Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera

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Composer of the Month:	edit · history · watch · refresh
The composer of the month for April is Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) The following articles on his operettas are minimal stubs: Barbe-bleue, Ba-ta-clan, Les deux aveugles, L'île de Tulipatan, Le mariage aux lanternes, while the following pages could all benefit from more attention: La belle Hélène, Les brigands, Geneviève de Brabant, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Madame Favart, La fille du tambour-major, M. Choufleuri restera chez lui le . . ., Orpheus in the Underworld, Le pont des soupirs, La Périchole, Robinson Crusoé, The Tales of Hoffmann, La vie parisienne.

Composer of the Month:

The composer of the month for April is Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

The following articles on his operettas are minimal stubs: Barbe-bleue, Ba-ta-clan, Les deux aveugles, L'île de Tulipatan, Le mariage aux lanternes,

while the following pages could all benefit from more attention: La belle Hélène, Les brigands, Geneviève de Brabant, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Madame Favart, La fille du tambour-major, M. Choufleuri restera chez lui le . . ., Orpheus in the Underworld, Le pont des soupirs, La Périchole, Robinson Crusoé, The Tales of Hoffmann, La vie parisienne.

WikiProject Opera Work in Progress:	edit · history · watch · refresh
Major revision: List of important operas (GuillaumeTell, Vivaverdi, Kleinzach, Moreschi, Folantin) Prospective good articles (GA): Prospective featured articles (FA): None at present, but Agrippina (opera) is in peer review here. Listing as an Opera Project Work in Progress* follows adoption by at least five members of the project.* Listing as a Prospective Good Article* or Featured Article follows adoption by at least two members.*

WikiProject Opera Work in Progress:

edit · history · watch · refresh

Major revision: List of important operas
(GuillaumeTell, Vivaverdi, Kleinzach, Moreschi, Folantin)

Prospective good articles (GA):

Prospective featured articles (FA): None at present, but Agrippina (opera) is in peer review here.

Listing as an Opera Project Work in Progress follows adoption by at least five members of the project.
Listing as a Prospective Good Article or Featured Article follows adoption by at least two members.

1 Scope
2 Project listing
3 Descendant WikiProjects
4 Similar WikiProjects
5 Participants
6 Getting started
7 Can you help?
8 Can you translate?
9 Article titles
10 Guidelines
11 Articles
12 Templates
- 12.1 Opera (title) template
13 Categories
14 Stubs
15 Navigation box templates
16 User and project box templates

Shortcut: WP:WPO

[edit] Scope

This WikiProject encompasses

articles on opera composers and librettists
articles on individual operas
articles on opera singers
articles on opera houses and opera companies (sometimes but not always the same)
articles on all genres of opera from grand opera to operetta
articles on opera recordings
articles on other opera-related topics

[edit] Project listing

Opera is an independent WikiProject listed under Performing Arts.

It was started by Viajero in June 2004. There were about 1,835 articles on opera, published and under development by the project, in May 2006.

[edit] Descendant WikiProjects

There are two descendant WikiProjects: WikiProject Operetta and WikiProject Gilbert and Sullivan.

[edit] Similar WikiProjects

Similar WikiProjects are WikiProject Classical music and WikiProject Composers.

[edit] Participants

Viajero
Wetman
BaronLarf
DrG
Antandrus
DrGeoduck
Alexs letterbox
Captbaritone
Kleinzach
Jsch
GuillaumeTell
Buondelmonte
Whfropera
Yid613
Museslave
Inge-Lyubov
Mak emi
Adam Cuerden
Moreschi
starshinesfeli
Mela dina
Wootking
Figaro
Gerry Lynch
Tnmusikherr
Papertiger96
Ehsiao
Fireplace
Jahenderson
Folantin
Doublea
OperaDevel
ForDorothy
Scott Andrew Hutchins
James Kilbourne
Heimstern Läufer
Rahelisdolentis
Klingoncowboy4
Kyoko
Lini – as of December 2006, interested in opera of the Baroque era
acs10
NickBigD
Voxclamans
Schnuckiputzi
Megazodiac
NewYork1956
Emperor7

[edit] Getting started

Welcome to the WikiProject Opera!

If you are new to Wikipedia, the first thing to do is to join. See Wikipedia:How to log in. There is also an FAQ at Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ.

We would also be delighted if you signed on to the project (above). You may also like to see our discussion page Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Opera.

[edit] Can you help?

We need articles (or stubs) on the following opera directors:

August Everding, Peter Konwitschny, Günther Schneider-Siemssen, Graham Vick

And the following contemporary singers:

Stefania Bonfadelli, Larissa Diadkova, Angela Denoke, Vladimir Galouzine, Cecilia Gasdia, Anja Harteros, Catherine Naglestad, David Pittman-Jennings, László Polgár, Christoph Prégardien, Dorothea Röschmann

And the following important 20th-century singers:

Anita Cerquetti, Zara Dolukhanova, Elena Gerhardt, Hildegard Hillebrecht, Sandor Konya, Milizia Korjus, Nina Koshetz, Erich Kunz, Fernando de Lucia, Blanche Marchesi, Antonina Nezhdanova, Karl Ridderbusch, Maria Stader, Riccardo Stracciari, Jennie Tourel, Jean-Emil Vanni-Marcoux

[edit] Can you translate?

Excellent material is available in the German Wikipedia, as well as the French and Italian. The following pages on composers have substantial information, which would be worth including in our articles:

German pages: Pasquale Anfossi, August Bungert, Johann Hiller, Wilhelm Kienzl, Eduard Künneke, Albert Lortzing, Aribert Reimann, Max von Schillings

French pages: Reynaldo Hahn

Please note that we now have articles (or stubs) on almost all the composers listed in the Opera Corpus.

[edit] Article titles

[edit] Operas: original vs English translation

The standard practice is to use English titles of operas for article names and in articles when it is common convention (e.g. The Marriage of Figaro. The Magic Flute, The Barber of Seville). This reflects the Wikipedia convention use English in titles when possible.

Nevertheless most operas are performed in English-speaking countries under their original names (e.g. Così fan tutte and Der Freischütz) and English titles for them should not be invented.

Titles in languages using a non-Latin alphabet (usually Russian in practice) are customarily listed under an English equivalent (a translation or a transliteration), without diacritics (diacritics can, however, be used in the body of the article). If necessary a redirect under the original title will point to the article with the English name.

[edit] Operas commonly known by English names

A list of translated English names

[edit] Operas: original language titles

When listing operas by their original language title, care should be taken to respect the rules of that language, including spelling, capitalization and accents.

Capitalization rules vary. Whereas in English, we capitalize all the major words (e.g. ' I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky'), in Italian and French, only proper names are capitalized (e.g. 'Il diluvio universale', 'Ugo, conte di Parigi', 'Le nozze di Figaro', 'Les mamelles de Tirésias', 'Les Indes galantes', 'Les contes d'Hoffmann', 'La vie parisienne'). In German, only nouns are capitalized (e.g. 'Die lustige Witwe', 'Die tote Stadt', 'Die ägyptische Helena').

Accents should be included in (Latin alphabet) titles.

Redirects should be included whenever possible to make the articles as accessible as possible. For example, 'La bohème' should have redirects from 'La boheme', 'La Bohème', 'La Boheme', 'Boheme' and 'Bohème' while 'La traviata' should have redirects from 'La Traviata' and 'Traviata'.

 
#REDIRECT [[La bohème]]

[edit] Naming conventions page

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (operas) is a formal, public page which summarizes the rules above.

[edit] Operas: avoiding ambiguity

To avoid ambiguity the word opera, or the name of the composer, may be added to the title in parentheses. For example Macbeth (opera) refers to the work by Verdi to distinguish it from Macbeth which is the play by Shakespeare. Likewise Otello (Rossini) is differentiated from the more famous work of Verdi which is simply Otello.

[edit] Opera houses and opera companies

We use the English name of an opera house or an opera company if one exists and is used on the official website, otherwise we use the official name in the local language. In accordance with Wikipedia naming conventions, we adopt the shortest possible distinctive name, i.e. La Scala (not Teatro alla Scala or La Scala, Milan), because there is only one La Scala. However, in some cases we have to disambiguate: there is more than one Teatro Regio in Italy, so we have Teatro Regio Parma, Teatro Regio Torino etc.

Although an opera house and an opera company may be separate legal entities, we often treat them as one for convenience (e.g. La Scala). This facilitates writing articles on singers etc.

However, when an opera company is associated with two or more houses (e.g. Opéra National de Paris which performs at both the Opéra Bastille and the Palais Garnier) we need separate articles. Moreover, there are cases where the history of the theatre as well as the company are extensive and complex. In these cases, two articles are called for (e.g. Royal Opera House Covent Garden (London), which has more than 200 years of mixed history, and Royal Opera, London which was created only in 1946).

[edit] Guidelines

[edit] The New Grove Dictionary of Opera

The leading reference work on opera in the English language is the New Grove Dictionary of Opera edited by Stanley Sadie and others. This should, in general, be followed for style.

[edit] Articles on specific operas

Articles may be divided into an introduction, performance history, list of roles, synopsis of the action, and a list of recordings - as appropriate to the opera. (An example of this arrangement is Il campiello.) A navigation box may be provided to enable easy navigation to other operas by the same composer - see the Navigation box templates para below for more details.

The introduction is normally in the present tense:

 
 '''''[title] ''''' (''[English title if needed]'') is an [[opera]] by [[composer]]]. 
 [[Librettist]] wrote the [language used] [[libretto]] [after the book/play/epic poem by...]

The performance history may indicate the popularity of the work and the regularity with which it is performed (in the world as whole) - again as appropriate.

When available, it's helpful to include the cast at the premiere(s) in the list of roles. See the Parsifal article for an example of standard formatting.

[edit] Roles

The norm when listing or referring to roles is to give proper names in their original form (in whatever language), while translating the others into English.

For example the roles in Richard Strauss's Salome are given as: Herodes, Herodias, Salome, Jochanaan, Narraboth, the page of Herodias, first Jew, second Jew (etc.), first Nazarene, second Nazarene (etc.), first soldier, second soldier, a Cappadocian, a slave.

[edit] Arias, duets, choruses etc.

Individual 'numbers' from operas are often referred to in different ways. For example, the song and duet from Act I of Carmen may be called (by the first line) Près des remparts de Séville, or (in translation) Near to the walls of Seville, or as 'the Seguidilla' or as a Chanson et duo.

We recommend referring to the first line in the original language (in italics), followed by the popular title (if there is one) or English translation. Thus Près des remparts de Séville (The Seguidilla) and La donna è mobile (Woman is Fickle).

[edit] Articles on opera singers

Although biographical articles customarily begin with the name of the person, extensive experimentation reveals that the following formula works well for opera singers, as it presents all the important facts in a stylistically pleasing way:

 '''Name''' (dates) [was|is] a [[nation|nationality]]  [[opera]]tic [[soprano|tenor|etc]]
 [whose career spanned|who was closely associated with the roles|etc] 
 [one more additional descriptive line]

(This is obviously adapted for singers who also had significant non-operatic careers.)

We then follow with biographical information, highlighting important operatic debuts and the roles most closely associated with the singer.

If singers are still living, we refer to them in the present tense, but make clear that they are retired and indicate when they were active.

[edit] Nationality in biographical articles

The nationality of composers, singers etc. has sometimes been controversial. Here are three guidelines:

1. Nationality should refer to national identity, in other words the national group with which the person identified, not the state of which the person was a citizen or subject.
2. Nationality should not be anachronistic/retrospective, i.e. for historic figures it should not be defined by present-day borders and states, but by contemporary ones.
3. If there is any doubt about the nationality of an individual, we should be inclusive and use a double designation (e.g. Anglo-German etc.) both in the introduction and in the categories.

[edit] Referring to opera houses

It is a habit in the opera world to refer to performances at certain opera houses simply using the name of the city, ie Milan, Paris, New York, which is an indirect reference to La Scala, Opera Garnier, or the Met. One can link the city name to the relevant city article, ie [[Milan]] or pipe it to the relevant opera house, ie [[|La Scala|Milan]]. The latter solution seems elegant except its violates the Wikie principle of least surprise (it isn't exactly what the reader expects). On the other hand, a singer's Berlin debut is in fact a debut in front of the audience of a given city, not just an appearance in a theater. This issue is compounded by the fact that some big cities have more than one opera house, for which we have separate articles (London, Berlin, and Paris) and that sometimes historical references are made to theaters which no longer exist.

A special note regarding London. The opera world customarily refers to the main opera house there as Covent Garden. However, our article on Covent Garden is on the neighborhood of London of that name, not the opera house. The Royal Opera House is the name of the article, and that is what needs to be linked. A reasonable solution is to refer to them both, ie: [...] at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

[edit] Referring to roles

When talking about singers, the opera world has the habit of referring to roles rather than the names of the opera, ie she made her Met debut as Mimi and went on to sing Liù. This is a useful shorthand, but it is not entirely helpful for people new to opera. It should be kept to a minimum and only used for a small number of very well-known roles, such as the Marschallin, the Countess, or the Queen of the Night.

[edit] Trivia

When it comes to anecdotes, influences on pop culture, and other peripheral content or "trivia", information should only be included in opera articles if it is likely to be of interest to a typical reader of the article. Examples of content which almost always fail this test are: songs, albums, video games, TV shows, or movies that reference the opera. Examples of content passing the test are: Apocalypse Now's use of The Ride of the Valkyries and direct adaptations such as Carmen Jones.

[edit] Spoiler warning tags

The use of spoiler tags before synopsis/plot summaries is regarded as unnecessary and distracting.

[edit] Articles

The main article is of course Opera. Articles indexing operatic topics include:

The opera corpus - an extended list of more than 1300 works by 400 composers
List of operas - an alphabetical list by title of operas with Wikipedia articles
List of important operas - an annotated chronological list of operas which are included for their historical significance or widespread popularity (or both).
List of major opera composers - an annotated compilation of the most frequently named composers on ten lists by opera experts
List of opera houses - lists opera houses by name (or name of performing arts centres in which they are located, if appropriate and best known that way, e.g. Kennedy Center in Washington DC).
List of important opera companies
List of opera festivals
List of opera directors

Then there are articles on the voice types:

[edit] Opera articles present and absent

An opera title list of about 1200 works showing which titles have articles and which do not, major articles still missing are indicated in bold.

Opera Work List

[edit] Good articles

[edit] Featured articles\Featured lists

[edit] Article ranking

The Article ranking table explains opera article ranking and gives examples.

[edit] Templates

Here are some suggested structures:

[edit] Opera (title) template

Introduction: name, language, composer, librettist, general historical and musical context.

==Performance history== from premiere(s) to the present day

==Roles== possibly in tabular form giving name, description, voice type and creator of each role.

==Synopsis==

==Recordings== divided into audio and video (with catalogue numbers when possible)

==Bibliography== for printed works (including ISBN when possible)

==External links== for online resources

For articles that are aiming at either good article or featured article status, the following extra sections are recommended.

==Context and analysis== - puts the work in context and provides a certain degree of sourced analysis.

==Recording history== - recommended for articles on specific composers or for particularly well-known operas.

==References== - provides details of the sources used for the article, with ISBNs where possible.

An extra section entitled Notes for inline citations may also be helpful, depending upon what citing format is being used.

[edit] Categories

Categories are implemented on Wikipedia in an ad hoc fashion, hence tend to be erratic. There is a special page for discussions about categories at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/Categories.

Here are the currently used categories for opera topics:

[edit] Operas

All opera title articles belong in:

Category:Operas

Operas are further categorized by language:

by genre (which should be plural and in the original language to avoid confusion):

and normally by composer, i.e.:

Category:Operas by Giacomo Puccini

Category:Compositions by George Frideric Handel

(N.B. for the purposes of Wikipedia (and indeed other encyclopedias such as Grove), operettas are considered a subcategory of operas, so, for example, The Merry Widow is in Category:Operas as well as Category:Operettas.)

In practice a single opera title article will have many category tags at the foot of the page. The order in which these appear should start with the most specific and end with the most general. For example, Tosca belongs to the following categories:

[[Category:Operas by Giacomo Puccini]]
[[Category:Verismo operas]]
[[Category:Italian-language operas]]
[[Category:Operas]]

Please note that for typographical reasons stubs go before category tags.

[edit] Composers

Category:Opera composers

There is also a Category:Operetta composers though listing under the main category is preferred.

[edit] Singers

Singers are categorized nationality, ie, Category:French opera singers and by voice:

[edit] Opera organizations

There are three main categories:

Opera houses may also be found in other categories, such as city, e.g. Category:Milan, and buildings, e.g. Category:Buildings and structures in Vienna.

[edit] Opera terminology

Opera terms are categorized under:

Category:Opera terminology

[edit] Opera recordings

Audio and video recordings of opera on 78, LP, CD, DVD etc. are categorized under:

Category:Opera recordings

[edit] Miscellaneous

Topics which don't fall under any of the above can always be included in Category:Opera.
(Forms of Chinese opera are listed under Category:Performing arts not opera.)

[edit] Category infobox

Opera Categories on Wikipedia

Opera: Opera genres • Opera by nationality

Operas: Operas by composer • Operas by genre • Operas by language

Composers • Librettists • Directors • Managers • Publishers

Singers: Singers by range • Singers by nationality

Opera houses • Companies • Festivals • Recordings • Terminology • Lists

Opera stubs • Singer stubs

[edit] Stubs

Wikipedia is developed from red links to stubs and then to full articles, so creating stubs is a stage in that process. (It is helpful if the stubs include sufficient information to be viable in their own right, e.g. an opera composer stub should at least include dates, nationality and major works.)

Here are several template messages (c.f. Wikipedia:Template messages) that are used for opera topic stubs:

Composers:

{{composer-stub}}

Opera singers:

{{opera-singer-stub}}

European opera houses

{{euro-struct-stub}}

General opera topics:

{{opera-stub}}

[edit] Navigation box templates

We are developing navigation boxes to make it easier to move from one opera article to another. The first four are for opera genres, opera lists, opera terms and opera categories (see above).

In addition, where there are Wikipedia entries for all or most of a composer's operas, some boxes are being developed in order to enable easy navigation from one to another. The following have been completed and applied to relevant opera articles:

Note that the operas are arranged in chronological order, and years of first performance (or of composition, if the first performance was somewhat after the composer's death) are included. The boxes are normally positioned at the top of the opera articles - see, for example, La traviata.

[edit] User and project box templates

We have an official opera message template indicating the involvement of the project.

A selection of other available user and project box templates is at Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/User and project boxes.

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Categories: WikiProject Performing arts | WikiProject Music