Word: corno
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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...
...voice 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...
Shaw was not tootling his corno out of key. The Dutch have been great creators on canvas, but not so great at creating music. Composer van Milligen's Brinie barely survived its first performance. A few other Dutch composers put some operatic notes on paper, but without much more success. Last week, for almost the first time in half a century, the Dutch, and their visitors at the fourth annual Holland Festival, were seeing, hearing and enjoying an opera composed by a Hollander...
...aging, bedridden Signora had been shrewd enough to quit her life as a ruthless courtesan before she became the victim instead of the victimizer of men. Now her cook, spying from the window on what happened in the Via del Corno, kept her supplied with the essential information for her intrigues and extortions. In the end, deserted and foiled, the half-crazed Signora determined to punish the entire street; she bought up every house and ordered wholesale evictions. But her fury brought on a stroke that left her a speechless idiot, while the Fascists collected the rent on her houses...