n535  2351  20 Dec 80
BC-MUSIC-12-21
    By Richard Dyer
    (c) 1980 Boston Globe (Field News Service)
    
    The most important musical publication of the year is one that will
not find its way under too many Christmas trees because it costs
nearly $2,000. It is the new edition, in 20 volumes, of that
indispensable standard companion to every student of music, ''Grove's
Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' (British, not American,
Macmillan).
    This is the kind of project-carried out by most of the important
writers about music in the world today, under the editorship of the
indefatigable Stanley Sadie-whose true scope and worth will become
apparent only after years of daily reference; but people who have
reason to use it daily, like the writers in the program office in
Symphony Hall, are already lavish in their praises.
    Another work that is destined to have importance as a work of
reference is ''The Concise Oxford History of Music,'' by Gerald
Abraham (Oxford) - if 982 pages is your idea of concision! This
handsome volume is not a condensation of the ''New Oxford History of
Music'' but an independent project that bears the imprint of a
single, all-curious mind. A work of reference of little use,
unfortunately, is the ''Britannica Book of Music,'' (Doubleday,
$24.95), a recycling of old encyclopedia articles hashed up with a
few specially comissioned essays (a few of them excellent) and
worthless record guides.
    Two musicological works are of the greatest significance. One is the
first volume of George Perle's two-volume study on the two operas of
Alban Berg; the first one, of course, is devoted to ''Wozzeck''
(University of California Press, $20); it is one of those few works
of scholarship and analysis you can label ''definitive;'' it may in
time be supplemented, but not superseded.
    Charles Rosen's newest book is called ''Sonata Forms'' (Norton,
$16.95) and it is challenging, provocative, and, of all things, funny
(''I put all my best jokes in it,'' the author recently confided);
the plural in the title is a signal of the originality of Rosen's
approach to matters we thought we already knew about.
    Of the season's biographical works perhaps the most fascinating is
''Schoenberg Remembered'' by Dika Newlin, in which one of the
century's greatest composers and most important teachers is observed
in the diaries of a 14-year-old Wunderkind who grew up to become one
of his leading advocates and explicators; there is a wonderful
collision of personalities here, and also much that shows in a
uniquely personal way the qualities of Schoenberg's teaching
(Pendragon Press, $18.95).
    Two other books about composers are signficant, Gerald Boardman's
''Jerome Kern: His Life and Music'' (Oxford, $20), a volume that is
as thorough as you would want a life to be, though the musical
content is repetitious and skimpy, and ''The Days Grow Short: The
Life and Music of Kurt Weill,'' by Ronald Sanders (Holt, Rinehart,
Winston, $16.95), a careful, informal biography, once again stronger
on the life than on the music - and what a fascinating, troubled life
it was. In a class by itself is the second volume of Cosima Wagner's
Diaries as translated by Geoffrey Skelton (Harcourt Brace, $35),
1,200 pages of the table talk by the man who was in the process of
composing ''Parsifal'' as noted by his worshipful wife - a book, like
its predecessor, that will interest students of psychology as much as
it interests students of music.
     There are several new books about singers. Last year's wonderful,
tough-minded book about Dame Maggie Teyte by her nephew (Garry
O'Connor's ''The Pursuit of Perfection,'' Atheneum, $15.95) was a
demonstration that relatives can write biographies; ''Diva,'' a
trashy life of Maria Callas by her cousin Steven Linakis
(Prentice-Hall, $10.95) is an argument on the other side. Callas also
figures importantly in two other recent books, Tito Gobbi's ''My
Life'' (Doubleday, $14.95), a rather ordinary book by an
extraordinary man, enlivened by an occasional spurt of nastiness, and
in Irving Kolodin's ''In Quest of Music'' (Doubleday, $14.95), a
disappointingly scrappy series of episodes from the history-spanning
musical life of the critic most of us grew up with - Kolodin has much
more than this to recall and to tell.
    Helen Drees Ruttencutter's ''Quartet'' (Lippincott, $10.95) is a
lively, charming, well-written profile of the Guarneri Quartet most
of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, where a number of
minor errors ought to have been caught (like the name of the great
violist Lionel Tertis, or which Beethoven Quartets are the most
difficult to play).
    A reissue of considerable local interest is the Da Capo Press's
edition of Quaintance Eaton's 1965 history of ''The Boston Opera
Company,'' which is full of solid information and delightful gossip
about the early days of opera in Boston.
    And finally another word needs to be said about the instruction,
pleasure and annoyance there is in ''Orchestra,'' a coffee-table book
''edited'' by Andre Previn (Doubleday, $16.95), a series of
tape-recorded conversations with orchestral musicians.
    ENDIT DYER
    
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