Bernard Shaw On Music

This volume contains the best of Shaw's musical writing including sections on Gl ck Handel Mozart Beethoven Rossini Verdi Berlioz pieces on opera musical analysis oratorios Gilbert and Sullivan plus a long autobiographical preface one of Shaw

This is the first of three volumes of musical criticisms by Bernard Shaw reflecting his great breadth of knowledge of the works of Wagner, Bach and Mozart to more contemporary British composers such as Walton, Tippett and Britten.

A collection of critical writings on music from the Nobel Prize–winning playwright behind Saint Joan and Man and Superman. The Critical Shaw: On Music is a comprehensive selection of renowned Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate Bernard Shaw’s extensive writings on a wide range of musical topics. Still recognized as one of Great Britain’s most important music critics, Shaw enriched London’s musical scene for some twenty years with his provocative, original, and penetrating reviews, before giving up music criticism to concentrate his talents on playwriting. His vast critical output encompassed opera, operetta, vocal and orchestral performance, musical theater, and oratorios, and took in major composers and performers as well as many long since forgotten names. Frequently embellished by his controversial political and social opinions, and delving as well into the nature of music criticism itself, Shaw’s reviews continue to stimulate and surprise, their depth and range setting standards that are rarely, if ever, matched today. Included in this edition is a previously unpublished draft on voice training prepared by Shaw for Vandeleur Lee, his mother’s singing teacher. The Critical Shaw series brings together, in five volumes and from a wide range of sources, selections from Bernard Shaw’s voluminous writings on topics that exercised him for the whole of his professional career: Literature, Music, Politics, Religion, and Theater. The volumes are edited by leading Shaw scholars, and all include an introduction, a chronology of Shaw’s life and works, annotated texts, and a bibliography. The series editor is L.W. Conolly, literary adviser to the Shaw Estate and former president of the International Shaw Society.

"Bernard Shaw's essays on music include some of the most scintillating ever written on the subject. In this volume, Louis Crompton has brought together Shaw's major articles on Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and a host of other composers, articles culled from six miscellaneous volumes of criticism made up largely of untitled reviews. Concert goers and opera enthusiasts will enjoy comparing Shaw's views of familiar works with their own, and professional music critics will find much to engage them in his pungent opinions. Throughout these pages Shaw's sparkling wit is everywhere in evidence, along with the intellectual vigor that him one of the mentors of his age. Crompton's extensive introduction discusses Shaw's views on musical greatness and traces connections between his thinking on music and the social and aesthetic currents of his time."--Publisher's description.

With his inimitable wit and sparkle, George Bernard Shaw brings us the character of Owen Jack, a salty non-conformist composer said to have been suggested by Beethoven. The relations between Jack and the other wayward bohemians of the story with the more conventional socialites around them offers shrewd insight into the nature of the artistic temperament, with its needs for a kind of commitment that overrides the everyday claims of the heart. A novel which anticipated Shaw's first plays by more than ten years, LOVE AMONG THE ARTISTS shows him already mocking the respectable morality of the Victorian society around him.