Stanley Sadie, 74; Edited New Grove Dictionary of Music

Stanley Sadie, a musicologist, critic, editor and Mozart authority, whose comprehensive revamping of a music encyclopedia resulted in the monolithic New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, died Monday at his home in Cossington, England.

He was 74 and had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Sadie was hired in 1969 to produce the sixth edition of a dictionary originally published in the late 1800s by Sir George Grove, an English musicographer. Sadie wound up executing not a simple revision but a reinvention, adding so much new material that he and his colleagues felt compelled to dub it the New Grove.

The 20-volume work stood virtually unchallenged for two decades as the definitive classical-music reference work in English. It established Sadie as “the spiritus rector behind the greatest work of musical lexicography in history,” music critic and National Public Radio commentator Ted Libbey wrote in the Los Angeles Times a few years ago.

Sadie was also the editor, with John Tyrrell, of the 29-volume second edition of the New Grove, published in 2001. It expanded the vaunted encyclopedia’s coverage of world music, jazz, pop and rock and for the first time offered an online edition. Under Sadie’s leadership, musicology became a flourishing industry, with Grove issuing spinoff dictionaries on such topics as musical instruments, female composers, opera and jazz.

Born in London into a family of mathematicians, Sadie studied music at Cambridge University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953, a master’s in 1957 and a doctorate in 1958 with a dissertation on mid-18th century British chamber music.

He taught at Trinity College of Music for several years before becoming a critic for the Times of London and the music journal Gramophone and the editor of Musical Times, which calls itself the world’s oldest continuously publishing classical music magazine.

He wrote books on Mozart, Beethoven and Handel.

When Grove’s publisher, Macmillan Ltd. of London, invited Sadie to become editor of a new edition of the dictionary, he saw it as a perfect melding of his interests.

“It suited my 18th century temperament,” he told the Independent of London in 1992. “I like precision. I like the idea of order emerging from chaos. And I like the interface -- horrible word, I shouldn’t use it -- that dictionaries offer between scholarship and journalism. The consequence is that I’m regarded by serious scholars as a mere scribe and by the press as a dusty academic.”

He envisioned a five-year involvement to update and expand the nine-volume 1954 edition of Grove to 12 or 14 volumes, but he and his colleagues discovered that they had far more catching up to do than they had anticipated.

Sadie decided that serious attention had to be paid to non-Western music -- a change in philosophy from Sir George Grove, who had avoided “all investigations into the music of barbarous nations” unless they had some direct effect on European music.

Developments in 20th century music, particularly in America, also demanded a more comprehensive approach, Sadie believed.

In the area of popular music and jazz, for instance, he and his staff faced up to such glaring omissions as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. The new edition included entries on those artists, as well as such pop and rock icons as Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

Bibliographies were expanded (the works list for composer Joseph Haydn ran 60 pages) and composers given short shrift in the previous incarnation -- Rachmaninoff had been notably slighted -- were more thoughtfully appraised.

The New Grove contained 20 million words spread over 22,500 articles written by 2,300 contributors from 70 countries, edited by Sadie and his staff of 50. An estimated 97% of the material was new.

The remade dictionary earned lavish praise from critics, including Harold Schonberg of the New York Times, who pronounced it a “triumph of contemporary musicology ... the most ambitious and comprehensive musical dictionary and encyclopedia ever attempted.”

The New Grove wasn’t perfect, however. After its release, critics spotted a fraud: a spoof entry on a fictitious Danish composer whose first and last names were actually commuter rail stops in suburban Copenhagen.

The phony article caused Sadie great pain. “When you spend 11 years trying to get everything right and then someone puts in something deliberately wrong,” he told the Sunday Times of London, “you do want to murder them.”

By the time the second edition of the New Grove was rolled out in 2001, Sadie had been replaced by a succession of younger editors. The British media reported that he had been deposed over disagreements with the publisher’s new German owners, who wanted to move up the publication deadline. Sadie protested that the new deadline would lead to errors.

He was also uncomfortable with the push to digitalize the mammoth reference work, which is now available online for a fee. That the online version might one day replace the print one was perhaps more than Sadie could bear.

“The New Grove is not just a retrieval system for information,” he told a Canadian interviewer in 2001. “It’s something to take to an armchair and read, to flip through and browse.”

Although no longer the chief steward of the vast Grove enterprise, Sadie did not lack for work. In the early 1990s he and his second wife, American-born bassist and cellist Julie Anne Vertrees, played a crucial role in preserving Handel’s London home as a museum. That effort sparked 40 trips across Europe to visit the birthplaces of other composers.

The result is “Calling on the Composer,” a unique 400-page guide to composer museums and memorials in Europe, to be published in May by Yale University Press.

Sadie’s final book, on Mozart’s early years, is to be published later this year by W.W. Norton & Co.

The day before he died, Sadie attended a concert of the Chilingirian String Quartet at a church near his home but was too sick to stay to the end. When the concert ended, the musicians assembled at Sadie’s home and played for him the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Opus 135.

In addition to Vertrees, Sadie is survived by three sons, two daughters and a sister.