Opera: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Works and the Best Recordings (review)

Opera: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Works and the Best Recordings is part of the New York Times Essential Library series. In addition to this title and subtitle, a further subtitle appears on the back cover: "A Passionate and Insightful Guide to 100 Essential Operas and Their Best Recordings."

That's quite a mouthful to swallow, and it's quite an assignment for the author — any author. Not only is he expected to choose the 100 essential operas (and, according to the subtitle, the 100 most important operas), but also the best recordings of each. I would respectfully suggest that this is a job for a committee, not for one single, solitary author. After all, no matter how hard one tries, it is difficult to be impartial. Thus, an author might be reluctant to include operas he dislikes, even though he knows them to be important, if not essential, to any well-rounded library. By the same token, it is just as difficult to ignore personal favorites that few others would consider for inclusion in their own lists.

A quick glance at the table of contents (i.e., the list of operas to be discussed) immediately tells us that there are some peculiar selections and some stranger omissions. The list also seems to be quite lopsided in favor of late-twentieth-century works, even including two from the twenty-first century that are too recent to have been able to establish any kind of a track record. It also appears to be rather biased against some once extremely popular nineteenth-century operas. But it would be inappropriate to judge these choices before reading the preface, which, one hopes, might explain why some operas were omitted and others chosen in their place.

Tommasini does make some important points in the preface. These include his desire to reach newcomers to opera, certainly a welcome intention. Since opera is an ongoing art form, he believes it important to choose a sizable number of twentieth-century operas, as well as two from the early twenty-first. This makes a certain amount of sense, but it may also conflict with the intention of dealing with the most important operas. And it would not justify omitting both Gounod's Faust and Boito's Mefistofele while including Busoni's Doktor Faust, even though the author obviously prefers the latter. Nor do I feel that the author's choice is warranted by, as he writes, the fact that the Gounod version has been vastly overpraised while the Busoni, "still little known," could use some help (p. xvii).

The latter words tell us all we need to know. Tommasini may well be more interested in choosing operas based on his own personal likes and dislikes rather than on his perceptions of what operas are essential or among the most important. To explore this point a little further, are there really six Britten operas that deserve inclusion ahead of Lohengrin? Or four by Prokofiev more important than Verdi's Ballo in maschera? Or perhaps three Janácek works that rate higher than Massenet's Manon? Some other operas inexplicably missing from Tommasini's list include Bellini's La sonnambula, Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, Donizetti's Don Pasquale and La favorite, Flotow's Martha, Giordano's Fedora, Halévy's La Juive, Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, Ponchielli's La Gioconda, Rossini's Guillaume Tell, and Weber's Der Freischütz. To be fair, I should not have written "inexplicably," since I believe I can guess the explanation. Many of the operas just listed are well known to be held in high esteem by the general operagoing public, while they tend to be frowned on by critics and opinion leaders. Others were of the greatest importance, historically speaking, but have fallen on hard times lately. To my way of thinking, these works deserve...