In Search of Opera, Again

And no, you are not, not, not to look at your Baedeker. Give it to me; I shan’t let you carry it. We will simply drift.

—E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

Handbooks have, at times, attracted bad press. Although the term has been around since the late tenth century, the handbook’s greatest popularity came in the nineteenth: from the 1830s, Karl Baedeker, John Murray, and Adolphe Joanne competed to provide an emergent mass of middle-class travellers with information and advice about their chosen destinations. Not only were these handbooks indicative of a new class of tourist, they also offered an easy target for commentators and satirists amused by the unworldly earnestness of these modern travellers and—worst of all—their famed adherence to the itineraries so minutely laid out for them. (‘Halle au blé. Curious roof. 1/4 hour’, advised Murray’s 1867 Handbook for Visitors to Paris, etc.¹)Thus my epigraph—the moment of Lucy Honeychurch’s forced departure from the programme dictated by her Baedeker, early in Forster’s novel—marks her emancipation from the handbook’s strictures such that ‘For one ravishing moment, Italy appeared’, while also auguring more radical liberations still to come.² Yet for all that the prescriptiveness of the Baedeker and its competitors was maligned, such handbooks also enabled a form of social emancipation in their own right. Opera houses—those once-hallowed aristocratic spaces—featured regularly on their itineraries, with instructions about where to obtain tickets, which nights to attend, and even, in some cases, advice about audience behaviour (Italian opera-goers ‘seldom observe strict silence during the performance of the music’, warned Baedeker’s 1909 Central Italy and Rome: A Handbook to Travellers).³ But even at home the course of opera’s supposed democratization during the nineteenth century might be traced via the appearance of numerous handbooks aiming to guide new listeners through an increasingly established canon of great works. As Leon Botstein has recently suggested, such musical handbooks were in some sense ‘moral equivalents of the Baedekers’.⁴ Small wonder that the surrounding rhetoric was much the same, with efficient enlightenment the end point—even while their proposed routes traversed a metaphorical rather than physical territory.

More surprising, perhaps, is not only that the handbook’s offer of trustworthy assistance might continue to appeal in our own iPhone-toting age of ever-ready information, but also that the format—once the crutch of the anxious layperson—appears to be enjoying a scholarly renaissance. Not for Oxford University Press the portable guides of yore, however. The constituents of its expanding Oxford Handbooks series are monumental tomes promising ‘authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research’.⁵ The sheer desk-demanding heft of the published volumes acts as a robust—not to mention retro—counterbalance to their parallel lives in the Oxford Handbooks Online repository.

Thus far, Oxford Handbooks have been produced on subjects from the United Nations to the Trinity; from fascism to ‘innovation management’; from banking to war; and from free will to William Shakespeare. Music seems to be a relatively late arrival at the party, the subjects listed largely disparate (and many still in production at the time of writing this review). That The Oxford Handbook of Opera (henceforth OHO) edited by Helen M. Greenwald has recently appeared amid the volumes dedicated to Great Men, august institutions, and venerated abstract concepts might give us pause on multiple fronts.⁶ Is ‘opera’ as measured by its prominence in musicology in any sense equivalent to ‘Shakespeare’ in literary studies? Should we be surprised, or pleased, or irritated that—with the exception of the volume on ‘Sondheim Studies’—OHO is the only Oxford Handbook in Music advertised to appeal not only to scholars but also to ‘knowledgeable listeners: those who simply love opera’?⁷ (Perhaps handbooks are for amateurs after all?) Put simply, what sort of a subject—indeed, what sort of a thing—is opera in this context?

The fifty chapters of OHO vary widely in approach, and in the relative size and significance of their topics. Nowhere are differences in...