Hildegard Behrens (9 February 1937 – 18 August 2009) was a German soprano with a wide repertoire including Wagner, Weber, Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Alban Berg roles.

Behrens was born in Varel, Germany in 1937 and was graduated from the University of Freiburg as a junior barrister before becoming serious about her talents as a singer, studying at first with Ines Leuwen at the Freiburg Academy Of Music. Her debut was as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro in Freiburg in 1971 and the following year she became a member of the Deutsche Oper. On 15 October 1976 she made her American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Giorgetta in Il tabarro.

She began her musical career singing small roles at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf where she stayed for six years during which she graduated into bigger roles. Then in the 1975–76 season, while rehearsing Wozzeck, she was "discovered" by Herbert von Karajan, who was then looking for his new Salome. She was summoned to Berlin to audition for the role. Karajan liked what he heard and invited her to portray the role at the 1977 Salzburg Festival.

August Everding (German pronunciation: [ˈaʊɡʊst ˈeːvɐdɪŋ]) (31 October 1928; Bottrop, Germany – 26 January 1999; Munich) was a German opera director and administrator. He studied at the Universities of Bonn and Munich, where launching his career in the 1950s. He was a member of the Roman Catholic fraternity Katholischer Studentenverein Arminia Bonn, a founder fraternities of the Kartellverband katholischer deutscher Studentenvereine . From 1968 onwards he worked as a director in Hamburg, before moving back to Munich in 1977 to become the General Intendant of the Bayerische Staatsoper. In the following years he also directed in Bayreuth, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Zurich Opera,

His productions were seen in all the major international houses: Vienna State Opera, Salzburg Festival. the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, La Scala, Milan, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera New York, San Francisco Opera and Opera Australia.

Many of his classic productions are preserved on DVD, including Hänsel und Gretel (1981) (Deutsche Grammophon B000AXSKB8), and Die Zauberflöte (Deutsche Grammophon B000ASAEQW). He was one the founder members of a society of the revolutionary thoughts on theaters and individual thinking and this was reflected in his works.

Leonard Bernstein ( /ˈbɜrnstaɪn/ US dict: bûrn′·stīn; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to The New York Times, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."

His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, as well as Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town and his own Mass.

Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.

As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.

Supreme Master (or "Suma") Ching Hai, (born 12 May 1950), is the spiritual teacher of the Quan Yin Method with an estimated 20,000 followers world wide.

Ching Hai is a poet, painter, musician, self-published writer and entrepreneur who heads the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association, a business group with worldwide interests in restaurants, fashion and jewellery design. She is known for her philanthropic and humanitarian work, but has been criticised for making allegedly ostentatious displays of generosity as well as self-promotion.

The San Francisco Weekly cites 1995 research by a Berkeley graduate student in journalism which says she was born Hue Dang Trinh to a Vietnamese mother and an ethnic Chinese father, on 12 May 1950 in a small village in the Quang Ngai Province in Vietnam. At 19, during the height of the Vietnam War, she developed a relationship with a German scientist and doctor who was a relief worker: Trinh worked as a Red Cross interpreter in Europe. They married, but separated after two years when she left him to pursue spiritual enlightenment. In 1979, she met a Buddhist monk in Germany whom she followed for three years, but his monastery denied entry to females. She moved to India to study different religions, and became a disciple of Thakar Singh. During her stay at his ashram, she learned the Sant Mat 'Light and Sound' meditation technique which Thakar Singh taught, and from which her Quan Yin Method is derived.

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.