In today's newspaper, the music reviewer, writing about a performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt, started off with George Bernard Shaw's definition of oratorio: 'Unstaged operettas on scriptural themes, written in a style in which solemnity and triviality are blended in the right proportion for boring an atheist out of his senses."

For those who are not too familiar with GBS' life, he wrote music reviews for a London newspaper in the 1880's under the nom de plume of Corno di Bassetto.