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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. -- Klein zach 05:18, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
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. -- Klein zach 07:23, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
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. -- Klein zach 10:03, 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)
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||
|
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. -- Klein zach 05:18, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
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. -- Klein zach 07:23, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
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. -- Klein zach 10:03, 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)