It may not nudge Stephen King or Norman Schwarzkopf or Madonna`s ”Sex”
off the best-seller lists this holiday season, but, then, its intended readership is a bit more select, and its literary and scholarly ambitions rather more serious.
From the good people who brought you the 20-volume ”The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians” (published in 1980) comes ”The New Grove Dictionary of Opera.” It arrives this week in four handsome wine-red volumes, each running to 1,200 densely packed pages or more, with 1,300 illustrations. There are some 10,000 articles, including 2,900 entries on composers, 2,500 on singers, 2,000 on individual operas. These are the work of roughly 1,300 contributors, representing the cream of international scholarship.
These logistics, while daunting, do not begin to explain the importance of this massive undertaking to opera and the field of serious music world in general. The new dictionary (or ”Opera Grove,” as it is already being called in the trade, to distinguish it from its voluminous parent, ”New Grove”)
must be reckoned the most comprehensive, indeed exhaustive, reference work of its kind ever published in the English language. There have been many opera guides, but never has every aspect of the art form been so thoroughly detailed.
The cost of ”Opera Grove,” $850, is relatively modest compared to the hefty $1,900 price tag carried by ”New Grove.” Still, for only $170 more than what it costs to subscribe to box seats for an entire season at Lyric Opera, you can have the entire world of opera at your fingertips. That includes opera history, traditions, practice, repertory, composers, performers, directors, theaters, librettos, casting, censorship, publishing and hundreds of related topics. Everything, in short, from Aachen (a town in Germany) to Teresa Zylis-Gara (the Polish soprano).
In that respect ”Opera Grove” is, like its predecessors, more an encyclopedia than a dictionary-a vast, flowering garden of operatic knowledge in which you can pluck things of interest at practically every turn.
Turn to page 914 of Volume One, for example, and you will find, in succession, a good article on opera conductors, an entry on the obscure Italian composer Nicola Conforto (1718-1788), the English dramatist William Congreve (who supplied the libretto for Handel`s ”Semele”), the stage designer John Conklin and the conductor James Conlon. While you are looking up one subject, your eye is very often drawn to something else, and off you go.
The opera world has undergone a tremendous evolution just in the six years it has taken editor Stanley Sadie, the Cambridge-educated musicologist, critic and author, and his half-British, half-American staff to assemble these volumes. ”Opera Grove” gave serious attention to that evolution. The editor estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of the entries are new material-that is, articles newly commissioned and not simply reprinted from the parent Grove.
”The composer entries we reprinted tended to fall into two categories,” Sadie explained by telephone from New York, where he is in the middle of a publicity tour. ”The first category is composers who may be unimportant as opera composers but have to be included for the sake of completeness. Secondly, we have retained articles whose authors are the sole living authorities on certain composers and thus cannot be improved upon:
There is, for example, no way we could improve on David Di Chiera`s entry on the Italian composer Antonio Sacchini (1730-1786), so we reprinted it.”
The lexicographer extraordinaire who also edited ”New Grove” and co-edited with H. Wiley Hitchcock its 1986 spinoff, ”The New Grove Dictionary of American Music,” Sadie himself contributed several entries, including articles on various Handel operas. But although his ”New Grove” article on Mozart was a model of scholarly care and readability, he modestly turned the
”Opera Grove” entry on Mozart over to scholar Julian Rushton.
”I was determined not to write the Mozart entry this time because I felt it was time for different views to come forward,” Sadie explains. ”Rushton wrote a very fine entry for us.” As a matter of fact Sadie and colleagues took tremendous pains to make their Grove truly ”new.” Says Sadie: ”Howard Mayer Brown, the University of Chicago scholar, wrote a really marvelous article on the background and origins of opera, and it`s one of the things I am most happy with in the whole dictionary.”
Other ”Opera Grove” articles of which Sadie says he is particularly proud include Richard Taruskin`s coverage of Russian opera, Lorenzo Bianconi`s 24-page article on Italy, Brian Trowell`s on the opera libretto, Roger Savage`s on opera production and the historical appraisal of the opera orchestra by Neil Zaslow and John Spitzer. The contributor list of ”New Grove” reflected a certain British bias that is not much in evidence this time around, Sadie says, judging by the healthy representation of American and Continental contributors.
”I think we`re really up with the leading edge of research in getting this material correct and in order. So it is actually a much more precise tool to use in operatic work than Grove itself,” he adds.
Sadie merely chuckles when asked if the operas included were meant to be a comprehensive list of works written from the inception of the genre in 1600 to the present: ”You can`t ever be comprehensive because you don`t know how many operas by composers you`ve never heard of are lying in someone`s desk drawer.”
The idea of a dictionary confined to opera probably would have found favor with George Grove (1820-1900), the civil engineer, scholar, critic, author, program annotator and music lover who edited the first ”Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians” in 1890. He was a Beethoven expert who discovered lost music of Schubert and was a friend to Brahms. Grove was knighted in 1883 in acknowledgement of his services to music.
Even in Sir George`s time the dictionary was criticized for occasionally skirting the needs of the less specialized reader. It cannot be said ”Opera Grove” is entirely free of jargon or analyses that defy easy penetration; nor, by rights, should it be if it is to have any credibility or usefulness to professionals. But it must also be pointed out that the majority of entries are addressed as much to informed laymen as to scholars.
A preliminary jog through the first two volumes turned up little that is perfunctory or weak, and only one error: Daniela Dessi did not make her Chicago debut in ”Otello,” as stated here; in fact, the soprano has never sung in Chicago. On the other hand, readers will be impressed with how up-to- the-moment ”Opera Grove” is. Among the performers appearing in any Grove dictionary for the first time are Cecilia Bartoli, June Anderson, Cecilia Gasdia, Thomas Hampson, Jerry Hadley and Ben Heppner.
Regrets? A pity that Chicago scholar Philip Gossett`s definitive article on Rossini wasn`t retained, particularly since Richard Osborne`s new entry recycles many of Gossett`s views. In the entry on ”Barber of Seville” we read that Beethoven admired the work, while, 56 pages later, another author contends Beethoven ”found no merit in Rossini.”
Some inconsistencies of transliteration evident in ”New Grove” have been changed while others have been stubbornly retained. Thus it is George Balanchine (not Balanchin), but it`s still Sergey Rakhmaninov (as the British prefer to spell Rachmaninoff), Sergey Diagilev (not Diaghilev) and Reyngol`d Glier (not Reinhold Gliere). If ”Opera Grove” wished to be consistent with itself, it would have had to address the composer of ”Yevgeny Onegin” as
”Chaykovsky”; here his name comes out Pyotr Ill`yich Tchaikovsky, which is neither fish nor fowl.
And Robert C. Marsh`s disappointing entry on Chicago contains the following dubious statement: ”From the beginning, Chicago has had an audience for opera that in its enthusiasm and dedication is unlikely to be surpassed anywhere in the world.” (Tell that to the Lyric subscribers who are halfway to the `burbs at the final curtain.) Clearly the fine teeth of Sadie`s editorial comb could have been honed more finely still.
In the face of such unparalleled riches, however, any criticisms must be minor and unimportant. Even on partial acquaintance ”The New Grove Dictionary of Opera” is as noble an achievement as the parent Grove. The cost may put it beyond the reach of the average music lover in these recessionary times; but those who take opera as seriously as they love it will not hesitate to hock their sterling to lay their hands on these volumes. (There is even a toll-free number for orders: 800-221-2123.)
Make no mistake: This will be the definitive reference work in opera for many, many years to come.
