#13301
Amilcare Ponchielli
1834 - 1886 (52 years)
Amilcare Ponchielli was an Italian opera composer, best known for his opera La Gioconda. He was married to the soprano Teresina Brambilla. Life and work Born in Paderno Fasolaro near Cremona, then Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, Ponchielli won a scholarship at the age of nine to study music at the Milan Conservatory, writing his first symphony by the time he was ten years old.
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Francesco Lamperti
1813 - 1892 (79 years)
Francesco Lamperti was an Italian singing teacher. Biography A native of Savona, Lamperti attended the Milan Conservatory where, beginning in 1850, he taught for a quarter of a century. He was director at the Teatro Filodrammatico in Lodi. In 1875, he left the school and began to teach as a private tutor. Among his pupils were Sophie Cruvelli, Emma Albani, Gottardo Aldighieri, Désirée Artôt, Sona Aslanova, Lillie Berg, David Bispham, Italo Campanini, Virgilio Collini, Samuel Silas Curry, Franz Ferenczy, Friederike Grün, Teresa Stolz, Marie van Zandt, Maria Waldmann, Herbert Witherspoon, Tecla Vigna, and Lizzie Graham.
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Glauber Rocha
1939 - 1981 (42 years)
Glauber de Andrade Rocha was a Brazilian film director, actor and screenwriter. He was one of the most influential moviemakers of Brazilian cinema and a key figure of Cinema Novo. His films Black God, White Devil and Entranced Earth are often considered to be two of the greatest achievements in Brazilian cinematic history, being selected by Abraccine as, respectively, the second and fifth best Brazilian films of all-time. Rocha also the distinction of having the most films on Abraccine's list: 5 films.
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Sammy Lee
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Sammy Lee , born Samuel Levy, was an American choreographer, dancer, and producer who worked mainly on Broadway and for 20th Century Fox film corporation in Hollywood. Work on Broadway Lee got his start on the Broadway stage as a dancer and choreographer, along with Signor Albertiera, in the Arthur Hammerstein produced Friml operetta, The Firefly. For the next several years Lee worked as a dancer and choreographer in many reviews before he got his big break as the choreographer for the George and Ira Gershwin musical, Lady, Be Good. In Lady, Be Good, Lee was the first to choreograph such hit songs as "Fascinating Rhythm", "Swiss Miss", and "Oh, Lady Be Good!".
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Donald Wolfit
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Sir Donald Wolfit, CBE was an English actor-manager, known for his touring wartime productions of Shakespeare. He was especially renowned for his portrayal of King Lear. Personal life Wolfit was born at New Balderton, near Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, and attended the Magnus Grammar School. He made his stage début in 1920 and first appeared in the West End in 1924, playing in The Wandering Jew. He was married three times. His first wife was the actress Chris Castor, and their daughter Margaret Wolfit was also an actor. He had two children by his second marriage - Harriet Graham, actor and writer, and Adam Wolfit, a photographer.
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Diran Kelekian
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Diran Kelekian was an Ottoman Armenian journalist and professor at the Darülfünûn-u Şahâne . He was editor of two newspapers, Cihan and Sabah . He studied in Constantinople and at the French Academy of Sciences at Marseilles, then became a lecturer at Ottoman University of Constantinople. He fled to Europe during the anti-Armenian violence of the 1890s and returned to Istanbul in 1898, becoming the editor of Sabah. He soon fled the country again, spending the middle 1900s in Cairo and returning after the Young Turk Revolution. He also worked as a correspondent of Daily Mail and Presse As...
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Carl Czerny
1791 - 1857 (66 years)
Carl Czerny was an Austrian composer, teacher, and pianist of Czech origin whose music spanned the late Classical and early Romantic eras. His vast musical production amounted to over a thousand works and his books of studies for the piano are still widely used in piano teaching. He was one of Ludwig van Beethoven's best-known pupils and would later on be one of the main teachers of Franz Liszt.
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Mark Sullivan
1874 - 1952 (78 years)
Mark Sullivan was an American journalist and syndicated political columnist. Author of the six-volume, 3,740-page Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925 , he was described as a "giant of American journalism" and the "Jeremiah of the United States Press".
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John Farrow
1904 - 1963 (59 years)
John Villiers Farrow, KGCHS was an Australian film director, producer, and screenwriter. Spending a considerable amount of his career in the United States, in 1942 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Wake Island, and in 1957 he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days. He had seven children by his wife, actress Maureen O'Sullivan, including actress Mia Farrow.
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Glenn Gould
1932 - 1982 (50 years)
Glenn Herbert Gould was a Canadian classical pianist. He was among the most famous and celebrated pianists of the 20th century, renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by remarkable technical proficiency and a capacity to articulate the contrapuntal texture of Bach's music.
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Karl Böhm
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Karl August Leopold Böhm was an Austrian conductor. He was best known for his performances of the music of Mozart, Wagner, and Richard Strauss. Life and career Education Karl Böhm was born in Graz. The son of a lawyer, he studied law and earned a doctorate in this subject before entering the music conservatory in his home town of Graz, Austria. He later enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied under Eusebius Mandyczewski, a friend of Johannes Brahms.
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Larry Teal
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Larry Teal is considered by many to be the father of American orchestral saxophone. Career Laurence Lyon Teal earned a bachelor's degree in pre-dentistry from the University of Michigan. Although he came to the University of Michigan to study dentistry, he soon became involved with Wilson's Wolverines—a jazz band with a more than local following. He toured Europe with them for several years and later returned to the States only to be recruited by Glen Gray's Casa Loma Orchestra of Detroit, one of the important society orchestras of the period. He later earned a Doctor of Music from the Detroi...
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Jiří Polívka
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Jiří Polívka was a Czech linguist, slavist, literary historian and folklorist. He was a disciple of Jan Gebauer. In 1895 he was appointed professor at Charles University in Prague. He became a corresponding member of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts and corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences . He was a supporter of Theodor Benfey’s migration theory. His major work was the collection Slavic Tales and studies about Slavic dialectology.
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W. C. Handy
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
William Christopher Handy was an American composer and musician who referred to himself as the Father of the Blues. He was one of the most influential songwriters in the United States. One of many musicians who played the distinctively American blues music, Handy did not create the blues genre but was the first to publish music in the blues form, thereby taking the blues from a regional music style with a limited audience to a new level of popularity.
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Alexandru Philippide
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Alexandru I. Philippide was a Romanian linguist and philologist. Educated in Iași and Halle, he taught high school for several years until 1893, when he secured a professorship at the University of Iași that he would hold until his death forty years later. He began publishing books on the Romanian language around the time he graduated from university, but it was not until he became a professor that he drew wider attention, thanks to a study of the language's history. Although not particularly ideological, he penned sharp, witty polemics directed at various intellectual figures, both at home a...
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Gerald Moore
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Gerald Moore CBE was an English classical pianist best known for his career as a collaborative pianist for many distinguished musicians. Among those with whom he was closely associated were Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schumann, Hans Hotter, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Victoria de los Ángeles and Pablo Casals.
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Carel Gabriel Cobet
1813 - 1889 (76 years)
Carel Gabriel Cobet was a Dutch classical scholar. Biography He was born in Paris, but educated in the Netherlands, at the Gymnasium Haganum and the University of Leiden. The university conferred on him an honorary degree, and recommended him to the government for a travelling pension. The ostensible purpose of his journey was to collate the texts of Simplicius of Cilicia, which, however, engaged but little of his time. He contrived to study almost every Greek manuscript in the Italian libraries, and returned after five years with an intimate knowledge of palaeography.
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Thomas van Erpe
1584 - 1624 (40 years)
Thomas van Erpe, also known as Thomas Erpenius , Dutch Orientalist, was born at Gorinchem, in Holland. He was the first European to publish an accurate book of Arabic grammar. After completing his early education at Leiden, he entered the university of that city, and in 1608 took the degree of master of arts. On the advice of Scaliger he studied Oriental languages whilst taking his course of theology. He afterwards travelled in England, France, Italy and Germany, forming connections with learned men, and availing himself of the information which they communicated. During his stay at Paris he c...
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Spike Jones
1911 - 1965 (54 years)
Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones was an American actor, comedian, musician, bandleader and conductor specializing in spoof arrangements of popular songs and classical music. Ballads receiving the Jones treatment were punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, burps, and outlandish and comedic vocals. Jones and his band recorded under the title Spike Jones and His City Slickers from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, and toured the United States and Canada as "The Musical Depreciation Revue".
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Fritz Reiner
1888 - 1963 (75 years)
Frederick Martin Reiner was an American conductor of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century. Hungarian born and trained, he emigrated to the United States in 1922, where he rose to prominence as a conductor with several orchestras. He reached the pinnacle of his career while music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s and early 1960s.
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Woody Herman
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Woodrow Charles Herman was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, singer, and big band leader. Leading groups called "The Herd", Herman came to prominence in the late 1930s and was active until his death in 1987. His bands often played music that was cutting edge and experimental; their recordings received numerous Grammy nominations.
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Constant Lambert
1905 - 1951 (46 years)
Leonard Constant Lambert was a British composer, conductor, and author. He was the founder and music director of the Royal Ballet, and he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement.
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Frank Tashlin
1913 - 1972 (59 years)
Frank Tashlin , also known as Tish Tash and Frank Tash, was an American animator and filmmaker. He was best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated shorts for Warner Bros., as well as his work as a director of live-action comedy films.
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Bud Abbott
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
William Alexander "Bud" Abbott was an American comedian, actor and producer. He was best known as the straight man half of the comedy duo Abbott and Costello. Early life Abbott was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey on October 2, 1897, into a show business family. His parents, Rae Fisher and Harry Abbott, had met while working for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. She was a bareback rider of German Jewish background and he was a concessionaire and forage agent. Bud was the third of the couple's four children. When Bud was a toddler, the family relocated to Harlem, then to the Coney Island section of...
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Robert Benchley
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.
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Richard Oswald
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Richard Oswald was an Austrian film director, producer, screenwriter, and father of German-American film director Gerd Oswald. Early career Richard Oswald, born in Vienna as Richard W. Ornstein, began his career as an actor on the Viennese stage. He made his film directorial debut at age 34 with The Iron Cross and worked a number of times for Jules Greenbaum. In 1916, Oswald set up his own production company in Germany, writing and directing most of his films himself. His pre-1920 efforts include such literary adaptations as The Picture of Dorian Gray , Peer Gynt , the once scandalous Different from the Others and Around the World in Eighty Days .
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Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
1892 - 1988 (96 years)
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose music, written over a period of seventy years, ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for his piano pieces, notably nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and...
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Théophile Cart
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Théophile Cart was a French Esperantist professor and linguist. Beginning in 1907, Cart was an editor for Lingvo Internacia.
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Giovanni Battista Viotti
1755 - 1824 (69 years)
Giovanni Battista Viotti was an Italian violinist whose virtuosity was famed and whose work as a composer featured a prominent violin and an appealing lyrical tunefulness. He was also a director of French and Italian opera companies in Paris and London. He personally knew Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
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Nikolai Shelgunov
1824 - 1891 (67 years)
Nikolai Vasil'evich Shelgunov was a Russian forestry professor, journalist, and literary critic, who became a notable figure of the Russian nihilist movement. Nikolai was born the son of a nobleman, on in Saint Petersburg. He studied at the Imperial Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg, graduating in 1841 and joining the staff of the forestry department of the Ministry of State Domains. By the late 1850s he was appointed professor at the Forestry Institute.
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John Robert Moore
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
John Robert Moore was an American biographer and bibliographer of Daniel Defoe. Early life and education John Robert Moore was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of an Episcopalian minister. Moore attended the University of Missouri where he received an A.B. in 1910 and an A.M. in 1914. After completing his degrees at the University of Missouri, he went to Harvard University where he earned a Ph.D. in 1917 with a dissertation on ballads.
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Mahalia Jackson
1911 - 1972 (61 years)
Mahalia Jackson was an American gospel singer, widely considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century. With a career spanning 40 years, Jackson was integral to the development and spread of gospel blues in black churches throughout the U.S. During a time when racial segregation was pervasive in American society, she met considerable and unexpected success in a recording career, selling an estimated 22 million records and performing in front of integrated and secular audiences in concert halls around the world.
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Giuseppe Guarneri
1698 - 1744 (46 years)
Bartolomeo Giuseppe "del Gesù" Guarneri was an Italian luthier from the Guarneri family of Cremona. He rivals Antonio Stradivari with regard to the respect and reverence accorded his instruments, and for many prominent players and collectors his instruments are the most coveted of all. Instruments made by Guarneri are often referred to as Del Gesùs.
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Emilio Fernández
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Emilio "El Indio" Fernández Romo was a Mexican film director, actor and screenwriter. He was one of the most prolific film directors of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. He is best known for his work as director of the film María Candelaria , which won the Palme d'Or award at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. As an actor, he worked in numerous film productions in Mexico and in Hollywood. He was the father of the Mexican actor Jaime Fernández.
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Giovanni Pacini
1796 - 1867 (71 years)
Giovanni Pacini was an Italian composer, best known for his operas. Pacini was born in Catania, Sicily, the son of the buffo Luigi Pacini, who was to appear in the premieres of many of Giovanni's operas. The family was of Tuscan origin, living in Catania when the composer was born.
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Antal Doráti
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Antal Doráti was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer who became a naturalized American citizen in 1943. Biography Antal Doráti was born in Budapest, where his father Alexander Doráti was a violinist with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra and his mother Margit Kunwald was a piano teacher.
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Victor Herbert
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
Victor August Herbert was an American composer, cellist and conductor of English and Irish ancestry and German training. Although Herbert enjoyed important careers as a cello soloist and conductor, he is best known for composing many successful operettas that premiered on Broadway from the 1890s to World War I. He was also prominent among the Tin Pan Alley composers and was later a founder of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers . A prolific composer, Herbert produced two operas, a cantata, 43 operettas, incidental music to 10 plays, 31 compositions for orchestra, nine b...
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Leo McCarey
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Thomas Leo McCarey was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was involved in nearly 200 films, including the critically acclaimed Duck Soup, Make Way for Tomorrow, The Awful Truth, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary's, My Son John and An Affair To Remember.
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Carl August Hagberg
1810 - 1864 (54 years)
Carl August Hagberg , was a Swedish linguist and translator. He was a member of the Swedish Academy, occupying a seat from 1851 until his death. He was the son of Carl Peter Hagberg. Hagberg is most famous for being the first person to produce a Swedish translation of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the twelve volumes of his translation was issued between 1847 and 1851. Several of his translations were, however, based on the work of Johan Henrik Thomander, who had produced a collected edition of Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II and Twelfth Night i...
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Gabdulkhay Akhatov
1927 - 1986 (59 years)
Gabdulkhay Khuramovich Akhatov was a Soviet Tatar Linguist, Turkologist and an organizer of science and then a second doctorate of Philology in 1965, attaining professorship in 1970. Akhatov graduated with honors from Kazan State Pedagogical Institute in 1951 and later from graduate school in 1954. He became a member of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and was also chairman of the specialized boards for doctoral and master's theses in a number of universities across the now-defunct USSR.
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Buddy Rich
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Bernard "Buddy" Rich was an American jazz drummer, songwriter, conductor, and bandleader. He is considered one of the most influential drummers of all time. Rich was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He discovered his affinity for jazz music at a young age and began drumming at the age of two. He began playing jazz in 1937, working with acts such as Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and Harry James. From 1942 to 1944, Rich served in the U.S. Marines. From 1945 to 1948, he led the Buddy Rich Orchestra. In 1966, he recorded a big-band style arrangement of songs from West Side Story.
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Terence MacDonagh
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
John Alfred Terence MacDonagh was an English oboist and cor anglais player, particularly known as one of the four members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's so-called "Royal Family" of woodwind players.
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Farinelli
1705 - 1782 (77 years)
Farinelli was the stage name of Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi , a celebrated Italian castrato singer of the 18th century and one of the greatest singers in the history of opera. Farinelli has been described as having had soprano vocal range and as having sung the highest note customary at the time, C6.
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Victor Sjöström
1879 - 1960 (81 years)
Victor David Sjöström , also known in the United States as Victor Seastrom, was a pioneering Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor. He began his career in Sweden, before moving to Hollywood in 1924. Sjöström worked primarily in the silent era; his best known films include The Phantom Carriage , He Who Gets Slapped , and The Wind . Sjöström was Sweden's most prominent director in the "Golden Age of Silent Film" in Europe. Later in life, he played the leading role in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries .
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Albert Henry Ross
1881 - 1950 (69 years)
Albert Henry Ross , , was an English advertising agent and freelance writer known for writing the Christian apologetics book Who Moved the Stone? and And Pilate Said. Biography Ross was born on 1 January 1881 in Kings Norton, Worcestershire just slightly south of Birmingham. His father, John Charles Ross was a wine merchant who operated different businesses in Birmingham. His mother was Mary Ann Ross and she was born in Hollingbourne, Kent in 1850. His parents were married in 1878. His mother died in Aston, Birmingham in 1912, and his father died in Aston, Birmingham in 1914.
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Mike Todd
1909 - 1958 (49 years)
Michael Todd was an American theater and film producer, celebrated for his 1956 Around the World in 80 Days, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Actress Elizabeth Taylor was his third wife. Todd was the third of Taylor's seven husbands, and the only one whom Taylor did not divorce - Todd died in a private plane accident a year after their marriage. He was the driving force behind the development of the eponymous Todd-AO widescreen film format.
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Carlos Chávez
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez was a Mexican composer, conductor, music theorist, educator, journalist, and founder and director of the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra. He was influenced by native Mexican cultures. Of his six symphonies, the second, or Sinfonía india, which uses native Yaqui percussion instruments, is probably the most popular.
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Lennox Berkeley
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley CBE was an English composer. Biography Berkeley was born on 12 May 1903 in Oxford, England, the younger child and only son of Aline Carla , daughter of Sir James Charles Harris, former British consul in Monaco, and Royal Navy Captain Hastings George FitzHardinge Berkeley , the illegitimate and eldest son of George Lennox Rawdon Berkeley, the 7th Earl of Berkeley . He attended the Dragon School in Oxford, going on to Gresham's School, in Holt, Norfolk and St George's School in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. He studied French at Merton College, Oxford, graduating with a fourth class degree in 1926.
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George Jones
1811 - 1891 (80 years)
George Jones was an American journalist who, with Henry Jarvis Raymond, co-founded the New-York Daily Times, now The New York Times. Biography Jones was born in 1811 in Poultney, Vermont, and moved to Granville, Ohio, for a time. He moved back to Vermont after his parents died. Jones was employed at the Northern Spectator.
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Baldassare Galuppi
1706 - 1785 (79 years)
Baldassare Galuppi was an Italian composer, born on the island of Burano in the Venetian Republic. He belonged to a generation of composers, including Johann Adolph Hasse, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, and C. P. E. Bach, whose works are emblematic of the prevailing galant music that developed in Europe throughout the 18th century. He achieved international success, spending periods of his career in Vienna, London and Saint Petersburg, but his main base remained Venice, where he held a succession of leading appointments.
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