For David Bispham Shaw had the sincerest admiration, and the De Reszkes won his praise because, as he explained it, they sang like dignified men, instead of like male viragoes in the dramatic Italian style. He made a point of insisting, however, that Édouard de Reszke occasionally abused his power by “wilful bawling for the mere fun of making a thundering noise. On hearing Gerster in 1890, he was sufficiently charmed to say: “The old artistic feeling remained so unspoiled and vivid that, if here and there a doubt crossed me whether the notes were all reaching the furthest half-crown seat as tellingly as they came to my front stall, I ignored it for the sake of the charm which neither singer nor opera (The Huguenots) has lost for me.” Of a concert given in 1893 by “our still adored Patti,” whom he calls “now the most accomplished of mezzo-sopranos,” he gives the following description:
“It always amuses me to see that vast audience (at Albert Hall) from the squares and villas listening with moist eyes whilst the opulent lady from the celebrated Welsh castle fervently sings: 'Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again.' The concert was a huge success: there were bouquets, raptures, effusions, kissings of children, graceful sharings of the applause with obbligato players—in short, the usual exhibition of the British bourgeoisie in the part of Bottom and the prima donna in the part of Titania. Patti hazarded none of her old exploits as a florid soprano with an exceptional range: her most arduous achievement was 'Ah, fors e lui,' so liberally transposed that the highest notes in the rapid traits were almost all sharp, the artist having been accustomed for so many years to sing them at a higher pitch. Time has transposed Patti a minor third down, but the middle of her voice is still even and beautiful; and this with her unsurpassed phrasing and that delicate touch and expressive nuance which make her cantabile singing so captivating, enables her to maintain what was, to my mind, always the best part of her old supremacy.”[111]
Of that brilliant executant Essipoff, the wife of Leschetizky, Shaw said that if it were possible to believe that she cared two straws about what she played, she would be one of the greatest executive musicians of Europe. Hollman was, on the whole and without any exception, in Shaw's opinion, the greatest violoncellist he had ever heard. Joachim's fineness of tone, perfect dignity of style, and fitness of phrasing impressed Shaw as truly magnificent; and when he heard him play Bach's “Chaconne in D minor,” he confessed that he came as near as he ever came to calling anything done by mortal artist perfect. Ysaye, that other master-violinist, moved Shaw as much as he moved Symons by the perfectly harmonious blending of his every faculty. Shaw smilingly reminded all readers of the screed of G. B. S. that “Decidedly, if Ysaye only perseveres in playing splendidly to us for twenty-five years more or so, it will dawn on us at last that he is one of the greatest of living artists; and then he may play how he pleases until he turns ninety without the least risk of ever hearing a word of disparagement or faint praise.”
In Shaw's view, Mozart is the ideal, the supreme composer. Again and again, throughout his works, Shaw has lavished upon Mozart the finely-tempered praise of the clear-eyed devotee. The critical rating of a composer is overwhelmingly impressive when it is supported by the avowal of personal indebtedness; and Shaw has frequently asserted that Mozart has influenced his dramatic works more than any English dramatist since Shakespeare. I remember discussing Mozart with Mr. Shaw one day; and I took occasion to express my scepticism as to the possibility of any profound influence exerted by Mozart the composer upon Shaw the dramatist. “In a certain sense, Mozart must always have been a model for me,” replied Mr. Shaw. “Throughout the entire period of my career as a critic of music, I always thought and wrote of Mozart as a master of masters. The dream of a musician is to have the technique of Mozart. It was not his 'divine melodies' but his perfect technique that profoundly influenced me. What a great thing to be a dramatist for dramatists, just as Mozart was a composer for composers! First, and above all things else, Mozart was a master to masters.”
The second part of Faust impressed Shaw as the summit of Schumann's achievement in dramatic music; and he was very ready to admit that Schumann had at least one gift which has now come to rank very high among the qualifications of a composer for the stage: a strong feeling for harmony as a means of emotional expression. He always found Brahms to be insufferably tedious when he tried to be profound, but delightful when he merely tried to be pleasant and naïvely sentimental. “Euphuism, which is the beginning and end of Brahms' big works,” Shaw remarks in connection with the “Symphony in E minor,” “is more to my taste in music than in literature. Brahms takes an essentially commonplace theme; gives it a strange air by dressing it in the most elaborate and far-fetched harmonies; keeps his countenance severely (which at once convinces an English audience that he must have a great deal in him); and finds that a good many wiseacres are ready to guarantee him as deep as Wagner, and the true heir of Beethoven.” Dvorak, Bohemia's most eminent creative musician, famed alike for an inexhaustible wealth of melodic invention and a rich variety of colouring, is stamped by Shaw as a romantic composer, and only that. His “Requiem” Shaw found utterly tedious and mechanical, while his “Symphony in G” is “very nearly up to the level of a Rossini overture, and would make excellent promenade music at the summer fêtes.” The announcement of a Mass by Dvorak affected Shaw very much as would the announcement of a “Divine Comedy” in ever so many cantos by Robert Louis Stevenson! He regarded Verdi as the greatest of living dramatic composers; and years before Shaw began writing musical criticism, when Von Bülow and others were contemptuously repudiating Verdi, Shaw was able to discern in him a man possessing more power than he knew how to use, or, indeed, was permitted to use by the old operatic forms imposed on him by circumstances.[112]
For the solemnly manufactured operas of Saint Saëns, Shaw felt not mere distaste, but genuine contempt. As soon, in fact, as he discovered the sort of thing that a French composer dreams of as the summit of operatic achievement, his artistic sympathy with Paris was cut off at the main. Early in his career, he solemnly announces, he gave up Paris as impossible from the artistic point of view! His characterization of French music is nothing short of Heinesque.
“London I do not so much mind. Your average Londoner is, no doubt, as void of feeling for the fine arts as a man can be without collapsing bodily; but, then, he is not at all ashamed of his condition. On the contrary, he is rather proud of it, and never feels obliged to pretend that he is an artist to the tips of his fingers. His pretences are confined to piety and politics, in both of which he is an unspeakable impostor. It is your Parisian who concentrates his ignorance and hypocrisy, not on politics and religion, but on art. In this unwholesome state of self-consciousness he demands statues and pictures and operas in all directions, long before any appetite for beauty has set his eyes or ears aching; so that he at once becomes the prey of pedants who undertake to supply him with classical works, and swaggerers who set up in the romantic department. Hence, as the Parisian, like other people, likes to enjoy himself, and as pure pedantry is tedious and pure swaggering tiresome, what Paris chiefly loves is a genius who can make the classic voluptuous and the romantic amusing. And so, though you cannot walk through Paris without coming at every corner upon some fountain or trophy or monument for which the only possible remedy is dynamite, you can always count upon the design including a female figure free from the defect known to photographers as under-exposure; and if you go to the opera—which is, happily, an easily avoidable fate—you may wonder at the expensive trifling that passes as musical poetry and drama, but you will be compelled to admit that the composer has moments, carried as far as academic propriety admits, in which he rises from sham history and tragedy to genuine polka and barcarolle; whilst there is, to boot, always one happy half-hour when the opera-singers vanish, and capable, thoroughly trained, hard-working, technically skilled executants entertain you with a ballet. Of course the ballet, like everything else in Paris, is a provincial survival, fifty years behind English time; but still it is generally complete and well done by people who understand ballet, whereas the opera is generally mutilated and ill done by people who don't understand opera.”
Is it any wonder, then, that the “tinpot stage history” of Saint Saëns was the bane of Shaw's existence and the abomination of his critical sense? Or that Offenbach's music struck him as wicked, abandoned stuff? And of Meyerbeer, then still regarded in Paris as a sort of Michelangelo, he says: “If you try to form a critical scheme of the development of English poetry from Pope to Walt Whitman, you cannot by any stretch of ingenuity make a place in it for Thomas Moore, who is accordingly either ignored in such schemes or else contemptuously dismissed as a flowery trifler. In the same way, you cannot get Meyerbeer into the Wagnerian scheme except as the Autolycus of the piece.”
The most significant feature of Shaw's career as a musical critic was his championship of Wagner. Although he had an exalted admiration for Wagner, he was no hero-worshipper, nor in the least degree blind to the defects of Wagner as a composer who failed to preserve philosophic continuity and coherence in his greatest dramatic achievement. The similarity of tastes in music between Wagner and Shaw is a very noticeable feature of the “C. di B.” and “G. B. S.” criticisms. It was to be expected that Shaw the dramatist would admire Wagner for composing music designed to heighten the expression of human emotion; he realized fully that such music was intensely affecting in the presence of that emotion, and utter nonsense apart from it. Like Wagner, Shaw had a deep love for Beethoven, an intense admiration for Mozart, and a sincere appreciation of the Mendelssohn of the Scotch symphony. And he likewise shared Wagner's sovereign contempt for the efforts of Schumann and Brahms to be “profound.”
A German would laugh at the notion that Wagner required any “championing” during the years from 1888 to 1894 inclusive, since the Bayreuth performances began in 1876. The chief novelty in Shaw's Wagner criticisms was his attack on Bayreuth for the various old-fashioned absurdities perpetrated there—the inadequacy of mise en scène, the ridiculous unnaturalness and inappropriateness of scenery and dress, and the retention in leading parts of “beer-barrels of singers” who did not know how to sing. The result of Shaw's first visit, in 1889, was an article on Bayreuth for the English Illustrated Magazine; a later visit produced an illustrated article in the Pall Mall Budget. Besides this, both visits were reported day by day by Shaw in the Star, over his signature, “Corno di Bassetto,” or “C. di B.” Up to that time, in Shaw's opinion, Bayreuth criticism had been either worship or blasphemy. “I threw off all this, and criticized performances of Wagner's works at Bayreuth precisely as I should have criticized performances of Wagner's works at Covent Garden. The effect on pious Wagnerians was as though I had brawled in church.”