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Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Bayreuth canon/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured list nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was promoted by The Rambling Man 15:47, 13 February 2010 [1].

Bayreuth canon

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Nominator(s): Peter cohen (talk) 16:54, 8 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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I am nominating this for featured list because I now believe that the article is as complete as is appropriate for this self-contined topic. I have just closed and archived a peer review Wikipedia:Peer review/Bayreuth canon/archive1 carried out by an experienced reviewer and creator of featured content who has good knowledge of the subject of this article. He has not sought to discourage me from applying for featured list status.

Rather than being in essay form, the article consists mainly of a definition list and a table giving performance details of the ten members of the canon. I therefore think that featured list is the way to go.

This is a self-nomination, my first for featured list though I have contributed as second author of a featured article and took some part in resolving issues at FAC. I am also an occasional contributer at FAC and related pages.Peter cohen (talk) 16:54, 8 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support: An important addition to the stock of Wagneriana.
    • No disambiguation links
    • All ext. links working
    • Image licences OK and alt text present. The alt text is somewhat overdetailed and could be trimmed.
    • In the table the information is slightly obscured by a preponderance of inline citations - every cell has at least one. A possible remedy is to group each line's citations in a references column - see List of works for the stage by Wagner for the general idea. This might make the table seem a little less cluttered.

Brianboulton (talk) 17:00, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

      • Thanks, Brian. I've trimmed the alt text a little. As far as the refs are concerned, I started putting them in all the individual boxes after seeing other FLs laid out like that. All the links in the last two columns are to the Bayreuth stats page. I could maybe ref the column headers and clear the boxes. As I don't get all the information in each row from the same place, I am hesitant to have a ref box at the end of rows that then mention several sources without being clear which says what. Let's see what other people say.--Peter cohen (talk) 00:51, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support: Like Brian Bolton, I find this important and useful addition to the information on both Wagner's operas and the Bayreuth Festival. The information is clearly presented and complete and very well referenced. I'm not wild about the yellow fields and am not sure how useful they are (especially since yellow as a 'code' is serving two different functions - "introduced by RW" and "part of the Ring Cycle" with disambiguation coming from the † ‡ symbols. Perhaps use a different colour for one of the two functions or just use the symbols? But that's a very minor point. Voceditenore (talk) 11:14, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Support, all issues resolved. Dabomb87 (talk) 22:06, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved issues, Dabomb87 (talk)
Comments from Dabomb87 (talk · contribs) This looks like a very well done list. I don't know much about the content area, so most of my comments are related to style and formatting:
  • I don't necessarily think that this article should be merged into another, but can you convince me that it would be unreasonable to integrate the meat of this article into, say, Bayreuth Festival?
    • The phrase has a semi-independent existence e.g. in a Canadian concert programme: "(Wagner's other historical opera is Rienzi, which he didn’t quite disown, but excluded it from the “Bayreuth canon”.)"; when detailing an opera house's programme for this year: "The last of Wagner’s early trio of operas that failed to make the cut for inclusion in the Bayreuth canon is a grandiose saga about struggling for power in 14th century Rome;" In discussing the impact of the Musical Director of the major opera house in Chile "the Teatro Municipal has now done all ten works of the ‘Bayreuth canon’ (six plus the Ring)". None of these instances mention the festival per se. People who have read any of these or the many similar quotes would want to identify what is meant by the phrase. A second factor is that such facts as Solti's being the first conductor to record the canon in the studio is appropriate to record here, but not in an article on the festival itself. Of course, the term takes it's name from the festival and usese the pseudo-religious that has grown up around Bayreuth. These operas were canonised by Wagner and his heirs by being staged at the "Shrine of St. Wagner" as Mark Twain called it; Wagnerites go on a pilgrimage there as Twain and many others have written, and Parsifal "consecrated" the stage of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus as Wagner himself said.--Peter cohen (talk) 13:59, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Can you add perhaps a sentence or two giving a basic definition of Bayreuth Festival (what is it, where and when is it held)? It is referred to several times so I don't think readers should have to click away to the main article to find out the basic gist of it.
  • Per the MOS, image captions that are sentence fragments should not have sentence-ending punctuation (i.e. period / full stop). Sample: "Richard Wagner and his second wife Cosima, who established the Bayreuth canon."
  • Bold is normally used only for the name of the article so I don't think the components of the canon should be bolded.
  • "a total of 2442 performances have" "a total of" seems redundant.
  • Any reason that some operas have English translations and others do not?
    • The four I've not translated have the same names as their protagonists. (Actually it should really be Tannhauser and the Song Contest at the Wartburg but nobody uses the full name in normal contexts.)--Peter cohen (talk) 14:26, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • The article uses a mixture of day month year and month day, year date formats. Use one format throughout. If you use the month-first format note that a comma follows the day.
  • In most of your references you have "accessed on <date>" but one has "viewed <date>". Was this intentional? Dabomb87 (talk) 02:00, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your comments. I shall deal with them point by point above.--Peter cohen (talk) 13:59, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ps. It's useful having someone do the nitpicky stuff and those who don't understand the topic are often best palced for that task.--Peter cohen (talk) 14:26, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Support Mm40 (talk) 12:11, 12 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved comments from Mm40 (talk)
Comments from Mm40 (talk)
  • I'd feel more comfortable supporting if you recruited an experienced copy-editor (read: not me) to go over this article with a fine-toothed comb. The prose seems, for the lack of a better word, clumsy in places. Even if this is promoted before a copy-edit is done, the article would benefit from one afterwards
  • The grammar in the first alt text needs to be checked: "A couple are shown" -> "A couple is shown", "and is sat sideways" -> "and is sitting sideways".
  • Some introduction to Wagner would be nice; nothing major, just nationality and lifespan.
  • "the directorship of members of his family"
  • Remove the space after the colon
  • On the sentence beginning "Wagner dubbed the opera", it's a bit odd that you're providing of the translation of the translation, if you understand what I'm saying. You might want to cut out "which opera producer Mike Ashman interprets as meaning a "festival work to consecrate a stage""
    • Ive reworded it slightly. The translation is Ashman's and then I have paraphrased his gloss on it where he is at pains to downplay the quasi-religious interpretation and play up the financial one. (There are various quasi-religious practices that have developed around Parsifal such as not applauding the first act that includes a Communion scene which Ashman argues against.)--Peter cohen (talk) 23:05, 11 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • "the highly influential one" makes it sound like the reader knows about this new production, you might just remove the part I quoted
    • Ive removed the "highly". This is probably the most famous production of the opera and would be familiar to Wagnerites. The Beckett ref at the end of the sentence is to its being influential.
  • "but over a much extended timescale" -> "but over an extended timescale"
  • Can you combine the last two sentences of the entry on the third component?
  • The first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph could be made to connect better. Currently, it sounds like the two ideas are completely unrelated
  • Can "three earlier completed operas" be reworded simply as "first three operas"?
  • Referring to Solti, how can a conductor have recorded pieces?
  • The table key is formatted a bit differently than I usually see (this is purely stylistic, so feel free to ignore me). Generally, One column has the symbol with color and the other has an explanation of its meaning. Also, the explanations generally don't include the columns the symbol is used in.
    • reworked
  • Again, this is stylistic, but consider 1) centering the "Opera" column for consistency, and 2) making symbols in the table subscript to remove table clutter
References
Thanks for your input. I think everything is addressed.--Peter cohen (talk) 00:23, 12 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Support, now that the issues below have been sorted out. GuillaumeTell

  • I've added a heading "Components" to create an extra section which a) makes the lead shorter and b) moves the TOC up. Hope that's uncontroversial.
  • I'll be happy to do some copy-editing as suggested above and may be able to fit that in later today. I've been involved in copy-editing some other articles on their way to FA: William Shakespeare, Her Majesty's Theatre, H.M.S. Pinafore, a few others, and am familiar with the subject and with WP:Wagner.
    • I'm now scrutinising the article and have immediately hit a few problems:
      1. The word canon might be unfamiliar to some readers. WP and Wictionary definitions use the sense intended here only for literary works (Shakespeare et al) but not musical ones - indeed, the word "canon" in music is defined only as the musical form. Perhaps the WP article, at least, might need to be changed?
        • Western canon links the Wikidictionary entry where the meaning is buried down the list. At the Wikipedia entry canon it is the third entry we are talking about. This search turnd up a few uses of "musical canon" in this sense. You could alter the article in that way. I'm not sure that decisions on the content of other articles are reason to hold up this FLC. Nor can I see it as particularly helpful to link either the wikipedia or wikktionary articles on canon when the relevant meaning is some way down the list in each case.--Peter cohen (talk) 21:34, 12 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      2. The first sentence refers to "music dramas or operas". However, "music drama" redirects to gesamtkunstwerk, which says that Wagner disapproved of the term. Would it not be better to say something like "total works of art (gesamtkunstwerks)" and forget about music dramas?
      3. But then, did Wagner mean this term to be used of all the works in the Bayreuth canon? Weren't the earliest three termed Romantische Opern?
        • I've opted to remove the reference altogether. I've looked at Millington's article in Grove which talks about Wagner trying out "Festspiel" and "Handlung" and asking readers of his article Über die Benennung ‘Musikdrama’ to come up with suggestions. SP I don't think we can say that Wagner was that happy with GKW either. Im sure I saw somewhere that he rechsristened the romantic operas as dramas.--Peter cohen (talk) 21:34, 12 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
      4. I'm not very happy with "Attendance at the festival is often considered in mystic terms as a pilgrimage by Wagnerians." What are mystic terms? What is a Wagnerian? How about "Many devotees of Wagner (known as Wagnerians) regard attendance at the festival (?Festival?) as akin to a pilgrimage"? - that is, if this formulation fits the reference!
    • I've now been through the rest of the article - added a few commas, moved things around a bit, altered some of the phraseology, done some clarification, put in another heading, etc. I don't think that there's anything controversial there, but do contact me if I've messed anything up. I haven't touched the tables! --GuillaumeTell 18:21, 12 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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