Word: corno
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
...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that his readers knew nothing, the articles were signed "Corno di Bassetto'' (basset horn- an old wind instrument now superseded by the clarinet).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...
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...
...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...