"Bernard Shaw's essays on music include some of the most scintillating ever written on the subject. In this volume, Louis Crompton has brought together Shaw's major articles on Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and a host of other composers, articles culled from six miscellaneous volumes of criticism made up largely of untitled reviews. Concert goers and opera enthusiasts will enjoy comparing Shaw's views of familiar works with their own, and professional music critics will find much to engage them in his pungent opinions. Throughout these pages Shaw's sparkling wit is everywhere in evidence, along with the intellectual vigor that him one of the mentors of his age. Crompton's extensive introduction discusses Shaw's views on musical greatness and traces connections between his thinking on music and the social and aesthetic currents of his time."--Publisher's description.

George Bernard Shaw's public career began in arts journalism-as an art critic, a music critic, and, most famously, a drama critic-and he continued writing on cultural and artistic matters throughout his life. His total output of essays and reviews numbers in the hundreds, dwarfing even his prolific playwriting career. This volume of Shaw's Major Cultural Essays introduces readers to the wealth and diversity of Shaw's cultural writings from across the breadth of his professional life, beginning around 1890 and ending in 1950. Topics covered include the theatre, of course, but also music, opera, poetry, the novel, the visual arts, philosophy, censorship, and education. Major figures discussed at length in these works include Ibsen, Wagner, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Wilde, Mozart, Beethoven, Keats, Rodin, Zola, Ruskin, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Poe, among many others. Coursing with Shavian flair and vigor, these essays showcase the author's broad aesthetic sensibilities, trace the intersection of culture and politics in Shaw's worldview, and provide a fascinating window into the vibrant cultural moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.