Editing George Bernard Shaw (section)

====Music====
Shaw's collected musical criticism, published in three volumes, runs to more than 2,700 pages.{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 3) 1981|pp=805–925}} It covers the British musical scene from 1876 to 1950, but the core of the collection dates from his six years as music critic of ''The Star'' and ''The World'' in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In his view music criticism should be interesting to everyone rather than just the musical élite, and he wrote for the non-specialist, avoiding technical jargon—"Mesopotamian words like 'the dominant of D major'".{{refn|In 1893 Shaw's column included his parody of music critics' idiom in a mock-academic analysis of Hamlet's "[[To be, or not to be|To be or not to be]]" soliloquy: "Shakespear, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop."{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 2) 1981|p=898}}|group=n}} He was fiercely partisan in his columns, promoting the music of Wagner and decrying that of [[Johannes Brahms|Brahms]] and those British composers such as [[Charles Villiers Stanford|Stanford]] and [[Hubert Parry|Parry]] whom he saw as Brahmsian.{{sfn|Anderson: ''Grove Music Online''}}{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 2) 1981|p=429}} He campaigned against the prevailing fashion for performances of [[George Frideric Handel|Handel]] [[oratorio]]s with huge amateur choirs and inflated orchestration, calling for "a chorus of twenty capable artists".{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 2) 1981|pp=245–246}} He railed against opera productions unrealistically staged or sung in languages the audience did not speak.{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 1) 1981|p=14}}