• Alphonse Daudet
• Basque people
• Belle époque
• Camille Saint-Saëns
• Cannes
• Caracas
• Charles Gounod
• Composer
• Conducting
• Diarist
• Franz Liszt
• Gabriel Fauré
• Georges Bizet
• Jacques Offenbach
• Jean Santeuil
• Jules Massenet
• Le Figaro
• Liane de Pougy
• Lilli Lehmann
• Louise Gillou
• Madeleine Lemaire
• Marcel Proust
• Mathilde Bonaparte
• Maurice Ravel
• Music critic
• Mélodie
• Napoleon I of France
• Naturalization
• Opéra-Comique
• Paul Verlaine
• Reynaldo Hahn
• Salzburg Festival
• Spanish people
• Stéphane Mallarmé
• Sybil Sanderson
• Venezuela
• Venezuelan people
• Victor Hugo
• Wikipedia Persondata
• Édouard Vuillard
• Émile Descombes
• 
  

• 
  Caracas
  Caracas (Spanish pronunciation: [kaˈɾakas]), officially Santiago de León de Caracas, is the capital and largest city of Venezuela; natives or residents are known as Caraquenians in English (Spanish: Caraqueños).
  Caracas is located in the northern part of the country, following the contours of the narrow Caracas Valley on the Venezuelan coastal mountain range (Cordillera de la Costa). Terrain suitable for building lies between 760 and 910 m (2,493.44 and 2,985.56 ft) above sea level. The valley is close to the Caribbean Sea, separated from the coast by a steep 2200 m (7400 ft) high mountain range, Cerro Ávila; to the south there are more hills and mountains.
  El Distrito Metropolitano de Caracas (Metropolitan District of Caracas) includes the Distrito Capital (the capital city proper) and four other municipalities in Miranda State: Chacao, Baruta, Sucre, and El Hatillo. The Distrito Capital had a population of 2,097,350 as of 2009, while that of Distrito Metropolitano was estimated at 4,196,514 as of (2008).
  
  wn.com/Caracas
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  Opéra-Comique
  Coordinates: 48°52′15″N 2°20′16″E / 48.870962°N 2.337703°E / 48.870962; 2.337703
  The Opéra-Comique is a Parisian opera company, which was founded around 1714 by some of the popular theatres of the Parisian fairs. In 1762 the company was merged with, and for a time took the name of its chief rival the Comédie-Italienne at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and was also called the Théâtre-Italien up to about 1793, when it again became most commonly known as the Opéra-Comique. Today the company's official name is Théâtre national de l'Opéra-Comique, and its theatre, with a capacity of around 1,248 seats, sometimes referred to as the Salle Favart (the third on this site), is located in Place Boïeldieu, in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier, one of the theatres of the Paris Opéra. The musicians and others associated with the Opéra-Comique have made important contributions to operatic history and tradition in France, and to French opera. Its current mission is to reconnect with its history, and discover its unique repertoire, to ensure production and dissemination of operas for the wider public. Mainstays of the repertory at the Opéra-Comique during its history have included the following works which have each been performed more than 1,000 times by the company: Cavalleria Rusticana, Le chalet, La dame blanche, Le domino noir, La fille du régiment, Lakmé, Manon, Mignon, Les noces de Jeannette, Le pré aux clercs, Tosca, La bohème, Werther and Carmen, the last having been performed more than 2,500 times.
  
  wn.com/Opéra-Comique
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  Venezuela
  Venezuela (ⁱ/ˌvɛnɨˈzweɪlə/ VEN-ə-ZWAY-lə), officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Spanish: República Bolivariana de Venezuela [repuˈβlika βoliβaˈɾjana ðe βeneˈswela]), is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south. Its northern coastline of roughly 2,800 kilometres (1,700 mi) includes numerous islands in the Caribbean Sea, and in the north east borders the northern Atlantic Ocean. Caribbean islands such as Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Curaçao, Bonaire, Aruba and the Leeward Antilles lie near the Venezuelan coast. Venezuela's territory covers around 916,445 square kilometres (353,841 sq mi) with an estimated population of 29,105,632. Venezuela is considered a state with extremely high biodiversity, with habitats ranging from the Andes mountains in the west to the Amazon Basin rainforest in the south, via extensive llanos plains and Caribbean coast in the center and the Orinoco River Delta in the east.
  
  wn.com/Venezuela

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  Alfred Cortot
  Alfred Denis Cortot (26 September 1877 – 15 June 1962) was a Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor. He is one of the most renowned 20th-century classical musicians, especially valued for his poetic insight in Romantic period piano works, particularly those of Chopin and Schumann.
  Born in Nyon, Vaud, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, to a French father and a Swiss mother, Cortot studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Émile Descombes (an associate and possibly a student of Frédéric Chopin), and with Louis Diémer, taking a premier prix in 1896. He made his debut at the Concerts Colonne in 1897, playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3. Between 1898 and 1901 he was a choral coach and subsequently an assistant conductor at the Bayreuth Festival. In 1902 he conducted the Paris premiere of Wagner's Götterdämmerung. He formed a concert society to perform Wagner's Parsifal, Beethoven's Missa solemnis, Brahms' German Requiem, and new works by French composers.
  In 1905, Cortot formed a trio with Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals, which established itself as the leading piano trio of its era. In 1907, he was appointed Professor by Gabriel Fauré at the Conservatoire de Paris, replacing Raoul Pugno. He continued to teach at the Paris Conservatoire until 1923, where his pupils included Clara Haskil, Yvonne Lefébure, Dinu Lipatti, Vlado Perlemuter, Simone Plé-Caussade, and Marguerite Monnot.
  
  wn.com/Alfred_Cortot
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  Alphonse Daudet
  Alphonse Daudet (13 May 1840 – 16 December 1897) was a French novelist. He was the father of Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet.
  Alphonse Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. The father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune and failure. Alphonse, amid much truancy, had a depressing boyhood. In 1856 he left Lyon, where his schooldays had been mainly spent, and began life as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south of France. The position proved to be intolerable and Daudet said later that for months after leaving Alès he would wake with horror, thinking he was still among his unruly pupils.
  On 1 November 1857, he abandoned teaching and took refuge with his brother Ernest Daudet, only some three years his senior, who was trying, "and thereto soberly," to make a living as a journalist in Paris. Alphonse took to writing, and his poems were collected into a small volume, Les Amoureuses (1858), which met with a fair reception. He obtained employment on Le Figaro, then under Cartier de Villemessant's energetic editorship, wrote two or three plays, and began to be recognized, among those interested in literature, as possessing individuality and promise. Morny, Napoleon III's all-powerful minister, appointed him to be one of his secretaries — a post which he held till Morny's death in 1865 — and showed Daudet no small kindness. Daudet had put his foot on the road to fortune.
  
  wn.com/Alphonse_Daudet
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  Basque people
  The Basques (Basque: euskaldunak, Spanish: vascos, French: basques) as an ethnic group, primarily inhabit an area traditionally known as the Basque Country (Basque: Euskal Herria), a region that is located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-central Spain and south-western France.
  The Basques are known in the local languages as:
  The English word Basque comes from French Basque (pronounced /bask/), which itself comes from Gascon Basco (pronounced /ˈbasku/) and Spanish Vasco^{[citation needed]} (pronounced /ˈbasko/). These, in turn, come from Latin Vasco (pronounced /wasko/), plural Vascones (see History section below). The Latin labial-velar approximant /w/ generally evolved into the bilabials /b/ and /β̞/ in Gascon and Spanish, probably under the influence of Basque and Aquitanian, a language related to old Basque and spoken in Gascony in Antiquity (similarly the Latin /w/ evolved into /v/ in French, Italian and other languages).
  
  wn.com/Basque_people
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  Camille Saint-Saëns
  Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl kamij sɛ̃sɑ̃s]; 9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony No. 3 (Organ Symphony).
  Saint-Saëns was born in Paris, France, on 9 October 1835. His father, a government clerk, died three months after his birth. He was raised by his mother, Clémence, with the assistance of her aunt, Charlotte Masson, who moved in. Masson introduced Saint-Saëns to the piano, and began giving him lessons on the instrument. At about this time, age two, Saint-Saëns was found to possess perfect pitch. His first composition, a little piece for the piano dated 22 March 1839, is now kept in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Saint-Saëns's precocity was not limited to music. He learned to read and write by age three, and had some mastery of Latin by the age of seven. His first public concert appearance occurred when he was five years old, when he accompanied a Beethoven violin sonata. He went on to begin in-depth study of the full score of Don Giovanni. In 1842, Saint-Saëns began piano lessons with Camille-Marie Stamaty, a pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who had his students play the piano while resting their forearms on a bar situated in front of the keyboard, so that all the pianist's power came from the hands and fingers but not the arms. At ten years of age, Saint-Saëns gave his debut public recital at the Salle Pleyel, with a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 15 in B-flat major (K. 450), and various pieces by Handel, Kalkbrenner, Hummel, and Bach. As an encore, Saint-Saëns offered to play any of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas from memory. Word of this incredible concert spread across Europe, and as far as the United States with an article in a Boston newspaper.
  
  wn.com/Camille_Saint-Saëns
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  Charles Gounod
  Charles-François Gounod (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl fʁɑ̃swa ɡuno]; 17 June 1818 – 17 October or 18 October 1893) was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.
  Gounod was born in Paris, the son of a pianist mother and an artist father. His mother was his first piano teacher. Under her tutelage, Gounod first showed his musical talents. He entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied under Fromental Halévy and Pierre Zimmermann (he later married Zimmermann's daughter). In 1839, he won the Prix de Rome for his cantata Fernand. He was following his father; François-Louis Gounod (d. 1823) had won the second Prix de Rome in painting in 1783. During his stay of four years in Italy, Gounod studied the music of Palestrina and other sacred works of the sixteenth century; these he never ceased to cherish. Around 1846-47 he gave serious consideration to joining the priesthood, but he changed his mind before actually taking holy orders, and went back to composition. During that period, he was attached to the Church of Foreign Missions in Paris.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Gounod
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  Franz Liszt
  Franz Liszt (German: [fʁant͡s lɪst]); Hungarian: Liszt Ferencz, in modern use Liszt Ferenc) (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886) was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.
  Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age. In the 1840s he was considered by some to be perhaps the greatest pianist of all time. He was also a well-known composer, piano teacher, and conductor. He was a benefactor to other composers, including Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg and Alexander Borodin.
  As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the "Neudeutsche Schule" ("New German School"). He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony. He also played an important role in popularizing a wide array of music by transcribing it for piano.
  
  wn.com/Franz_Liszt
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  Gabriel Fauré
  Gabriel Urbain Fauré (pronounced: [ɡabʁiɛl yʁbɛ̃ fɔʁe]; 12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, nocturnes for piano, and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune". Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his greatest works in his later years, in a harmonically and melodically much more complex style.
  Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family. His talent became clear when he was a small boy. At the age of nine he was sent to a music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend. After graduating from the college in 1865 Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition. When he became successful in his middle age, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire, he still lacked time for composing; he retreated to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition. By his last years, Fauré was recognised in France as the leading French composer of his day. An unprecedented national musical tribute was held for him in Paris in 1922, headed by the president of the French Republic. Outside France, Fauré's music took decades to become widely accepted, except in Britain, where he had many admirers during his lifetime.
  
  wn.com/Gabriel_Fauré
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  Georges Bizet
  Georges Bizet (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ bizɛ]) formally Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, (25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875) was a French composer, mainly of operas. In a career cut short by his early death, he achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, became one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertory.
  During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned. Neither of the two operas that reached the stage—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—was immediately successful.
  
  wn.com/Georges_Bizet
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  Jacques Offenbach
  Jacques Offenbach (20 June 1819 – 5 October 1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s–1870s and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr. and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffman remains part of the standard opera repertory.
  Born in Cologne, the son of a synagogue cantor, Offenbach showed early musical talent. At the age of 14, he was accepted as a student at the Paris Conservatoire but found academic study unfulfilling and left after a year. From 1835 to 1855 he earned his living as a cellist, achieving international fame, and as a conductor. His ambition, however, was to compose comic pieces for the musical theatre. Finding the management of Paris's Opéra-Comique company uninterested in staging his works, in 1855 he leased a small theatre in the Champs-Élysées. There he presented a series of his own small-scale pieces, many of which became popular.
  
  wn.com/Jacques_Offenbach
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  Jules Massenet
  Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet (French pronunciation: [ʒyl emil fʁedeʁik masnɛ]) (May 12, 1842 – August 13, 1912) was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas fell into almost total oblivion. Apart from Manon and Werther, his works were rarely performed. However, since the mid-1970s, many operas of his such as Thaïs and Esclarmonde have undergone periodic revivals.
  Massenet was born in Montaud, then an outlying hamlet and now a part of the city of Saint-Étienne, in the Loire. When he was six, his family moved to Paris due to his father's ill-health. There his mother (Adélaïde Massenet, née Royer; her husband's second wife) started taking piano pupils. She also taught Jules so well that at the age of 11 he was able to enter the Paris Conservatoire. He was still a student when his family moved from Paris to Chambéry, but Jules returned to Paris after a few months, living with a married member of his father's family by his first wife. To support himself during his studies, he worked as timpanist for six years at the Théâtre Lyrique, playing also other percussion instruments in other theatres, and working as a pianist in the Café de Belleville.
  
  wn.com/Jules_Massenet
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  Liane de Pougy
  Liane de Pougy (2 July 1869 – 26 December 1950), was a Folies Bergères dancer renowned as one of Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesans.
  Anne Marie Chassaigne was born in La Flèche, Sarthe, France, the daughter of Pierre Blaise Eugène Chassaigne and his wife Aimée Lopez, and raised in a nunnery. At the age of 16, she ran off with Armand Pourpe, a naval officer, marrying because she was pregnant. The baby was named Marco Pourpe, and his mother was, in her own opinion 'a terrible mother'. ‘My son was like a living doll given to a little girl’. She would have preferred the baby to be a girl ‘because of the dresses and the curly hair’.(Marco grew up to volunteer as an airman in WWI and was killed on 2 December 1914 near Villers-Brettoneux.)
  The marriage was not a happy one. Anne-Marie later wrote in her memoirs that her new husband took her violently on their wedding night, an event which left her emotionally scarred. It is said that the groom was a brute and abused her – she wore the scar of his beatings on her breast for the rest of her life. When Armand Pourpe's naval career led him to a billet in Marseilles, Anne-Marie took a lover, the Marquis Charles de MacMahon. When her husband found them in bed together he shot her with a revolver, wounding her on the wrist. Deciding to leave her husband, Anne Marie sold her rosewood piano to a young man who paid 400 francs cash for the instrument. Within an hour, Anne Marie was on her way to Paris, leaving her infant son with his father, who in turn sent his son to live with the boy's grandparents, in Suez.
  
  wn.com/Liane_de_Pougy
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  Lilli Lehmann
  Lilli Lehmann, born Elisabeth Maria Lehmann, later Elisabeth Maria Lehmann-Kalisch (November 24, 1848 Würzburg – May 17, 1929 Berlin) was a German operatic soprano of phenomenal versatility. She was also a voice teacher.
  The future opera star's father, Karl-August Lehmann, was a singer (Heldentenor) while her mother, Maria Theresia Löw (1809–1885), was a soprano of Jewish origin. Her first lessons were from her mother, who had been a prima donna under Spohr at the Cassel opera. After singing small parts on the stage, for example in Mozart's Magic Flute at Prague in 1866, and studies under Heinrich Laube in Leipzig, Lehmann made her proper debut in 1870 in Berlin as a light soprano in Meyerbeer's Das Feldlager in Schlesien. She subsesequently became so successful that she was appointed an Imperial Chamber Singer for life in 1876.
  Lehmann sang in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, singing in the first complete performances of The Ring Cycle as Woglinde and Helmwige. She performed in London in 1884, and appeared at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1885–1890. Together with her Met colleagues Fischer, Alvary, Brandt, and Seidl, she helped to popularise Wagner's music in America. By remaining in America beyond the leave granted her by the Berlin Opera, she faced a ban following her return to Germany. After the personal intervention of the Emperor, the ban was lifted.
  
  wn.com/Lilli_Lehmann
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  Marcel Proust
  Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.
  Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris' then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponds with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.
  Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace. She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide the necessary assistance to her son's later attempts to translate John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. He was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith.
  
  wn.com/Marcel_Proust
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  Maurice Ravel
  Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937) was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects. Much of his piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music has entered the standard concert repertoire.
  Ravel's piano compositions, such as Jeux d'eau, Miroirs, Le tombeau de Couperin and Gaspard de la nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, uses a variety of sound and instrumentation.
  Ravel is perhaps known best for his orchestral work Boléro (1928), which he considered trivial and once described as "a piece for orchestra without music".
  According to SACEM, Ravel's estate earns more royalties than that of any other French composer. According to the law of most countries (including all members of the World Trade Organization), Ravel's works have been in the public domain since January 1, 2008, in most countries.
  
  wn.com/Maurice_Ravel
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  Napoleon I of France
  Napoleon Bonaparte (French: Napoléon Bonaparte [napoleɔ̃ bɔnɑpaʁt]) (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) was a French military and political leader who rose to prominence during the latter stages of the French Revolution. As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815. His legal reform, the Napoleonic Code, has been a major influence on many civil law jurisdictions worldwide, but he is best remembered for his role in the wars led against France by a series of coalitions, the so-called Napoleonic Wars. He established hegemony over most of continental Europe and sought to spread the ideals of the French Revolution, while consolidating an imperial monarchy which restored aspects of the deposed Ancien Régime. Due to his success in these wars, often against numerically superior enemies, he is generally regarded as one of the greatest military commanders of all time and his campaigns are studied at military academies throughout much of the world.
  Napoleon was born in Corsica to parents of noble Genoese ancestry, and trained as an artillery officer in mainland France. He rose to prominence under the French First Republic and led successful campaigns against the First and Second Coalitions arrayed against France. In 1799, he staged a coup d'état and installed himself as First Consul; five years later the French Senate proclaimed him emperor. In the first decade of the 19th century, the French Empire under Napoleon engaged in a series of conflicts—the Napoleonic Wars—involving every major European power.
  
  wn.com/Napoleon_I_of_France
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  Paul Verlaine
  Paul-Marie Verlaine (French pronunciation: [vɛʁˈlɛn]; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.
  Born in Metz, he was educated at the Lycée impérial Bonaparte (now the Lycée Condorcet) in Paris and then took up a post in the civil service. He began writing poetry at an early age, and was initially influenced by the Parnassien movement and its leader, Leconte de Lisle. Verlaine's first published poem was published in 1863 in La Revue du progrès, a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard. Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de Ricard (Louis-Xavier de Ricard's mother) at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent artistic figures of the day: Anatole France; Emmanuel Chabrier; inventor-poet and humorist Charles Cros; the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; Theodore de Banville; François Coppée; Jose-Maria de Heredia; Leconte de Lisle; Catulle Mendes, and others. Verlaine's first published collection, Poèmes saturniens (1866), though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve, established him as a poet of promise and originality.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Verlaine
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  Reynaldo Hahn
  Reynaldo Hahn (August 9, 1874 – January 28, 1947) was a Venezuelan, naturalised French, composer, conductor, music critic and diarist. Best known as a composer of songs, he wrote in the French classical tradition of the mélodie. The fine craftsmanship, remarkable beauty, and originality of his works capture the insouciance of la belle époque.
  Reynaldo Hahn was born in Caracas, Venezuela, the youngest of twelve children. Reynaldo's father Carlos was an affluent engineer, inventor, and businessman of German-Jewish extraction; his mother, Elena María de Echenagucia, was a Venezuelan of Spanish, (Basque) origin, and as most wealthy families descended from Spanish colonists in that country. The increasingly volatile political atmosphere in South America during the 1870s caused his father to retire and leave Venezuela.
  Hahn's family moved to Paris when he was three years old. Although he showed interest in his native music of Caracas in his youth, France would "determine and define Hahn's musical identity in later life". The city and its cultural resources: the Paris Opéra, the Paris Opéra Ballet, the Opéra-Comique, in addition to the nexus of artists and writers, proved an ideal setting for the precocious Hahn.
  
  wn.com/Reynaldo_Hahn
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  Spanish people
  The term Spanish people (or Spaniards) has two distinct meanings: Traditionally, it applies to people native to any part of Spain. More recently, it has also come to have a legal meaning, referring to people who hold Spanish citizenship.
  Within Spain there are a number of nationalisms and regionalisms, reflecting the country's complex history. The official language of Spain is Spanish (also known as Castilian), a standard language based on the mediaeval dialect of the Castilians of north-central Spain. There are several commonly spoken regional languages. With the exception of Basque, the languages native to Spain are Romance languages.
  There are substantial populations outside Spain with ancestors who emigrated from Spain; most notably in Latin America.
  The earliest modern humans inhabiting Spain are believed to have been Neolithic peoples who may have arrived in the Iberian Peninsula as early as 35,000­–40,000 years ago. In more recent times the Iberians are believed to have arrived or developed in the region between the 4th millennium BC and the 3rd millennium BC, initially settling along the Mediterranean coast. Celts settled in Spain during the Iron Age. Some of those tribes in North-central Spain, which had cultural contact with the Iberians, are called Celtiberians. In addition, a group known as the Tartessians and later Turdetanians inhabited southwestern Spain and who are believed to have developed a separate civilization of Phoenician influence. The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians successively founded trading colonies along the Mediterranean coast over a period of several centuries. The Second Punic War between the Carthaginians and Romans was fought mainly in what is now Spain and Portugal.
  
  wn.com/Spanish_people
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  Stéphane Mallarmé
  Stéphane Mallarmé (pronounced [ste.fan ma.laʁ.me]) (18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.
  Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris. He worked as an English teacher and spent much of his life in relative poverty; but was famed for his salons, occasional gatherings of intellectuals at his house on the rue de Rome for discussions of poetry, art, philosophy. The group became known as les Mardistes, because they met on Tuesdays (in French, mardi), and through it Mallarmé exerted considerable influence on the work of a generation of writers. For many years, those sessions, where Mallarmé held court as judge, jester, and king, were considered the heart of Paris intellectual life. Regular visitors included W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Paul Verlaine, and many others.
  
  wn.com/Stéphane_Mallarmé
• 
  Sybil Sanderson
  Sibyl Sanderson (December 7, 1864 – May 16, 1903) was a famous American operatic soprano during the Parisian Belle Époque.
  She was born in Sacramento, California, in the United States. Sibyl's father Silas Sanderson was a California politician and lawyer; after serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California, he became a highly-paid legal advisor to the Southern Pacific Railroad. After his death in 1886, she and her mother moved to Paris and became transplanted socialites. Sanderson proved to be a remarkably gifted singer and began to appear on the stages of the Opéra-Comique, and later Opéra, in Paris, most notably in the works of Jules Massenet. She was his favorite soprano and appeared in the premieres of a number of his operas, the roles having been created for her unique talents (her professional debut took place in Paris in the title role in Esclarmonde).
  She was also a famous interpreter of Manon, Massenet's most enduring opera. Sanderson was also admired by Camille Saint-Saëns, who wrote the title role in Phryné for her. Success outside of Paris was elusive for Sanderson; she appeared at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera (debut in title role of Manon on January 16, 1895, the last performance as Juliette in Roméo et Juliette on December 31, 1901) to lackluster reviews.
  
  wn.com/Sybil_Sanderson
• 
  Venezuelan people
  Venezuelan people are from a multiethnic nation in South America called Venezuela. Venezuelans are predominantly Roman Catholic and speak Spanish. The majority of Venezuelans are the result of a mixture of Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians, but nearly one fourth is White.
  With approximately 28 million people in 2006, Venezuela is the sixth-most populous country in Latin America, after Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru.
  More than ninety percent of the Venezuelans live in urban areas – a figure significantly higher than the world average. The literacy rate (98 percent) in Venezuela is also well above the world average, and the rate of population growth is slightly higher than the world average. Also, a large proportion of Venezuelans are young, largely because of recent decreases in the infant mortality rate. While 30 percent of the people are 14 years of age or younger, just 4 percent are aged 65 or older.
  The country has a diverse population that reflects its colourful history and the peoples that have populated here from ancient times to the present. The historic amalgam of the different main groups forms the basics of Venezuela's current demographics: European immigrants, Amerindian peoples, Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners and other recent immigrants.
  
  wn.com/Venezuelan_people
• 
  Victor Hugo
  Victor-Marie Hugo (French pronunciation: [viktɔʁ maʁi yɡo]) (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist^{[citation needed]} and exponent of the Romantic movement in France.
  In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (also known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).
  Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism^{[citation needed]}, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Panthéon.
  Hugo was the third, illegitimate, son of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1774–1828) and Sophie Trébuchet (1772–1821); his brothers were Abel Joseph Hugo (1798–1855) and Eugène Hugo (1800–1837). He was born in 1802 in Besançon (in the region of Franche-Comté) and lived in France for the majority of his life. However, he decided to live in exile as a result of Napoleon III's Coup d'état at the end of 1851.
  
  wn.com/Victor_Hugo
• 
  Édouard Vuillard
  Jean-Édouard Vuillard (November 11, 1868 – June 21, 1940) was a French painter and printmaker associated with the Nabis.
  Jean-Édouard Vuillard, the son of a retired captain, spent his youth at Cuiseaux (Saône-et-Loire); in 1878 his family moved to Paris in modest circumstances. After his father's death in 1884, Vuillard received a scholarship to continue his education. In the Lycée Condorcet Vuillard met Ker Xavier Roussel (also a future painter and Vuillard's future brother in law), Maurice Denis, musician Pierre Hermant, writer Pierre Véber, and Aurélien Lugné-Poë.
  In 1885, Vuillard left the Lycée Condorcet. On the advice of his closest friend, Roussel, he refused a military career and joined Roussel at the studio of painter Diogène Maillart. There, Roussel and Vuillard received the rudiments of artistic training. In 1887, after three unsuccessful attempts, Vuillard passed the entrance examination for the École des Beaux-Arts. Vuillard kept a private journal from 1888–1905 and later from 1907 to 1940.
  
  wn.com/Édouard_Vuillard
• Émile Descombes
  Émile Descombes (1829 – 1912) was a French pianist and teacher.
  Little is known about his life, except that he is variously described as an associate or disciple of Frédéric Chopin, and possibly even one of his last pupils.
  He taught at the Paris Conservatoire, where his students included Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie (Descombes called him "the laziest student in the Conservatoire"), Alfred Cortot, Reynaldo Hahn, Édouard Risler and Joseph Morpain.
  
  wn.com/Émile_Descombes

• Violin Sonata in C major: I. Sans lenteur, tendrement
• Violin Sonata in C major: II. Véloce
• Violin Sonata in C major: III. Modéré, très à l’aise, au gré de l’interprète
• Soliloque et Forlane: Andante — Allegro scherzando
• Nocturne in E-flat major: Andantino
• Romance in A major: Très modéré
• Piano Quartet No. 3 in G major: I. Allegretto moderato
• Piano Quartet No. 3 in G major: II. Allegro assai
• Piano Quartet No. 3 in G major: III. Andante
• Piano Quartet No. 3 in G major: IV. Allegro assai
• Si mes vers avaient des ailes

• Si mes vers avaient des ailes
• Paysage
• Rêverie
• Offrande
• Mai
• Infidelité
• Seule
• Les Cygnes
• Nocturne
• Trois jours de vendange
• D'une prison
• Séraphine
• L'Heure exquise
• Fêtes galantes
• Douze rondels : Le Jour
• Douze rondels : Je me metz en vostre mercy
• Douze rondels : Le Printemps
• Douze rondels : L'Air
• Douze rondels : La Paix
• Douze rondels : Gardez le trait de la fenêtre
• Douze rondels : La Pêche
• Douze rondels : Quand je fus pris au pavillon
• Douze rondels : Les Étoiles
• Douze rondels : L'Automne
• Douze rondels : La Nuit
• Douze rondels : Le souvenir d'avoir chanté

• Chansons grises : Chanson d'automne
• Chansons grises : Tous deux
• Chansons grises : L'allée est sans fin
• Chansons grises : En sourdine
• Chansons grises : L'Heure Exquise
• Chansons grises : Paysage triste
• Chansons grises : La Bonne Chanson
• D'une prison
• L'Incrédule
• Offrande
• Fêtes galantes
• Si mes vers avaient des ailes
• Rêverie
• Quand la nuit n'est pas étoilée
• À Chloris
• Quand je fus pris au pavillon
• Nocturne
• Séraphine
• Mai
• Les Cygnes
• Trois jours de vendange
• Fumée
• Dans la nuit
• Sur l'eau
• Infidélité
• Seule
• Paysage
• La Nuit
• Le Printemps

• Les Fontaines
• A Chloris
• Études latines
• La Chère Blessure
• Rondels
• Quand je fus pris au pavillon
• Les Étoiles
• L'Automne
• Infidélité
• Si mes vers avaient des ailes
• L'Enamourée
• Chansons grises: Chanson d'automne
• Chansons grises: Tous deux
• Chansons grises: L'allée est sans fin
• Chansons grises: En Sourdine
• Chansons grises: L'Heure exquise
• Chansons grises: Paysage triste
• Chansons grises: La Bonne Chanson
• D'une prison
• Offrande
• L'Incrédule
• Fêtes galantes

Born: 1874-08-09

Died: 1947-01-28

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• timeline:
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• 2006
• 2005
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• 2001