Classical: An opera reference work with the panache to match the epics that it celebrates

Published on Tuesday 24 November 2009 20:43

IT SEEMS only right that a book on opera should be lavish in the extreme. After all, this is the most exorbitant of musical art forms, where tradition, right back to the elaborate "deus ex machina" of Venetian Baroque, has it that the plots, sets, singers, intrigue and, ultimately, the budgets should be larger than life.

Grand opera is the glory days of Hollywood in song. Anything less than tinsel, titillation, celebrity and scandal and it loses its gloss. Living proof is on our doorstep, where Scottish Opera has been forced to scale down in recent years through lack of cash. We've been on a diet of fewer, lower budget productions for some time, so a little reminder that operatic indulgence is alive and kicking elsewhere is good for kick-starting dormant memories.

You'll find that here in the opera lover's ultimate Christmas present. Simply named Opera – Composers, Works, Performers, and standing at 12in x 9in, and 3in thick, with 850 glossily illustrated pages listing 350 operas and 140 composers, it's the gesamtkunstwerk of coffee table books.

If Matthew Boyden's everyday popular paperback Rough Guide to Opera is the opera buffa of reference books, this one is equivalent to Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Actually, it doesn't tell us much more information-wise than Boyden's comprehensive perennial, but it does, with the help of more than 1,500 illustrations from relevant productions across the operatic globe, show us that opera, in some parts of the world, still exists on the largest of scales.

It is worth bearing in mind that the book – a revision of Andras Batta's original edition 10 years ago – is published in Germany, where opera is still a vibrant statement of civic pride and where the majority of towns and cities support permanent "repertoire" companies. Most of the full-colour illustrations are from there, with examples, too, from hotspots such as Paris, Milan, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, plus a handful from London's Royal Opera House.

It's perhaps symbolic that the very few examples cited of Scottish Opera come from way back – Jonathan Miller's 1988 production of Bernstein's Candide (which the composer himself attended) and Anthony Besch's 1976 production of Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. And Edinburgh Festival regulars might recognise a few nostalgic examples that have found their way into the Festival's diminishing opera programme, such as Jossi Wieler's and Sergio Morabito's IKEA-style staging of Debussy's Plleas et Mlisande, originally conceived for Hanover State Opera.

What is particularly attractive about this book is the stylishly concise and up-to-date written content. Every opera is described in relation to its plot and context. But even where such obvious candidates as Mozart, Verdi and Wagner are concerned, revision editor Matthias Heilmann and his team offer fresh thought and quirky asides.

Mozart's true relationship with Salieri (aside from Peter Shaffer's dramatised fiction in his play Amadeus) is revisited and clarified; the Wagner pages are spiced up with, among other asides, an intriguing illustration of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus's orchestra pit, drawn by first clarinettist Heinrich Venzi during a rehearsal in 1882, and depicting its crypt, with Wagner looking in from above, as at some musical Nibelheim.

As for repertoire, there's a fascinating breadth of coverage. The very first few entries (the layout is alphabetical) combine the obvious and not-so-obvious, Glasgow-born Eugene d'Albert's The Lowlands (illustrated by a 2007 Berlin production), John Adams' Doctor Atomic (premiered last year in San Francisco with the BBC SSO's Donald Runnicles as musical director), and Battistelli's The Autumn of the Patriarch among the more obscure.

One thing that might surprise is the extent of operas based on Scottish themes. Aside from such well-known examples as Donizetti's Walter Scott-inspired Lucia di Lammermoor and Rossini's La donna del lago, discover Franois Boieldieu's The White Lady, complete with a trumped up Scottish national anthem (more like a heuchter-cheuchter peasant dance) and photos of two recent German productions that are Brigadoon through and through.

So, even for the opera aficionado, there's a sense of adventure in this book, although the omission of any operas by James MacMillan (he's written two major full-scale ones for key companies) and the inclusion of only one by Peter Maxwell Davies, rather expose the editors' Teutonic mainstream prejudices.

Nonetheless, it's a publication that celebrates the sheer indulgence of a glorious art form, serves to remind us of a side of opera we're sadly short of in Scotland, and which, at the modest price of 39.99, is cheaper than the average Covent Garden ticket.

&#149 Opera – Composers, Works, Performers by Andras Batta is published by HF Ullmann at 39.99, www.ullmann-publishing.com