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Christopher Booker he Great Composers: Reviews and 150Mbardments Bernard Shaw Ed. Louis eroMpton (University of California £17.15) What exactly are we to make of the mass of WstrItlog on music and m usician s which Bernard inaw contributed to various papers over the a,st quarter of the 19th century? Compared with a greater part of the dreary, routine ;tuff which then passed (and has passed :vet' since) as music criticism, Shaw's rolsicking, opinionated reviews must have tned startling. His knockabout style — scribing Brahms as 'the Leviathan 'launderer', Rossini as 'one of the greatest 1.asters of claptrap who ever lived', or r;akYing of Schubert's Great C Major Sym°0Y 'a more exasperatingly brainless *,()MPosition has never been put on paper' — ;138 had a lasting influence on journalism Lec'a the style, for instance, of Mr Bernard vin). And it is a surprise for many people .0 discover just how knowledgeable about Si Shaw was. He could spot an interTlated B Flat in a Mozart aria, or Rossini's ..;:eaP use of the diminished seventh, with ",e best of them. If he took the view that iiverdi's worst sins as a composer have been ns against the human voice', he was per tly capable of supporting his opinion by .`ekPlaining that the composer of Aida :anded to treat the upper fifth of the singer's llge as 'the whole voice, and pitched his melodies in the middle of it instead of in the middle of the entire compass, the result being a frightful strain . . . not relieved, as Handel relieved his singers, by frequent rests of a bar or two and by long ritornellos'.
But it would be foolish to crack up as one of the profoundest musicial thinkers a man who could describe Das Rheingold as a 'poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany in the middle of the 19th century by Engels's Condition of the Labouring Classes in England'. Shaw remained essentially a journalist, albeit an enormously entertaining one, and few of his judgements really touch the deeps.
His real importance, I think, is that he gives us a marvellously vivid series of snapshots of the state of music, both in England and more generally, as it was at one of the most interesting periods of transition in musical history. He was writing, between 1876 and 1894, at just that moment when the great edifice of 19th century Romantic music was all but complete. The giants, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi, Liszt, were all nearing the end of their careers (two of them, Wagner and Liszt, he actually saw). And one of Shaw's greatest strengths was that, with the clear eye of a new age, he saw through the weaknesses, the shame and pretensions of 19th century music as nobody else around: as he put it, 'its grandioseness . . . its neuroseness . . . its effort, its hurry, its excitement, its aspiration without purpose, its forced and invariably disappointing climaxes, its exhaustion and decay'.
Confronted with a typical late Victorian concert programme which included Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, Berlioz's King Lear overture, the Tannhauser overture with the Venusberg music, the first act of Die Walkiire and `by way of a liqueur at the end', the Ride of the Valkyries, he could comment 'will future ages by able to credit such monstrous, undiscriminating gorging and gormandising?' He scorned vast choruses singing the Messiah or the St Matthew Passion (anticipating later taste, he remarked that it would be better to have a Bach Passion sung by twelve voices rather than twelve hundred). He was unbelievably rude about most of the 19th century's musical idols — Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Sullivan, the sentimental Gounod ('M Gounod's piety is inane, and so at bottom his music is tedious'). Of Rossini he concluded, 'I cannot say "Rest his soul" for he had none: but I may at least be allowed the fervent aspiration that we may never look on his like again'; and of the composer he most loved to hate, 'Brahms's enormous gift of music is paralleled by nothing on earth but Mr Gladstone's gift of words; it is a verbosity which outfaces its own commonplaces by sheer magnitude'.
Nevertheless, for all his outspokenness, Shaw always gave justification for his criticism. He was remarkably clear-eyed in separating wheat from chaff. He was quick to spot those last great flowers of the 19th century tradition, Elgar, Puccini and Strauss, all of whom he quickly hailed In terms which certainly would arouse no blush today. He recognised Mozart as a far more serious composer than was then fashionable (as late as 1917, after hearing a Beecham performance of Figaro, he suggested that Beecham should for one night hand over his baton to Elgar: `If Sir Thomas does not. blush to the roots of his hair and exclaim "Great Heavens! And I took this gre! composer for a mere confectioner!" I will pay a penny to any war charity he likes name'. And above all, of course, he revered his supreme idols (along with the Mozart of Don Giovanni), Beethoven and Wagner.. Over the past 50 years, many anthologies of Shaw's criticism have floated in and otli of print, none (because there is so much t° choose from) quite like another. As an academic who shows signs of being what Richard Ingrams would call an 'American bore', Professor Crompton seems to hav.! sacrificed a good deal of the more knociv about fun (e.g. the marvellous opening paragraph describing Shaw's journey do'al to Bow for a performance of Dido and Aeneas). This is less of a bedside book thnn't say, Alec Robertson's long out-of-poll' Penguin selection. On the other hand, this anthology gains greatly in terms of giving a full panorama of Shaw's musical writings' from his first 'ghosted' contributions to the Hornet in the late 1870s through to scat' tered writings 50 years and more later..As never before perhaps we can appreciate just where Shaw stood on almost any 19th cell" tury composer of note (he came at just the right time to compile his 'end of tern' report' — I fear the age of Schoen' and Stravinsky would have left hi° baffled). And not least do I value this nevi volume for a passage I had never seen before —a wonderful eyewitness descr1pti°11 of Wagner conducting at the Wagner Feistival staged in the Albert Hall in June 187' With a 'tense, neuralgic glare' which never faltered, the great man did everything Pnss ible to disconcert the players. 'When he wanted more emphasis, h: stamped; when the division into bars vin, merely conventional, he disdained coup' ing, and looked daggers — spoke the tn°„. sometimes — at innocent instrumentalts1:: who were enjoying the last few bars of their. rest without any suspicion that the ttrill,a,, tient composer had just discounted hall " stave or so'. Even when Richter pickedt.T the baton to conduct the second half 0f the concert, Wagner continued to disconcert, the entire hall by remaining on the P18.0 form, then stumbling around looking in ..,valt for an exit while the music continued. I,e for all this, Shaw still saw his hero as a ;culls of superman among ordinary ni01t; Which, on his day of course, is how WC still sometimes be tempted to see Sun himself.
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