Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Opera: A Review-Essay of Recent Reference Works

Abstract

It is hard to believe that the English-reading world suddenly needs four compendious new reference on opera.(1) All four of these encyclopedic dictionaries, published in the last few years, tend to be described by both publishers and reviewers in slightly overwhelming statistical terms. For the comparative statistics that follow, I have tended to take publishers at their word, although in a few cases I counted numbers myself. Total number of entries: New Grove/Opera, 10,000; Viking, 2,360; International, 1,030; Oxford, 4,500. Number of contributors: New Grove/Opera, 1,300; Viking, 115; International, 205; Oxford, 2. Entries on individual composers: New Grove/Opera, 2,900; Viking, 827; International, 198; Oxford, 750. Entries on individual operas: New Grove/Opera, 2,000; Viking, 1,533; International, 421; Oxford, 600. Entries on individual singers: New Grove/Opera, 2,600; International, 319; Oxford, 900. Entries on other people (librettists, conductors, impresarios, designers, critics, etc.): New Grove/Opera, perhaps 1,000; International, 154; Oxford, 400. Illustrations: New Grove/Opera, 1,300; Viking, 393; International, 427. Definitions and topical entries (e.g., Ensemble, Grand Opera, Soprano, Stage Design, Russia, Tulsa): New Grove, perhaps 500; Oxford, about 800. The Oxford Dictionary of Opera also includes among its alphabetical entries about 300 of the more popular opera arias or ensembles, and about 400 names of characters from well-known operas. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera includes these two categories also - in its case identifying about 2,500 vocal numbers and more than 5,000 characters' names - but relegates them to appendices at the end of volume four. The Viking Opera Guide provides, at the start, a glossary of 250 terms and phrases related to and a cross-referenced list of 1,182 librettists (and their works) at the end, rather than including either of these categories among its general entries. The New Grove/Opera - to distinguish it from the twenty-volume, $2,000 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (also edited by Stanley Sadie, in 1980) - is obviously the place to begin. How does one assess a work of 5,324 pages, written by more than 1,300 people? Even that formidable page-total may mislead in the direction of understatement. Each page of text in these four volumes - ten inches in total width, twenty-three pounds on your bookshelf - two columns of about six hundred words each. Composers' lists and bibliographies, as well as inset quotations, are even more densely packed, in eye-challenging seven-point type. We are talking about a work of more than six million words, the equivalent of fifty or sixty normal books. One may ask some preliminary questions of such an Alpine effort, in advance of trying to skim it (reading it is out of the question), or to use it as a reference. First, what is its reach; what are the terms of its inclusiveness? Second, who are all these authors? And third, for whom was it intended? Nothing even distantly related to as the Western world has come to understand it, is alien to the New Grove/Opera. No doubt there are people who have written operas, or things like operas, whose names are not included; but by the time you have hit Composer Number 2,900, you have reached pretty far down in the barrel. To get to this number, in fact, the editors have had to include people like Edward Elgar, who only thought of writing an and Hans Eisler, who never completed one, as well as composers of religious pageants, interludes, operettas, oratorios, musicals, and the like. In addition to the 2,000 operas given separate entries of their own, perhaps 30,000 more are cited in the composer lists. In the entry on Dictionaries and Guides, Nigel Simeone refers to the apparently irresistible quest for truly comprehensive documentation of opera, and cites Franz Stieger's eleven-volume Opernlexicon (Tutzing:$Schneider, 1975-83), which contains details of about 60,000 works (I, 1163). …