Talk:Frederica von Stade

Too detailed

@Niggle1892: I would argue that with this series of edits, this career section has become entirely too detailed. We don't need a day-by-day, performance-to-performance recounting of her career. Beginnings and major milestones will do. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 15:01, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

@WikiDan61: Thank you for your advice, and for your expert tidying up of references (way beyond my wiki-wits). I've now trimmed my Career section to focus almost entirely on FVS's debuts in her operatic roles and her debuts in major venues (Met, Paris, Covent Garden, Salzburg, Vienna, Glyndebourne). I hope that the section is now not vastly too long.Niggle1892 (talk) 18:53, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

I looked at the recordings, and changed those "by one composer":

• Most composers don't need a given name to be recognisable.
• Album titles will probably not get an article: don't link the whole title, but individual pieces
• Don't link Symphony No. 4, - it needs to be specific.
• Don't link the same piece in consecutive rows.
• Not done yet: the conductor should be linked. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 23:01, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

@Niggle1892: The problem, as I see it (and I am only one editor, so take this for what it's worth) is that you've written a fan's biography rather than an encyclopedia article. Your heavy use of quotes from Ms. Von Stade will thrill the fans, and adds lots of "spice", but really does not aid in the concise presentation of her biography. The same is true for all of the fascinating tidbits (such as her relationships to this or that famous person, or the "vertiginously hanging basket." Remember, we're creating an encyclopedia here, not a book or magazine article. Some editors complain that the encyclopedic style is too "dry" and boring; but that's kinda what we're trying to achieve here. The article should be engaging, but not obsequious. I urge you to read WP:BETTER and consider whether your updates meet the guidelines spelled out there. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 12:40, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

@Niggle1892: I was informed (thanks, Gerda!) that a new "ping" only works with a new signature. Thusly. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 13:42, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

@WikiDan61:Thank you again, WikiDan61, for taking so much trouble over my scribblings, and for dealing with them so much more gently than you might have done. A few thoughts in response (and please forgive them if they're foolish or discourteous). When I first read Wikipedia's article about FVS, a few things struck me. (1) The discography was incomplete. (2) The biography added nothing to that available at fredericavonstade.com, which was much better written. (3) Readers were told that FVS had sung at a comedy gala for the Prince of Wales: she hadn't. (4) The Recordings section singled out two CDs for special mention without any apparent reason. (5) Career details seemed to be randomly selected without any regard to their significance either to FVS's life or to music generally. In sum, the page was amateurish, out of date, inaccurate and, in the arbitrariness of what it chose to mention and what it chose to exclude, implicitly very subjective. Encyclopedic? Anything but.

There are, of course, any number of resources available for people interested in FVS - her own website, articles in the Grove dictionaries of music and opera and entries in other musical reference books too, dozens of magazine pieces and e-features. It seemed to me that as it stood, the Wiki-page added little if anything to what these alternatives offered, and was essentially redundant, perhaps even worse than that. In attempting a revision of it, my hope was to piece together a kind of mosaic that would create value by presenting readers with the most complete portrait of FVS available in any one place.Niggle1892 (talk) 18:53, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

@Niggle1892: It is not Wikipedia's aim to add to the other sources that are available, but to briefly summarize them. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia should be a first source of information, with the cited sources providing generally much more in depth coverage. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 12:02, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

@WikiDan61: I take your point, and I've taken your advice to study the Wikipedia style guide. As a retired academic and retired journalist, I've concluded, sadly, that the Wiki-world simply isn't for me. Thank you again for your extraordinary patience and politeness.Niggle1892 (talk) 18:53, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

@Niggle1892: I don't know that I'd give up altogether yet. The writing style is different here, and many good journalists and writers find it hard to adapt. (I'm an engineer who does technical writing mostly, so probably closer in tone to the encyclopedia style.) But your knowledge and research vigor are greatly needed. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 17:08, 7 August 2018 (UTC)

@WikiDan61: I can't tell you how much I appreciate those kind words. Thank you. You've made all my hours of googling worthwhile.Niggle1892 (talk) 18:53, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Section headers

Niggle, please return to the simple section headers such as "1970s". Have mercy with someone who wants to link to the section Frederica von Stade#1970s, and will arrive at the top if not using the flowery quotation. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:57, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

Family Name

Her family name is a little bit surprisingly. The part "von" means she would be of noble descent. But I don't recognize a family of that name. It's probably more the Low German form "van" (like the Dutch). Then it's not part of a noble name but just a geographical term meaning "coming from". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.37.100.180 (talk) 22:18, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Inclusion of children's names in infobox

@Nikkimaria:. Hi! Thank you for taking an interest in my attempts at improving this article – it's always nice to have a helping hand from someone more experienced. I agree that neither of Ms von Stade's children is notable, but do you think that they might qualify as relevant? Her elder daughter has sung with her in recital and on one of her albums, and her younger has appeared with her in an opera and is the dedicatee and subject of a song cycle for which she wrote the texts. Do you think that their involvement with their mother's career might be enough to make their inclusion in the article's infobox justifiable?Niggle1892 (talk) 21:54, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

(watching:) I suggest you leave them out in the infobox which should summarize the most notable facts, which probably is not mother and daughter performing together. If there are good sources, you could add it to the article, but again, we should focus on essential things. - Just realize that I posted good advice to you just above, - a while ago. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:17, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Hallo again – it's lovely to hear from one of my favourite Wikipedians. Thank you for your kind words, as gentle and constructive as ever, but I've no plans to contribute anything more to this article than I already have done. The infobox is the way that it is because that's how Drmies left it, and I've not an atom of desire to have a wrestling match with him/her or with anyone else. I don't have much in common with Ms von Stade, but one characteristic that we share is that when situations of conflict arise, we don't shout or stamp our feet – we just go into a corner and have a little cry. As for "essential" things, Gerda, how is one to decide what's essential and what isn't? There's no right length for a biography. For example, a life of your friend Rossini could be as short as a page in a Gramophone guide or as long as a 750-page book, and each could be good in its own terms. The reason that I allowed myself roughly 10,000 words was that that seemed to be the norm for Wikipedia's most ambitious articles about singers, so I foolishly imagined that a von Stade biography of that length wouldn't necessarily be objectionable. It was, of course, stupid of me to forget Wikipedia's deep-rooted inverted snobbery, which dictates that while a 10,000-word article about someone like Michael Jackson may be fine and dandy, a 10,000-word biography of a classical singer who has spent decades helping to improve the life chances of poor and homeless kids is an outrage not to be tolerated. (And all the worse for being written in "lively" prose, I'm told. Dead prose is so much preferable.)

If it's not too self-indulgent, I should perhaps explain why I rewrote the article in the way that I did. The arrival of Covid-19 got me thinking about what things I would most regret if I were about to die. One of them was that when I first tackled Frederica von Stade two years ago, I was so cowardly that I was intimidated out of rewriting it in the way that I wanted to, which was as a gift for the kind of reader who, like me, would gladly buy a book about Ms von Stade if one existed. So I decided to use my weeks of virus lockdown to give it the structure, tone, depth, detail, colour and humour that I had originally planned. Although I didn't quite manage to finish my work before Drmies arrived with his bulldozer – I would like to have expanded the "Spirituality" subsection and added a short section on "Voice and art" – my article probably tells people more about Ms von Stade than any other single thing that has ever been written about her. I realize that very few people will ever see it, but at least I have the clear conscience and artistic satisfaction that comes from having now at last painted a likeness of her that, for all its flaws, is as faithful to her truth as it's within my meagre powers to achieve. Anyway, thank you again for all your friendly messages, and my very best wishes to you for much more happiness in music and writing in the years to come.Niggle1892 (talk) 22:35, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Noble pursuit, making an article be as good as humanly possible. May I suggest concentrating on the article prose? The infobox is supposed to be as lean and mean as possible, to hold critically important facts, nothing complex. Explaining why the children are important to the topic is worthy of prose but not the infobox. And the infobox instructions tell us to avoid listing children who don't have their own Wikipedia article. Binksternet (talk) 04:22, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

It might help if you think of the infobox as the enemy of the rest of the article. Picture a reader who is looking for one particular fact about the topic; if they find it in the infobox then they may leave directly. They may not look at your carefully crafted prose and get caught up in the pleasure of discovery.

There are editors on Wikipedia who continue to push against having the infobox at all, for the belief that it takes power away from the prose. Some of the articles out there reflect this passion: Ina Coolbrith and We Can Do It! are two of mine, both highly developed. A great many articles about paintings and graphic art purposely have no infobox. Some Featured Article biographies without infobox include Frédéric Chopin, Maurice Ravel, Cosima Wagner, Georges Bizet, Mary Shelley, P. G. Wodehouse, Master Juba and Ima Hogg. Obviously, the infobox is not absolutely required. Binksternet (talk) 05:31, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

@Binksternet: Hallo Binksternet! What you say about infoboxes is something that wouldn't have occurred to me in a thousand years, and yet is also, once someone has been clever enough to point it out, obviously true. From now on, where infoboxes are concerned, I'm a Binksternetite.Niggle1892 (talk) 13:37, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

I was pinged to Niggle's post, and try hard to ignore ignore ignore the above temptation to say anything about infoboxes. Niggle, it's not difficult to find your work of love in the history, but - I hope this won't disappoint you too much - would I read it? Perhaps some day, - right now I am busy writing articles. My work admiring a singer is Inge Borkh, with others and not where I want it, and one article I helped to gain GA status (but didn't write much myself) is Jessye Norman, and one I didn't touch yet but would like to before I die, and hopefully before she dies, is Gwyneth Jones. You are invited to help. For FvS, what do you think of putting the discography in a separate article? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:57, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: Don't worry – I'm not the least bit disappointed that the thought of ploughing through Flicka by Niggle doesn't tempt you. As it stands now, the article is very much targeted at the little company of FvS superfans who own virtually every record that she ever made. (I feel slightly guilty that in inflating my article to the length that I have, I've denied casual readers the more concise biography that they'd have preferred, but anyone who googles FvS can easily find the webpages maintained for her by her agent that have bios that can be read in a few minutes.) As to whether my FvS discography should be made into a separate article, my inclination would be to keep things as they are – readers who're not interested in it can easily skip over it. Indeed, I gave the article the architecture that it has very much in the expectation that different readers would be interested only in different bits of it. Some people will mainly be curious about her childhood and her personal life. Some will only want to see if there are any FvS CDs or DVDs that they haven't yet heard about. Some will be specially interested in what she had to say about her signature roles. Some will want to use the "Special Events" section to track down her TV appearances on YouTube. And journalists – who have already paid me the compliment of quoting whole paragraphs from my first version of the article more or less word for word – will be hunting for odds and ends that can spice up a profile of her or make a useful icebreaker when they interview her. (It was for their sake that I put Donald Trump in the lead of the article – when the sad day comes for newspapers to print their FvS obituaries, any subeditor would delight in the subtitle "Opera star who lost a singing contest with Donald Trump".)

In the two years since I first invaded Wikipedia, nothing has made me happier than your suggestion that I might join you in your own Wiki-work on opera singers. I have the most profound respect for what you have brought to the encyclopaedia, and that someone who has done such an enormous amount to improve Wikipedia's coverage of classical music should think me worth encouraging is a tremendous honour (and in truth, one that I don't really deserve). But I've made it a rule never to contribute significantly to an article that someone else has created except on those very rare occasions when I suspect that I know more about its subject than they do. Ms von Stade is the only singer on whom I consider myself an expert. (I need hardly add that I wish you many, many more years to bring your work on Ms Jones and all your other projects to completion. Live long and prosper!)Niggle1892 (talk) 16:12, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining. Just peeking in after a lovely day out, I don't have time for a decent reply for many points touched. Drmies is a longtime friend, and an excellent admin, please take into account that I am biased. We don't agree on everything, of course. What I try to do is write a little article each day (often polish/reference those that a friend started), instead of one big thing. (I have a biggy in the back of my mind, though, that I want to improve before I die.) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:40, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

@Gerda Arendt: I'm glad to read your words about Drmies – he/she seemed reasonably friendly when we exchanged a few messages a year or two ago, and I'd like to think that he/she wasn't really the ogre that he/she seemed on this occasion. (I do know that I can be irritating even in small doses, so I can quite understand that wading through an ocean of my ramblings might be enough to make even a saint a bit peeved.) I hope that your plans for your JSB project come to fruition. Although I don't understand his music, I love the sound that it makes – the first record that I ever bought was an LP of the last three Brandenburgs, and I spent many happy, if cacophonous hours murdering the 48 as the most hopeless piano pupil in England. My Mum was German, and when I was tidying up a box of her old papers a few years ago, I was stunned to find a certificate of confirmation from the Thomaskirche. "Mum," I said, "you've actually stood on the most sacred ground in the whole musical world!" She wasn't the least impressed – her musical God was Puccini. Ouch!Niggle1892 (talk) 00:37, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. I woke up with the idea that you take your version of this article to your user space, or to draft space. Also that you please move this discussion to your talk, and we continue personal things there, how is that? Some of what was exchanged here isnt't really about this article. I'll probably take the infobox temptation somewhere else, because - while it also has nothing to do with FvS - the idea that the infobox is the enemy of an article writer('s prose) is interesting, explains a lot, and needs clarification. Drnies is a father, btw. Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:05, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Longer biography

For a longer biography of von Stade, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frederica_von_Stade&oldid=1193483832 Niggle1892 (talk) 19:30, 18 January 2024 (UTC)