Talk:Rescue opera

Problems with this term

I have rewritten parts of this article. It's important to realize that 'rescue opera' is a term with a special history, rather than a stylistic genre. Charlton has the best part of a page in Grove explaining this and I recommend reading it. --Kleinzach 05:18, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I recommend reading the many, many books that describe it as a genre. I'm partially reverting you, and I hope you'll do the rest of the job yourself. Next time, please consider that Charlton is not a god of music history and his word does not defeat everyone else's. Thank you. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 05:33, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Please read Charlton. None of the composers mentioned in the article designated their works as 'rescue operas'. You can check that. Sources other than Charlton are included in the article. Also cool down, and remember WP:CIVIL. Rescue opera is complicated and such articles should edited with a level head. --Kleinzach 05:57, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I've read Charlton. Please read the many, many books that describe "rescue opera" as a genre. (Your contention that we can't describe something as a genre unless its exponents call their works that is quite clearly silly.) Next time, please consider that Charlton is not a god of music history and his word does not defeat everyone else's. Thank you. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 06:17, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

"Exponents"? Do you mean composers? Are you suggesting that composers don't know what genre tradition their works belong to? I don't edit war so I am not reverting your changes. Future editors (since there don't seem to be any other ones here at the moment) can perhaps consider what 'genre' means, whether a non-historical one with no tradition and no stylistic unity can be called as such. --Kleinzach 07:23, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

You know, if you weren't so busy holding up David Charlston as the supreme authority on what is and is not Authentic, you might have read the cited sources which discuss the stylistic techniques and tradition of rescue opera. You might also have considered the idea that the nature of scholarship often consists of drawing connections between historical documents that were not necessarily made at the time, and that the naming of these things is probably the least significant thing about drawing that connection. You think, say, that any historian who describes The Pirates of Penzance as a Savoy opera is automatically inferior? Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 07:49, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Again WP:Civil. What cited sources "discuss the stylistic techniques and tradition of rescue opera". Please name them. --Kleinzach 08:35, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

You keep using that word "civil." I do not think it means what you think it means, and pointing out that you're treating the opinion of one scholar as completely authoritative and better than all other scholars', in complete defiance of WP:RS, is not what it means. In any case, Grout (cited) discusses at length the stylistic characteristics of the opera of this period (we could say that he's talking about a broader inter-period genre - things like Ossian, ou Les bardes aren't rescue operas - but unlike rescue opera, "1785-1815 French opera" isn't really recognized as a genre, and your contention that rescue opera has "no tradition and no stylistic unity" is quite plainly and ridiculously false), and dozens of other sources (not all cited, because there is a finite number of hours in my day) refer to the genre as a genre, speaking of its beginnings, characteristics, etc. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 08:52, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Are there any reliable sources (other than Grove and Oxford Music) that discuss the term 'rescue opera' rather than just using the word 'genre' casually as a shorthand for a group of operas with similar themes? If there are please quote them (as I have quoted Charlton and Kennedy) so we know what their opinions are. --Kleinzach 09:07, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

What's wrong with the Oxford Dictionary of Opera? (See also Smith, quoted in the article.) I mean, you'd think it would be a good idea to look at the sources already cited before asking for more as if there weren't any. It would also be helpful if you could cite a secondary source dismissing all these scholarly texts' use of "genre"; your personal opinion is not sufficient. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:17, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

'Rescue opera' as an unhistorical term/inauthentic genre

For the record:

Rescue opera is an unhistorical term of limited usefulness. It is not an authentic genre like 'opera buffa', and was coined only in the late 19th or early 20th century. In origin it has been traced to German criticism, as part of the tendency to label musical phenomenon in a single word . . . The very vagueness of the term's pedigree has, in part, the obvious result that no two published definitions of 'rescue opera' in English will be found to agree, and no one definition will satisfactorily cover the range of operas that are called as evidence of a 'rescue' tendency in the later 18th century. This is because to take the concept 'rescue' as a cardinal criterion is false to dramatic history. In the broadest sense, a 'rescue' is a form of happy dramatic resolution, or turn of events, that can be related to the deus ex machina of classical opera seria. (Significantly no one has proposed a category of deus ex machina operas.)

— David Charlton (1992), 'Rescue opera', The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie

And here is another reliable source that doesn't call 'rescue opera' a genre:

Rescue opera. Type of opera, or opéra comique, popular in France after the revolution, which the hero or heroine is saved from some dire fate by human heroism.

— Michael Kennedy (1992), 'Rescue opera', The Oxford Dictionary of Music

If there are any factual errors in Charlton (or Kennedy), please point them out. Otherwise the article should not contradict what we normally regard as the most reliable of opera sources. --Kleinzach 07:23, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Can you point to a guideline on the "most reliable of opera sources"? (WikiProject Opera calls it the "leading reference work," but that in no way says or even implies that its word is forever and ever law and rescue opera isn't a genre you plebeian.) Because Wikipedia's normal guidelines for reliable sources don't make the distinction that "encyclopedias are reliable" and "non-encyclopedias with which Kleinzach disagrees" are not.

There don't need to be factual errors. It's an opinion. Other (indeed, seemingly most) scholars have different opinions. Checking them out might be a good idea. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 07:49, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

If the term 'rescue opera' did not exist until the end 19th/early 20th centuries, that is a fact not an opinion. (BTW I have three opera references on my desk - the two Oxfords and Grove - and yes, I can Google as well.)--Kleinzach 08:39, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Then it looks like it's your lucky day, because I never claimed that the term was contemporary - indeed, I rephrased the lead to make it more clear that the term was recent. If your quibble was only over the name, why have you been going on and on and on? Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 08:55, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

If you agree that the term is not contemporary, why are you insisting (contra Charlton and Kennedy) that it is an authentic genre? Also why did you delete the Charlton reference from the List of opera genres here? --Kleinzach 09:15, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Because "the name for this genre was coined more recently than the creation of its contents" and "these operas have no similarity or tradition and are not a genre" is an idiotic equivalence. I hope that's not what you're saying, but I'm having trouble interpreting these bizarre comments any other way, so could you please clarify? Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:21, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Just to be clear: The two quotes above ("the name for this genre was coined more recently than the creation of its contents" and "these operas have no similarity or tradition and are not a genre") were not written by me. --Kleinzach 09:32, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Oooh just one more before I go to bed. If you prefer, you can use "the term is not contemporary" and "no tradition and no stylistic unity," which is also an idiotic equivalence, and has the added benefit of being what you actually wrote rather than an accurate paraphrase. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:35, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Another deletion of a citation from this article

Another quotation from Grove has been (partially) deleted from the article, see [1].

The edit summary by Roscelese reads "no real debate about whether or not it's a genre, so contention that it isn't shouldn't be in lead". Clearly there is a controversy about this matter (as can be seen from the discussions above). Enforcing your opinion by deleting citations (as with the List of opera genres [2]) is not helpful to the editorial process. --Kleinzach 10:03, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Please see WP:LEAD: "notable controversies" can be included, but this isn't a particularly notable controversy, so it belongs in the body and not the lead. If you want, I'll add the text to the appropriate paragraph in the body - it's just that I wanted to include the citation of the date in the lead without dragging in a theory that belongs in the body. (Likewise, if List of opera genres had a sort of "miscellaneous information" column, I would totally support adding that some people don't think it's a genre. But in a list article with no space to discuss different opinions, it is arbitrary and possibly some sort of WP:RS violation to prioritize one scholar's opinion over all these others by excluding the genre and saying, in Wikipedia's voice, that it isn't a real genre.) Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 17:35, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree that the full quote should go in the body, rather than the lead. For the list article, if there is no column for notes, how about adding a footnote with balanced information? The old footnote relied on only one source. What this article really needs is a fuller description of what rescue operas were, with quotes from the plots of the examples. A good article to cite to for this would be Longyear, R. Morgan. "Notes on the Rescue Opera". The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1 (January 1959), pp. 49–66, which clearly describes this as a genre. this article also may give assistance in this expansion. I note, also, that a large number of references call "rescue opera" a genre: See, e.g., this and this and this, for example. All the best, -- Ssilvers (talk) 23:29, 28 January 2011 (UTC)