Obiter Scripta: Essays, Lectures, Articles, Interviews and Reviews on Music, and Other Subjects (review)

Obiter Scripta: Essays, Lectures, Articles, Interviews and Reviews on Music, and Other Subjects. By Albi Rosenthal. Oxford: Offox Press; Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. [viii, 472 p. ISBN 0-9506989-3-8 (U.K.); 0-8108-3861-3 (U.S.). $60.]

For nearly half a century, Albi Rosenthal has been preeminent among the world's music antiquarian dealers. One of my earliest recollections of his name dates back to the mid-1950s, when Richard S. Hill slyly assured me that one of the most important things any music bibliographer needed to know was PRImrose 1488, this being the phone number of the Belsize Park Gardens shop in London. The seventy-five writings collected in this book tell us why.

Several of the essays are classics. These include the brief overview of the history of the music antiquarian trade (pp. 6-18), Rosenthal's report on the discovery of the La Clayette manuscript (pp. 101-41), and some of the Mozart and Monteverdi studies (pp. 198-257). Among the most valuable, to my thinking, is a talk given at the Bodleian Library in 1952 (pp. 333-42), previously unpublished. Rosenthal may have been fairly new to the music antiquarian world at that time, but he described the goals and resources of music bibliography with impressive mastery. This was a world inhabited by librarians, collectors, scholars, and dealers, and the underlying theme in this essay, and in the whole book, is that they are all at their best and happiest when they are intermixed. Most of us, whether established in or about to enter any of the specialties in that day, would have been better off if we had attended this talk. Even today, anyone who wants to be reminded now what the world was like fifty years ago needs to dip into this fine mixture of insight and delight. (Until I read this talk, I must confess, I had never heard the story of the composer Bergier: see p. 334.)

The essays are useful lessons in other things as well. Seeing them in one book may bring out their considerable redundancy. In the several texts repeated here in nearly literal translation, however, one can also appreciate some ingenious recasting. (Rosenthal's ingenuity is as legendary as it is delightful.) This may be a very personal book, but it also reflects on the taste and discretion that the antiquarian aspires to. Here one can admire the judicious ways in which nice things get said about almost everybody (even a few who are widely known as notorious scoundrels). The name index was a mistake if its only purpose is to help the reader dig out the same anecdotes about people, the formulaic evaluations that remind one of a Homeric presence. In serving this purpose, however, it makes the book all the more delightful. The spirit is one of affection and discretion--of a dealer who, in the moment of transaction, draws back to suggest, "I really don't want to sell this book to you; I love it so much that I want to keep it for myself."

Amidst the gossip and goodwill are critical insights and high standards informed by an awesome skill, in working fluently in most of the languages of Western civilization, and in invoking its heritage of history, literature, music, art, philosophy, and quite a bit more. In sum, here is a clarity, an elegance, and a depth of sympathy, the likes of which make for an antiquarian dealer you enjoy trusting: it was always a delight to pay his (somewhat steep) prices. If reading books evokes particular composers--and I leave it to the readers of this review to conjure their own counterparts to Parsifal, or Boris Godunov, or Mathis der Maler, or Nixon in China, or Ravel's Bolero--here is the closest the book collection of the music library will likely ever get to The Marriage of Figaro...