Stanley Sadie

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Stanley Sadie CBE (October 30, 1930-March 21, 2005) was a British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), which was published as the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Sadie was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read music under Thurston Dart (BA, MusB 1953, MA 1957, PhD 1958). His doctoral dissertation was on mid-eighteenth-century British chamber music. After Cambridge, he taught at Trinity College of Music, London (1957-1965).

Sadie then turned to music journalism, becoming music critic for The Times (1964-1981), and contributing reviews to the Financial Times after 1981, when he had to leave his position and The Times because of his commitments to the Grove and other scholarly work. He was editor of The Musical Times 1967-1987.

From 1970 Sadie was editor of what was planned to be the 6th edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980). Sadie oversaw major changes to the Dictionary, which grew from nine volumes to 20, and was published as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and is now referred to as the first edition under that name. He was also an important force behind the second (or seventh) edition (2001), which grew further to 29 volumes. Sadie also oversaw a major expansion of the Grove franchise, editing the one-volume Grove Concise Dictionary of Music (1988), and several spinoff dictionaries, such as the New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (three volumes, 1984), the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, (with H. Wiley Hitchcock, four volumes, 1986), and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (four volumes, 1992). He also edited composer biographies based on the entries in Grove.

Outside his work on the Grove Dictionaries, Sadie was a renowned Mozart scholar, publishing several books. He also was instrumental in saving the Mayfair house where George Frideric Handel once lived, turning it into the Handel House Museum.

He was president of the Royal Musical Association (1989-94), and of the International Musicological Society (1992-97).

Sadie died at his home in Cossington, Somerset on 21 March 2005, of amytrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), which had been diagnosed only a few weeks earlier. He was survived by his second wife, their son and daughter, and two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.