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PARTISAN REVIEW
neither was a sedentary listener; both pursued music wherever it
could be heard. Stendhal's travels in Austria, and the Germanies,
and in Italy as far as Naples greatly added to what he heard in Paris .
Shaw covered the British Isles and visited Bayreuth and Paris. We
should also remember that their main musical fare was opera. In the
nineteenth century it was the leading genre, with religious music
second. For the public, those forms were the test by which a com–
poser was judged; and for our purpose, we note that opera, oratorios,
passions, and requiems are all dramas in music.
We are now ready for what our two men did and thought as crit–
ics. They intended from the outset to write for the general reader
and to proselytize for certain ideas . Shaw repeatedly made fun of so–
called technical criticism, showing by parody that he was fully able
to write the gibberish of program notes and saying why they were
useless . Stendhal could not have done the same, but then the public
he was aiming at- the opera-going high society- would not have
stood it, or understood it, if he had . His indications without techni–
cal terms are precise and sufficient to make his points, just like
Shaw's.
Their propaganda runs in parallel. Stendhal was bent on rescu–
ing from neglect Mozart and the former repertory (Cimarosa, Per–
golese, and other composers of the late eighteenth century), and at
the same time he was trying to preach the modern, which for him
was Rossini. Shaw was bent on rescuing from neglect Mozart and
the former repertory (Berlioz, Verdi, Schubert, and other early
nineteenth-century composers), and at the same time he was bat–
tling for the modern, which for him was Wagner.
It would be too much to say that after his crusade Shaw was not
fully committed to Wagner, but it is evident that for him "the master
of masters" was Mozart. More markedly, Stendhal had reservations
about Rossini, and for him the greatest of masters was Mozart.
Though propagandists for a cause, our pair were first and
always critics, which means granting virtues to what they disliked
and seeing faults in what they admired. In doing this kind ofjustice,
their estimates of Meyerbeer and Rossini are strikingly alike. More–
over, as conscious critics of themselves they were oddly self–
depreciatory. Stendhal declared himself"mistalented" for music; and
Shaw, asking rhetorically, "Who am I to criticize ...
?"
answered (at
least, he did so once): "Simply nobody but a man of letters of no
musical authority at all ."
A common element in our critics' writing is their historical
sense. They drew analogies over a wide range in all the arts. They il–
lustrated by reference to the well known, and in music they defined
