the former in your head, the only way to escape the latter is to have the force of character Bernard Shaw did have.

The same problem is also raised in one of Shaw's pieces about Mozart where he, as candidly as usual, confesses that his enormous admiration of Mozart actually hampers his critical faculties. I suspect Shaw was a trifle too harsh on himself here. He is by no means without severe judgements of Mozart's works, most notably the Requiem which he declares as more or less written by Mozart's pupil Süssmayr after his death and containing no more that four worthy movements. Modern research has largely rejected the former and I certainly don't subscribe to the latter. All the same, Shaw is full of memorable quotes about Mozart too; his description of the harrowing finale of Don Giovanni has been quoted numerous times and could surely stand another repetition: ''beyond all comparison the most wonderful of the wonders of dramatic music.'' Apart from such wonderful but ultimately useless rhetoric, Shaw has a good deal of wise observations about Mozart.

If it may be said for Shaw to have had a favourite composer, this certainly was Mozart; and if it may be said for him to have had a favourite work too, this surely was Don Giovanni. The piece under that name reprinted here is a review of an actual performance given by completely forgotten singers today, yet between the critical commentaries Shaw casually throws a huge amount of insight. I will limit myself to two examples. The first is another proof of Shaw’s awesome ability to predict the future which sometimes makes me wonder if he was not God impersonated. Commenting on various cuts in the performance, he mentions the duet between Leporello and Zerlina that was added for the first Vienna production in 1788 and dismisses it as ''a very dispensable piece of buffoonery.'' Correct. Today the scene is almost never included in productions or recordings. At another place, while criticizing the singer in the lead role, Shaw remarks on something that I think is very often missed today: the almost perfect lack of self-consciousness in Don Juan (Don Giovanni in Italian). Otherwise he would never have become a great seducer indeed:

Don Juan may be as handsome, as irresistible, as adroit, as unscrupulous, as brave as you please; but the one thing that is not to be tolerated is that he should consciously parade these qualities if they were elaborate accomplishments instead of his natural parts. […] A Don Juan who is continually aiming at being Don Juan may excite our admiration by the skill with which he does it; but he cannot convince that he is the real man.

Mozart’s Centenary is ostensibly a review of London’s attempts to commemorate a century since Mozart’s death but is in fact an inexhaustible mine of perceptive observations to be pondered about very carefully; and so are the next two pieces for that matter. During his time Mozart was regarded as suspicious innovator whose music often was too complex, too richly orchestrated or too difficult to perform for many musicians. Century or two after his death, it is clear that he was no musical revolutionary, but he surely was the pinnacle of the Classical period in music history. Furthermore, Shaw was conscious of the main reason why Mozart is often neglected or underrated – a frightfully modern notion. It is the deceptive simplicity of Mozart’s music that lays at the bottom of the trouble. Virtually everybody – singers, pianists, etc. – have remarked that you can’t make an effect, you can’t impress the audience with Mozart, and the audience is generally a mob enough to care for little but spectacle, so this is a major problem. It is trite to say that but if you’re an opera singer who wants to bring the hall down at a concert, you will choose Rossini, Bellini or even Verdi; but you sure as heck won’t choose anything by the great Salzburger. Mozart’s absolutely unmatched ability to say a great deal with very few notes is his most extraordinary feature as a composer and his most damning curse at the same time. Bernard Shaw very well knew, as did Harold Schonberg, that behind the superficially light and merry music of Mozart, there often is a lot of passion, tragedy, sadness, subtlety and depth. The passage about Mozart’s unpopularity with that part of an audience which is chiefly interested in stunning and grandiose effects, gently called by Shaw ''Titan fanciers'', is well worth quoting for it reveals a truly great insight into human nature:

We all in our native barbarism have a relish for the strenuous: your tenor whose B flat is like the bursting of a boiler always brings down the house, even when the note brutally effaces the song; and the composer who can artistically express in music a transport of vigour and passion of the more muscular kind, such as the finale to the Seventh Symphony, the Walkürenritt, or the Hailstone chorus, not to mention the orgies of Raff, Liszt and Berlioz, is always a hero with the intemperate in music, who are so numerous nowadays that we may confidently expect to see some day a British Minister of the Fine Arts introducing a local Option Bill to concert rooms.

Yet again, Shaw does have a fine point. Have you never met the ''connoisseur'' of opera who listens for nothing but those exhilarating high notes? I have. Have you never heard world famous tenors ruin arias with roof-splitting final notes? I have. Take Franco Corelli for example. I rather like Franco actually, but he is known – nay he was recorded even – to bark shamelessly through ''Di quella pira'' only to finish with simply fabulous high note, some ten seconds long, that of course brings the house down, almost literally. Certainly, in music as in other arts, simplicity is by far not always linked with quality, let alone with profoundness. Indeed, it seldom is. That’s why Mozart is such a rare phenomenon in the history of music.

You should see the ''intemperate in music'' today, Bernie; they’re everywhere. Of course I completely disagree with Shaw. The ''orgies'' of Liszt I consider as some of the finest orchestral pieces ever composed, to begin with; the fact that they are seldom performed, and almost always very badly, is quite another matter. The finale to the Seventh Symphony may not be among Beethoven’s most profound pages but surely isn’t ''clumsy and obvious sensationalism'' either, as Shaw described it at another place. As for the famous Walkürenritt (''The Ride of the Valkyries'' that is) Shaw seems to have forgotten how well it fits Wagner’s stage directions in the beginning of the third act of Die Walküre; that it is often incompetently played as vulgar three-minute orchestral showpiece is, again, a very different matter. But Shaw’s irreverence is legendary for it is great fun to read. Verdi’s orchestra was mostly ''nothing but a big guitar'', Grieg was ''infinitesimal'', this singer was a ''creaking wreck'' and that orchestra did what he hoped was ''their worst'' and so on and so forth. It is difficult not admit that it is terribly amusing. It is not for nothing that this completely inimitable humour has enriched the English language with an adjective especially invented for it: Shavian. Several more examples are due now

In the nineteenth century, Verdi, Gounod, Arthur Sullivan, and the rest wrote so abominably for the human voice that the tenors all had goat-bleat (and were proud of it); the baritones had a shattering vibratom and could not, to save their lives, produce a note of any definite pitch; and the sopranos had the tone of a locomotive whistle without its steadiness: all this being the result of singing parts written for the extreme upper fifth of voices of exceptional range, because high notes are pretty.

I have read most of the articles on Verdi elicited by his death, and I have blushed for my species. By this I mean the music-critic species; for though I have of late years disused this learned branch I am still entitled to say to my former colleagues ''Anch’io son critico.'' And when I find men whom I know otherwise honourable glibly pretending to an intimate acquaintance with Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio, with Un Giorno di Regno, with La Battaglia di Legnano; actually comparing them with Falstaff and Aida, and weighing with a nicely judicial air, the differences made by the influence of Wagner, well knowing all the time that they know no more of Oberto than they do of the tunes Miriam timbrelled on the shores of the divided Red sea, I say again I blush for our profession, and ask them, as an old friend who wishes them well, where they expect to go after such shamelessly mendacious implications when they die.

Then there is Verdi of course, an opera titan for whom Bernard Shaw has a lot of affection and wise words to share. To begin with one major disagreement, I do think Shaw overestimates the role of Boito in Verdi’s musical development; then again, this may well be due to the fact that I myself am greatly prejudiced against Verdi’s two ''Boito operas'', namely the last two he ever wrote: Otello and Falstaff, both with libretti written by Boito based on Shakespeare and, if you believe Shaw, with some musical touches that could not have entered Verdi’s musical language were it not for his great librettist. Shaw at least have the common sense, denied to many, to flatly call these two works ''music dramas'', for that’s exactly what they are. For my part, though, Verdi previous two masterpieces, Aida and Don Carlo, are music dramas as well, and greatly superior ones at that. I have never been able to share the widespread reverence for Falstaff and Otello; though Shaw thinks otherwise, he shrewdly remarks that the great change in direction in these late works was caused by the ''inevitable natural drying up of Verdi’s spontaneity and fertility.'' That said, Shaw has a great deal of admiration for a number of Verdi’s earlier masterpieces such as Rigoletto, Un Ballo in Maschera and especially Il Trovatore. The protagonist in the first of these has stimulated one of the finest examples of Shavian rhetoric: ''…the raging self-contempt, the superstitious terror, the impotent fury, the savage vindictiveness, the heartbroken grovelling of the crippled jester wounded in his most vulnerable point – his fierce love of his child, the only creature who does not either hate or despise him.'' If you know a better description of this character in so short a space, let me know about it too. Now I understand why Shaw was indeed The Perfect Wagnerite. Because he was Verdian as well.

Nor should we pass with paying serious attention Shaw’s major accusation that ''Verdi's worst sins as a composer have been sins against human voice.'' Such a claim – together with the very subtle implication that Verdi’s characterisation is inferior to Wagner’s or Mozart’s – is of course rather startling. For all his ranting and rambling, though, seldom does Shaw provide his statements with less than spectacular argumentation. In this particular case his formidable erudition is very convincing indeed. Shaw repeats again and again that Verdi was especially merciless to his baritones (though I think he might have added the sopranos and the tenors as well) because he wrote parts that lie very high and are all but impossible to sing without ruining one’s voice. He is very fond of giving Il Trovatore as an example, especially Count di Luna's famous aria ''Il balen del suo sorriso?'', I suspect together with the following ''Per me ora fatale'' for both are next to impossible to sing. I am fond of giving for such an example the whole part of Rigoletto, certainly one of the greatest characters ever ''burnt in music'' as beautifully put by Shaw. The tragic jester is a character of staggering complexity and power that you are right not to expect in opera at all. Unfortunately, the part is a real killer. It is a miracle, indeed, that there is but one great baritone (Ettore Bastianini, of course) who made a recording worthy of Verdi’s score. Apart from the sad, but true, fact that opera is an impossible art by default, for at least in practice singing and acting are not quite compatible, Rigoletto’s part requires huge voice, with brilliant top notes, extreme agility and excellent diction, not to say anything about the intelligence that the singer must possess and the slave labour he must endure before he masters the part, if ever. It goes without saying that Verdi’s parts, fiendishly difficult as they may be, are rousing and extremely exciting gems to be experienced. But when they are poorly performed, which even on record is by far more often the case, they are almost physically painful.

It is fascinating to observe how Shaw sets out to make his case that Verdi’s vocal virtuosity and merciless treatment of the human voices stems from his limited powers of characterisation. His argument is very subtle but utterly devastating. Shaw invites us to consider how Wagner or Mozart, in a single work, wrote several vocal parts in absolutely the same range but so vastly different in terms of characters that only singers of extreme versatility can sing them all in different productions; as a general rule, such singers indeed do not exist. Shaw gives excellent examples too: Don Juan, Leporello and Masetto in Mozart’s Don Giovanni; Bartolo, Figaro and Almaviva in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro; Wotan and Aberich in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen; Amfortas and Klingsor in Wagner’s Parsifal. Theoretically, anybody who can sing the notes of one of these parts, can sing them all. But opera is a great deal more than mere singing of mere notes. There is acting, physical and vocal, there is specific inflection of the text, but without distorting the melodic line. Anybody who is even slightly familiar with any of these operas – I am only with the first and the third myself, and to some extent – cannot fail to appreciate the power of Shaw’s point. Imagine the same fellow singing Leporello tonight and Don Juan next week? He must have something more than artistic genius for that. Verdi never was capable of anything like that, his last masterpieces included. His characterisation always rested more on vocal range than on intrinsic value. I consider this comparative analysis of vocal parts one of Shaw’s most searing observations.

Far from being dated, sometimes Shaw’s observations are way more relevant today than when he penned them. A case in point is the piece Directing Opera where he laments hideous staging that happened ''for want of a stage manager''. I believe Shaw was fortunate enough to die too early to experience the vogue for modernist staging all over the world. But I do wonder what he would have thought of that pornographic crap, of that unspeakable abomination, that occupies eight out of ten modern productions of whatever you like (from Mozart to Wagner) had he known that such peaks of deliberate perversity happen, not for want of, but precisely because of stage directors. And I regret to say that the audience generally loves it. I don’t even want to wonder what Shaw might have thought of the horrible decline in the singing standards. Singing? Boy, you must be joking! Nowadays singing is completely obsolete in the opera house. Opera is all about screaming, screeching, yelling and bellowing. But that’s another story.

Finally, I should like to make a brief note of something that has often been neglected, or indeed misrepresented. Many have sneered that Shaw never had any qualifications for being a music critic. Judging by these pieces of musical criticism, this is certainly not the case. Quite apart from how sound or unsound, personal and partial, prejudiced and pugnacious Shaw’s opinions may be, he does seem knowledgeable about music. He must have had very good ears, for one thing, for he often mentions specific notes which this or that singer could or could not achieve, sometimes he even mentions transpositions with half a tone. So far as I know none of these expert opinions have ever been compared with other contemporary sources, if any exist, of the same performances and pronounced incompetent. As Shaw remarks wisely, what makes a man a critic is his personal reaction towards great art. Perfectly correct. The greater the personality of the critic, the more bombshells he throws on you, the more food for thought you get: it’s a pleasure to agree and delight to disagree with such a fine mind as Bernard Shaw’s.

Just like Harold Schonberg’s Facing the Music (1981), in which are collected his best columns from The New York Times, this volume of Shaw’s musical criticism is indispensable for every true lover of classical music. Just like his American colleague several generations later, Shaw’s writing is immensely enjoyable, wonderfully readable, thoroughly provocative and unbelievably penetrating. Another important similarity is the almost complete absence of severely technical language; so reading the volume does not require any knowledge of music theory whatsoever. What the book does require, though, is a lively interest in classical music – should you be devoid of that, you may not read it at all. By ''lively interest'' I mean a certain amount of background; nothing special, really, just to have a vague idea who Händel, Beethoven, Mozart, Verdi and Wagner were and to be able to put them in the right historical context of their times; some familiarity with the most famous operas (or music dramas) of the last three fellows would also be of immense help.

It is a tribute to Shaw's mind and pen that he is able to offer his readers something fresh and stimulating as regards to composers and works about which the literature is so vast, not to mention that most of it does remain fresh and stimulating more than a century after it was written. He is quite successful at the other two fronts, the much less illustrious ones: 1) composers whom I find interesting but far from compelling (say, Berlioz); and 2) composers I couldn't care less about (say Gilbert and Sullivan as well as a long streak of obscurities). Even at his worst and most osbcure - either is seldom the case - Shaw is at least readable, interesting and entertaining. I am looking very much forward to reading his complete musical criticism. I am already pretty sure it is worth the effort, if any is needed. ( )