Opera Nights. By Gerald Newman. (Putnam. 35s.) IN this book
Mr. Newman gives a detailed analysis, with musical illustrations, of twenty-nine operas, the earliest in date being Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice, and the most recent Berg's Wozzeck, first produced in 1925. All the operas are worth including, for Mr. Newman's discrimination has saved his book from the defect of most others of this kind—namely, an overloading with ephemeral rubbish. It is, he confesses, not a book of musical criticism but a guide to listeners, and from this point of view it is, on the whole, well done. Nevertheless, one misses (and it is a common fault in the critics of music as compared with literary critics) the absence of a specifically aesthetic point of view. ' Sometimes he fails to do justice to a work because dramatically it does not appeal to him. For example, it is strange to find him deaf to the extra- ordinary quality of Mozart's music in Cosi fan Tutte, a work which most musicians would assert is one of the greatest of Mozart's achievements ; also, in spite of his tribute to Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice, no reader would gather from his pages that this is a musical and dramatic masterpiece on a superior plane altogether to such operas as Charpentier's Louise, Strauss's Elektra, or Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole. In other words, the good, the mediocre and the supreme are here lumped together without sufficient differenti- ation, in spite of the fine tribute paid to Berlioz's Les Troyens.
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