Shaw on music is endlessly readable because he is endlessly knowledgeable. He is also remarkably prophetic. Some of the things he was saying about music and musicians a century ago, eccentric in their time, are commonplaces today. As a Wagnerian, and a partisan of the 'music of the future', he was ready for Schonberg before Schonberg was born...

Non-musical Shavians have generally assumed that their idol was able to sustain so unstaunchable a flow of musical journalism through verbal trickery, egotistical bluff, and a background of domestic vocalism and scrambling through operatic scores at the piano. He had, in fact, a very thorough musical training, though he despised the academies. Like all of us musical autodidacts, he taught himself the elements with the Novello primers. He knew the entire terminology of the craft but took no pride in it.