Musical Super Sleuth

Musical history has not been kind to the memories of Johann Kittl, Anton Titl and Rudolf Bibl, three 19th century composers whose reputations were as truncated as their names. Nevertheless, K.T.&B. have an outspoken champion-- Boston Composer-Musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky. Along with some 10,000 other menand women-about-music, the three have recently been embalmed in an impressive Slonimsky-built ossuary of pure research: the 1,855-page fifth edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (G. Schirmer; $18).

Since its original publication in 1900, few researchers have challenged the au thority of Baker's Dictionary.* But Musicologist Slonimsky, a man with an insatiable appetite for facts, has long suspected that the book was studded with subterranean errors. To produce his new edition, he spent four tireless years writing to authorities the world over to verify birth and death dates and fill in biographical lacunae. The Vienna Bureau of Meteorology, for instance, helped him verify the fact that Beethoven died during a violent storm: the weather report of March 26, 1827 noted that a thunderstorm with heavy winds broke over the city at 4 p.m., shortly before Beethoven died.

Bastard? Slonimsky's sleuthing has also revealed that Liszt's great rival, Austrian Piano Virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg, was not, as he claimed to be, the bastard son of nobility (his real parents were Theodore Thalberg and Fortunee Stein, who may even have been married to each other); that Soprano Helen Traubel sliced four years off her age in her autobiography (she was born in 1899, not 1903); that the dates of Wagner's imprisonment for debt in Paris, a little matter omitted in Wagner's own accounts, were from Oct. 28 to Nov. 17, 1840. It was Slonimsky who several years ago told Brazilian Composer Heitor Villa-Lobos when he was born= 1887, not 1881 or 1890, as some previous references had it.

An even more notable triumph was Slonimsky's temporary resurrection of English Opera Composer Edward Maryon (The Prodigal Son, The Cycle of Life), who was believed by his own publishers to be dead until Slonimsky, after a futile appeal to Scotland Yard, discovered him alive in London (when he died in 1954, 87-year-old Composer Maryon left Slonimsky all his manuscripts). On the other hand, Slonimsky has suffered his setbacks: no amount of sleuthing has ever revealed the official birth dates of Antonio Vivaldi or Enrico Caruso; no fewer than 13 Enrico Carusos were born in Naples on or about the date (Feb. 25, 1873) on which the tenor is assumed to have been born (he was the 18th or 19th of 21 children, most of whom did not survive infancy, and his parents probably did not bother to register his birth).

Pablo's Strad. Slonimsky, who was born in St. Petersburg on April 27, 1894 (according to unchecked information), does his sleuthing from a book-lined study on Boston's Beacon Street. He attributes his success as a detective to his refusal to trust authorities. But even Slonimsky can err. He "feels disgraced" by the fact that he reprinted the story that Queen Isabella II of Spain gave Violinist Pablo de Sarasate a Stradivarius when he was ten (actually, as Slonimsky later learned, Sarasate bought the Strad himself when he was 22). And Slonimsky's new dictionary contains another error of which he is still unaware: Rumanian Pianist Dinu Lipatti died of what his doctor called lympho-granulomatosis (Hodgkin's disease), not of rheumatoid arthritis.

* Named for its first compiler, U.S. Lexicographer and Editor Theodore Baker (1851-1934).

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