Dean, Winton (Basil)

Dean, Winton (Basil) , English musicologist; b. Birkenhead, March 18, 1916. He pursued studies in the liberal arts at King’s Coll., Cambridge (B.A., 1938; M.A., 1941) and took private music lessons from Philip Radcliffe. In 1965 he became a member of the council and in 1970 vice president of the Royal Musical Assn. In 1965–66 he was the Ernest Bloch Prof, of Music and in 1977 the Regent’s Lecturer at the Univ. of Calif, at Berkeley. He was the Matthew Vassar Lecturer at Vassar Coll. in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1979. In 1979 he became a member of the management committee of the Halle Handel Soc., of which he was vice president from 1991 until being made an honorary member in 1999. In 1975 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy and in 1989 a corresponding member of the American Musicological Soc. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from the Univ. of Cambridge in 1996. In addition to his valuable books, he has contributed articles to various scholarly journals and music periodicals.

Writings

Bizet (London, 1948; 2nd ed., rev., 1965, as Georges Bizet: His Life and Work) 3rd ed., 1976); Carmen (London, 1949); Franck (London, 1950); Introduction to the Music of Bizet (London, 1950); Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959; rev. ed., 1990); Handel and the opéra Seria (Berkeley, 1969); with J. Knapp, Handel’s opéras 1704–1726 (Oxford, 1987;^2nd ed., rev, 1995); Essays on opéra (Oxford, 1990).

Bibliography

N. Fortune, ed., Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of W. D. (Cambridge, 1987).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire