#14001
Charles Mingus
1922 - 1979 (57 years)
Charles Mingus Jr. was an American jazz upright bassist, composer, bandleader, pianist, and author. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history, with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Eric Dolphy. Mingus's work ranged from advanced bebop and avant-garde jazz with small and midsize ensembles, to pioneering the post-bop style on seminal recordings like Pithecanthropus Erectus and Mingus Ah Um , and progressive big b...
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Isaak Revzin
1923 - 1974 (51 years)
Isaak Iosifovic Revzin was a Russian linguist and semiotician associated with the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. Life Isaac Revzin was born in Istanbul. He worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages. A structural linguist, he proposed that linguistics be developed as a formal axiomatic theory. Despite the fact that he was a specialist in machine translation, he only saw a computer once in his life. He also wrote in collaboration with his wife, Olga Revzina. He died in Moscow.
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Maurice Coindreau
1892 - 1990 (98 years)
Maurice-Edgar Coindreau was a literary critic and translator of fiction from English into French and Spanish. He is notable for having introduced many canonical American authors of the 20th century—such as William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway—to the French-speaking public.
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William Lovelock
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
William Lovelock was an English classical composer and pedagogue who spent many years in Australia. He was the first Director of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane, and later became the chief music critic for The Courier-Mail newspaper while developing an independent career as a composer.
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Katharine Lloyd-Williams
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Katharine Georgina Lloyd-Williams CBE was a British anaesthetist, general practitioner and medical educator. She was a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital from 1934 and dean of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine from 1945, retiring from both posts in 1962.
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Robert Reitz
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Robert Karl Friedrich Reitz was a Swiss violinist and university lecturer. He was concert master of the Staatskapelle Weimar, first violinist of the Reitz Quartet and professor at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar.
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Peter C. Lutkin
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Peter Christian Lutkin was an American organist, choral conductor, and composer. Career Peter Lutkin was born in Thompsonville, Wisconsin on March 27, 1858. His parents, Peter Christian and Hannah Lutkin, emigrated to the U.S. from Denmark in 1844. He attended Chicago public schools and was a chorister and organist at St. Peter and St. Paul's Episcopal Church. At age thirteen he began formal music training, studying organ with Clarence Eddy, piano with Regina Watson, and theory with Frederick Grant Gleason.
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Samuel French Morse
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Samuel French Morse was an American poet and teacher. He had the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize named in his honor, which lasted from 1983–2009. The prize was for a first or second book of poems by a U.S. poet, with a $1000 cash award, and publication of the winning manuscript by Northeastern University Press/UPNE.
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Ernesto Montenegro
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Ernesto Montenegro was a Chilean journalist and writer associated with the Generation of 1912. Career Ernesto Montenegro spent much of his life in the United States, where he served as a journalist and founded a magazine named Chile.
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Elias Wessén
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Elias Wessén was a prominent Swedish linguist and a professor of Scandinavian languages at Stockholm University . In 1947, he was honoured with one of the 18 seats at the Swedish Academy . His earliest work concerned morphological problems in the Germanic languages, Onomasiology and Norse mythology. He published parts of Sveriges runinskrifter, editions of medieval texts and together with Åke Holmbäck, a translation of the Swedish medieval province laws . He published several reference works, such as Svensk språkhistoria in three tomes, and a grammar for modern Swedish Vårt svenska språk. In ...
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Boris Blacher
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Boris Blacher was a German composer and librettist. Life Blacher was born when his parents were living within a Russian-speaking community in the Manchurian town of Niuzhuang . He spent his first years in China and in the Asian parts of Russia, and in 1919, he eventually came to live in Harbin.
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Godfrey Ridout
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Godfrey Ridout was a Canadian composer, conductor, music educator, and writer. Life and career Ridout was a descendant of Thomas Ridout, the first Surveyor General of Upper Canada during the administration of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe. He attended University of Toronto with John Beckwith. During his time at the Toronto University, he was a pupil of Ettore Mazzoleni , Weldon Kilburn , and Charles Peaker at its Conservatory of Music. He then taught on the conservatory faculty from 1940 to 1948. He left there to join the faculty at Toronto University, where he taught until 1982. Am...
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Rasmus Rask
1787 - 1832 (45 years)
Rasmus Kristian Rask was a Danish linguist and philologist. He wrote several grammars and worked on comparative phonology and morphology. Rask traveled extensively to study languages, first to Iceland, where he wrote the first grammar of Icelandic, and later to Russia, Persia, India, and Ceylon . Shortly before his death, he was hired as professor of Eastern languages at the University of Copenhagen. Rask is especially known for his contributions to comparative linguistics, including an early formulation of what would later be known as Grimm's Law. He was elected as a member to the American P...
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Lucien Tesnière
1893 - 1954 (61 years)
Lucien Tesnière was a prominent and influential French linguist. He was born in Mont-Saint-Aignan on May 13, 1893. As a senior lecturer at the University of Strasbourg and later professor at the University of Montpellier , he published many papers and books on Slavic languages. However, his importance in the history of linguistics is based mainly on his development of an approach to the syntax of natural languages that would become known as dependency grammar. He presented his theory in his book Éléments de syntaxe structurale , published posthumously in 1959. In the book he proposes a sophi...
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Jean Arp
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp , better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter, and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist. Early life Arp was born Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp to a French mother and a German father in Straßburg during the period between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, when the city and surrounding region was under control of the German Empire. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law required Arp to adopt a French name, and he legally became Jean Arp, although he continued referring to himself as "H...
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William Godwin
1756 - 1836 (80 years)
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, an early mystery novel which attacks aristocratic privilege. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s. He wrote prolifically in t...
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Jan Tschichold
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Jan Tschichold was a German calligrapher, typographer and book designer. He played a significant role in the development of graphic design in the 20th century – first, by developing and promoting principles of typographic modernism, and subsequently idealizing conservative typographic structures. His direction of the visual identity of Penguin Books in the decade following World War II served as a model for the burgeoning design practice of planning corporate identity programs. He also designed the typeface Sabon.
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William Lloyd Garrison
1805 - 1879 (74 years)
William Lloyd Garrison was an American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known for his widely read anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which Garrison founded in 1831 and published in Boston until slavery in the United States was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
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Lincoln Steffens
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Lincoln Austin Steffens was an American investigative journalist and one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. He launched a series of articles in McClure's, called "Tweed Days in St. Louis", that would later be published together in a book titled The Shame of the Cities. He is remembered for investigating corruption in municipal government in American cities and for his leftist values.
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John Lennon
1940 - 1980 (40 years)
John Winston Ono Lennon was an English singer, songwriter, and musician who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon's work included music, writing, drawings, and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history.
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Frank Harris
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Frank Harris was an Irish-American editor, novelist, short story writer, journalist and publisher, who was friendly with many well-known figures of his day. Born in Ireland, he emigrated to the United States early in life, working in a variety of unskilled jobs before attending the University of Kansas to study law. After graduation, he quickly tired of his legal career and returned to Europe in 1882. He traveled in continental Europe before settling in London to pursue a career in journalism. In 1921, in his sixties, he became a US citizen. Though he attracted much attention during his life ...
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Joseph Pulitzer
1847 - 1911 (64 years)
Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian-American politician and newspaper publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World. He became a leading national figure in the Democratic Party and was elected congressman from New York.
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Upton Sinclair
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California. He wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.
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Cecil Beaton
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar–winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.
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Arthur Ransome
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The entire series remains in print, and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.
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Lytton Strachey
1880 - 1932 (52 years)
Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
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Loie Fuller
1862 - 1928 (66 years)
Loie Fuller , also known as Louie Fuller and Loïe Fuller, was an American dancer and a pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting techniques. Early life and debut Marie Louise Fuller was born on January 15, 1862 in Fullersburg, Illinois, on a remote farm conveniently linked to Chicago by a newly-constructed plank road. When Fuller was two, her parents Reuben Fuller and Delilah Eaton moved to Chicago and opened a boarding house. Fuller's parents took her to the Progressive Lyceum, a hub of Freethought, on Sunday mornings.
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Horace Vernet
1789 - 1868 (79 years)
Émile Jean-Horace Vernet more commonly known as simply Horace Vernet, was a French painter of battles, portraits, and Orientalist subjects. Biography Vernet was born to Carle Vernet, another famous painter, who was himself a son of Claude Joseph Vernet. He was born in the Paris Louvre, while his parents were staying there during the French Revolution. Vernet quickly developed a disdain for the high-minded seriousness of academic French art work which was distinguished by art influenced by Classicism, and decided to paint subjects taken mostly from contemporary life. During his early career, ...
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Mihai Eminescu
1850 - 1889 (39 years)
Mihai Eminescu was a Romanian Romantic poet from Moldavia, novelist, and journalist, generally regarded as the most famous and influential Romanian poet. Eminescu was an active member of the Junimea literary society and worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul , the official newspaper of the Conservative Party . His poetry was first published when he was 16 and he went to Vienna, Austria to study when he was 19. The poet's manuscripts, containing 46 volumes and approximately 14,000 pages, were offered by Titu Maiorescu as a gift to the Romanian Academy during the meeting that was held on 25 January 1902.
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Frederick Ashton
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton was a British ballet dancer and choreographer. He also worked as a director and choreographer in opera, film and revue. Determined to be a dancer despite the opposition of his conventional middle-class family, Ashton was accepted as a pupil by Léonide Massine and then by Marie Rambert. In 1926 Rambert encouraged him to try his hand at choreography, and though he continued to dance professionally, with success, it was as a choreographer that he became famous.
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Georges Rouault
1871 - 1958 (87 years)
Georges Henri Rouault was a French painter, draughtsman, and print artist, whose work is often associated with Fauvism and Expressionism. Childhood and education Rouault born in Paris to a poor family. He was born in a Parisian cellar after his family's home was destroyed in the Paris insurrection of 1871. His mother encouraged his love for the arts, and, in 1885, the fourteen-year-old Rouault embarked on an apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer, which lasted until 1890. This early experience as a glass painter has been suggested as a likely source of the heavy black contouring and glowing colors, likened to leaded glass, which characterize Rouault's mature painting style.
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Nellie Bly
1864 - 1922 (58 years)
Elizabeth Cochran Seaman , better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.
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Ida Tarbell
1857 - 1944 (87 years)
Ida Minerva Tarbell was an American writer, investigative journalist, biographer and lecturer. She was one of the leading muckrakers and reformers of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was a pioneer of investigative journalism.
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John Gunther
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
John Gunther was an American journalist and writer. His success came primarily by a series of popular sociopolitical works, known as the "Inside" books , including the best-selling Inside U.S.A. in 1947. However, he is now best known for his memoir Death Be Not Proud , on the death of his teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor.
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Martha Graham
1894 - 1991 (97 years)
Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide. Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. She was the first dancer to perform at the White House, travel abroad as a cultural ambassador, and receive the highest civilian award of the US: the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. In her lifetime she received honors ranging from the Key to the City of Paris to Japan's Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She said, in the 1994 documentary The Dancer Revealed: "I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer.
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Henry Morton Stanley
1841 - 1904 (63 years)
Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a Welsh-American explorer, journalist, soldier, colonial administrator, author and politician who was famous for his exploration of Central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Besides his discovery of Livingstone, he is mainly known for his search for the sources of the Nile and Congo rivers, the work he undertook as an agent of King Leopold II of the Belgians which enabled the occupation of the Congo Basin region, and his command of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. He was knighted in 1897, and served in Parliament as a Liberal U...
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Paul Sérusier
1864 - 1927 (63 years)
Paul Sérusier was a French painter who was a pioneer of abstract art and an inspiration for the avant-garde Nabis movement, Synthetism and Cloisonnism. Education Sérusier was born in Paris. He studied at the Académie Julian and was a monitor there in the mid-1880s. In the summer of 1888 he travelled to Pont-Aven and joined the small group of artists centered there around Paul Gauguin. While at the Pont-Aven artist's colony he painted a picture that became known as The Talisman, under the close supervision of Gauguin. The picture was an extreme exercise in Cloisonnism that approximated to pure abstraction.
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Alvar Aalto
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware, as well as sculptures and paintings. He never regarded himself as an artist, seeing painting and sculpture as "branches of the tree whose trunk is architecture." Aalto's early career ran in parallel with the rapid economic growth and industrialization of Finland during the first half of the 20th century. Many of his clients were industrialists, among them the Ahlström-Gullichsen family, who became his patrons. The span of his career, from the 1920s to the 1970s, is ...
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Giorgio Vasari
1511 - 1574 (63 years)
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian Renaissance painter and architect, who is best known for his work The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of all art-historical writing, and still much cited in modern biographies of the many Italian Renaissance artists he covers, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, although he is now regarded as including many factual errors, especially when covering artists from before he was born.
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Edith Wharton
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
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Edward Bernays
1891 - 1995 (104 years)
Edward Louis Bernays was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government...
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Yuen Ren Chao
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Yuen Ren Chao , also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born and raised in China, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. A naturally gifted polyglot and linguist, his Mandarin Primer was one of the most widely used Mandarin Chinese textbooks in the 20th century. He invented the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization scheme, which, unlike pinyin and other romanization systems, transcribe...
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Vladimir Propp
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk taless to identify their simplest irreducible structural units. Biography Vladimir Propp was born on 29 April 1895 in Saint Petersburg to an assimilated Russian family of German descent. His parents, Yakov Philippovich Propp and Anna-Elizaveta Fridrikhovna Propp , were Volga German wealthy peasants from Saratov Governorate. He attended Saint Petersburg University , majoring in Russian and German philology. Upon graduation he taught Russian and German at a secondary school...
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James Thurber
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
James Grover Thurber was an American cartoonist, writer, humorist, journalist and playwright. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker and collected in his numerous books.
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Yves Tanguy
1900 - 1955 (55 years)
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as just Yves Tanguy , was a French surrealist painter. Biography Tanguy was the son of a retired navy captain, and was born January 5, 1900, at the Ministry of Naval Affairs on Place de la Concorde in Paris, France] His parents were both of Breton origin. After his father's death in 1908, his mother moved back to her native Locronan, Finistère, and he ended up spending much of his youth living with various relatives.
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Isadora Duncan
1877 - 1927 (50 years)
Angela Isadora Duncan was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the US. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the US and Soviet Russia from the age of 22. She died when her scarf became entangled in the wheel and axle of the car in which she was travelling in Nice, France.
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Paul Celan
1920 - 1970 (50 years)
Paul Celan , born Paul Antschel, was a Romanian poet and translator, regarded as one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era. His poetry is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.
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George Frideric Handel
1685 - 1759 (74 years)
George Frideric Handel was a German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest developme...
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Franz Liszt
1811 - 1886 (75 years)
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher of the Romantic period. With a diverse body of work spanning more than six decades, he is considered to be one of the most prolific and influential composers of his era and remains one of the most popular composers in modern concert piano repertoire.
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Claude Debussy
1862 - 1918 (56 years)
Claude Debussy was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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