“It is not enough to see Richard III: you should be able to whistle it.” Such is Shaw's advice in his weekly music column in The Star in 1889, which he devoted to a current production of Shakespeare's history play. There was orchestral music that had been composed for the production, but Shaw's comment is directed at Richard III itself as a piece of music, and he reviews the acting as a musical performance, talking about a “magnificent duet,” for example, and a “striking solo.” Richard Mansfield's “execution of his opening scena was . . . deeply disappointing,” and in a staccato passage “he actually missed half a bar” by dropping a syllable from a word. Mansfield occasionally “made fine music for a moment,” but his performance as a whole was a musical failure. “It is a positive sin for a man with such a voice to give the words without the setting, like a Covent Garden libretto” (Shaw's Music, vol. 1, pp. 586-91).