Stanley Sadie

• 1. Introduction

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  Stanley John Sadie spent the better part of three decades turning a nine-volume reference work into a twenty-volume monument that reshaped how the world studies music. Born on the 30th of October 1930 in Wembley, he would become the editor who took the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and transformed it so completely that it required an entirely new name: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The 1980 publication stands as one of the most ambitious editorial projects in the history of musicology.

  Sadie was not simply an administrator of other people's knowledge. He was a trained Cambridge musicologist, a working music critic for nearly two decades at The Times, the editor of The Musical Times for twenty years, and a man who harbored a long-standing desire to write a large biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His death in Cossington, Somerset, on the 21st of March 2005, came only weeks after a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He was seventy-four years old.

  What drove a man of that scholarly range to devote decades to editing rather than authorship? And what does it mean that his biggest solo writing project arrived in print the year after he died? Those are the questions that run through Stanley Sadie's life.

• 2. Cambridge and Early Formation

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  Sadie studied music privately for three years with Bernard Stevens before arriving at Cambridge. At Gonville and Caius College, he read music under Thurston Dart, a scholar who would later be counted alongside Sadie himself as one of Britain's leading musicologists of the post-World War II generation.

  He moved quickly through the Cambridge system. A Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music both came in 1953, a Master of Arts followed in 1957, and a PhD in 1958. His doctoral dissertation focused on mid-eighteenth-century British chamber music, a subject that placed him deep in historical repertoire rather than contemporary trends.

  Before Cambridge, Sadie had been educated at St Paul's School in London. After finishing his doctorate, he joined the teaching staff at Trinity College of Music, London, where he remained from 1957 until 1965. That eight-year teaching post overlapped with the beginning of his journalism career, a combination that would define his working method: never in a single lane.

• 3. The Critic at The Times

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  In 1964, Sadie became music critic for The Times, a position he held until 1981. For seventeen years, he wrote about live performance for one of Britain's most prominent newspapers, developing the ear and the clarity of judgment that a working critic needs to survive in daily journalism.

  After 1981, his commitments to the Grove dictionary and other scholarly projects grew too large to allow him to continue at The Times. He shifted to contributing reviews to the Financial Times instead. The pressures of the Grove editorial project had simply overtaken his journalism schedule.

  In parallel with his newspaper work, Sadie served as editor of The Musical Times from 1967 until 1987, a tenure of twenty years. That journal is one of the oldest music periodicals in the world, and steering it for two decades while simultaneously working on one of the largest reference projects in music history is a measure of the pace at which he operated. His involvement with the Man and Music volumes, accompanying a television series that ran from 1989 to 1993, extended that editorial reach into the visual medium as well.

• 4. Building The New Grove

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  In 1970, Sadie took on the editorship of what was then planned as simply the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. What he produced by 1980 was something so different in scale and ambition that it earned a new title entirely.

  The original Grove had run to nine volumes. Under Sadie's oversight, the dictionary grew to twenty volumes. The transformation was not cosmetic; the editorial scope, the range of contributors, and the depth of individual entries had all expanded to a degree that made the old edition obsolete by comparison. The published work was called The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and it is now counted as the first edition under that name.

  Sadie did not stop there. He was also a major force behind the second edition of New Grove, published in 2001, which grew further still to twenty-nine volumes. Beyond those two landmark editions, he oversaw an entire family of specialist dictionaries. The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments appeared in three volumes in 1984. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, edited with H. Wiley Hitchcock, ran to four volumes in 1986. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera filled four volumes in 1992. The one-volume Grove Concise Dictionary of Music came out in 1988. Each of those projects required its own editorial apparatus, its own network of specialists, its own decisions about what to include and what to leave out.

• 5. Mozart and the Unfinished Biography

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  Sadie had told his colleague Neal Zaslaw that he wanted to write what he called a 'big book' about Mozart's life. The popularity of his separately published essay on the composer, drawn from the Grove Dictionary, had demonstrated that there was genuine readership for his voice on the subject.

  The result, Mozart: The Early Years, was published in 2006, the year after Sadie died. It was intended as the first volume of a larger biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Zaslaw contributed a foreword to the final publication, carrying the project through to print after Sadie's death.

  The book's posthumous status makes it unusual in Sadie's output. Most of what he produced was collaborative by design, the result of editing and commissioning rather than sole authorship. Mozart: The Early Years is the clearest surviving evidence of what Sadie might have written had he not devoted so much of his career to the immense labor of the Grove enterprise. He was also an accomplished bassoonist, a fact that sits quietly alongside the biography of a composer for whom the woodwind section was a particular source of orchestral color.

• 6. Honors and Affiliations

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  In 1982, Sadie was appointed CBE, Commander of the Order of the British Empire. That same year, the University of Leicester awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters.

  The Royal College of Music elected him an honorary fellow in 1994, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he had studied under Thurston Dart, did the same. The return of that particular honor to his undergraduate institution closes a loop that began in the early 1950s.

  His professional affiliations ranged across the major scholarly societies in the field. He served as president of the Royal Musical Association from 1989, and as president of the International Musicological Society from 1992 until 1997. He became a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society in 1996, and was a member of The Critics' Circle. In 2005, the year he died, Sadie became a Handel Prize laureate, an honor named for a composer whose music would have been central to the British chamber music repertoire he wrote about in his doctoral dissertation nearly five decades earlier.