Word: bassetto
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...musicality of Shaw's language pervades the evening. His mother had a fine mezzo-soprano voice, and at the beginning of his journalistic career, he was a music critic signing himself Corno di Bassetto, which means basset horn. The cadences of his speeches are like arias, and Donnelly delivers them that way with an ingratiating Dublin inflection. Indeed, most of Shaw's greater plays could be transposed into operas, just as Pygmalion was made into My Fair Lady...
...teacher named Vandeleur Lee. While Lee posed as the magazine's critic, young Bernard wrote the notices. After a year on The Hornet, Shaw retired from criticism for seven years. Soon after his return, he wrote for London's The Star under his famous pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, and later for The World simply as "G.B.S...
...spring night in 1889, a young man named Bernard Shaw sat in an Amsterdam theater watching the first performance of an opera by a Dutch composer named Simon van Milligen. In his report to the London Star, perspicacious young "Corno di Bassetto" (Shaw's pen name) was kind to the opera, but hooted at the company director's curtain speech about the triumphant establishment of a great national school of opera...
Most people know that George Bernard Shaw was once a music critic, writing for London papers under the name Corno di Bassetto (basset horn, a wind instrument). That he was also an amateur composer was revealed last week when Arthur Pforzheimer, Manhattan rare book dealer, exhibited manuscripts of two sweet Shaw songs, / Lack Thy Kisses and Here She Comes, written in 1884 to verses by a friend, a Miss Radford. > Last fortnight the Basle, Switzerland radio station broadcast a gay little opera buffa, La Contadina, by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, second-rank 18th-Century composer. Mislaid in the Brussels Royal Library...
...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...