Arthur David Jacobs (14 June 1922 – 13 December 1996) was an English musicologist, music critic, teacher, librettist and translator.
Among his many books, two of the best known are his Penguin Dictionary of Music, which was reprinted in several editions between 1958 and 1996, and his biography of Arthur Sullivan, which was praised by critics in Britain and America.
Jacobs taught at the Royal Academy of Music, at Huddersfield Polytechnic, and at universities in the US, Canada, and Australia from 1964 to 1985 and translated more than 20 operas into English.
[6] For The Musical Times, between 1949 and 1996, Jacobs wrote on a wide variety of musical topics, including the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Three Choirs Festival, Russian song, The Gypsy Baron, Thespis, the Metropolitan Opera, Leonard Bernstein, Così fan tutte, Trial by Jury, Glyndebourne, Otto Klemperer, and composers from Handel to César Franck to Elgar to Janáček.
He loved to challenge received opinions and liked nothing so much as to disconcert a reader or colleague with an outlandish view", adding that "he was also generous to a fault and an absolute fanatic in the matter of giving the young the wherewithal to improve themselves".
He was a good linguist himself and translated more than 20 operas … in a fluent and direct style that sometimes betrayed (though not often inaptly) his early love of Gilbert and Sullivan.
"[2] His English translations of German, Italian, French and Russian opera libretti included Berg's Lulu, Berlioz's, Benvenuto Cellini, Donizetti's, L'elisir d'amore, Gluck's Iphigenie en Aulide, Handel's Riccardo Primo, Monteverdi's, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Richard Strauss's Die schweigsame Frau, Rossini's La Cenerentola, L'italiana in Algeri, and Il Turco in Italia, Schoenberg's Erwartung, Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades,[4] and Verdi's Don Carlos.