Massenetique wrote:We need to conform to a standard in capitalizing French titles.
Indeed! But:
Despite I have a great respect for the Grove et al., I'm afraid they are quite wrong, regarding French capitalization.
The rules for French titles are well explained in the
Lexique des Règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie Nationale (Paris, 1990 - pp. 168-171), and can be found online on
Wikipédia and on the
Université Laval (Québec) site (see §3). Unfortunately, I don't know why English sources doesn't translate it properly.
One problem is that in French 19th scores the work title was usually printed in capitals, so one can hardly see what is in upper/lower case.
One solution is to look at old musical
newspapers (like
Le Ménestrel...) - they can know be read and searched on
Gallica (the BnF's online library).
Here is an example, about a recently added score:
http://imslp.org/wiki/L%27oeil_crev%C3% ... v%C3%A9%29
Looking in Gallica's documents:
score: "L'ŒIL CREVÉ",
newspaper: "L'Œil crevé"
books (
1,
2): "l'Œil crevé" (within a sentence)
So, the correct title in ISMLP shound't be (IMHO!): "L'oeil crevé (Hervé)",
nor: "L'Oeil crevé (Hervé)",
but: "L'Œil crevé (Hervé)".
@Massenetique: you see, I refrained. I'm just arguing
.
(
Last year I was arguing against over-capitalization, now against under-capitalization! That's quite funny.)