Grove Renewed
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Fifth Edition, edited by Eric Blom. (Macmillan, £36.)
STATISTICS first-9 volumes; 8,516 pages of roughly 1,000 words per page; 75 plates and numerous other illustrations, mainly of instruments, of which about 500 are shown in all; 456 contribu- tors, from John Hullah (b. 1812) to the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, 186 of whom are new; about 250 major new entries and 5,000 shorter ones, comprising half the work. This is the most radical revision the dictionary has undergone in the seventy-six years of its existence. As well as additions, there have been many removals and replacements. The important removals are the long articles by Grove, the founder and first editor, on Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert, to be replaced by new, shorter articles. Of these, the late William McNaught's Beethoven is less illuminating than might have been hoped for from this thoughtful and original writer, with a good deal of not quite convincing purple. The Mendelssohn, by Percy M. Young, is still very long (twenty-four pages), and nearly all biography, with only two pages on the music. Best of the three is Maurice J. E. Brown's on Schubert, a biographically and musically well-balanced and informative survey.
Several other articles on major composers are new. Some of these improve considerably on the earlier. .entries, notably those of Leon Vallas on Berlioz and d'Indy, Winton 'Dean on Bizet, Arthur Hedley on Chopin, Wilfrid Mellers on Couperin and Rameau, Frank Walker on Wolf, Verdi and Pergolesi, and Professor Abraham• on Schumann, Borodin and Ualakirev. Brahms, who badly needed a new piece, is done by Philip Radcliffe, soundly but rather naively, as if Brahms and his period were less familiar than they are. Percy Young's new Wagner article, like his Mendelssohn, is mainly biographical, and on the music does not supersede the old one, which had more to say about the development of the composer's style. One or two articles on composers have been retained that might have been supplanted or augmented. Fifteen pages for Bach, compared with seventeen for Berlioz, is not enough, and ' Terry's excellent factual account might well have been augmented with a study of the musical style to put the proportions right. The old article on Handel by Scott Goddard is similarly short, and it seems surprising that there is nothing much new to be said about Purcell, Lully, Buxtehude, Vivaldi, .Boccherini, Telemann, or even Clementi and Dittersdorf, such as there is in Professor Lewis's article on Schlitz or Peter Gradenwitz's on Stamitz. Ernest Walker's -well-informed but not wholly sympathetic Debussy now seems slightly out of focus, and the old Rakhmaninov entry, with brief additions, is cruelly short and sharp, especially in comparison with, for instance, the handsome pieces on Medtner and Skriabin. And something more in the way of a summing up of Strauss would have been appropriate. The same is true of one or two modern composers—Hindemith for instance, or Hoists or Stravinsky, who is done with incomplete sympathy by Rollo Myers. Myers also does modern French music. Otherwise most modern composers are done by writers native (in effect if not in fact) to their conntry, in general knowledgeably and soundly: though the Swiss contributor is slightly parochial, and there are a few inadequate entries—Roy Harris, K. A. Hartmann, Charles Ives, Rolf Liebermann and Shostakovich. For more internationally established modern cbmposers the editor has usually been able to find authoritative English writers, as in the excellent entries on Schoenberg (Humphrey Searle), Messiaen (Felix Aprahamian) Copland (Wilfrid Mellers). Modern British music is dealt with by numerous writers of varying persuasions. Frank Howes is outstanding on Vaughan Williams and Britten. Walton needed something more authoritative than Kenneth Avery's naive and disproportionately long chronological survey.
On more general subjects there are fewer ,changes but many additions. The 'academic' entries (harmony, counterpoint, etc.) are done by Dr. H. K. Andrews, somewhat conservatively and with curiously selective bibliographies. On 'Chromaticism' Dyson's entry remains, but its last paragraph now appears absurd. Parry on 'Form' also remains, with some, revisions, and so do the articles -on 'Sonata' and 'Variations,' quite justifiably, although all badly need some additions to deal with twentieth- century developments—sorhething like William Mann's survey of the twentieth century in the entirely new composite article on 'Song,' which is comprehensive and excellent, even though he does not write with full authority on the contribution of some remoter nations. Not all the new historical surveys are equally good. F. H. Shera's on 'Symphony,' little more than sa dull succession
of brief descri$tions of the familiar repertory works, in chrono- logical order, with no attempt at any summary of symphonic trends, is much less illuminating than theold entry. And Gordon Jacob on 'Orchestration' is more didactic and less historically informative than Wallace in the earlier edition. One article that • did badly need replacing, and has been left hardly altered, is the composite one on 'Opera,' which is now rather out of date. Of the new subjects the most important is a series of articles by Robert Donington on interpretation, ornamentation, and other matters connected with performance, mostly of old music, with one odd little entry on ',Esthetics,' which might as well not have been written. There is an excellent series ,on acoustics and related subjects by Ll..S. Lloyd. Other new, or virtually new, subjects dealt with at length are 'Cinema Organ,' Film Music' (both very impressive); 'Jazz' (historically more informative than Professor Abraham's old note, but without its keen comment); and, longest of all, on 'Folk Music,' a composite study of 240 pages on the music of 47 nations.
So much for the contributors. What of the editor's own con- tribution? His is the credit for the enormously enlarged scope of the edition and the many new subjects covered, of which 'Voice Training,' on which nothing useful ever has been, or, it seems, can be said or written, is the only intruder. And since he has chosen his contributors, he takes some responsibility for what they have written—responsibility meaning in most cases credit. The number of his own entries must run well into four figures.
They include articles on major figures as different as Gluck, Faure, Bloch and Reger, as well as many others, and a brilliant appreciation of Sullivan. Typographically he has made immense improvements, with the entries picked out in heavy, bold type, and beautifully clear catalogues of works. Only in his discon- tinuing the printing of the list of contributors at the beginning of each volume has he made a mistake—and that will probably be much less troublesome to the ordinary user than .to the reviewer, whose wanting to identify so many initials one after another is exceptional. Now as much Blom's as Grove's Diction- ary, the new edition is without equal among music dictionaries anywhere, and is likely to remain in the lead for a long time.
COLIN MASON
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