Wikipedia:Peer review/Schubert's last sonatas/archive1

Schubert's last sonatas

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for August 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I am hoping to make this article GA; I don't believe it will reach FA. Any comments would be welcome.

Thanks, Gidip (talk) 11:53, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Comment - First of all, the lead section needs to be expanded into three paragraphs. It might also need some copyediting. Greg Jones II 15:12, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Comments by Alton

• "In a letter to Probst – one of his publishers, dated October 2, Schubert mentioned..." — subordinate clause should be made clear here.
• "The first theme shifts from C minor to C major - another Schubertian feature, and contains many..." — same. Dashes need to be dashes too (—), not hyphens (-). Super-picky, I know, but that's what people like to get you for, unfortunately.
• Because I'm a huge stickler for this, and for that reason only, I'm going to need to see more citations around the "Structure" section of the article. These sections of articles tend to be very OR, and synthesizing your own conclusions, however obvious they may be, is, unfortunately OR. ("the penultimate chord is highly unusual for a closing cadence...for Schubert's time." — for example. Who says? If you, then that's OR.)
• I would appreciate more linking, it 'increases the volume' of the article by many times, adding various points of departure for the reader. Some words you could link include most of the key signatures, technical musical terms (ternary, coda).. I see that you've done it a couple times, but the guideline that I follow so as not to overlink is once per L2 heading.
• I prefer to do this, but I'm not sure if people hate it: I like to link some specialized musical terms to Wiktionary, just because a large part of the readership might not be familiar with basic terminology like forte, and I know I need help when you start talking about things like "tonal stasis".
• "The inner movements were sketched up to the barline..." — as far as I know, barline refers to a line between any two measures. The "music end" (final barline), perhaps?
• "Schubert's mature music often manipulates our sense of time..." — I'm wary of using "our" here. Maybe "one's"?
• Citations always go after the puncutation. (cf. Wikipedia:Footnotes#Ref_tags_and_punctuation) Unfortunately this is the case for 90% of your <ref> tags...
• Repeating the above, the lead must be expanded greatly. It should summarize the entire article in a couple paragraphs.
• On reading the talk page, it seems like this is a merged article. It really looks like it would benefit from ancillary articles though, not the least of covering the sonatas themselves, so that in this 'comparison' article you can focus more on the overarching concepts and ideas.
• You reference Charles Fisk frequently. Who is he? Elucidate his credentials on first mention.
• "appearance of the three piano pieces D. 946...", "and the string quintet, among others..." — It seems odd to me to juxtapose the definite article with lower case letters, when referring to a specific piece. I would advise to capitalize the piece names, such as "String Quartet", when it is in fact the name of the piece and not a genre.
• "dedicated to Johann Nepomuk Hummel, whom he greatly admired - a pupil of Mozart, composer (a pioneer of the Romantic style, like Schubert himself), and leading pianist..." — again, clean up the clauses.
• "(in major mode works) or to the relative major (in minor mode works)..." — mode, to me, refers to Musical mode, as in lydian and dorian. It sounds weird to me to hear 'major/minor mode', but it might be just me.
• Regarding the section "Extramusical connotations and suggestions of a narrative": here I start getting the feeling that there are outside ideas pulled in to be made relevant to these three sonatas. At this point in this large article, you have to consider what information this article needs as a core. It might be more appropriate to have a separate article addressing the phenomenon in a general sense, and then clarify how it applies in these sonatas only in here. Rather than describe the entire technique in this article. See, your lead for this section "Schubert's mature music often manipulates our sense of time and forward movement." implies that his 'mature music' includes not only these sonatas but his other later works as well. The whole section up to cite #51 doesn't seem to be specific to these sonatas, since it's outlining the technique in a very general since. In this way, I think that material should be cut. Moved, preferably.
• I feel the same about "Beethoven's Influence". It might benefit to create a separate article (somewhat like "Beethoven's influence on Schubert") if these are not the only works in which it is apparent. Just so the basics of Schubert's admiration of Beethoven don't have to be repeated several times.
• "Beethoven's Influence" should be "Beethoven's influence" anyways, unless Influence is a proper noun somehow.
• You visit the idea of them being presented as a set, but it isn't mentioned later. In the reception section you mention briefly "the final trilogy", but I'm just curious, was that idea abandonded by interpreters of these pieces? Besides Brendel's staunch support of them as a set, did other pianists recognize that they were such unified works, or is it merely of interest to musicologists?
• "As mentioned above, Schubert's last..." — I personally don't like self-referencing in any form. I don't think the corresponding guideline (WP:SELF) agrees with me, so, your call.
• "Schubert was a great admirer of Beethoven, and..." — I prefer to use the composer's full name first time around. Some people might think you're talking about Johann van Beethoven... Same thing here ( influenced by it: Schumann and Brahms.) (style of Liszt and even of Schoenberg) and the performers here, especially, because I don't know who they are (performance, Schnabel and Erdmann, are known).

This is an incredibly detailed article, and goes to an unprecedented depth of understanding. I learned a lot going over it these couple times. I am very excited for this article to become one of the gems of the classical music articles. It seems well on its way toward being recognized as such. ALTON .ıl 08:16, 16 August 2008 (UTC)