The New Grove Mozart. - book reviews

National Review, August 24, 1984 by Terry Teachout

THE 1980 EDITION of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, known as The New Grove, has been widely acclaimed as the single most comprehensive English-language musical reference work ever published. It is also horrendously expensive. For the benefit of your average indigent musician who would like to have easier access to so marvelous a research tool, Norton is bringing out a series of single-volume composer biographies drawn from The New Grove.

Each volume contains the full text of the original article complete with bibliography and work-list, the whole corrected and updated in the light of recent musicological research. Of the first five volumes in the series. Stanley Sadie's The New Grove Mozart wins the honors by a nose: It's the best short study of Mozart's life and work ever to see print, and it clearly deserved publication as a separate volume. (Stanley Sadie, incidentally, edited the complete New Grove.) This is not to say that the other volumes are less than excellent; Nicholas Temperley's ten-page discussion of the Bach "revival" in The New Grove Bach Family, for example, is exemplary in its compression and clarity. Christoph Wolff is the principal author of The New Grove Bach Family; other volumes in this initial release include Winton Dean on Handel, Jens Peter Larsen on Haydn, and Maurice J.E. Brown on Schubert.