Beyond Beckmesser : THE NEW GROVE DICTIONARY OF OPERA; Edited by Stanley Sadie (Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, New York: $850; 4 volumes, illustrated, 5,323 pp.)

‘The time for an absolutely comprehensive and accurate opera dictionary has passed for ever. The task is altogether too formidable and too complicated.”

That poignant, now blissfully outdated lament was voiced back in 1914 by Oscar Sonneck.

Oscar Sonneck?

It isn’t exactly a household name. Never mind. “The New Grove Dictionary of Opera,” which now poses a heavy threat to fragile bookshelves and fragile budgets everywhere, tells all--well,nearly all--in loving detail. Here’s the gentleman, on page 454 of the fourth voluminous volume:

“Sonneck. Oscar G(eorge) T(heodore)( b Lafayette (now in Jersey City), NJ. 6 Oct 1873; d New York, 30 Oct 1928). American musicologist, librarian and editor. He went to Germany to study the piano in 1883, later developing interests in philosophy, musicology and composition. . . .”

And so it goes for 24 lines of smallish print, with five bibliographical references appended.

It may be worth noting that old Sonneck issued his declaration of futility 14 years after the death of Sir George Grove, the British engineer and scholar who established the gold standard for musical lexicography. The eighth child--it says here--of a fishmonger and venison dealer in Charing Cross, Grove devoted much of his life to creating the first exhaustive (everything is relative) musical encyclopedia in the English language, the epochal four-volume “Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” which first appeared in installments between 1877 and 1890.

That was just the beginning. Five bigger and better editions evolved over the decades, culminating in the 20-volume “New Grove” edited by Stanley Sadie in 1980. No self-respecting educator, student, aficionado, performer, librarian or critic can get far without it. “The New Grove” has mustered some valued spinoffs for special-interest groups: three volumes on musical instruments, four on American music, and two on jazz. And now, perhaps most daunting of all, four unprecedented volumes on opera.

The vital statistics suggest the scope of this project, most of which involves material that is new at best, updated at worst. Aided by a large army of editorial accomplices and (mostly) authoritative contributors, Sadie has assembled 5,323 pages of operatic profundity and trivia--more than 10,000 articles on composers, singers, librettists, individual works, companies, houses, designers, directors, impresarios, cities and countries.

More esoteric subjects are covered as well--and nearly always well: censorship, postage stamps, patrons, casting and opera-house architecture. A diligent, possibly misguided reader may even find an entry or two on critics.

No operatic area, historical or sociological, is too small or too narrow for exploration here. Anyone hungry for information on the evolution of the ticket, for instance, will be happy to find nearly three pages devoted to this pressing issue, with 13 illustrations documenting classic examples from 1716 to 1861, and 10 bibliographical citations pointing the way to further enlightenment. Among other nuggets of fascination, the learned author of this entry tells us of a “widespread custom . . . that assisted the forgers” until the mid-19th Century:

“Tickets allowed admission to a certain area of the house, but not to specific seats (apart sometimes from the boxes). This led to the practice, possibly initiated in France, of the upper classes sending footmen or engaging ‘place-keepers’ to occupy seats and then exchanging places with them shortly before curtain time.”

The dictionary contains at least 1,300 illustrations, both historical and contem porary. Still, some fans may be disappointed to find at least one crucial entry unadorned. Without a photo, after all, posterity may forget the trademark stance of a certain 20th-Century tenorissimo who, we are reminded in the text, likes to clutch a little white tablecloth to his portly chest in moments of ecstasy.

The fans may find some consolation, however, in the flight of hyperbole that embellishes the same tenorissimo’s biography. His popular exploits, we are told, “brought him fame and affection beyond that achieved by any other (sic) opera singer of the past.”

Any other opera singer? What about Caruso? Geraldine Farrar? John McCormack? Maria Callas? What, indeed, about Placido Domingo?

We learn, in the rival tenorissimo’s slightly shorter entry, that he “was generally felt to be the supreme exponent” of Verdi’s Otello. It is impossible to tell if that dubious sweeping judgment should be attributed to the late Harold Rosenthal or Elizabeth Forbes; both names are credited. In any case, the judgment dishonors the memories of Mario del Monaco, Ramon Vinay, James McCracken and Jon Vickers, not to mention the illustrious Otellos of the first half of the century.

Yes, there is room here for quibbling. The Grove editors, who often betray a British bias, bypass Esa-Pekka Salonen. One can find an entry for Joan Cross, but not Milton . Gilda Cruz-Romo is listed as Cruz- Romeo . A rather obscure baritone from Essex named William Shimell is described ipso facto as the “ideal Don Giovanni.”

The politically correct entry for George Shirley, the first black tenor to sing leading roles at the Met, is color-blind. A little-known soprano named Lynn Dawson gets nearly as much attention as Leontyne Price. Causes of premature death or unexpected career disintegration are often ignored. The delicate problem of Christof Perick’s last name (in Germany he still spells it without the e ) is solved by leaving the accomplished conductor out of the dictionary. Some of the Russian spelling choices, though phonetically logical, seem confusing or at least eccentric: Dyagilev, Rakhmaninov, Shalyapin .

Still, the nits can be ignored in context. This is a monumental reference source. It collects and organizes information on a scale that would have astounded Oscar Sonneck, and does so with degrees of precision that might even have confounded Sixtus Beckmesser, the most fastidious of Wagnerian pedants.

It musters writing of provocative point in unexpected places. Take this passage at the close of David Murray’s analysis of Richard Strauss’ “Salome”:

“Necrophilia is not among the more popular perversions, and Strauss was less concerned to fathom any ‘deeper meaning’ it might have than to exploit its operatic potential in terms of unbridled invention, lurid but cogent, and also tender--and profoundly effective.”

At $850--nearly 16 cents a page--the price is steep. But, for those inclined to care, “The New Grove Dictionary of Opera” is priceless from a ( Aachen ) to z ( Zylis-Gara ).