Alexander Schneider (21 October 1908 – 2 February 1993) was a violinist, conductor, and educator. Born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania, he later moved to the United States as a member of the Budapest String Quartet. He died in Manhattan, New York City, at the age of 84.
Alexander (Sasha) was born Abram Sznejder. At 13 he almost died of tetanus after cutting his knee in an accident. The tetanus distorted his joints and recovery was long and painful. Sasha left Vilnius in 1924 and joined his brother Mischa Schneider in Frankfurt, after securing a scholarship to study violin with Adolf Rebner, the principal violin tutor at the Hoch Conservatory.
In 1927, Alexander became leader (concertmaster) of an orchestra in Saarbrücken. It was at this point that he changed his name. The orchestra director wanted him as leader but wanted a German-sounding name. Abram took Schneider as a surname because his brother Mischa had already selected it. Alexander appealed to him as a first name. In 1929 he was appointed leader of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk Orchestra in Hamburg. In 1932, he lost this job as a result of the ongoing Nazi campaign against Jews - soon the time would come to leave Germany.
Mieczysław Horszowski (June 23, 1892 – May 22, 1993) was a Polish-American pianist who had the longest known career in the history of the performing arts.
Horszowski was born in Lwów (Lemberg), Austria-Hungary, (now Ukraine) and was initially taught by his mother, a pupil of Karol Mikuli (himself a pupil of Frédéric Chopin). He became a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna at the age of seven; Leschetizky had studied with Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny.
In 1901 he gave a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 in Warsaw and soon after toured Europe and the Americas as a child prodigy. In 1905 the young Horszowski played to Gabriel Fauré and met Camille Saint-Saëns in Nice. In 1911 Horszowski put his performing career on hold in order to devote himself to literature, philosophy and art history in Paris.
While Horszowski's family was of Jewish origin (which made him a fugitive from Europe in the 1930s), he was himself an early convert to Roman Catholicism, and a very devout one. As the French critic André Tubeuf has written, "Horszowski was both very Jewish and very Catholic, in both cases as only a Pole could have been."
Franz Peter Schubert (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁants ˈʃuːbɛɐ̯t]; 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer.
Although he died at the age of 31, Schubert was a prolific composer, having written some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of Schubert's music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th century. Today, Schubert is seen as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.
Schubert was born in Himmelpfortgrund (now a part of Alsergrund), Vienna, on 31 January 1797. His father, Franz Theodor Schubert, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish schoolmaster; his mother, Elisabeth Vietz, was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith, and had also been a housemaid for a Viennese family prior to her marriage. Of Franz Theodor's fourteen children (one illegitimate child was born in 1783), nine died in infancy; five survived. Their father was a well-known teacher, and his school in Lichtental, a part of Vienna's 9th district, was well attended. He was not a musician of fame or with formal training, but he taught his son some elements of music.
Justin Drew Bieber ( /ˈbiːbər/ BEE-bər, born March 1, 1994) is a Canadian Pop/R&B singer-songwriter, musician, and actor. Bieber was discovered in 2008 by Scooter Braun, who came across Bieber's videos on YouTube and later became his manager. Braun arranged for him to meet with Usher in Atlanta, Georgia, and Bieber was soon signed to Raymond Braun Media Group (RBMG), a joint venture between Braun and Usher, and then to a recording contract with Island Records offered by L.A. Reid. Bieber's debut single, "One Time", was released in 2009 and peaked in the top twenty in Canada and charted in the top thirty in several international markets. His debut album, the seven-track EP My World, followed in November 2009, and was soon certified platinum in the United States. He became the first artist to have seven songs from a debut album chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
Kurt Schneider (7 January 1887 – 27 October 1967) was a German psychiatrist known largely for his writing on the diagnosis and understanding of schizophrenia, as well as personality disorders then known as psychopathic personalities.
Schneider was born in Crailsheim, Kingdom of Württemberg, and trained in medicine in Berlin and Tübingen. He was drafted for and completed military service in World War I and later obtained a postgraduate qualification in psychiatry. In 1931 he became director of the German Psychiatric Research Institute in Munich, which was previously founded by Emil Kraepelin.
Disgusted by the developing tide of psychiatric eugenics championed by the Nazi Party, Schneider left the institute (when?) and served as an army doctor (for who?) during World War II. After the war, anti-Nazi academics were appointed to serve in, and rebuild Germany's medical institutions and Schneider was given the post of Dean of the Medical School at Heidelberg University. Schneider kept this post until his retirement in 1955.