One ghost that must haunt the National Gallery is that of George Bernard Shaw. The unhappy child of a drunken father and a neglectful mother, Shaw found solace and imaginative stimulation among the paintings there in the late 1860s and early 1870s, when the gallery had been open for only a few years.
His biographer Michael Holroyd pictures the teenage GBS prowling for hours through its rooms together with his soulmate Matthew Edward McNulty - "two schoolboys, one short and dark, the other [ Shaw] tall and fair, going from picture to picture, full of argument, until they knew every work there and could recognise at sight the style of many Flemish and Italian painters".
The great man never forgot his spiritual debt to the gallery and on his death in 1950, he left it a third of his estate - which brought an added windfall with the stage and screen success of My Fair Lady, adapted from Shaw's play Pygmalion.
But if art loomed large in Shaw's unconventional education, music loomed even larger. His mother had a fine mezzo-soprano voice, trained by the music teacher George Vandeleur Lee, the third member of the parental ménage à trois in the Shaw household. Lee organised amateur music concerts, featuring Italian opera, in which the young Shaw was an eager participant. At 15, he wrote later, he could "sing and whistle from end to end leading works by Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi".
Music remained a lifelong passion and, not surprisingly, was a strong element in Shaw's novels and plays. More than that, he asserted that music underlay all his writing - that his plays were, in effect, operas without music. Mozart, he said, "taught me how to say profound things and at the same time remain flippant and lively". Elsewhere he wrote: "It was from Handel I learned that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke unanswerably you have style. . .Handel has this power."
It was a power that Shaw himself demonstrated in the music criticism with which he made his mark in the late 1880s, and in which he is still probably unsurpassed. His favourite composer was Mozart, the "master of the masters"; above all he loved the opera Don Giovanni. He championed the avant-garde music dramas of Wagner and the emergent genius of Elgar, whom he hailed as the first great English composer since Purcell, 200 years before. He extolled the masterpieces of Bach, which were unappreciated by the Victorians; he described Rossini as "one of the greatest masters of claptrap that ever lived"; and he famously detested most of Brahms for its "heavy, all-pervading, unintelligent German sentimentality" - in particular the "colossally stupid Requiem, which has made so many of us wish ourselves dead."
But apart from his deaf-spot on Brahms, and his delight in provocation for its own sake, Shaw was generally a fair if exacting critic. He had an astonishing knowledge of all aspects of music - composers, instruments, voices, scores, conductors - a highly perceptive ear, and vivid powers of description. When he listened to music, he said, he did with his ears what you do with your eyes when you stare.
He understood the difficulties musicians had to contend with and argued for reforms, such as more and better rehearsals and an end to the star system that exalted the solo performer at the expense of the musical work. He said that public opera houses were as essential as public museums and galleries and campaigned for cheaper tickets and programmes (Shaw, thou shouldst be living at this hour).
Although he ceased to be a regular critic in the 1890s, he continued to write about music throughout his life. (A 1941 letter to the London Times about performance style in Handel's Messiah is as relevant now as when he wrote it.) And his views were never clouded by nostalgia: a magazine piece written shortly before his death at the age of 94 is headlined: "We sing better than our grandparents!"
Given all of this, it is only right that in recent years the Shaw Room of the National Gallery has been used increasingly for music concerts - and a grand space it is too, with its high ceiling and chandeliers, classical pillars, portraits and busts, and the life-size bronze statue of GBS at one end, with beard bristling, and one hand clasped in front of him, ready to punctuate one of his trademark provocations. Not least, as Shaw would have noted, the room has
a pleasant acoustic.
This was doubtless a strong factor in the National Chamber Choir's choice of the Shaw Room for its regular Thursday evening performances. And it has also now become the Dublin venue for the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's current series of concerts, which continues there tomorrow week, December 4th, at 3.15pm. The programme comprises Haydn's String Quartet in C major, Opus 33 "The Bird"); Franck's Piano Quintet in F minor, Opus 14 (with Antti Siirala, piano); and Quartet no 3 by the contemporary Irish composer Stephen Gardner, intriguingly subtitled, "Don't push your granny when she's shavin'". The quartet will return to the Shaw Room in the New Year on February 5th (Mozart, Shostakovich and Beethoven) and April 2nd (Haydn, Bartók and Zemlinsky).
Thankfully for the spirit of GBS, there's no sign of Brahms. And as for that statue in the room, it's unlikely to come to life, like the effigy of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni; but the sight of it should keep the performers on their toes.
The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet's current programme can also be heard next Thursday, December 1st, 8pm, at the Aula Maxima, UCC, Cork; on Friday, December 2nd, 8pm, at Castalia Hall, Ballytobin, Callan, Co Kilkenny; on Tuesday, December 6th, 7.30pm, and Wednesday, December 7th, 1pm at the Harty Room, Queen's University Belfast.