#13651
Sam Peckinpah
1925 - 1984 (59 years)
David Samuel Peckinpah was an American film director and screenwriter. His 1969 Western epic The Wild Bunch received an Academy Award nomination and was ranked No. 80 on the American Film Institute's top 100 list. His films employed a visually innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence as well as a revisionist approach to the Western genre.
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Jacques Ibert
1890 - 1962 (72 years)
Jacques François Antoine Marie Ibert was a French composer of classical music. Having studied music from an early age, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and won its top prize, the Prix de Rome at his first attempt, despite studies interrupted by his service in World War I.
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Florent Schmitt
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Florent Schmitt was a French composer. He was part of the group known as Les Apaches. His most famous pieces are La tragédie de Salome and Psaume XLVII . He has been described as "one of the most fascinating of France's lesser-known classical composers".
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John Ross
1777 - 1856 (79 years)
Sir John Ross was a Scottish Royal Navy officer and polar explorer. He was the uncle of Sir James Clark Ross, who explored the Arctic with him, and later led expeditions to Antarctica. Biography Early life John Ross was born in Balsarroch, West Galloway, Scotland, on , the son of the Reverend Andrew Ross of Balsarroch, Minister of Inch in Wigtownshire, and Elizabeth Corsane, daughter of Robert Corsane, the Provost of Dumfries. His family home was on the shore of Loch Ryan, at Stranraer.
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Percy French
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
William Percy French was an Irish songwriter, author, poet, entertainer and painter. Life French was born at Clooneyquinn House, near Tulsk, County Roscommon, the son of an Anglo-Irish landlord, Christopher French, and Susan Emma French . He was the third of nine children. His younger sister, Emily later Emily de Burg Daly was also a writer.
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Paul Muni
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Paul Muni was an American stage and film actor from Chicago. He started his acting career in the Yiddish theater and during the 1930s, he was considered one of the most prestigious actors at the Warner Bros. studio and was given the rare privilege of choosing his own parts.
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Anton Rubinstein
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He was the elder brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, who founded the Moscow Conservatory.
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Graham Thurgood
1900 - Present (126 years)
Graham Thurgood is a retired professor of linguistics at California State University, Chico. Thurgood graduated with a Ph.D. in linguistics from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under James Matisoff.
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William Allan Neilson
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
William Allan Neilson was a Scottish-American educator, writer and lexicographer, graduated in the University of Edinburgh in 1891 and became a PhD in Harvard University in 1898. He was president of Smith College between 1917 and 1939.
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Adolf Tobler
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Adolf Tobler was a Swiss-German linguist and philologist. Born in Hirzel in Zürich, Switzerland, he was the brother of linguist Ludwig Tobler . Adolf Tobler died in Berlin, Germany. He studied Romance philology at the universities of Zürich and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1857. At Bonn, he was influenced by the teachings of Friedrich Christian Diez and Nicolaus Delius. After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher at the Solothurn cantonal school, then at the gymnasium in Bern. In 1867, he relocated to the University of Berlin, where from 1871 up until his death, he held the chair of Romance philology.
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Otis Redding
1941 - 1967 (26 years)
Otis Ray Redding Jr. was an American singer and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Nicknamed the "King of Soul", Redding's style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s.
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Nellie Melba
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Dame Nellie Melba was an Australian operatic lyric coloratura soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century, and was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician. She took the pseudonym "Melba" from Melbourne, her home town.
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Edward Denison Ross
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Sir Edward Denison Ross was an orientalist and linguist, specializing in languages of the Middle East, Central and East Asia. He was the first director of the University of London's School of Oriental Studies from 1916 to 1937.
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Bohuslav Martinů
1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Bohuslav Jan Martinů was a Czech composer of modern classical music. He wrote 6 symphonies, 15 operas, 14 ballet scores and a large body of orchestral, chamber, vocal and instrumental works. He became a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and briefly studied under Czech composer and violinist Josef Suk. After leaving Czechoslovakia in 1923 for Paris, Martinů deliberately withdrew from the Romantic style in which he had been trained. During the 1920s he experimented with modern French stylistic developments, exemplified by his orchestral works Half-time and La Bagarre. He also adop...
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Alfred Jeanroy
1859 - 1953 (94 years)
Alfred Jeanroy was a French linguist. Jeanroy was a leading scholar studying troubadour poetry, publishing over 600 works. He established an influential view of the second generation of troubadours divided into two camps: “idealists” and “realists” .
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Gustave Charpentier
1860 - 1956 (96 years)
Gustave Charpentier was a French composer, best known for his opera Louise. Life and career Charpentier was born in Dieuze, Moselle, the son of a baker, and with the assistance of a rich benefactor he studied violin at the conservatoire in Lille before entering the Paris Conservatoire in 1881. There he took lessons in composition under Jules Massenet and had a reputation of wanting to shock his professors. In 1887 he won the Prix de Rome for his cantata Didon. During the time in Rome that the prize gave him, he wrote the orchestral suite Impressions d'Italie and began work on the libretto an...
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Tom Brown
1662 - 1704 (42 years)
Thomas Brown , also known as Tom Brown, was an English translator and satirist, largely forgotten today save for a four-line gibe that he may have written concerning John Fell. Biography Early life Brown was born at either Shifnal or Newport in Shropshire; he is identified with the Thomas Brown, son of William and Dorothy Brown, who was recorded christened on 1 January 1663 at Newport. His father, a farmer and tanner, died when Thomas was eight years old. He took advantage of the free schooling offered in the county, attending Adams' Grammar School at Newport, before going up to Christ Churc...
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Lyubomir Andreychin
1910 - 1975 (65 years)
Lyubomir Andreychin was a Bulgarian linguist. Correspondent Member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences since 1951. His principal field of scientific research included the grammar and stylistics of modern Bulgarian.
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Richard Tauber
1891 - 1948 (57 years)
Richard Tauber was an Austrian lyric Tenor and film actor. He sang the tenor role in number of operas, including Don Giovanni by Mozart and Da Ponte. Early life Richard Tauber was born in Linz, Austria, to Elisabeth Seifferth , a widow and an actress who played soubrette roles at the local theatre, and Richard Anton Tauber, an actor; his parents were not married and his father was reportedly unaware of the birth as he was touring North America at the time. The child was given the name Richard Denemy; he was sometimes known as [Carl] Richard Tauber, and also used his mother's married name, Sei...
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Angus Cameron
1941 - 1983 (42 years)
Angus Fraser Cameron was a Canadian linguist and lexicographer. Life Cameron was born in Nova Scotia on 11 February 1941 and educated at Truro Senior High School and Mount Allison University before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford. He was then a lecturer at Mount Allison University before completing a post-graduate degree at Oxford in 1968 entitled "Old English nouns of colour: a semantic study". This was the starting point for his later lexicographical work. In 1968, he was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of English and Centre for Medieval Studies by the Un...
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Ferdinand Justi
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Ferdinand Justi was a German linguist and Orientalist. He finished his studies of linguistics at the University of Marburg and the University of Göttingen. In 1861 he lived in Marburg, where in 1865 he became associate and in 1869 full professor of comparative linguistics and Germanic philology.
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Kenneth More
1914 - 1982 (68 years)
Kenneth Gilbert More, CBE was an English film and stage actor. Initially achieving fame in the comedy Genevieve , he appeared in many roles as a carefree, happy-go-lucky gent. Films from this period include Doctor in the House , Raising a Riot , The Admirable Crichton , The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw and Next to No Time . He also played more serious roles as a leading man, beginning with The Deep Blue Sea , Reach for the Sky , A Night to Remember , North West Frontier , The 39 Steps and Sink the Bismarck .
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Hans von Bülow
1830 - 1894 (64 years)
Freiherr Hans Guido von Bülow was a German conductor, virtuoso pianist, and composer of the Romantic era. As one of the most distinguished conductors of the 19th century, his activity was critical for establishing the successes of several major composers of the time, especially Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms. Alongside Carl Tausig, Bülow was perhaps the most prominent of the early students of the Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Franz Liszt; he gave the first public performance of Liszt's Sonata in B minor in 1857. He became acquainted with, fell in love with and eventually married Liszt's daughter Cosima, who later left him for Wagner.
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Robert Aldrich
1918 - 1983 (65 years)
Robert Burgess Aldrich was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. An iconoclastic and maverick auteur working in many genres during the Golden Age of Hollywood, he directed mainly films noir, war movies, westerns and dark melodramas with Gothic overtones. His most notable credits include Vera Cruz , Kiss Me Deadly , The Big Knife , Autumn Leaves , Attack , What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte , The Flight of the Phoenix , The Dirty Dozen , and The Longest Yard .
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Louis Feuillade
1873 - 1925 (52 years)
Louis Feuillade was a French filmmaker of the silent era. Between 1906 and 1924, he directed over 630 films. He is primarily known for the crime serials Fantômas, Les Vampires and Judex made between 1913 and 1916.
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Bill Evans
1929 - 1980 (51 years)
William John Evans was an American jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His interpretations of traditional jazz repertoire, his ways of using impressionist harmony and block chords, and his trademark rhythmically independent, "singing" melodic lines, continue to influence jazz pianists today.
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Olaf Broch
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Olaf Broch was a Norwegian linguist. He was born in Horten, and was a brother of children's writer Lagertha Broch, zoologist Hjalmar Broch, and social worker Nanna Broch. He was a professor of Slavic languages at the University of Oslo from 1900 to 1937. Among his works are Slawische Phonetik from 1911, Håndbok i elementær fonetikk from 1921, and Proletariatets diktatur from 1923. He translated works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky into Norwegian. He was decorated Commander of the Order of St. Olav in 1946.
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Douglas Sirk
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Douglas Sirk was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. However, he also directed comedies, westerns, and war films. Sirk started his career in Germany as a stage and screen director, but he left for Hollywood in 1937 after his Jewish wife was persecuted by the Nazis.
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Hans Stumme
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Hans Stumme was a German linguist, known for his research of Semitic and other Afroasiatic languages. He studied at the universities of Tübingen, Halle, Leipzig and Strasbourg, obtaining his habilitation in 1895. While a student at Leipzig, his teachers were Ludolf Krehl, Albert Socin and Friedrich Delitzsch. In 1900 he became an associate professor of Oriental philology at Leipzig, where in 1909 he was named an honorary professor of Neo-Arabic and Hamitic languages.
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Zdzisław Stieber
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Zdzisław Stieber, was a Polish linguist and Slavist. He was born in Szczakowa, then part of the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia . His family was of assimilated German descent in Poland for generations. He died in Warsaw.
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André Grétry
1741 - 1813 (72 years)
André Ernest Modeste Grétry was a composer from the Prince-Bishopric of Liège , who worked from 1767 onwards in France and took French nationality. He is most famous for his opéras comiques. Biography He was born at Liège, his father being a poor musician. He was a choirboy at the church of St. Denis . In 1753 he became a pupil of Jean-Pantaléon Leclerc and later of the organist at St-Pierre de Liège, Nicolas Rennekin, for keyboard and composition and of Henri Moreau, music master at the collegiate church of St. Paul. But of greater importance was the practical tuition he received by attending the performance of an Italian opera company.
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Ahatanhel Krymsky
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Ahatanhel Yukhymovych Krymsky was a Ukrainian Orientalist, linguist, polyglot , literary scholar, folklorist, writer, and translator. He was one of the founders of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1918 and a full member of it and of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1903.
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Leopold Mozart
1719 - 1787 (68 years)
Johann Georg Leopold Mozart was a German composer, violinist, and theorist. He is best known today as the father and teacher of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and for his violin textbook Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule .
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Charles-Valentin Alkan
1813 - 1888 (75 years)
Charles-Valentin Alkan was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.
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Régis Blachère
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Régis Blachère was a French orientalist and translator of the Qur'an. Bibliography 1975: Analecta, Institut français de Damas, Damas, 1975.2002: Le Coran, Presses universitaires de France, , 1956: Dans les pas de Mahomet, Hachette.1960: Dictionnaire arabe-français-anglais , .1967: Dictionnaire arabe-français-anglais Arabic/French/English Dictionary - Langue classique et moderne, Maisonneuve et Larose.1958: Éléments de l'arabe classique, Quatrième édition revue et corrigée, G.-P. Maisonneuve.1970: Exercices d'arabe classique, Adrien Maisonneuve, Extraits des principaux géographes arabes du Moy...
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Qian Xuantong
1887 - 1939 (52 years)
Qian Xuantong was a Chinese linguist and writer considered to be a leading figure of the Doubting Antiquity School, along with Gu Jiegang. He was a professor of literature at National Peking University.
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Preston Sturges
1898 - 1959 (61 years)
Preston Sturges was an American playwright, screenwriter, and film director. Sturges took the screwball comedy format of the 1930s to another level, writing dialogue that, heard today, is often surprisingly naturalistic and mature, despite the farcical situations. It is not uncommon for a Sturges character to deliver an exquisitely turned phrase and take an elaborate pratfall within the same scene.
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Umberto Giordano
1867 - 1948 (81 years)
Umberto Menotti Maria Giordano was an Italian composer, mainly of operas. His best-known work in that genre was Andrea Chénier . He was born in Foggia in Apulia, southern Italy, and studied under Paolo Serrao at the Conservatoire of Naples. His first opera, Marina, was written for a competition promoted by the music publishers Casa Sonzogno for the best one-act opera, remembered today because it marked the beginning of Italian verismo. The winner was Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. Giordano, the youngest contestant, was placed sixth among seventy-three entries with his Marina, a work which g...
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Anthony Mann
1906 - 1967 (61 years)
Anthony Mann was an American film director and stage actor. Mann initially started as a theatre actor appearing in numerous stage productions. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood where he worked as a talent scout and casting director. He then became an assistant director, most notably working for Preston Sturges. His directorial debut was Dr. Broadway . He directed several feature films for numerous production companies, including RKO Pictures, Eagle-Lion Films, Universal Pictures, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His first major success was T-Men , garnering notable recognition for producing several films in the film noir genre through modest budgets and short shooting schedules.
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Carl Theodor Dreyer
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Carl Theodor Dreyer , commonly known as Carl Th. Dreyer, was a Danish film director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his movies are noted for emotional austerity and slow, stately pacing, frequent themes of social intolerance, the inseparability of fate and death, and the power of evil in earthly life.
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John Dowland
1563 - 1626 (63 years)
John Dowland was an English Renaissance composer, lutenist, and singer. He is best known today for his melancholy songs such as "Come, heavy sleep", "Come again", "Flow my tears", "I saw my Lady weepe", "Now o now I needs must part" and "In darkness let me dwell". His instrumental music has undergone a major revival, and with the 20th century's early music revival, has been a continuing source of repertoire for lutenists and classical guitarists.
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Pola Negri
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Pola Negri was a Polish stage and film actress and singer. She achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles. She was also acknowledged as a sex symbol.
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Mary Garden
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Mary Garden was a Scottish-American operatic lyric soprano, then mezzosoprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century. She spent the latter part of her childhood and youth in the United States and eventually became an American citizen, although she lived in France for many years and eventually retired to Scotland, where she spent the last 30 years of her life and died.
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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
1714 - 1788 (74 years)
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach , also formerly spelled Karl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, and commonly abbreviated C. P. E. Bach, was a German Classical period composer and musician, the fifth child and second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach.
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Heitor Villa-Lobos
1887 - 1959 (72 years)
Heitor Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the best-known South American composer of all time. A prolific composer, he wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works, totaling over 2,000 works by his death in 1959. His music was influenced by both Brazilian folk music and stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, as exemplified by his Bachianas Brasileiras and his Chôros. His Etudes for classical...
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Raymond Chandler
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime . All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he wa...
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Antonio Janigro
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Antonio Janigro was an Italian cellist and conductor. Biography Born in Milan, he began studying piano when he was six and cello when he was eight. Initially taught by Giovanni Berti, Janigro enrolled in the Verdi Conservatory of Milan, where he was instructed by Gilberto Crepax. By 1934 Janigro was studying under Diran Alexanian and Pablo Casals at the École Normale in Paris. He graduated from the school in 1934 and began performing solo and in recitals with Dinu Lipatti, Paul Badura-Skoda and Alfredo Rossi.
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Henry Wheaton
1785 - 1848 (63 years)
Henry Wheaton was a United States lawyer, jurist and diplomat. He was the third reporter of decisions for the United States Supreme Court, the first U.S. minister to Denmark, and the second U.S. minister to Prussia.
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Ignaz Moscheles
1794 - 1870 (76 years)
Isaac Ignaz Moscheles was a Bohemian piano virtuoso and composer. He was based initially in London and later at Leipzig, where he joined his friend and sometime pupil Felix Mendelssohn as professor of piano in the Conservatory.
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Marcel Dupré
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Marcel Jean-Jules Dupré was a French organist, composer, and pedagogue. Biography Born in Rouen into a wealthy musical family, Marcel Dupré was a child prodigy. His father Aimable Albert Dupré was titular organist of Saint-Ouen Abbey from 1911 til his death and a friend of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who built an organ in the family house when Marcel was 10 years old. His mother Marie-Alice Dupré-Chauvière was a cellist who also gave music lessons, and his paternal uncle Henri Auguste Dupré was a violinist and violist. Both of his grandfathers, Étienne-Pierre Chauvière and Aimable Auguste-Pompé...
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