#14801
Helena Modjeska
1840 - 1909 (69 years)
Helena Modrzejewska , known professionally as Helena Modjeska, was a Polish actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles. She was successful first on the Polish stage. After emigrating to the United States , she also succeeded on stage in America and London. She is regarded as the greatest actress in the history of theatre in Poland.
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Sidney Lanier
1842 - 1881 (39 years)
Sidney Clopton Lanier was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned , taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry.
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Dimitri Mitropoulos
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Dimitri Mitropoulos was a Greek and American conductor, pianist, and composer. Life and career Mitropoulos was born in Athens, the son of Yannis and Angelikē Mitropoulos. His father owned a leather goods shop in downtown Athens. He was musically precocious, demonstrating his abilities at an early age. From the ages of eleven to fourteen, when Mitropoulos was in secondary school, he would host and preside over informal musical gatherings at his house every Saturday afternoon. His earliest acknowledged composition – a sonata for violin and piano, now lost – dates from this period. His opera S...
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William Grant Still
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
William Grant Still Jr. was an American composer of nearly two hundred works, including five symphonies, four ballets, nine operas, over thirty choral works, art songs, chamber music, and solo works. Born in Mississippi and growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Still attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and then Edgard Varèse. Because of his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, Still is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Albert Bachmann
1863 - 1934 (71 years)
Johann Albert Bachmann was a Swiss lexicographer and dialectologist, professor for Germanic philology at Zürich University from 1896. From 1892 he was an editor of the Schweizerisches Idiotikon dictionary, acting as editor-in-chief from 1896 until his death. Bachmann specialized on Swiss German dialects. He edited the series Beiträge zur Schweizerdeutschen Grammatik and founded, together with Louis Gauchat, the Phonographic Archive of Zurich University in 1913.
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Paul Chambers
1935 - 1969 (34 years)
Paul Laurence Dunbar Chambers Jr. was an American jazz double bassist. A fixture of rhythm sections during the 1950s and 1960s, he has become one of the most widely-known jazz bassists of the hard bop era. He was also known for his bowed solos. Chambers recorded about a dozen albums as a leader or co-leader, and over 100 more as a sideman, especially as the anchor of trumpeter Miles Davis's "first great quintet" and with pianist Wynton Kelly .
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Mark Noble
1754 - 1827 (73 years)
Mark Noble was an English clergyman, biographer and antiquary. Life He was born in Digbeth, Birmingham, the third surviving son of William Heatley Noble, a merchant there. His father sold, among many other commodities, beads, knives, toys, and other trifles which he distributed wholesale among slave traders, and he had also a large mill for rolling silver and for plating purposes. Mark was educated at schools at Yardley, Worcestershire, and Ashbourne, Derbyshire. On the death of his father he inherited a modest fortune, and was articled to Mr. Barber, a solicitor of Birmingham. On the expira...
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Richard Fariña
1937 - 1966 (29 years)
Richard George Fariña was an American folksinger, songwriter, poet and novelist. Early years and education Fariña was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of an Irish mother, Theresa Crozier, and a Cuban father of Galician origin, also named Richard Fariña. He grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. He earned an academic scholarship to Cornell University, starting as an engineering major, but later switching to English. While at Cornell he published short stories for local literary magazines and for national periodicals, including Transatlantic Review and Mademoiselle.
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Erich Kleiber
1890 - 1956 (66 years)
Erich Kleiber was an Austrian, later Argentine, conductor, known for his interpretations of the classics and as an advocate of new music. Kleiber was born in Vienna, and after studying at the Prague Conservatory, he followed the traditional route for an aspiring conductor in German-speaking countries of the time, starting as a répétiteur in an opera house and moving into conducting in increasingly senior positions. After holding posts in Darmstadt , Barmen-Elberfeld , Düsseldorf and Mannheim he was appointed in 1923 to the important post of musical director of the Berlin State Opera.
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Eddie Condon
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Albert Edwin Condon was an American jazz banjoist, guitarist, and bandleader. A leading figure in Chicago jazz, he also played piano and sang. He also owned a self-named night club in New York City.
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Dolores Costello
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Dolores Costello was an American film actress who achieved her greatest success during the era of silent movies. She was nicknamed "The Goddess of the Silent Screen" by her first husband, the actor John Barrymore. She was the mother of John Drew Barrymore and grandmother of actress and talk show host Drew Barrymore.
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Hugo Alfvén
1872 - 1960 (88 years)
Hugo Emil Alfvén was a Swedish composer, conductor, violinist, and painter. Career Violinist Alfvén was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and studied at the Royal College of Music from 1887 to 1891 with the violin as his main instrument while receiving lessons from Lars Zetterquist. He also took private composition lessons from Johan Lindegren, a leading counterpoint expert. At the same time he played the violin at the Royal Opera in Stockholm 1890-1892.
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Elio Petri
1929 - 1982 (53 years)
Eraclio Petri , commonly known as Elio Petri, was an Italian film director, screenwriter, theatre director, and critic associated with the political cinema in the 1960s and '70s. His film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion won the 1971 Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, and his film The Working Class Goes to Heaven won the Palme d'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.
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Uzeyir Hajibeyov
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Uzeyir bey Abdulhuseyn bey oghlu Hajibeyov , known as Uzeyir Hajibeyov , was an Azerbaijani composer, conductor, publicist, playwright, and social figure. He is recognized as the father of Azerbaijani composed classical music and opera. Uzeyir Hajibeyov composed the music of the national anthem of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic . He also composed the anthem used by Azerbaijan during the Soviet period. He was the first composer of an opera in the Islamic world. He composed the first oriental opera Leyli and Majnun in 1908 and since then he is revered for adapting the written masterpiece to the ...
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Blanche Sweet
1896 - 1986 (90 years)
Sarah Blanche Sweet was an American silent film actress who began her career in the early days of the motion picture film industry. Early life Born Sarah Blanche Sweet in Chicago, Illinois in 1896, she was the daughter of Pearl Alexander, a dancer, and Gilbert Joel Sweet, a wine merchant. The actors Antrim and Gertrude Short were cousins of Blanche. Her mother died when Blanche was an infant, and she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Cora Blanche Alexander. Cora Alexander found her many parts as a young child. At age 4, she toured in the play The Battle of the Strong with Marie Burroug...
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Mario Mattoli
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Mario Mattoli was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He directed 86 films between 1934 and 1966. His 1939 film Defendant, Stand Up! was shown as part of a retrospective on Italian comedy at the 67th Venice International Film Festival.
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G. David Houston
1880 - 1940 (60 years)
Gordon David Houston was Professor of English at Howard University, one of the first African-American educators to teach Old English literature and the first African-American from Cambridge to graduate from Harvard University.
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Mary Lou Williams
1910 - 1981 (71 years)
Mary Lou Williams was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records . Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.
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Erna Berger
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Erna Berger was a German lyric coloratura soprano. She was best known for roles such as Queen of the Night and Konstanze. Career Born in Dresden, Germany, Berger spent some years as a child in India and South America. She lived there later on as well, working as a clerk and a piano teacher, before borrowing enough money for the trip back to Germany. At age 26, she secured a position as a soubrette soprano at the Semperoper in Dresden and had her first success as Hannele in Paul Graener's opera Hanneles Himmelfahrt, based on Gerhart Hauptmann's play The Assumption of Hannele. She later held leading positions at the Vienna State Opera, the Berlin State Opera, and the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
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Agostino Steffani
1654 - 1728 (74 years)
Agostino Steffani was an Italian bishop, polymath, diplomat and composer. Education Steffani was born at Castelfranco Veneto on 25 July 1654. As a boy he was admitted as a chorister at San Marco, Venice.
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Bernd Alois Zimmermann
1918 - 1970 (52 years)
Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a German composer. He is perhaps best known for his opera Die Soldaten, which is regarded as one of the most important German operas of the 20th century, after those of Berg. His eclectic music, which employs a wide range of techniques including dodecaphony and musical quotation, encompasses the styles of the avant-garde, serial, and postmodern.
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Arthur Adams
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Arthur Aleksandrovich Adams , was a Soviet spy, and Hero of the Russian Federation, who passed critical information to the Soviet Union about the American Manhattan Project. Early life Adams was born in the city of Eskilstuna, Sweden in 1885 to a Swedish father and a Russian Jewish mother. Following the death of his father, Adams's mother with her children returned to Russia, where she died in 1895. Adams entered a military navy school in 1896. In 1903 he graduated from a school of mining technology in Kronshtadt. His wife, Dorothy, was an aunt of American book editor Robert Gottlieb.
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Sarah Robertson
1891 - 1948 (57 years)
Sarah Margaret Armour Robertson was a Canadian painter of landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals for private homes. Early life Robertson was born in Montreal on June 16, 1891, the daughter of John Armour Robertson and Jessie Anne Christie, and the oldest of four siblings. Her parents were originally from Scotland. She was educated in Montreal. During her childhood, the family lived comfortably, but later faced financial struggles. She began art studies at the age of nineteen with a Wood Scholarship to the Art Association of Montreal under William Brymner and Maurice Cullen. World War ...
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Eben Gowrie Waterhouse
1881 - 1977 (96 years)
Eben Gowrie Waterhouse was an Australian who had three distinguished careers. Starting out as an innovative teacher of languages, he became one of Australia's most prominent Germanists when classical German culture still commanded worldwide respect. Between the Wars in Sydney he was a leading arbiter of taste in house-and-garden living, fostering a conception of garden design which still dominates much of the Sydney North Shore and parts of Melbourne. Finally, in his long retirement he brought about, as scholar and plant-breeder, an international revival of interest in the genus Camellia.
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Adrian Willaert
1480 - 1562 (82 years)
Adrian Willaert was a Flemish composer of High Renaissance music. Mainly active in Italy, he was the founder of the Venetian School. He was one of the most representative members of the generation of northern composers who moved to Italy and transplanted the polyphonic Franco-Flemish style there.
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Hoimar von Ditfurth
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Hoimar von Ditfurth was a German physician and scientific journalist. He was the father of Christian von Ditfurth, a historian, and Jutta Ditfurth, a writer and journalist. Ditfurth won many awards during his long career, including the Adolf Grimme Awards in 1968, the Bambi Prize in 1972, and the Kalinga Prize in 1978.
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Louis Hasselmans
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Louis Hasselmans was a French cellist and conductor. Biography The son of harpist Alphonse Hasselmans, Louis Hasselmans studied the cello with Jules Desart at the Conservatoire de Paris. He obtained a First prize in 1893. He worked with Albert Lavignac, Benjamin Godard and Jules Massenet.
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Silvestre Revueltas
1899 - 1940 (41 years)
Silvestre Revueltas Sánchez was a Mexican composer of classical music, a violinist and a conductor. Life Revueltas was born in Santiago Papasquiaro in Durango, and studied at the National Conservatory in Mexico City, St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, and the Chicago College of Music. He gave violin recitals and in 1929 was invited by Carlos Chávez to become assistant conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, a post he held until 1935. He and Chávez did much to promote contemporary Mexican music. It was around this time that Revueltas began to compose in earnest. He bega...
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Wilhelm Backhaus
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
Wilhelm Backhaus was a German pianist and pedagogue. He was particularly well known for his interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms. He was also much admired as a chamber musician.
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Marjorie Lawrence
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Marjorie Florence Lawrence CBE was an Australian dramatic soprano, particularly noted as an interpreter of Richard Wagner's operas. She was the first Metropolitan Opera soprano to perform the immolation scene in Götterdämmerung by riding her horse into the flames as Wagner had intended. She was afflicted by polio from 1941. Lawrence later served on the faculty of the School of Music at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
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Herbert Rawlinson
1885 - 1953 (68 years)
Herbert Banemann Rawlinson was an English-born stage, film, radio, and television actor. A leading man during Hollywood's silent film era, Rawlinson transitioned to character roles after the advent of sound films.
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Kirill Kondrashin
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Kirill Petrovich Kondrashin was a Soviet and Russian conductor. People's Artist of the USSR . Early life Kondrashin was born in Moscow to a family of orchestral musicians. Having spent many hours at rehearsals, he made a firm decision at the age of 14 to become a conductor. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory from 1931 to 1936 under the conductor Boris Khaikin. Kondrashin began conducting in the Young People's Theatre in Moscow in 1931, continuing in the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre three years later. He conducted at the Maly Opera Theatre in Leningrad from 1938 to 1942 and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow from 1943.
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Bobby Timmons
1935 - 1974 (39 years)
Robert Henry Timmons was an American jazz pianist and composer. He was a sideman in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for two periods , between which he was part of Cannonball Adderley's band. Several of Timmons' compositions written when part of these bands – including "Moanin'", "Dat Dere", and "This Here" – enjoyed commercial success and brought him more attention. In the early and mid-1960s he led a series of piano trios that toured and recorded extensively.
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Daniel Bonade
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Daniel Bonade was a French classical clarinetist and professor of clarinet. He was the most influential teacher of the first generation of American-born professional clarinetists. Biography Daniel Bonade was born in Geneva, Switzerland on April 4, 1896. His father, Louis Bonade, was a clarinetist and received the Premier Prix from the Paris Conservatory in 1870. His mother, Esther Poissenot, was a pianist and a vocalist.
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Howard Lindsay
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Howard Lindsay, born Herman Nelke, was an American playwright, librettist, director, actor and theatrical producer. He is best known for his writing work as part of the collaboration of Lindsay and Crouse, and for his performance, with his wife Dorothy Stickney, in the long-running play Life with Father.
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Dinu Lipatti
1917 - 1950 (33 years)
Constantin "Dinu" Lipatti was a Romanian classical pianist and composer whose career was cut short by his death from effects related to Hodgkin's disease at age 33. He was elected posthumously to the Romanian Academy. He composed few works, all of which demonstrated a strong influence from Bartok.
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Juliette Alvin
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Juliette Louise Alvin was a French-British cellist, viola da gamba player, and pioneering music therapist. Biograph She was born in Limoges, France, and studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, where she was awarded the Premier Prix d'Excellence and the Mèdaille d'Or. She studied under a master class arrangement with Pablo Casals. Her debut recital took place in 1927 at London's Wigmore Hall.
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Usmar Ismail
1921 - 1971 (50 years)
Usmar Ismail was an Indonesian film director, author, journalist and revolutionary of Minangkabau descent. He is widely regarded as the native Indonesian pioneer of the cinema of Indonesia. Biography Ismail was born in 1921 in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra. His father, Datuk Tumenggung Ismail, taught at the medical school in Padang. His brother Abu Hanifah was also a well-known revolutionary and writer. Ismail attended ASM-A Yogyakarta and later obtained a B.A. in cinematography from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1952.
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Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
1875 - 1911 (36 years)
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis was a Lithuanian composer, painter, choirmaster, cultural figure, and writer in Polish. Čiurlionis contributed to symbolism and art nouveau, and was representative of the fin de siècle epoch. He has been considered one of the pioneers of abstract art in Europe. During his short life, he composed about 400 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings, as well as many literary works and poems. The majority of his paintings are housed in the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania. His works have had a profound influence on modern Lithuanian...
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James Booker
1939 - 1983 (44 years)
James Carroll Booker III was a New Orleans rhythm and blues keyboardist. His 1960 recording "Gonzo" reached No. 43 on the Billboard magazine record chart and No. 3 in R&B, and he toured internationally in the 1970s. After being mainly a rhythm and blues player, Booker later fused this genre with jazz and with popular music such as The Beatles, playing these in his signature backbeat. His influence is profound in the New Orleans music scene, where his renditions and originals are most often performed. Flamboyant, and having an extraordinary technical facility, he was known as "the Black Libera...
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Frank Benson
1858 - 1939 (81 years)
Sir Francis Robert Benson was an English actor-manager. He founded his own company in 1883 and produced all but two of Shakespeare's plays. His thirty-year association with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and the annual Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon laid down foundations for the creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company after his death.
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Caspar Whitney
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Caspar William Whitney was an American author, editor, explorer, outdoorsman and war correspondent. He originated the concept of the All-American team in college football in 1889 when he worked for Harper's Magazine.
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Paul Ritter
1829 - 1907 (78 years)
Paul Ritter was a German architectural painter and etcher. Biography Ritter was born at Nuremberg. He was deaf from the fourth year of his life. A pupil of Heideloff, he engraved for publishers in Berlin, Stuttgart, and Nuremberg. About 1870 he took up painting in oil. In 1888 the title of royal professor was conferred on him. He died in Nuremberg.
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Lowell Mason
1792 - 1872 (80 years)
Lowell Mason was an American music director and banker who was a leading figure in 19th-century American church music. Lowell composed over 1600 hymn tunes, many of which are often sung today. His best-known work includes an arrangement of Joy to the World and the tune Bethany, which sets the hymn text Nearer, My God, to Thee. Mason also set music to Mary Had A Little Lamb. He is largely credited with introducing music into American public schools, and is considered the first important U.S. music educator. He has also been criticized for helping to largely eliminate the robust tradition of p...
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Ian Hendry
1931 - 1984 (53 years)
Ian Mackendrick Hendry was a British actor. He worked on several British TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, including the lead in the first series of The Avengers and The Lotus Eaters, and played roles in the films The Hill , Repulsion , Get Carter , and Theatre of Blood .
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Joe Farrell
1937 - 1986 (49 years)
Joseph Carl Firrantello , known as Joe Farrell, was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who primarily performed as a saxophonist and flutist. He is best known for a series of albums under his own name on the CTI record label and for playing in the initial incarnation of Chick Corea's Return to Forever.
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Jock Mahoney
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Jacques Joseph O'Mahoney , known professionally as Jock Mahoney, was an American actor and stuntman. He starred in two Action/Adventure television series, The Range Rider and Yancy Derringer. He played Tarzan in two feature films and was associated in various capacities with several other Tarzan productions. He was credited variously as Jacques O'Mahoney, Jock O'Mahoney, Jack Mahoney, and finally Jock Mahoney.
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Franco Faccio
1840 - 1891 (51 years)
Francesco Antonio Faccio was an Italian composer and conductor. Born in Verona, he studied music at the Milan Conservatory from 1855 where he was a pupil of Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and, as scholar William Ashbrook notes, "where he struck up a lifelong friendship with Arrigo Boito, two years his junior" and with whom he was to collaborate in many ways.
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Orlando di Lasso
1533 - 1594 (61 years)
Orlando di Lasso was a composer of the late Renaissance. The chief representative of the mature polyphonic style in the Franco-Flemish school, Lassus stands with William Byrd, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Tomás Luis de Victoria as the leading composers of the later Renaissance. Immensely prolific, his music varies considerably in style and genres, which gave him unprecedented popularity throughout Europe.
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