To perform his job of making ‘deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music’ it was vital to convince everyone that he knew nothing.
‘When people hand me a sheet of instrumental music, and ask my opinion of it, I carefully hold it upside down, and pretend to study it in that position with the eye of an expert. When they invite me to try their new grand piano, I attempt to open it at the wrong end; and when the young lady of the house informs me that she is practising the ’cello, I innocently ask her whether the mouthpiece did not cut her lips dreadfully at first.’
This is the voice of the irresistible G.B.S./Bassetto – and Shaw means us not to resist, but to laugh and swallow his words and then discover that what we have assimilated is his burning sense of undervaluation and the resentment he felt at having to overcome it with such imposture. Bassetto’s business ‘is not to be funny, but to be accurate’; he explains that ‘seriousness is only a small man’s affectation of bigness’, but that ‘there is nothing so serious as great humor’. Though spoken of as severe, Bassetto speaks of himself as ‘lenient, almost foolishly goodnatured’. He never indulges in the cruel practice of giving misleading flattery. He has his passions: he hates the banjo (‘If it be true that the Prince of Wales banjoizes, then I protest against his succession to the throne’); he hates the interruptions of encores and the habit of bouquet-throwing (the poor artists having to take the same vast bouquet to performance after performance to have it spontaneously hurled at them); he hates the old (Mendelssohn) when used as an obstacle to the new (Wagner); and he hates audiences, especially the practised coughers who should be removed to Piccadilly where their ailment can be treated ‘by gently passing a warm steam-roller over their chests’. More annoying still were the men who beat time – one actually did it by shooting his ears up and down. ‘Imagine the sensation of looking at a man with his ears pulsating 116 times per minute in a quick movement from one of Verdi’s operas.’
But his chief objection to aristocracy-ridden London audiences was their imposition on music of artificial social standards. A wastefully competitive system obliged managers to convert opera houses and concert halls into fashionable post-prandial resorts. Intervals, which for many were the main events of the evening, were extended so that part of the audience was still chattering at full blast while the music was being played. Bassetto did not lack for a solution. The soldiers at present placed for show purposes in the vestibule should be moved into the stalls where they could turn their rifles on anyone who disturbed a performance. He urged the use of convict labour for the chorus and scene-shifting, and the taxing of private box-holders at twenty shillings in the pound to finance a Public Entertainments Trust under the chairmanship of Corno di Bassetto. After which they could get rid of the sham classical performances that had made the British into a race of cultural humbugs. ‘The hypocrisy of culture, like other cast-off fashions, finds its last asylum among the poor,’ he wrote.
Shaw calculated that the sort of social criticism that the editor T. P. O’Connor had found unendurable on the political pages of The Star would be acceptable when paraded through its musical columns. His objections to the tyranny of evening dress were famous. Bassetto disliked wearing the uniform of an idealist ‘class of gentlemen to which I do not belong, and should be ashamed to belong’. In his eyes, it acted as a false passport. ‘Next season, I shall purchase a stall for the most important evening I can select,’ Shaw threatened Augustus Harris, the cautious manager of Covent Garden Opera House. ‘I shall dress in white flannels.
‘I shall then hire for the evening the most repulsive waiter I can find in the lowest oyster shop in London. I shall rub him with bacon crackling, smooth his hair with fried sausages, shower stale gravy upon him, season him with Worcester sauce, and give him just enough drink to make him self-assertive without making him actually drunk. With him I shall present myself at the stalls; explain that he is my brother; and that we have arranged that I am to see the opera unless evening dress is indispensable, in which case my brother, being in evening dress, will take my place.’
Shaw admitted the easy advantages of a compulsory costume that was cheap, simple, durable. It ‘prevents rivalry and extravagance on the part of the male leaders of fashion,’ he wrote, ‘annihilates class distinctions, and gives men who are poor and doubtful of their social position (that is, the majority of men) a sense of security and satisfaction’. Such arguments applied equally to women’s clothes: yet they were free to pursue private enterprise with horrible consequences:
‘At 9 o’clock (the Opera began at 8) a lady came in and sat down very conspicuously in my line of sight. She remained there until the beginning of the last act. I do not complain of her coming late and going early: on the contrary, I wish she had come later and gone earlier. For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly as if someone had killed it by stamping on its breast and then nailed it to the lady’s temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to bear the operation... I presume that if I had presented myself at the doors with a dead snake round my neck, a collection of blackbeetles pinned to my shirtfront, and a grouse in my hair, I should have been refused admission. Why, then, is a woman to be allowed to commit such a public outrage?... I suggest to the Covent Garden authorities that, if they feel bound to protect their subscribers against the danger of my shocking them with a blue tie, they are at least equally bound to protect me against the danger of a woman shocking me with a dead bird.’
Bassetto’s ‘Musical Mems’ were a continual protest against distractions from good musical performance. The worse the music, the more Bassetto diversified. Readers liked to hear of the voice trainer who hit his pupils, declaring that it was the only method to make them produce the vowel o; they liked to discover Bassetto himself, after a visit to the ballet, at dawn the next day with a policeman, a postman and a milkman (‘who unfortunately broke his leg’) attempting pirouettes and entrechats in Fitzroy Square; they liked, as part of a teetotal campaign, his plea for dancing in church, which just stopped short of converting Westminster Abbey into a ballroom; they even accepted his rank socialism: ‘What we want is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves.’
Almost the only person not to be diverted was T. P. O’Connor. Bassetto had fabricated for the public a very pretty relationship between critic and editor. But the reality was unpleasant. ‘I find it impossible to continue as I have been doing lately,’ Shaw told Massingham early in 1890. ‘This week I have had to attend five concerts; have advanced fourteen shillings from my exhausted exchequer; and have written the Bassetto column, all for two guineas.’ But T. P. O’Connor refused to increase Bassetto’s salary. He wanted to be rid of him and of his attempts to turn his Liberal paper into a Socialist one. But to do so would make him one of the most unpopular editors in London. So he starved him out. Bassetto had sometimes made fun of his own resignation – ‘this threat never fails to bring Stonecutter Street to its knees,’ he told readers; ‘though, lest too frequent repetition should blunt it, I am careful not to employ it more than three times in any one week.’ In private, Shaw was driven by destitution to walk to and from many of the concerts and to wait a year for the repayment of some of his expenses.
By the early summer of 1890 their relationship had grown so strained that ‘we came to the very grave point of having to exchange assurances that we esteemed one another beyond all created mortals’. The day O’Connor had been looking forward to arrived in the middle of May 1890, when Bassetto of The Star became G.B.S. of The World. It was William Archer who persuaded Yates to re-employ Shaw. ‘Arranged to take the musical criticship of The World,’ Shaw wrote in his diary on 14 May, ‘if T. P. O’Connor has nothing to sa
y to the contrary.’ In his own style, O’Connor had everything to say in its favour. ‘I am extremely glad to hear you have got the excellent offer of The World,’ he congratulated Shaw the next day. ‘...Take the offer by all means.’ Above Corno di Bassetto’s last column which appeared on 16 May, O’Connor stuck a discordant adieu: ‘The larger salary of a weekly organ of the classes has proved too much for the virtue even of a Fabian.’ ‘After the malediction, the valediction,’ Bassetto countered, and went on to show how all grievance (though not forgotten) could be submerged in humour:
‘A man who, like myself, has to rise regularly at eleven o’clock every morning cannot sit up night after night writing opera notices... I ask some indulgence for my successor, handicapped as he will be for a time by the inevitable comparison... I hope he will never suffer the musical department of the Star to lose that pre-eminence which has distinguished it throughout the administration of “Corno di Bassetto”.’
*
The character adopted by G.B.S. in The World was less dramatic than Bassetto. Anyone who made him laugh melted most of the criticism out of him. By offering the most far-fetched comparisons and analogies as stepping stones to his conclusions – the training of circus horses to compose dance music or the installation on the site of the prompter’s box of a steam crane to hoist despairing critics out of their seats and drop them at the refreshment bar – G.B.S. amused the deaf stockbrokers, but also encouraged them to overlook what lay behind these fantasies, and to dismiss his serious recommendations as more absurdity. For the first time in his writing a note of exasperated despair sounds over the misreading of his careful statements. ‘It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.’
Shaw’s method of judging music, he once stated, was to do with his ears what he did with his eyes when he stared. Some critics imposed on the public by displays of ‘scientific analysis’. G.B.S. resented this fashion for ‘silly little musical parsing exercises to impress the laity’. In one of his most effective debunking feats, he parodied this scholarly pretentiousness with a comparable ‘analysis’ of Hamlet’s soliloquy on death:
‘Shakespear, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop.’
Academic preconceptions, G.B.S. argued, had encouraged a ruck of ‘barren professors of the art of doing what has been done before and need not be done again’. He detected a gentlemanly gang at work in the musical world, and it was with outcast irony that he asked: ‘who am I that I should be believed, to the disparagement of eminent musicians?’ Commenting on Professor Stanford’s Eden, he continued:
‘If you doubt that Eden is a masterpiece, ask Dr Parry and Dr Mackenzie, and they will applaud it to the skies. Surely Dr Mackenzie’s opinion is conclusive: for is he not the composer of Veni Creator, guaranteed as excellent music by Professor Stanford and Dr Parry? You want to know who Dr Parry is? Why, the composer of Blest Pair of Sirens, as to the merits of which you have only to consult Dr Mackenzie and Professor Stanford.’
As early as 1885 Shaw made out his historical case against the persisting influence of these composers. ‘Our really serious music is no longer recognized as religious,’ he wrote, ‘whilst our professedly religious music... is only remarkable as naїve blasphemy, wonderfully elaborated, and convinced of its own piety.
‘It was Mendelssohn who popularized the pious romancing which is now called sacred music; in other words, the Bible with the thought left out. M. Gounod proved his capacity in this direction by giving us Faust with all Goethe’s thought left out, the result having been so successful (and, it must be confessed, so irresistibly charming), it is natural that he should turn his attention to the Bible, which is worshipped in England so devoutly by people who never open it, that a composer has but to pick a subject, or even a name, from it, to ensure a half-gagged criticism and the gravest attention for his work, however trivial.’
G.B.S. was merciless on the ‘flagrant pedantry... and waste of musical funds’ which the oratorio market produced for English festivals. ‘I do not know how it is possible to listen to these works without indignation, especially in circumstances implying a parallel between them and the genuine epic stuff of Handel.’ Had oratorio been invented in Dante’s time, ‘the seventh circle in his Inferno would have been simply a magnified Albert Hall, with millions of British choristers stolidly singing, All that hath life and breath, sing to the Lord, in the galleries, and the condemned, kept awake by demons, in the arena, clothed in evening dress’.
He was obliged to listen to a good deal of work by contemporary composers: Sir Frederick Cowen, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Charles Stanford, Sir Arthur Sullivan, and other knights and bachelors of music, most of whose works he would happily have committed ‘to the nearest County Council “destructor”’. Sullivan, a musician of care and refinement, who had spent over twenty years composing for the drawing-room and the Church, achieved success through a burlesque of the classics he revered. ‘They trained him to make Europe yawn; and he took advantage of their teaching to make London and New York laugh and whistle.’ In Stanford, G.B.S. detected a similar division exposed by the ‘somewhat scandalous’ success of his Irish Symphony, into which Shaw read ‘a record of fearful conflict between the aboriginal Celt and the Professor’.
Here was a beginning in his quest for a formula that, with its symbol of a reconciled England and Ireland, would integrate inherited factors in such deep conflict that they had forced his parents to occupy separate countries and were eventually to neutralize himself as a man without nationality. For who was Shaw to censure Stanford for not displaying his emotions in public? Yet it is partly as self-censure, self-analysis and self-encouragement that we should read such passages:
‘When Professor Stanford is genteel, cultured, classic, pious, and experimentally mixolydian, he is dull beyond belief. His dullness is all the harder to bear because it is the restless, ingenious, trifling, flippant dullness of the Irishman, instead of the stupid, bovine, sleepable-through dullness of the Englishman... Far from being a respectable oratorio-manufacturing talent, it is, when it gets loose, eccentric, violent, romantic, patriotic, and held in check only by a mortal fear of being found deficient in what are called “the manners and tone of good society”. This fear, too, is Irish: it is, possibly, the racial consciousness of having missed that four hundred years of Roman civilization which gave England a sort of university education when Ireland was in the hedge school.
In those periods when nobody questions the superiority of the university to the hedge school, the Irishman, lamed by a sense of inferiority, blusters most intolerably... Then the fashion changes; Ruskin leads young Oxford out into the hedge school to dig roads; there is general disparagement in advanced circles of civilization, the university, respectability, law and order... This reaction is the opportunity of the Irishman in England to rehabilitate his self-respect, since it gives him a standpoint from which he can value himself as a hedge-school man... If he seizes the opportunity, he may end in founding a race of cultivated Irishmen whose mission in England will be to teach Englishmen to play with their brains as well as with their bodies; for it is all work and no play in the brain department that makes John Bull such an uncommonly dull boy.’
His few aberrations in judgement usually arise from treating music historically, that is, with the type of academic measuring-rod he scorns. He placed Hermann Goetz ‘above all other German composers of the last hundred years, save only
Mozart and Beethoven, Weber and Wagner’, partly because his Symphony in F was technically and intellectually more symphonic in form than any by Schumann or Schubert. He undervalued Schubert and considered him overplayed because ‘I could not see that Schubert added anything to Mozart & Beethoven except sugar: and though the sugar was extraordinarily rich and sweet, I rather jumped over him to Mendelssohn’. Music composed out of the dramatic instinct (such as Goetz’s Taming of the Shrew) attracted him far more than anything intimate. He was sometimes a poor judge of chamber music because it tended to conflict with his commitment to twenty-four-hours-a-day cheerfulness.
He sniped at Brahms, insisting that with all his great powers of utterance he had nothing to say (‘Brahms’ enormous gift of music is paralleled by nothing on earth but Mr Gladstone’s gift of words’). Shaw’s hostility to Brahms focused on his Requiem (‘patiently borne only by the corpse’). In 1947 he explained that ‘the first performances of Brahms’s Requiem in London were dreadfully and insincerely mock-solemn and dull. Now that I know the work, its fugal bits and march music amuse me; and its one Mendelssohnic chorus is a favourite of mine.’ But this explanation cannot conceal Shaw’s antipathy to all near-contemporary religious music, especially when connected with death. He empties these works of poetry and makes them colossal monuments to boredom. He literally cannot listen to them.
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