Opera: A Research and Information Guide (review)

Opera: A Research and Information Guide, 2nd ed. Guy A. Marco New York: Garland Publishing, 2001 652 pages, $125.00

This is the second edition of Guy Marco's bibliography of books on opera, which was first published in 1984 and reviewed in the winter 1985/86 issue of The Opera Quarterly. As in the first edition, the literature includes composers and their operas, histories of opera, production, libretti and librettists, opera houses, and publications on other opera-related topics. This literature has been growing rapidly over the past decade and a half, and, as a result, Marco's rewrite has 2,833 entries compared to the 704 in the first edition. This expansion of this literature makes the publication of an updated bibliography absolutely essential.

But the problems in compiling such a bibliography are staggering and require a scholar of Marco's eminence and experience even to attempt the job. Perhaps the biggest problem is that not every book published abroad reaches libraries in the United States and may thus escape the compiler's attention. Then there is the problem of what to include and what to omit, since trying to include everything would result in an overly long and unwieldy work. Should every biography of major composers (such as Donizetti, Verdi, Rossini, Wagner, Puccini, or Mozart) be included, or is it enough to include only those in English? What about a book on opera in Helsinki, written in Finnish? Or one on Tbilisi, published in Georgian, which has a totally different script even from Cyrillic?

Inevitably, no matter what decisions the compiler makes, he or she is left open to second guessing on the part of any reviewer, who probably would have made different decisions or might be more sensitive to particular aspects of the literature. The main function of a review of a compilation such as this is neither to praise nor to criticize, but to advise the prospective user of what to expect. Therefore, I feel duty bound to point out not only what can be found in the book but also which publications were omitted that I believe would have made the title even more valuable.

Marco's foreword discusses the limitations of his work and some of his criteria for inclusion. Essentially, he gave preference to recent books published in English and used a cutoff date of December 1999. However, as will be pointed out below, many important books published abroad before that date are omitted. This probably is due to the lag between the publication of a book in, say, Italy or Germany and its acquisition and cataloguing by major U.S. libraries. The author could have—and should have—solved this problem by casting a wider net among known book collectors and dealers, who generally obtain new titles of interest to them immediately and don't have to wait to catalogue them. This step might also have brought in many older books not held in public collections. Perhaps the best way to approach Marco's guide is to concentrate on what I regard as the two principal sections, which are entitled "Composers and Their Operas" and "Countries."

The listings dealing with composers and their operas range from no entries at all for composers like Ponchielli to long lists with many subdivisions for major composers like Donizetti. Thus, for Donizetti, the compiler's subheadings include "Editions," "Thematic Catalogues and Worklists," "Bibliographies," "Conferences," "Periodicals," "Letters and Documents," "Biographies," "Operas in General," and "Individual Works." In this instance, Marco lists only two biographies, both in English (by Weinstock and Ashbrook) but omits at least one in German (by Steiner-Isenmann) ¹ and others in Italian. He also omits a major compilation by Annalisi Bini and Jeremy Commons, published in Italy in 1997, that provides all available reviews of the Donizetti premieres. ² Other prominent Italian composers (Verdi, Rossini, Puccini, and Bellini) are given a similar comprehensive treatment. Mascagni and Giordano, famous as they are, have fewer entries. In...