Talk:Joseph Haydn's ethnicity

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[edit] ethnicity

I do not agree with the sentences: "The principal contending ethnicities were Croatian and German. Mainstream musical scholarship today generally adopts the second of these two hypotheses." and wanted to change it to "Mainstream musical scholarship today generally adopts that Haydn's mother tongue was German, but due to the vagueness of the concept, does not generally use the term ethnicity in this context any more."

My changes were reverted with the explanation: "I think we can rely on the commonsense notion, just as Haydn himself would have meant."

My answer: In the German language literature this is certainly NOT considered a common sense notion. No modern scholarly text written in German or written by German speaking authors would use the notion "ethnicity" in this context (since it is dangerous to use such a vague concept after the notion of "German" has been so much misused by the Nazis). So the sentence that meanstream scholarship generally considers Haydn of German ethnicity is clearly wrong. Nahabedere (talk) 14:02, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Hello Hahabedere, By "mainstream scholarship" I mean the biographies of Haydn that you'll find on the shelf of any large library: Geiringer, Brenet, Hughes, Larsen, Robbins Landon (all cited in the article). These are unquestionably the "mainstream" scholarly authorities concerning Haydn's life, and they all discuss the question of whether Haydn was Croatian or Austrian.

Now you write Austrian, which is a totally different thing. The term Austrian does not necessarily imply a certain language. For example, both in history and today, many people identify themselves as Croatian-speaking Austrians.

In general, it seems that by "mainstream scholarship" you mean, "mainstream scholarship in the English language". A large part of scholarship on Haydn has been written in German, and there, today the situation is different. We could present it that way. Nahabedere (talk) 11:54, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Concerning the purpose of your edit: obviously, horrible deeds have been done, by the Nazis and others, in the name of ethnicity. But pretending that ethnicity doesn't exist will not be of any help in preventing future deeds of this kind. To the contrary, full awareness of ethnic identification and its often terrible consequences is probably crucial in preventing such deeds. Sincerely, Opus33 (talk) 15:29, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

A discussion on this would lead to far. In the German speaking world, people just tend to use more precise terms instead of the vague, and hence dangerous concept of "ethnicity", for example, "German speaking", "German citizen", "declaring oneself German". Nahabedere (talk) 11:54, 14 March 2008 (UTC)