Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301210234
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PETER GOODMAN NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MUSIC DICTIONARY ARRIVES AS INTEREST IN OPERA SURGES
Five years ago in Houston, on the eve of the premiere of John Adams' opera "Nixon in China," the iconoclastic director Peter Sellars announced that "opera is the place to be for the next ten years."At the same time in London, Stanley Sadie, chief editor of the encyclopedic New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "took a deep breath" and plunged into the creation of a New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Sellars' statement about opera, Sadie said recently, was "actually right - much as I begrudge him anything right. I don't like the way he produces operas."
But Sadie did not let his personal taste keep Sellars out of the volume, a 5,400-page, $850-retail effort that is meant to be the last word on one of Western civilization's most complex art forms. So the opera dictionary, published last month after five years of work, does include a 450-word article on Peter Sellars (by Steven Ledbetter, though, not by Stanley Sadie.)
The dictionary arrives, much to Sadie's bemused surprise, in the midst of a wave of interest in opera, sparked by recent innovations such as surtitles, regularly televised performances, increased use in movie soundtracks and commercials, and a surge of activity by production teams such as those involving composer Philip Glass, director Sellars and singer-composer Meredith Monk. Opera companies around the nation, joined at last this year by the ultra-conservative Metropolitan Opera, have been presenting new operas at a rapid pace.
"When we started on this project," Sadie recalled, "it didn't seem a sort of interesting thing to be doing." But he has been impressed by the increased curiosity about opera, manifested in Britain recently by the use of "Nessun Dorma," from Puccini's "Turandot," as theme song for the soccer World Cup. "Some of the big arenas in London have been used for opera," he recounted. "Pavarotti sang in Hyde Park, on a day it poured with rain, but everyone went anyway, including the prince and princess of Wales, when they were still together."
Not that this opera dictionary is projected as a worldwide best-seller. The initial press run, Sadie said, would be about 7,000 copies, more than the 6,000 of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music but far fewer than the 26,000 copies already in print of the Big Daddy of them all, the 20-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Sadie said that he expected the first printing to sell out in about two years, with more printings after that.
The dictionary is meant to be nearly exhaustive and extensively cross-referenced. Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro," for instance, will be found not only in its own entry but in more than a dozen others ranging from the composer and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, to Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II and the leading members of the original cast.
Preparing the dictionary, like any encyclopedic work, took constant effort, but Sadie and his assistant editors accomplished it in what he considers a mere five years at least partly because they were already veterans of the preceding dictionaries.