Verdi's

Saturday, 24 November 2012

Verdi: Aïda - San Francisco Opera (starring Luciano Pavarotti)

BBC Proms 2011: Verdi - Dies Irae from Requiem

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72nd Street
72nd Street is one of the major bi-directional crosstown streets in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Where the west end of 72nd Street curves into the south end of Riverside Drive, the memorial to Eleanor Roosevelt stands in Riverside Park. At this end of the street is the landmarked Beaux-Arts Chatsworth Apartments (344 West 72nd Street, John E. Scharsmith, architect, 1902-04, Annex, 1905-06).
At 72nd Street, Broadway crosses Amsterdam Avenue, creating a minute triangular space, Verdi Square; across the street to the south lies Sherman Square.
72nd Street is one of the few streets to go through Central Park, connecting the Upper West Side via Women's Gate, Terrace Drive and Inventors Gate, with the Upper East Side. However, Terrace Drive is often closed to vehicular traffic and therefore the crosstown M72 bus crosses the park at 65th Street.
The Dakota apartment building is located on the corner of West 72nd Street and Central Park West. Before automotive traffic, broad cross-streets offered desirable sites for prominent residences; the mansion at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue was the first of the Gilded Age mansions to be replaced by an apartment block, 907 Fifth Avenue, and McKim, Mead, and White’s Charles L. Tiffany mansion (1882) at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue was replaced by an apartment block (19 East 72nd Street, Rosario Candela, architect), but the Rhinelander Mansion, occupied now by Ralph Lauren, is still located on the southeast corner.

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Alexander Island
Alexander Island, which is also known as Alexander I Island, Alexander I Land, Alexander Land, Alexander I Archipelago, and Zemlja Alexandra I, is the largest island of Antarctica. It lies in the Bellingshausen Sea west of Palmer Land, Antarctic Peninsula from which it is separated by Marguerite Bay and George VI Sound. George VI Ice Shelf entirely fills George VI Sound and connects Alexander island to Palmer Land. The island partly surrounds Wilkins Sound, which lies to its west. Alexander Island is about 240 miles (390 km) long in a north-south direction, 50 miles (80 km) wide in the north, and 150 miles (240 km) wide in the south. Alexander Island is the second largest uninhabited island in the world while Devon Island remains the largest uninhabited island in the world, covering 55,247 square kilometers.
Alexander Island was discovered on January 28, 1821 by a Russian expedition under Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who named it Alexander I Land for the reigning Tsar Alexander I of Russia, but it was believed to be part of the Antarctic mainland until 1940. Its insular nature was proven in December 1940, by a sledge party under Finn Ronne of the United States Antarctic Service. In the 1950s, a British base administered as part of the British Antarctic Territory was constructed as Fossil Bluff (Base KG).

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Beethoven Peninsula
The Beethoven Peninsula is a deeply indented, ice-covered peninsula, 60 miles (100 km) long in a northeast-southwest direction and 60 miles (100 km) wide at its broadest part, forming the southwest part of Alexander Island, which lies off the southwestern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula. The south side of the peninsula is supported by the Bach Ice Shelf whilst the north side of the peninsula is supported by the Wilkins Ice Shelf. The Mendelssohn Inlet, the Brahms Inlet and the Verdi Inlet apparently intrude into it. The Bach Ice Shelf, Rossini Point and Berlioz Point are some distance away, on the Ronne Entrance from the Southern Ocean. Beethoven Peninsula is one of the eight peninsulas of Alexander Island.
The peninsula was first seen and photographed from the air in 1940 by the US Antarctic Service, which compiled the first rough map of southwest Alexander Island. It was resighted and photographed from the air by the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition (RARE), 1947–48, and remapped from RARE photos by Derek J.H. Searle of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in 1960. It was named by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee after the composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

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Broadway (New York)
Broadway is one of the avenues in the borough of Manhattan, New York City, United States, which runs through almost the entire length of Manhattan island and continues northward through the Bronx borough before terminating in Westchester County, New York. It is the oldest north–south main thoroughfare in the city, dating to the first New Amsterdam settlement. The name Broadway is the English literal translation of the Dutch name, Breede weg. A stretch of Broadway is known worldwide as the heart of the American theatre industry.
Broadway was originally the Wickquasgeck Trail, carved into the brush destination of Manhattan by its Native American inhabitants. This trail originally snaked through swamps and rocks along the length of Manhattan Island. Upon the arrival of the Dutch, the trail soon became the main road through the island from Nieuw Amsterdam at the southern tip. The Dutch explorer and entrepreneur David de Vries gives the first mention of it in his journal for the year 1642 ("the Wickquasgeck Road over which the Indians passed daily"). The Dutch named the road "Heerestraat". In the mid-eighteenth century, part of Broadway in what is now lower Manhattan was known as Great George Street. In the 18th century, Broadway ended at the town commons north of Wall Street, where Eastern Post Road continued through the East Side and Bloomingdale Road the west side of the island. In the late 19th century the widened and paved part of Bloomingdale Road north of Columbus Circle was called "The Boulevard" but on February 14, 1899 the name "Broadway" was extended to the whole old road.

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Busseto
Busseto (Büsé in Emilian) is a comune in the province of Parma, in Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy. It was the capital of Stato Pallavicino. Opera composer Giuseppe Verdi was born in the nearby village of Le Roncole and he moved there in 1824. Giovannino Guareschi also lived in Le Roncole and his Mondo Piccolo was set there.
In the town and the local area many sites associated with the life of Verdi can be visited. These include:
The nearby village of Le Roncole was Verdi's birthplace.
Close by the main square is the home of Antonio Barezzi, the man who supported his early endeavours. He became both Verdi's patron and his father-in-law. In the upstairs lounge, the young Verdi gave his first public performance in 1830 and continued to frequent the house until the death of his benefactor.
The first portrait of Verdi and an oil depicting Barezzi Antonio is on display in the house. Verdi's letters are also on display. The Casa Barezzi is the headquarters of the Friends of Verdi; the organization oversaw the restoration of the building in 1979 and 1998. Since 2001, there has been a permanent exhibition of objects and documents related to Verdi and his relationship to the Barezzi family.

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Cimitero Monumentale
The Cimitero Monumentale ("Monumental Cemetery") is one of the two largest cemeteries in Milan, Italy, the one being the Cimitero Maggiore. The Monumentale is noted for the abundance of artistic tombs.
It was designed by the architect Carlo Maciachini (1818-1899). The structure was planned to consolidate a number of small cemeteries that used to be scattered around the city into a single location, at that time being removed from the central city area.
It opened in 1866 and since then has been filled with a wide range of both contemporary and classical Italian sculptures as well as Greek temples, elaborate obelisks, and other original works such as a scaled-down version of Trajan's Column. Many of the tombs belong to noted industrialist dynasties, sometimes eponymous of world famous businesses and brands.
The main entrance is through the large Famedio, a massive Hall-of-Fame-like Neo-Medieval style building of marble and stone that contains the tombs of some of the city's and the country's most honored citizens, including that of novelist Alessandro Manzoni.

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Gresham College
Coordinates: 51°31′04″N 0°06′35″W / 51.5177°N 0.1098°W / 51.5177; -0.1098
Gresham College is an institution of higher learning located at Barnard's Inn Hall off Holborn in central London, England. It was founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham and today it hosts over 140 free public lectures every year within the City of London.
Sir Thomas Gresham, founder of the Royal Exchange, left his estate jointly to the City of London Corporation and to the Mercers' Company, which today support the college through the Joint Grand Gresham Committee under the presidency of the Lord Mayor of London. Gresham's will provided for the setting up of the College—in Gresham's mansion in Bishopsgate, on the site now occupied by Tower 42, the former NatWest Tower—and endowed it with the rental income from shops sited around the Royal Exchange, which Gresham had established.
The early success of the College led to the incorporation of the Royal Society in 1663, which pursued its activities at the College in Bishopsgate before moving to its own premises in Crane Court in 1710. The College remained in Gresham's mansion in Bishopsgate until 1768, and moved about London thereafter until the construction in 1842 of its own buildings in Gresham Street EC2. Gresham College did not become part of the University of London on the founding of the University in the 19th century, although a close association between the College and the University persisted for many years. Since 1991, the College has operated at Barnard’s Inn Hall, Holborn EC1.

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Italy
Italy ⁱ/ˈɪtəli/ (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic or the Republic of Italy (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a unitary parliamentary republic in south-central Europe. To the north, it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia along the Alps. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia–the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea–and many other smaller islands. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. The territory of Italy covers some 301,338 km² (116,347 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 60.6 million inhabitants, it is the fifth most populous country in Europe, and the 23rd most populous in the world.
Rome, the capital of Italy, was for centuries a political and religious centre of Western civilisation as the capital of the Roman Empire and site of the Holy See. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Italy endured numerous invasions by foreign peoples, from Germanic tribes such as the Lombards and Ostrogoths, to the Byzantines and later, the Normans, among others. Centuries later, Italy became the birthplace of Maritime republics and the Renaissance, an immensely fruitful intellectual movement that would prove to be integral in shaping the subsequent course of European thought.

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La Scala
La Scala (Italian: Teatro alla Scala), is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala (Italian: Nuovo Regio Ducale Teatro alla Scala). The premiere performance was Antonio Salieri's Europa riconosciuta.
Most of Italy's greatest operatic artists, and many of the finest singers from around the world, have appeared at La Scala during the past 200 years. Today, the theatre is still recognised as one of the leading opera and ballet theatres in the world and is home to the La Scala Theatre Chorus, La Scala Theatre Ballet and La Scala Theatre Orchestra. The theatre also has an associate school, known as the La Scala Theatre Academy (Italian: Accademia Teatro alla Scala), which offers professional training in music, dance, stage craft and stage management.
La Scala's season traditionally opens on 7 December, Saint Ambrose's Day, the feast day of Milan's patron saint. All performances must end before midnight, and long operas start earlier in the evening when necessary.

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Le Roncole
Le Roncole, or Roncole Verdi, is a village in the province of Parma (Emilia-Romagna region) of Italy, a frazione of the comune of Busseto. It is located c. 140 km southeast of Milan. Today Le Roncole is called Roncole Verdi, named after the composer Giuseppe Verdi who was born there on either 9 or 10 October, 1813. He remained in the area his entire life and wrote in 1863: "I was, am and always will be a peasant from Roncole."
The countryside and surrounding area is the center of activities throughout most of Verdi's life. The composer's birthplace, the "Casa Natale del Maestro", can be visited, as can the organ used by the young Verdi in the church a few kilometers away.
Coordinates: 44°57′09″N 10°04′20″E / 44.9525°N 10.07222°E / 44.9525; 10.07222

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Manhattan
Manhattan (/mænˈhætən/) is the most densely populated and the oldest of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the U.S. state of New York. The borough and county consist of Manhattan Island and several small adjacent islands: Roosevelt Island, Randall's Island, Wards Island, Governors Island, Liberty Island, part of Ellis Island,Mill Rock, and U Thant Island; as well as Marble Hill, a very small area on the mainland bordering the Bronx. The original city of New York began at the southern end of Manhattan, expanded northward, and then between 1874 and 1898, annexed land from surrounding counties.
The New York County is the most densely populated county in the United States, and one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with a 2010 population of 1,585,873 living in a land area of 22.96 square miles (59.5 km²), or 69,464 residents per square mile (26,924/km²), more dense than any individual American city. It is also one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, with a 2005 per capita income above $100,000. Manhattan is the third-largest of New York's five boroughs in population, and its smallest borough in land area.

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Milan
Milan (Italian: Milano [miˈlaːno] ( listen); Lombard: [miˈlan]; Latin: Mediolanum) is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital of Lombardy as well as of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area is the 5th largest in EU and the largest in Italy with an estimated population of approximately 5 million. The growth of many suburbs and satellite settlements around the city proper, following the Italian economic miracle of 1950s–60s and massive commuting flows, suggest that socioeconomic linkages have expanded well beyond the boundaries of its administrative limits and its agglomeration, creating a region of approximately 9,3 million people. It has been suggested that the Milan metropolitan area is part of the so-called Blue Banana, the area of Europe with the highest population and industrial density. Its health care and education system is considered one of the best of Europe.

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Palermo, Italy
Palermo (Italian: [paˈlɛrmo] ( listen), Sicilian: Palermu, Latin: Panormus, from Greek: Πάνορμος, Panormos, Arabic: بَلَرْم‎, Balarm; Phoenician: זִיז, Ziz) is a city in Southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old. Palermo is located in the northwest of the island of Sicily, right by the Gulf of Palermo in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The city was founded by the Phoenicians, but named by the Ancient Greeks as Panormus meaning 'always fit for landing in.' Palermo became part of the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and eventually part of the Byzantine Empire, for over a thousand years. From 827 to 1071 it was under Arab rule during the Emirate of Sicily when it first became a capital. Following the Norman reconquest, Palermo became capital of a new kingdom (from 1130 to 1816), the Kingdom of Sicily. Eventually it would be united with the Kingdom of Naples to form the Two Sicilies until the Italian unification of 1860.

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Parma
Parma listen (help·info) (Emilian: Pärma) is a city in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna famous for its prosciutto, cheese, architecture and surrounding countryside. This is the home of the University of Parma, one of the oldest universities in the world. Parma is divided into two parts by the little stream with the same name. Parma's Etruscan name was adapted by Romans to describe the round shield called Parma.
The Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci (born in a hamlet in the countryside) wrote: "As a capital city it had to have a river. As a little capital it received a stream, which is often dry". The district on the far side of the river is Oltretorrente.
Parma was already a built-up area in the Bronze Age. It has been verified by now that in the current position of the city rose a terramare. The "terramare" (marl earth) were ancient villages in structural wood on pile-dwelling built according to a defined scheme and squared form, built on the dry land, generally in proximity of the rivers. During this age (among the 1500 BC and the 800 BC) the first necropolises (placed where stand the present-day Piazza Duomo and Millstone Square) rose also.

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Piacenza
Piacenza listen (help·info) (Placentia in Latin, Piasëinsa in the local dialect of Emiliano-Romagnolo) is a city and comune in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Piacenza. Modern forms of the name descend from Latin Placentia. The etymology is long-standing, tracing an origin from the Latin verb, placēre, "to please." It is thus a "pleasant abode" or as James Boswell reported some of the etymologists of his time to have translated, "comely." This was a name "of good omen."
Strategically the city is at a major crossroads at the intersection of Route E35/A1 between Bologna, gateway to eastern Italy, and Milan, gateway to the Alps, and Route E70/A21 between Brescia at the foot of the Alps and Tortona, where branches lead to Turin in the north, a major industrial city, and Genoa, a major coastal port. Piacenza is also at the confluence of the Trebbia, draining the northern Apennines, and the Po, the major waterway of northern Italy, draining to the east. Piacenza right from its foundation has been of vital interest to political powers who would control northern Italy, more than any other city there. In peace it is a cultural center; in war, a focus of conflict. Piacenza also host one campus of the Politecnico di Milano.

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Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Originally called the Theatre Royal, it served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later, Handel's first season of operas began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there.
The current building is the third theatre on the site following disastrous fires in 1808 and 1857. The façade, foyer, and auditorium date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from an extensive reconstruction in the 1990s. The Royal Opera House seats 2,256 people and consists of four tiers of boxes and balconies and the amphitheatre gallery. The proscenium is 12.20 m wide and 14.80 m high. The main auditorium is a Grade 1 listed building.

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Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg (Russian: Санкт-Петербург, tr. Sankt-Peterburg; IPA: [sankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk] ( listen)) is a city and a federal subject (a federal city) of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. In 1914 the name of the city was changed to Petrograd (Russian: Петроград; IPA: [pʲɪtrɐˈgrat]), in 1924 to Leningrad (Russian: Ленинград; IPA: [lʲɪnʲɪnˈgrat]) and in 1991 back to Saint Petersburg.
In Russian literature, informal documents, and discourse, the "Saint" (Санкт-) is usually omitted, leaving Petersburg (Петербург, Peterburg). In common parlance Russians may drop "-burg" (-бург) as well, leaving only Peter (Питер, Russian: [ˈpʲitʲɪr]).
Saint Petersburg was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 27 [O.S. 16] 1703. From 1713 to 1728 and from 1732 to 1918, Saint Petersburg was the Imperial capital of Russia. In 1918 the central government bodies moved from Saint Petersburg (then named Petrograd) to Moscow. It is Russia's second largest city after Moscow with almost 5 million inhabitants. Saint Petersburg is a major European cultural center, and also an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea.

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Suez Canal
The Suez Canal (Arabic: قناة السويس‎ Qanāt al-Sūwais), also known by the nickname "The Highway to India", is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Opened in November 1869 after 10 years of construction work, it allows transportation by water between Europe and Asia without navigation around Africa. The northern terminus is Port Said and the southern terminus is Port Tawfik at the city of Suez. Ismailia lies on its west bank, 3 km (1.9 mi) north of the half-way point.
When first built, the canal was 164 km (102 mi) long and 8 m (26 ft) deep. After multiple enlargements, the canal is 193.30 km (120.11 mi) long, 24 m (79 ft) deep and 205 metres (673 ft) wide as of 2010. It consists of the northern access channel of 22 km/14 mi, the canal itself of 162.25 km/100.82 mi and the southern access channel of 9 km/5.6 mi.
The canal is single lane with passing places in Ballah By-Pass and in the Great Bitter Lake. It contains no locks; seawater flows freely through the canal. In general, the canal north of the Bitter Lakes flows north in winter and south in summer. The current south of the lakes changes with the tide at Suez.

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Taro (département)
Taro is the name of a département of the First French Empire in present Italy. It was named after the Taro river. It was formed in 1808, when the states of Parma and Piacenza were annexed by France. Its capital was Parma. It was divided into the following arrondissements:
It was disbanded after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. Its territory is presently divided over the Italian provinces Parma and Piacenza. The most notable person born in the Département of Taro was the composer Giuseppe Verdi (born 9 or 10 October 1813 in the village of Le Roncole near Busseto).

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Villa Verdi
Villa Verdi is the house that composer Giuseppe Verdi owned from 1848 to the end of his life in 1901. It is located in the village of Sant'Agata in the commune of Villanova sull'Arda in the Italian province of Piacenza less than two miles from the village of Le Roncole, where he was born in 1813, and the town of Busseto where he lived from 1824.
After buying the estate on which he began to build his house in 1848 and, after various stops and starts, it was completed in 1880. Originally, the house was occupied by his parents, but, after the death of his mother, his father returned to Busseto. Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi, the opera singer with whom he lived prior to their 1859 marriage, moved into the Villa in 1851.
Verdi extended the original house on the property by adding two wings with terraces to the front, plus greenhouses, a chapel, and garages for coaches in the rear. Also, much of both Strepponi's and Verdi's time was taken up with considerable expansion of the parkland surrounding the house and the planting of many trees, some quite exotic in their origin.

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Villanova sull'Arda
Villanova sull'Arda is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Piacenza in the Italian region Emilia-Romagna, located about 120 km northwest of Bologna and about 25 km east of Piacenza.
Villanova sull'Arda borders the following municipalities: Besenzone, Busseto, Castelvetro Piacentino, Cortemaggiore, Monticelli d'Ongina, Polesine Parmense, San Pietro in Cerro, Stagno Lombardo.
Sant'Agata was the home for over 50 years of the composer Giuseppe Verdi who was born in the village of Le Roncole in 1813, who lived in the nearby town of Busseto, and who built the Villa Verdi in 1848.

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Adam Müller
Adam Heinrich Müller (30 June 1779 – 17 January 1829) was a German publicist, literary critic, political economist, theorist of the state and forerunner of economic romanticism.
Müller was born in Berlin. It was intended that he should study Protestant theology, but from 1798 he devoted himself in Göttingen to the study of law, philosophy, and natural science. He was a student of Gustav Hugo. Returning to Berlin, he was persuaded by his friend Friedrich Gentz to take up political science. He had early formed a close intimacy with Gentz, his elder by 15 years; and this connection exercised an important influence both on his material circumstances and his mental development in after life. The two men differed widely in character and in their fundamental principles, but agreed, at least in their later period, in their practical political aims, and the friendship was only terminated by death.
Müller worked for some time as referendary in the Kurmärkische Kammer in Berlin. Müller's relations with the Junker party and his co-operation with them in their opposition to Hardenberg's reforms made any public employment in Prussia impossible for him. He travelled in Sweden and Denmark, spent about two years in Poland, and then went to Vienna, where he was converted to the Catholic faith on 30 April 1805. Through Gentz he became acquainted with Metternich, to whom he was useful in the preparation of state papers.

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Adam Oehlenschläger
Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger (14 November 1779 – 20 January 1850) was a Danish poet and playwright. He introduced romanticism into Danish literature.
He was born in Vesterbro, then a suburb of Copenhagen, on November 14,1779. His father, a Schleswiger by birth, was at that time organist, and later became keeper, of the royal palace of Frederiksberg; he was a very brisk and cheerful man. The poet's mother, on the other hand, who was partly German by extraction, suffered from depression, which afterwards deepened into melancholy madness.
Oehlenschläger and his sister Sofia were allowed their own way throughout their childhood, and were taught nothing, except to read and write, until their twelfth year. At the age of nine, Oehlenschläger began to make fluent verses. Three years later, while walking in Frederiksberg Gardens, he attracted the notice of the poet Edvard Storm, and the result of the conversation was that he received a nomination to the college called Posterity's High School, an important institution of which Storm was the principal. Storm himself taught the class of Scandinavian mythology, and thus Oehlenschläger received his earliest bias towards the poetical religion of his ancestors.

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Adolphe Adam
Adolphe Charles Adam (24 July 1803 – 3 May 1856) was a French composer and music critic. A prolific composer of operas and ballets, he is best known today for his ballets Giselle (1844) and Le corsaire (1856, his last work), his operas Le postillon de Lonjumeau (1836), Le toréador (1849) and Si j'étais roi (1852, often regarded as his finest work), and his Christmas carol "Minuit, chrétiens!" ("O Holy Night") (1847). Adam was also a noted teacher. Léo Delibes was among his pupils.
Adolphe Adam was born in Paris to Louis Adam (1758–1848), who was also a composer, as well a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. His mother was the daughter of a physician. As a child, Adolphe Adam preferred to improvise music on his own rather than study music seriously. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1821, where he studied organ and harmonium under the celebrated opera composer François-Adrien Boieldieu. Adam also played the triangle in the orchestra of the Conservatoire; however, he did not win the Prix de Rome and his father did not encourage him to pursue a music career.

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Alessandro Manzoni
Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni (7 March 1785 – 22 May 1873) was an Italian poet and novelist. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed (orig. Italian: I Promessi Sposi) (1827), generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language.
Manzoni was born in Milan, Italy, on 7 March 1785. Pietro, his father, aged about fifty, belonged to an old family of Lecco, originally feudal lords of Barzio, in the Valsassina. The poet's maternal grandfather, Cesare Beccaria, was a well-known author, and his mother Giulia had literary talent as well. The young Alessandro spent his first two years of life in cascina Costa in Galbiate and he was wet-nursed by Caterina Panzeri, as attested by a memorial plate affixed in the place. In 1792 his parents broke their marriage and his mother began a relationship with the highbrow Carlo Imbonati, moving to England and later to Paris. For this reason, their son was brought up in several religious institutes. Alessandro Manzoni was a slow developer, and at the various colleges he attended he was considered a dunce. At fifteen, however, he developed a passion for poetry, and wrote two sonnets of considerable merit. Upon the death of his father in 1805, he joined the freethinking household of his mother at Auteuil, and spent two years mixing with the literary set of the so-called "ideologues", philosophers of the 18th-century school, among whom he made many friends, notably Claude Charles Fauriel. There too he imbibed the anti-Catholic creed of Voltairianism.

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Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин, tr. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin; IPA: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr sʲɪˈrɡʲejɪvʲɪtɕ ˈpuʂkʲɪn] ( listen); 6 June [O.S. 26 May] 1799 – 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1837) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.
Born into the Russian nobility in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo.
While under the strict surveillance of the Tsar's political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov. His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was serialized between 1825 and 1832.
Notoriously touchy about his honour, Pushkin fought a total of twenty-nine duels, and was fatally wounded in such an encounter with Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthès. D'Anthès, a French officer serving with the Chevalier Guard Regiment, had been attempting to seduce the poet's wife, Natalya Pushkina. Pushkin's early death at the age of 37 is still regarded as a catastrophe for Russian literature.

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Alexandre Herculano
Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho e Araújo (born March 28, 1810 in Lisbon – died September 13, 1877 in Santarém), was a Portuguese novelist and historian.
Herculano's family had humble origins. One of his grandfathers was a foreman stonemason in the royal employ. Herculano received his early education, comprising Latin, logic and rhetoric, at the Necessidades Monastery, and spent a year at the Royal Marine Academy studying mathematics with the intention of entering on a commercial career. In 1828 Portugal fell under the absolute rule of D. Miguel, and Herculano, becoming involved in the unsuccessful military pronunciamento of August 1831, had to leave Portugal clandestinely and take refuge in England and France. In 1832 he accompanied the Liberal expedition to Terceira Island as a volunteer, and was one of D. Pedro's famous army of 7500 men who landed at the Mindelo and occupied Oporto. He took part in all the actions of the great siege, and at the same time served as a librarian in the city archives. He published his first volume of verses, A Voz de Propheta, in 1832, and two years later another entitled A Harpa do Crente.

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Almeida Garrett
João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, Viscount of Almeida Garrett (February 4, 1799 – December 9, 1854) was a Portuguese poet, playwright, novelist and politician. He is considered to be the introducer of the Romanticism in Portugal. He is regarded as one of history's greatest romantics and a true revolutionary and humanist.
Garrett was born João Leitão da Silva in Porto, the son of António Bernardo da Silva Garrett (1740–1834), a Fidalgo of the Royal Household and Knight of the Order of Christ whose mother was the daughter of an Irish father born in exile in France and an Italian mother born in Spain, and his wife (m. 1796) Ana Augusta de Almeida Leitão (b. Porto, c. 1770). At an early age, around 4 or 5 years old, Garrett changed his name to João Baptista da Silva Leitão, adding a name from his godfather and altering the order of his surnames.
In 1809, his family fled the second French invasion carried out by Soult's troops, seeking refuge in Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira Island, Azores. While in the Azores, he was taught by his uncle, Dom Frei Alexandre da Sagrada Família (Faial, Horta, May 22, 1737 – Terceira, Angra do Heroísmo, April 22, 1818), also a freemason, then the 25th Bishop of Angra (1816–1818) and former Bishop of Malaca and Timor; his two other uncles were Manuel Inácio da Silva Garrett, Archdeacon of Angra, and Inácio da Silva Garrett, also a clergyman of Angra. In childhood, his mulatto Brazilian nanny Rosa de Lima taught him some traditional stories that later influenced his work.

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Aloysius Bertrand
Louis-Jacques-Napoléon “Aloysius” Bertrand (20 April 1807 – 29 April 1841) was a French poet instrumental in the introduction of the prose poem into French literature and is credited with inspiring later Symbolist poets . He wrote a collection of poems entitled Gaspard de la nuit, after which composer Maurice Ravel wrote a suite of the same name, based on the poems "Scarbo", "Ondine", and "Le Gibet".
Bertrand was born in Ceva, Piedmont, Italy (then a part of Napoleonic France) and his family settled in Dijon in 1814. There he developed an interest in the Burgundian capital. His contributions to a local paper lead to recognition by Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve. He lived in Paris shortly with little success. He returned to Dijon and continued writing for local newspapers. Gaspard was sold in 1836 but it wasn't published until 1842 after his death of tuberculosis. The book was rediscovered by Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. It is now considered a classic of poetic and fantastic literature. He died in Paris.

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Antoine Wiertz
Antoine Joseph Wiertz (22 February 1806 – 18 June 1865) was a Belgian romantic painter and sculptor.
Born in Dinant from a relatively poor family, he entered the Antwerp art academy in 1820. Thanks to his protector Pierre-Joseph de Paul de Maibe, a member of the Second Chamber of the States-General, king William I of the Netherlands awarded an annual stipend to Wiertz from 1821 onwards. Between November 1829 and May 1832, he stayed in Paris, where he studied the old masters at the Louvre.
In 1828, Wiertz took part in the Grand Concours, also known as Concours de Rome, but came out only second. He landed the prestigious Prix de Rome only at his second attempt in 1832, which enabled him to go to Rome, where he resided from May 1834 until February 1837. Upon his return, he established himself in Liège with his mother.
During his stay in Rome, Wiertz worked on his first great work, Les Grecs et les Troyens se disputant le corps de Patrocle ("Greeks and Trojans fighting for the body of Patrocles", finished in 1836), on a subject borrowed from canto XVII of Homer's Iliad. It was exhibited in Antwerp in 1837, where it met with some success. Wiertz submitted the work for the Paris Salon of 1838, but it arrived too late and was refused.

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Anton Reicha
Anton (Antonín, Antoine) Reicha (Rejcha) (26 February 1770 – 28 May 1836) was a Bohemia-born, later naturalized French composer. A contemporary and lifelong friend of Beethoven, Reicha is now best remembered for his substantial early contribution to the wind quintet literature and his role as a teacher – his pupils included Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz. Reicha was also an accomplished theorist and wrote several treatises on various aspects of composition. Some of his theoretical work dealt with experimental methods of composition, which he applied in a variety of works such as fugues and études for piano and string quartets.
Reicha was born in Prague into a family of a town piper. His father died when Reicha was just 10 months old, and his mother was uninterested in the boy's education. At the age of 10 the young composer ran away from home, and was subsequently raised and educated in music by his uncle Josef Reicha. When the family moved to Bonn, Josef secured for his nephew a place at the Hofkapelle, but for Reicha this was not enough. He studied composition secretly, against his uncle's wishes, and entered the University of Bonn in 1789. When Bonn was captured by the French in 1794, Reicha had to flee to Hamburg, where he made his living by teaching harmony and composition, and studied mathematics and philosophy. Between 1799 and 1801 he lived in Paris, trying to achieve recognition as an opera composer, without success. In 1801 he moved to Vienna, where he studied with Salieri and Albrechtsberger and produced his first important works. His life was once again affected by war in 1808, when he had to leave Vienna. Reicha settled in Paris, where he spent the rest of his life teaching composition; in 1818 he was appointed professor at the Conservatoire.

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Antoni Malczewski
Antoni Malczewski (3 June 1793 – 2 May 1826) was an influential Polish romantic poet, known for his only work, "a narrative poem of dire pessimism", Maria (1825).
At the times, prominent and scandalizing was his autodestructive romance with married woman, Zofia Rucińska, who suffered from mental illness.
Malczewski was born to a wealthy family in either Volhynia or Warsaw, and attended school in Krzemieniec (modern-day Kremenets, Ukraine), but did not graduate. He joined the army of the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw during the Napoleonic Wars in 1811, and remained in the army of Congress Poland under Emperor Alexander from 1815. He was wounded in the foot in a duel in 1816 and so had to leave the army.
After leaving the army, he spent several years traveling through western Europe, staying some time in Paris, climbing Mont Blanc in 1818, and spending a good portion of his inherited fortune. He returned to his estate in Volhynia in 1821, where he began an ill-fated affair with a married woman and began writing. He moved to Warsaw in 1824, where he published the poetic novel Maria at his own expense in 1825, and died in poverty the next year in unclear circumstances.

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Antonio Scotti
Antonio Scotti (January 25, 1866 – February 26, 1936) was an Italian baritone. He was a principal artist of the New York Metropolitan Opera for more than 33 seasons, but also sang with great success at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and Milan's La Scala.
Antonio Scotti was born in Naples, Italy. His family wanted him to enter the priesthood but he emarbarked instead on a career in opera. He received his early vocal training from Esther Trifari-Paganini and Vincenzo Lombardi. According to most sources, he made his debut at Malta's Theatre Royal in 1889, performing the role of Amonasro in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida. Engagements at various Italian operatic venues ensued and he later gained valuable stage experience singing in Spain, Portugal, Russia and South America.
In 1898, he debuted at Italy's most renowned opera house, La Scala, Milan, as Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger. This now seems a surprising choice of role for Scotti because his subsequent career did not encompass the operas of Richard Wagner.

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Arrigo Boito
Arrigo Boito (Italian pronunciation: [arˈriɡo ˈbɔito]; 24 February 1842 – 10 June 1918), aka Enrico Giuseppe Giovanni Boito, pseudonym Tobia Gorrio, was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist and composer, best known today for his libretti, especially those for Giuseppe Verdi's operas Otello and Falstaff, and his own opera Mefistofele. Along with Emilio Praga, he is regarded as one of the prominent representatives of the Scapigliatura artistic movement.
Born in Padua, the son of Silvestro Boito, an Italian painter of miniatures and his wife, a Polish countess, Józefina Radolińska, Boito studied music at the Milan Conservatory with Alberto Mazzucato until 1861. In 1866 he fought under Giuseppe Garibaldi in the Seven Weeks War in which the Kingdom of Italy and Prussia fought against Austria, after which Venice was ceded to Italy.
His only finished opera, Mefistofele, based on Goethe's Faust, was given its first performance on 5 March 1868, at La Scala, Milan. The premiere, which he conducted himself, was badly received, provoking riots and duels over its supposed "Wagnerism", and it was closed by the police after two performances. Verdi commented, "He aspires to originality but succeeds only at being strange." Boito withdrew the opera from further performances to rework it, and it had a more successful second premiere, in Bologna on 10 April 1875. Boito's revised and drastically cut version also changed Faust from a baritone to a tenor, and it is still frequently performed and recorded today.

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Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini (Italian pronunciation: [arˈtuːro toskaˈniːni]; March 25, 1867 – January 16, 1957) was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory. As music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra he became a household name (especially in the United States) through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire.
Toscanini was born in Parma, Emilia-Romagna, and won a scholarship to the local music conservatory, where he studied the cello. He joined the orchestra of an opera company, with which he toured South America in 1886. While presenting Aida in Rio de Janeiro, Leopoldo Miguez, the locally hired conductor, reached the summit of a two-month escalating conflict with the performers due to his rather poor command of the work, to the point that the singers went on strike and forced the company's general manager to seek a substitute conductor. Carlo Superti and Aristide Venturi tried unsuccessfully to finish the work. In desperation, the singers suggested the name of their assistant Chorus Master, who knew the whole opera from memory. Although he had no conducting experience, Toscanini was eventually convinced by the musicians to take up the baton at 9:15 P.M., and led a performance of the two-and-a-half hour opera. The public was taken by surprise, at first by the youth and sheer aplomb of this unknown conductor, then by his solid mastery. The result was astounding acclaim. For the rest of that season Toscanini conducted eighteen operas, all with absolute success. Thus began his career as a conductor, at age 19.

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Bedřich Smetana
Bedřich Smetana (Czech pronunciation: [ˈbɛdr̝ɪx ˈsmɛtana] ( listen); 2 March 1824 – 12 May 1884) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. He is thus widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride, for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Fatherland") which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native land, and for his First String Quartet From My Life.
Smetana was naturally gifted as a pianist, and gave his first public performance at the age of six. After his conventional schooling, he studied music under Josef Proksch in Prague. His first nationalistic music was written during the 1848 Prague uprising, in which he briefly participated. After failing to establish his career in Prague, he left for Sweden, where he set up as a teacher and choirmaster in Gothenburg, and began to write large-scale orchestral works. During this period of his life Smetana was twice married; of six daughters, three died in infancy.

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Bessie Abott
Bessie Abott (1878 - February 9, 1919) was an American opera singer.
Bessie Abott was one of twin daughters ,Bessie and Jessie, born in Heuvelton, New York as Bessie Pickens to John Pickens Jr and his wife, Frances Josephine Button. She was a descendant of General Andrew Pickens. She used her mother's maiden name, Abbott, and later drop off a letter in her name after she saw a misprinted theater program in Paris. She started as a vaudeville act with her twin sister Jessie Pickens at Pickens Hall, which was built by her grandfather, John Pickens sr.. The act was known as the Abbott Sisters. Bessie sang with Caruso in San Francisco's Grand Opera House during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She married Thomas Waldo Story in 1912 and retired from her career. She was widowed in 1915. She died in 1919, at the age of 40, "after an illness of several years."
The Heuvelton Historical Association, 83 State Street, Heuvelton, New York

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Bettina von Arnim
Bettina von Arnim (the Countess of Arnim) (4 April 1785, Frankfurt am Main – 20 January 1859, Berlin), born Elisabeth Catharina Ludovica Magdalena Brentano, was a German writer and novelist.
Bettina (as well: Bettine) Brentano was a writer, publisher, composer, singer, visual artist, an illustrator, patron of young talent, and a social activist. She was the archetype of the Romantic era’s zeitgeist and the crux of many creative relationships of canonical artistic figures. Best known for the company she kept, she numbered among her closest friends Goethe, Beethoven, and Pückler and tried to foster artistic agreement among them. Many leading composers of the time, including Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johanna Kinkel, and Johannes Brahms, admired her spirit and talents. As a composer, von Arnim's style was unconventional, molding and melding favorite folk melodies and historical themes with innovative harmonies, phrase lengths, and improvisations that became synonymous with the music of the era.

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Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm (German: Brüder Grimm or Die Gebrüder Grimm), Jakob Grimm (January 4, 1785 – September 20, 1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (February 24, 1786 – December 16, 1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who together collected folklore. They are among the most well-known storytellers of European folk tales, and their work popularized such stories as "Cinderella", "The Frog Prince" (Der Froschkönig), "Hansel and Gretel" (Hänsel und Gretel), "Rapunzel", "Rumpelstiltskin" (Rumpelstilzchen), and "Snow White" (Schneewittchen). Their first collection of folk tales, Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), was published in 1812.
The brothers spent their formative years first in the German town of Hanau and then in Steinau. Their father's death in 1796, about a decade into their lives, caused great poverty for the family and affected the brothers for many years. They attended the University of Marburg where historian and jurist Friedrich von Savigny spurred their interest in philology and Germanic studies—a field in which they are now considered pioneers—and at the same time developed a curiosity for folklore, which grew into a life-long dedication to collecting German folk tales.

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Burt Lancaster
Burton Stephen "Burt" Lancaster (November 2, 1913 – October 20, 1994) was an American film actor noted for his athletic physique and distinctive smile (which he called "The Grin"). After initially building his career on "tough guy" roles Lancaster abandoned his "all-American" image in the late 1950s in favor of more complex and challenging roles, and came to be regarded as one of the best actors of his generation as a result.
Lancaster was nominated four times for Academy Awards and won once — for his work in Elmer Gantry in 1960. He also won a Golden Globe for that performance and BAFTA Awards for The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Atlantic City (1980). His production company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, was the most successful and innovative star-driven independent production company in Hollywood of the 1950s, making movies such as Marty (1955), Trapeze (1956), and Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
In 1999, the American Film Institute named Lancaster 19th among the greatest male stars of all time.

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Carl Maria von Weber
Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber (18 or 19 November 1786 – 4–5 June 1826) was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school.
Weber's operas Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon greatly influenced the development of the Romantic opera in Germany. Der Freischütz came to be regarded as the first German "nationalist" opera, Euryanthe developed the Leitmotiv technique to a hitherto-unprecedented degree, while Oberon anticipated Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream and, at the same time, revealed Weber's lifelong interest in the music of non-Western cultures. This interest was first manifested in Weber's incidental music for Schiller's translation of Gozzi's Turandot, for which he used a Chinese melody, making him the first Western composer to use an Asian tune that was not of the pseudo-Turkish kind popularized by Mozart and others.
A brilliant pianist himself, Weber composed four sonatas, two concertos and the Konzertstück (Concert Piece) in F minor, which influenced composers such as Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn. The Konzertstück provided a new model for the one-movement concerto in several contrasting sections (such as Liszt's, who often played the work), and was acknowledged by Stravinsky as the model for his Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra. Weber's shorter piano pieces, such as the Invitation to the Dance, was later orchestrated by Berlioz, while his Polacca Brillante was later orchestrated by Liszt.

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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.

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Clara Maffei
Elena Clara Antonia Carrara Spinelli (13 March 1814, Bergamo – 13 July 1886, Milan, of meningitis) was an Italian woman of letters and backer of the Risorgimento, usually known by her married name of countess Clara Maffei or Chiarina Maffei.
At 17 years old she married Andrea Maffei - they separated by mutual consent on 15 June 1846. She had a long and lasting relationship with Carlo Tenca.
She is well-known for the salon she hosted in via dei Tre Monasteri in Milan, known as the "Salotto Maffei". Starting in 1834 and organised by Tommaso Grossi and Massimo d'Azeglio, it attracted several well-known literati, artists, scholars, composers and pro-Risorgimento figures to meet to discuss art and literature. These included Alessandro Manzoni, Francesco Hayez (who painted a portrait of Clara which he then gave to her husband), Giuseppe Verdi and Giovanni Prati.

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Clara Schumann
Clara Schumann (née Clara Josephine Wieck; 13 September 1819 – 20 May 1896) was a German musician and composer, considered one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era. She exerted her influence over a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital and the tastes of the listening public. Her husband was the composer Robert Schumann. She and her husband encouraged Johannes Brahms, and she was the first pianist to give public performances of some of Brahms' works, notably the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel.
Clara Josephine Wieck was born in Leipzig on 13 September 1819 to Friedrich and Marianne Wieck (née Tromlitz). Her parents divorced when she was four years old; Clara was raised by her father. One of her father's students would scare Clara and dress up as ghosts but when she was older, she married him. In March 1828, at the age of eight, the young Clara Wieck performed at the Leipzig home of Dr. Ernst Carus, director of a mental hospital at Colditz Castle, and met another gifted young pianist invited to the musical evening named Robert Schumann, nine years older than her. Schumann admired Clara's playing so much that he asked permission from his mother to discontinue his studies of the law, which had never interested him much, and take music lessons with Clara's father, Friedrich Wieck. While taking lessons, he took rooms in the Wieck household, staying about a year.

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Clemens Brentano
Clemens Brentano, or Klemens Brentano (September 9, 1778 – July 28, 1842) was a German poet and novelist.
He was born in Ehrenbreitstein, near Koblenz, Germany. His sister was Bettina von Arnim, Goethe's correspondent. His father's family was of Italian descent. He studied in Halle and Jena, afterwards residing at Heidelberg, Vienna and Berlin. He was close to Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte and Tieck.
From 1798 to 1800 Brentano lived in Jena, the first center of the romantic movement. In 1801, he moved to Göttingen, and became a friend of Achim von Arnim. He married writer Sophie Mereau on 29 October 1803. In 1804, he moved to Heidelberg and worked with Arnim on Zeitungen für Einsiedler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn. After his wife Sophie died in 1806 he married a second time in 1807 to Auguste Busmann. In the years between 1808 and 1818, he lived mostly in Berlin, and from 1819 to 1824 in Dülmen, Westphalia.
In 1818, weary of his somewhat restless and unsettled life, he returned to the practice of the Catholic faith and withdrew to the monastery of Dülmen, where he lived for some years in strict seclusion. He took on there the position of secretary to the Catholic visionary nun, the Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, of whom it was said that, during the last twelve years of her life, she could eat no food except Holy Communion, nor take any drink except water, subsisting entirely on the Holy Eucharist.

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César Franck
César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck (10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life.
He was born at Liège, in what is now Belgium (though at the time of his birth it was under the Netherlands' control). In that city he gave his first concerts in 1834. He studied privately in Paris from 1835, where his teachers included Anton Reicha. After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception to an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable improviser, and travelled widely in France to demonstrate new instruments built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.
In 1858 he became organist at Sainte-Clotilde, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872; he took French nationality, a requirement of the appointment. His pupils included Vincent d'Indy, Ernest Chausson, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Guillaume Lekeu, and Henri Duparc. After acquiring the professorship Franck wrote several pieces that have entered the standard classical repertoire, including symphonic, chamber, and keyboard works.

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Daniel Auber
Daniel François Esprit Auber (French pronunciation: [daɲɛl fʁɑ̃swa ɛspʁi obɛːʁ]) (29 January 1782 – 12/13 May 1871) was a French composer.
The son of a Paris print-seller, Auber was born in Caen in Normandy. Though his father expected him to continue in the print-selling business, he also allowed his son to learn how to play several musical instruments. His first teacher was the Tirolean composer, Josef Alois Ladurner (1769–1851). At the age of 20 Auber was sent to London for business training, but he was obliged to leave England in 1804 when the Treaty of Amiens was breached.
Auber had already attempted musical composition, and at this period produced several concertos pour basse, modeled after violoncellist Lamarre, in whose name they were published. The praise given to his concerto for the violin, which was played at the Paris Conservatoire by Mazas, encouraged him to undertake a resetting of an old comic opera, Julie (1811). He also began to study with the renowned Luigi Cherubini.
In 1813 the unfavourable reception of his one-act debut opera Le Séjour militaire put an end for some years to his attempts as composer. But his failure in business, and the death of his father in 1819, compelled him once more to turn to music. He produced another opera, Le Testament et les billets-doux (1819), which was no better received than the former. But he persevered, and the next year was rewarded by the complete success of La Bergère châtelaine, an opera in three acts.

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E. T. A. Hoffmann
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (24 January 1776 – 25 June 1822), better known by his pen name E. T. A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach's famous but fictitious opera The Tales of Hoffmann, and the author of the novelette The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the famous ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote. Also Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on one of Hoffmann's characters.
Hoffmann's stories were very influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.
Hoffmann's ancestors, both maternal and paternal, were jurists. His father, Christoph Ludwig Hoffmann (1736–97) was a barrister in Königsberg, Prussia, and also a poet and amateur musician who played the viola da gamba. During 1767 he married his cousin Lovisa Albertina Doerffer (1748–96). Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, born on 24 January 1776, was the youngest of three children, of whom the second died in infancy.

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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".

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Emanuel Leutze
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (May 24, 1816, Schwäbisch Gmünd – July 18, 1868) was a German American history painter best known for his painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.
Leutze was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Württemberg (Germany), and was brought to America as a child. His parents settled first in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then at Fredericksburg, Va. His early education was good, though not especially in the direction of art. The first development of his artistic talent occurred while he was attending the sickbed of his father, when he attempted drawing to occupy the long hours of waiting. His father died in 1831. At 14, he was painting portraits for $5 apiece. Through such work, he supported himself after the death of his father. In 1834, he received his first instruction in art in classes of John Rubens Smith, a portrait painter in Philadelphia. He soon became skilled, and promoted a plan for publishing, in Washington, portraits of eminent American statesmen; however, he met with but slight encouragement.

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Enrico Caruso
Enrico Caruso (Italian pronunciation: [enˈriːko kaˈruːzo]) (February 25, 1873 – August 2, 1921) was an Italian tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and North and South America, appearing in a wide variety of roles from the Italian and French repertoires that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. Caruso also made approximately 290 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920. All of these recordings, which span most of his stage career, are available today on CDs and as digital downloads.
Caruso's 1904 recording of "Vesti la giubba" from Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci was the first sound recording to sell a million copies.
Caruso's 25-year career, stretching from 1895 to 1920, included 863 appearances at the New York Metropolitan Opera before he died from an infection at the age of 48. His fame has lasted to the present day despite the limited marketing and promotional vehicles available during Caruso's era. (He was, nonetheless, a client of Edward Bernays, during the latter's tenure as a press agent in the United States.) Publicity in Caruso's time relied on newspapers, particularly wire services, along with magazines, photography and relatively instantaneous communication via the telephone and the telegraph, to spread a message and raise a performer's profile.

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Felix Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (German pronunciation: [ˈjaːkɔp ˈluːtvɪç ˈfeːlɪks ˈmɛndl̩szoːn baʁˈtɔldi]), born, and generally known in English-speaking countries, as Felix Mendelssohn (3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847) was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period.
The grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn was born into a prominent Jewish family, although initially he was raised without religion and was later baptised as a Lutheran Christian. Mendelssohn was recognised early as a musical prodigy, but his parents were cautious and did not seek to capitalise on his talent.
Early success in Germany, where he also revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, was followed by travel throughout Europe. Mendelssohn was particularly well received in Britain as a composer, conductor and soloist, and his ten visits there – during which many of his major works were premiered – form an important part of his adult career. His essentially conservative musical tastes, however, set him apart from many of his more adventurous musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz. The Leipzig Conservatoire (now the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig), which he founded, became a bastion of this anti-radical outlook.

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France Prešeren
France Prešeren ( pronunciation (help·info)) (3 December 1800 – 8 February 1849) was a Slovene Romantic poet. He is considered the Slovene national poet.^{[clarification needed]} Although he was not a particularly prolific author, he inspired virtually all Slovene literature thereafter.
He was born 3 December 1800 (Saturday) in the Upper Carniolan village of Vrba, then part of the Habsburg Monarchy (today in Slovenia), to a relatively well-to-do peasant family. Already as a child, he showed considerable talent, and so his parents decided to provide him with a good education. At the age of eight, he was sent to elementary schools in Grosuplje and Ribnica, run by the local Roman Catholic clergy. In 1812, he moved to the Carniolan provincial capital of Ljubljana, where he attended the State Gymnasium. Already at a very young age, he learned Latin, Ancient Greek, and German, which was then the language of education, administration, and high culture in most areas inhabited by Slovenes. In Ljubljana, Prešeren's talent was spotted by the poet Valentin Vodnik, who encouraged him to develop his literary skills in Slovene. As a high school student, he became friends with the future philologist Matija Čop, who would have an extremely important influence on the development of Prešeren's poetry. In 1821, Prešeren enrolled at the University of Vienna, where he studied law, against the wishes of his mother, who wanted him to become a priest. In Vienna, he became acquainted with the western canon from Homer to Goethe, but he was most fascinated by Dante and the Italian trecentists, especially Petrarch and Boccaccio. He also read contemporary Romantic poets, and he was even fired from a teaching post at Klinkowström's Jesuit institute for having loaned a booklet of banned poetry to his friend Anastasius Grün.

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Francesco Hayez
Francesco Hayez (February 10, 1791 – December 21, 1881) was an Italian painter, the leading artist of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan, renowned for his grand historical paintings, political allegories and exceptionally fine portraits.
Hayez came from a relatively poor family from Venice. His father was of French origin while his mother, Chiara Torcella, was from Murano. The child Francesco, youngest of five sons, was brought up by his mother's sister, who had married Giovanni Binasco, a well-off shipowner and collector of art. From childhood he showed a predisposition for drawing, so his uncle apprenticed him to an art restorer. Later he became a student of the painter Francesco Maggiotto with whom he continued his studies for three years. He was admitted to the painting course of the New Academy of Fine Arts in 1806, where he studied under Teodoro Matteini. In 1809 he won a competition from the Academy of Venice for one year of study at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. He remained in Rome until 1814, then moved to Naples where he was commissioned by Joachim Murat to paint a major work depicting Ulysses at the court of Alcinous. In the mid 1830s he attended the "Salotto Maffei" salon in Milan, hosted by Clara Maffei (whose portrait Hayez painted for her husband), and he was still in Milan in 1850 when he was appointed director of the Academy of Brera there.

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Francisco Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish pronunciation: [fɾanˈθisko xoˈse ðe ˈɣoʝa i luˈθjentes]; 30 March 1746–16 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era. The subversive and imaginative element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet, Picasso and Francis Bacon.. In his honour, Spain's main national film awards are called the Goya Awards.
Goya was born in Fuendetodos, Aragón, Spain, in 1746 to José Benito de Goya y Franque and Gracia de Lucientes y Salvador. He spent his childhood in Fuendetodos, where his family lived in a house bearing the family crest of his mother. His father earned his living as a gilder. About 1749, the family bought a house in the city of Zaragoza and some years later moved into it. Goya may have attended school at Escuelas Pias. He formed a close friendship with Martin Zapater at this time, and their correspondence from the 1770s to the 1790s is a valuable source for understanding Goya's early career at the court of Madrid. At age 14, Goya studied under the painter José Luzán. He moved to Madrid where he studied with Anton Raphael Mengs, a painter who was popular with Spanish royalty. He clashed with his master, and his examinations were unsatisfactory. Goya submitted entries for the Royal Academy of Fine Art in 1763 and 1766, but was denied entrance.

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Franco Faccio
Franco Faccio (March 8, 1840 – July 21, 1891) was an Italian composer and conductor.
Born in Verona, Faccio became known as a conductor of Verdi's music. He studied music at the Milan Conservatory where he was a pupil of Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti. After finishing his studies he began his career as a composer, writing I Profughi Fiamminghi (Milan, 1863) and Amleto (Genoa, 1865), the latter being one of the many operas based on William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Both operas failed to achieve success either among the critics or the general public. However the Marcia Funebre composed for the Amleto is considered as an important example of Faccio's lyricism. Its popularity is made evident by its transcriptions for wind band in late 19th century. One can still listen to this part of the opera in Corfu during Easter, where the band of Philharmonic Society of Corfu performs it during the epitaph litany of Saint Spyridon in the morning of Holy Saturday. Faccio was one of the initiators of the Scapigliatura movement with poet Emilio Praga and poet and composer Arrigo Boito.

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Franz Berwald
Franz Adolf Berwald (July 23, 1796, Stockholm – April 3, 1868) was a Swedish Romantic composer who was generally ignored during his lifetime. He made his living as an orthopedic surgeon and later as the manager of a saw mill and glass factory.
Berwald came from a family with four generations of musicians; his father, a violinist in the Royal Opera Orchestra, taught Franz the violin from an early age; he soon appeared in concerts. In 1811, Karl XIII came to power and reinstated the Royal Chapel; the following year Berwald started working there, as well as playing the violin in the court orchestra and the opera, receiving lessons from Edouard du Puy, and also started composing. The summers were off-season for the orchestra, and Berwald travelled around Scandinavia, Finland and Russia. Of his works from that time, a septet and a serenade he still considered worthwhile music in his later years.
In 1818 Berwald started publishing the Musikalisk journal, later renamed Journal de musique, a periodical with easy piano pieces and songs by various composers as well as some of his own original work. In 1821, his Violin Concerto was premiered by his brother August. It was not well received; some people in the audience burst out laughing during the slow movement.

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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.

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Franz Schubert
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.

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Frieda Hempel
Frieda Hempel (26 June 1885 – 7 October 1955) was a German soprano singer in operatic and concert work who had an international career in Europe and the United States.
Frieda Hempel was born in Leipzig, Germany, and studied first at the Leipzig Conservatory and afterwards at Stern Conservatory, Berlin, where she was a pupil of Selma Nicklass-Kempner. Her earliest appearances were in Breslau, singing Violetta, Queen of the Night and Rosina. She made a debut in Schwerin in 1905, and was engaged there for the next two years, singing also Gilda, Leonora and Woglinde.
She made such a success that the Kaiser Wilhelm II requested the Schwerin authorities to release her to sing also in Berlin. She made a debut there in 1905 as Frau Fluth (in Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor). She sang at the Royal Court Opera, Berlin, from 1907 to 1912, where she was also admired as Lucia, Marguerite de Valois and Marie.
She appeared at the Covent Garden, London in 1907 as Bastienne, as Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, as Eva and Elsa and again as Frau Fluth: Melba and Selma Kurz were taking centre stage in the more popular roles.

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Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller [ˈjoːhan ˈkʁɪstɔf ˈfʁiːdʁɪç fɔn ˈʃɪlɐ] (10 November 1759 – 9 May 1805) was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works he left as sketches. This relationship and these discussions led to a period now referred to as Weimar Classicism. They also worked together on Xenien, a collection of short satirical poems in which both Schiller and Goethe challenge opponents to their philosophical vision.
Friedrich Schiller was born on 10 November 1759, in Marbach, Württemberg as the only son of military doctor Johann Kaspar Schiller (1733–96), and Elisabeth Dorothea Kodweiß (1732–1802). They also had five daughters. His father was away in the Seven Years' War when Friedrich was born. He was named after king Frederick the Great, but he was called Fritz by nearly everyone. Kaspar Schiller was rarely home during the war, but he did manage to visit the family once in a while. His wife and children also visited him occasionally wherever he happened to be stationed. When the war ended in 1763, Schiller's father became a recruiting officer and was stationed in Schwäbisch Gmünd. The family moved with him. Due to the high cost of living—especially the rent—the family moved to nearby Lorch.

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Fromental Halévy
Jacques-François-Fromental-Élie Halévy, usually known as Fromental Halévy (pronounced [fʁɔmɑ̃tal alevi]) (27 May 1799 – 17 March 1862), was a French composer. He is known today largely for his opera La Juive.
Halévy was born in Paris, the son of a cantor, Élie Halfon Halévy, who was the secretary of the Jewish community of Paris, a writer and a teacher of Hebrew, and a French Jewish mother. The name Fromental, by which he was generally known, reflects that he was born on the feast-day of that name in the French Revolutionary calendar, which was still operative at that time. He entered the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of nine or ten (accounts differ), in 1809, becoming a pupil and later protégé of Cherubini. After two second-place attempts, he won the Prix de Rome in 1819: his cantata subject was Herminie.
As he had to delay his departure to Rome because of the death of his mother, he was able to accept the first commission that brought him to public attention - a Marche Funèbre et De Profundis en Hébreu for three part choir, tenor and orchestra, which was commissioned by the Consistoire Israélite du Département de la Seine, for a public service in memory of the assassinated duc de Berry, performed on 24 March 1820. Later, his brother Léon recalled that the De Profundis, "infused with religious fervor, created a sensation, and attracted interest to the young laureate of the institute."

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Frédéric Chopin
Frédéric François Chopin ( /ˈʃoʊpæn/; French pronunciation: [fʁe.de.ʁik ʃɔ.pɛ̃]; Polish: Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin, also phonetically Szopen; 22 February or 1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of French-Polish parentage. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music. Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, a village in the Duchy of Warsaw. A renowned child-prodigy pianist and composer, Chopin grew up in Warsaw and completed his music education there; he composed many mature works in Warsaw before leaving Poland in 1830 at age 20, shortly before the November 1830 Uprising.
Following the Russian suppression of the Uprising, he settled in Paris as part of Poland's Great Emigration. During the remaining 19 years of his life, Chopin gave only some 30 public performances, preferring the more intimate atmosphere of the salon; he supported himself by sales of his compositions and as a piano teacher. After some romantic dalliances with Polish women, including an abortive engagement, from 1837 to 1847 he carried on a relationship with the French writer Amantine Dupin (pen name "George Sand"). For most of his life, Chopin suffered from poor health; he died in Paris in 1849 at age 39.

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Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (Italian pronunciation: [doˈmeːniko ɡaeˈtaːno maˈɾia doniˈdzetti]; 29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848) was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore (1832), Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), and Don Pasquale (1843), all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment (both from 1840). Along with Vincenzo Bellini and Gioachino Rossini, he was a leading composer of bel canto opera.
The youngest of three sons, Donizetti was born in 1797 in Bergamo's Borgo Canale quarter located just outside the city walls. His family was very poor with no tradition of music, his father being the caretaker of the town pawnshop. Nevertheless, Donizetti received some musical instruction from Simon Mayr, a German composer of internationally successful operas who had become maestro di cappella at Bergamo's principal church in 1802.

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Gaspare Spontini
Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (14 November 1774 – 24 January 1851) was an Italian opera composer and conductor, extremely celebrated in his time, though largely forgotten after his death.
Born in Maiolati in the province of Ancona, now Maiolati Spontini, he spent most of his career in Paris and Berlin, but returned to his place of birth at the end of his life. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Spontini was an important figure in French opera. In his more than twenty operas, Spontini strove to adapt Gluck's classical tragédie lyrique to the contemporary taste for melodrama, for grander spectacle (in Fernand Cortez for example), for enriched orchestral timbre, and for melodic invention allied to idiomatic expressiveness of words. His single great masterpiece and success was La vestale.
As a youth, Spontini studied at the Conservatorio della Pietà de' Turchini in Naples. In 1803, he went to Paris, where he was appointed court composer in 1805.
In 1807, Spontini wrote La vestale, his best known work. Written with the encouragement of Empress Joséphine, its premiere at the Opéra in Paris established Spontini as one of the greatest Italian composers of his age. His contemporaries Cherubini and Meyerbeer considered it a masterpiece, and later composers like Berlioz and Wagner admired it.

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Germaine de Staël
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (French pronunciation: [stal]; 22 April 1766 – 14 July 1817), commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French-speaking Swiss author living in Paris and abroad. She influenced literary tastes in Europe at the turn of the 19th century.
Anne Louise Germaine Necker was born in Paris, France. Her father was the prominent Swiss banker and statesman Jacques Necker, who was the Director of Finance under King Louis XVI of France. Her mother was Suzanne Curchod, almost equally famous for being the early love of Edward Gibbon, being the wife of Necker herself, and being the mistress of one of the most popular salons of Paris. Mother and daughter had little sympathy for each other. Mme Necker, despite her talents, her beauty and her fondness for philosophic society, was strictly decorous, somewhat reserved, and wanted to bring up her daughter with the discipline of her own childhood. Anne Louise was from her earliest years energetic and boisterous. She began very early to write, though not to publish. She was said to have injured her health by excessive study and intellectual excitement. But in reading all the accounts of Mme de Staël's life which come from herself or her intimate friends, it must be carefully remembered that she was the most distinguished and characteristic product of the period of sensibility — the singular fashion of ultra-sentimentalism — which required that both men and women, but especially women, should be always palpitating with excitement, steeped in melancholy, or dissolved in tears. Still, her father's dismissal from the ministry and the consequent removal of the family from the busy life of Paris were probably beneficial to her.

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Giacomo Leopardi
Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒakomo leoˈpardi]; June 29, 1798 – June 14, 1837) was an Italian poet, essayist, philosopher, and philologist. Although he lived in a secluded town in the ultra-conservative Papal States, he came in touch with the main thoughts of the Enlightenment, and, by his own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the Romantic era.
Giacomo Leopardi was born of a local noble family in Recanati, in the Marche, at the time ruled by the papacy. His father, the count Monaldo Leopardi, was a good-hearted man, fond of literature but weak and reactionary, who remained bound to antiquated ideas and prejudices; his mother, the marquise Adelaide Antici Mattei, was a cold and authoritarian woman, obsessed over rebuilding the family's financial fortunes, which had been destroyed by Monaldo's gambling addiction. At home, a rigorous discipline of religion and savings reigned. However, Giacomo's happy childhood, which he spent with his younger brother Carlo Orazio and his sister Paolina, left its mark on the poet, who recorded his experiences in the poem Le Ricordanze.

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Giacomo Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer (5 September 1791 – 2 May 1864) was a noted German opera composer, and the first great exponent of "grand opera." At his peak in the 1830s and 1840s, he was the most famous and successful composer of opera in Europe, yet he is rarely performed today.
He was born to a Jewish family in Tasdorf (now a part of Rüdersdorf), near Berlin with the name Jacob Liebmann Beer. His father was the enormously wealthy financier Jacob Judah Herz Beer (1769-1825) and his much-beloved mother, Amalia Liebmann Meyer Wulff (1767-1854) also came from the wealthy elite. Their other children included the astronomer Wilhelm Beer and the poet Michael Beer.
Beer's first keyboard instructor was Franz Lauska, a pupil of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and a favoured teacher at the Berlin court. Beer also became one of Muzio Clementi's pupils while Clementi was in Berlin, and old Clementi himself, although he had long given up teaching, was so much struck, during a visit to Berlin, with the promise displayed in the boy's performance as to consent to give Beer lessons. Beer made his public debut in 1801 playing Mozart's D minor Piano Concerto in Berlin. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported: 'The amazing keyboard playing of young Bär (a Jewish lad of 9), who carried off the difficult passages and other solo parts with aplomb, and has fine powers of rendition even more rarely found in one of his age, made the concert even more interesting'.

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Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒaːkomo putˈtʃiːni]; 22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924) was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire. Some of his arias, such as "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi, "Che gelida manina" from La bohème, and "Nessun dorma" from Turandot, have become part of popular culture.
Described by Encyclopædia Britannica Online as "one of the greatest exponents of operatic realism", he is regarded as one of the last major Italian opera composers. His repertoire is essentially rooted in verismo, or a post-Romantic operatic tradition and literary style. Whilst his work is essentially based on traditional late-19th century Italian opera, his music shows some influences from then-contemporary composers and movements such as Igor Stravinsky and Impressionism. Common themes within his operas include the important role, yet usually tragic end, of his heroines, as well as love; furthermore, there is a strong presence of exoticism in his operas, with several being set in faraway locations.

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Gioachino Rossini
Gioachino Antonio Rossini (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoaˈkiːno anˈtɔːnjo rosˈsiːni] (Giovacchino Antonio Rossini in the baptismal certificate) (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces. His best-known operas include the Italian comedies Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola and the French-language epics Moïse et Pharaon and Guillaume Tell (William Tell). A tendency for inspired, song-like melodies is evident throughout his scores, which led to the nickname "The Italian Mozart". Until his retirement in 1829, Rossini had been the most popular opera composer in history.
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born into a family of musicians in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy which was then part of the Papal States. His father, Giuseppe, was a horn player and inspector of slaughterhouses. His mother, Anna, was a singer and a baker's daughter. Rossini's parents began his musical training early, and by the age of six he was playing the triangle in his father's musical group.

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Giovanni Boldini
Giovanni Boldini (31 December 1842 – 11 July 1931) was an Italian genre and portrait painter. According to a 1933 article in Time magazine, he was known as the "Master of Swish" because of his flowing style of painting.
Boldini was born in Ferrara, the son of a painter of religious subjects, and went to Florence in 1862 to study painting, meeting there the realist painters known as the Macchiaioli. Their influence is seen in Boldini's landscapes which show his spontaneous response to nature, although it is for his portraits that he became best known.
Boldini attained great success in London as a portraitist. From 1872 he lived in Paris, where he became a friend of Edgar Degas. He also became the most fashionable portrait painter in Paris in the late 19th century, with a dashing style of painting which shows some Impressionist influence but which most closely resembles the work of his contemporaries John Singer Sargent and Paul Helleu. He was nominated commissioner of the Italian section of the Paris Exposition in 1889, and received the Légion d'honneur for this appointment.

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Giulio Ricordi
Giulio Ricordi (December 19, 1840 - June 6, 1912) was an Italian editor and musician.
Ricordi was born in Milan, where he also died.
With the nickname Jules Burgmein, Ricordi contributed a very great deal to the prestige of the Casa Ricordi, publishing company of his family. This firm also produced several magazines (La gazzetta musicale, Musica e musicisti and Ars et labor), and various other once famous publications (La biblioteca del pianista, l'Opera Omnia di Frédéric Chopin, L'arte musicale in Italia, Le Sonate di Domenico Scarlatti).
Ricordi was also publisher of the later operas by Giuseppe Verdi and had the good sense to promote younger composers of merit. These included Amilcare Ponchielli, Alfredo Catalani, Umberto Giordano, and, above all, Giacomo Puccini. To the last-named, in particular, he became something of a father-figure, feared (and often needing to be censorious over Puccini's dilatory work habits) but deeply trusted.

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Giuseppe de Luca
Giuseppe De Luca (December 25, 1876 – August 26, 1950), was a famous Italian baritone who achieved his greatest triumphs at the New York Metropolitan Opera. He notably created roles in the world premieres of two operas by Giacomo Puccini: Sharpless in Madama Butterfly (at La Scala, Milan, 1904) and the title role in Gianni Schicchi (Metropolitan Opera, 1918).
De Luca was born in Rome, the son of a blacksmith, and sang in church choirs as a boy. After his voice broke, a wealthy patron paid for him to have singing lessons at the Rome Conservatory, where he studied with two top-class pedagogues, Venceslao Persichini (who also taught De Luca's fellow baritone stars Mattia Battistini and Titta Ruffo) and Antonio Cotogni. He made his operatic debut at Piacenza in 1897, singing Valentin in Gounod's Faust. His debut proved a success and he was invited to sing at a string of more important venues.
He appeared at Italy's foremost opera house, La Scala, Milan, from 1902 to 1910, and made his London debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1907.

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Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (Italian pronunciation: [dʒuˈzɛppe ˈverdi]; 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century. His works are frequently performed in opera houses throughout the world and, transcending the boundaries of the genre, some of his themes have long since taken root in popular culture – such as "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto, "Va, pensiero" (The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, "Libiamo ne' lieti calici" (The Drinking Song) from La traviata and the "Grand March" from Aida.
Verdi’s masterworks dominate the standard opera repertoire a century and a half after their composition.
Verdi was born the son of Carlo Giuseppe Verdi and Luigia Uttini in Le Roncole, a village near Busseto, then in the Département Taro which was a part of the First French Empire after the annexation of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. The baptismal register, on 11 October lists him as being "born yesterday", but since days were often considered to begin at sunset, this could have meant either 9 or 10 October. The next day, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin as Joseph Fortuninus Franciscus. The day after that (Tuesday), Verdi's father took his newborn the three miles to Busseto, where the baby was recorded as Joseph Fortunin François; the clerk wrote in French. "So it happened that for the civil and temporal world Verdi was born a Frenchman."

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Gonçalves Dias
Antônio Gonçalves Dias (Portuguese pronunciation: [ɡõˈsawvis ˈdʒiɐs]; August 10, 1823 — November 3, 1864) was a Brazilian Romantic poet, playwright and linguist. A major exponent of the Brazilian Romanticism and of the literary tradition known as "Indianism", he is famous for writing the poem "Canção do exílio", arguably the most well-known poem of the Brazilian literature, the short epic poem I-Juca-Pirama, and many other nationalist and patriotic poems that would later give him the title of national poet of Brazil. He was also an avid researcher of the Brazilian indigenous languages and folklore.
He is the patron of the 15th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Antônio Gonçalves Dias was born in Caxias on August 10, 1823, to Portuguese João Manuel Gonçalves Dias and cafuza Vicência Ferreira. After completing his studies in Latin, French and Philosophy, he went in 1838 to Portugal to earn a degree in Law at the University of Coimbra. There, he got in contact with the Romantic ideals and wrote his critically acclaimed poem "Canção do exílio". He graduated in 1845 and returned to Brazil in the same year. He goes to Rio de Janeiro, living there until 1854. There, he wrote the drama Leonor de Mendonça in 1846 and his first poetry book, Primeiros Cantos, in 1847.

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Hans Gude
Hans Fredrik Gude (March 13, 1825 – August 17, 1903) was a Norwegian romanticist painter and is considered along with Johan Christian Dahl to be one of Norway's foremost landscape painters. He has been called a mainstay of Norwegian National Romanticism. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.
Gude's artistic career was not one marked with drastic change and revolution, but was instead a steady progression that slowly reacted to general trends in the artistic world. Gude's early works are of idyllic, sun-drenched Norwegian landscapes which present a romantic, yet still realistic view of his country. Around 1860 Gude began painting seascapes and other coastal subjects. Gude had difficulty with figure drawing initially and so collaborated with Adolph Tidemand in some of his painting, drawing the landscape himself and allowing Tidemand to paint the figures. Later Gude would work specifically on his figures while at Karlsruhe, and so began populating his paintings with them. Gude initially painted primarily with oils in a studio, basing his works on studies he'd done earlier in the field. However, as Gude matured as a painter he began to paint en plein air and espoused the merits of doing so to his students. Gude would go on to work with watercolors later in life as well as gouache in an effort to keep his art constantly fresh and evolving, and although these were never as well received by the public as his oil paintings, his fellow artists greatly admired them.

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Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz (pronounced: [ɛktɔʁ bɛʁˈljoːz]; 11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts (Requiem). Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a conductor, he performed several concerts with more than 1,000 musicians. He also composed around 50 songs. His influence was critical for the further development of Romanticism, especially in composers like Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many others.
Hector Berlioz was born in France at La Côte-Saint-André in the département of Isère, near Grenoble. His father, a respected provincial physician and scholar, was responsible for much of the young Berlioz's education. His father, Louis-Joseph Berlioz, was an atheist, with a liberal outlook; his mother, Marie-Antoinette, was an orthodox Roman Catholic. He had five siblings in all, three of whom did not survive to adulthood. The other two, Nanci and Adèle, remained close to Berlioz throughout his life.

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Heinrich Heine
Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was one of the most significant German poets of the 19th century. He was also a journalist, essayist, and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder (art songs) by composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. Heine's later verse and prose is distinguished by its satirical wit and irony. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities. Heine spent the last 25 years of his life as an expatriate in Paris.
Heine was born in Düsseldorf, Rhineland, into a Jewish family. He was called "Harry" as a child, but became "Heinrich" after his conversion to Christianity in 1825. Heine's father, Samson Heine (1764–1828), was a textile merchant. His mother Peira (known as "Betty"), née van Geldern (1771–1859), was the daughter of a physician. Heinrich was the eldest of the four children; his siblings were Charlotte, Gustav - who later became Baron Heine-Geldern and publisher of the Viennese newspaper Das Fremdenblatt - and Maximilian, later a physician in Saint Petersburg.

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Heinrich Marschner
Heinrich August Marschner (Zittau, 16 August 1795 – Hanover, 16 December 1861), was the most important composer of German Romantic opera between Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner, and is remembered principally for his operas Hans Heiling (1833), Der Vampyr (1828), and Der Templer und die Jüdin (1829). Marschner’s ability to depict supernatural horror by musical means is especially evident in the first two operas as well as in some of his ballads, such as "Die Monduhr" (c. 1839). Next to his operas, his most significant musical contribution is to the Lied, the best of which are comparable with those by Carl Loewe. Marschner also wrote a considerable amount of chamber music, including seven piano trios, as well as unaccompanied male choruses that were very popular in the nineteenth century. While Marschner’s operas strongly influenced Wagner, his chamber music, songs, and his cantata Klänge aus Osten (1842) were admired by Robert Schumann, whose cantata Paradise and the Peri (1843) shows the older composer’s influence. Marschner’s Bagatelles for guitar (1814) have been revived by guitarists, and so have been some of his piano trios. Among his operas, Hans Heiling and especially Der Vampyr have been adapted and revived in recent years with considerable success.

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Heinrich von Kleist
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (18 October 1777 – 21 November 1811) was a poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him.
Kleist was born into the von Kleist family in Frankfurt an der Oder in the Margraviate of Brandenburg. After a scanty education, he entered the Prussian Army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796, and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant. He studied law and philosophy at the Viadrina University and in 1800 received a subordinate post in the Ministry of Finance at Berlin.
In the following year, Kleist's roving, restless spirit got the better of him, and procuring a lengthened leave of absence he visited Paris and then settled in Switzerland. Here he found congenial friends in Heinrich Zschokke and Ludwig Friedrich August Wieland (d. 1819), son of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland; and to them he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family (1803, originally entitled The Ghonorez Family).

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Henry Fuseli
Henry Fuseli (German: Johann Heinrich Füssli) (February 7, 1741 – April 17, 1825) was a British painter, draughtsman, and writer on art, of Swiss origin.
Fuseli was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the second of eighteen children. His father was Johann Caspar Füssli, a painter of portraits and landscapes, and author of Lives of the Helvetic Painters. He intended Henry for the church, and sent him to the Caroline college of Zurich, where he received an excellent classical education. One of his schoolmates there was Johann Kaspar Lavater, with whom he became close friends.
After taking orders in 1761 Fuseli was forced to leave the country as a result of having helped Lavater to expose an unjust magistrate, whose powerful family sought revenge. He first travelled through Germany, and then, in 1765, visited England, where he supported himself for some time by miscellaneous writing. Eventually, he became acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom he showed his drawings. Following Sir Joshua's advice he devoted himself wholly to art. In 1770 he made an art-pilgrimage to Italy, where he remained till 1778, changing his name from Füssli to Fuseli, because it was more Italian-sounding.

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Hercule Poirot
Hercule Poirot ( /ɜrˈkjuːl pwɑrˈoʊ/; French pronunciation: [ɛʁkyl pwaʁo]) is a fictional Belgian detective, created by Agatha Christie. Along with Miss Marple, Poirot is one of Christie's most famous and long-lived characters, appearing in 33 novels and 51 short stories published between 1920 and 1975 and set in the same era.
Poirot has been portrayed on radio, on screen, for films and television, by various actors, including John Moffatt, Albert Finney, Sir Peter Ustinov, Sir Ian Holm, Tony Randall, Alfred Molina and David Suchet.
His name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes' Hercule Popeau and Frank Howel Evans' Monsieur Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer living in London. Hercule Poirot's initials replicate that of the sauce which he happens to like, HP Brown Sauce, as he comments in Elephants Can Remember: "Ah yes, that is correct my initials do appear to be the same as such a fine delicacy, a good English creation". A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle. In An Autobiography Christie admits, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp". For his part Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of "ratiocination" prefigured Poirot's reliance on his "little grey cells".

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Ignaz Moscheles
(Isaac) Ignaz Moscheles (23 May 1794 – 10 March 1870) was a Bohemian composer and piano virtuoso, whose career after his early years was based initially in London, and later at Leipzig, where he succeeded his friend and sometime pupil Felix Mendelssohn as head of the Conservatoire.
Much of what we know about Moscheles's life is derived from the edition of his diaries prepared by his wife, Charlotte, after his death, and published in 1874. This edition also gives lively portraits of his era and of his musical contemporaries. Unfortunately however the diaries themselves have since gone missing, although they may perhaps rematerialise. Another important source is the correspondence between Moscheles and Mendelssohn, preserved at the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds, and published in 1888 by Ignaz's son (and Felix Mendelssohn's god-son), Felix Moscheles.

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J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light" and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on or around the 23 April 1775 in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, England. His father, William Turner (1738–7 August 1829), was a barber and wig maker, His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers. A younger sister, Mary Ann Turner, was born in September 1778 but died aged four in August 1783.

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Jan Václav Voříšek
Jan Václav Hugo Voříšek (Czech pronunciation: [jan ˈvaːt͡slaf ˈɦuɡo ˈvor̝iːʃɛk]; Johann Hugo Worzischek, 11 May 1791, Vamberk, Bohemia - 19 November 1825, Vienna, Austria), was a Czech composer of classical music, pianist, and organist.
Voříšek was born in the town of Vamberk where his father was the schoolmaster, choirmaster and organist. A child prodigy, he started to perform publicly in Bohemian towns at the age of nine. His father taught him music, encouraged his playing the piano, helped him get a scholarship to attend the University of Prague where he studied philosophy. He also had lessons in piano and composition from Tomášek. He found it impossible to obtain sufficient work as a musician in Prague, so in 1813 at the age of 22 Voříšek moved to Vienna to study law and, he hoped, to meet Beethoven. In Vienna he was able to greatly improve his piano technique under the guidance of Hummel, but once more failed to gain full time employment as a musician.
Although Voříšek was enthralled by the classical music of Mozart, he was more intrigued by the romanticism of Ludwig van Beethoven.

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Jean Paul
Jean Paul (21 March 1763 – 14 November 1825), born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.
Jean Paul was born at Wunsiedel, in the Fichtelgebirge mountains (Bavaria). His father was an organist at Wunsiedel. In 1765 his father became a pastor at Joditz near Hof, and in 1767 at Schwarzenbach, but he died on 25 April 1779, leaving the family in great poverty. After attending the Gymnasium at Hof, Jean Paul went in 1781 to the University of Leipzig. His original intention was to enter his father's profession, but theology did not interest him, and he soon devoted himself wholly to the study of literature. Unable to maintain himself at Leipzig he returned in 1784 to Hof, where he lived with his mother. From 1787 to 1789 he served as a tutor at Töpen, a village near Hof; and from 1790 to 1794 he taught the children of several families in a school he had founded in nearby Schwarzenbach.
Jean Paul began his career as a man of letters with Grönländische Prozesse ("Greenland Lawsuits", published anonymously in Berlin) and Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren ("Selections from the Devil's Papers", signed J. P. F. Hasus), the former of which was issued in 1783-84, the latter in 1789. These works were not received with much favour, and in later life Richter himself had little sympathy for their satirical tone. A spiritual crisis he suffered on 15 November 1790, in which he had a vision of his own death, altered his outlook profoundly. His next book, Die unsichtbare Loge ("The Invisible Lodge"), a romance published in 1793 under the pen-name Jean Paul (in honour of Jean Jacques Rousseau), had all the qualities that were soon to make him famous, and its power was immediately recognized by some of the best critics of the day.

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Johan Christian Dahl
Johan Christian Claussen Dahl (February 24, 1788 – October 14, 1857), often known as J. C. Dahl, was a Norwegian artist who is considered the first great romantic painter in Norway, the founder of the "golden age" of Norwegian painting, and one of the great European artists of all time. He is often described as "the father of Norwegian landscape painting" and is regarded as the first Norwegian Painter ever to reach a level of artistic accomplishment comparable to that attained by the greatest European artists of his day. He was also the first acquire genuine fame and cultural renown abroad. As one critic has put it, "J.C. Dahl occupies a central position in Norwegian artistic life of the first half of the 19th century.
Although Dahl spent much of his life outside of Norway, his love for his country is clear in the motifs he chose for his paintings and in his extraordinary efforts on behalf of Norwegian culture generally. Indeed, if one sets aside his own monumental artistic creations, his other activities on behalf of art, history, and culture would still have guaranteed him a place at the very heart of the artistic and cultural history of Norway. He was, for example, a key figure in the founding of the Norwegian National Gallery and of several other major art institutions in Norway, as well as in the preservation of Norwegian stave churches and the restoration of the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim and Håkonshallen in Bergen.

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John Clare
John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet, the son of a farm labourer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self".
Clare was born in Helpston, six miles to the north of the city of Peterborough. In his life time, the village was in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and his memorial calls him "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Helpston now lies in the Peterborough unitary authority of Cambridgeshire.
He became an agricultural labourer while still a child; however, he attended school in Glinton church until he was twelve. In his early adult years, Clare became a pot-boy in the Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood may be the main culprit behind his 5-foot stature and may have contributed to his poor physical health in later life.^{[citation needed]}

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John Constable
John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.
John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill in Essex. Golding Constable also owned his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary and used to transport corn to London. He was a cousin of the London tea merchant, Abram Newman. Although Constable was his parents' second son, his older brother was mentally handicapped and so John was expected to succeed his father in the business, and after a brief period at a boarding school in Lavenham, he was enrolled in a day school in Dedham. Constable worked in the corn business after leaving school, but his younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills.

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John Keats
John Keats ( /ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work only having been in publication for four years before his death.
Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.
The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.
John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. Keats and his family seemed to have marked his birthday on 29 October, however baptism records give the birth date as the 31st. He was the eldest of four surviving children; George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818) and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889). Another son was lost in infancy. John was born in central London although there is no clear evidence of the exact location. His father first worked as a hostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop inn, an establishment he later managed and where the growing family lived for some years. Keats believed that he was born at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, but there is no evidence to support this. The Keats at the Globe pub now occupies the site, a few yards from modern day Moorgate station. He was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and sent to a local dame school as a child.

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José de Espronceda
José Ignacio Javier Oriol Encarnación de Espronceda y Delgado (25 March 1808 — 23 May 1842) was a famous Romantic Spanish poet.
Espronceda was born in Almendralejo, at the Province of Badajoz. As a youth, he studied at the Colegio San Mateo at Madrid, having Alberto Lista as a teacher. When he was 15 years old, he formed a secret society named "Los Numantinos" alongside his friends Ventura de la Vega and Patricio de la Escosura, conspiring against Ferdinand VII and intending to avenge the death of Rafael del Riego. For this, he was imprisoned in a monastery and exiled. Afterward, he left Spain and lived in Lisbon, Belgium, France, England and Holland. On his return to Spain in 1833, he became active in the extreme left-wing of Spanish political culture. Espronceda is also known for his affair with Teresa Mancha, for whom he wrote "Canto a Teresa" (from El diablo mundo). He later went to the Malay Peninsula and helped build the Dutch colonies there. He died of diphtheria in 1842.
Having been inspired to a literary career by his teacher Alberto Lista, Espronceda began to write the historical poem El Pelayo during his stay in the monastery. The poem was never completed. Later he wrote the novel Sancho Saldaña. His other important works include El estudiante de Salamanca and El Diablo Mundo, long lyric poems, the latter remained unfinished. Also important were A Jarifa en una orgía, El verdugo, El canto del cosaco, La canción del pirata and Himno al sol. Many of his works display the tendencies of Romanticism, and along with José Zorilla he is considered Spain's most important Romantic poet, as well as the most rebellious.

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José Zorrilla
José Zorrilla y Moral (Spanish pronunciation: [xoˈse θoˈriʎa]; 21 February 1817 – 23 January 1893), was a Spanish Romantic poet and dramatist.
He was born in Valladolid to a magistrate in whom Ferdinand VII placed special confidence,. He was educated by the Jesuits at the Real Seminario de Nobles in Madrid, wrote verses when he was twelve, became an enthusiastic admirer of Walter Scott and Chateaubriand, and took part in the school performances of plays by Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca.
In 1833 he was sent to study law at the University of Toledo, but after a year of idleness, he fled to Madrid, where he horrified the friends of his absolutist father by making violent speeches and by founding a newspaper which was promptly suppressed by the government. He narrowly escaped transportation to the Philippines, and passed the next few years in poverty.
The death of the satirist Mariano José de Larra brought Zorrilla into notice. His elegiac poem, read at Larra's funeral in February 1837, introduced him to the leading men of letters. In 1837 he published a book of verses, mostly imitations of Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo, which was so favourably received that he printed six more volumes within three years.

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Julian Budden
Julian Medforth Budden, BA, BMus (9 April 1924, Hoylake, Wirral – 28 February 2007, Florence, Italy) was a British opera scholar, radio producer and broadcaster. He is particularly known for his three volumes on the operas of Giuseppe Verdi (published in 1973, 1978, & 1981), a single volume biography in 1982 and a single volume work on Giacomo Puccini and his operas in 2002. He is also the author of numerous entries in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
His parents were the then professor of architecture at Liverpool University, Lionel Budden, and a poet, writer and journalist Maud, (née Fraser) who from 1938 until 1964 provided the rhymes for the strip 'Curly Wee and Gussie Goose', which was syndicated in newspapers throughout the world. He attended Stowe School and read Classics at Queen's College Oxford.
The war interrupted his studies; he worked in the Friends' Ambulance Unit from 1943-46, serving in Austria and Italy. He completed his BA in 1948 and then studied piano (with Thornton Lofthouse) and bassoon (with Archie Camden) at the Royal College of Music.

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Juliusz Słowacki
Juliusz Słowacki (Polish pronunciation: [ˈjuljuʂ swɔˈvat͡ski]; 4 September 1809 – 3 April 1849) was a Polish Romantic poet. He is considered one of the "Three Bards" of Polish literature — a major figure in the Polish Romantic period, and the father of modern Polish drama. His works often feature elements of Slavic pagan traditions, Polish history, mysticism and orientalism. His style includes the employment of neologisms and irony. His primary genre was the drama, and secondly, lyric poetry. His most popular works include the dramas Kordian and Balladyna and the poem Beniowski.
Słowacki spent his youth in Stolen Lands, in Kremenets (Polish: Krzemieniec) (now Ukraine) and Vilnius (Polish: Wilno) (now Lithuania). He briefly worked for the government of the Kingdom of Poland. During the November 1830 Uprising, he was a courier for the Polish revolutionary government. When the uprising ended in defeat, he found himself abroad and thereafter, like many compatriots, lived the life of an émigré. He settled briefly in Paris, France, and later in Geneva, Switzerland. He also traveled through Italy, Greece and the Middle East. Eventually he returned to Paris, where he spent the last decade of his life. He briefly returned to Poland when another uprising broke out during the Spring of Nations (1848).

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Karel Hynek Mácha
Karel Hynek Mácha (Czech pronunciation: [ˈkarɛl ˈɦɪnɛk ˈmaːxa]) (16 November 1810 – 6 November 1836) was a Czech romantic poet.
Mácha grew up in Prague, the son of a foreman at a mill. He learned Latin and German in school. He went on to study law at Prague University; during that time he also became involved in theatre (as an actor he first appeared in Jan Nepomuk Štěpánek's drama Czech and German in July 1832 in Benešov), where he met Eleonora Šomková, with whom he had a son out of wedlock. He was fond of travel, enjoying trips into the mountains, and was an avid walker. Eventually he moved to Litoměřice, a quiet town some 60 km from Prague, to prepare for law school exams and to write poetry. Three days before he was to be married to Šomková, just a few weeks after he had begun working as a legal assistant, Mácha, in helping put out a fire, overstrained himself, and died after a short period of illness, due to pneumonia. The day after his death he was expected in Prague to marry his mistress.

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Karl Bryullov
Karl Pavlovich Bryullov (Russian: Карл Па́влович Брюлло́в12 December 1799 - 11 June 1852), also transliterated Briullov or Briuloff and referred to by his friends as "The Great Karl", was a Russian painter. He is regarded as a key figure in transition from the Russian neoclassicism to romanticism.
Karl Bryullov was born on December, 12th (23), 1799 in St.-Petersburg, in a family of the academician, the woodcarver and engraver Pavel Ivanovich Briullo (Brulleau, 1760—1833). He felt drawn to Italy from his early years. Despite his education at the Imperial Academy of Arts (1809–1821), Bryullov never fully embraced the classical style taught by his mentors and promoted by his brother, Alexander Bryullov. After distinguishing himself as a promising and imaginative student and finishing his education, he left Russia for Rome where he worked until 1835 as a portraitist and genre painter, though his fame as an artist came when he began doing historical painting.
His best-known work, The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–1833), is a vast composition compared by Pushkin and Gogol to the best works of Rubens and Van Dyck. It created a sensation in Italy and established Briullov as one of the finest European painters of his day. After completing this work, he triumphantly returned to the Russian capital, where he made many friends among the aristocracy and intellectual elite and obtained a high post in the Imperial Academy of Arts.

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Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.
He travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died at 36 years old from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi in Greece.
Byron was celebrated in life for aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumours of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile. It has been speculated that he suffered from bipolar I disorder, or manic depression.

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Lorenzo Ferrero
Lorenzo Ferrero (born 1951) is a contemporary Italian composer with a predilection for opera, a librettist, author, and book editor. He started composing at an early age and wrote over a hundred compositions thus far, including twelve operas, three ballets, and numerous orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works. His musical idiom is characterized by eclecticism, stylistic versatility, and a neo-tonal language.
Born in Turin, he was initially self-taught, then studied composition from 1969 to 1973 with Massimo Bruni and Enore Zaffiri at Turin Music Conservatory, and philosophy with Gianni Vattimo and Massimo Mila at the University of Turin, earning a degree in aesthetics with a thesis on John Cage in 1974.
His early interest in the psychology of perception and psychoacoustics led him to IMEB, the International Electroacoustic Music Institute of Bourges, France where he did research on electronic music between 1972 and 1973, IRCAM in Paris, and to the Musik/Dia/Licht/Film Galerie in Munich, Germany in 1974.

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Louis Niedermeyer
Abraham Louis Niedermeyer (27 April 1802 – 14 March 1861) was a composer chiefly of church music but also of a few operas, and a teacher who took over the Ecole Choron, duly renamed École Niedermeyer, a school for the study and practice of church music, where several eminent French musicians studied including Gabriel Fauré and André Messager.
Born in Nyon, Switzerland, Niedermeyer studied piano in Vienna with Ignaz Moscheles and composition with Emanuel Aloys Förster. He studied further in Rome with Vincenzo Fioravanti (1819) and in Naples with Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli. While in Rome, he had the luck to meet Gioachino Rossini, who befriended him and urged the production of some of Niedermeyer's operas. His first opera, Il reo per amore, was put on in Naples in 1820 with some success.
Like Rossini, Niedermeyer settled in Paris (at the age of 21, in 1823); and there, in later years, four more of his operas were staged, though with little success:
Niedermeyer also collaborated with his friend Rossini on the assembly of Robert Bruce, Rossini's third and last pastiche; Niedermeyer provided the all-important French texts with their characteristic tone color and harmonies.

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Louise Bertin
Louise-Angélique Bertin (Les Roches, Essonne, 15 January 1805 – Paris, 26 April 1877) was a French composer and poet.
Louise Bertin lived her entire life in France. Her father, Louis-François Bertin, and also her brother later on, were the editors of Journal des débats, an influential newspaper. As encouraged by her family, Bertin pursued music. She received lessons from François-Joseph Fétis, who directed a private family performance of Guy Mannering, the first opera that Bertin ever composed, in 1825. This opera, never formally produced, took its story line from the book of the same name, written by Sir Walter Scott. Two years later, Bertin's second opera, Le Loup-garou, was produced at the Opéra-Comique.
At the age of 21, Bertin began working on an opera semiseria, based on Goethe's Faust. A performance of the completed opera was scheduled for 1830. However, due to many unforeseen complications, Fausto did not actually reach the stage until a full year later. It was not well received and only saw three performances.

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Louise Homer
Louise Homer (April 30, 1871 – May 6, 1947) was an American operatic contralto who had an active international career in concert halls and opera houses from 1895 until her retirement in 1932. After a brief stint as a vaudeville entertainer in New England, she made her professional opera debut in France in 1898. She then became a member of the Metropolitan Opera from 1900 to 1919 and again from 1927 to 1929. She was also active as an opera singer in Boston, Chicago, and California. She recorded extensively for Victor Records and Columbia Records in the early decades of the 20th century. She was married to composer Sidney Homer for 52 years, and composer Samuel Barber was her nephew.
Homer sang a broad repertoire which encompassed works from the French, German, and Italian repertoires. She enjoyed particular success in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. She often stated in interviews that her favorite role to perform was Amneris in Verdi's Aida. At the Met she sang in several United States premieres and created roles in two world premieres: the witch in Engelbert Humperdinck's Königskinder and the title role in Horatio Parker's Mona. Soprano Nellie Melba once hailed her as "the world's most beautiful voice". In 1923 and 1924 she was listed as one of the 12 greatest living women by the National League of Women Voters.

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Luchino Visconti
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo (2 November 1906 - 17 March 1976), was an Italian theatre, opera and cinema director, as well as a screenwriter. He is best known for his films The Leopard (1963) and Death in Venice (1971).
One of seven children, Visconti was born in Milan into a noble and wealthy family, one of the region's richest. His father Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone was the Duke of Grazzano and Count of Lonate Pozzolo. In his early years he was exposed to art, music and theatre, and met the composer Giacomo Puccini, the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the writer Gabriele d'Annunzio.
During World War II Visconti joined the Italian Communist Party.
Visconti made no secret of his homosexuality. His last partner was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who played Martin in Visconti's film The Damned. Berger also appeared in Visconti's Ludwig in 1972 and Conversation Piece in 1974 along with Burt Lancaster. Other lovers included Franco Zeffirelli, who also worked as part of the crew in production design, as assistant director, and other roles in a number of Visconti's films and theatrical productions.

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Lucrezia Bori
Lucrezia Bori (24 December 1887 – 14 May 1960) was a Spanish operatic singer, a lyric soprano.
Lucrezia Bori was born in Valencia, Spain. Her real name was Lucrecia Borja y González de Riancho and her family were reputed to be descended from the Borgias.
Her voice had a unique timbre and transparent quality unlike any present-day singer. She studied in Milan with Vidal and made her debut at the Teatro Adriano in Rome as Micaëla in Bizet's Carmen in 1908. in 1911 she sang Octavian in the Italian premiere of Der Rosenkavalier at La Scala.
Her career at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, where she became one of the great and unforgotten favourites, began during the Met's first visit to Paris, in 1910 (June 9; Manon Lescaut). It would last until 1936, although from 1915 to 1921 she stopped singing due to nodes on her vocal cords. She appeared a total of 654 times. She was famous for her portrayals of Manon in Massenet's opera; Mimì in La bohème; Fiora in L' amore dei trè rè; Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande; and Violetta in La traviata.

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Ludwig Uhland
Johann Ludwig Uhland (26 April 1787 – 13 November 1862), was a German poet, philologist and literary historian.
He was born in Tübingen, then Duchy of Württemberg, and studied jurisprudence at the university there, but also took an interest in medieval literature, especially old German and French poetry. Having graduated as a doctor of laws in 1810, he went to Paris for eight months to continue his studies of poetry; and from 1812 to 1814 he worked as a lawyer in Stuttgart, in the bureau of the minister of justice.
He had begun his career as a poet in 1807 and 1808 by contributing ballads and lyrics to Seckendorff's Musenalmanach; and in 1812 and 1813 he wrote poems for Kerner's Poetischer Almanach and Deutscher Dichterwald. In 1815 he collected his poems in a volume entitled Vaterländische Gedichte, which almost immediately secured a wide circle of readers. To almost every new edition he added some fresh poems. His two dramatic works Ernst, Herzog von Schwaben (1818) and Ludwig der Baier (1819) are unimportant in comparison with his Gedichte.

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Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (ⁱ/ˈlʊdvɪɡ væn ˈbeɪt.hoʊvən/; German pronunciation: [ˈluːtvɪç fan ˈbeːt.hoːfən] ( listen); baptized 17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers.
Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of the Holy Roman Empire, Beethoven moved to Vienna in his early 20s, studying with Joseph Haydn and quickly gaining a reputation as a virtuoso pianist. His hearing began to deteriorate in his late twenties, yet he continued to compose, conduct, and perform, even after becoming completely deaf.
Beethoven was the grandson of a musician of Flemish origin named Lodewijk van Beethoven (1712–73) who moved at the age of twenty to Bonn. Lodewijk (Ludwig is the German cognate of Dutch Lodewijk) was employed as a bass singer at the court of the Elector of Cologne, eventually rising to become Kapellmeister (music director). Lodewijk had one son, Johann (1740–1792), who worked as a tenor in the same musical establishment, and gave lessons on piano and violin to supplement his income. Johann married Maria Magdalena Keverich in 1767; she was the daughter of Johann Heinrich Keverich, who had been the head chef at the court of the Archbishopric of Trier.

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Léon Rothier
Léon Rothier (December 26, 1874 – December 6, 1951) was a French musician, predominantly an opera singer in the bass range, who reached the peak of his powers in the early 20th century at New York's Metropolitan Opera.
Rothier was born in 1874 in Reims, in the Champagne-Ardenne région of northern France. In this city he began his career as a violinist, but afterwards traveled to the Conservatoire de Paris to study voice.
In 1899, he made his singing debut at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, in Charles Gounod's Philémon et Baucis. One year later, he participated in the premiere of Gustave Charpentier's Louise. Rothier left the Opéra-Comique in 1907, and after some short stints in a few French theatres, moved to the United States, beginning a 30-year association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. He created the role of Grandfather Tyl in L'oiseau bleu by Albert Wolff (1919). He was still fulfilling public singing engagements in New York City as late as 1949, at the Town Hall performance space.

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Marie Rappold
Marie Rappold, née Winterroth (1873 – 12 May 1957) was an English-born American operatic soprano.
Rappold was born in London to German parents. She appeared on stage in London at the age of five before moving with her parents to Brooklyn, New York, where she later studied with Oscar Saenger and sang with the Amberg German Opera Company.
On 22 November 1905, Rappold made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Sulamith in Karl Goldmark's Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba, 1875). She continued to appear at the Met until 1920, during which time, she gave a total of 198 performances in 23 roles and 22 operas. Her first husband, Dr. Julius Rappold, objected to her career, and she divorced him in 1907. In 1913, she married tenor Rudolf Berger (17 April 1874, Moravia – 27 February 1915, New York City).
During World War I, Edison Records started a marketing campaign, hiring prominent opera singers and vaudeville performers to perform alongside and alternating with Edison records of their performances played on top-of-the-line Edison Diamond Disc Phonographs. At various stages during the performances, all lights in the theater would be darkened and the audience challenged to guess whether they were hearing a live performance or a recording. Written accounts of the time often said that much of the audience was astonished when the lights went back up to reveal only the Edison phonograph on stage. According to a book published by the Edison company titled Composers and Artists whose Art is Re-Created by Edison's New Art (ca. 1920), the first such "comparison test" took place at Carnegie Hall on April 28, 1916 with Rappold providing the live vocal performance.

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Mikhail Glinka
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (Russian: Михаи́л Ива́нович Гли́нка) (June 1 [O.S. May 20] 1804 – February 15 [O.S. February 3] 1857), was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition within his own country, and is often regarded as the father of Russian classical music. Glinka's compositions were an important influence on future Russian composers, notably the members of The Five, who took Glinka's lead and produced a distinctive Russian style of music.

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Mikhail Lermontov
Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (Russian: Михаи́л Ю́рьевич Ле́рмонтов; IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil ˈjurʲjɪvʲɪtɕ ˈlʲɛrməntəf]; October 15 [O.S. October 3] 1814 – July 27 [O.S. July 15] 1841), a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", became the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837. Lermontov is considered the supreme poet of Russian literature alongside Pushkin and the greatest figure in Russian Romanticism. His influence on later Russian literature is still felt in modern times, not only through his poetry, but also through his prose, which founded the tradition of the Russian psychological novel.
Lermontov was born in Moscow into a respectable noble family of the Tula Oblast, and grew up on the Tarkhany estate in the village of Tarkhany (now Lermontovo) in Penza Oblast. According to legend, his paternal family is descended from the Scottish Earls of Learmont, one of whom settled in Russia in the early 17th century, during the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov. The legendary Scottish poet Thomas the Rhymer (Thomas Learmonth) is thus claimed as a relative of Lermontov. The only ascertainable genealogical information states that the poet was descended from Yuri (George) Learmont, a Scottish officer in the Polish service who settled in Russia in the middle of 17th century

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Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a "w" to make his name "Hawthorne" in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children.

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Niccolò Paganini
Niccolò (or Nicolò) Paganini (27 October 1782 – 27 May 1840) was an Italian violinist, violist, guitarist, and composer. He was one of the most celebrated violin virtuosi of his time, and left his mark as one of the pillars of modern violin technique. His Caprice No. 24 in A minor, Op. 1, is among the best known of his compositions, and has served as an inspiration for many prominent composers.
Niccolò Paganini was born in Genoa, Italy, the third of the six children of Antonio and Teresa (née Bocciardo) Paganini. Paganini's father was an unsuccessful trader, but he managed to supplement his income through playing music on the mandolin. At the age of five, Paganini started learning the mandolin from his father, and moved to the violin by the age of seven. His musical talents were quickly recognized, earning him numerous scholarships for violin lessons. The young Paganini studied under various local violinists, including Giovanni Servetto and Giacomo Costa, but his progress quickly outpaced their abilities. Paganini and his father then traveled to Parma to seek further guidance from Alessandro Rolla. But upon listening to Paganini's playing, Rolla immediately referred him to his own teacher, Ferdinando Paer and, later, Paer's own teacher, Gasparo Ghiretti. Though Paganini did not stay long with Paer or Ghiretti, the two had considerable influence on his composition style.

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Nikolay Karamzin
Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin (Russian: Никола́й Миха́йлович Карамзи́н) (12 December [O.S. 1 December] 1766 – 3 June [O.S. 22 May] 1826) was a Russian writer, poet, historian, and critic. He is best remembered for his History of the Russian State, a 12-volume national history.
Karamzin was born in the village of Mikhailovka, in the government of Orenburg on 1 December (old style) 1766. His father was an officer in the Russian army. He was sent to Moscow to study under Swiss-German teacher Johann Matthias Schaden; he later moved to St Petersburg, where he made the acquaintance of Ivan Dmitriev, a Russian poet of some merit, and occupied himself with translating essays by foreign writers into his native language. After residing for some time in St Petersburg he went to Simbirsk, where he lived in retirement until induced to revisit Moscow. There, finding himself in the midst of the society of learned men, he again took to literary work.
In 1789 he resolved to travel, and visited Germany, France, Switzerland and England. On his return he published his Letters of a Russian Traveller, which met with great success. These letters, modelled after Irish-born Poet, Laurence Sterne´s Sentimental Journey, were first printed in the Moscow Journal, which he edited, but were later collected and issued in six volumes (1797–1801).

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Novalis
Novalis (German pronunciation: [noˈvaːlɪs]) was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (May 2, 1772 – March 25, 1801), an author and philosopher of early German Romanticism.
Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg was born in 1772 at Oberwiederstedt manor (now part of Arnstein, Saxony-Anhalt), in the Harz mountains. The family seat was a manorial estate, not simply a stately home. Novalis descended from ancient, Low German nobility. Different lines of the family include such important, influential magistrates and ministry officials as the Prussian chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg (1750–1822). An oil painting and a christening cap commonly assigned to Novalis are his only possessions now extant. In the church in Wiederstedt, he was christened Georg Philipp Friedrich. He spent his childhood on the family estate and used it as the starting point for his travels into the Harz mountains.
Novalis’s father, the estate owner and salt-mine manager Heinrich Ulrich Erasmus Freiherr von Hardenberg (1738–1814), was a strictly pietistic man who had become a member of the Moravian (Herrnhuter) Church. His second marriage was to Auguste Bernhardine von Hardenberg, née Bölzig (1749–1818), who gave birth to eleven children: their second child was Georg Philipp Friedrich, who later named himself Novalis.

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Philipp Otto Runge
Philipp Otto Runge (23 July 1777 – 2 December 1810) was a Romantic German painter and draughtsman. He made a late start to his career and died young, nonetheless he is considered among the best German Romantic painters.
Runge was born as the 9th of 11 children of a family of shipbuilders in Wolgast, in Western Pomerania, then under Swedish rule. As a sickly child he often missed school and at an early age learned the art of scissor-cut silhouettes from his mother, practised by him throughout his life. In 1795 he began a commercial apprenticeship at his older brother Daniel's firm in Hamburg. In 1799 Daniel supported Runge financially to begin study of painting under Jens Juel at the Copenhagen Academy. In 1801 he moved to Dresden to continue his studies, where he met Caspar David Friedrich, Ludwig Tieck, and his future wife Pauline Bassenge. He also began extensive study of the writings of the 17th century mystic Jakob Boehme. In 1803, on a visit to Weimar, Runge unexpectedly met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the two formed a friendship based on their common interests in color and art.

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Piotr Michałowski
Piotr Michałowski (July 2, 1800 – June 9, 1855) was a Polish painter of the Romantic period, especially known for his many portraits.
His talent was long underestimated, but he was re-discovered by Pablo Picasso in 1948. When the painter visited Poland, he saw Michałowski's work in the Warsaw National Museum and shouted, "Here, painter!"
The Sukiennice Museum, a division of the National Museum in Kraków, contains a room devoted to Michałowski's work.

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Pope Pius IX
Blessed Pope Pius IX (13 May 1792 – 7 February 1878), born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, was the longest-reigning elected Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, serving from 16 June 1846 until his death, a period of nearly 32 years. During his pontificate, he convened the First Vatican Council in 1869, which decreed papal infallibility. The Pope defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, meaning that Mary was conceived without original sin. Pius IX also granted the Marian title of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, a famous Byzantine icon from Crete entrusted to the Redemptorist priests. In addition to this, Pius IX was also the last Pope to rule as the Sovereign of the Papal States, which fell completely to Italian nationalist armies by 1870 and were incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy. He was beatified in 2000.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.

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Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( /ˈvɑːɡnər/; German pronunciation: [ˈʁiçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ]; 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, conductor, theatre director and polemicist primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas", as he later called them). Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex texture, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. Unlike most other opera composers, Wagner wrote both the music and libretto for every one of his stage works. Perhaps the two best-known extracts from his works are the Ride of the Valkyries from the opera Die Walküre, and the Wedding March (Bridal Chorus) from the opera Lohengrin.
Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works such as The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser which were broadly in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner transformed operatic thought through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"). This would achieve the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts and was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realized this concept most fully in the first half of the monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. However, his thoughts on the relative importance of music and drama were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional operatic forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

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Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law to return to music, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. He had been assured by his teacher Friedrich Wieck that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this dream. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing.
Schumann's published compositions were written exclusively for the piano until 1840; he later composed works for piano and orchestra; many Lieder (songs for voice and piano); four symphonies; an opera; and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. Works such as Kinderszenen, Album für die Jugend, Blumenstück and Albumblätter are among his most famous. His writings about music appeared mostly in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), a Leipzig-based publication which he jointly founded.

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Roger Parker
Roger Parker (born London United Kingdom, 2 August 1951) is an English musicologist, and is currently Thurston Dart Professor of Music at King's College London.
He studied at the University of London, first at Goldsmiths' College, then at King's College London. In 1982, he moved to Cornell University in upstate New York, where he was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor. In 1994 he came back to England to become a Lecturer in Music (later Professor) and Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford. In 1999 he became Professor of Music at Cambridge University, where he was a Fellow of St John's College and (in 2005-6) Chair of the School of Arts and Humanities. In 2002 he was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley; in 2007 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Roger Parker's work has centred on opera, in particular Italian opera of the nineteenth century. For ten years he was founding co-editor (with Arthur Groos) of the Cambridge Opera Journal, and he continues as General Editor (with Gabriele Dotto) of the The Critical Edition of the Operas of Gaetano Donizetti published by Casa Ricordi of Milan.

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Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer (27 January 1805 – 24 May 1881) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings.
Palmer, who was born in Newington, London in Surrey Square off the Old Kent Road, was the son of a bookseller and sometime Baptist minister, and was raised by a pious nurse. Palmer painted churches from around age twelve, and first exhibited Turner-inspired works at the Royal Academy at the age of fourteen. He had little formal training, and did not have a formal schooling, although he was educated briefly at Merchant Taylors' School.
Through John Linnell, he met William Blake in 1824. Blake's influence can be seen in the works he produced over the next ten years or so, which are generally reckoned to be his greatest. These works were of landscapes around Shoreham, near Sevenoaks in the west of the county of Kent. He purchased a run-down cottage, nicknamed "Rat Abbey", and it was there that he lived from 1826 to 1835, depicting the area as a demi-paradise, mysterious and visionary, and often shown in sepia shades under moon and star light. There Palmer also associated with the group of Blake-influenced artists known as The Ancients (including George Richmond and Edward Calvert). They were among the few who ever saw the Shoreham paintings since, as a result of attacks by critics in 1825, he only ever opened those early portfolios to selected friends.

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Saverio Mercadante
Giuseppe Saverio Raffaele Mercadante (baptised 17 September 1795 – 17 December 1870) was an Italian composer, particularly of operas. While Mercadante may not have retained the international celebrity of Gaetano Donizetti or Gioachino Rossini beyond his own lifetime, he composed as impressive a number of works as either; and his development of operatic structures, melodic styles and orchestration contributed significantly to the foundations upon which Giuseppe Verdi built his dramatic technique.
Mercadante was born in Altamura, near Bari in Apulia; his precise date of birth has not been recorded, but he was baptised on 17 September 1795. Mercadante studied flute, violin and composition at the conservatory in Naples, and organized concerts among his compatriots. The opera composer Gioachino Rossini said to the conservatory Director, Niccolo Zingarelli, "My compliments Maestro - your young pupil Mercadante begins where we finish". In 1817 he was made conductor of the college orchestra, composing a number of symphonies, and concertos for various instruments - including six for flute about 1818-1819, and whose autograph scores are in the Naples conservatory, where they were presumably first performed with him as soloist.

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Sigismond Thalberg
Sigismond Thalberg (January 8, 1812 – April 27, 1871) was a composer and one of the most distinguished virtuoso pianists of the 19th century.
Sigismond Thalberg was born in Pâquis near Geneva, Switzerland, on January 8, 1812. According to his birth certificate, he was the son of "Joseph Thalberg" and "Fortunée Stein", both from Frankfurt-am-Main, but the names in the birth certificate are now regarded as fictitious. For reasons of Thalberg's illegitimate birth, during his lifetime it was common use not to call his parents true names. François-Joseph Fétis, in the article "Thalberg" in his Biographie universelle des musiciens (1863), therefore wrote that Thalberg was son of a Prince „M.. D..“ and a Baroness „W...“.
The identity of Thalberg's mother as Baroness Maria Julia Wetzler von Plankenstern was disclosed 1871 by L. R. von Kohlenegg (Poly Henrion) in an article for the paper Ueber Land und Meer and 1882 by Constant von Wurzbach in the eighth volume of his Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Österreich. As excuse for their being indiscreet both authors wrote that the Baroness herself had always admitted that Sigismond Thalberg was her son. She wore a ring on one of her thumbs and told people who had asked her about it, that the ring had been given to her by Thalberg's father after she had given birth to the child. She was born Julia Bydeskuty von Ipp, from a Hungarian family of a lower rank of the nobility. In 1820 she married Baron Alexander Ludwig Wetzler von Plankenstern.

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Stendhal
Marie-Henri Beyle (23 January 1783 – 23 March 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).
Born in Grenoble, Isère, he had an unhappy childhood in what he found to be stifling provincial France, disliking his "unimaginative" father and mourning his mother, who had died when he was young. His closest friend was his younger sister, Pauline, with whom he maintained a steady correspondence throughout the first decade of the 19th century.
The military and theatrical worlds of the First French Empire were a revelation to Beyle. He was named an auditor with the Conseil d'État on 3 August 1810, and thereafter took part in the French administration and in the Napoleonic wars in Italy. He travelled extensively in Germany and was part of Napoleon's army in the 1812 invasion of Russia.

wn.com/Stendhal
Taras Shevchenko
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Тара́с Григо́рович Шевче́нко, Russian: Тара́с Григо́рьевич Шевче́нко, Taras Grigoryevich Shevchenko), ( March 9 [O.S. February 25] 1814 – March 10 [O.S. February 26] 1861) was a Ukrainian poet, artist and humanist. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language. Shevchenko also wrote in Russian and left many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.
Born into a serf family of Hryhoriy Ivanovych Shevchenko (1782? - 1825) and Kateryna Yakymivna Shevchenko (Boiko) (1782? - August 6, 1823) in the village of Moryntsi, of Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire (now in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine) Shevchenko was orphaned at the age of eleven. He was taught to read by a village precentor, and loved to draw at every opportunity. Shevchenko went as a household servant with his Russian aristocrat lord Pavel Engelhardt to Vilnius (1828–31) and then to Saint Petersburg.

wn.com/Taras_Shevchenko
Théodore Géricault
Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (26 September 1791 – 26 January 1824) was a profoundly influential French artist, painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings. Although he died young, he became one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.
Born in Rouen, France, Géricault was educated in the tradition of English sporting art by Carle Vernet and classical figure composition by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a rigorous classicist who disapproved of his student's impulsive temperament yet recognized his talent. Géricault soon left the classroom, choosing to study at the Louvre instead, where (from 1810 to 1815) he copied from paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Diego Velázquez, and Rembrandt. During this period at the Louvre he discovered a vitality he found lacking in the prevailing school of Neoclassicism. Much of his time was spent in Versailles, where he found the stables of the palace open to him, and where he gained his knowledge of the anatomy and action of horses.

wn.com/Théodore_Géricault
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (pronounced: [pjɛʁ ʒyl teofil ɡotje]; August 30, 1811 – October 23, 1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic.
While Gautier was an ardent defender of Romanticism, his work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as diverse as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Proust and Oscar Wilde.
Gautier was born on August 30, 1811, in Tarbes, capital of Hautes-Pyrénées département in southwestern France. His father, Pierre Gautier, was a fairly cultured minor government official and his mother was Antoinette-Adelaïde Concarde. The family moved to Paris in 1814, taking up residence in the ancient Marais district.
Gautier's education commenced at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris (fellow alumni include Voltaire and Charles Baudelaire), which he attended for three months before being brought home due to illness. Although he completed the remainder of his education at Collège Charlemagne (alumni include Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve), Gautier's most significant instruction came from his father, who prompted him to become a Latin scholar by age 18.

wn.com/Théophile_Gautier
Titta Ruffo
Titta Ruffo (9 June 1877 - 5 July 1953), born as Ruffo Titta Cafiero, was an Italian opera star who had a major international singing career. Known as the "Voce del leone" ("voice of the lion"), he was greatly admired, even by rival baritones, such as Giuseppe De Luca, who said of Ruffo: "His was not a voice, it was a miracle" (although not often published is the second part of De Luca's conclusion "...which he [Ruffo] bawled away..."), and Victor Maurel, the creator of Verdi's Iago and Falstaff. Maurel said that the notes of Ruffo's upper register were the most glorious baritone sounds he had ever heard (see Pleasants, cited below). Indeed Walter Legge, the prominent classical record producer, went so far as to call Ruffo "a genius".
Born Ruffo Titta in Pisa (he reversed his forename and surname for the stage), Ruffo was the son of an engineer. He studied voice with several teachers, but he was an independent thinker and, basically, his vocal method was self-taught.
Ruffo made his operatic debut in 1898 at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome as the Herald in Wagner's Lohengrin. After a slow start, his career took off in the early 1900s and he quickly achieved international renown due to the power and ardency of voice and acting.

wn.com/Titta_Ruffo
Ugo Foscolo
Ugo Foscolo (Italian pronunciation: [ˈuɡo ˈfoskolo]; 6 February 1778 – 10 September 1827), born Niccolò Foscolo, was an Italian writer, revolutionary and poet.
Foscolo was born on the Ionian island of Zakynthos. His father was Andrea Foscolo, an impoverished Venetian nobleman, and his mother Diamantina Spathis was Greek.
In 1788, on the death of his father, who worked as a physician in Spalato, today Croatia (Split), the family removed to Venice, and at the University of Padua Foscolo completed the studies begun at the Dalmatian grammar school.
Amongst his Paduan teachers was the abbé Cesarotti, whose version of Ossian had made that work highly popular in Italy, and who influenced Foscolo's literary tastes; he knew both modern and Ancient Greek. His literary ambition revealed itself by the appearance in 1797 of his tragedy Tieste--a production which obtained a certain degree of success.
Foscolo, who, for causes not clearly explained, had changed his Christian name Niccolò to that of Ugo, now began to take an active part in the stormy political discussions which the fall of the republic of Venice had provoked. He was a prominent member of the national committees, and addressed an ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, expecting Napoleon to overthrow the Venetian oligarchy and create a free republic.

wn.com/Ugo_Foscolo
Umberto I of Italy
Umberto I or Humbert I (Italian: Umberto Ranieri Carlo Emanuele Giovanni Maria Ferdinando Eugenio di Savoia, English: Humbert Ranier Charles Emmanuel John Mary Ferdinand Eugene of Savoy; 14 March 1844 – 29 July 1900), nicknamed the Good (in Italian il Buono), was the King of Italy from 9 January 1878 until his death. He was deeply loathed in far-left circles, especially among anarchists, because of his conservatism and support of the Bava-Beccaris massacre in Milan. He was killed by anarchist Gaetano Bresci two years after the incident.
The son of Victor Emmanuel II and Archduchess Adelaide of Austria, Umberto was born in Turin, which was then capital of the kingdom of Sardinia, on 14 March 1844, his father's 24th birthday. His education was entrusted to, amongst others, Massimo Taparelli, marquis d'Azeglio and Pasquale Stanislao Mancini.
From March 1858 he had a military career in the Sardinian army, beginning with the rank of captain. Umberto took part in the Italian Wars of Independence: he was present at the battle of Solferino in 1859, and in 1866 commanded the XVI Division at the Villafranca battle that followed the Italian defeat at Custoza.

wn.com/Umberto_I_of_Italy
Vasily Zhukovsky
Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky (Russian: Васи́лий Андре́евич Жуко́вский; IPA: [vɐˈsʲilʲɪj ɐˈndrʲejɪvʲɪtɕ ʐʊˈkofskʲɪj]; February 9 [O.S. January 29] 1783 – April 24 [O.S. April 12] 1852) was the foremost Russian poet of the 1810s and a leading figure in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century. He held a high position at the Romanov court as tutor to the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna and later to her son, the future Tsar-Liberator Alexander II.
Zhukovsky is credited with introducing the Romantic Movement into Russia. The main body of his literary output consists of free translations covering an impressively wide range of poets, from ancients like Ferdowsi and Homer to his contemporaries Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and others. Many of his translations have become classics of Russian literature, arguably better-written and more enduring in Russian than in their original languages.
Zhukovsky was born in the village of Mishenskoe, in Tula Oblast, Russia, the illegitimate son of a landowner named Afanasi Bunin and his Turkish housekeeper Salkha. The Bunin family had a literary bent and some 90 years later produced the Nobel Prize-winning modernist writer Ivan Bunin. For reasons of social propriety, Zhukovsky was formally adopted by a family friend. He kept his adopted surname and patronymic for the rest of his life, even when later ennobled, eventually passing it on to his own children.

wn.com/Vasily_Zhukovsky
Victor Borge
Victor Borge ( /ˈbɔrɡə/ BOR-gə; 3 January 1909 – 23 December 2000), born Børge Rosenbaum, was a Danish and American comedian, conductor and pianist, affectionately known as The Clown Prince of Denmark,The Unmelancholy Dane, and The Great Dane.
Borge was born Børge Rosenbaum in Copenhagen, Denmark, into a Jewish family. His parents, Bernhard and Frederikke Rosenbaum, were both musicians—his father a violist in the Royal Danish Orchestra and his mother a pianist. Like his mother, Borge began piano lessons at the age of two, and it was soon apparent that he was a prodigy. He gave his first piano recital when he was eight years old, and in 1918 was awarded a full scholarship at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, studying under Olivo Krause. Later on, he was taught by Victor Schiøler, Liszt's student Frederic Lamond, and Busoni's pupil Egon Petri.
Borge played his first major concert in 1926 at the Danish concert-hall Odd Fellow Palæet (The Odd Fellow's Lodge building). After a few years as a classical concert pianist, he started his now famous "stand up" act, with the signature blend of piano music and jokes. He married American Elsie Chilton in 1933, the same year he debuted with his revue acts. Borge started touring extensively in Europe, where he began telling anti-Nazi jokes.

wn.com/Victor_Borge
Victor Emanuel II
Victor Emanuel II (Vittorio Emanuele Maria Alberto Eugenio Ferdinando Tommaso; 14 March 1820 – 9 January 1878) was king of Sardinia from 1849 until, on 17 March 1861, he assumed the title King of Italy to become the first king of a united Italy since the 6th century, a title he held until his death in 1878. The Italians gave him the epithet Father of the Fatherland (Italian: Padre della Patria).
Victor Emanuel was born the eldest son of Charles Albert of Sardinia and Maria Theresa of Austria. His father was King of Sardinia. He lived for some years of his youth in Florence and showed an early interest in politics, the military, and sports. In 1842 he married his cousin Adelaide of Austria. He was styled as the Duke of Savoy prior to becoming King of Sardinia.
He took part in the First Italian War of Independence under his father, fighting in the front line at the battles of Pastrengo, Santa Lucia, Goito and Custoza.

wn.com/Victor_Emanuel_II
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
Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini (3 November 1801 – 23 September 1835) was a Italian opera composer. A native of Catania in Sicily, his greatest works are I Capuleti ed i Montecchi (1830), La sonnambula (1831), Norma (1831), Beatrice di Tenda (1833), and I puritani (1835). Known for his long-flowing melodic lines, for which he was named "the Swan of Catania", Bellini was the quintessential composer of bel canto opera. He died in Puteaux, France at the age of 33, nine months after the premiere of his last opera, I puritani.
Born in Catania, Sicily, Bellini was a child prodigy from a highly musical family and legend has it he could sing an aria of Valentino Fioravanti at eighteen months. He began studying music theory at two, the piano at three, and by the age of five could apparently play well. Bellini's first five pieces were composed when he was just six years old. Regardless of the veracity of these claims, it is certain that Bellini grew up in a musical household and that a career as a musician was never in doubt.

wn.com/Vincenzo_Bellini
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time.
Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.
Born in College Wynd in the Old Town of Edinburgh in 1771, the son of a solicitor, Scott survived a childhood bout of polio in 1773 that left him lame. To cure his lameness he was sent in 1773 to live in the rural Borders region at his paternal grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, adjacent to the ruin of Smailholm Tower, the earlier family home. Here he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny, and learned from her the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends that characterised much of his work. In January 1775 he returned to Edinburgh, and that summer went with his aunt Jenny to take spa treatment at Bath in England, where they lived at 6 South Parade. In the winter of 1776 he went back to Sandyknowe, with another attempt at a water cure at Prestonpans during the following summer.

wn.com/Walter_Scott
Washington Irving
Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra. Irving also served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846.
He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819. He continued to publish regularly—and almost always successfully—throughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York.

wn.com/Washington_Irving
William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".
Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".

wn.com/William_Blake
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

wn.com/William_Shakespeare
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Their father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with their father, and they would be distant from him until his death in 1783.

wn.com/William_Wordsworth
Zygmunt Krasiński
Count Napoleon Stanisław Adam Ludwig Zygmunt Krasiński (Polish pronunciation: [ˈzɨɡmunt kraˈɕiɲskʲi]; Paris, France, 19 February 1812 – 23 February 1859, Paris, France), a Polish count, is traditionally ranked with Mickiewicz and Słowacki as one of Poland's Three National Bards — the trio of great Romantic poets who influenced national consciousness during the period of Poland's political bondage.
Krasiński was the son of a general, Count Wincenty Krasiński, of the aristocratic Krasiński family. He studied law at Warsaw University and in Geneva, where he met Adam Mickiewicz.
Krasiński was more sociopolitically conservative than the other two poets. He published much of his work anonymously.
He is best known for his philosophical Messianist ideas. His drama, Nie-boska Komedia (The Un-Divine Comedy, 1835), portrays the tragedy of an old-world aristocracy defeated by a new order of communism and democracy, and is a poetic prophecy of class conflict and of Russia's October Revolution (see also Okopy Świętej Trójcy); and his drama, Irydion (1836), deals, in the context of Christian ethics, with the struggle of a subjugated nation against its oppressor.

wn.com/Zygmunt_Krasiński
Étienne Méhul
Étienne Nicolas Méhul (22 June 1763 – 18 October 1817) was a French composer, "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution." He was also the first composer to be called a "Romantic".
Méhul was born at Givet in Ardennes to Jean-François Méhul, a wine merchant, and his wife Marie-Cécile (née Keuly). His first music lessons came from a blind local organist, but he had innate aptitude and was sent to study with a German musician and organist, Wilhelm Hanser, at the monastery of Lavaldieu, a few miles from Givet. Here Méhul developed his lifelong love of flowers.
In 1778 or 1779 he went to Paris and began to study with Jean-Frédéric Edelmann, a harpsichord player and friend of Méhul's idol Christoph Willibald von Gluck. Méhul's first published composition was a book of piano pieces in 1783. He also arranged airs from popular operas and by the late 1780s he had begun to think about an operatic career for himself.
In 1787, the writer Valadier offered Méhul one of his libretti, Cora, which had been rejected by Gluck in 1785. The Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra put Méhul's work, under the title Alonzo et Cora, into rehearsal in June 1789. However, the rehearsals were abandoned on 8 August, probably because the Opéra had been suffering severe financial difficulties throughout the 1780s, and the opera was not premiered until 1791. In the meantime, Méhul found an ideal collaborator in the librettist François-Benoît Hoffman, who provided the words to the first of Méhul's operas to be performed, Euphrosine. Its premiere in 1790 was an immense success and marked the composer out as a new talent. It was also the start of his long relationship with the Comédie Italienne theatre (soon to be renamed the Opéra-Comique).

wn.com/Étienne_Méhul

Verdi: Requiem

UC Davis Symphony Orchestra and University Chorus Jeffrey Thomas, conducting, with Arianna...

published: 25 Feb 2008

author: UCtelevision

Nabucco Verdi

Nabucco Verdi...

published: 16 Aug 2006

author: angieearts

Verdi: Aïda - San Francisco Opera (starring Luciano Pavarotti)

A magnificent spectacle of stars, scenery and choreography, this version of Verdi's Aïda i...

published: 27 Jan 2012

author: classicalmusictv

Verdi - Traviata

Verdi...

published: 07 Mar 2007

author: Boaz Lahav

BBC Prom 13 - Verdi' Requiem

Proms 2011 - Prom 13 - Broadcast on BBC 4 Original concert on 24 July 2011 - Broadcast on ...

published: 23 Aug 2011

author: Tenorfach

Nabucco - Hebrew Slaves Chorus

...

published: 19 Sep 2009

author: wmalazcia

Verdi: Requiem, Dies irae

Visit www.claudiovandelli.com Claudio Vandelli, conductor New Russia State Symphony Orches...

published: 14 Jan 2008

author: Claudio Vandelli

Verdi Dies Irae Solti

Requiem Sir Georg Solti Wiener Philharmonic Joan Sutherland Soprano Luciano Pavarotti Teno...

published: 30 Sep 2007

author: elias12186

BBC Proms 2011: Verdi - Dies Irae from Requiem

Originally broadcast live from the Royal Albert Hall, London Verdi's Requiem - his great s...

published: 28 Jul 2011

author: Radio3Video

Verdi's Funeral

Archival footage of the cortège....

published: 02 Feb 2009

author: PerTeQuaggiu

LA TRAVIATA - Drinking Song

Placido Domingo and Teresa Stratas sing the Brindisi from Act I of La Traviata...

published: 10 Mar 2007

author: sutherland9

Verdi - Aida - Grand March

Verdi - Aida - Grand March...

published: 22 Jan 2009

author: TheWickedNorth

Va pensiero ('Nabucco', G. Verdi)

The most popular opera chorus by the "Orfeón Donostiarra"...

published: 04 Mar 2007

author: jrtapia

Verdi -Requiem- Dies irae

Karajan -Verdi Requiem I know that the Mozart's Requiem is generally preferred but I belie...

published: 17 Jul 2008

author: pozzil

Fox Retro

for FOX Channels Italy: Art Direction: Juan Pablo Kessler Concept Art: Santiago Wardak Cr...

published: 28 Sep 2011

author: PUNGA

PIZZA VERDI (short film) by Gary Nadeau

Pizza Verdi **WINNER "CORTI CORTISSIMI" BEST SHORT 2012 SALENTO FINIBUS TERRAE INTERNAT...

published: 08 Jun 2011

author: gary nadeau

Smart Data - Nokia

Nokia Creative Berlin: Thomas Markert - CD Ronaldo Ramirez - AD Aina Ørebech - Producer ...

published: 17 Nov 2011

author: PUNGA

Yemek Siparişi Sepet ile Taşınmaz...:)

Aile akşam yemeği için eve yemek servis hizmeti veren internet sitesinden akşam yemeği sip...

published: 12 Jun 2012

author: Istelezzet

Tamburasi - Giuseppe Verdi - Vinska pesma (Brindisi) - Live

City Tamburica Orchestra Branko Radicevic - Ruma Libiamo ne'lieti calici (Drinking Song) i...

published: 30 Oct 2010

author: tamburasiruma

Carlos Kleiber, 1965 (Live) Falstaff - Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi Falstaff Sir.John Falstaff : Norman Mittelmann Ford : William Justus Fenton...

published: 23 Aug 2012

author: jacquesurlus

Il trovatore, 1939 (Live) Björling / Cigna / Basiola - Vittorio Gui

Giuseppe Verdi Il trovatore Manrico.........Jussi Björling Leonora.........Gina Cigna Azuc...

published: 13 Jun 2012

author: jacquesurlus

Rigoletto, 1945 (Live) Warren / Sayão / Björling - Cesare Sodero

Giuseppe Verdi Rigoletto Rigoletto............Leonard Warren Gilda................Bidú Say...

published: 12 Jun 2012

author: jacquesurlus

Verdi: Requiem, Dies irae

Visit www.claudiovandelli.com Claudio Vandelli, conductor New Russia State Symphony Orches...

published: 14 Jan 2008

author: Claudio Vandelli

Avalon String Quartet - Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1893): "String Quartet in E minor: Allegro"

On October 24, 2010, St. John Evangelical United Church of Christ welcomed the Avalon Stri...

published: 30 Oct 2010

author: StJohnEUCC

Therion - Il trovatore (Giuseppe Verdi)

Il trovatore (Giuseppe Verdi) Therion Goes Classic Live in Sala Palatului Bucharest On Dec...

published: 19 Sep 2008

author: akmalazizan

Aida, 1964 (Live) Price / Labó / Simionato / Bastianini - Karajan

Giuseppe Verdi Aida *The sound is bad, but to hear Leontyne Price in the full glory of his...

published: 04 Jun 2012

author: jacquesurlus

Andrea Bocelli - La Traviata di Giuseppe Verdi (Live in Yerevan 22.04.2012)

Անդրեա Բոչելլի (Andrea Bocelli) HD - La Traviata di Giuseppe Verdi - Libiam ne' lieti cali...

published: 22 Apr 2012

author: Hakob Artemyan

Luciano Pavarotti - Lunge da lei (Live)

Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007) Born and died in Modena, Italy, Pavarotti was an Italian ten...

published: 12 Apr 2008

author: GermanOperaSinger

Falstaff - Giuseppe Verdi / The Royal Opera House

The spectacular opening production of Londons newly-restored Royal Opera House, first broa...

published: 16 Sep 2009

author: KulturFilms

Maria Callas : La Traviata De Giuseppe Verdi - Parego, O Cara - ClassicalExperience

ClassicalExperience - (Re)Discover the best classical music - ClassicalExperience is your ...

published: 06 Oct 2012

author: ClassicalExperience

Placido Domingo, Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazon - Libiamo Ne'lieti Calici

Placido Domingo, Anna Netrebko, Rolando Villazon - Libiamo Ne'lieti Calici...Duet Violetta...

published: 06 Jul 2010

author: PYTHONIASTY

Giuseppe Verdi: Macbeth, Vieni t'affretta, Or tutti sorgete - Maria Callas "Live" 1952

Registrazione "Live" RAI 1952 ( public domain), rimasterizzata e restaurata con eliminazio...

published: 04 Apr 2009

author: Roberto Scandurra

Fox Retro

for FOX Channels Italy: Art Direction: Juan Pablo Kessler Concept Art: Santiago Wardak Cr...

published: 28 Sep 2011

author: PUNGA

PIZZA VERDI (short film) by Gary Nadeau

Pizza Verdi **WINNER "CORTI CORTISSIMI" BEST SHORT 2012 SALENTO FINIBUS TERRAE INTERNAT...

published: 08 Jun 2011

author: gary nadeau

Smart Data - Nokia

Nokia Creative Berlin: Thomas Markert - CD Ronaldo Ramirez - AD Aina Ørebech - Producer ...

published: 17 Nov 2011

author: PUNGA

Yemek Siparişi Sepet ile Taşınmaz...:)

Aile akşam yemeği için eve yemek servis hizmeti veren internet sitesinden akşam yemeği sip...

published: 12 Jun 2012

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photo: AP / Sebastian D'souza

FILE - In this Nov. 26, 2008 file photo, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the accused gunman walks at the Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal railway station in Mumbai, India.

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This article is about the 19th century composer. For other uses, see Verdi (disambiguation).

Giuseppe Verdi

Signature G. Verdi

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (Italian pronunciation: [dʒuˈzɛppe ˈverdi]; 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century. His works are frequently performed in opera houses throughout the world and, transcending the boundaries of the genre, some of his themes have long since taken root in popular culture – such as "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto, "Va, pensiero" (The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, "Libiamo ne' lieti calici" (The Drinking Song) from La traviata and the "Grand March" from Aida.

Verdi’s masterworks dominate the standard opera repertoire a century and a half after their composition.

1 Early life
- 1.1 Initial recognition
2 Middle years
3 Later compositions
4 Final years and death
5 Role in the Risorgimento
6 Style
7 Works
8 Political significance
9 Media
10 Cultural depictions and references
- 10.1 Eponyms
11 References
12 External links

Early life [link]

Giuseppe Verdi in Vanity Fair (1879)

Verdi was born the son of Carlo Giuseppe Verdi and Luigia Uttini in Le Roncole, a village near Busseto, then in the Département Taro which was a part of the First French Empire after the annexation of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. The baptismal register, on 11 October lists him as being "born yesterday", but since days were often considered to begin at sunset, this could have meant either 9 or 10 October. The next day, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin as Joseph Fortuninus Franciscus. The day after that (Tuesday), Verdi's father took his newborn the three miles to Busseto, where the baby was recorded as Joseph Fortunin François; the clerk wrote in French. "So it happened that for the civil and temporal world Verdi was born a Frenchman."^[1]

When he was still a child, Verdi's parents moved from Piacenza to Busseto, where the future composer's education was greatly facilitated by visits to the large library belonging to the local Jesuit school. Also in Busseto, Verdi was given his first lessons in composition.

Verdi went to Milan when he was twenty to continue his studies. He took private lessons in counterpoint while attending operatic performances, as well as concerts of, specifically, German music. Milan's beaumonde association convinced him that he should pursue a career as a theatre composer. During the mid 1830s, he attended the Salotto Maffei salons in Milan, hosted by Clara Maffei.

Returning to Busseto, he became the town music master and, with the support of Antonio Barezzi, a local merchant and music lover who had long supported Verdi's musical ambitions in Milan, Verdi gave his first public performance at Barezzi’s home in 1830.

Because he loved Verdi’s music, Barezzi invited Verdi to be his daughter Margherita's music teacher, and the two soon fell deeply in love. They were married on 4 May 1836 and Margherita gave birth to two children, Virginia Maria Luigia (26 March 1837 – 12 August 1838) and Icilio Romano (11 July 1838 – 22 October 1839). Both died in infancy while Verdi was working on his first opera and, shortly afterwards, Margherita died of encephalitis^[2]^[3]on 18 June 1840, aged only 26.^[4] Verdi adored his wife and children, and he was devastated by their untimely deaths.

Initial recognition [link]

	"O sommo Carlo" Ernani (1844), Act 3, sung by Mattia Battistini, Emilia Corsi, Luigi Colazza, Aristodemo Sillich, and the La Scala chorus in 1906.
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The production by Milan's La Scala of his first opera, Oberto in November 1839 achieved a degree of success, after which Bartolomeo Merelli, La Scala's impresario, offered Verdi a contract for two more works.

It was while he was working on his second opera, Un giorno di regno, that Verdi's wife died. The opera, given in September 1840, was a flop and he fell into despair and vowed to give up musical composition forever. However, Merelli persuaded him to write Nabucco and its opening performance in March 1842 made Verdi famous. Legend (and Verdi's own "An Autobiographical Sketch" of 1879^[5]) has it that it was the words of the famous Va pensiero chorus of the Hebrew slaves that inspired him to write music again. A large number of operas – 14 in all – followed in the decade after 1843, a period which Verdi was to describe as his "galley years". These included his I Lombardi in 1843, and Ernani in 1844. For some, the most original and important opera that Verdi wrote is Macbeth in 1847. For the first time, Verdi attempted an opera without a love story, breaking a basic convention in 19th century Italian opera.

In 1847, I Lombardi, which was revised and renamed Jérusalem, was produced by the Paris Opera. Due to a number of Parisian conventions that had to be honored (including extensive ballets), it became Verdi's first work in the French Grand opera style.

Middle years [link]

	"Bella figlia dell'amore" Rigoletto (1851), Act 3. A 1907 Victor Records recording with Enrico Caruso, Bessie Abott, Louise Homer and Antonio Scotti. "Stride la vampa" Il trovatore (1853), Act 2. Sung by Gabriella Besanzoni in 1920. "Ah, fors'è lui" ... "Sempre libera" La traviata (1853), Act 1. Sung by Lucrezia Bori.
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Sometime in the mid-1840s, after the death of Margherita Barezzi, Verdi began an affair with Giuseppina Strepponi, a soprano in the twilight of her career.^[6] Their cohabitation before marriage was regarded as scandalous in some of the places they lived, but Verdi and Giuseppina married on 29 August 1859 at Collonges-sous-Salève, near Geneva.^[7] While living in Busseto with Strepponi, Verdi bought an estate two miles from the town in 1848. Initially, his parents lived there, but, after his mother's death in 1851, he made the Villa Verdi at Sant'Agata in Villanova sull'Arda his home until his death.

As the "galley years" were drawing to a close, Verdi created one of his greatest masterpieces, Rigoletto, which premiered in Venice in 1851. Based on a play by Victor Hugo (Le roi s'amuse), the libretto had to undergo substantial revisions in order to satisfy the epoch's censorship, and the composer was on the verge of giving it all up a number of times. The opera quickly became a great success.

With Rigoletto, Verdi sets up his original idea of musical drama as a cocktail of heterogeneous elements, embodying social and cultural complexity, and beginning from a distinctive mixture of comedy and tragedy. Rigoletto's musical range includes band-music such as the first scene or the song La donna è mobile, Italian melody such as the famous quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore", chamber music such as the duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile and powerful and concise declamatos often based on key-notes like the C and C# notes in Rigoletto and Monterone's upper register.

There followed the second and third of the three major operas of Verdi's "middle period": in 1853 Il Trovatore was produced in Rome and La traviata in Venice. The latter was based on Alexandre Dumas, fils' play The Lady of the Camellias, and became the most popular of all Verdi's operas, placing second in the Operabase list of most performed operas worldwide.^[8]

Later compositions [link]

	"È scherzo od è follia" Un ballo in maschera (1859), Act 1, Scene 2. Performed by Enrico Caruso, Frieda Hempel, Maria Duchêne, Andrés de Segurola and Léon Rothier. "Nè gustare m'è dato un'ora..." La forza del destino (1862), Act 3, Scene 3. Sung by Enrico Caruso and Giuseppe de Luca.
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Between 1855 and 1867, an outpouring of great Verdi operas followed, among them such repertory staples as Un ballo in maschera (1859), La forza del destino (commissioned by the Imperial Theatre of Saint Petersburg for 1861 but not performed until 1862), and a revised version of Macbeth (1865). Other somewhat less often performed include Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) and Don Carlos (1867), both commissioned by the Paris Opera and initially given in French. Today, these latter two operas are most often performed in their revised Italian versions. Simon Boccanegra followed in 1857.

Giuseppe Verdi in 1876 by Etienne Carjat

In 1869, Verdi was asked to compose a section for a requiem mass in memory of Gioachino Rossini and proposed that this requiem should be a collection of sections composed by other Italian contemporaries of Rossini. The requiem was compiled and completed, but it was cancelled at the last minute (and was not performed in Verdi's lifetime). Verdi blamed this on the lack of enthusiasm for the project by the intended conductor, Angelo Mariani, who had been a longtime friend of his. The episode led to a permanent break in their personal relations. The soprano Teresa Stolz (who later had a strong professional – and, perhaps, romantic – relationship with Verdi) was at that time engaged to be married to Mariani, but she left him not long after. Five years later, Verdi reworked his "Libera Me" section of the Rossini Requiem and made it a part of his Requiem Mass, honoring the famous novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni, who had died in 1873. The complete Requiem was first performed at the cathedral in Milan on 22 May 1874.

Verdi's grand opera, Aida, is sometimes thought to have been commissioned for the celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but, according to one major critic,^[9] Verdi turned down the Khedive's invitation to write an "ode" for the new opera house he was planning to inaugurate as part of the canal opening festivities. The opera house actually opened with a production of Rigoletto. Later in 1869/70, the organizers again approached Verdi (this time with the idea of writing an opera), but he again turned them down. When they warned him that they would ask Charles Gounod instead and then threatened to engage Richard Wagner's services, Verdi began to show considerable interest, and agreements were signed in June 1870.

Teresa Stolz was associated with both Aida and the Requiem (as well as a number of other Verdi roles). The role of Aida was written for her, and although she did not appear in the world premiere in Cairo in 1871, she created Aida in the European premiere in Milan in February 1872. She was also the soprano soloist in the first and many later performances of the Requiem. It was widely believed that she and Verdi had an affair after she left Angelo Mariani, and a Florence newspaper criticised them for this in five strongly worded articles. Whether there is any truth to the accusation may never be known with any certainty. However, after Giuseppina Strepponi's death, Teresa Stolz became a close companion of Verdi until his own death.

Verdi and Wagner, who were the leaders of their respective schools of music, seemed to resent each other greatly. They never met. Verdi's comments on Wagner and his music are few and hardly benevolent ("He invariably chooses, unnecessarily, the untrodden path, attempting to fly where a rational person would walk with better results"), but at least one of them is kind: upon learning of Wagner's death, Verdi lamented, "Sad, sad, sad! ... a name that will leave a most powerful impression on the history of art."^[10] Of Wagner's comments on Verdi, only one is well-known. After listening to Verdi's Requiem, the German, prolific and eloquent in his comments on some other composers, stated, "It would be best not to say anything."

Final years and death [link]

	"Sì, pel ciel marmoreo giuro!" Otello (1887), Act 2. Performed by Titta Ruffo and Enrico Caruso.
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During the following years, Verdi worked on revising some of his earlier scores, most notably new versions of Don Carlos, La forza del destino, and Simon Boccanegra.

Otello, based on William Shakespeare's play, with a libretto written by the younger composer of Mefistofele, Arrigo Boito, premiered in Milan in 1887. Its music is "continuous" and cannot easily be divided into separate "numbers" to be performed in concert. Some^[who?] feel that although masterfully orchestrated, it lacks the melodic lustre so characteristic of Verdi's earlier, great, operas, while many critics consider it Verdi's greatest tragic opera, containing some of his most beautiful, expressive music and some of his richest characterizations. In addition, it lacks a prelude, something Verdi listeners are not accustomed to. Arturo Toscanini performed as cellist in the orchestra at the world premiere and began his friendship with Verdi (a composer he revered as highly as Beethoven).

Verdi's statue in the Piazza G. Verdi, Busseto

Verdi's last opera, Falstaff, whose libretto was also by Boito, was based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and Victor Hugo's subsequent translation. It was an international success and is one of the supreme comic operas which shows Verdi's genius as a contrapuntist.

In 1894, Verdi composed a short ballet for a French production of Otello, his last purely orchestral composition. Years later, Arturo Toscanini recorded the music for RCA Victor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra which complements the 1947 Toscanini performance of the complete opera.

In 1897, Verdi completed his last composition, a setting of the traditional Latin text Stabat Mater. This was the last of four sacred works that Verdi composed, Quattro Pezzi Sacri, which are often performed together or separately. The first performance of the four works was on 7 April 1898, at the Grande Opéra, Paris. The four works are: Ave Maria for mixed chorus; Stabat Mater for mixed chorus and orchestra; Laudi alla Vergine Maria for female chorus; and Te Deum for double chorus and orchestra.

On 29 July 1900, King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated, a deed that horrified the aged composer^[11].

While staying at the Grand Hotel et de Milan^[12] in Milan, Verdi had a stroke on 21 January 1901. He grew gradually more feeble and died six days later, on 27 January. Arturo Toscanini conducted the vast forces of combined orchestras and choirs composed of musicians from throughout Italy at the state funeral for Verdi in Milan. To date, it remains the largest public assembly of any event in the history of Italy.^[13]

Verdi was initially buried in Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale. A month later, his body was moved to the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a rest home for retired musicians that Verdi had established.

He was an agnostic.^[14]

Role in the Risorgimento [link]

Giuseppe Verdi, the bust outside of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Italy by Antonio Ugo.

Music historians have long perpetuated a myth about the famous Va, pensiero chorus sung in the third act of Nabucco. The myth reports that, when the Va, pensiero chorus was sung in Milan, then belonging to the large part of Italy under Austrian domination, the audience, responding with nationalistic fervor to the exiled slaves' lament for their lost homeland, demanded an encore of the piece. As encores were expressly forbidden by the government at the time, such a gesture would have been extremely significant. However, recent scholarship puts this to rest. Although the audience did indeed demand an encore, it was not for Va, pensiero but rather for the hymn Immenso Jehova, sung by the Hebrew slaves to thank God for saving His people. In light of these new revelations, Verdi's position as the musical figurehead of the Risorgimento has been correspondingly downplayed.^[15]Claudio, Verdi, Milan: Rusconi, 1982

On the other hand, during rehearsals, workmen in the theater stopped what they were doing during Va, pensiero and applauded at the conclusion of this haunting melody^[16] while the growth of the "identification of Verdi's music with Italian nationalist politics" is judged to have begun in the summer 1846 in relation to a chorus from Ernani in which the name of one of its characters, "Carlo", was changed to "Pio", a reference to Pope Pius IX's grant of an amnesty to political prisoners.^[17]

After Italy was unified in 1861, many of Verdi's early operas were re-interpreted as Risorgimento works with hidden Revolutionary messages that probably had not been intended by either the composer or librettist. Beginning in Naples in 1859 and spreading throughout Italy, the slogan "Viva VERDI" was used as an acronym for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia (Viva Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), referring to Victor Emmanuel II, then king of Sardinia.^[18]^[19]

The Chorus of the Hebrews (the English title for Va, pensiero) has another appearance in Verdi folklore. Prior to Verdi's body's being driven from the cemetery to the official memorial service and its final resting place at the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, Arturo Toscanini conducted a chorus of 820 singers in "Va, pensiero". At the Casa, the Miserere from Il trovatore was sung.^[20]

Verdi was elected as a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1861 following a request of Prime Minister Cavour but in 1865 he resigned from the office.^[21] In 1874 he was named Senator of the Kingdom by King Victor Emanuel II.

Style [link]

Verdi caricatured by Delfico (1860)

Verdi's predecessors who influenced his music were Rossini, Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer and, most notably, Gaetano Donizetti and Saverio Mercadante. With the exception of Otello and Aida, he was free of Wagner's influence. Although respectful of Gounod, Verdi was careful not to learn anything from the Frenchman whom many of Verdi's contemporaries regarded as the greatest living composer. Some strains in Aida suggest at least a superficial familiarity with the works of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, whom Franz Liszt, after his tour of the Russian Empire as a pianist, popularized in Western Europe.

Throughout his career, Verdi rarely utilized the high C in his tenor arias, citing the fact that the opportunity to sing that particular note in front of an audience distracts the performer before and after the note appears. However, he did provide high Cs to Duprez in Jérusalem and to Tamberlick in the original version of La forza del destino. The high C, often-heard in the aria "Di quella pira" from Il trovatore , does not appear in Verdi's score.

Some critics maintain he paid insufficient attention to the technical aspect of composition, lacking as he did schooling and refinement.^{[citation needed]} Verdi himself once said, "Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned." He hastened to add, however, "I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music."

Giuseppe Verdi. Portrait by Giovanni Boldini, 1886. This famous portrait was the main inspiration of Luchino Visconti in creating the character played by Burt Lancaster in his film Il Gattopardo.

However, it would be incorrect to assume that Verdi underestimated the expressive power of the orchestra or failed to use it to its full capacity where necessary. Moreover, orchestral and contrapuntal innovation is characteristic of his style: for instance, the strings producing a rapid ascending scale in Monterone's scene in Rigoletto accentuate the drama, and, in the same opera, the chorus humming six closely grouped notes backstage portrays, very effectively, the brief ominous wails of the approaching tempest. Verdi's innovations are so distinctive that other composers do not use them; they remain, to this day, some of Verdi's signatures.

Verdi was one of the first composers who insisted on patiently seeking out plots to suit his particular talents. Working closely with his librettists and well aware that dramatic expression was his forte, he made certain that the initial work upon which the libretto was based was stripped of all "unnecessary" detail and "superfluous" participants, and only characters brimming with passion and scenes rich in drama remained.

Many of his operas, especially the later ones from 1851 onwards, are a staple of the standard repertoire. With the possible exception of Giacomo Puccini, no composer of Italian opera has managed to match Verdi's popularity.

Works [link]

Main article: List of compositions by Giuseppe Verdi

Verdi's operas, and their date of première are:

Oberto, 17 November 1839
Un giorno di regno, 5 September 1840
Nabucco, 9 March 1842
I Lombardi alla prima crociata, 11 February 1843
Ernani, 9 March 1844
I due Foscari, 3 November 1844
Giovanna d'Arco, 15 February 1845
Alzira, 12 August 1845
Attila, 17 March 1846
Macbeth, 14 March 1847
I masnadieri, 22 July 1847
Jérusalem (a revision and translation of I Lombardi alla prima crociata) 26 November 1847
Il corsaro, 25 October 1848
La battaglia di Legnano, 27 January 1849
Luisa Miller, 8 December 1849
Stiffelio, 16 November 1850
Rigoletto, 11 March 1851
Il trovatore, 19 January 1853
La traviata, 6 March 1853
Les vêpres siciliennes, 13 June 1855
Simon Boccanegra, (Original Version), 12 March 1857
Aroldo (A major revision of Stiffelio), 16 August 1857
Un ballo in maschera, 17 February 1859
La forza del destino, 10 November 1862
Don Carlos, 11 March 1867
Aida, 24 December 1871
Simon Boccanegra, (Revised Version), 24 March 1881
Otello, 5 February 1887
Falstaff, 9 February 1893

Political significance [link]

Unlike most of the visual arts, opera was commercially profitable, accessible to most classes of society, and thus an effective means of reaching the 19th-century public. Verdi used musical theater to contrast noble ideals with the corrosive effects of power, love of country with the inevitable call for sacrifice and death, and the lure of passion with the need for social order.^[22]

Media [link]

La donna è mobile

Enrico Caruso sings La donna è mobile from Verdi's Rigoletto, circa 1908

O patria mia

Marie Rappold performing "O patria mia" from Verdi's Aida (1916)
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Cultural depictions and references [link]

File:Final scene from the opera Risorgimento!.jpg

The final scene of the opera Risorgimento!

The 1985 play After Aida is a play-with-music similar to Amadeus. It is an accurate and learned, yet dramatic and humorous, depiction of Verdi's relationship with his librettist Arrigo Boito, and the attempts of Giulio Ricordi and Franco Faccio to get the two to collaborate on a project, Otello.
He is a character in the opera, Risorgimento! (2010) by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Italian unification.

Eponyms [link]

There are many theatres named after Verdi in Italy.
The Verdi Inlet on the Beethoven Peninsula of Alexander Island just off Antarctica
Verdi Square at Broadway and West 72nd Street in Manhattan features the Giuseppe Verdi Monument.
Asteroid 3975 Verdi
Verdi Football Club, an association football club founded in Parma in July 1913, is after a series of name changes known today as the Parma F.C..

Verdi's name literally translates as "Joseph Green" in English (although verdi is the plural form of "green"). Musical comedian Victor Borge often referred to the famous composer as "Joe Green" in his act, saying that "Giuseppe Verdi" was merely his "stage name". The same joke-translation is mentioned in Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun by Patrick Redfern to Hercule Poirot – a prank which inadvertently gives Poirot the answer to the murder.

References [link]

Notes

^ Martin, 3
^ on magiadellopera.com (in Italian): "On 18 June 1840 Margherita Barezzi's life was cut short by violent encephalitis."
^ reocities.com (in Italian): "...on 20 [sic] June 1840 his young wife Margherita died, struck down by a severe form of acute encephalitis."
^ museocasabarezzi.it (in Italian): "She died the following year [1840] on 18 June, aged only 26 years, while Verdi was working on his ill-fated second opera, Un Giorno di Regno."
^ Verdi "An Autobiographival Sketch" (1879) in Werfel and Stefan, pp. 80 – 93
^ Roger Parker, "Giuseppe Verdi", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 18 May 2008), (subscription access)
^ Phillips-Matz, pp.394–95
^ "Opera Statistics". Operabase. http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en#opera. Retrieved 8 May 2011.
^ Budden, Vol. 3, p. ?
^ Schonberg, p. 260
^ Newman, p. 597: "Did he feel himself somehow guilty of at least indirectly causing that assassination? For almost 30 operas he composed throughout his long life, at least half dealt with killings, murder and other sort of violent ends of various personage, including assassination plots against kings, leaders, or men in charge in six of them: Attila, Macbeth, Rigoletto, Les vêpres siciliennes, Simon Boccanegra, and Un ballo in maschera."
^ The hotel's website contains a brief history of the composer's stay and a few photographs of those days
^ Phillips-Matz, p. 764, notes the crowd "estimated at 200,000". In the second part of his 2010 BBC4 series, Opera Italia, on the subject of Verdi's operas, presenter and music director of the Royal Opera House, Antonio Pappano notes the size as being 300,000
^ Tintori, p. 232.
^ Casini, p. ?
^ Phillips-Matz, p.116
^ Phillips-Matz, pp. 188–191
^ Parker, in Grove Music Online
^ Budden, Vol. 3, p. 80
^ Phillips-Matz, p.765
^ "Giuseppe Verdi politico e deputato, Cavour, il Risorgimento" on liberalsocialisti.org (In Italian) Retrieved 2 January 2010
^ Hunt, p. ?

Cited sources

Budden, Julian (1973). The Operas of Verdi, Volume I (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816261-8.
Budden, Julian (1973). The Operas of Verdi, Volume II (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816262-6.
Budden, J. (1973). The Operas of Verdi, Volume III (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816263-4.
Casini, Claudio, Verdi, Milan: Rusconi, 1982
De Van, Gilles (trans. Gilda Roberts), Verdi’s Theater: Creating Drama Through Music. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1998 ISBN 0-226-14369-4 (hardback), ISBN 0-226-14370-8
Hunt, Lynn (2009 (3rd edition)). The Making of the West. Bedford/St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-46510-6.
Martin, G. (1963). Verdi: His Music, Life and Times (1st ed.). Dodd, Mead & Company. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/2-00-145672-0|2-00-145672-0]].
Newman, Earnest, Stories of the Great Operas. Philadelphia: The Blakinson Company, 1930
Parker, Roger (2001). "Giuseppe Verdi". Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press.
Parker, Roger (1992). "The New Grove Dictionary of Opera". In ed. Stanley Sadie. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. ISBN 0-333-73432-7.
Phillips-Matz, Mary Jane (1993). Verdi: A Biography (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-313204-4.
Schonberg, Harold C. (1997). The Lives of the Great Composers. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-03857-2. http://books.google.com/?id=VawrK1CRFJgC&pg=PA260&lpg=PA260&dq=wagner's+death+verdi. Retrieved 9 January 2008
Tintori, Giampiero, Guida all'ascolto di Giuseppe Verdi, Milano: Mursia, 1983.
Werfel, Franz and Stefan, Paul, Verdi: The Man and His Letters, New York: Vienna House 1973 ISBN 0-8443-0088-8

Other sources

Kamien, R. (1997). Music: an appreciation – student brief (3rd ed.). McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-07-036521-0.
Gal, H. (1975). Brahms, Wagner, Verdi: Drei Meister, drei Welten. Fischer. ISBN 3-10-024302-1.
Michels, Ulrich (1992). dtv-Atlas zur Musik: Band Zwei (7th ed.). Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN 3-423-03023-2.
(IT) Polo, Claudia, Immaginari verdiani. Opera, media e industria culturale nell'Italia del XX secolo, Milano: BMG/Ricordi, 2004

Verdi's life in and around Busseto
Associazione Amici di Verdi (ed.), Con Verdi nella sua terra, Busseto, 1997, (in English)
Maestrelli, Maurizio, Guida alla Villa e al Parco (in Italian), publication of Villa Verdi, 2001
Mordacci, Alessandra, An Itinerary of the History and Art in the Places of Verdi, Busseto: Busseto Tourist Office, 2001 (in English)
Villa Verdi: the Visit and Villa Verdi: The Park; the Villa; the Room (pamphlets in English), publications of the Villa Verdi

External links [link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Giuseppe Verdi

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi Official Site
National Museum Giuseppe Verdi - Busseto
Stanford University list of Verdi operas, premiere locations and dates, etc.
Works by Giuseppe Verdi at Project Gutenberg
"Album Verdi" from the Digital Library of the National Library of Naples (Italy)
Free scores by Verdi at the International Music Score Library Project
Free scores by Giuseppe Verdi in the Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)
Free scores by Giuseppe Verdi in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
The Mutopia Project has compositions by Giuseppe Verdi
Works by or about Giuseppe Verdi in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Detailed listing of "complete" recordings of Verdi's operas and of extended excerpts
"Verdi and Milan", lecture by Roger Parker on Verdi, given at Gresham College, London 14 May 2007
Verdi cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library
Sheet music for "Ah! I have sigh'd to rest me.", Macon, GA: John C. Schreiner & Son. From Confederate Imprints Sheet Music Collection.

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Authority control: LCCN: n79038460 | WorldCat

Persondata
Name	Verdi, Giuseppe
Alternative names	Verdi, Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco
Short description	Italian composer
Date of birth	9 /10 October 1813
Place of birth	Le Roncole, Italy
Date of death	27 January 1901(1901-01-27)
Place of death	Milan, Italy

vep:Verdi Džuzeppe

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Luciano Pavarotti performing at the opening of the Constantine Palace in Strelna, 31 May 2003. The concert was part of the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg.

Luciano Pavarotti, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (12 October 1935 – 6 September 2007) was an Italian operatic tenor, who also crossed over into popular music, eventually becoming one of the most commercially successful tenors of all time. He made numerous recordings of complete operas and individual arias, and established himself as one of the finest tenors of the 20th century.^[1] He was one of The Three Tenors and became well known for his televised concerts and media appearances. Pavarotti was also noted for his charity work on behalf of refugees and the Red Cross, amongst others.

Pavarotti began his professional career as a tenor in 1961 in Italy. That same year, he made his first international appearance in La traviata in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.^[2] He sang in opera houses in addition to Italy, in the Netherlands, Vienna, London, Ankara, Budapest and Barcelona. The young tenor earned valuable experience and recognition while touring Australia at the invitation of soprano Joan Sutherland in 1965. He made his United States debut in Miami soon afterwards, also on Sutherland's recommendation. His position as a leading lyric tenor was consolidated in the years between 1966 and 1972, during which time he first appeared at Milan's La Scala and other major European houses. In 1968, he debuted at New York City's Metropolitan Opera as Rodolfo in Puccini's La bohème. At the Met in 1972, in the role of Tonio in Donizetti's La fille du régiment he earned the title "King of the high Cs" when he sang the aria "Ah mes amis ... pour mon âme". He gained worldwide fame for the brilliance and beauty of his tone, especially into the upper register.^[3] He was at his best in bel canto operas, pre-Aida Verdi roles and Puccini works such as La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. The late 1970s and 1980s saw Pavarotti continue to make significant appearances in the world's foremost opera houses.

Celebrity beyond the world of opera came to Pavarotti at the 1990 World Cup in Italy with performances of Puccini's "Nessun dorma", sample (help·info) from Turandot, and as one of The Three Tenors in their famed first concert held on the eve of the tournament's final match. He sang on that occasion with fellow star tenors Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, bringing opera highlights to a wider audience. Appearances in advertisements and with pop icons in concerts furthered his international celebrity.

His final performance in an opera was at the Metropolitan Opera in March 2004. Later that year, the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) inducted him into its Italian American Hall of Fame in recognition of his lifetime of work. During a ceremony held at the Foundation's Anniversary Gala just four days after his 69th birthday, singer Faith Hill presented Pavarotti with a birthday cake and sang "Happy Birthday" to the opera legend.

The 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, saw Pavarotti on stage for the last time, where he performed "Nessun dorma", with the crowd serving as the aria's chorus, and he received a thunderous standing ovation.^[4]

He died from pancreatic cancer on 6 September 2007.

1 Earlier life and musical training
2 Career
3 Other work
- 3.1 Film and television
- 3.2 Humanitarianism
4 Death
5 Personal life
- 5.1 Settlement of estate
6 See also
7 Notes and references
8 External links

Earlier life and musical training [link]

Luciano Pavarotti was born in 1935 on the outskirts of Modena in Northern Italy, the son of Fernando Pavarotti, a baker and amateur tenor, and Adele Venturi, a cigar factory worker.^[5] Although he spoke fondly of his childhood, the family had little money; its four members were crowded into a two-room apartment. According to Pavarotti, his father had a fine tenor voice but rejected the possibility of a singing career because of nervousness. World War II forced the family out of the city in 1943. For the following year they rented a single room from a farmer in the neighbouring countryside, where the young Pavarotti developed an interest in farming.

After abandoning the dream of becoming a football goalkeeper, Pavarotti spent seven years in vocal training. Pavarotti's earliest musical influences were his father's recordings, most of them featuring the popular tenors of the day - Beniamino Gigli, Giovanni Martinelli, Tito Schipa and Enrico Caruso. Pavarotti's favourite tenor and idol was Giuseppe Di Stefano.^[6] He was also deeply influenced by Mario Lanza, saying, "In my teens I used to go to Mario Lanza movies and then come home and imitate him in the mirror".^[7] At around the age of nine he began singing with his father in a small local church choir.

After what appears to have been a normal childhood with a typical interest in sports — in Pavarotti's case football above all, he graduated from the Scuola Magistrale and faced the dilemma of a career choice. He was interested in pursuing a career as a professional football goalkeeper, but his mother convinced him to train as a teacher. He subsequently taught in an elementary school for two years but finally allowed his interest in music to win out. Recognising the risk involved, his father gave his consent only reluctantly.

Pavarotti began the serious study of music in 1954 at the age of 19 with Arrigo Pola, a respected teacher and professional tenor in Modena who offered to teach him without remuneration. Not until he began these studies was Pavarotti aware that he had perfect pitch.^{[citation needed]}

In 1955, he experienced his first singing success when he was a member of the Corale Rossini, a male voice choir from Modena that also included his father, which won first prize at the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen, Wales. He later said that this was the most important experience of his life, and that it inspired him to become a professional singer.^[8] At about this time Pavarotti first met Adua Veroni. They married in 1961.

When his teacher Arrigo Pola moved to Japan, Pavarotti became a student of Ettore Campogalliani, who at that time was also teaching Pavarotti's childhood friend, Mirella Freni, whose mother worked with Luciano's mother in the cigar factory. Like Pavarotti, Freni was destined to operatic greatness; they were to share the stage many times and make memorable recordings together.

During his years of musical study, Pavarotti held part time jobs in order to sustain himself – first as an elementary school teacher and then as an insurance salesman. The first six years of study resulted in only a few recitals, all in small towns and without pay. When a nodule developed on his vocal cords, causing a "disastrous" concert in Ferrara, he decided to give up singing. Pavarotti attributed his immediate improvement to the psychological release connected with this decision. Whatever the reason, the nodule not only disappeared but, as he related in his autobiography, "Everything I had learned came together with my natural voice to make the sound I had been struggling so hard to achieve".

Career [link]

1960s–1970s [link]

Pavarotti began his career as a tenor in smaller regional Italian opera houses, making his debut as Rodolfo in La Bohème at the Teatro Municipale in Reggio Emilia in April 1961.

Very early in his career, on 23 February 1963, he debuted at the Vienna State Opera with the same role. In March and April 1963 Vienna saw Pavarotti again as Rodolfo and as Duca di Mantova in Rigoletto. The same year saw his Royal Opera House debut, where he replaced an indisposed Giuseppe di Stefano as Rodolfo.^[9]

While generally successful, Pavarotti's early roles did not immediately propel him into the stardom that he would later enjoy. An early coup involved his connection with Joan Sutherland (and her conductor husband, Richard Bonynge), who in 1963 had sought a young tenor taller than herself to take along on her tour to Australia.^[10] With his commanding physical presence, Pavarotti proved ideal.^[11] The two sang some forty performances over two months, and Pavarotti later credited Sutherland for the breathing technique that would sustain him over his career.^[12]

Pavarotti made his American début with the Greater Miami Opera in February 1965, singing in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor opposite Joan Sutherland on the stage of the Miami-Dade County Auditorium in Miami. The tenor scheduled to perform that night became ill with no understudy. As Sutherland was traveling with him on tour, she recommended the young Pavarotti as he was well acquainted with the role.

Shortly after, on 28 April, Pavarotti made his La Scala debut in the revival of the famous Franco Zeffirelli production of La Bohème, with his childhood friend Mirella Freni singing Mimi and Herbert von Karajan conducting. Karajan had requested the singer's engagement. After an extended Australian tour, he returned to La Scala, where he added Tebaldo from I Capuleti e i Montecchi to his repertoire on 26 March 1966, with Giacomo Aragall as Romeo. His first appearance as Tonio in Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment took place at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 2 June of that year. It was his performances of this role that would earn him the title of "King of the High Cs".

He scored another major triumph in Rome on 20 November 1969 when he sang in I Lombardi opposite Renata Scotto. This was recorded on a private label and widely distributed, as were various recordings of his I Capuleti e i Montecchi, usually with Aragall. Early commercial recordings included a recital of Donizetti (the aria from Don Sebastiano were particularly highly regarded) and Verdi arias, as well as a complete L'Elisir d'Amore with Sutherland.

His major breakthrough in the United States came on 17 February 1972, in a production of La Fille du Régiment at New York's Metropolitan Opera, in which he drove the crowd into a frenzy with his nine effortless high Cs in the signature aria. He achieved a record seventeen curtain calls.

Pavarotti sang his international recital début at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, on 1 February 1973, as part of the college's Fine Arts Program, now known as the Harriman-Jewell Series. Perspiring due to nerves and a lingering cold, the tenor clutched a handkerchief throughout the début. The prop became a signature part of his solo performances.

He began to give frequent television performances, starting with his performances as Rodolfo (La Bohème) in the first Live from the Met telecast in March 1977, which attracted one of the largest audiences ever for a televised opera. He won many Grammy awards and platinum and gold discs for his performances. In addition to the previously listed titles, his La Favorita with Fiorenza Cossotto and his I Puritani (1975) with Sutherland stand out.

In 1976, Pavarotti debuted at the Salzburg Festival, appearing in a solo recital on 31 July, accompanied by pianist Leone Magiera. Pavarotti returned to the festival in 1978 with a recital and as the Italian singer in Der Rosenkavalier in 1983 with Idomeneo, and both in 1985 and 1988 with solo recitals.

In 1979, he was profiled in a cover story in the weekly magazine Time.^[13] That same year saw Pavarotti's return to the Vienna State Opera after an absence of fourteen years. With Herbert von Karajan conducting, Pavarotti sang Manrico in Il Trovatore. In 1978, he appeared in a solo recital on Live from Lincoln Center.

1980s–1990s [link]

At the beginning of the 1980s, he set up The Pavarotti International Voice Competition for young singers, performing with the winners in 1982 in excerpts of La Bohème and L'Elisir d'Amore. The second competition, in 1986, staged excerpts of La Bohème and Un Ballo in Maschera. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of his career, he brought the winners of the competition to Italy for gala performances of La Bohème in Modena and Genoa, and then to China where they staged performances of La Bohème in Beijing (Peking). To conclude the visit, Pavarotti performed the first ever concert in the Great Hall of the People before 10,000 people, receiving a standing ovation for nine effortless high Cs. The third competition in 1989 again staged performances of L'Elisir d'Amore and Un ballo in Maschera. The winners of the fifth competition accompanied Pavarotti in performances in Philadelphia in 1997.

In the mid-1980s, Pavarotti returned to two opera houses that had provided him with important breakthroughs, the Vienna State Opera and La Scala. Vienna saw Pavarotti as Rodolfo in La Bohème with Carlos Kleiber conducting and again Mirella Freni was Mimi; as Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore; as Radames in Aïda conducted by Lorin Maazel; as Rodolfo in Luisa Miller; and as Gustavo in Un Ballo in Maschera conducted by Claudio Abbado. In 1996, Pavarotti appeared for the last time at the Staatsoper in Andrea Chenier.

In 1985, Pavarotti sang Radames at La Scala opposite Maria Chiara in a Luca Ronconi production conducted by Maazel, recorded on video. His performance of the aria "Celeste Aïda" received a two-minute ovation on the opening night. He was reunited with Mirella Freni for the San Francisco Opera production of La Bohème in 1988, also recorded on video. In 1992, La Scala saw Pavarotti in a new Zeffirelli production of Don Carlo, conducted by Riccardo Muti. Pavarotti's performance was heavily criticized by some observers and booed by parts of the audience.

Pavarotti became even better known throughout the world in 1990 when his rendition of Giacomo Puccini's aria, "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot was taken as the theme song of BBC's TV coverage of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. The aria achieved pop status and remained his trademark song. This was followed by the hugely successful Three Tenors concert, held on the eve of the World Cup final at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome with fellow tenors Plácido Domingo and José Carreras and conductor Zubin Mehta, which became the biggest selling classical record of all time. A highlight of the concert, in which Pavarotti hammed up a famous portion of di Capua's "O Sole Mio" and was mimicked by Domingo and Carreras to the delight of the audience, became one of the most memorable moments in contemporary operatic history. Throughout the 1990s, Pavarotti appeared in many well-attended outdoor concerts, including his televised concert in London's Hyde Park, which drew a record attendance of 150,000. In June 1993, more than 500,000 listeners gathered for his free performance on the Great Lawn of New York's Central Park, while millions more around the world watched on television. The following September, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, he sang for an estimated crowd of 300,000. Following on from the original 1990 concert, the Three Tenors concerts were held during the Football World Cups: in Los Angeles in 1994, in Paris in 1998, and in Yokohama in 2002.

In 1995, Pavarotti's friends, the singer Lara Saint Paul (as Lara Cariaggi) and her husband showman Pier Quinto Cariaggi, who had produced and organised Pavarotti's 1990 FIFA World Cup Celebration Concert at the PalaTrussardi in Milan,^[14] produced and wrote the television documentary The Best is Yet to Come, an extensive biography about the life of Pavarotti.^[15] Lara Saint Paul was the interviewer for the documentary with Pavarotti, who spoke candidly about his life and career.^[16]

Pavarotti's rise to stardom was not without occasional difficulties, however. He earned a reputation as "The King of Cancellations" by frequently backing out of performances, and his unreliable nature led to poor relationships with some opera houses. This was brought into focus in 1989 when Ardis Krainik of the Lyric Opera of Chicago severed the house's 15-year relationship with the tenor.^[17] Over an eight-year period, Pavarotti had cancelled 26 out of 41 scheduled appearances at the Lyric, and the decisive move by Krainik to ban him for life was well-noted throughout the opera world, after the performer walked away from a season premiere less than two weeks before rehearsals began, saying pain from a sciatic nerve required two months of treatment.

On 12 December 1998, he became the first (and, to date, only) opera singer to perform on Saturday Night Live, singing alongside Vanessa L. Williams. He also sang with U2, in the band's 1995 song "Miss Sarajevo", and with Mercedes Sosa in a big concert at the Boca Juniors arena La Bombonera in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1999.

In 1998, Pavarotti was presented with the Grammy Legend Award. Given only on special occasions, as of 2007 it has been awarded only 15 times since its first presentation in 1990.

2000s [link]

Luciano Pavarotti performing on 15 June 2002 at a concert in the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille

In 2004, one of Pavarotti's former managers, Herbert Breslin, published a book, The King & I.^[17] Seen by many as bitter and sensationalistic, it is critical of the singer's acting (in opera), his inability to read music well and learn parts, and of his personal conduct, although acknowledging their mutual success. In an interview in 2005 with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC, Pavarotti rejected the allegation that he could not read music, although he acknowledged he did not read orchestral scores.

He received an enormous number of awards and honours, including Kennedy Center Honors in 2001. He also holds two Guinness World Records: one for receiving the most curtain calls (165)^[18] and another for the best-selling classical album (In Concert by The Three Tenors). (The latter record is thus shared by fellow tenors Plácido Domingo and José Carreras.)

In late 2003, he released his final compilation - and his first and only "crossover" album, Ti Adoro. Most of the 13 songs were written and produced by the Michele Centonze who had already helped produce the "Pavarotti & Friends" concerts between 1998 and 2000.^[19] The tenor described the album as a wedding gift to Nicoletta Mantovani.

Pavarotti began his farewell tour in 2004, at the age of 69, performing one last time in old and new locations, after more than four decades on the stage. Pavarotti gave his last performance in an opera at the New York Metropolitan Opera on 13 March 2004, for which he received a long standing ovation for his role as the painter Mario Cavaradossi in Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. On 1 December 2004, he announced a 40-city farewell tour. Pavarotti and his manager, Terri Robson, commissioned impresario Harvey Goldsmith to produce the Worldwide Farewell Tour. His last full-scale performance was at the end of a two-month Australasian tour in Taiwan, in December 2005.

In March 2005, Pavarotti underwent neck surgery to repair two vertebrae. In early 2006, he underwent further back surgery and contracted an infection while in the hospital in New York, forcing cancellation of concerts in the U.S., Canada and the UK.^[20]

On 10 February 2006, Pavarotti sang "Nessun Dorma" at the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Turin, Italy, at his final performance. In the last act of the opening ceremony, his performance received the longest and loudest ovation of the night from the international crowd. Leone Magiera, who directed the performance, revealed in his 2008 memoirs, Pavarotti Visto da Vicino, that the performance was prerecorded weeks earlier.^[21] "The orchestra pretended to play for the audience, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing. The effect was wonderful," he wrote. Pavarotti's manager, Terri Robson, said that the tenor had turned the Winter Olympic Committee's invitation down several times because it would have been impossible to sing late at night in the sub-zero conditions of Turin in February. The committee eventually persuaded him to take part by pre-recording the song.

Other work [link]

Film and television [link]

Pavarotti's one venture into film, a romantic comedy called Yes, Giorgio (1982), was roundly panned by the critics. He can be seen to better advantage in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's adaptation of Rigoletto for television, released that same year, or in his more than 20 live opera performances taped for television between 1978 and 1994, most of them with the Metropolitan Opera, and most available on DVD.

Humanitarianism [link]

Pavarotti annually hosted the "Pavarotti and Friends" charity concerts in his home town of Modena in Italy, joining with singers from all parts of the music industry, including Andrea Bocelli, Jon Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams, Bono, James Brown, Mariah Carey, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow, Céline Dion, Elton John, Deep Purple, Meat Loaf, Queen, George Michael, Sting and the Spice Girls, to raise money for several UN causes. Concerts were held for War Child, and victims of war and civil unrest in Bosnia, Guatemala, Kosovo and Iraq. After the war in Bosnia, he financed and established the Pavarotti Music Centre in the southern city of Mostar to offer Bosnia's artists the opportunity to develop their skills. For these contributions, the city of Sarajevo named him an honorary citizen in 2006.^[22]

He performed at benefit concerts to raise money for victims of tragedies such as the Spitak earthquake that killed 25,000 people in northern Armenia in December 1988,^[23] and sang Gounod's Ave Maria with legendary French pop music star and ethnic Armenian Charles Aznavour.

He was a close friend of Diana, Princess of Wales. They raised money for the elimination of land mines worldwide. He was invited to sing at her funeral service, but declined to sing, as he felt he could not sing well "with his grief in his throat". Nonetheless, he attended the service.

In 1998, he was appointed the United Nations Messenger of Peace, using his fame to raise awareness of UN issues, including the Millennium Development Goals, HIV/AIDS, child rights, urban slums and poverty.^[24]

In 1999, Pavarotti performed a charity benefit concert in Beirut, to mark Lebanon's reemergence on the world stage after a brutal 15 year civil war. The largest concert held in Beirut since the end of the war, it was attended by 20,000 people who travelled from countries as distant as Saudi Arabia and Bulgaria.^[25]

In 2001, Pavarotti received the Nansen Medal from the UN High Commission for Refugees for his efforts raising money on behalf of refugees worldwide. Through benefit concerts and volunteer work, he has raised more than any other individual.^[26]

Other honours he received include the "Freedom of London Award" and The Red Cross "Award for Services to Humanity", for his work in raising money for that organization, and the 1998 "MusiCares Person of the Year", given to humanitarian heroes by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.^[27]^[28]

He was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.^[29]

Death [link]

Wikinews has related news: Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti dies at age 71

While undertaking an international "farewell tour," Pavarotti was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in July 2006. The tenor fought back against the implications of this diagnosis, undergoing major abdominal surgery and making plans for the resumption and conclusion of his singing commitments.^[30] He died at his home in Modena on 6 September 2007. Within hours of his death, his manager, Terri Robson, noted in an e-mail statement, "The Maestro fought a long, tough battle against the pancreatic cancer which eventually took his life. In fitting with the approach that characterized his life and work, he remained positive until finally succumbing to the last stages of his illness".^[31]^[32]^[33]

Pavarotti's funeral was held in Modena Cathedral. Romano Prodi and Kofi Annan attended.^[34] The Frecce Tricolori, the aerobatic demonstration team of the Italian Air Force, flew overhead, leaving green-white-red smoke trails. After a funeral procession through the centre of Modena, Pavarotti's coffin was taken the final ten kilometres to Montale Rangone, a village part of Castelnuovo Rangone, and was buried near his parents' grave. The funeral, in its entirety, was also telecast live on CNN. The Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival Hall flew black flags in mourning.^[35] Tributes were published by many opera houses, such as London's Royal Opera House.^[36] The Italian football giant Juventus F.C., of which Pavarotti was a lifelong fan, was represented at the funeral and posted a farewell message on its website which said: "Ciao Luciano, black-and-white heart" referring to the team's famous stripes when they play on their home ground.

Personal life [link]

On 13 December 2003, he married his former personal assistant, Nicoletta Mantovani (born 1969), with whom he already had a daughter, Alice. A second child, Riccardo, did not survive, because of complications at the time of birth in January 2003. Pavarotti is also survived by three other daughters by his first wife Adua, to whom he was married for 34 years: Lorenza, Cristina, and Giuliana. At the time of his death, he had one granddaughter.

Settlement of estate [link]

His first will was opened the day after his death and a second will, within the same month of September.^[37] He left an estate outside his native Modena, a villa in Pesaro, a flat in Monte Carlo, and three flats in New York City.^[38]

Pavarotti's widow's lawyers Giorgio Bernini, Anna Maria Bernini, and manager Terri Robson announced on 30 June 2008 that his family amicably settled his estate – 300 million euros ($ 474.2 million, including $15 million in U.S. assets). Pavarotti drafted two wills before his death: one divided his assets by Italian law, giving half to his second wife, Nicoletta Mantovani, and half to his four daughters; the second gave his U.S. holdings to Mantovani. The judge confirmed the compromise by the end of July 2008. However, a Pesaro public prosecutor, Massimo di Patria, investigated allegations that Pavarotti was not of sound mind when he signed the will.^[39]^[40]^[41] Pavarotti's estate has been settled "fairly", a lawyer for Pavarotti's widow, Nicoletta Mantovani, said in statements after reports of a dispute between Ms. Mantovani and his three daughters from his first marriage.^[42]

Notes and references [link]

^ The Times Obituary: Luciano Pavarotti, 6 September 2007
^ [1]^{[dead link]}
^ Warrack, John and Ewan West (1996). "Luciano Pavarotti." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera. (3rd Ed.), ... an excellent technique, and a conquering personality.")
^ Kington, Tom (7 April 2008). "Pavarotti mimed at final performance". The Guardian (London). http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2271470,00.html. Retrieved 2008-04-07.
^ Luciano Pavarotti Biography (1935-2007)
^ YouTube - Luciano Pavarotti talks about his idol Giuseppe di Stefano
^ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5e2_1189060061 Originally from MSNBC article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20607839/
^ "Pavarotti eisteddfod career start". BBC Online. 6 September 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/6981188.stm. Retrieved 2007-09-07.
^ Paul Arendt, "It Was All About the Voice," The Guardian,(Italy), 7 September 2007
^ Joan Sutherland quoted in Paul Arendt, "It Was All About the Voice," The Guardian, (London), 7 September 2007: "The young Pavarotti was a revelation to the opera world. He made his debut in the United States with us in Miami in 1965. He then came as part of our company to Australia, where he sang three times a week for 14 weeks, and we went on to make countless recordings together.
^ Richard Dyer, "Opera star Luciano Pavarotti dies: Epic career spanned 40 years, The Boston Globe, 6 September 2007
^ Ariel David, "World Mourns Italian Tenor Pavarotti," WTOPnews.com, 6 September 2007
^ Time Cover Archive, Sept 24th, 1979
^ Pavarotti, Luciano: The Event, The World Cup Celebration Concert (1990) Pavarotti, Luciano
^ The New York Public Library: Luciano Pavarotti, The Best is Yet to Come Pavarotti: The Best is Yet to Come: LEO - the New York Public Library Catalogue^{[dead link]}
^ The Best is Yet to Come Pavarotti: The Best is Yet to Come, Interviewed by Lara Saint Paul: Penrith City Library Catalogue
^ ^a ^b Herbert H. Breslin, The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti's Rise to Fame by His Manager, Friend and Sometime Adversary, New York: Doubleday Publishing, 2004 ISBN 978-0-385-50972-5 ISBN 0-385-50972-3
^ Block, Mervin (15 October 2004). "'60 Minutes' Story About Singer Hits False Note". Poynter Online. http://www.mervinblock.com/?q=node/34. Retrieved 2009-09-28.
^ Pavarotti & Friends concert series at Amazon.com
^ "Pavarotti 'will return to stage'". BBC News Online. 25 July 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5212832.stm. Retrieved 2007-09-05.
^ Kington, Tom (7 April 2008). "Pavarotti mimed at final performance". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/apr/07/classicalmusicandopera.italy. Retrieved 28 August 2009.
^ "Sarajevo authorities name Pavarotti honorary citizen", Deseret News (Salt Lake City), 22 February 2006; retrieved on 2007-09-06
^ Alessandra Rizzo, "Italian tenor Pavarotti dies at age 71" on yahoo.com^{[dead link]}; retrieved on 2007-09-06
^ "Luciano Pavarotti to Promote UN Causes During Series of Concerts, 2005 - 2006", U.N. Press release, 5/4/2005, retrieved on 6 September 2007
^ Pavarotti breaks a different kind of sound barrier; 14 June 1999; retrieved on 2007-10-12
^ Crossette, Barbara (30 May 2001). "United Nations: Honor For Tenor With Midas Touch". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE5D8133CF933A05756C0A9679C8B63. Retrieved 2007-09-06.
^ "Freedom of London for Pavarotti". Entertainment (BBC News). 13 September 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/entertainment/4236980.stm. Retrieved 2007-09-06.
^ Parker, Lyndsey (31 February 1997). "Pavarotti Is The Person". Yahoo! Music News (Yahoo!). http://music.yahoo.com/read/news/12044059. Retrieved 2007-09-06.
^ Delta Omicron
^ "Singer Luciano Pavarotti recovering from pancreatic cancer surgery". Fox News. 7 July 2006. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,202530,00.html. Retrieved 2007-09-05.
^ "Tenor Luciano Pavarotti dead at 71" on cnn.com, 6 September 2007; retrieved on 2007-09-06
^ Pavarotti dead at 71: manager; retrieved on 2007-09-06
^ "Pavarotti Dead At Age 71". CBS News. 7 September 2007. http://www.webcastr.com/videos/news/pavarotti-dead-at-age-71.html.
^ People gather at Modena Cathedral to say farewell to Pavarotti|
^ "Black flag flies over Vienna Opera House for Pavarotti". Agence France-Presse. 2007-09-06. http://www.focus-fen.net/index.php?id=n121376. Retrieved 2007-09-06.
^ Castonguay, Gilles (2007-09-06). "Luciano Pavarotti dead at 71". Reuters. http://www.canada.com/topics/entertainment/story.html?id=24dd10ff-8048-45bb-9fde-b362693e5ac8&k=84681&p=1. Retrieved 2007-09-06.
^ Hooper, John (19 September 2007). "Pavarotti's will leaves US property to his second wife". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,,2172193,00.html. Retrieved 2007-10-06.
^ Owen, Richard (11 September 2007). "Pavarotti's manager on his last days". The Times (London). http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2433004.ece. Retrieved 2007-10-14.
^ ap.google.com, Pavarotti widow, daughters agree on inheritance^{[dead link]}
^ uk.reuters.com, Pavarotti's widow and daughters reach inheritance deal
^ independent.co.uk, Widow settles dispute with Pavarotti's daughters over will
^ Lee, Felicia R. (1 July 2008). "Pavarotti's Daughters and Widow Reach Deal". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/arts/01arts-PAVAROTTISDA_BRF.html. Retrieved 5 April 2010.

External links [link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Luciano Pavarotti

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Luciano Pavarotti

Official website
Luciano Pavarotti at the Internet Movie Database
Discography (Capon's Lists of Opera Recordings)
Luciano Pavarotti discography at MusicBrainz
The Times obituary
Review of The King and I at theage.com.au
The Pavarotti Story Decca Records
Pavarotti Video Biography by National Italian American Foundation NIAF
History of the Tenor - Sound Clips and Narration
Funeral Mass of Luciano Pavarotti

v t e Kennedy Center Honorees (2000s)

2000	Mikhail Baryshnikov Chuck Berry Plácido Domingo Clint Eastwood Angela Lansbury

2001	Julie Andrews Van Cliburn Quincy Jones Jack Nicholson Luciano Pavarotti

2002	James Earl Jones James Levine Chita Rivera Paul Simon Elizabeth Taylor

2003	James Brown Carol Burnett Loretta Lynn Mike Nichols Itzhak Perlman

2004	Warren Beatty Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee Elton John Joan Sutherland John Williams

2005	Tony Bennett Suzanne Farrell Julie Harris Robert Redford Tina Turner

2006	Zubin Mehta Dolly Parton Smokey Robinson Steven Spielberg Andrew Lloyd Webber

2007	Leon Fleisher Steve Martin Diana Ross Martin Scorsese Brian Wilson

2008	Morgan Freeman George Jones Barbra Streisand Twyla Tharp Pete Townshend & Roger Daltrey

2009	Mel Brooks Dave Brubeck Grace Bumbry Robert De Niro Bruce Springsteen

complete list 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s

Persondata
Name	Pavarotti, Luciano
Alternative names
Short description	Opera singer
Date of birth	12 October 1935
Place of birth	Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Date of death	6 September 2007
Place of death	Modena, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

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Claudio Abbado, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI^[1] (Italian pronunciation: [ˈklaudio abˈbaːdo]; born June 26, 1933), is an Italian conductor. He has served as music director of the La Scala opera house in Milan, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Vienna State Opera, and principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra from 1989 to 2002, when he retired from the position for health reasons.

Claudio Abbado.

1 Biography
2 Awards
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

Biography [link]

Born in Milan, Italy, Abbado is the son of the violinist and composer Michelangelo Abbado, who was his first piano teacher, and the brother of musician Marcello Abbado. After studying piano at the Milan Conservatory,^[2] in 1955 Claudio Abbado studied conducting with Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music. In 1958 he won the international Koussevitsky Competition for conductors,^[2] which resulted in a number of operatic conducting engagements in Italy, and in 1963 he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos Prize for conductors,^[2] allowing him to work for five months with the New York Philharmonic.

Abbado recalls desiring to become a conductor for the first time as a child, when he heard a performance of Claude Debussy's Nocturnes. He had the opportunity to attend many orchestral rehearsals in Milan led by such conductors as Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler and has told interviewers that Toscanini's tyrannical and sometimes abusive manner towards musicians in rehearsal repelled him, and that he resolved to behave in the gentler manner of Bruno Walter. Abbado is known to exhibit a friendly, understated, and non-confrontational manner in rehearsal.

He made his début at La Scala in his hometown of Milan in 1960 and served as its music director from 1968 to 1986, conducting not only the traditional Italian repertoire but also presenting a contemporary opera each year, as well as a concert series devoted to the works of Alban Berg and Modest Mussorgsky. Abbado also founded the Filarmonica della Scala in 1982, for the performance of orchestral repertoire in concert.

Abbado conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time in 1965 in a concert at the Salzburg Festival. He served as music director for the Vienna State Opera from 1986 to 1991, with notable productions such as Mussorgsky's original Boris Godunov and his seldom-heard Khovanshchina, Franz Schubert's Fierrabras, and Gioacchino Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims.

From 1979 to 1987 he was principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and from 1982 to 1986 he was principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. With both orchestras, Abbado made a number of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon.

In 1989, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra elected him as their chief conductor, to succeed Herbert von Karajan, a post he held until 2002.^[3] In 2004 he returned to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic and performed Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in a series of recorded live concerts. The resulting CD won Best Orchestral Recording and Record of the Year in Gramophone Magazine's 2006 awards.^[4]

The Orchestra Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic established the Claudio Abbado Composition Prize in 2006 in his honour.^[5]

Claudio Abbado has performed and recorded a wide range of Romantic works, in particular Gustav Mahler whose symphonies he has recorded several times. He is also noted for his interpretations of modern works by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Giacomo Manzoni, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Thomas Adler, Giovanni Sollima, Roberto Carnevale, Franco Donatoni and George Benjamin.

In 1988, he founded the music festival Wien Modern, which has since expanded to include all aspects of contemporary art. This interdisciplinary festival takes place each year under his direction.

Abbado is also well known for his work with young musicians. He is founder and music director of the European Union Youth Orchestra (1978) and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (1986). He is also a frequent guest conductor with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe with whom he recorded a cycle of Franz Schubert symphonies to considerable acclaim. More recently, he has worked with the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar of Venezuela.^[6]

He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2000 and the treatment led to the removal of a portion of his digestive system. After recovery he formed the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2003^[7] and their concerts have been highly acclaimed.^[8] Abbado is scheduled to remain as the orchestra's music director and chief conductor through 2010.^[9] He also serves as music director of the Orchestra Mozart of Bologna, Italy.

In September 2007 he announced that he was cancelling all of his forthcoming conducting engagements for the "near future" on the advice of his physicians^[10] but two months later he resumed conducting concerts with an engagement in Bologna.^[11] In July 2011, aged 78, he declared himself to be in good health.^[12]

Abbado's son is the opera director Daniele Abbado. From his relationship with the violinist Viktoria Mullova, he is the father of her oldest child, Misha.^[13] His nephew, Roberto Abbado, (the son of his brother Marcello, born 1926, who is a composer and pianist) is also a conductor.

Awards [link]

Claudio Abbado has received many awards and recognitions among which the Grand cross of the Légion d'honneur, Bundesverdienstkreuz, Imperial Prize of Japan, Mahler Medal, Khytera Prize, and honorary doctorates from the universities of Ferrara, Cambridge, Aberdeen, and Havana.

In 1973, he won the Mozart Medal awarded by Mozartgemeinde Wien,^[14] and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1994.

He has won 1997 Grammy Award in the Best Small Ensemble Performance (with or without conductor) category for "Hindemith: Kammermusik No. 1 With Finale 1921, Op. 24 No. 1" and 2005 Grammy Award in the Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with Orchestra) category for "Beethoven: Piano Cons. Nos. 2 & 3" performed by Martha Argerich.

In April 2012, Abbado was voted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame,^[15] and in May of the same year, he was awarded the conductor prize at the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards.^[16]

References [link]

^ quirinale.it
^ ^a ^b ^c Randel, Don Michael (1996). "Claudio Abbado". The Harvard biographical dictionary of music. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press. pp. 1. ISBN 0-674-37299-9.
^ Alex Ross (2001-10-22). "Beethoven Unbound". The New Yorker. http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/abbados_beethov.html. Retrieved 2007-08-07.
^ "Best of Category (Orchestral), Gramophone Award Winner, and Record of the Year". Gramophone. June 2006. Archived from the original on 2007-02-15. http://web.archive.org/web/20070215092400/http://www.gramophone.co.uk/awardstemplate.asp?id=955&award_year=2006. Retrieved 2007-08-07.
^ Matthew Westphal (2006-11-06). "Berlin Philharmonic Names Winner of First Claudio Abbado Composition Prize". Playbill Arts. http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/5540.html. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
^ Charlotte Higgins (2006-11-24). "Land of hope and glory". The Guardian. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1955176,00.html. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
^ Tom Service (2007-08-22). "The maestro". The Guardian. http://music.guardian.co.uk/proms2007/story/0,,2153754,00.html. Retrieved 2007-08-30.
^ Andrew Clements (2007-08-24). "Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Abbado (review of Prom 51, 2007)". The Guardian. http://music.guardian.co.uk/proms2007/story/0,,2155410,00.html. Retrieved 2007-08-30.
^ Ben Mattison (2005-02-01). "Claudio Abbado Extends Tenure at Lucerne Festival Orchestra". Playbill Arts. http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/1293.html. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
^ Daniel J. Wakin (2007-09-07). "Abbado, Ill, Cancels Appearances". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/arts/music/07abba.html. Retrieved 2007-09-07.
^ Matthew Westphal (2007-11-09). "Claudio Abbado Returns to Podium Following Illness". Playbill Arts. http://www.playbillarts.com/news/article/7338.html. Retrieved 2007-11-11.
^ http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2011/07/abbado-cautiously-gives-himself-clean-bill-of-health.html
^ Tim Ashley (2001-02-02). "And this one's by the Bee Gees". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,431917,00.html. Retrieved 2007-08-30.
^ "Claudio Abbado biography". http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-musicians/abbado-claudio-biography.
^ "Claudio Abbado (conductor)". Gramophone. http://www.gramophone.co.uk/HallofFame/ArtistPage/Perry. Retrieved 10 April 2012.
^ "Claudio Abbado awarded classical honour". BBC News. May 9, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17989089#. Retrieved May 9, 2012.

External links [link]

Claudio Abbado at Allmusic
Claudio Abbado at Deutsche Grammophon
Claudio Abbado at Sony BMG Masterworks
Claudio Abbado discography
Claudio Abbado at the Internet Movie Database
Works by or about Claudio Abbado in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Claudio Abbado collected news and commentary at The Guardian
Claudio Abbado collected news and commentary at The New York Times

Preceded by Guido Cantelli	Music Director, La Scala, Milan 1968–1986	Succeeded by Riccardo Muti

v t e Laureates of the Wolf Prize in Arts

Architecture	Ralph Erskine (1983/4) Fumihiko Maki / Giancarlo De Carlo (1988) Frank Gehry / Jørn Utzon / Denys Lasdun (1992) Frei Otto / Aldo van Eyck (1996/7) Álvaro Siza Vieira (2001) Jean Nouvel (2005) David Chipperfield / Peter Eisenman (2010)

Music	Vladimir Horowitz / Olivier Messiaen / Josef Tal (1982) Isaac Stern / Krzysztof Penderecki (1987) Yehudi Menuhin / Luciano Berio (1991) Zubin Mehta / György Ligeti (1995/6) Pierre Boulez / Riccardo Muti (2000) Mstislav Rostropovich / Daniel Barenboim (2004) Giya Kancheli / Claudio Abbado (2008) Plácido Domingo / Simon Rattle (2012)

Painting	Marc Chagall / Antoni Tàpies (1981) Jasper Johns (1986) Anselm Kiefer (1990) Gerhard Richter (1994/5) Louise Bourgeois (2002/3) Michelangelo Pistoletto (2006/7) Rosemarie Trockel (2011)

Sculpture	Eduardo Chillida (1984/5) Claes Oldenburg (1989) Bruce Nauman (1993) James Turrell (1998) Louise Bourgeois (2002/3) Michelangelo Pistoletto (2006/7)

Agriculture Arts Chemistry Mathematics Medicine Physics

v t e London Symphony Orchestra Principal Conductors

Hans Richter (1904) Edward Elgar (1911) Arthur Nikisch (1912) Thomas Beecham (1915) Albert Coates (1919) Willem Mengelberg (1930) Hamilton Harty (1932) Josef Krips (1951) Pierre Monteux (1960) István Kertész (1965) André Previn (1968) Claudio Abbado (1979) Michael Tilson Thomas (1987) Colin Davis (1995) Valery Gergiev (2007)

v t e Berliner Philharmoniker Principal Conductors

Ludwig von Brenner (1882) Hans von Bülow (1887) Arthur Nikisch (1895) Wilhelm Furtwängler (1922) Leo Borchard (1945) Sergiu Celibidache (1945) Wilhelm Furtwängler (1952) Herbert von Karajan (1954) Claudio Abbado (1989) Simon Rattle (2002)

Persondata
Name	Abbado, Claudio
Alternative names
Short description	Conductor
Date of birth	1933-06-26
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

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Simone Verdi
Personal information
Full name	Simone Verdi
Date of birth	(1992-07-12) 12 July 1992 (age 19)
Place of birth	Broni, Italy
Height	1.71 m (5 ft 7 ¹⁄₂ in)
Playing position	Striker / Winger
Club information
Current club	Torino
Number	92
Youth career
	Audax Travacò
2003–2011	Milan
Senior career*
Years	Team	Apps^†	(Gls)^†
2009–2011	Milan	0	(0)
2011–	Torino	11	(0)
National team^‡
2010–	Italy U-19	8	(2)
* Senior club appearances and goals counted for the domestic league only and correct as of 18 December 2011. † Appearances (Goals). ‡ National team caps and goals correct as of 12 January 2011

Simone Verdi (born 12 July 1992) is an Italian professional footballer, who plays as a striker for Serie B club Torino, in a co-ownership deal with Milan. He is nicknamed Verdinho, as his playing style resembles that of a Brazilian.^[1]

1 Club career
- 1.1 Milan
- 1.2 Torino
2 International career
3 Statistics
4 References
5 External links

Club career [link]

Milan [link]

Verdi started playing football with amateur club Audax Travacò, before joining Milan at the age of 11.^[2] He made his professional debut for the club, aged 17, in a Coppa Italia game against Novara, on 13 January 2010.^[3] He then made his second appearance two weeks later, in the quarter-final against Udinese, which Milan lost 0–1.^[4] While playing for the under-20 squad, the young striker scored his first goal at the San Siro in the return leg of the Primavera TIM Cup final, on 14 April 2010. Milan went on to win the match 2–0, as Verdi also made an assist, and secured the trophy 3–1 on aggregate.^[5]^[6]

In May 2010, Milan CEO Adriano Galliani announced that Verdi, along with three other teammates, was expected to join the senior team permanently for the 2010–11 season.^[7] Subsequently, Verdi signed his first professional contract with the club.^[8] However, he continued playing mainly in the youth team.^[9]

Torino [link]

At the beginning of the 2011–12 season, Verdi transferred to Serie B club Torino in a co-ownership deal (exchanged with Gianmario Comi).^[10]^[11] He made his official debut for the club in the first league game of the season, a 2-1 away win against Ascoli, on 27 August 2011.^[12]

International career [link]

Verdi won his first international cap on 22 September 2010, being called-up by Italy U-19 to play a game against Serbia U-19.^[13]

Statistics [link]

As of 27 August 2011.

Team	Season	Domestic League		Domestic Cup		European Competition¹		Other Tournaments²		Total
Team	Season	Apps	Goals	Apps	Goals	Apps	Goals	Apps	Goals	Apps	Goals
Milan	2009–10	0	0	2	0	0	0	–		2	0
Milan	2010–11	0	0	0	0	0	0	–		0	0
Torino	2011–12	1	0	0	0	–		–		1	0
Career Total		1	0	2	0	0	0	0	0	3	0

¹European competitions include the UEFA Champions League.
²Other tournaments include none to date.

References [link]

^ Maurizio Ferrari (3 August 2010). "Largo ai giovani" (in Italian). milannews.it. http://www.milannews.it/?action=read&idnotizia=31200. Retrieved 4 August 2010.
^ "Esordienti Provinciali A 2003/2004" (in Italian). acmilan.com. Associazione Calcio Milan. Archived from the original on 6 June 2004. http://web.archive.org/web/20040606090441/www.acmilan.com/MostraInfo.asp?id_info=18945. Retrieved 16 August 2010.
^ "First Pippo, then Mathieu". acmilan.com (Associazione Calcio Milan). 13 January 2010. http://www.acmilan.com/NewsDetail.aspx?idNews=114716. Retrieved 13 January 2010. ^{[dead link]}
^ "Bitter elimination". acmilan.com (Associazione Calcio Milan). 27 January 2010. http://www.acmilan.com/NewsDetail.aspx?idNews=115478. Retrieved 28 January 2010. ^{[dead link]}
^ This year the youth team are even better! (Web TV production). Associazione Calcio Milan. 19 April 2010. http://milantime.acmilan.com/en-young_world-this_year_the_youth_team_are_even_better_-c-24-0-11371-0. Retrieved 22 April 2010.
^ "Il Milan del futuro vola con Verdi e Zigoni" (in Italian). La Gazzetta dello Sport. 15 April 2010. http://archiviostorico.gazzetta.it/2010/aprile/15/Milan_del_futuro_vola_con_ga_10_100415017.shtml. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
^ "Berlusconi non molla, anche se Galliani capisce i tifosi: "Abituati a caviale e champagne"" (in Italian). goal.com. 18 May 2010. http://www.goal.com/it/news/2/serie-a/2010/05/18/1930935/berlusconi-non-molla-anche-se-galliani-capisce-i-tifosi-abituati-. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
^ Pietro Mazzara (13 July 2010). "Milan, Fossati ha firmato e Verdi passa al contratto professionistico" (in Italian). milannews.it. http://www.milannews.it/?action=read&idnotizia=29751. Retrieved 4 August 2010.
^ Pietro Mazzara (7 July 2010). "Per Verdi si profila una stagione tra Primavera e prima squadra" (in Italian). milannews.it. http://www.milannews.it/?action=read&idnotizia=29178. Retrieved 4 August 2010.
^ "Official A.C. Milan press release". acmilan.com (Associazione Calcio Milan). 1 July 2011. http://www.acmilan.com/en/news/breaking_news_show/11831. Retrieved 29 August 2011.
^ "Verdi al Toro, Comi al Milan" (in Italian). torinofc.it (Torino Football Club). 30 June 2011. http://www.torinofc.it/content/view/8294/61/. Retrieved 29 August 2011.
^ "Ascoli–Torino 1–2" (in Italian). torinofc.it (Torino Football Club). 27 August 2011. http://www.torinofc.it/content/view/8586/61/. Retrieved 29 August 2011.
^ "Simone Verdi" (in Italian). figc.it. Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio. http://www.figc.it/nazionali/DettaglioConvocato?codiceConvocato=3562&squadra=1. Retrieved 7 December 2010.

External links [link]

Profile at official club website (Italian)
International caps at figc.it (Italian)

v t e Torino F.C. – current squad

1 Morello 3 D'Ambrosio 4 Basha 5 Di Cesare 6 Ogbonna 7 Antenucci 9 Bianchi 10 Sgrigna 11 Iori 14 Gasbarroni 16 Zavagno 18 Chiosa 19 Stevanović 20 Vives 22 Guberti 23 Suciu 25 Glik 27 De Feudis 28 Parisi 30 Masiello 33 Surraco 34 F. Coppola 36 Darmian 50 Pratali 69 Meggiorini 77 Pasquato 89 Gomis 90 Oduamadi 92 Verdi 99 Benussi Head Coach: Ventura

Persondata
Name	Verdi, Simone
Alternative names
Short description	Footballer
Date of birth	12 July 1992
Place of birth	Broni, Italy
Date of death
Place of death

http://wn.com/Simone_Verdi

http://pt.wn.com/Simone Verdi

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Verdi

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

Anna Netrebko
Anna Netrebko, 2005
Background information
Birth name	Anna Yuryevna Netrebko
Born	(1971-09-18) 18 September 1971 (age 40) Krasnodar, Soviet Union (now Krasnodar, Russia)
Origin	Russian
Genres	Opera
Instruments	Vocals
Years active	1993–present
Website	annanetrebko.com

Anna Yuryevna Netrebko (Russian: Анна Юрьевна Нетребко, born 18 September 1971) is a Russian operatic soprano. She now holds dual Russian and Austrian citizenship and currently resides in Vienna. She has been nicknamed "La Bellissima" by fans.

1 Biography
2 Performances
3 Discography
4 Recognitions and awards
5 References
6 External links

Biography [link]

Netrebko was born in Krasnodar (Russia), in a family of Kuban Cossack background.^[1] While a student at the Saint Petersburg conservatoire, Netrebko worked as a janitor at Saint Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre.^[2] Later, she auditioned for the Mariinsky Theatre, where conductor Valery Gergiev recognized her from her prior work in the theater. He subsequently became her vocal mentor.^[3] Under Gergiev's guidance, Netrebko made her operatic stage debut at the Mariinsky at age 22, as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro. She went on to sing many prominent roles with the Kirov Opera, including Amina in La sonnambula, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor.

In 1994, she sang the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte with the Riga Independent Opera Avangarda Akadēmija under conductor David Milnes.

In March 2006, Netrebko applied to become an Austrian citizen, receiving her citizenship in late July.^[4] According to an interview in the Austrian weekly news, she will live in Vienna and Salzburg. Netrebko cites the cumbersome and humiliating process of obtaining visas (as a Russian citizen) for her many performances abroad as the main reason for obtaining Austrian citizenship.^[5]

In March 2007, Netrebko announced that she would be an ambassador for SOS Children's Village in Austria, and be a sponsor for the Tomilino village in Russia.^[6]

In April 2008, Netrebko announced that she and her fiancé, Uruguayan baritone Erwin Schrott, had married.^[7] Their son Tiago Aruã Schrott was born on 5 September 2008 in Vienna.^[8]

Netrebko at the Mariinsky Theatre after receiving the honorary title of People's Artist of Russia

Performances [link]

Anna Netrebko as Adina in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore

In 1995, at the age of 24, Netrebko made her American debut as Lyudmila in Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila at the San Francisco Opera. Following this successful performance, she became a frequent guest singer in San Francisco. She is known as an acclaimed interpreter of other Russian operatic roles, such as Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace, Louisa in Betrothal in a Monastery and Marfa in The Tsar's Bride. Netrebko has also made successful forays into bel canto and romantic roles such as Gilda in Rigoletto, Mimi in La bohème, Giulietta in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, and Elvira in I puritani.

In 2002, Netrebko made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Natasha in the Met premiere of War and Peace.^[9] In the same year, she sang her first Donna Anna at the Salzburg Festival's production of Don Giovanni, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. She also performed at the Russian Children's Welfare Society's major fund raiser, the "Petroushka Ball". She returned to the Ball in 2003 and 2006 and is an honorary director of the charity.

In 2003, Netrebko performed as Violetta in Verdi's La traviata in Munich, the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Los Angeles Opera, and Donna Anna at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Her second album, Sempre Libera, was released the following year. She later appeared as Violetta Valéry in La traviata at the Salzburg Festival, conducted by Carlo Rizzi and in 2008 she performed the same role at Covent Garden to triumphant acclaim on the opening night, opposite Jonas Kaufmann and Dmitri Hvorostovsky in performances conducted by Maurizio Benini. However, she cancelled three subsequent performances due to suffering a bronchial condition. This was the second time she had cancelled her performances at the Royal Opera House, having withdrawn from some performances of Don Giovanni the previous summer due to illness.

On 30 May 2007, Netrebko made her Carnegie Hall debut with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and the Orchestra of St. Luke's. Originally scheduled for 2 March 2006, Netrebko postponed the recital because she did not feel artistically ready.^[10]

Netrebko appeared at the Last Night of the Proms on 8 September 2007 where she performed "Ah! Se una volta ... Ah! Non credea mirarti ... Ah! Non giunge" from La sonnambula, "Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß" (Giuditta) and the song "Morgen!" by Richard Strauss (with violinist Joshua Bell).^[11] In the fall of 2007 she reprised her role as Juliette in Roméo et Juliette at the Metropolitan Opera. In December 2007, Netrebko performed for Martin Scorsese, a 2007 Honoree, at the Kennedy Center Honors, and in May 2008 she made a much-awaited debut at the Paris Opera in I Capuleti e i Montecchi, with Joyce DiDonato as her Romeo.

Netrebko was scheduled to sing Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor in October 2008 at the Metropolitan Opera, but due to her pregnancy she decided to drop out of the role.

In her first performance after her maternity leave, Netrebko sang Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor when it opened at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg on 14 January 2009, in a production from the Scottish Opera led by John Doyle.^[12] She then sang the same role in January and February 2009 at the Metropolitan Opera. Netrebko appeared as Giulietta in I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Royal Opera House in Spring 2009, and as Violetta in La traviata in June 2009 at the San Francisco Opera. On 13 November 2010 in a matinee performance broadcast nationally by PBS, she sang the role of Norina in Don Pasquale at New York's Metropolitan Opera House under conductor James Levine. On 2 April 2011, she sang the title role of Gaetano Donizetti's Anna Bolena at the Vienna State Opera for a sold-out premiere there, and the repeat performance on 5 April 2011 was broadcast live to cinemas around the world. On 7 December 2011 she opened very successfully the new season at La Scala in Milan as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni.

In September 2011, it was announced that Netrebko will be performing at either or both of the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, near her native Krasnodar.^[13]

Discography [link]

Complete opera recordings in DVD format [link]

#	Recording year	Opera	Cast	Conductor, Opera house and orchestra	Release year	Label
1	1995	Glinka Ruslan and Lyudmila	Anna Netrebko Vladimir Ognovenko Larissa Diadkova Gennady Bezzubenkov Galina Gorchakova	Valery Gergiev Kirov Opera orchestra, chorus and ballet	2003	Philips
2	1998	Prokofiev Betrothal in a monastery	Anna Netrebko Larissa Diadkova Nikolai Gassiev Aleksander Gergalov Sergei Aleksashkin	Valery Gergiev Kirov Opera orchestra, chorus and ballet	2005	Philips
3	2005	Verdi La traviata	Anna Netrebko Rolando Villazón Thomas Hampson Helene Schneiderman Diane Pilcher	Carlo Rizzi Vienna Philharmonic, Vienna State Opera chorus and Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg (stage music)	2006	Deutsche Grammophon
4	2005	Donizetti L'elisir d'amore	Anna Netrebko Rolando Villazón Ildebrando D'Arcangelo Leo Nucci Inna Los	Alfred Eschwé Vienna State Opera orchestra, chorus and stage orchestra	2007	Virgin Classics
5	2006	Mozart Le nozze di Figaro	Anna Netrebko Ildebrando D'Arcangelo Bo Skovhus Dorothea Röschmann Christine Schäfer	Nicolaus Harnoncourt Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera chorus	2007	Deutsche Grammophon
6	2007	Bellini I puritani	Anna Netrebko Eduardo Valdes Franco Vasallo John Relyea Eric Cutler	Patrick Summers Metropolitan Opera orchestra, chorus and ballet	2008	Deutsche Grammophon
7	2007	Massenet Manon	Anna Netrebko Rolando Villazón Christof Fischesser Alfredo Daza Rémy Coraza	Daniel Barenboim Staatskapelle Berlin and Berlin State Opera chorus	2008	Deutsche Grammophon
8	2008	Puccini La bohème	Anna Netrebko Rolando Villazón George von Bergen Nicole Cabell Adrian Eröd	Bertrand de Billy Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and chorus Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz children chorus	2009	Axiom Films
9	2009	Donizetti Lucia di Lammermoor	Anna Netrebko Mariusz Kwiecien Piotr Beczala Colin Lee Ildar Abdrazakov	Marco Armiliato Metropolitan Opera orchestra, chorus and ballet	2009	Deutsche Grammophon
10	2010	Donizetti Don Pasquale	Anna Netrebko Mariusz Kwiecien Matthew Polenzani John del Carlo	James Levine Metropolitan Opera orchestra and chorus	2011	Deutsche Grammophon
11	2011	Donizetti Anna Bolena	Anna Netrebko Elīna Garanča Ildebrando D'Arcangelo Elisabeth Kulman Francesco Meli	Evelino Pidò Vienna State Opera orchestra and chorus	2011	Deutsche Grammophon

Complete opera recordings in audio CD format [link]

#	Recording year	Opera	Cast	Conductor, Opera house and orchestra	Release year	Label
1	1995	Glinka Ruslan and Lyudmila	Anna Netrebko Vladimir Ognovenko Larissa Diadkova Gennady Bezzubenkov Galina Gorchakova	Valery Gergiev Kirov Opera orchestra, chorus and ballet	2003	Philips
2	1997	Prokofiev The love for three oranges	Anna Netrebko Larissa Diadkova Mikhail Kit Evgeny Akimov Alexander Morozov	Valery Gergiev Kirov Opera orchestra, chorus and ballet	2001	Philips
3	1998	Prokofiev Betrothal in a monastery	Anna Netrebko Larissa Diadkova Nikolai Gassiev Aleksander Gergalov Sergei Aleksashkin	Valery Gergiev Kirov Opera orchestra, chorus and ballet	1999	Philips
4	2005	Verdi La traviata	Anna Netrebko Rolando Villazón Thomas Hampson Helene Schneiderman Diane Pilcher	Carlo Rizzi Vienna Philharmonic, Vienna State Opera chorus and Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg (stage music)	2006	Deutsche Grammophon
5	2006	Mozart Le nozze di Figaro	Anna Netrebko Ildebrando D'Arcangelo Bo Skovhus Dorothea Röschmann Christine Schäfer	Nicolaus Harnoncourt Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera chorus	2007	Deutsche Grammophon
6	2007	Puccini La bohème	Anna Netrebko Rolando Villazón Boaz Daniel Nicole Cabell Stéphane Degout	Bertrand de Billy Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and chorus Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz children chorus	2008	Deutsche Grammophon
7	2008	Bellini I Capuleti e i Montecchi	Anna Netrebko Elīna Garanča Joseph Calleja Robert Gleadow Tiziano Bracci	Fabio Luisi Vienna Symphony and the Wiener Singakademie	2009	Deutsche Grammophon

Recognitions and awards [link]

Time magazine placed her on its Time 100 list in 2007.^[14] She was identified by the journal Musical America as "a genuine superstar for the 21st century" and was named 'Musician of the Year' for 2008.^[15] She has also been described by Associated Press as "the reigning new diva of the 21st century".

She was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation (2004).^[16]

Playboy magazine placed her in their "sexiest babes of classical music" list.^[17]

References [link]

^ Интервью с Анной Нетребко-Анна Нетребко: Я никогда не ходила по струнке. Татьяна Павловская, Краснодар. , in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, issue no. 4070 dated 19 May 2006
^ Melissa Whitworth, "Cinderella Soprano". Telegraph, 19 February 2006
^ Jessica Duchen, " Anna Netrebko: A rare jewel from the East". The Independent, 6 November 2006.
^ ORF.at, 26 July 2006. (in German, Google translation)
^ Galina Stolyarova, "National Treasure". Moscow Times, 26 May 2006
^ Anna Netrebko profile, SOS Children's Villages
^ Jeffries, Stuart. "I conquered the critics." The Guardian. 26 April 2008 (Retrieved 9 February 2009)
^ "Anna Netrebko brachte Buben zur Welt" (in German). ORF. 5 September 2008. http://wien.orf.at/stories/305472/. Retrieved 6 September 2008.
^ Peter Culshaw, "'Justin Timberlake is too young for me'". Telegraph, 26 October 2006.
^ AP via San Francisco Chronicle "Russian Soprano Debuts at Carnegie Hall" May 30, 2007
^ Last Night of the Proms: program
^ Stolyarova, Galina. "Mariinsky Diva Back With New Production." The St. Petersburg Times. January 16, 2009 (Retrieved 9 February 2009)
^ http://rt.com/art-and-culture/news/anna-netrebko-opera-sochi-675/
^ Porterfield, Christopher (3 May 2007). "Anna Netrebko". TIME Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1595332_1615983,00.html. Retrieved 7 January 2008.
^ Elliott, Susan (6 November 2007). "Musical America Announces 2008 Awards". Musical America. http://www.musicalamerica.com/news/newsstory.cfm?archived=0&storyID=17023&cookies=1. Retrieved 7 January 2008.
^ УКАЗ Президента РФ от 06.06.2005 N 641 Президент России
^ http://www.playboy.com/worldofplayboy/features/classical-babes/results.html?pollid=3315&submit.x=138&submit.y=21&submit=go

External links [link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Anna Netrebko

v t e Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg

Stock company	Conductor and opera company director Valery Gergiev \| 22 sopranos · Anna Netrebko \| 13 mezzo-sopranos · Olga Borodina \| 23 tenors \| eight baritones \| 14 basses

Stages	Main stage · Second stage · Concert Hall · Theatre Museum

Persondata
Name	Netrebko, Anna
Alternative names
Short description	Singer
Date of birth	18 September 1971
Place of birth	Krasnodar, Soviet Union
Date of death
Place of death

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Netrebko

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

La donna è mobile

Enrico Caruso sings La donna è mobile from Verdi's Rigoletto, circa 1908

O patria mia

Marie Rappold performing "O patria mia" from Verdi's Aida (1916)

Make changes yourself !

Make changes yourself !

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