• Ariadne auf Naxos
• Artistic director
• Berlin State Opera
• Blossom Time
• Brompton Cemetery
• Carl Beines
• Carmen
• Catholic Church
• Charles Gounod
• Chemnitz
• Cigarette card
• Das lockende Ziel
• Der Evangelimann
• Der Freischütz
• Der Zarewitsch
• Diana Napier
• Die Fledermaus
• Die tote Stadt
• Dionysus
• Don Giovanni
• Dynamics (music)
• Faust (opera)
• Find a Grave
• Franz Lehár
• Frasquita
• Freiburg im Breisgau
• G. Schirmer
• Giuditta
• Guy's Hospital
• Harry Liedtke
• Hoch Conservatory
• Jew
• Land Without Music
• Linz
• London Clinic
• Lung cancer
• Marlene Dietrich
• Mary Losseff
• Melodie der Liebe
• Messa di voce
• Mignon
• Nazism
• Neil Chotem
• Nicolas Slonimsky
• Odeon Records
• Operetta
• Paganini
• Phonograph
• Richard Strauss
• Richard Tauber
• Richard Wagner
• Right of abode
• Royal Opera House
• Royalties
• Schön ist die Welt
• Semperoper
• Soubrette
• Statelessness
• Strabismus
• Sturmabteilung
• Tenor
• The Bartered Bride
• The Land of Smiles
• The Magic Flute
• Theater an der Wien
• Theodore Baker
• Thomas Beecham
• Tosca
• Vienna State Opera
• Wikipedia Persondata
• Wilhelm Kienzl
• YouTube
• 
  

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  Berlin State Opera
  The Staatsoper Unter den Linden (Berlin State Opera) is a German opera company. Its permanent home is the opera house on the Unter den Linden boulevard in the Mitte district of Berlin, which also hosts the Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra.
  King Frederick II of Prussia shortly after his accession to the throne commissioned the original building on the site. Construction work began in July 1741 with what was designed by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff to be the first part of a "Forum Fredericianum" on present-day Bebelplatz. Although not entirely completed, the Court Opera (Hofoper) was inaugurated with a performance of Carl Heinrich Graun's Cesare e Cleopatra on December 7, 1742. This event marked the beginning of the successful, 250-year co-operation between the Staatsoper and the Staatskapelle Berlin, the state orchestra, whose roots trace back to the 16th century.
  In 1842, Gottfried Wilhelm Taubert instituted the tradition of regular symphonic concerts. In the same year, Giacomo Meyerbeer succeeded Gaspare Spontini as General Music Director. Felix Mendelssohn also conducted symphonic concerts for a year.
  
  wn.com/Berlin_State_Opera
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  Brompton Cemetery
  Coordinates: 51°29′0″N 0°11′21″W / 51.483333°N 0.18917°W / 51.483333; -0.18917
  Brompton Cemetery is located near Earl's Court in South West London, England (postal districts SW 5 and 10), in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is managed by The Royal Parks and is one of the Magnificent Seven. Established by Act of Parliament, it opened in 1840 and was originally known as the West of London and Westminster Cemetery.
  Brompton Cemetery, consecrated by the Bishop of London in June 1840, is one of the Britain's oldest and most distinguished garden cemeteries. Some 35,000 monuments, from simple headstones to substantial mausolea, now mark the resting place of more than 205,000 burials. The site includes large plots for family mausolea, and common graves where coffins are piled deep into the earth, as well as a small columbarium. Brompton was closed to burials between 1952 and 1996, but is once again a working cemetery, with plots for interments and a 'Garden of Remembrance' for the deposit of cremated remains.
  
  wn.com/Brompton_Cemetery
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  Guy's Hospital
  Guy's Hospital is a large NHS hospital in the borough of Southwark in Central London, England. It is administratively a part of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. It is a large teaching hospital and is, with St. Thomas' Hospital and King's College Hospital, the location of King's College London School of Medicine (formerly known as the GKT School of Medicine). The Tower Wing (formaly known as Guy's Tower) is the tallest hospital building in the world, standing at 142.6m, with 34 floors.
  The hospital was founded in 1721 by Thomas Guy (1644/45–27 December 1724), a publisher of unlicensed Bibles who had made a fortune in the South Sea Bubble. It was originally established as a hospital to treat "incurables" discharged from St Thomas' Hospital. Guy had been a Governor and benefactor of St Thomas' and his fellow Governors supported his intention by granting the south-side of St Thomas' Street for a peppercorn for 999 years. Guy is interred in the crypt of the Chapel of his foundation.
  
  wn.com/Guy's_Hospital
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  Hoch Conservatory
  Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium - Musikakademie was founded in Frankfurt am Main on September 22, 1878. Through the generosity of Frankfurter Joseph Hoch, who bequeathed the Conservatory one million German gold marks in his testament, a school for music and the arts was established for all age groups. It has played an important role in the history of music in Frankfurt. Many famous musicians have taught there: in the late 19th century, with teachers like Clara Schumann on the faculty, the Conservatory achieved international renown. In the 1890s about 25% of the students were from other countries: 46 were from England and 23 from America.
  In the 1920s, under director Bernhard Sekles, the Conservatory was far ahead of its time: Sekles initiated the world’s first Jazz Studies (directed by Mátyás Seiber) and in 1931 the Elementary Music Department.
  Today Dr. Hoch's Conservatory offers instruction in the Music Education for Youth and Adults (ANE) program, the Elementary Music Department (Basisabteilung), and the Pre-College-Frankfurt (PCF) program, which provides preparation for future studies at a Hochschule or Conservatory. There are also Ballet, Early Music and New Music departments. The following qualifications are available: Diplom in Music and Diplomas in Music Pedagogy in all instruments, voice, music theory, composition, performance, and Elementary Music Pedagogy.
  
  wn.com/Hoch_Conservatory
• London Clinic
  The London Clinic is a private healthcare organisation based in central London. Although it maintains several consulting rooms in the traditional doctors' street of Harley Street, the main hospital site is on the corner of Devonshire Place and the Marylebone Road. One of its main buildings is the cancer centre, which provides diagnosis and treatment for all types of cancer.
  It was established in 1932 by a group of Harley Street doctors.
  The London Clinic is a registered charity in the United Kingdom. In 2006 it had a gross income of £75million, making it one of the 100 largest charities in the UK.
  The London Clinic is not currently surveyed and accredited by a recognised holistic international healthcare accreditation scheme.
  Coordinates: 51°31′22.7″N 0°9′1″W / 51.522972°N 0.15028°W / 51.522972; -0.15028
  
  wn.com/London_Clinic
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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.
  
  wn.com/Royal_Opera_House
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  Sturmabteilung
  The Sturmabteilung (SA) (German pronunciation: [ˈʃtʊʁmʔapˌtaɪlʊŋ] ( listen);Storm Detachment or Assault Division) or Brownshirts) functioned as the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Their main assignments were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies; the disruption of opposing political parties and the fight against their paramilitary units (esp. the Rotfrontkämpferbund); and the intimidation of Jewish citizens (eg. the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses).
  The SA was the first Nazi paramilitary group to develop pseudo-military titles for bestowal upon its members. The SA ranks were adopted by several other Nazi Party groups, chief amongst them the SS, itself originally a branch of the SA. SA men were often called "brownshirts" for the colour of their uniforms (similar to Benito Mussolini's blackshirts). Brown-coloured shirts were chosen as the SA uniform because a large batch of them were cheaply available after World War I, having originally been ordered during the war for colonial troops posted to Germany's former African colonies.
  
  wn.com/Sturmabteilung
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  Theater an der Wien
  The Theater an der Wien (The Theatre on the Wien River) is a historic theatre on the Left Wienzeile in the Mariahilf district of Vienna. Completed in 1801, it has seen the premieres of many celebrated works of theatre, opera, and symphonic music. Since 2006, the theatre has served primarily as an opera house, hosting its own company.
  The theatre was the brainchild of the Viennese theatrical impresario Emanuel Schikaneder, who is best known to history as Mozart's librettist and collaborator on the opera The Magic Flute (1791). Schikaneder's troupe had already been successfully performing for several years in Vienna in the smaller Theater auf der Wieden, where The Magic Flute had premiered. Schikaneder, whose performances often emphasized spectacle and scenery, felt ready to move to a larger and better equipped venue.
  He had already been granted an imperial licence to build a new theatre in 1786, but it was only in 1798 that he felt ready to act on this authorization. The building was designed by the architect Franz Jäger in Empire style (it has since been remodeled). Construction was completed in 1801. The theatre has been described as "the most lavishly equipped and one of the largest theatres of its age.".
  
  wn.com/Theater_an_der_Wien
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  Vienna State Opera
  The Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) is an opera house – and opera company – with a history dating back to the mid-19th century. It is located in the centre of Vienna, Austria. It was originally called the Vienna Court Opera (Wiener Hofoper). In 1920, with the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy by the First Austrian Republic, it was renamed the Vienna State Opera. The members of the Vienna Philharmonic are recruited from its orchestra.
  The building was the first major building on the Vienna Ringstraße commissioned by the controversial Viennese "city expansion fund". Work commenced on the building in 1861 and was completed in 1869, following plans drawn up by architects August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, who lived together in the 6. Bezirk. It was built in the Neo-Renaissance style.
  The Ministry of the Interior had commissioned a number of reports into the availability of certain building materials, with the result that stones long not seen in Vienna were used, such as Wöllersdorfer Stein, for plinths and free-standing, simply-divided buttresses, the famously hard stone from Kaisersteinbruch, whose colour was more appropriate than that of Kelheimerstein, for more lushly decorated parts. The somewhat coarser-grained Kelheimerstein (also known as Solnhof Plattenstein) was intended as the main stone to be used in the building of the opera house, but the necessary quantity was not deliverable. Breitenbrunner stone was suggested as a substitute for the Kelheimer stone, and stone from Jois was used as a cheaper alternative to the Kaiserstein. The staircases were constructed from polished Kaiserstein, while most of the rest of the interior was decorated with varieties of marble.
  
  wn.com/Vienna_State_Opera

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  Charles Gounod
  Charles-François Gounod (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl fʁɑ̃swa ɡuno]; 17 June 1818 – 17 October or 18 October 1893) was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.
  Gounod was born in Paris, the son of a pianist mother and an artist father. His mother was his first piano teacher. Under her tutelage, Gounod first showed his musical talents. He entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied under Fromental Halévy and Pierre Zimmermann (he later married Zimmermann's daughter). In 1839, he won the Prix de Rome for his cantata Fernand. He was following his father; François-Louis Gounod (d. 1823) had won the second Prix de Rome in painting in 1783. During his stay of four years in Italy, Gounod studied the music of Palestrina and other sacred works of the sixteenth century; these he never ceased to cherish. Around 1846-47 he gave serious consideration to joining the priesthood, but he changed his mind before actually taking holy orders, and went back to composition. During that period, he was attached to the Church of Foreign Missions in Paris.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Gounod
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  Franz Lehár
  Franz Lehár (30 April 1870 – 24 October 1948) was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas of which the most successful and best known is The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe).
  Lehár was born in the northern part of Komárom, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (now Komárno, Slovakia), the eldest son of an Austrian bandmaster in the Infantry Regiment No. 50 of the Austro-Hungarian Army and a Hungarian woman from a family of German descent. He grew up speaking only Hungarian until the age of 12. Later he put a diacritic above the "a" of his father's name "Lehar" to indicate the long vowel in Hungarian phonology.
  While his younger brother Anton entered cadet school in Vienna to become a professional officer, Franz studied violin and composition at the Prague Conservatory, where his violin teacher was Antonín Bennewitz, but was advised by Antonín Dvořák to focus on composing music. After graduation in 1899 he joined his father's band in Vienna, as assistant bandmaster. In 1902 he became conductor at the historic Vienna Theater an der Wien, where his first opera Wiener Frauen was performed in November of that year.
  
  wn.com/Franz_Lehár
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  Harry Liedtke
  Harry Liedtke (12 October 1882 – 28 April 1945) was a German film actor.
  Liedtke was born in Königsberg, East Prussia to a merchant as the seventh out of 12 children. After the death of his father in 1896, he grew up in an orphanage and began a qualification in retail business. By the chance acquaintance of Hans Oberländer, a stage director at Berlin, he started to take stage classes and was first engaged at the municipal Theater of Freiberg, Saxony. In 1908 Liedtke worked at the New German Theatre in New York City and in 1909 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin.
  In 1912 Liedtke appeared for the first time in the silent movie Zu spät and from now on usually as a young Charming Boy and gentleman. With Ernst Lubitsch he made movies like Das fidele Gefängnis (1917), Die Augen der Mumie Ma (1918), Carmen (1918), Die Austernprinzessin (1919), Madame Dubarry (1919), Sumurun (1920) and Das Weib des Pharao (1921). He also appeared in several crime stories as Stuart Webbs or Joe Deebs written by Joe May. Liedtke was a popular actor in the 1920s and partner of Marlene Dietrich in I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (1929). Liedtke met with less success in sound films, probably due to his advancing age.
  
  wn.com/Harry_Liedtke
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  Jew
  The Jews (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים‎‎ ISO 259-3 Yhudim Israeli pronunciation [jehuˈdim]), also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and an ethnoreligious group, originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation.Converts to Judaism, whose status as Jews within the Jewish ethnos is equal to those born into it, have been absorbed into the Jewish people throughout the millennia.
  In Jewish tradition, Jewish ancestry is traced to the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the second millennium BCE. The modern State of Israel defines itself as a Jewish state in its Basic Laws, and Israel's Law of Return states: "Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh." Israel is the only country where Jews are a majority of the population. Jews achieved political autonomy twice before in ancient history. The first of these periods lasted from 1350 to 586 BCE, and encompassed the periods of the Judges, the United Monarchy, and the Divided Monarchy of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, ending with the destruction of the First Temple. The second was the period of the Hasmonean Kingdom spanning from 140 to 37 BCE. Since the destruction of the First Temple, most Jews have lived in diaspora. A minority in every country in which they live (except Israel), they have frequently experienced persecution throughout history, resulting in a population that has fluctuated both in numbers and distribution over the centuries.
  
  wn.com/Jew
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  Marlene Dietrich
  Marlene Dietrich (German pronunciation: [maɐˈleːnə ˈdiːtʁɪç]; 27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992) was a German-American actress and singer.
  Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as "Lola-Lola" in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, brought her international fame and provided her a contract with Paramount Pictures in the US. Hollywood films such as Shanghai Express and Desire capitalised on her glamour and exotic looks, cementing her stardom and making her one of the highest-paid actresses of the era. Dietrich became a US citizen in 1939, and throughout World War II she was a high-profile frontline entertainer. Although she still made occasional films in the post-war years, Dietrich spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a successful show performer.
  In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth-greatest female star of all time.
  
  wn.com/Marlene_Dietrich
• Mary Losseff
  Mary Losseff (also Mara Loseff); b. Vladivostok, 13 March 1907; d. London, 3 July 1972. Russian (later, British) singer and film actress.
  Losseff was the stage, screen and life partner of the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber from 1929 to the mid 1930s, and Tauber’s close friend until his death in 1948. She was the muse for his 1934 operetta Der singende Traum and his three songs titled An eine schöne Frau, and she also starred opposite him in numerous productions. She made commercial recordings of one solo (Peter, Peter) and several duets with Tauber. She co-starred in four films: Das Land des Lächelns (1930), Liebeskommando (1931), Bretter, die die Welt bedeuten (1935) and The Sky’s the Limit (1938). Her voice was a high, light and sweet soprano – not big or great, but charming, true and technically assured.
  Losseff’s early life was comfortable. Her father owned a factory and the family were relatively well off. With the October Revolution, however, the family were forced to flee to Japan, where they remained for two years. They then moved on to Berlin in 1921. Little is known of this period except that Mary bore an illegitimate child, Dimitri, in 1927. This did not affect her plans to make a career on the stage. She took lessons from Bertha Niklas-Kempner and sent Dimitri to boarding school from the age of three for the whole of his childhood. She made her debut at Rudolf Nelson’s Review in 1929, singing ‘Peter, Peter’. This period is described by her then-lover, the pianist and composer Peter Kreuder, in his book Nur Puppen habe keine Tränen.
  
  wn.com/Mary_Losseff
• Neil Chotem
  Neil Chotem (9 September 1920, Saskatoon - 21 February 2008, Greenfield Park, Quebec) was a Canadian composer, arranger, conductor, pianist, and music educator. His compositional style is eclectic but conservative, and often incorporates elements of jazz and popular music. He composed a considerable body of works for television and radio and also wrote music for a number of leading Canadian performers like Maureen Forrester, Paul Piché, and Michel Rivard. For the progressive rock band Harmonium he wrote much of the music for their critically acclaimed album L'Heptade (1976). In 1968 he, Paul de Margerie, and Marcel Lévêque were awarded a Montreal Festival du disque prize for 3=12, an LP for which the three men all worked together as conductors and arrangers. He received another prize from that same organization that same year for Renée Claude's recording of his arrangement of Jacques Brel's song Ne me quitte pas. In 1993 he received the Prix de la Guilde from the Guilde des musiciens du Québec.
  
  wn.com/Neil_Chotem
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  Nicolas Slonimsky
  Nicolas Slonimsky (April 27 [O.S. April 15] 1894 – December 25, 1995) was a Russian born American composer, conductor, musician, music critic, lexicographer and author. He described himself as a "diaskeuast" (from Greek διασκευαστής); "a reviser or interpolator."
  Slonimsky was born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy in Saint Petersburg. He was of Jewish origin, but his parents adopted the Orthodox faith after the birth of his older brother, and Nicolas was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. His maternal aunt, Isabelle Vengerova, was his first piano teacher.
  Slonimsky was brought to the United States in 1923 by Vladimir Rosing to work as an accompanist in the newly formed Opera Department at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he continued his composition and conducting studies. He also accompanied Rosing at many of his vocal recitals, including a performance at Carnegie Hall in October 1924. After two years, Slonimsky moved to Boston to work as an assistant for Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky, for whom he had earlier worked as a rehearsal pianist in Paris. During this time, Slonimsky taught music theory at Boston Conservatory and the Malkin Conservatory, and began to write music articles for The Boston Evening Transcript, The Christian Science Monitor and the magazine, The Etude.
  
  wn.com/Nicolas_Slonimsky
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  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.
  
  wn.com/Paganini
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  Richard Strauss
  Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and other orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, An Alpine Symphony, and Metamorphosen. Strauss was also a prominent conductor throughout Germany and Austria.
  Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.
  Strauss was born on 11 June 1864, in Munich, the son of Franz Strauss, who was the principal horn player at the Court Opera in Munich. In his youth, he received a thorough musical education from his father. He wrote his first composition at the age of six, and continued to write music almost until his death.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Strauss
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  Richard Tauber
  Richard Tauber (16 May 1891 – 8 January 1948) was an Austrian tenor acclaimed as one of the greatest singers of the 20th century. Some critics commented that "his heart felt every word he sang".
  He was born in Linz, Austria to Elisabeth Seifferth, an actress who played soubrette roles at the local theatre. His father, Richard Anton Tauber, also an actor, was not married to his mother and was unaware of the birth as he was touring America at the time. Being born out of wedlock, he was given the name Richard Denemy (Denemy being his mother's maiden name). He also used the names Ernst Seiffert, Carl Tauber and C. Richard Tauber at various times.
  Richard accompanied his mother on tour to various theatres but she found it increasingly difficult to cope, and in 1897 he was sent to school in Linz, when his father took over his upbringing. His father, who had a Jewish background but had converted to Roman Catholicism,^{[citation needed]} hoped that Richard would become a priest, but the boy missed the excitement of the theatre and instead joined his father in Prague, and subsequently in 1903 at the theatre in Wiesbaden. Richard hoped to become a singer but failed to impress any of the teachers he auditioned for, probably because he chose to sing Wagner, for which his voice was not suited. Consequently, his father entered him at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt to study piano, composition and conducting, subjects which stood Tauber in good stead in later years. He made rapid progress but he still hoped to become a singer; whilst staying with friends at Freiburg he was heard by the well-known voice teacher Professor Carl Beines, who encouraged him to sing more quietly and promised a good career as a Mozart tenor.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Tauber
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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.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Wagner
• Theodore Baker
  Theodore Baker (June 3, 1851 – October 13, 1934) was an American musicologist.
  Born in New York, Baker studied business but turned to music as a career, becoming an organist in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1874 he moved to Germany and obtained his doctorate at Leipzig in 1882. His dissertation dealt with the music of the Seneca Indians, and was the first major work published on the music of American Indians. Themes included in the work were used by Edward MacDowell in his Indian Suite. In 1891 Baker returned to the United States, where he took the post of literary editor for Schirmer Publishing in 1892. He worked there until 1926, when he retired and moved back to Germany. He died in Dresden in 1934.
  Baker translated a considerable body of books and libretti into English, and wrote often in the Musical Quarterly, a Schirmer publication. In 1900, he published the first edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, which was revised after his death by Nicholas Slonimsky and is still in print in its ninth edition.
  
  wn.com/Theodore_Baker
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  Thomas Beecham
  Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet, CH (29 April 1879 – 8 March 1961) was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras. From the early 20th century until his death, Beecham was a major influence on the musical life of Britain and, according to the BBC, was Britain's first international conductor.
  Born to a rich industrial family, Beecham began his career as a conductor in 1899. He used his access to the family fortune to finance opera from the 1910s until the start of the Second World War, staging seasons at Covent Garden, Drury Lane and His Majesty's Theatre with international stars, his own orchestra and a wide repertoire. Among the works he introduced to England were Richard Strauss's Elektra, Salome and Der Rosenkavalier and three operas by Frederick Delius.
  Together with his younger colleague Malcolm Sargent, Beecham founded the London Philharmonic, and he conducted its first performance at the Queen's Hall in 1932. In the 1940s, he worked for three years in the United States, where he was music director of the Seattle Symphony and conducted at the Metropolitan Opera. After his return to Britain, he founded the Royal Philharmonic in 1946 and conducted it until his death in 1961.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Beecham
• Wilhelm Kienzl
  Wilhelm Kienzl (17 January 1857 – 3 October 1941) was an Austrian composer.
  Kienzl was born in the small, picturesque Upper Austrian town of Waizenkirchen. His family moved to the Styrian capital of Graz in 1860, where he studied the violin under Ignaz Uhl, piano under Johann Buwa, and composition from 1872 under the Chopin scholar Louis Stanislaus Mortier de Fontaine. From 1874, he studied composition under Wilhelm Mayer-Rémy, music aesthetics under Eduard Hanslick and music history under Friedrich von Hausegger. He was subsequently sent to the music conservatorium at Prague University to study under Josef Krejci, the director of the conservatorium. After that he went to Leipzig Conservatory in 1877, then to Weimar to study under Liszt, before completing doctoral studies at the University of Vienna.
  While Kienzl was at Prague, Krejci took him to Bayreuth to hear the first performance of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle. It made a lasting impression on Kienzl, so much so that he founded the "Graz Richard Wagner Association" (now the "Austrian Richard Wagner Company, Graz Office") with Hausegger and with Friedrich Hofmann. Although he subsequently fell out with "The Wagnerites", he never lost his love for Wagner's music.
  
  wn.com/Wilhelm_Kienzl

• One Day When We Were Young
• I'm in Love with Vienna
• My Heart and I
• One Night of Love
• At the Balalaika
• Sympathy
• Waltz of my Heart
• Can I Forget You?
• Long Ago (and Far Away)
• Dearly Beloved
• All the Things You Are
• Rosalie
• In the Still of the Night
• Heimweh
• Vienna, City of My Dreams
• Au Revoir
• A Little Love, A Little Kiss
• Love, Here is My Heart
• Marcheta
• Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht
• Somewhere Over the Hill
• Liebe kleine Nachtigall
• Fascination
• Indian Summer
• Starlight Serenade

Born: 1891-05-16

Died: 1948-01-08

• timeline:
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• timeline:
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001