"After the recital, I went to my dentist's; there is nothing that soothes me more, after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals, than to sit and have my teeth drilled by a skilled hand."
What a recital that must have been--and what a critic that was! None other than George Bernard Shaw, of course. The great Irish dramatist, novelist, and political writer was, for some four years, music critic for The Star, and later The World, when he was about forty years of age and had moved to London.
Shaw had started out doing political articles, but because these were about five hundred years ahead of their time intellectually, the editor breathed a sigh of relief when the fiery Shaw suggested music instead of controversial politics. Unfortunately, Shaw was hardly less controversial in music; musicians feared him, other critics hated him--but the public seemed to love it.
Shaw used a pseudonym--Corno di Bassetto (basset horn)--and fired off hundreds of obstinately opinionated but amazingly informed criticisms. In fact, Shaw knew more music than most critics even today know. His mother was a singer, and Shaw's knowledge of vocal production and interpretation is evident in every article. Shaw ordered scores by the hundred and could play these at the piano, singing what had to be sung. He learned the scores so well that any deviation from the original was mercilessly exposed. With typical modesty, Shaw informed the gentle reader that he never expressed an opinion on a subject "unless I know at least six times more about it than you do."
Opinions there are, and in abundance. Shaw waged a one-man battle for quality; although convinced that London audiences were so deadheaded and philistine that they deserved only the worst, Shaw insisted that they have the best. He wrote:
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, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them limb from limb and strew them in gobbets about the stage.
Shaw mocked the "inoffensive, considerate, say-nothing-to-nobody sort of criticism" and the "gentle men who keep only one sort of margarine, which they spread impartially over all."
Shaw's own uncompromising personality is always in the foreground. At one point he even includes his own toothaches, influenza, and other aches and pains--while commenting on the low quality of program notes. He inflicts his personal instrumental likes and dislikes on us--he detests the cello, for example, and informs us, "I had as soon hear a bee buzzing in a stone jug."
The English oratorio, regarded as sacred, regularly provoked fits of rage. According to Shaw, these were "dull imitations of Handel…unstaged operettas on scriptural theme, written in a style in which solemnity and triviality are blended in the proportions for boring an atheist out of
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