Cambridge University Press has undertaken an ambitious project: to publish comprehensive encyclopedias for major composers. The venture began with encyclopedias on Mozart in 2006 and Handel in 2009 and has continued in 2014 for two giants of opera shortly after the bicentennial of their birth: Verdi and Wagner. The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia, edited by Roberta Montemorra Marvin, is one of the shortest and least expensive, at 614 pages and $160 hardback. It is nevertheless comprehensive, with entries by over 75 contributors on Verdi’s works, singers, librettists and acquaintances, as well as articles on politics, music criticism, staging, etc. Readers can find everything from La Traviata to Filippo Palizzi, who painted a portrait of Verdi’s dog. While encyclopedias have a long history, the trend of composer encyclopedias is a relatively recent one and one that promises numerous benefits.

In some ways, such encyclopedias fit recent interest in ‘public musicology’,Footnote ¹ bringing musicological work to the wider public. The jacket cover promises that the Verdi Encyclopedia ‘will have a broad appeal for opera-lovers, students, and scholars’ and the volume succeeds remarkably well at this goal. Opera lovers and singers will doubtlessly gravitate toward entries on individual singers and operas. The encyclopedia is particularly excellent in both. Singers are easily found, especially since Appendices 2a–c list singers by name, by role and by opera. Whenever possible, lively and amusing descriptions appear. In the entry on the first Aida (Antonia Pozzoni Anastasi), for example, Susan Rutherford quotes Verdi, who admired her ‘beautiful presence’ and ‘good’ acting but not her ‘tremolo and … sagging intonation’ (p. 30). The encyclopedia also indicates the range of roles, Verdian and otherwise, that each singer performed. Singers will find it intriguing, for example, that Felice Varesi created such diverse roles as Macbeth, Rigoletto and Giorgio Germont, though Germont with dubious success.

True to the goal of public musicology, however, such accessibility is blended with academic rigour. Entries on individual operas demonstrate this balance. Authors of these articles offer the expected plot summaries and utilize lively prose. Yet, they also provide meatier material, grounded in excellent scholarship. Virtually all opera entries, for example, give a vivid picture of the multitude of revisions and versions that surrounded most works. This is not only true for Flora Willson’s article on Don Carlos, an opera notorious for its many versions, but also for works such as Il Trovatore, which David Lawton expertly charts through its various phases of composition. Most opera entries also situate the work within larger issues. Emanuele Senici, for example, explores Luisa Miller’s resonance with melodrama and explains how Ricordi ‘orchestrated’ the success of Falstaff, which Verdi viewed as ‘a specifically Italian way of responding to [foreign] influences’ (p. 163). The opera lover can thus see how scholarship enriches anyone’s experience of Verdi operas, whether casual amateur or dedicated researcher.

The idea of approachable scholarship is also evident in the rich context the encyclopedia provides for how Verdi’s operas were created, performed and received. Philip Gossett’s article on ‘compositional process’ elucidates how Verdi wrote his works, Arne Langer’s article on ‘staging and stage directors’ discusses how Verdi envisioned his operas onstage, and Susan Rutherford’s article on ‘singing techniques’ explains how Verdi challenged the prevailing bel canto approach. In these and many similar articles, opera lovers are invited to learn more about the complexities of opera history. This marriage of the popular and the academic should help spread musicology to a wider public.

There are only a few respects in which the general reader might find this encyclopedia frustrating. More Italian terms could be translated; rifacimento (remake) and ispettore (inspector), for example, appear without English equivalents. The numerous voice types – soprano leggero, tenore di grazia, etc. – could also have been explained, perhaps within the articles on ‘singing techniques’ or ‘singers’. Some opera lovers might also wish for a discography or videography, which are featured in several other Cambridge encyclopedias. Marvin argues that ‘such listings become outdated well before they are published’ (p. xii). Instead, she takes a more holistic approach. Articles on ‘film’, ‘radio and television (Italy)’ (both by Claudia Polo) and ‘singers’ (by Hilary Poriss) survey major trends in Verdi films, broadcasts and recordings. I think this approach strikes an appropriate balance between the importance of recorded performances and the impossibility of keeping up with every new release, but it may disappoint readers interested in a comprehensive listing.

While the Verdi Encyclopedia has much to offer the lay reader, it also satisfies students and scholars of opera. Marvin offers an immense repository of information, painstakingly organized and cross-referenced. She also foregrounds the nature of musicological research. One of greatest strengths of the encyclopedia is its frank acknowledgement of how dependent our knowledge of Verdi is on both available sources and current trends. Several articles make clear how much more we could know were sources in private hands made publicly accessible. For instance, in his article on ‘correspondence’, Carlo Matteo Mossa notes that ‘Veridan autographs often turn up in antiquarian or prestigious auction house catalogs, and their buyers or owners are not always willing to make them available for study, transcription, or reproduction’ (p. 105). Readers also get a strong sense of how dependent our view of Verdi is on our time period in Gregory W. Harwood’s article on ‘biography’. During his lifetime, Verdi was fashioned as an ‘artist-hero’ who ‘synthesiz[ed] the Italian school of melody with the Germanic school of harmony’, then viewed as a ‘national icon’ in early twentieth-century biographies, and finally has received more critical, varying assessments in recent biographies (pp. 60–62). In each case, Harwood notes how biographers were impacted by their access (or lack thereof) to Verdi documents in private hands.

The encyclopedia also addresses controversial aspects of Verdi scholarship in as balanced a manner as possible. This is particularly true in the article on ‘politics’, a topic that has sparked often rancorous scholarly debates.Footnote ² Historian Carlotta Sorba tackles this article. For those not immersed in the controversy, she helpfully outlines its basics. Verdi lived during a tumultuous period of Italian political history and was involved in this history, both directly and symbolically. Yet, the level of his involvement, his intentions and the way in which audiences interpreted his works remain topics of debate. Wisely for an encyclopedia, which by its nature is intended to be relatively neutral, Sorba does not ‘take sides’. Instead, she presents contradictions and potential avenues for thought. She gives examples both of Verdi’s eager involvement with politicized works (such as La Battaglia di Legnano) and his disinterest in this path; for instance, he ignored Giuseppe Giusti’s plea to abandon works like Macbeth and write pieces that would ‘rejuvena[te] … the Italian people’ (p. 347). She also leaves open the most controversial aspect of the debate: whether Verdi and his audiences saw early works such as Nabucco as political during their time. She observes that such operas ‘could easily be projected onto the state of Austrian domination’, but does not insist that they were (p. 348). The one tangible example of political appropriation she gives is of Ernani, fairly innocuous in itself, but performed with newly politicized texts in Bologna in 1846–47. Doubtless, some scholars on either side of the debate will find fault with Sorba’s article. Anyone wishing to grasp the full complexities of the debate will also need to read the bibliography she provides. For the encyclopedia’s broad readership, however, Sorba’s concise assemblage of possibilities and contradictions is probably the best approach.

Marvin’s aim, stated on the jacket cover, to ‘[reflect] the very latest scholarship’ also is evident in one of the encyclopedia’s best attributes: its emphasis on the fluid realities of opera performance, which have become a focus of recent opera research. Not only are singers given a prominent role, but the encyclopedia highlights the staging of Verdi’s operas. Virtually every person involved in contemporary Verdi staging receives an entry and there are articles on scenography (Olga Jesurum), staging and stage directors (Arne Langer), and the disposizione scenica or staging manuals (David B. Rosen). Similarly, changes made to Verdi’s operas during his lifetime – substitute arias, revisions and adaptations – have often been ignored or denigrated. Here, they are painstakingly detailed, helpfully cross-referenced, and often given their own entries.

The encyclopedia does present a few drawbacks for the scholar. Articles frequently feature delightful contemporary quotations, yet scholars wishing to locate these will often find no citation. While Marvin wisely did not weight the encyclopedia with footnotes, some articles do include at least the author’s name or the journal in which a quotation appeared, and it would have been helpful to do this more consistently.

There also is no entry on Verdi himself, nor on other major contemporary composers of the time, such as Bellini and Wagner, even though similar articles appear in some of the other Cambridge encyclopedias. This was a deliberate decision on Marvin’s part and in some respects is justified. While a reader wishing for an ‘all in one’ Verdi book may rue the lack of a biographical article, considerable overlap would have resulted since every facet of Verdi’s life and works is already covered in the individual entries and a chronology of his life appears in the appendix. Articles on other major composers of the time would have increased the encyclopedia’s length. As it is, however, readers are left to glean important information about Verdi’s relationship to Wagner, for example, in individual entries. Only in Flora Willson’s article on Don Carlos, for example, do we learn that Verdi, first exposed to Wagner’s music with the overture to Tannhaüser, deemed Wagner ‘mad’ (p. 128). Most readers probably would have appreciated a central location where they could learn about Verdi and Wagner’s relationship. Marvin herself wrote an excellent, concise entry on Verdi for the Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia and the Verdi Encyclopedia would have benefitted from similar articles.

No scholar would expect to consult only one reference work about Verdi, and this encyclopedia joins numerous other types of Verdi scholarship that all enrich each other. Many excellent biographies exist, as do comprehensive studies of the operas, and this encyclopedia should provide a springboard for readers to move to these in-depth works. There are several other reference works on Verdi in other languages and serious scholars should consult these as well: the Dizionario verdiano Footnote ³ and the Verdi Handbuch.Footnote ⁴

Cambridge also offers a different type of reference work in its Cambridge Companion to Verdi.Footnote ⁵ Like other volumes in the Cambridge companion series, this contains individual articles on important topics but makes no attempt to be comprehensive. The companions and encyclopedias complement each other well. For example, readers will benefit both from Scott L. Balthazar’s excellent, concise explanations of individual forms in numerous entries in the encyclopedia, but also his extended article on these forms in the companion.

Overall, The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia is a massive, collaborative undertaking that offers value to music lovers and scholars alike. It is an excellent example of ‘public musicology’. Lucid prose, clear organization and a wealth of information about Verdi and his world appeal to the lay reader. At the same time, the encyclopedia incorporates the latest scholarly trends, foregrounds the historical sweep of Verdi research and offers a comprehensive reference resource for scholars. One hopes that Cambridge will continue this type of scholarship, perhaps not only with composers but genres, geographical regions or stylistic periods as well. As for The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia, no music library, opera lover’s bookshelf, singer’s reading list or opera scholar’s bibliography should be without it.