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Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide \"sheer\" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the \"merely entertaining\" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions. Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discussesCos\" fan tutteas a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.

The publication of a dictionary in one's discipline is always a welcome event, allowing its users to quickly find essential information on a variety of topics, people, and institutions. The second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter AmeriGrove II), an eight-volume set comprising some 5300-plus pages, offers a comprehensive view of all musics American; it is a delight to peruse. At more than double the length of its predecessor, which was published in 1986, AmeriGrove II covers an even wider array of topics. It “refers to musical life and cultures within the region now covered by the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and US territories. [It] likewise features coverage of the music-making practices of native cultures whose occupation of these regions predates European contact” (1:vii).

No nineteenth-century composer had more diverse ties to his contemporary world than Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At various points in his life he made his home in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Rome, and Budapest. In his roles as keyboard virtuoso, conductor, master teacher, and abbé, he reinvented the concert experience, advanced a progressive agenda for symphonic and dramatic music, rethought the possibilities of church music and the oratorio, and transmitted the foundations of modern pianism.

This new investigation of the Brandenburg Concertos explores musical, social, and religious implications of Bach's treatment of eighteenth-century musical hierarchies. By reference to contemporary music theory, to alternate notions of the meaning of \"concerto,\" and to various eighteenth-century conventions of form and instrumentation, the book argues that the Brandenburg Concertos are better understood not as an arbitrary collection of unrelated examples of \"pure\" instrumental music, but rather as a carefully compiled and meaningfully organized set. It shows how Bach's concertos challenge (as opposed to reflect) existing musical and social hierarchies. Careful consideration of Lutheran theology and Bach's documented understanding of it reveals, however, that his music should not be understood to call for progressive political action. One important message of Lutheranism, and, in this interpretation, of Bach's concertos, is that in the next world, the heavenly one, the hierarchies of the present world will no longer be necessary. Bach's music more likely instructs its listeners how to think about and spiritually cope with contemporary hierarchies than how to act upon them. In this sense, contrary to currently accepted views, Bach's concertos share with his extensive output of vocal music for the Lutheran liturgy an essentially religious character.

DICTIONARY: Officially known as the \"The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition,\" the work under review, published earlier this year, is in fact the seventh revision of a colossus that now encompasses 29 volumes -- some 25 million words -- and is accepted, though not always with delight, as the standard English-language reference work on classical music. Since its last iteration in 1980, Grove has expanded its horizons to include articles (much touted, at least in its own advertising) on world music, pop and jazz. It has extensively overhauled previous entries to reflect current scholarship; added more than 5,500 new ones; and created an online version that's easier for subscribers to search and also allows immediate updates -- which is fortunate, since the new edition has many mistakes and inconsistencies. The online version also has a definite edge in price; subscriptions are $295 for one year (or $30 for a single month), while the print edition retails for $4,850. VOICE: As a musical instrument, the human voice is a second-class citizen in the Grove republic. Even in the \"New Grove Dictionary of Opera\" (1994), most major opera singers were treated in one or two brief paragraphs, listing little more than roles sung and opera houses performed in, capped with a one-line description of the singer's instrument (Franco Corelli: \"large and stentorian\"). But when the full Grove takes over many of these entries, they look even mingier, contrasted with the far longer descriptions of instrumentalists and conductors that surround them. In his 9-inch entry, Murray Perahia gets a whole paragraph discussing his particular approach to the piano; while the 3-inch biography of Mirella Freni, one of the greatest sopranos of our time, describes her distinguishing characteristics simply as \"purity, fullness and even focus.\" This doesn't differentiate her from far more minor sopranos, such as Ashley Putnam, whose voice is \"flexible, silver-toned,\" and whose entry is exactly the same length. ROCK 'N' ROLL: In its marketing, the New Grove bills itself as \"the premier authority,\" not just on the classics, but, apparently, on all forms of music. This is not even approximately accurate. We hadn't had the book a week before we discovered an embarrassing gaffe -- \"classic rock\" is defined as \"the incorporation of classical music referents into some rock,\" when in fact the term means rock from the late '60s through the '70s. (This mistake still has not been corrected online, even though [Grove]'s editors acknowledged it to us months ago.) It's hard to imagine that Grove would so drastically misdefine anything in classical music, nor is it a surprise to discover that classical music still dominates the dictionary, even sometimes in entries not specifically devoted to it.