Just the facts?

Monumental, encyclopedic, indispensable, not-to-be-superseded—these are the superlatives applicable to Winton Dean's three volumes that survey in depth the oratorios (1959) and the operas (vol.1, 1987; vol.2, 2006) of George Frideric Handel. The books are essential reading for anyone who wishes to come to terms with the texts of the works written for performance in public theatres. Music directors and conductors should be among these readers, but often they are not, to Dean's evident chagrin. For music historians the books have become a model for a style of musicology dubbed (not always approvingly) empiricist. Despite their clarity of expression, they are not really intended for general readers, as they contain musical jargon and numerous notated examples. That the volume under review was published in its author's 91st year truly is remarkable, and probably warrants an entry in Guinness world records ; no doubt the assistance of Anthony Hicks, acknowledged in the preface, enabled completion.

Readers are by now familiar with Dean's modus operandi. For each work, considered in chronological order, Dean gives a detailed prose summary of the plot, followed by a discussion of the origins of the story and how Handel and his librettists adapt and adopt the musical and literary forebears in creating a new work. The approach is borrowed from literary criticism, and is heavily invested in judging the work's success in terms of aesthetic cohesion. Dean then covers the history of the text, in both manuscript and printed forms, and, briefly, the work's performances. He describes the autograph scores and librettos, then the copies and editions. If the work was revised he compares the versions. Each work is accorded roughly 26 pages, comprising chiefly close-set prose but also including tables of comparisons, characters and casts and music examples. In the latest volume there are also four chapters providing economic, social and political context for the operas of the periods he designates as 'The rival queens, 1726 - 1728', 'The "Second Academy", 1729 - 1734', 'Covent Garden, 1734 - 1737' and 'The last operas, 1738 - 1741'.

Reviewers of the earlier volumes have rightly lauded the sheer scale of the enterprise, the order brought to what must have looked—at times even to Dean—as a vast, impenetrable and recalcitrant body of data. The need to amass and organize was driven in large measure by the inadequacies of the Handel literature and the published scores available in the 1930s and 1940s, as Dean noted in the preface to his oratorio volume. Data-gathering was the means Dean initially thought he was employing to gain purchase on his 'ultimate quarry … nothing less than the nature of Handel's genius' (p.vii), a goal that in the present volume 47 years later is summarily dismissed: 'The elucidation of the process that generated music in Handel's subconscious mind, if possible at all, would seem to require the services of a psychoanalyst, a computer, and perhaps the equivalent of an Enigma machine, as well as a corps of musicians' (p.374).

In this abandonment lies a painful dilemma. In order to provide the materials necessary to the production of new and greatly improved editions of the texts that will, in turn, lead to superior performances and heightened sensory gratification, Dean must neglect the synthesis that he is in a unique position to encompass. By way of example, let us consider one of the stereotypes of genius, the speedy scribbler of divine or profound inspiration. Does Handel the opera composer conform with or refute the stereotype? Summarizing Dean's individual characterizations of the later operas we learn that three took a long time to complete, four were written in a hurry, seven lack sufficient data to make a determination, and nine proceeded with what Dean describes as Handel's 'usual dispatch' (p.343), a curious term that manages to suggest a comfortable speed and an ease of delivery while downplaying the mental labour. If we assume that the characterizations are accurate, they hardly indicate a regular recurrence of abnormal speed. Does...