Talk:Jacques Offenbach

I added an infobox to the Wikipedia page, and I strongly believe that it should be on this page. I do not know why the infobox is not already on the infobox, as other composers in general (e.g. Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Frédéric Chopin) greatly benefit from the addition of an infobox, rather than simply an image. Why can we not have an infobox? Wcamp9 (talk) 02:05, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, in violation of the longstanding direction of Arbcom, you inserted an infobox into an existing article (a Featured article!) without first raising a WP:CONSENSUS to do so. You also ignored the comment on the edit screen of the article that says: "Before adding an infobox, please consult Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers#Biographical infoboxes and seek consensus on this article's talk page." The composers Wikiproject has stated: Many members of this project think that Infoboxes are seldom useful additions to articles for many reasons, including:

1. They often give trivia undue emphasis and prominence at the head of the article
2. They tend to become redundant (by duplicating the lead)
3. They can, conversely, become over-complex and thus vague, confused, or misleading, often compounding errors found elsewhere in the article, e.g. by confusing style and genre, setting forth haphazard lists of individual works, or highlighting the subject's trivial secondary or non-musical occupations.

They think it is normally best, therefore, to avoid infoboxes altogether for classical musicians, and prefer to add an infobox to an article only following consensus for that inclusion on the article's talk page. Particular care should be taken with featured articles as these have been carefully crafted according to clear consensus on their talkpages. (See the Request for Comment about composers' infoboxes and earlier infobox debates.)

WP:INFOBOXUSE states: The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article. Whether to include an infobox, which infobox to include, and which parts of the infobox to use, is determined through discussion and consensus among the editors at each individual article. While sports and politician bios can benefit from infoboxes, as a Signpost report notes: "Infoboxes may be particularly unsuited to liberal arts fields when they repeat information already available in the lead section of the article, are misleading or oversimplify the topic for the reader". I disagree with including an infobox in this article for these reasons, and the others mentioned below: first, the box misleadingly emphasizes less important factoids, stripped of context and lacking nuance, whereas the excellent WP:LEAD section emphasizes and contextualizes the most important facts about the subject; and second, as the key information about the subject is already discussed in the Lead, in the body of the article, and in the Google Knowledge Graph, the box is a 3rd or 4th mention of these facts. Particular problems with the box that you added include: (1) it begins, controversially, with the name "Jacob", which is not the name by which he is generally known (you also stuck that at the top of the article and I shall be deleting it unless there is a consensus to retain it), and may not even be his birth name, as the article later explains -- IBs should not include controversial content; (2) his date of birth, date of death and country of birth are given in the first sentence of the Lead, and his city of birth is explained at the beginning of the 2nd paragraph of the Lead, so the IB is largely redundant; (3) his place of death is not a "key fact" about him -- it is stated later in the article and is not necessary again; (4) the link to his list of works is given elsewhere in the article, and the Lead section better contextualizes and explains his key works, so encouraging the reader to immediately click away from the article to this long list of works is not helpful and is better in the works section, where it belongs. -- Ssilvers (talk) 03:04, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

His detractors called him "Seldom Bach". TheScotch (talk) 05:03, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Do you have a source for that? Nikkimaria (talk) 05:24, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

To be more specific, do you have a WP:Reliable source that also indicates the encyclopedic importance of the nickname? See WP:NOTEVERYTHING and WP:BALASP. -- Ssilvers (talk) 06:02, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

I asked User:Nikkimaria about this, and they apparently are relying on MOS:BIRTHDATE, which states: "Beyond the first paragraph of the lead section, birth and death details should only be included after a name if there is special contextual relevance." It can be argued that the birth and death dates of a subject's parents do have special contextual relevance. What historical periods and events did they experience that may have affected the subject's upbringing? For example, my parents grew up during the Great Depression, and the attitudes that they developed from that definitely affected my childhood. -- Ssilvers (talk) 14:12, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for this comment, I would agree that the dates of the parents do give context. Massenet (who has just had his parents' dates removed) was born when his father was 54 - he'd lived during the revolution, the Terror, Napoleon etc. I think also the fact that this is a longer, detailed, featured article tips the balance in favour of giving these dates. Clearly we don't need dates for his class mates or minor teachers, but I would tend to give the parents where they are reliably known. Cg2p0B0u8m (talk) 15:05, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

• I don't see them as important in their own right and find them a little trivial. Firstly, a reader has to have a wide enough grasp of history to understand what other events took place in those dates. Secondly they would have to understand what impact those dates had on the individuals in question - which is an entirely different point. Finally, they would have to guess what the impact on the parents meant to the article's subject. All this is a little too stretched to really mean anything to readers. I have all lived through some major events in history (as have we all), but some of them had zero impact on me, while other minor events that will never reach a history book had a great impact on me. If the events his parents lived through affected their raising of Offenbach, then that's something that should be expanded on in text, not left so people somehow 'sense' it through dates. - SchroCat (talk) 15:19, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
  • Then why mention the parents at all? Should the section "He was the second son and the seventh of ten children of Isaac Juda Offenbach né Eberst and his wife Marianne née Rindskopf. Isaac, who came from a musical family, had abandoned his original trade as a bookbinder and earned an itinerant living as a cantor in synagogues and playing the violin in cafés." be cut? (re Massenet, I should have mentioned, but forgot, that having a father aged 54 might be of interest). Cg2p0B0u8m (talk) 15:39, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

  You need to mention who the parents were: that's standard in any biographical article. - SchroCat (talk) 15:47, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

  Agreed. If we have sources discussing the impact that historical periods and events experienced by his parents impacted Offenbach, we could of course consider including such details as context - but providing dates and having readers guess at those details doesn't accomplish that. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:01, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

  My view is that if giving parents' dates is good enough for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (which it is) it's good enough for lesser works of reference, including Wikipedia, but though I think our rule is idiotic, depriving the reader of conceivably useful information for no clear reason, I suppose we are lumbered with yet another perverse ruling from the MoS. Tim riley talk 06:54, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

  There's nothing stopping us integrating the dates into the text, where they're useful -- for example, if it's important that a person's mother was fifty years old when he was born, or that his father died while he was at school, this can be said in prose. On the other hand, if it would seem pointless or distracting to include those details in the text, I'm not sure what the value of having the dates in brackets on this page (rather than those of the parents) would really be. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:55, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

  Whatever individual editors' thoughts on the point, I think it is a pity when Wikipedia gets solipsistic and opts out of the mainstream. Our "only we know best" attitude doesn't, in my view, do our reputation any good. But I haven't the energy nowadays to press to change the MoS. To quote Red Peppers, "Ever tried going into St Paul's and offering to rewrite the Bible?". Tim riley talk 12:24, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

  The parents usually do not have their own Wikipedia pages, as is the case with Offenbach, Sullivan, etc., so if one were interested in their dates, the only place they are usually displayed is here. I agree with the ODNB editors that seeing them does give the reader a chance to think about the era which the subject's chief influences, his or her parents, have themselves experienced. Was a subject's parents raised in a colony, though the subject was born after the revolution? Was a famously bawdy person from the "roaring 20s" raised by products of the Victorian era? How did her Depression-era, loan-manager father raise the financially irresponsible Kim Basinger? Nikkimaria argues that providing such dates, without expressly writing about the context commonly implied by those dates, does not accomplish the goal of giving context to a subject's upbringing and background, but it would usually be too tangential to go into details about, for example what Kim Basinger's parents may have said to her about managing money as a child. Also, this is another instance in which Wikipedians, using a strict interpretation of the MOS, are telling the main editors of articles that are stable, high-quality articles, where these dates have resided through peer reviews, GA reviews and FA reviews: "you were wrong to include the dates". -- Ssilvers (talk) 14:29, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

  If the context indicated by the dates is tangential, why are the dates not tangential? It's a matter of degree rather than difference - all using dates does is make it less obvious. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:35, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

  Why then, does the Alpha authority the ODNB choose to include them? Tim riley talk 14:40, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

@Tim riley I just knocked off a quick stub on the Broadway bio operetta The Love Song which was based on the life of Offenbach (allegedly). I thought it might be worth mentioning briefly in this article in the Legacy and reputation section, but will leave it to you to decide how. Incidentally, much more could be written on the operetta itself if you are interested in expanding it. Best. 4meter4 (talk) 15:12, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

The operetta is based on Offenbach's life and uses passages of his music, but the biographical story is highly fictionalized. It was intended by the Shuberts to take advantage of the popularity of Blossom Time (operetta), but it was not a hit. I guess it ought to be mentioned in Offenbach's article. -- Ssilvers (talk) 14:25, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Just to add, it was based on a more successful Hungarian work that was a hit in Budapest. There was also a German language adaptation of the Hungarian which informed the English language production. No clue how well that one did. See Bozo, Peter (September 2016). "Nadors Erzahlungen oder das Budapester Dreimaderlhaus. Ein Beitrag zur Budapester Offenbach-Rezeption". Studia Musicologica. 57 (3–4). Gale Academic. While paywalled, the viewable abstract in English has some good content.4meter4 (talk) 14:49, 6 October 2025 (UTC)