Repairing UTF-8 that had been stored as Latin-1. The correction is mechanical, not a guess: the stored text re-encodes to exactly these bytes. last_name: "Gardès" -> "Gardès"

Repairing character-encoding corruption (mojibake) introduced during data import; the person/ensemble name itself is unchanged. Cause: UTF-8 bytes were decoded as Windows-1252 at import, so each non-ASCII letter became a 2-character sequence. Stored value "Gardès" is being corrected to "Gardès". Detected by decoding the stored text back through the offending codec and confirming it yields valid UTF-8. Part of a sweep of all singers, conductors, composers, characters, operas and recordings; 419 fields matched.