SHAW AND MUSIC
DR.
E. NAGESWARA RAO
The
Shaw family had the musical tradition. It was extra-ordinary that almost every
member of the family could sing or play on some instrument. Shaw wrote in his
preface to his first novel, Immaturity:
“All the women could ‘pick out tunes’ on the piano, and support them
with the chords of the tonic, sub-dominant, dominant and tonic again. Even a
Neapolitan sixth was not beyond them. My father played the trombone...My eldest
uncle (William) played the ophicleide….My aunt Emily
played the violincello. Aunt Shah (Charlotte) used
the harp and tambourine.” Shaw’s mother, Lucinda, had a mezzo-soprano voice
which she had developed under Vandeleur Lee, an
orchestral conductor and teacher of music. Mrs. Shaw’s rehearsals at home for
Lee’s concerts and operas had a salutary effect on Bernard Shaw. At fifteen he
could “sing and whistle from end to end leading works by Handel, Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi.” He
owed his musical education to George John Vandeleur
Lee.
Shaw’s
knowledge of music is seen in the emphasis he placed on music in all his writings. Music is predominant in his “nonage” hovels and
their prefaces. The second novel, The Irrational Knot, for instance,
begins with a satiric attack on working men’s concerts organised
by Christian Socialist persons. The pugilist hero of the fourth novel, Cashel Byron, understands the fight between Wagner and his
critics in terms of his own profession: “I made out from the gentleman’s
remarks that there is a man in the musical line named Wagner, who is what you
might call a game sort of composer; and that the musical fancy, though he
cannot deny that his tunes are first-rate, and that, so to speak, he wins his
fights, yet they try to make out that he wins them in an outlandish way, and
that he has no real science.”
There
is a fuller display of Shaw’s musical knowledge in the third novel, Love Among the Artists, in which the hero, Owen Jack, is a
composer in the manner of Beethoven. He is intensely contemptuous of the
second-rate and demoniacally possessed as he composes: “He was playing from a
manuscript score, and was making up for the absence of an orchestra by
imitations of the instruments. He was grunting and buzzing the bassoon parts,
humming when the violincello had the melody,
whistling for the flutes; singing hoarsely for the horns, barking for the
trumpets, squealing for the oboes, making indescribable sounds in imitation of clarionets and drums, and marking each sforzando
by a toss of his head and a gnash of his teeth.” There is also an amusing
description of the rehearsals of Jack’s Fantasia later.
In
the first novel, Immaturity, Mr. Musgrave, the lawyer, discusses the
responsibilities and faults of music critics. He complains about the excessive
use of technical jargon. Robert Smith, the hero, takes Harriet Russell to an
operatic rendering of “Les Huguenots” which she did not appreciate. She thinks
that the experiment was a failure, though the performance was splendid. He was
very much impressed by a pastoral ballet, The Golden Harvest, done by a
gifted ballerina, Eyminia Pertoldi,
in the Italian tradition. Edward Conolly, the hero of
The Irrational Knot, is a first-rate musician and actually gives
concerts at Wandsworth. While he was touring the
continent, he takes part in a number of classical concerts. His
misunderstanding with his wife was partly because of her inability to
appreciate classical music. His sister, Susanna, performs ballets and
burlesques to support herself. She has considerable
merit, but her popularity suffers when she becomes a dipsomaniac.
Music
has an important role in Shaw’s dramatic words also. The hell scene in Man
and Superman–this play, incidentally, was inspired by Mozart’s Don
Giovanni–has stage directions: “a ghostly violincello
palpitating on the same note endlessly” and “wailings from uncanny wind instruments.”
The mystical rite in the third act of The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman (fourth
in the Back to Methuselah cycle) begins with “Invisible trumpets uttering
three solemn blasts in the manner of Die Zauberflote,”
which is followed by “organ music of the kind called sacred in the nineteenth century.”
Like the characters in his novels, many characters in
Shaw’s plays are also musicins. Clementina
Buoyant is addicted to the saxophone with which she charms alligators; Randall Utterword trills a flute solo of “Keep the Home Fires
Burning” as the curtain descends on bomb-ravaged
The plays themselves are conceived
on musical principles. They are described as operas without music. The dialogues are often
comparable to duets, trios, and quartets. In the cast of the plays, Shaw often
insisted on variety in pitch: Candida should be contralto, Marchbanks
a tenor, Morell a baritone, Prossy
a soprano, and Burgess a bass. Shaw argued that a conversation in which all the
characters spoke at the same speed and pitch is disagreeable and unnatural.
Shaw’s interest in music is evident
from his early musical criticisms in The Hornet and The
Star. His championship of Richard Wagner may be seen in his critical essay,
The Perfect Wagnerite. G. K. Chesterton called him a perfect Wagnerite
in music, a perfect Ibsenite in drama, and a perfect Whistlerite in painting.
Dr Frances Pietch
points out that three ideas of music dominated the nineteenth
century: (l) as a symbol of the Infinite, (2) as an art which most directly
expressed emotions, (3) as a part of the social forces at work. Wagner’s
compositions are based on leitmotifs. He was interested in the social
mission of art. Shaw too was interested in the involvement of music with the
social issues of his time. This typically Victorian attitude to music may be
found in Shaw’s early works. His discussions of the artists, his criticism of
society, and his concept of the hero are derived from his study of Mozart and
Wagner.
Thus Shaw’s deep knowledge of music
runs as an undercurrent in almost all his work, be it a novel, short-story,
play, or criticism.