The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols. - book reviews

National Review, April 26, 1993 by John Simon

One of the best things that happened to me as a boy in Yugoslavia was Gustav Kobbe's The Complete Opera Book, which someone gave me. I had seen or heard very few operas at that time, but reading their plots was a wonderful experience all the same: such good stories even without the music, and unencumbered in the reading by tenors and divas with tonnage to rival the British fleet's. Granted, coming to opera by way of plot summaries is like entering a palace through the service entrance; still, once you're inside, the splendor is arguably even greater.

My copy of Kobbe was lost along with everything else I left behind in Belgrade. But after a little over half a century of opera-going, I have had it restored to me in an incomparably finer avatar as The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, in four capacious volumes edited by Stanley Sadie. To those familiar with his twenty-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which anyone with any sort of interest in music must be, the opera dictionary (hereinafter GDO) is bound to be as exciting an arrival as a new novel by a favorite author to his most ardent fans. A more accurate analogy, perhaps, would be to call GDO Son of The New Grove Dictionary of Music, in that its material is 80 per cent new, and 20 per cent of their parents' quiddity is what I would guess most kids inherit.

Some 1,300 experts from all over the world have contributed 10,000 articles covering over 5,000 pages. There are entries on 2,900 composers, 2,000 operas, 550 librettists, and 2,500 singers. There are numerous illustrations, musical quotations, and useful appendices, notably an index of names of operatic characters, and another of titles of arias and ensembles. I cannot imagine an opera lexicon performing better than GDO does, to be sure at a cost of $850; but then, operatic stars never came cheap.

The typical lexicon has an easy time of it critically: it does not have to pass aesthetic judgment. I see on my shelves A Dictionary of Angels next to an Encyclopedia of Fairies. Clearly, all angels (except the fallen ones) are equally good and fair, and though some fairies are mischievous, it is easy enough to tell which ones are which. But once your lexicon has to include singers, things become pretty hairy. Mere facts about them would be paltry stuff; but describing voices is hard, and passing judgments on singers an open invitation to snarling dispute. Is it even seemly for an encyclopedia to hand out grades, especially when, all entries being signed, it must forgo the authority of anonymity?

But GDO valiantly assumes such critical responsibility. I turn to a singer I remember booing at the Met in my student days, Kurt Baum, and find that J. B. Steane concludes: "His strong voice and ability to bridge the German and Italian repertoire were valued; less so the charmless style and tight voice production, which also limit the appeal of his recordings." That strikes me as a model of precision, concision, and incision. Now for one of my favorites, Denise Duval. The entry, signed (as so often) by two authors, Andre Tubeuf and Elizabeth Forbes, tells me she appeared at the "Folies Bergeres" (incorrect for Folies-Bergere), which I didn't know, and concludes, "A very beautiful woman with great dramatic intelligence, she was a most gifted singing actress, as the roles composed for her by Poulenc demonstrate. She retired in 1965 owing to ill-health." (Actually, some South American quack, in an emergency, damaged her vocal cords.) The evaluation strikes me as perfect.

The thoroughness of GDO is reflected in articles on topics a lesser lexicon might have overlooked, such as "Rehearsals," "Publishing," "Seating," and the history of operatic production in cities as remote and seemingly marginal as Perm and Perth. This kind of book is almost dangerous in the hands of an opera enthusiast, who could easily get absorbed enough to neglect such humdrum activities as eating and sleeping. Its handsomely printed double-column pages invite browsing as much as looking up specifics. Where and how else would I have found out about Marilyn: Scenes from the Fifties by the Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, in which Marilyn Monroe closes an act by singing "a sort of long-distance duet" with Wilhelm Reich, the prosecuted psychiatrist?

You can look up directors and designers in GDO, get information on conductors and even on recordings, and there are charts and bibliographies. But the main thing, of course, is composers and operas. You will find instructive entries on even minor figures - say, the Brazilian composer Mozart Camargo Guarnieri (born 1907), whose operatic activity was limited to a one-act comic opera, Pedro Malasarte, and an unsuccessful one-act lyric tragedy. At the end of the piece, a note directs you (GDO's crossreferencing is excellent) to an entry on Pedro Malasarte itself. What exhaustiveness!

No less impressive is that a composer is treated here not only as the creator of operas; his non-operatic music, if important, is also given due recognition, and parallels between the two are often developed. The writing is not short on individual flavor, as when Jan Szmaczny, in the article on Dvorak, observes, "Marginalia in Dvorak's score of Charpentier's Louise reveal a somewhat prurient interest in the musical language rather than a fascination with verismo drama." How can interest in musical language become even mildly prurient? I don't know, but I applaud the writer's gutsy idiosynerasy of expression.