# Obituary Of Winton Dean, The Leading Handel Scholar And Opera Critic



## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

A few months late: here are 3 obituaries of Winton Dean, the leading Handel scholar and opera critic who died last December.

*1)* Conrad Wilson in The Herald (Glasgow) wrote:

"As a champion of Handel's dramatic genius he did not suffer fools gladly, particularly the extremist modern stage directors who loved distorting the works out of all recognition. Spurred by the sting of his lash, these people were inevitably prone to dismiss him as fuddy-duddy, although since it was not in newspapers that Mr Dean tended to express himself -- he was much too secure and scholarly for that -- such directors knew they were safe from his scorn, or thought they were"

http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/obituaries/winton-dean.23052322

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*2)* The Times (UK):

Incisive opera critic and influential musical scholar renowned for his innovative and meticulous studies of Handel's operas.

Winton Dean was one of the most distinguished musical scholars of his day, with a formidable range of learning and with a trenchant prose style that not only made him a brilliant reviewer but also enlivened his more substantial publications. Though he never held a permanent academic post, he was highly regarded in the musicological community, especially for his pioneering work on Handel; and he was widely read for the verve and conviction of his writing.

Opera always lay at the centre of his interests, and his practical and critical work did much for the recognition of Handel as a great dramatic composer whose operas could still draw and excite audiences. While he took pleasure in the establishment of Handel in the modern repertory, errant performers or producers with ideas that ran counter to the works' style and spirit quickly felt the sting of his lash as a reviewer.

Winton Basil Dean was born in 1916, the eldest son of the theatre director Basil Dean. Educated at Harrow and at King's College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and English, he also worked privately on music with Philip Radcliffe. He interested himself in the theatre, and was deeply impressed by the dramatic potential of some stagings of Handel's dramatic oratorios, in one of which, Saul, he took to the boards himself. On the outbreak of war he joined the Navy, working in Naval Intelligence in 1944-45.

Dean's first book was a study of Bizet, enlarged from its modest 1948 dimensions in 1965. It remains the most valuable English treatment of the composer, and confirmed in Dean an interest in French opera which never left him. However, he soon turned his attention back to Handel, where his most important work was to lie. Handel's "Dramatic Oratorios and Masques" (1959) at once set him in the forefront of Handel scholarship. Immensely detailed in its attention to sources, and providing a thorough account of individual works, the book at the same time reflects a cultivated understanding of Georgian England and of the musical conditions of Handel's London. He regarded these connections as essential to a proper appreciation of the music's greatness.

This was followed in 1969 by Handel and the Opera Seria, based on the Ernest Bloch lectures which he had delivered at the University of Berkeley, California, in 1965-66. Here he insisted on the works' theatricality, and on this quality as justification for their revival as well as their study. He regarded it as a preliminary survey, and developed it in the first volume of a collaboration with J. Merrill Knapp, "Handel's Operas", 1704-26 (1987). Here the same qualities of detailed textual examination and wide-ranging historical understanding were displayed. However, the collaborators began to find that, in Dean's words, they "held different opinions about the scope of the book", and Knapp withdrew from the project. After Knapp's death in 1993, Dean went on to embark on the succeeding volume single-handed, completing it for publication in 2006, the year of his 90th birthday. True to his belief in Handel's dramatic genius, he also prepared various editions, including (in collaboration with Sarah Fuller) a performing version of Giulio Cesare in Egitto for production by the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham in 1977. He also served on the committees of Handel Societies in England and Germany.

Dean's interests extended well beyond Handel. A vigorous and well-informed critic, he contributed many reviews to Opera and The Musical Times, where his certainty of conviction made him a formidable adversary in controversy. His continuing devotion to French music led to some valuable essays and papers on opera of the Revolutionary period, in which the thoroughness of his investigation of obscure scores is presented with a witty enjoyment of some of their eccentricities. He also edited a series of lectures which E. J. Dent had delivered at Cornell University in 1937-38, as The Rise of Romantic Opera, which paid especial attention to France. He contributed a brilliant extended essay on Shakespeare and opera to a symposium, Shakespeare in Music (1964), in which the masterpieces are given just evaluation while the preposterous are not spared.

Another searching contribution was one on Beethoven and opera to The Beethoven Companion (1971), an essay that has achieved classic status and been several times reprinted. He wrote with much perception on French, German and Italian opera in the Age of Beethoven volume of The New Oxford History of Music, and was an apt choice for what proved a perceptive article on "Criticism" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. A festschrift in his honour, "Music and Theatre" (1987), reflected both the range of his interests and the high regard in which he was held by his colleagues. A collection of his work was published as Essays on Opera in 1990. As a young man he had written fiction and poetry; but plans for an opera with Lennox Berkeley, for which he had prepared the libretto, were halted by the composer's death.

Dean was an entertaining companion, in conversation lively if dogmatic, and as happy in the open air as in the library. A competent cricketer in youth (his writings include a book on the village team for which he kept wicket), he remained into old age a fine salmon fisherman and an excellent shot on the Borders estate which his wife inherited. Here he spent part of each year, dispensing generous hospitality and recording sporting events in his game book with the meticulousness that he elsewhere accorded to Handel.

He married in 1939 Thalia Shaw, daughter of the second Lord Craigmyle, who tended his life devotedly. They had a son, Stephen, born in 1946.They had two daughters who died in childhood - Brigid, in a tragic accident when she was two, to which he seldom referred but which affected him deeply, and Diana, who died aged 10 days as a result of the rhesus factor. They later adopted another daughter, also called Diana, when she was three months old. After the death of his wife who suffered a stroke in 2000, Dean was attentively looked after by his son Stephen, who also gave him tireless help with editorial work and indexing for his last three books. His determined concentration on the matter in hand extended to details of his personal life, as when his Scottish house caught fire last year and he refused to leave the building until he had finished his breakfast. Dean was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1975 and an honorary MusD of Cambridge in 1996.

Dean is survived by his son Stephen and adopted daughter Diana.

Winton Dean, musical scholar and opera critic, was born on March 18, 1916. He died on December 19, 2013, aged 97.

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*3)* A letter by Andrew Porter in the May issue of Opera magazine:

'One of the critic's roles is that of watchdog, and he must bark as appropriate.' The sentence comes from his long, marvellous essay on criticism in the 1954 Grove (revised in New Grove 1980, dropped from the latest edition). It ends with a listing of The Critic's Qualifications, 'so multifarious as almost to place him among the mythical beasts'. In summary they are: a knowledge of the technical and theoretical principles of music; a knowledge of musical history and scholarship; a wide general education; the ability to think straight and to write in a clear and stimulating manner; an insight into the workings of the creative imagination; an integrated philosophy of life; an enduring inquisitiveness and curiosity; and an acceptance of his own limitations. To which Dean adds, from Shaw: 'A criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading'.

For many years, in many articles, reviews, programme notes, sleeve notes, chapters in, for example, The New Oxford History of Music, and encyclopedia entries, Dean produced a stream of writing about music at its highest and best. He was a frequent and valued contributor to 'Opera', 'The Listener' and 'The Musical Times. A 22-page bibliography of his writings up to 1985, compiled by his son Stephen, appears in the Festschrift 'Music and Theatre' that honoured his 70th birthday. It would be much longer now. Their range is immense. It covers many new operas. Handel looms large. The magisterial Handel's "Dramatic Oratorios and Masques", which appeared in 1959, held harsh words about Handel's operas: 'theatrically impossible', 'monotony of form and structure', 'librettos for the most part infantile', 'convention that turned characters into puppets'. That changed when Winton got to know the operas better, heard them in the theatre, and became their impassioned champion. In his 1965-6 Bloch lectures at Berkeley, published as "Handel and the Opera Seria", we read: 'Handel's mastery of opera as a fusion of music and drama is scarcely less absolute than that of Monteverdi and Mozart.' The claim was handsomely supported by the two great volumes on the operas (with J. Merrill Knapp as collaborator)

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## Revenant (Aug 27, 2013)

Thanks for sharing all of the above. In getting to know Handel better over the past year, I've greatly enjoyed and benefitted from Dean's writings and amazing scholarship, along with that of Paul Henry Lang. Very glad to know that he got to whiplash those stage directors who tried to make an obscene mockery of Handel's works. Love it when it (seldom) happens.


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