Talk:Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny/Archive 1

Archive 1

English title or German title?

I have entered a request that this article be moved back to its English title on Wikipedia:Requested moves. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 16:47, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

German title, as per language policy on Classical music and opera. I most often hear of this in German form. --Oldak Quill 18:26, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fair enough, but I think that is not the most common form in the non-German speaking world. A google search on +mahagonny +brecht +aufstieg, for instance, gets about 8,000 hits, whereas a similar search on +mahagonny +brecht -aufstieg gets about 12,000. Restricting the search to English pages only, the results are about 4,300 and 1,300 for English and German respectively. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 11:23, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

See: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English):"If you are talking about a person, country, town, movie or book, use the most commonly used English version of the name for the article (as you would find it in other encyclopedias). This makes it easy to find, and easy to compare information with other sources." Hyacinth 21:21, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny → Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Somebody just moved this article from the English title to the German title. This Brecht/Weill musical, like The Threepenny Opera and other pieces by those German authors, has been known to English-speaking audiences by its English title since it was first produced, so I think it should be moved back. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 16:27, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Oh, looks like User:Susvolans moved it back. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 20:59, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Strike that. it's been moved again. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 23:12, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Support. A non-English language work should probably be at the English transliteration of its name unless known better in the English-speaking world by the original name. -Sean Curtin 03:05, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)
  • Comment. Nothing wrong with REDIRECTs named with both the foreign language spelling and the English transliteration. This is helpful to different kinds of WP users, and REDIRECTs are simple and inexpensive. Lentower 14:25, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
• Support. ADH (t&m) 16:56, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)
• Support. Neutrality^talk 21:20, Jan 12, 2005 (UTC)
• Comment See also discussion at Talk:Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in which I give some search engine statistics which of course should be treated with care and diligence. There is also a German article on the opera on the German Wikipedia under the German title [1] (it has an interwiki link to the article on the English wikipedia which should be corrected if this article remains at the German title in the English Wikipedia). --Tony Sidaway|Talk 23:58, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)
• Support. The Opera Project has a well-developed guideline on when to use original-language titles. We don't invent English titles for foreign-language works, but we use them when they exists and are in current usage. 'Rise and Fall' is specifically listed here as a well-known name. (The German name should of course be a redirect.)-- Kleinzach 06:27, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
• Support. per Kleinzach. Lentower 14:25, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Obtrusive Brecht Plays navigation box

Do other people find this obtrusive here? The norm is for these boxes to be collapsible. Do we need it anyway? -- Kleinzach 05:53, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Why not purge the article of all references to Brecht? It was only his idea, his project, his name that makes it famous. DionysosProteus 11:47, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Brecht was the librettist. (Please learn to indent - you do it with a colon as I have done with this paragraph. Not indenting makes your posts look rather manic.) -- Kleinzach 06:18, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Doh! He also came up with the idea, it was his project for several years before Weill joined. Your fanaticism with regards to the dramatic element of opera is quite bizarre. Must I remind you of the OED definition once again? "A DRAMATIC and musical work". I'm beginning to suspect an unexamined, unpleasant incident in the distant past. DionysosProteus 12:43, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Grammar

There are some pretty bad grammatical mistakes in this article. Also a few things in the 'Gebrauchsmusik' section need tidying up: for example I don't see how the reference to the music accompanying silent films makes sense. And the phrase '... all the while in Europe he was considered a real composer and not just some hack pandering to the playwright to make a living' could be a lot more elegant!