Talk:Pygmalion (Benda)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Not moved Consensus appears to be against the move at this time Alpha_Quadrant    (talk)  20:25, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

Pygmalion (opera) → Pygmalion (Benda) – This duodrama is of Georg Benda and Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter, and there are more than one opera with the same title. I don't know if I should choose either this, Pygmalion (Gotter), or Pygmalion (Benda and Gotter). However, the title chosen must be mentioned before the argument is posted. --Gh87 (talk) 04:20, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Oppose – The current name is wholly compliant with WikiProject Opera/Article guidelines. Besides, I'm not aware of any oper article which uses its librettist as a disambiguator. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:58, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The disambiguation page Pygmalion has opera references and may help you re-think your argument. You may strike and insert at anytime and anywhere.  --Gh87 (talk) 07:29, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The disambiguation guidelines I mentioned allow for an infinite number of works without the need to move any. The opera titles mention at Pygmalion follow those guidelines, and I don't see the need to abandon them now. If Karol Kurpiński's lost opera Pygmalion gets an article, they can be applied to its title as well. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 09:43, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This is a complex case, but it has not been described well enough for editors to make an informed decision. It would help, for example, if it were noted that the title of the other opera article disambiguated with "(opera)" has an "i" instead of a "y": Pigmalion (opera). Let's give the folks clear information, guys. I will oppose until that is fixed. N oetica Tea? 10:50, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Opera?
I wonder if Pygmalion can be properly styled a "opera": indeed, it is a 18th-century melodrama, i.e. "a technique of combining spoken recitation with short pieces of accompanying music". Opera seems quite a different genre, and probably this article ought to be renamed "Pygmalion (melodrama)", or something like that.--Jeanambr (talk) 15:55, 27 June 2016 (UTC)
 * There are a number of opera subgenres and specific works which are difficult to categorise. Benda's work is certainly not an opera as normally understood, and that should be further elaborated in the article. However, I think removing the opera-related categories is not helpful nor is changing the disambiguator – that is merely cosmetic. More importantly, what do reputable sources say about the work? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 10:23, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I do not know much about the work itself; about the genre Annie Janeiro Randall (Music in Weimar circa 1780: Decentering Text, Decentering Goethe, in Burkhard Henke, Susanne Kord and Simon Richter (eds), Unwrapping Goethe's Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge, Rochester, NY, Camden House, 2000, pp. 106–107) describes melodrama as "a musico-dramatic genre featuring intensely declaimed monologues in which text is typically delivered via underscored speech rather than singing". She writes, in particular, that "Rousseau's scène lyrique, Pygmalion (Lyrical Scene, Pygmalion, music by Coignet, with two numbers by Rousseau) was the catalyst for the 1770s flowering of the melodrama genre in Germany", and that "Georg Benda also set a translation of Rousseau's Pygmalion in 1779 in Gotha". She finally reports the opinion of Mozart, who declared himself "absolutely delighted" at the genre. "You know, of course, – he wrote in a letter of his – that there is no singing in it, only recitation to which the music is like a sort of obbligato accompanimento to a recitative". Much the same statements (including the quote from Mozart) can be found in Giorgio Pestelli's L'età di Mozart e di Beethoven (Storia della Musica, Volume 7), Turin, EDT, 1991, p. 69. Pestelli just adds that the genre was so foreign to the period Italian habits and tastes that the Italian word to term it, "melologo", has been created by scholars only in modern times.--Jeanambr (talk) 22:01, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
 * That's what I gathered from reading the article you linked, Melodrama. Category:Melodramas are a subcategory of Category:Operas by genre, so I don't see the need to change the disambiguator for this article. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:57, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
 * You may be right, but if opera "is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (libretto) and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting", shouldn't melodrama (where, to quote Mozart again, "there is no singing") be removed from its subcategories? That's all from me. Cheers.--Jeanambr (talk) 06:38, 29 June 2016 (UTC)