14 - “Please remember, this is Italian opera”

Summary

Stick to my plays long enough, and you will get used to their changes of key & mode. I learnt my flexibility & catholicity from Beethoven; but it is to be learnt from Shakespear to a certain extent. My education has really been more a musical than a literary one as far as dramatic art is concerned. Nobody nursed on letters alone will ever get the true Mozartian joyousness into comedy.

(Shaw to Max Beerbohm, 1900)

[L]et the people in your next play have a little will and a little victory, and then you will begin to enjoy yourself and write your plays in the Shavian Key – D flat major, vivacissimo.

(Shaw to Siegfried Trebitsch, 1906)

“It is not enough to see Richard III: you should be able to whistle it.” Such is Shaw's advice in his weekly music column in The Star in 1889, which he devoted to a current production of Shakespeare's history play. There was orchestral music that had been composed for the production, but Shaw's comment is directed at Richard III itself as a piece of music, and he reviews the acting as a musical performance, talking about a “magnificent duet,” for example, and a “striking solo.” Richard Mansfield's “execution of his opening scena was . . . deeply disappointing,” and in a staccato passage “he actually missed half a bar” by dropping a syllable from a word. Mansfield occasionally “made fine music for a moment,” but his performance as a whole was a musical failure. “It is a positive sin for a man with such a voice to give the words without the setting, like a Covent Garden libretto” (Shaw's Music, vol. 1, pp. 586-91).