Winton Dean
Winton Basil Dean (18 March 1916 – 19 December 2013) was an English musicologist of the 20th century, most famous for his research on the life and works—in particular the operas and oratorios—of George Frideric Handel, as detailed in his book Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (1959).
Dean was born in Birkenhead in March 1916, the son of the film and theatre producer Basil Dean.[1] He was educated at Harrow and King's College, Cambridge, where he took part in stagings of Handel oratorios in the 1930s.[1]
After World War II, he became notable as a writer on music, particularly when he published several articles about the compositions of Bizet, starting with La Coupe du roi de Thulé in Music & Letters in 1947. He considerably rewrote his 1948 book on Bizet in 1965 due to new material and music of the composer which had since emerged.[2] From 1965 he wrote articles criticizing the Oeser edition of Carmen, listing many mistakes, describing it as "a musicological disaster of the first magnitude", and continued to point out its errors in reviews of subsequent performances and recordings.[3] In the 1954
However, Handel became his main focus; and apart from the book already mentioned, he also published Handel and the Opera Seria (Berkeley, 1969), and a more general Essays on Opera (Oxford, 1990, 2/1993). His definitive two-volume work on
Dean contributed heavily to a number of musicological publications, including
Major publications
- Dean, Winton (1959), Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, Oxford University Press
- Dean, Winton (1975), Bizet, J. M. Dent & Sons, ISBN 9780460031639
- Dean, Winton; Knapp, J Merrill (1987), Handel's operas: 1704–1726, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-315219-9
- Dean, Winton (1990), Essays on Opera, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780193152656
- Dean, Winton (2006), Handel's Operas, 1726-1741, Boydell Press, ISBN 1843832682
Notes
- ^ a b c Sadie, Stanley. Winton (Basil) Dean. In: The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Macmillan, London & New York, 1997.
- ^ a b c Porter, Andrew. Obituary – Winton Dean. Opera, May 2014, Vol 65 No 5, pp. 578–9.
- ^ Dean, Winton. The True 'Carmen'? The Musical Times, Vol. 106, No. 1473 (Nov 1965), pp. 846–855. Reprinted as chapter 28 of Essays on Opera (1990).
- ^ Including chapter II on French Opera in The New Oxford History of Music – The Age of Beethoven 1790-1820, OUP, 1982.
References
- Stanley Sadie: "Dean, Winton", Grove Music Online ed L. Macy (Accessed 11 December 2006), grovemusic.com, subscription access.
- Winton Dean's obituary