Opera is a costly art. Producing recordings of operas is a costly business. Opera enthusiasts who wish to own recorded versions of their favorite operas, must thus expect to have credit cards that can call up large funds. Hence, the usefulness and value of another art form, one that developed in the C20th. This new art form is the guide to recorded opera, a collection of critical assessments and recommendations intended to help readers avoid wasting their money.
Of all such publications - and they can provide endless hours of absorbing reading even if the aim is not necessarily to get a well-informed recommendation - an outstanding example is The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera. Developed from an idea by Roland Gellat, and edited by Paul Gruber, it surveys and assesses virtually all opera sets on record up to 1993, the year of its publication. The team of reviewers is impressive, comprising a team of twenty highly qualified contributors working in the USA and England.
Something I always look for in books of this type is a detailed index. The one here meets all my requirements. It enables me to find all references in the book to, for example, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, a singer you might think is represented in recorded opera sets more than anybody else. It is Placido Domingo, however, whose index entries occupy more space here than those of any other singer.
An alphabetical order of composers dictates where the recorded opera reviews are found. Once you have found "M" near the centre of the book, for example, you can locate Mozart, and find his operas discussed in chronological order. There is also an index of opera titles, if you prefer that means of finding what you want. There are no illustrations, and pages are laid out in two-column format, so the book is reasonably compact and not too weighty.
Each reviewer is set the task of assessing all available recorded sets of a particular opera (a luxury few of us can enjoy) and providing a recommendation. Perhaps it is in the nature of opera, an art form with so many inter-relating components, that few single versions of a particular opera are found to excel on all counts. One of the few is the de Sabata "Tosca". Nevertheless the reviewers always attempt to "narrow the field" and indicate strengths and weaknesses along the way.
My copy of this excellent publication came all the way from Texas, USA, and was kindly provided by fellow Internet reviewer Dr David Kemp.
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