Wikipedia

Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by WikiLeon (talk | contribs) at 07:24, 18 June 2007 (→Intro: Opera Browser dablink). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Composers of the Month edit · history · watch · refresh

Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/OotM/August2025

Opera of the Month edit · history · watch · refresh

Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/SotM/August2025

Template:Subprojects


Shortcut
You may be looking for WikiProject Opera Browser, the Wikiproject dedicated to Opera Software.

Scope

This WikiProject encompasses

  1. articles on opera composers and librettists
  2. articles on individual operas
  3. articles on opera singers
  4. articles on opera houses and opera companies (sometimes but not always the same)
  5. articles on all genres of opera from grand opera to operetta
  6. articles on opera recordings
  7. articles on other opera-related topics

Project listing

Opera is an independent WikiProject listed under Performing Arts.

It was started by Viajero in June 2004. There were about 1,835 articles on opera, published and under development by the project, in May 2006. A total of 3,530 articles were identified after a bot run in June 2007.

Descendant WikiProjects

There are two descendant WikiProjects: WikiProject Gilbert and Sullivan and WikiProject Richard Wagner.

Similar WikiProjects

Similar WikiProjects are WikiProject Classical music and WikiProject Composers.

Active participants

Former participants

Viajero • Wetman • BaronLarf • DrG • Antandrus • DrGeoduck • Captbaritone • Jsch • Whfropera • Yid613 • Inge-Lyubov • starshinesfeli • Meladina  • Wootking • Figaro • Gerry Lynch • Tnmusikherr • Papertiger96 • Ehsiao • Jahenderson • Doublea • OperaDevel • ForDorothy • Scott Andrew Hutchins • James Kilbourne • Heimstern Läufer • Rahelisdolentis • Klingoncowboy4 • acs10 • Schnuckiputzi • Megazodiac • Nickbigd

Getting started

Welcome to the WikiProject Opera!

If you are new to Wikipedia, the first thing to do is to join. See Wikipedia:How to log in. There is also an FAQ at Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ.

We would also be delighted if you signed on to the project (above). You may also like to see our discussion page Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Opera.

Can you help?

We need articles (or stubs) on the following contemporary singers:

Stefania Bonfadelli, Larissa Diadkova, Angela Denoke, Vladimir Galouzine, Anja Harteros, Catherine Naglestad, David Pittman-Jennings, László Polgár, Christoph Prégardien, Dorothea Röschmann

And these important 20th-century singers:

Zara Dolukhanova, Hildegard Hillebrecht, Sandor Konya, Nina Koshetz, Fernando de Lucia, Blanche Marchesi, Riccardo Stracciari, Jean-Emil Vanni-Marcoux

And these French librettists:

Hector-Jonathan Crémieux, Louis-Adolphe Jaime, Mélesville, Charles-Louis-Etienne Nuitter, Albert Vanloo

And these historic theatres in Paris:

Théâtre de la Gaîté, Théâtre des Menus-Plaisirs

Can you translate?

Excellent material is available in the German Wikipedia, as well as the French and Italian. The following pages on composers have substantial information, which would be worth including in our articles:

German pages: Pasquale Anfossi, August Bungert, Wilhelm Kienzl, Albert Lortzing, Aribert Reimann, Max von Schillings (half finished translation)


Please note that we now have articles (or stubs) on almost all the composers listed in the Opera Corpus.

Article titles

Operas: original vs English translation

The standard practice is to use English titles of operas for article names and in articles when it is common convention (e.g. The Marriage of Figaro. The Magic Flute, The Barber of Seville). This reflects the Wikipedia convention use English in titles when possible.

Nevertheless most operas are performed in English-speaking countries under their original names (e.g. Così fan tutte and Der Freischütz) and English titles for them should not be invented.

Titles in languages using a non-Latin alphabet (usually Russian in practice) are customarily listed under an English equivalent (a translation or a transliteration), without diacritics (diacritics can, however, be used in the body of the article). If necessary a redirect under the original title will point to the article with the English name.

Operas commonly known by English names

Operas: original language titles

When listing operas by their original language title, care should be taken to respect the rules of that language, including spelling, capitalization and accents.

Capitalization rules vary. Whereas in English, we capitalize all the major words (e.g. ' I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky'), in Italian and French, only proper names are capitalized (e.g. 'Il diluvio universale', 'Ugo, conte di Parigi', 'Le nozze di Figaro', 'Les mamelles de Tirésias', 'Les Indes galantes', 'Les contes d'Hoffmann', 'La vie parisienne'). In German, only nouns are capitalized (e.g. 'Die lustige Witwe', 'Die tote Stadt', 'Die ägyptische Helena').

Accents should be included in (Latin alphabet) titles.

Redirects should be included whenever possible to make the articles as accessible as possible. For example, 'La bohème' should have redirects from 'La boheme', 'La Bohème', 'La Boheme', 'Boheme' and 'Bohème' while 'La traviata' should have redirects from 'La Traviata' and 'Traviata'. 

 
#REDIRECT [[La bohème]]

Naming conventions page

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (operas) is a formal, public page which summarizes the rules above.

Operas: avoiding ambiguity

To avoid ambiguity the word opera, or the name of the composer, may be added to the title in parentheses. For example Macbeth (opera) refers to the work by Verdi to distinguish it from Macbeth which is the play by Shakespeare. Likewise Otello (Rossini) is differentiated from the more famous work of Verdi which is simply Otello.

Opera houses and opera companies

We use the English name of an opera house or an opera company if one exists and is used on the official website, otherwise we use the official name in the local language. In accordance with Wikipedia naming conventions, we adopt the shortest possible distinctive name, i.e. La Scala (not Teatro alla Scala or La Scala, Milan), because there is only one La Scala. However, in some cases we have to disambiguate: there is more than one Teatro Regio in Italy, so we have Teatro Regio Parma, Teatro Regio Torino etc.

Although an opera house and an opera company may be separate legal entities, we often treat them as one for convenience (e.g. La Scala). This facilitates writing articles on singers etc.

However, when an opera company is associated with two or more houses (e.g. Opéra National de Paris which performs at both the Opéra Bastille and the Palais Garnier) we need separate articles. Moreover, there are cases where the history of the theatre as well as the company are extensive and complex. In these cases, two articles are called for (e.g. Royal Opera House Covent Garden (London), which has more than 200 years of mixed history, and Royal Opera, London which was created only in 1946).

Guidelines

The New Grove Dictionary of Opera

The leading reference work on opera in the English language is the New Grove Dictionary of Opera edited by Stanley Sadie and others. This should, in general, be followed for style.

Articles on specific operas

Articles may be divided into an introduction, performance history, list of roles, synopsis of the action, and a list of recordings - as appropriate to the opera. (An example of this arrangement is Il campiello.) A navigation box may be provided to enable easy navigation to other operas by the same composer - see the Navigation box templates para below for more details.

The introduction is normally in the present tense: 

 
 '''''[title] ''''' (''[English title if needed]'') is an [[opera]] by [[composer]]]. 
 [[Librettist]] wrote the [language used] [[libretto]] [after the book/play/epic poem by...]

The performance history may indicate the popularity of the work and the regularity with which it is performed (in the world as whole) - again as appropriate.

When available, it's helpful to include the cast at the premiere(s) in the list of roles. See the Parsifal article for an example of standard formatting.

Roles

The norm when listing or referring to roles is to give proper names in their original form (in whatever language), while translating the others into English.

For example the roles in Richard Strauss's Salome are given as: Herodes, Herodias, Salome, Jochanaan, Narraboth, the page of Herodias, first Jew, second Jew (etc.), first Nazarene, second Nazarene (etc.), first soldier, second soldier, a Cappadocian, a slave.

Arias, duets, choruses etc.

Individual 'numbers' from operas are often referred to in different ways. For example, the song and duet from Act I of Carmen may be called (by the first line) Près des remparts de Séville, or (in translation) Near to the walls of Seville, or as 'the Seguidilla' or as a Chanson et duo.

We recommend referring to the first line in the original language (in italics), followed by the popular title (if there is one) or English translation. Thus Près des remparts de Séville (The Seguidilla) and La donna è mobile (Woman is Fickle).

Articles on opera singers

Although biographical articles customarily begin with the name of the person, extensive experimentation reveals that the following formula works well for opera singers, as it presents all the important facts in a stylistically pleasing way: 

 '''Name''' (dates) [was|is] a [[nation|nationality]]  [[opera]]tic [[soprano|tenor|etc]]
 [whose career spanned|who was closely associated with the roles|etc] 
 [one more additional descriptive line]

(This is obviously adapted for singers who also had significant non-operatic careers.)

We then follow with biographical information, highlighting important operatic debuts and the roles most closely associated with the singer.

If singers are still living, we refer to them in the present tense, but make clear that they are retired and indicate when they were active.

Nationality in biographical articles

The nationality of composers, singers etc. has sometimes been controversial. Here are three guidelines:

1. Nationality should refer to national identity, in other words the national group with which the person identified, not the state of which the person was a citizen or subject.
2. Nationality should not be anachronistic/retrospective, i.e. for historic figures it should not be defined by present-day borders and states, but by contemporary ones.
3. If there is any doubt about the nationality of an individual, we should be inclusive and use a double designation (e.g. Anglo-German etc.) both in the introduction and in the categories.

Referring to opera houses

It is a habit in the opera world to refer to performances at certain opera houses simply using the name of the city, ie Milan, Paris, New York, which is an indirect reference to La Scala, Opera Garnier, or the Met. One can link the city name to the relevant city article, ie [[Milan]] or pipe it to the relevant opera house, ie [[|La Scala|Milan]]. The latter solution seems elegant except its violates the Wikie principle of least surprise (it isn't exactly what the reader expects). On the other hand, a singer's Berlin debut is in fact a debut in front of the audience of a given city, not just an appearance in a theater. This issue is compounded by the fact that some big cities have more than one opera house, for which we have separate articles (London, Berlin, and Paris) and that sometimes historical references are made to theaters which no longer exist.

A special note regarding London. The opera world customarily refers to the main opera house there as Covent Garden. However, our article on Covent Garden is on the neighborhood of London of that name, not the opera house. The Royal Opera House is the name of the article, and that is what needs to be linked. A reasonable solution is to refer to them both, ie: [...] at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Referring to roles

When talking about singers, the opera world has the habit of referring to roles rather than the names of the opera, ie she made her Met debut as Mimi and went on to sing Liù. This is a useful shorthand, but it is not entirely helpful for people new to opera. One way to clarify a potentially unfamiliar role to its opera is to use the formula [[Opera title|Role name]] providng a link to the opera through the role name.

Trivia

When it comes to anecdotes, influences on pop culture, and other peripheral content or "trivia", information should only be included in opera articles if it is likely to be of interest to a typical reader of the article. Examples of content which almost always fail this test are: songs, albums, video games, TV shows, or movies that reference the opera. Examples of content passing the test are: Apocalypse Now's use of The Ride of the Valkyries and direct adaptations such as Carmen Jones.

Spoiler warning tags

The use of spoiler tags before synopsis/plot summaries is regarded as unnecessary and distracting.

Articles

The main article is of course Opera. Articles indexing operatic topics include:

Then there are articles on the voice types:
Soprano • Mezzo-soprano • Alto • Castrato • Countertenor • Tenor • Baritone • Bass-baritone • Bass

Opera articles present and absent

An opera title list of about 1200 works showing which titles have articles and which do not, major articles still missing are indicated in bold.

Good articles

Agrippina • Dido and Aeneas • The Fairy-Queen • Orfeo ed Euridice • Parsifal • Venus and Adonis

Porgy and Bess • List of important operas • List of major opera composers

Article ranking

The Article ranking table explains opera article ranking and gives examples.

Article templates

Here are some suggested structures:

Opera (title) template

Introduction: name, language, composer, librettist, general historical and musical context.

==Performance history== from premiere(s) to the present day
==Roles== possibly in tabular form giving name, description, voice type and creator of each role.
==Synopsis==
==Noted arias== refer format in Un ballo in maschera (without title translation) or Turandot (with title translation)
==Recordings== divided into audio and video (with catalogue numbers when possible)
==Bibliography== for printed works (including ISBN when possible)
==External links== for online resources

For articles that are aiming at either good article or featured article status, the following extra sections are recommended.

==Context and analysis== - puts the work in context and provides a certain degree of sourced analysis.
==Recording history== - recommended for articles on specific composers or for particularly well-known operas.
==References== - provides details of the sources used for the article, with ISBNs where possible.

An extra section entitled Notes for inline citations may also be helpful, depending upon what citing format is being used.

Categories

Categories are implemented on Wikipedia in an ad hoc fashion, hence tend to be erratic. There is a special page for discussions about categories at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/Categories.

Here are the currently used categories for opera topics:

Operas

All opera title articles belong in:

Operas are further categorized by language:

by genre (which should be plural and in the original language to avoid confusion):

and normally by composer, i.e.:

(N.B. for the purposes of Wikipedia (and indeed other encyclopedias such as Grove), operettas are considered a subcategory of operas, so, for example, The Merry Widow is in Category:Operas as well as Category:Operettas.)

In practice a single opera title article will have many category tags at the foot of the page. The order in which these appear should start with the most specific and end with the most general. For example, Tosca belongs to the following categories: 

[[Category:Operas by Giacomo Puccini]]
[[Category:Verismo operas]]
[[Category:Italian-language operas]]
[[Category:Operas]]

Please note that for typographical reasons stubs go before category tags.

Composers, librettists, directors and managers

The main and preferred category is Category:Opera composers, although Category:Operetta composers and Category:Zarzuela composers are also still used.

Category:Opera librettists • Category:Opera directors • Category:Opera managers

Singers

Singers are categorized nationality, ie, Category:French opera singers and by voice:

Category:sopranos • Category:mezzo-sopranos • Category:altos • Category:countertenors • Category:tenors • Category:baritones • Category:basses

Other categories

There are three main categories for opera organizations: Category:Opera houses, Category:Opera companies and Category:Opera festivals. (Opera houses may also be found in other categories, such as city, e.g. Category:Milan, and buildings, e.g. Category:Buildings and structures in Vienna.) Associations etc. are under Category:Opera organizations.

Opera terms are categorized under: Category:Opera terminology. Audio and video recordings of opera on 78, LP, CD, DVD etc. are categorized under: Category:Opera recordings. Publishers are under Category:Opera publishers, and publications under Category:Opera publications. Topics which don't fall under any of the above can always be included (temporarily) in Category:Opera.

(Forms of Chinese opera are listed under Category:Performing arts not opera.)

Category sorting

Alphabetical order in the listing of operas/people

The titles of articles are sorted omitting the definite or indefinite article such as "A", "The", "Le", "La", "Les", "Der", "Die", "Das", etc. This is done using a "Default sort" tag, which is placed before the categories. For example La naissance d'Osiris requires {{DEFAULTSORT:Naissance d'Osiris}}. That means that the opera will file under N and not under L, although the actual article title ("La naissance d'Osiris") will appear in the Category listing under N.

Two other points here: first, the default sort title should always start with a capital letter, as lower-case initial letters are filed after upper-case Z; second, if there's a special character or accent early in the title, the default sort title should not contain the special character/accent, for a similar reason. So, in the same category, if "Zéphire" isn't changed to "Zefire", it would file after "Zwerg".

People have to be sorted in the same way, e.g. {{DEFAULTSORT:Verdi, Giuseppe}}, otherwise Verdi will appear under 'G' rather than 'V'.

Category listing

There is a complete list of categories containing opera articles at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/Catlist.

Category infobox

Stubs

Wikipedia is developed from red links to stubs and then to full articles, so creating stubs is a stage in that process. (It is helpful if the stubs include sufficient information to be viable in their own right, e.g. an opera composer stub should at least include dates, nationality and major works.)

Here are several template messages (c.f. Wikipedia:Template messages) that are used for opera topic stubs:

  • Composers: {{composer-stub}}
  • Opera singers: {{opera-singer-stub}}
  • European opera houses: {{euro-struct-stub}}
  • General opera topics: {{opera-stub}}

Infoboxes

New infoboxes: We hope all new infoboxes will be proposed and discussed on the project talk page before being added to individual pages. We deplore the use of generic infoboxes that have not been designed with opera in mind, and contain factual errors and ambiguities. Remember: factual accuracy is essential, infoboxes aren't.

This note can be added to pages:
<!-- please do not add an infobox, per [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Opera#Infoboxes]]-->

We are developing navigation boxes to make it easier to move from one opera article to another. The first four are for opera genres, opera lists, opera terms and opera categories (see above).

In addition, where there are Wikipedia entries for all or most of a composer's operas, some boxes are being developed in order to enable easy navigation from one to another. The following have been completed and applied to relevant opera articles:

Auber operas • Bellini operas • Bizet operas • Britten operas • Donizetti operas • Gluck operas • Grétry operas • Handel operas • Janacek operas • Meyerbeer operas • Monteverdi operas • Mozart operas • Offenbach operas • Prokofiev operas • Puccini operas • Rameau operas • Rossini operas • Strauss operas • Tchaikovsky operas • Verdi operas • Vivaldi operas • Wagner operas

Note that the operas are arranged in chronological order, and years of first performance (or of composition, if the first performance was somewhat after the composer's death) are included. The boxes are normally positioned at the top of the opera articles - see, for example, La traviata.

Project banners

We have an official Opera Project Talk Page banner indicating the involvement of the project. The banner was added to all identified opera pages by SatyrBot in June 2007.

Userboxes

A selection of available userbox templates is at Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera/User and project boxes.

Project code of conduct

The Opera Project believes in collaboration and compromise. Edit warring is evil and strongly deplored, so please don't do it. Take the initiative and be bold, but if you encounter opposition discuss matters calmly, either with the user in question on the article's talk page, or the project talk page if a wider audience is desirable. Please don't indulge in a revert-war. Thanks for reading this.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Opera&oldid=138928921"