Music: Basset Horn

The conclusion is irresistible that the attraction of Gilbert-Sullivan opera is not sufficient to overcome my inertia. The reason is not jar to seek. Mr. Gilbert’s paradoxical wit, astonishing to the ordinary Englishman, is nothing to me. Nature has cursed me with a facility for the same trick; and I could paradox Mr. Gilbert’s head off were I not convinced that such trifling is morally unjustifiable. As to Sir Arthur’s scores, they form an easy introduction to dramatic music and picturesque or topical orchestration for perfect novices; but as I had learned it all from Meyerbeer . . . and was pretty well tired of Offenbach before Trial By Jury was born, there was no musical novelty in the affair for me.

In 1883 and 1889, Londoners read such music reviews (feuilletons to the journalists of the day) in Thomas Power (“Tay Pay”) O’Connor’s evening Star. Often infuriating because the glib reviewer seemed to know everything and to assume that his readers knew nothing, the articles were signed “Corno di Bassetto” (basset horn— an old wind instrument now superseded by the clarinet). This week, publication of the collected Corno di Bassetto’s Star pieces† reminded old (81) George Bernard Shaw’s loyal public that he had served his hitch with the musical dead watch long, long ago.

Shaw boasts that he got his Star post “because I believed I could make musical criticism readable even by the deaf.” As Corno di Bassetto he succeeded partly by being flip, partly by avoiding, to the scandalized amusement of his colleagues, the technical aspect of music. Nevertheless, Shaw had a sound background. With the aid of his mother and a singing teacher who had moved into their Dublin house, he had developed a skilled but “uninteresting” baritone voice, had learned the piano and mastered in great detail a tremendous lot of musical scores, mostly the operas of Meyerbeer and Verdi.

The musical life of London in 1888 had more Maggie Moores, Mile. Colombatis and Mme Belle Coles, forgotten today, than Pattis, Nordicas, Richters. Corno di Bassetto, busy with political agitating, missed a new Dvorak symphony and a concert by Harold Bauer (who played the violin for the first ten years of his career before becoming a pianist). Shaw on Patti: There has not yet been witnessed a dramatic situation so tragic that Madame Patti would not get up in the middle of it to bow and smile if somebody accidentally sprung his opera hat. She is simply a marvelous Christy Minstrel, and when you have heard her sing Within a Mile in the Albert Hall, so perfectly that not a syllable or whisper of it is lost, you have heard the best she can do.

Superseded today by other wind instruments, Corno di Bassetto seems not displeased with his efforts of 1888, although he claims he has not bothered to reread them. In an addendum to one article he offers just one apology for his 19th Century animadversions—for what he wrote about a Brahms piano concerto: “[His] music is at bottom only a prodigiously elaborated compound of incoherent reminiscences, and it is quite possible for a young lady with one of those wonderful ‘techniques’ which are freely manufactured at Leipzig and other places, to struggle with his music for an hour at a stretch without giving such an insight to her higher powers as half a dozen bars of a sonata by Mozart.”

†London Music 1888-1889-Dodd, mead $2,500.