JACQUES BARZUN
615
weeks, is to receive a flogging for every wrong note that she plays. In
The Music Cure,
subtitled "a piece of utter nonsense," pieces by
Chopin, played by a beautiful girl, rescue a young diplomat from
hallucinations. The playlet is insignificant . In another farce, a
chorus of angels sings "Bill Bailey"; in
The Simpleton of the Unexpected
Isles,
a matter-of-fact trumpet ushers in the Last Judgment; and in
Methuselah
we hear three trombone calls reminiscent of the Masonic
symbol in Mozart's
Magic Flute.
Half a dozen other "musical in–
terventions" in the plays could be listed- all trifling and purely at–
mospheric, as in Shakespeare . Their fewness is in fact remarkable,
for the theater of Shaw's time made much use of incidental music.
The unions had not yet made the practice prohibitively expensive.
The only serious role given to music in Shaw's work occurs in
Man and Superman,
whose plot is derived from Mozart's
Don Giovanni
and where the famous scene in Hell is heralded by three musical
quotations from the opera. The introductory chords resound three
times more during the scene. But as we shall see, none of this pre–
pares us for what the play winds up saying about music. The value
Shaw assigns to it in relation to himself and to society is complex and
unexpected, and as it forms the "difference" here looked for, it must
be kept back until the end.
As to the esthetic influence of music on Shaw and on Stendhal,
a curious remark has been made by the students of each- indepen–
dently, since, so far as I know, nobody has coupled the two disparate
geniuses before now. The remark is that their greatest works "fol–
low musical form." I myself was caught in that trap, when thirty
years ago I was asked to write a commentary on the "Scene in Hell"
for a recording of it by a quartet of famous actors . Most recently, in
1979, a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne pointed out musical
patterns in Stendhal's two great novels . After reflection, I have come
to think that these discoveries are false criticism. They are based on
such things as the recurrence of themes and the verbal tagging of
characters and situations, which presumably correspond to effects of
timbre and tonal choices . All these suppositions about musical form
through words, I think, exemplify only our modern love of meta–
phorical nonsense .
It
is shown to be nonsense by two plain facts:
every art is distinct in its means and methods; and all the arts
employ repetition and recurrence, harmony and contrast between
parts, because the human mind, in order to think at all, demands
order and iteration in anything and everything it touches .
One more point of resemblance between Stendhal and Shaw:
