Opera: A Concise History, Leslie Orrey, revised...

Opera: A Concise History, Leslie Orrey, revised and updated by Rodney Milnes (Thames & Hudson: $9.95). This is a concise, comprehensive and fully illustrated history of opera, tracing its origins from the mystery plays and other religious rituals of the 13th and 14th centuries to its present-day incarnations. Orrey traces the parallel developments of the traditions of Italy and France and the separate strains created in England and Germany. “The French adopted the literary approach to drama, and argued that the musical setting of words should be simple, following and reinforcing the natural inflexions of the voice and the cadences of the poetry.” The Italians, on the other hand, “held that purely musical factors, such as melody, harmony, timbre and so on, had their own individual and sometimes overriding contribution to add to the sum total.” Opera seria , which took place in palaces, “became the indispensable luxury at all the courts in Europe. In it, the autocratic dictator could see his idealized benevolent despotism at work.” Appropriate subjects were Alexander the Great, or Titus. In the Republic of Venice, on the other hand, works were performed before a citizens’ audience. Here “Monteverdi and his librettist, Busenello, could concentrate on a fine dramatic story with no fear of political or moral pressure.” And the plot could include humor, which was rigidly excluded in court opera. But, he writes, “it was left to Mozart to realize fully its potentialities. His use of clarinets to illustrate the languishing, lovelorn ladies in ‘Cosi fan tutte’ is exquisite.” Following one thread of his chronicle after Mozart, who synthesized all the previous approaches, Orrey suggests that the development proceeded through nationalistic movements, typified by Weber, who invented German Romanticism, and Wagner.

Milnes claims that current trends in opera, rather than threatening its most cherished conventions, are “reassuring evidence that opera, far from being moribund, is as vital today as it has ever been.”

Truman, Roy Jenkins (Perennial Library / Harper & Row: $7.95). Roy Jenkins, the English Labour politician and statesman, was first elected to Parliament in 1948, the year Truman defeated Thomas Dewey for the American presidency. Thus Jenkins’ biography of our 33rd President is unique among other more detailed accounts of Truman’s life as it is told from the perspective of a contemporary political figure who was witness not only to the events of Truman’s career, but to its legacies as well. The book describes Truman’s political education from his early years in Jackson County, Mo., through his experiences in the Army during World War I, to his emergence, under the tutelage of Thomas J. Pendergast, “one of the legendary city bosses of American politics,” as the junior senator from Missouri, winning election in 1934. This humble, modest man, who gained a place as F.D.R.’s running mate in a nearly brokered convention, served as vice president only 82 days before Roosevelt died. From these inauspicious beginnings, he inherited the nation’s highest office at a turbulent time in foreign affairs.

Jenkins’ account of Truman’s meeting at Potsdam with Churchill and Stalin provides insight into the origins of the Cold War. According to Jenkins, Truman casually informed the Soviet leader that the Americans had developed the A-bomb. “During the war, Roosevelt had made a conscious decision not to share atomic secrets with the Russians. Truman’s early postwar position was in favor of such sharing in exchange for a mutual agreement to stop further development and undertake that none of the three main powers (the third being England) . . . would use the bomb without the agreement of the other two.” It was the British who lobbied to deny Stalin access to America’s lethal new technology, and Truman ultimately adopted their position.

The emergence of the so-called Truman Doctrine arose in reaction to the British withdrawal of aid from Greece and Turkey after March, 1947. Truman’s words were, “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempts of subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.” With the stated purpose of protecting these nations from the Soviet threat, the Truman Doctrine emerged as the dominant American strategy for competition with the Soviet Union in the international sphere. This is an accessible, discursive account not only of those critical years after World War II, which have formed the cornerstone of international relations for the last four decades, but of Truman’s domestic legacy as well.

The Realists: Eight Portraits, C. P. Snow (Collier Books / Macmillan: $9.95). In this volume, first published a decade ago, the British novelist C. P. Snow has assembled eight novelistic portraits of great writers, including Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevski and Proust, who are concerned with the “actual social setting in which their personages exist.” An amalgam of literary biography and the novelistic art, these portraits are fascinating to us not only because their form is unique but also because they are so rich with details. The most compelling of his vignettes occurs in the portrait of Dostoevski. Dostoevski was in prison for political reasons, when the tsar decided to play a ghoulish practical joke on all the prisoners. They were driven to a field, and a clerk read aloud each of the prisoners’ sentences: death by firing squad. A priest read them their last rites, the soldiers raised their rifles, drums rolled, then a coach drove up and a government messenger interrupted. The tsar had sent a reprieve. For Snow, a writer’s work cannot be understood apart from its author. He sees a writer’s work as inherently political, observing that Friedrich Engels claimed to have learned more about 19th-Century France from Balzac than from “all the historians, sociologists and political analysts in the world.”

Snow is more interested in a writer like Stendhal, whose Julien Sorel, “the first voice of ultimate class hatred in a major work of fiction,” was created, Snow suggests, in response to Stendhal’s own disaffection with Parisian society.