Humanities desk
< February 7	<< Jan \| February \| Mar >>	February 9 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

February 8

languages of Opera

sorry if this has been asked before. What languages, in order, would be useful for an Opera singer singing the standard repertoire to know and speak well/with good pronunciation (I would think obviously with Italian in first place). Thanks. --80.99.254.208 (talk) 20:32, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Italian first. Then German, French and Russian. Languages like English, Czech, Polish, Spanish, Danish, Romanian, Dutch et al also figure, but they're very much minor players unless you're singing in a specialised market. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:46, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

thanks. surprised spanish is so low as a romance language. could you try to put your second list Iafter the period after russian) in order outside of speciazlied markets, givin your reasoning? again, we are talking standard repertoire in a city like new york or san francisco. i don't know much about opera. --94.27.203.71 (talk) 22:36, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Our Spanish opera explains why there are so few Spanish language operas. If you do mean opera in the U.S. then English would move up into the second list, as translated operas are more common than Dutch or Romanian. You can use Operabase to view popularity of various countries operas. 75.41.110.200 (talk) 23:45, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Re the order of the languages outside the top three: It's a somewhat complex question, which rather depends on where you're talking about. In English-speaking countries, it's becoming more common to hear operas originally written in other languages sung in English instead, It's a tradition that used to be there, almost completely died out, but is returning. Add to that a pile of operas written in English in the first place; this includes composers from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand ... all the usual suspects. So English is essential. But most English-language operas are never sung in places outside the anglosphere, just as there are various German, French, Italian and Russian operas that are limited to their home countries, even though those 4 languages account for the bulk of operas that are performed internationally. Now, go to Budapest and you'll hear a pile of Hungarian operas that have long performance traditions there but are virtually never sung anywhere else; same for Prague, Bucharest, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Lisbon, Rotterdam, Oslo, Helsinki, Belgrade etc. Some of the Czech operas of Leoš Janáček have entered the standard repertoire; but I cannot think of a single Finnish, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Danish, Swedish, Serbian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Icelandic, Portuguese or even Spanish opera that's in the standard repertoire in the anglosphere. On that basis, I'd give positions 5 and 6 to English and Czech. But please take that with a strong OR caution. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 08:48, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Jack, thank you, this is immeasurably well-reasoned and awing in its completeness, thank you for the answer/followup! Below (new section) I ask the same question of languages of Literature, I'd love to hear your take on that question too :). Thanks again! --78.92.86.220 (talk) 12:09, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

How kind of you. Thank you. I might leave the literature question to those who know what they're talking about. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 13:36, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support for communism

I have to write a two to three page paper in support of communism using The Communist Manifesto as my source. I have read the manifesto but I'm having trouble coming up with arguments in favor of communism based solely on the document. What are some arguments/evidence in favor of communism that come from the manifesto that I can use in my essay? (I have decided to structure my essay with a paragraph detailing things the manifesto says are wrong with bourgeoisie controlled society and a paragraph saying how communism would fix those issues, so if the points could fall into those two categories it would be helpful.) Thanks in advance, Ks0stm ^{(T•C•G•E)} 21:35, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some problems with capitalism present as themes in the Manifesto might be class polarisation (search for "Society as a whole is more and more splitting up..."); wealth concentration i.e. the expansion of the many and shrinkage of the few ("entire sections of the ruling classes..."); worker immiseration ("Masses of labourerers, crowded into the factory..."/""as the repulsivness of the work increases..."), and the tendency of that kind of society to experience boom-bust cycles of an increasingly dramatic nature ("Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production..."). Just a few pointers, hope they help get you started. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 21:46, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I got paragraphs written about the first two and got started on paragraphs for the last two, but I can't seem to find Marx's detailing of how communism would fix the last two. Where can I find what results a conversion to communism would have on the last two? Ks0stm ^{(T•C•G•E)} 23:26, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is this support of communism back then or now ? Goals like "Free education for all children in public schools" and "Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form and combination of education with industrial production" would have sounded great back then. Now, of course, those have been largely eliminated in Western nations. StuRat (talk) 22:41, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really know...my professor wasn't specific other than that the only two sources we could use were the manifesto and "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" by Mao, however I have decided not to use the Mao speech. Ks0stm ^{(T•C•G•E)} 23:26, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

On the point of 'contradictions' you could boil it down to: "There is not so much difference between the ideologies of capitalism and communism, you know. The difference is simple. Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and communism is the reverse." –John Gardner, The man from Barbarossa --Aspro (talk) 23:38, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It is sad and shocking to see US students are forced to write papers supporting Communist Manifesto. --SupernovaExplosion (talk) 02:51, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Why? →Σ τ c. 02:54, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Because...the spectre is haunting the world. :P --SupernovaExplosion (talk) 03:22, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It is sad and shocking to see that anyone believes a college student might be irreparably brain damaged by reading an important historical document and writing five hundred words to show that he grasped its major points. I weep for the future if American young people really can't be trusted to write for the devil's advocate on occasion. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 04:08, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, but we love Marx in America. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:24, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps you should read it as a piece of its time... it was published in 1848 (though not translated into English until 1888) and was therefore very much influenced by the social and political conditions of that era. Maybe you could also contrast conditions 150 years ago with the current time where the "houses of power and landed gentry of old Europe--the bourgeoisie" are much less of a problem for the proletariat compared to the maturity of the "corporate world" now. Astronaut (talk) 15:11, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

They're just asking you to summarize Marx's arguments in favor of Communism. Don't view it as a "debate." Just figure out what Marx is saying. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:23, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You should consider changing your planned structure, to reflect the source text better. Spend more time describing what Marx said was wrong with capitalism, remembering that it is also a hymn to the successes of capitalism, because he doesn't say much about the virtues of communism. Itsmejudith (talk) 17:40, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's been ages since I last read the Manifesto all the way through, although I've read it many times, but it doesn't do that great a job, I recall, of explaining what communism's intermediate goal or nature would be. There's a lyrical section that praises both the immense achievements and condemns the huge problems that capitalism has brought about, and the next-to-final section (before the peroration) posits an immediate programme and set of demands upon which the working class can unite with the most liberal sections of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia (free professionals), such as universal suffrage, universal education and the break-up of feudal lands. But millions of people who considered or consider themselves Marxists have disagreed, sometimes bloodily, over what communism is and would mean after you've achieved most of that basic programme (which many Western nations have done over the last 160 years). So even though the preamble to the Manifesto promises to declare who the communists are (not just a pejorative name to call your opponents) and what they propose, and even though it's inspired millions of people (including me and those with whom I disagree violently, e.g. Mao Tse-tung), and even though it has a brilliant critique of early industrial capitalism, it isn't necessarily a very solid source to argue for communism. Requiring you to combine that with On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, which is really about something entirely different (it was the prelude to the Hundred Flowers Campaign which Wikipedia says lasted for only six weeks) is silly because all they basically share in common is the word communism and the lack of a positive description of what communism is. It's like arguing for Christianity using only the Book of Genesis and Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. —— Shakescene (talk) 03:18, 11 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The significant proportion of the positive programme of the Communist party is contained here in Chapter 2. The chief plank of the platform is relatively clear, "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."; regarding private property's effect on freedom of labour, "In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer;" regarding private property's effect on social distribution, "Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations;" supercession of bourgeois culture with Communist (ie: post-proletarian culture); regarding the bourgeois imprisonment of women and children, "Abolition [Aufhebung, abolition by transcendence] of the family!;" and so on and so on in precisely the dialectic between "what is wrong with capitalism" and "what the Communist Party" proposes, leading finally to the classic social democratic demands list "1. Abolition of property in land… 10. Free education for all children in public schools…" as an immediate programme for 1848 workers. Look closer Lenny "Oh, you're 50 foot tall and made of alienated wage labour extracted in the value form!" Fifelfoo (talk) 01:38, 13 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]