Freebase: Discussion about Composition

Alabama Song: don't merge

2008-10-08T21:22:32.0017Z

Made a mistake, this is a musical track of the composition.

Candide: Play or Opera?

2008-10-02T07:22:29.0012Z

Neither !

Candide is first of all a novel by Voltaire in which he pokes fun at Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (the inventor of the infinitesimal calculus) and his priciple of philosophical optimism ("all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds").

Second, it is a comic operetta by Leonard Bernstein based on this book. An operetta is a little opera, strictly a play with songs, entr'actes and dances.The term has become synonymous with "light opera." Operetta is a hybrid between play and opera but a genre in itself !!

Now it is up to you how you model this...

Candide: Play or Opera?

2008-10-02T00:11:35.0012Z

And what about Rock Operas and where do they merge into musicals and... augh!

Candide: Play or Opera?

2008-10-01T20:16:09.0017Z

I changed some of the data here that pertained to Voltaire's original story (e.g. the operetta was written in 1956 or so, not 1759). But this topic raises an interesting problem -- are operettas plays or operas? Or rather than open up a problem that's presumably unresolvable (Wikipedia, at least, suggests that the boundary is pretty fuzzy), how should this one be modeled?

Candide has a composer (Bernstein), a librettist or book writer (Hellman or Wheeler depending on the version), and a lyricist (Wilbur). The musical composition type gives us properties for two of them (composer and lyricist); the play type also has types for composer and lyricist, and also brings in author from the written work type. The presence of a book writer suggests that it should be a play; the fact that it is performed as an opera suggests it should be an opera. We could just treat it as both, but that does leave some duplicated properties (the composer and lyricist properties, at minimum).

Thoughts?