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

National Review, April 26, 1993 by John Simon

I found the level of writing consistently high, except in the lost arts of grammar and correct usage. Thus I read in the entry on Gottfried von Einem "both works share the same playwright," in the one on Rousseau's Le Devin du village "consensus of agreement," in the one on Boris Blacher about plural "protagonists," in the one on The Fiery Angel the solecism "centered around," and so on. Yet the style is usually one of elegant understatement, as when we read that Mstislav Rostropovich's "operatic performances favor extremes of tempo and dynamics in support of emotional conviction," which is a nice way of saying the old boy is overdoing it. Again, Goffredo Petrassi's 1950 one-act opera, Morte dell'aria (which, by the way, means "Death in the Air," not the demise of the aria) "would lose little if presented as a cantata," which is a polite way of conveying rigor mortis in the drama department.

Certain errors are bound to creep into a work of this scope and polyglot nature. I can sympathize, for example, when the second "j" is dropped out of Satoraljaujhely, the birthplace of the Hungarian mezzo Ella Nemethy, or when, in the entry on Bartok, the playwright Lengyel's first name, Menyhert loses the accent on the second "e." (As Melchior Lengyel, incidentally, he provided the source material of Dietrich's Angel and Garbo's Ninotchka.) But some typos are troubling, as when we read about a "meto [sic] perpetuo."

There are, however, more serious shortcomings. The article on Bartok, for instance, could have mentioned how eagerly the composer searched for a second operatic subject after Bluebeard's Castle without ever finding one. And in the entry on that opera we read that the heroine, Judith, wants to "warm and dry [Bluebeard's] castle from him," which, of course, should be for him. Raffaello de Banfield, who set a number of Tennessee Williams texts, deserves inclusion at least for his Una lettera d'amore di Lord Byron, considering what sorts of minuscule talents do make it. In the entry on the composer Tadeusz Baird, we read that his one-act opera Jutro of 1966 "marks the liberation of mid-twentieth-century Polish opera from its overtly national ties," though this emancipation was achieved forty years earlier in King Roger by his great compatriot Karol Szymanovski. The article on Opera mentions the director Joe Chaikin as "Jo," which might mislead one about his sex. And so on.

And whereas it is forgivable when obscurer languages get misspelled, one would expect better French than "theme initiale [sic] de Melisande" and German than "Der Sprung [sic] uber den Schatten" or "Der [sic] lange Weihnachtsmal." In both languages, minor errors are not infrequent. And why is there no article on booing, a particularly important phenomenon in Italian opera houses, which may help keep Italian operatic performance on the mark?

Although the editor has commendably sought out appropriate contributors from far and wide, there are occasional slip-ups. For one thing, a sense of national pride makes the book bend over backward for British composers and operas, as, for example, for Harrison Birtwistle and his detestable Punch and Judy. For another, the writer chosen is sometimes too close to his subject, as when Ned Rorem is written up by James Holmes, with whom he has been living for decades. Again, it is curious to read in the entry on the German-Transylvanian composer Rudolf Wagner-Regeny that he was "the teacher of several wellknown composers," to wit Bredemeyer, Dittrich, Goldmann, and Tilo Medek. I have never heard of the first three worthies, and have come across the fourth only as the signatory of that entry.