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The Playwright as Perfect Wagnerite: Motifs from the Music Dramas in the Theatre of Bernard Shaw Arthur Ganz Let us begin with some hypothetical circumstances—for the moment dissociated from the names of the persons whom in fact they concern. A young man, brought up in a musical household and especially knowledgeable about opera, determines upon a career as a writer. As he makes his way in the literary world, he becomes a music reviewer, the liveliest and most perceptive of his day. He also becomes the champion of a musico-dramatic artist, the grandiosity of whose conceptions and the novelty of whose techniques make him, even at the culmination of his career, a figure of controversy. So passionate does the young writer’s advocacy of his hero become that he produces a book explicating the composer’s major work (ingeniously if somewhat perversely in terms of the socialism to which our writer has be come committed). He then turns to dramatic criticism and at last finds his true métier as a playwright. Nevertheless— and here we come to the crux of our hypothesis—despite the young writer’s long public admiration for an artist who was not only a composer but one of the seminal dramatic theorists and prac titioners of the age, the older composer-dramatist has no discern ible influence on the young playwright’s work. What is there to say of such a hypothesis except that it is preposterous? Surely it is hardly reasonable to argue that a dramatist at an impressionable and formative stage of develop ment could admire, and even champion, an already famous composer of theater pieces without the older artist’s work having a significant, even profound, effect on that of the younger. Nevertheless, the paucity of critical references to the relations 187 188 Comparative Drama between Wagner and Shaw—the figures here described—sug gests that some such assumption has been widely made. That this assumption, however improbable, should have stood for so long is hardly surprising: two bodies of dramatic work more disparate than those of Wagner and Shaw are, after all, not easy to imagine. Between Wagner’s vast and solemn evocations of Germanic legend and Shaw’s sharp and witty dissections of the modem world an impassable gulf would seem to be fixed. (Even if we take into account the humane comedy of Meistersinger or the heroic tragedy of Saint Joan, we will hardly have established any equivalences.) The one work of Shaw’s, Man and Super man, that admittedly derives from an opera owes its origin not to Wagner but to Mozart; nor are we surprised that Don Giovanni with its pace, its wit, and its rebellious hero defying the demands of authority should appeal to the brilliant socialist playwright. It is, in fact, helpful to remind ourselves that Shaw’s operatic allegiances extend beyond Wagner. Not only is there a sense of musical organization and the balancing of various voices in Shaw’s style (Shaw himself proudly quoted Granville-Barker’s appeal to the actors at a rehearsal of one of Shaw’s plays: “Ladies and gentlemen: will you please remember that this is Italian opera”)1 but familiar “operatic” situations are not un known in his work (in the first act of Arms and the Man the heroine herself points out the analogy between the hero’s situa tion and that of Emani). More important still Wagner himself has similar allegiances. Part of the operatic tradition that stimu lated the drama of Bernard Shaw had also fostered the work of Wagner. “Not only Rienzi,” as Robert Gutman shows us, “but also Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Meistersinger, The Twilight of the Gods, and Parsifal reveal in their mixed heritage strains that descend, as does Verdi’s Aida, from Meyerbeer’s Parisian grand opera.”2 Moreover, a crucial part of this operatic structure was, beyond its grandiose historical spectacle, the Scribean drama turgy that formed its foundation. When we recall that much of Shaw’s work consists of ingenious inversions of Scribean and other kinds of conventional nineteenth-century dramatic form ulas, we recognize the point at which the Shavian and Wagnerian ancestries merge. A further recognition...
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