Franz von Suppé

Franz von Suppé (also spelled von Suppè; born Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo de Suppé; 18 April 1819 – 21 May 1895) was an Austrian composer of light operas and other theatre music. He came from the Kingdom of Dalmatia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now part of Croatia). A composer and conductor of the Romantic period, he is notable for his four dozen operettas. Nearly the total amount of sources, both in English and in other languages, have always reported the name spelled with an acute accent. Recently, an alternate spelling with grave accent has taken hold, reported by very few other sources as either alternative or only spelling. The latter spelling has been sustained among the others by Andreas Weigel, claiming that Suppé used to sign his name using the grave accent, like his father; nonetheless, his name is written with the acute accent on his tombstone while in the baptismal registry it was even written without any accent (a probable misspell by the priest). Further information provided by Weigel's research that is already incorporated in the more recent article in the Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon is that Suppé's added name "Demelli" is incorrect, that his mother's maiden name is Jandovsky or Jandowsky (not Landovsky nor Landowsky), and that Suppé lied about or embellished very many things in his biography to a degree quite unique in music history (for example about his education and when he met his wives). This lack of clarity about which accent should be used to spell Suppé's surname is due to the fact that in Italian both grave and acute accent exist but, until the 20th century, the applications of the two accents were not under a precise rule. As of the 16th century, most writers and printers used only the grave accent on the last vowel of words and names and the acute accent on internal vowels, but since this case hardly even occurs in Italian the grave was de-facto the only accent in use. The orthography started stabilising only after the birth of the Kingdom of Italy, when Italians began using the acute accent to denote close-mid vowels (/e/ and /o/) to distinguish them from open-mid vowels (/ɛ/ and /ɔ/), and the grave accent in all the other cases, following a use that already existed but was not the most common till then. Suppé was born during the 19th century and this would explain why both spellings are found in different sources and can be considered legitimate, however most of the sources concur on the acute accent which also matches with the close-mid pronunciation of the last vowel in Italian.

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