Talk:Frédéric Chopin

erasing a section

This statement is silly and i'm erasing it. Particularly in Mozart's case; He was a child prodigy and composed music basically his entire life. You also have to take into account location. There were many musically pillars in German speaking territory and anyone blossoming would not immediately be praised as the greatest.

"According to Polish musicologist and Chopin biographer Zdzisław Jachimecki, comparison of the juvenile Chopin with any earlier composer is difficult because of the originality of the works that Chopin was composing already in the first half of his life. At a comparable age, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven had still been apprentices, while Chopin was perceived by peers and audiences to be already a master who was pointing the path to the coming age." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Devilxhlywood (talk • contribs) 23:31, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

B-class for WP:POLAND: failed

For the usual reason: insufficient citations. There are numerous unreferenced paras, and at least one outstanding cite request. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 16:21, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Bibliography section

The comment that somebody has inserted under Bibliography, after the last reference to “Jorgensen, Cecilia; Jens Jorgensen (2003) …”, is both incorrect in substance and derogative and inappropriate in form. The referenced book does not contain “much speculation”, but is based on letters by Chopin and Jenny Lind, on the discovery of erroneous English and French translations and annotations of Chopin’s important letter of 30 October 1848, and on other sources. The book was well received by Prof. Poniatowska and Chopin in the World (2003-2004). The book’s contradiction of information in Fr. Niecks’ biography (its Preface names Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt among his few surviving "chief sources of information") and in other Chopin literature is no reason to dismiss Jorgensen’s work. Finally, the line, “an allegation that it was Lind who paid …”, is cited inaccurately and out of context and it is also improper for a bibliography. Therefore, it is proposed for Wikipedia’s consideration to revise and shorten the reference as follows: “Jorgensen, Cecilia; Jens Jorgensen (2003). Chopin and The Swedish Nightingale. Brussels: Icons of Europe. ISBN 2-9600385-0-9, reviewed by Prof. Dr Irena Poniatowska in Chopin in the World (2003-2004, p. 25-26). – Icons of Europe’s subsequent research findings on Jenny Lind’s close relationship and romance with Chopin have in 2004-2010 been shared with Chopin experts including Prof. Dr hab. Mieczysław Tomaszewski and Société de Chopin à Paris and with stakeholders in BBC’s Chopin 2010 documentary as listed and accessible for verification at the website http://www.iconsofeurope.com/chopin.jennylind.htm". Jean de Beaumont (talk) 18:37, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

GA/FA?

Hello. I have been thinking about getting this article up to GA or FA status, as I am currently doing with the Antonín Dvořák article. For reference on how a Featured Article on a composer would look like, please see these examples: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Gustav Mahler, Edward Elgar and Frederick Delius. The article looks good overall. However, there are a couple of things we need to do in order to get it up to GA/FA status though:

• Lead section - looks good. It is at least three paragraphs, but can be expanded to four paragraphs if possible.
• Life section - Looks good as well. I think the header should be changed to "Biography" in order to keep in line with other composer FAs (for example, see Edward Elgar, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Gustav Mahler). I believe that the "Life" header should be kept, as it has been used on some composer FAs. Also, I am thinking about revising the section as well. I am concerned about the use of the days of the week when referring to dates, since we want to maintain a consistent format with the dates. For example, in the death section, on the paragraph regarding the time of his actual death, I think we should remove "Wednesday" to maintain a consistent date format, but if this is a mistake, that will be all right.
• Music - the publishing subsection is completely unsourced. Aside from this section, it looks good.
• Reputation section - I'm actually quite surprised that this article does not have a reception section and it may need to be added as well.
• External links - needs an extensive cleanup, as it has been tagged for over two years now.
• Copyedit - this article may need to undergo an extensive copyedit. Also I am concerned about using redundancies in the article like "The vast majority of" should be "most of", as well as avoiding weasel words per WP:PEACOCK. We should also watch out for vague terms as well, which are often redundant in the article if it becomes excessive, such as “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”.
• Overlinking - I have some concerns about overlinking as well, but I believe it looks fine for now.
• Citations - per the WP:POLAND B-Class assessment by Piotrus above, there are insufficient citations throughout the article, and quite a few outstanding citation requests, so I am thinking it will be appropriate if we should expand the article and add the sources from the bibliography section with the appropriate page numbers and links to the books there. Also, all of the dead links need to be fixed or replaced, as I have found like at least 9 dead links there and I have repaired at least one dead link. When citing books, reliable websites and encyclopedias, we should also use the {{cite book}} and {{cite web}} template where appropriate and they should be listed with the author's name in alphabetical order to maintain consistency. As per Wikipedia:Cite_book#Title, we should use the language parameter to mention the appropriate language in the citations if it is not published in English, as there are some sources that are foreign (i.e. the Gastone Belotti references, which are Italian) and we should not use icons. Also, we need to provide the ISBN and OCLC numbers for some of the books that don't contain them as well.

All are welcome to assist in this process. Comments, ideas, thoughts or suggestions would be very much appreciated. If there are a few mistakes, please let me know here. Thank you, Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 16:28, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

I can try with Poland-related issues if you'll have any questions. I can get a hold of the relevant Polish Biographical Dictionary entry around XMAS, or if you want to be done by then, I can ask some collegues if they could scan it and send it to me; unfortunately Chopin means Tome IV (1938), so the quality is going to be, well, pre-war. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 17:24, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

All right, then. I agree with this matter. :) I also admit that I make quite a few unintentional mistakes in editing the article, since I am a member of the Composers WikiProject, and I apologize. By the way, I have already put the article in my future projects and if no one minds, I am going to help work on expanding and improving the Chopin article. This will take a few weeks, during which the article may temporarily look odd, but we will try to keep it coherent to the general reader (it attracts at least 2000-3000 viewings each day). Suggestions on this improvement and my above proposals would be welcome, but as we are working within a particular structure, it would be appreciated if these were raised on the talk page, rather than merely bolted onto the article. At an appropriate time, the redrafted article will be put up for general criticism at peer review. The objective is to have the article as TFA on the 165th anniversary of Chopin's death, 17 October 2014. Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 17:30, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Sounds good. Btw, since you mention cite books, are you familiar with this nice tool? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 18:17, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I am familiar with how the tool works. I think it would be very useful for these books in question if they have URLs from Google Books. I am also in the process of reformatting the references in the Bibliography section as well. If there are any good faith mistakes in my edits, please feel free to address them. :) Lord Sjones23 (talk - contributions) 18:25, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Photograph of Chopin

Apparently this exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Image-Frederic_Chopin_photo_downsampled.jpeg

Should we use it in the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.192.186.66 (talk) 23:00, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

"Disparate" views

The article currently says the following:

• It is very difficult to characterise Chopin's oeuvre briefly. Robert Schumann, speaking of Chopin's Sonata in B-flat minor, wrote that "he alone begins and ends a work like this: with dissonances, through dissonances, and in dissonances", and in Chopin's music he discerned "cannon concealed amid blossoms". Franz Liszt, in the opening of his biography about Chopin (Life of Chopin), termed him a "gentle, harmonious genius". Thus disparate have been the views on Chopin's music.

First of all, the Liszt quote appears to deal with Chopin's personality, not his music. Second, even if it did, it simply means that different people have had different concepts of what is dissonant (and Liszt was after all harmonically more progressive than Schumann). So this passage requires cleanup. Toccata quarta (talk) 11:22, 28 September 2012 (UTC)