Published in Oxford Magazine 8 February 2012 

Trade secrets 

The job of the critic has two parts: one is factual, to give sufficient background of the work under review to enable the reader to understand what is being written about, the other to give an informed and reasoned opinion of the writer’s experience of the work. All has to be digested and presented in a way which will attract and hold the attention of readers, even those with only a peripheral interest in the subject. I take the opportunity of a mismatch between musical activity and dates of publication of Oxford Magazine to devote this contribution to acknowledge my debt to my sources of information on musical matters, paying my respects to the diligence, thoroughness and dedication of those who compile dictionaries, biographies and other tomes down to editors of and contributors to programme notes. The last are most revealing when they give the director an opportunity to explain the thinking behind the production.

Let us start with general musical dictionaries. Like all great dictionaries from Samuel Johnson on, musical dictionaries reflect the personality and prejudices of the lexicographer. I give some examples, starting with the great George Grove himself. The original four volume work, Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (a copy acquired for me by Blackwell’s in 1990’s) was published over the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It is written with ground-breaking exuberance, remarkable for its insightful assessments of composers which stand the test of time, notably Haydn and Berlioz. I quote the opening of the entry on the latter (contributed by Edward Dannreuther, Esq.), rivalling the enthusiasm of David Cairns’ biography of: the composer:

‘He stands alone – a colossus with few friends and no direct followers; a marked individuality, original, puissant, bizarre, violently one-sided; whose influence has been and will again be felt far and wide, for good and for bad, but cannot rear disciples nor form a school.’

Such rhetoric was expunged by the time of the fifth edition, a complete revision by Eric Blom, published in 1954 and issued in paperback at the time of the publication of The New Grove in 1980. It is worth quoting this politically incorrect diatribe from the introduction:

‘LANGUAGE. – I have pointed out, not perhaps, quite superfluously, that Grove V is an English work. To this I would add that it is written in English, a fact that… needs emphasising because so much musical literature nowadays … turns out to use a language that can only be called Musicologese.  It treats English …. as a medium to be subjected to any amount of accretion, modification and perversion. … :This assertion is usually made by people, who … simply do not know English, and have either no intention or no ability to learn it.’

I never had the means or the shelf-space to acquire The New Grove so I rarely consult it. I do however have the independently published one-volume New Grove Concise Dictionary which is often useful. I mention at random a few other reference works. The 1936 Nordlunds Musik Lexicon from Sweden devotes eight pages to Jenny Lind but only seven to Beethoven. A French Dictionnaire des Musiciens (Composers) by Roland de Candé lists 800 entries chosen from a shortlist of 3000 explaining:

Dans le délicat travail de sélection, il a fallu rester attentive à l’importance relative des diverse écoles européennes, pour éviter que la nationalité de l’éditeur et de l’auteur ne fissent naître un déséquilibre en faveur de l’école française.

Thank you!

On a more serious note, there is the Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians, published in the 1920’s by a distinguished Editorial Committee, chaired by Hugh Allen under the General Editorship of A Eaglefield-Hull, with sub-Committees from nations around the world with many well-known musicians (including, for instance Béla Bartók). Starting in 1880, this dictionary aims to heal the cultural divisions brought about by the First World War, in particular taking into account the new spellings, place-names and boundaries brought about by the peace settlement. It is a fascinating product of its time. Of more general interest and invaluable for putting composers and their works in a chronological context, I must mention The Dictionary of Composers and their Music by Eric Gilder and June G Port, 275 composers arranged first alphabetically, then by date of birth and finally by time-line. Also worthy of attention is what I call the ‘up-down book’ used to identify tunes. Thus, starting with * if the tune goes down you register D, remains the same, R, or up, U.  Thus the tune is recorded as a sequence of D, R, U. For example, the National Anthem appears as *RUDUU URUDD DUDDU. The first group of five gives 243 possibilities; adding the second increases this to 59,049 and the third to 14,348,907. At the other extreme to the New Grove, I can recommend the Top Pocket Music Dictionary published by Longmans, just too large to fit the top pockets of my jackets but containing admirably succinct definitions: ‘Mahler, Gustav (1860-1911) Austrian conductor and composer; works include 10 symphonies, some with vocal parts, and songs’. What more is there to say?

Turning now from the general to specifically dictionaries of opera, long gone are the days in which one’s only recourse to brush up on or learn about an opera to be seen was by reference to Kobbé. Nowadays this has a distinctly old-fashioned air. We are swamped with information, there for the taking, from Margaret Juntwait, ‘live from the Met’, through programme notes, booklets provided with CDs and DVDs to Wikipedia and Google.

 Two events have enhanced and transformed the enjoyment and appreciation of opera over the past thirty years. The first was the advent of surtitles in the late 1980’s and the second the transmissions to cinemas of live performances in high definition video and sound projection which started in 2007.  (The latter has made up for the loss of live opera in Oxford now WNO only comes once a year and we have been abandoned by Glyndebourne on Tour and now even by Ellen Kent.) Surtitles mean that we no longer have to furnish ourselves with detailed knowledge of the plot, making the likes of Kobbé for this purpose redundant; it is easy now to follow the intricacies of the plot in the theatre. I give my favourite sources currently most consulted; the list is by no means immutable.

First and foremost, I place Phaidon Book of the Opera. First published in English, translated from the Italian in 1979, it gives the plots, performance histories and other details of 780 operas written between 1597 and 1977. Arranged chronologically, this is invaluable to seeing at a glance where an opera stands among its near contemporaries. For example, 1842-3 saw first performances of Nabucco, Linda di Chamonix, Rienzi, Ruslan and Lyudmilla, Der Fliegende Holländer, Don Pasquale, I Lombardi and The Bohemian Girl. Match that today! The nearest I can come is those I have heard of from 1951-53: The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress, Billy Budd, Amahl and the Night Visitors, Die Liebe der Danae and Gloriana. There are many one-volume operatic dictionaries. I select two as giving just the right amount of information to learn about the new and refresh knowledge of the familiar.  The first of these is James Anderson’s Bloomsbury Dictionary of Opera and Operetta from 1989. It is impossible to imagine a single volume work more packed with information. Not only does it contain entries for nine hundred operas and operettas and their composers but it is particularly valuable for its tables listing literary sources by authors from Aeschylus to Oscar Wilde, singers and opera on record (for the rare occasion on which I feel it necessary to hear or see the CD or DVD before reviewing a performance) as well as a chronology by nationality from 1597 to 1989. The other volume I currently consult before reviewing is The Rough Guide to the Opera written by Matthew Boyden, edited by Joe Staines with synopses of some hundreds of operas by one hundred and fifty composers, with cogent critical notes tailored to surveying the recordings up to the date of publication (third edition 2002).

When it comes to individual composers, again I have strong preferences. I would not see a Verdi opera without consulting Julian Budden’s three volume masterpiece. Wagner always gives me the excuse to reread Ernest Newman, whose early, precocious, Gluck & the Opera is also required reading. For others there are reliable books by the prolific Charles Osborne, particularly his Bel Canto Operas and for Richard Strauss. For Handel, Janacek, Monteverdi (and early opera), Mozart and Puccini there are many sources but none currently preferred. I rarely consult the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, which entails a visit to a library. Its entries on individual operas are somewhat long-winded and rarely contain information not readily available more succinctly elsewhere.

For the history, sociology and economics of opera, another subject which fascinates me and the object of much current research, a good starting point is the excellently readable Oxford Illustrated History of Opera. I have many books on opera from past times, reflecting the changes in taste and popularity, from the origins of opera, the fall in popularity of Handel’s operas following The Beggar’s Opera, to its resurrection from the 1950’s (Joseph Kerman’s influential Opera as Drama, first published in 1956, only mentions Handel twice, in passing), Gluck’s revolution in France and so on until the present day. The Standard Operaglass, published around 1925 in Dresden (though in English), gives detailed plots of one hundred and fifty nine ‘celebrated operas’, many by composers not recognised by Grove. To what extent was the decline of Il Trovatore from its position as the most popular opera in the 1930’s due to the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, which sends it up mercilessly?

My one blank spot is for those, amateur or professional, who philosophise about the opera, no matter how close they are to the operatic establishment. They call to mind the girl friend of the philologist protagonist of Christopher Hampton’s play The Philanthropist, who complains in exasperation: ‘You never understand what I am trying to say’, to which he replies: ‘No, but I do understand what you do say’. Not much! Or Richard Wagner, recorded by Camille Saint-Saens: ‘When I reread my theoretical works, I can no longer understand them’.

I have listed a few of the highlights of my extensive music library, accumulated over the past decades. I am left with a problem which I am sure I share with many of my readers: to decide how it should be disposed of when I am gone. In this age of paperless communication, few have the space or the desire to inherit a large library. Perhaps the best to hope for is that some of it can be ‘Kindled’ rather than used as kindling!

PETER SCHOFIELD

3 February 2012