If music critics are remembered at all by posterity, it is usually for having been notably wrong in their judgments. A case in point: Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904), 19th century Europe's most renowned and most recalcitrant critic, who for 40 years mercilessly shredded Wagnerian operas, won painful immortality when Wagner wrote him into Meistersinger as the waspish Beckmesser. But perhaps the most remarkable music critic of all time, a man who later made his mark in wider literary fields, was George Bernard Shaw. A new selection from his weekly criticisms for London's The Star and The World (Shaw on Music; Doubleday Anchor...
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