“A vortex of culture”: Shaw, Wagner e Widowers’ Houses

[Autom. eng. transl.] George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) represented a very personal elaboration of the intertwining of Anglo-Irish origins, London adoption and Wagnerian universe capable of determining a true "vortex of culture". The first resulted in the constant Shavian circumspection towards the "myopic, prejudiced, cultural nationalism establishing a firm foothold on Ireland" and in the project of "an internationalist or transnationalist vision for Ireland which was often interpreted as unpatriotic". The second did not involve the rejection of the before, for which GBS never managed to “take an objective view”: on the contrary, as he wrote in 1921, “for London as London, or England as England, I cared nothing [, but] as the English language was my weapon, there was nothing for it but London”. [...] It was, however, above all the Wagnerian universe, in which GBS operated "Wagnerianly" with unstoppable energy and unusual cultural-musicological competence, which provided him with "an international culture" with a marked melopoetic propensity (i.e. intersemiotic between literature and music) to overcome the initial condition of paralyzing impasse between marginalization provincial in the Dublin "lower middle class" and the aspiration for an important role in the pulsating center of British culture.