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A collection of critical writings on music from the Nobel Prize–winning playwright behind Saint Joan and Man and Superman.
The Critical Shaw: On Music is a comprehensive selection of renowned Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate Bernard Shaw’s extensive writings on a wide range of musical topics. Still recognized as one of Great Britain’s most important music critics, Shaw enriched London’s musical scene for some twenty years with his provocative, original, and penetrating reviews, before giving up music criticism to concentrate his talents on playwriting. His vast critical output encompassed opera, operetta, vocal and orchestral performance, musical theater, and oratorios, and took in major composers and performers as well as many long since forgotten names. Frequently embellished by his controversial political and social opinions, and delving as well into the nature of music criticism itself, Shaw’s reviews continue to stimulate and surprise, their depth and range setting standards that are rarely, if ever, matched today. Included in this edition is a previously unpublished draft on voice training prepared by Shaw for Vandeleur Lee, his mother’s singing teacher.
The Critical Shaw series brings together, in five volumes and from a wide range of sources, selections from Bernard Shaw’s voluminous writings on topics that exercised him for the whole of his professional career: Literature, Music, Politics, Religion, and Theater. The volumes are edited by leading Shaw scholars, and all include an introduction, a chronology of Shaw’s life and works, annotated texts, and a bibliography. The series editor is L.W. Conolly, literary adviser to the Shaw Estate and former president of the International Shaw Society.
About the author
Acclaimed Irish playwright and Nobel laureate Bernard Shaw has left an indelible mark on Western theater, culture, and politics. Over the course of his life, he wrote more than sixty plays that addressed prevailing social problems through comedy. Shaw was also a prolific essayist and lecturer on politics, economics and sociological subjects, and was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work that is marked by its use of stunning satire to encapsulate humanity.
Christopher Innes is Distinguished Research Professor at York University, Toronto, and Research Professor at Copenhagen University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and of the Royal Society of Arts (UK), and a Killam Fellow, he holds a Canada Research Chair in Performance and Culture at York. The author of fifteen books—translated into eight different languages—he is also General Editor of the Cambridge "Directors in Perspective" series, as well as co-editor of the quarterly journal Modern Drama.
Brigitte Bogar, currently studying in the PhD Music program at York University, Toronto, has performed several major operatic roles, including Leonora in Fidelio, Gutrune in Götterdämmerung, Agathe in Der Freischutz, Elektra in Idomeneo, and Romeo in I Capuletti e i Montecchi. In 2014, she recorded a CD featuring music composed by Bernard Shaw and his mother. Ms. Bogar is the founder of Nordic Opera Canada, for whom she has directed and performed in August Enna’s Little Matchgirl and The Princess and the Pea. She also conducts and sings with the Toronto Swedish Singers and has organized conferences in the United States for the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Music Association.
