Music: Words & Music

About all that can be said for, against and about that noble, peculiar form of art, Grand Opera, was said last week in a 603-page book entitled The Opera (Simon & Schuster; $3.75). Authors are Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock, who neatly duetted the equally compendious Men of Music for the same shrewd, music-loving publishers.* In their survey of more than three centuries of opera they give some bassoon blatts to some of opera’s most sacred cows (Wagner’s Parsifal is largely “plain dreary”). Brockway and Weinstock ticket Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera for its less-than-flawless taste, convict it of indifference to native opera.

A minor but irritating fault: The Opera’s authors repeatedly employ a word which they spell “unctious.”

*Partner Richard Leo Simon’s brother Henry is musicritic for the New York newspaper PM: his cousin Robert A., for The New Yorker.