Have you heard either the Swedish or Basel recordings of Phantom? The Swedish cast w/ Mikael Samuelson is one of my favorites.
you’ve obviously never heard chinese opera 
… or maybe you did… 
i speak mandarin. i don’t actually understand what “american style” means so i can’t answer the op. however, i think it’s safe to assume that a lot of songs are influenced by popular media and also that a song written for and with a certain language in mind will always sound better in that intended language. this is true even between mandarin and say, the cantonese version of the same song. i’m not a linguist (nor musically inclined) so i wouldn’t know if there are any languages out there that would actually be bad for making music with, but certainly mandarin songs sounds just fine to me. (the ones i like at any rate)
WAG: the song was probably composed with both the english and mandarin versions in mind.
I’m in no professional position to argue, but I disagree anyway.
Trust me, I’ve had the (unfortunate) opportunity to listen to tons and tons of Mandarin pop songs, which includes many hours of seeing the words go by on the karaoke screen. Tones are not sung, though perhaps they take that into account when actually composing the lyrics. I’ve heard a given word sung many different ways melodically.
Such as yuan2liang4 (which means to forgive). I’ve heard this sung at an even pitch for both characters, with yuan being at a higher pitch than liang, and with liang being higher than yuan. As for the actual syllable themselves, they’re usually sung evenly (as in no rising or falling within the syllable), which corresponds most strongly to 1st tone (not 2nd or 4th, as in the word). You just have to use common and sense and context to know what word it is. I mean, it’s hard to imagine it being mistaken for yuan2liang2 (unprocessed food grains) in a poppy love song!
I’m also not sure what is “American” about Edith Piaf (not "Edith Pilaf, as jackdavinci humorously misspelled).
She was singing in a distinctly French style and tradition, with a number of other contemporaries.
:dubious: The Austrians don’t seem to have a problem singing prettily. :mad:
Sanskrit is totally unsingable.
I rather like the French habit of doing strange rhythmic things with words. Carla Bruni’s album Quelqu’un M’a Dit has beautiful examples of that type of wordplay. The words really come alive, like a 3-D picture coming out of the page.
I agree 100%. Even cheesy Italian pop sounds all right to me.
I take it you’re familiar with Takarazuka Takarazuka theatre, in which every role is played by an extremely good female crossdresser? (That is, a woman dressing like a man.)
I love them both, and wish the Basel cast had made a full recording.
Italian, IMO, is a fantastic language to sing in.
German sounds just fine in baroque music. Play some Bach sometime, especially his Christmas Cantatas.
Being the parent language of Hindi, Sanskrit is just as singable. Only, you don’t get to hear it all that often, I suppose. You obviously haven’t heard Anuradha Paudwal sing the Gayatri Mantra (and many other mantras in the bhajan style). Not sure that it qualifies as “American style”, though.
I’m not Austrian. And neither are any of my vocal music major friends, all of whom hate singing in German.
Could it be that a language that tends to focus on vowel sounds is easier for a non-speaker to enjoy? So Italiano > Deutsch, or as a more extreme example, Hawai’ian might be more appealing than Xhosa?
Pig Latin
Music in German is okay, but what is really bad is singing in English translated from German.
I grew up in a Lutheran Church and the Hymnal back then consisted mostly of old Traditional German Lutheran songs directly translated into English. And the Pastor who grew up speaking German Loved the oldest and heaviest of them. I’m sure he sang them in German in his head.
They had absolutely no flow, sometimes maintained the German structure of moving clauses and phrases to the end of the sentence, Had beat emphasis on really stupid words, and tried to cram too many sylabals into too few beats, or had words just draw out over arbitrarily many beat to fit the phrase. Add to that the fact our church had brought over a very nice, large and expensive original organ from Europe, so they paid an Organ expert to play it. Unfortunately he liked to personalize his song with flourishes and improv.
By the second or third line most people were opening and closing their mouths like a car trying to move with the parking break on, and huddling in groups pointing at the music to come to a consensus where they were in it. By the end everybody had lost interest and were milling around waiting to sit again, with only a few people stilleven trying to sing.
??? A tonal language requires this though. The sound ‘MA’ means seven different things in Cantonese, everything from Grandmother to horse.
I think German music sounds great when it’s original to Germany. Much music doesn’t fit the meter right after being translated.
Michael Kunze has done some fantastic work on English-to-German translations of musicals. His translation of Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is the best.
The “Andrew Lloyd Webber Masterpiece” DVD was recorded in Bejing and has a group of Chinese children singing “Amigos Para Sempre” in Mandarin (I think) tha is positively enchanting. The rest of the show is in English, but it is very very good.