IMSLP Forums

It appears we have duplicates for:

1. Lully

Lully, Jean Baptiste
Lully, Jean Baptitste de

2. Rossini

Rossini, Gioacchino
Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

I've fixed the Rossini duplicate.

The two Lullys are actually not duplicates; a violist e-mailed me and notified me of a wrongful attribution to Jean-Baptiste Lully of a piece that was composed by his son who had the same name (apparently, "de" is always used in the son's name but usually not in the father's, for some reason), and after some research this is correct. I've added "(ii)" to the category title so that this is clear

Wow, that's confusing! But it brought up something I was wondering about... when do we alphabetize the de's and da's and d's for composers? I added a category for Eugen d'Albert and put it under Albert, Eugen d' (because that's what Grove does). Should the other names (such as de Falla) be treated the same way?

Well... as you can see (with Jean-Baptiste de Lully (ii))... changing the title of a Composer category is a pain in the rear lol, and so if Falla can be ordered under "De Falla" (and apparently the other "de"s are also this way), it might be a good idea to leave it this way lol (at least until I find a less painful way of changing the composer category name). Another way is to change the ordering without changing the category name, which is quite easy... though, I don't know if people expect Manuel de Falla under D or F?

If Grove lists Eugen d'Albert as Albert, Eugen d' then it's fine

"de" in French just means "of", so in de Lully = "junior". So we would best keep French d(e)'s as de Lully alphabetized under L, and d'Albert under A, and d'Indy would be under I. For de Falla, I think that "de" has the same meaning in spanish, but I have a feeling that he would better be categorized under D... don't know why, he's just known with this De Falla.

Of course, this also applies to loads of titles. Take Ravel's <i>La Valse</i> or Debussy's <i>La Mer</i>. They are normally alphabetized under V and M respectively. Another annoying thing about computerized alpha-numeric ordering is how a Symphony No. 2 will appear among the Syphony No. 20's instead of after 1.

We can treat these works the same way as the numbers in the beginning: categorize them as symphony no. 02 and the order should be correct.

Edit: just tried it with the Beethoven piano sonatas and it works perfectly. Maybe Feldmahler can create one more of his magic scripts...

I've just fixed this in the latest Add Work special page Now, the Add Work special page will pad all numbers in the piece title with 0s up to 4 digits (ex. No.4 --> No.0004) in the category sort key.

I've also added "La" to the list of words that should be moved to the end of the title in the sort key if it appears at the beginning of the title, and so the Debussy problem is solved also

The only problem with this is that it might break some existing lists (for example, the BWV numberings in the Cantatas), since the new numbers start with 0 now... but I think we can work something out in specific cases. Ultimately, I might write a bot to automatically clean up this (and related) issues with non-conformity (to the work page standard), but I don't think this is a big issue once the root problem is solved (and "wrong" work pages don't continue to be created).