The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols.

One of the best things that happened to me as a boy in Yugoslavia was Gustav Kobbe's The Complete Opera Book, which someone gave me. I had seen or heard very few operas at that time, but reading their plots was a wonderful experience all the same: such good stories even without the music, and unencumbered in the reading by tenors and divas with tonnage to rival the British fleet's. Granted, coming to opera by way of plot summaries is like entering a palace through the service entrance; still, once you're inside, the splendor is arguably even greater.

My copy of Kobbe was lost along with everything else I left behind in Belgrade. But after a little over half a century of opera-going, I have had it restored to me in an incomparably finer avatar as The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, in four capacious volumes edited by Stanley Sadie. To those familiar with his twenty-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which anyone with any sort of interest in music must be, the opera dictionary (hereinafter GDO) is bound to be as exciting an arrival as a new novel by a favorite author to his most ardent fans. A more accurate analogy, perhaps, would be to call GDO Son of The New Grove Dictionary of Music, in that its material is 80 per cent new, and 20 per cent of their parents' quiddity is what I would guess most kids inherit.

Some 1,300 experts from all over the world have contributed 10,000 articles covering over 5,000 pages. There are entries on 2,900 composers, 2,000 operas, 550 librettists, and 2,500 singers. There are numerous illustrations, musical quotations, and useful appendices, notably an index of names of operatic characters, and another of titles of arias and ensembles. I cannot imagine an opera lexicon performing better than GDO does, to be sure at a cost of $850; but then, operatic stars never came cheap.

The typical lexicon has an easy time of it critically: it does not have to pass aesthetic judgment. I see on my shelves A Dictionary of Angels next to an Encyclopedia of Fairies. Clearly, all angels (except the fallen ones) are equally good and fair, and though some fairies are mischievous, it is easy enough to tell which ones are which. But once your lexicon has to include singers, things become pretty hairy. Mere facts about them would be paltry stuff; but describing voices is hard, and passing judgments on singers an open invitation to snarling dispute. Is it even seemly for an encyclopedia to hand out grades, especially when, all entries being signed, it must forgo the authority of anonymity?

But GDO valiantly assumes such critical responsibility. I turn to a singer I remember booing at the Met in my student days, Kurt Baum, and find that J. B. Steane concludes: "His strong voice and ability to bridge the German and Italian repertoire were valued; less so the charmless style and tight voice production, which also limit the appeal of his recordings." That strikes me as a model of precision, concision, and incision. Now for one of my favorites, Denise Duval. The entry, signed (as so often) by two authors, Andre Tubeuf and Elizabeth Forbes, tells me she appeared at the "Folies Bergeres" (incorrect for Folies-Bergere), which I didn't know, and concludes, "A very beautiful woman with great dramatic intelligence, she was a most gifted singing actress, as the roles composed for her by Poulenc demonstrate. She retired in 1965 owing to ill-health." (Actually, some South American quack, in an emergency, damaged her vocal cords.) The evaluation strikes me as perfect.

The thoroughness of GDO is reflected in articles on topics a lesser lexicon might have overlooked, such as "Rehearsals," "Publishing," "Seating," and the history of operatic production in cities as remote and seemingly marginal as Perm and Perth. This kind of book is almost dangerous in the hands of an opera enthusiast, who could easily get absorbed enough to neglect such humdrum activities as eating and sleeping. Its handsomely printed double-column pages invite browsing as much as looking up specifics. Where and how else would I have found out about Marilyn: Scenes from the Fifties by the Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, in which Marilyn Monroe closes an act by singing "a sort of long-distance duet" with Wilhelm Reich, the prosecuted psychiatrist?

You can look up directors and designers in GDO, get information on conductors and even on recordings, and there are charts and bibliographies. But the main thing, of course, is composers and operas. You will find instructive entries on even minor figures - say, the Brazilian composer Mozart Camargo Guarnieri (born 1907), whose operatic activity was limited to a one-act comic opera, Pedro Malasarte, and an unsuccessful one-act lyric tragedy. At the end of the piece, a note directs you (GDO's crossreferencing is excellent) to an entry on Pedro Malasarte itself. What exhaustiveness!

No less impressive is that a composer is treated here not only as the creator of operas; his non-operatic music, if important, is also given due recognition, and parallels between the two are often developed. The writing is not short on individual flavor, as when Jan Szmaczny, in the article on Dvorak, observes, "Marginalia in Dvorak's score of Charpentier's Louise reveal a somewhat prurient interest in the musical language rather than a fascination with verismo drama." How can interest in musical language become even mildly prurient? I don't know, but I applaud the writer's gutsy idiosynerasy of expression.

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.

What I find most disturbing, however, is the choice of Richard Taruskin to write on Prokofiev. Yes, he is a leading authority on Russian music, but in an article in the New York Times a couple of years ago he consigned all of Prokofiev, with the exception of Peter and the Wolf, to oblivion. Accordingly, the entry on The Fiery Angel concludes with the weasely statement, "Though its difficult stage career and its reputation as [Prokofiev's] most modernistic work have lent [it] the aura of a cause celebre, familiarity has not always worked to its advantage." Just what does that invidious "not always" mean?

Entries on modern subjects are most prone to errors, but these occur elsewhere, too. At the end of Auber's La Muette de Portici (1828), Fenella, we read, "flings herself into the lava." Since the eruption of Vesuvius has just taken place as a final coup de theatre, and Fenella is in the city of Naples, the convergence of the twain is a bit premature. The girl merely leaps off a balcony to her death.

None of this, however, invalidates the enormous erudition, care, and catholicity that have gone into GDO, an achievement we are not likely to see surpassed in a very long time. But if you cannot afford, or do not need, a work so comprehensive, there is now available a splendid one-volume compilation, The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, edited by John Warrack and Ewan West. Though its much smaller format makes it something different from the GDO, it is still an astonishingly comprehensive and satisfying handbook. It actually contains a few things that GDO does not, for example the name of the play on which Henze's Boulevard Solitude is based (even if it gets the ending of the opera wrong), or the titillating information that the lyric and Wagnerian tenor Rene Kollo began as a pop singer.

And it is only here that you will learn that Stravinsky planned a last opera on the rebirth of the world after atomic disaster, a project thwarted by the death of the projected librettist, Dylan Thomas. And it is here, not in GDO, that youll find the wonderful German term Kravattentenor (necktie tenor), defined as one "whose tone suggests that he is being strangled by his neckwear." In the Oxford, moreover, Fenella manages to off herself without benefit of lava. Even so, if money is no object, you will obviously get a great deal more from The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. But wait; if money is no object, why not acquire both?

Mr. Simon, NR's film critic, is also theater critic for New York magazine.