The Dangerous Delinquents

If music critics are remembered at all by posterity, it is usually for having been notably wrong in their judgments. A case in point: Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904), 19th century Europe's most renowned and most recalcitrant critic, who for 40 years mercilessly shredded Wagnerian operas, won painful immortality when Wagner wrote him into Meistersinger as the waspish Beckmesser. But perhaps the most remarkable music critic of all time, a man who later made his mark in wider literary fields, was George Bernard Shaw. A new selection from his weekly criticisms for London's The Star and The World (Shaw on Music; Doubleday Anchor Books; 95-c-) proves that Critic Shaw did not have to be wrong to be memorable. Half a century later, his musical opinions on the whole stand up better than his political theories, white his style ought to put most contemporary critics to shame.

A Moral Problem. Shaw's mother took up singing to help her through a dull and disappointing marriage, and it was not very long before young Bernard admitted "knowing much more about music than any of the great composers." He talked his way into a critic's job with a promise not to "write about Bach in B minor . . . I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was then refined and academic to the point of being unreadable."

By the time he quit regular criticism for playwrighting, in 1894, Shaw had learned to "distinguish between what every [artist] can do and what only a very few can do." He learned that "a criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading . . . When my critical mood is at its height, personal feeling is not the word: it is passion: the passion for artistic perfection . . . The true critic, I repeat, is the man who becomes your personal enemy on the sole provocation of a bad performance." And he decided that the quick, deadline-ducking judgments delivered by newspaper critics could be valid: "The only compositions which will bear thinking of for more than half an hour are those which require an intimate acquaintance for at least ten years for their critical mastery." Critic Shaw followed a simple but infinitely cunning line: he discussed music not as an art but as a grave moral problem, studied musicians precisely as a social reformer studies dangerous delinquents. A bad performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni seemed every bit as wicked to Shaw as a real-life Don Juan seems to a headmistress. "I hate performers who debase great works of art," he summed up."I long for their annihilation: if my criticisms were flaming thunderbolts, no prudent Life or Fire Insurance Company would entertain a proposal from any singer within my range ..." Shaw on Music is afire with annihilating invective. He comments, for instance, on the "surprising power of the average Italian chorister to destroy all stage illusion the moment he shambles on the scene with his blue jaws, his reach-me-down costume ... his embarrassed eye on the prompter, and his general air of being in an opera chorus because he is fit for nothing better." Unnerving frankness is the keynote of most of the reviews' opening lines, e.g., "For some time past I have been carefully dodging Dr. Hubert Parry's Job"; the closing lines are marked by a note of extreme sorrow: " He might have let Job alone . . . for, patient as we both are, there are limits to human endurance." Deadly insults march in disguise as compliments, as when Shaw wrote of Soprano Adelina Patti, after she had enjoyed 35 years of enormous popularity: "It is my firm belief that Patti is capable of becoming a great singer." Battle Lines. Shaw's criticisms are, almost to a word, a joy to read, even when the personalities are beyond memory. One reason: musical battle lines were clearly drawn in Shaw's day. He could be simply for or against Wagner (he was for) and romantic Italian opera (against, at least until Verdi's later works); musical forms were firm, and a chord was a chord. It made things easier for him than for today's critic, who has precious little new music to discuss, less that is controversial.

But even that would hardly have bothered Shaw. If he could not find a controversial subject in the concert hall, he got one from outside. He took for granted that a music column was just the place for discussions of a Dickens novel, the French Revolution, the paintings of Tintoretto, Ibsen's Wild Duck, the salaries of bishops. "Musical criticisms," wrote he, "like sermons, are of low average quality simply because they are never discussed or contradicted." What 20th century music needs, among other things, is more sermons like Preacher Shaw's.

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