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Shaw on Music

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George Bernard Shaw

Shaw on Music

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

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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.''

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.

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.

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.)

[The Amazon limits do not allow to go into any detail about Shaw's opinions of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Verdi. So here I give but one example of Shaw's tremendous erudition and the final two paragraphs.]

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.

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.

Shaw's writing is excellent, but the production values of this book are very poor, not in keeping with the material. Cheap paper, even worse typography, looks like it was run off an old Xerox.

The book arrived in a timely manner and was exactly what I ordered. I wanted it as a gift for a friend who didn't know it existed.