The Stockbrokers' Critic

I could make deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music, the alleged joke being that I knew nothing about it. The real joke was that I knew all about it.

--George Bernard Shaw

G.B.S. was right. During two decades (1876-94) of intermittently covering London concert halls and opera houses, he emerged as the finest music critic in the English language. And over the years, his acerbic judgments have worn remarkably well--a consequence, explained Shaw, of the fact that "G.B.S. never commits himself on a musical subject until he knows at least six times as much about it as you do." In a fascinating and previously uncollected selection of Shavian criticism' (How to Become a Musical Critic; Hill & Wang; $5), readers can once more watch G.B.S. committing himself -- informed, passionate, and armed with annihilating invective.

Brass Bugle. Shaw's background for criticism was his family of amateur musicians: a trombone-playing father, a harp-playing aunt, a mother with a mezzo-soprano voice of "remarkable purity of tone," and an uncle who played the ophicleide, a giant brass bugle. Shaw himself started training to become an operatic baritone, changed his mind, and at 20 began ghosting musical criticism for a London weekly, The Hornet, in conspiracy with his mother's voice teacher named Vandeleur Lee. While Lee posed as the magazine's critic, young Bernard wrote the notices. After a year on The Hornet, Shaw retired from criticism for seven years. Soon after his return, he wrote for London's The Star under his famous pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, and later for The World simply as "G.B.S."

Even in his apprentice, Vandeleur Lee days, Shaw was far ahead of the informed opinion of his time. He was an early booster of Wagner, regarded Mozart as the greatest of composers at a time when he was not sufficiently appreciated, insisted that Bach's music belonged not to the past but to the future. British music of the 19th century was to Shaw simply "a little Mozart and water," and he periodically attacked "the absurdity of being the only music-patronizing nation in the world which systematically tolerates opera delivered in a foreign tongue." The composer he most conspicuously failed to appreciate was Brahms, whom he found "just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician, with the brains of a third-rate village policeman."

Strange Shriek. As a trained singer himself (even when he was 93 he used to quaver through the scores of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov or Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos), Shaw saved some of his sharpest shafts for vocalists. Of the famed Italian Tenor Enrico Tamberlik, appearing in Rossini's Otello, he wrote: "He sings in a doubtful falsetto and his movements are unmeaning, and frequently absurd. For the C sharp in the celebrated duet L'ira d'avverso fato, he substituted a strange description of shriek at about that pitch. The audience, ever appreciative of vocal curiosities, eagerly redemanded it."

Even after he had turned to fulltime playwriting, Shaw continued to lecture, scold and argue about music in letters to assorted editors. When he disapproved of an attack on Strauss's Elektra in The Nation by the world-famed critic Ernest Newman, he returned, roaring, to the battle: "This infatuated attempt of writers of modest local standing to talk de haut en bas to men of European reputation, and to dismiss them as intrusive lunatics, is an intolerable thing, an exploded thing, a foolish thing, a parochial boorish thing, a thing that should be dropped by all good critics and discouraged by all good editors as bad form, bad manners, bad sense, bad journalism, bad politics and bad religion. I can stand almost anything from Mr. Newman except his posing as Strauss's governess."

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