#14901
Zhang Ruoming
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Zhang Ruoming was a Chinese scholar of French literature, translator and journalist. She was a professor at Yunnan University and considered an authority on the French author André Gide. She was one of the first Chinese women to earn a doctorate in France, graduating from the University of Lyon. In her youth, she was a leader in the May Fourth Movement in Tianjin and was known for her political association with Zhou Enlai and the Chinese Communist Party in France in the early 1920s.
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Olav Beito
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Olav Toreson Beito was a Norwegian linguist and professor of Nordic studies at the University of Oslo. Beito was born in Øystre Slidre, the son of the farmer Thore Andreas Beito and Marit Beito . He married Marit Eker in 1930. Beito earned his candidatus philologiæ degree in 1932 from the University of Oslo, and then taught at schools in Fredrikstad and Oslo. From 1936 to 1939 and in 1948 he taught at the University of Oslo. He received a doctorate in 1942 with a dissertation on r-declension of Old Norse consonant stems. He taught Norwegian at the University of Iceland from 1954 to 1955. He ...
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Fred Niblo
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Fred Niblo was an American pioneer film actor, director and producer. Biography He was born Frederick Liedtke in York, Nebraska to a French mother and a father who had served as a captain in the American Civil War and was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. Using the stage name Fred Niblo, Liedtke began his show business career performing in vaudeville and in live theater. After more than 20 years doing live performing as a monologist, during which he traveled extensively around the globe, he worked in Australia from 1912 through 1915, where he turned to the burgeoning motion picture indus...
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Aira Kaal
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Aira Kaal was an Estonian writer. From 1931 to 1940, she studied in Tartu University, focusing on philosophy, but also learning Estonian literature, world literature and English. From 1938 to 1939, she worked in Great Britain, where she met her husband Arthur Robert Hone, with whom she returned to Estonia. From 1945 to 1950, she was a lecturer in the Tartu State University, teaching the foundations of Marxism-Leninism.
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Egon Petri
1881 - 1962 (81 years)
Egon Petri was a Dutch-American pianist. Life and career Petri's family was Dutch. He was born a Dutch citizen in Hanover, Germany, and grew up in Dresden, where he attended the Kreuzschule. His father, a professional violinist, taught him to play the violin. While still a teenager, Petri played with the Dresden Court Orchestra and with his father's string quartet. He studied composition and theory with Hermann Kretzschmar and Felix Draeseke at the Dresden Conservatory.
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Max Steiner
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Maximilian Raoul Steiner was an Austrian composer and conductor who emigrated to America and became one of Hollywood's greatest musical composers. Steiner was a child prodigy who conducted his first operetta when he was twelve and became a full-time professional, proficient at composing, arranging, and conducting, by the time he was fifteen. Threatened with internment in England during World War I, he fled to Broadway; and in 1929 he moved to Hollywood, where he became one of the first composers to write music scores for films. He is often referred to as "the father of film music", as Steiner...
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Mykola Lysenko
1842 - 1912 (70 years)
Mykola Vitaliyovych Lysenko was a Ukrainian composer, pianist, conductor and ethnomusicologist of the late Romantic period. In his time he was the central figure of Ukrainian music, with an oeuvre that includes operas, art songs, choral works, orchestral and chamber pieces, and a wide variety of solo piano music. He is often credited with founding a national music tradition during the Ukrainian national revival, in the vein of contemporaries such as Grieg in Norway, The Five in Russia as well as Smetana and Dvořák in what is now the Czech Republic.
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Henry Koster
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Henry Koster was a German-born film director. He was the husband of actress Peggy Moran. Early life Koster was born to Jewish parents in Berlin, Germany. He was introduced to cinema around the year 1910 when his uncle opened a movie theater in Berlin. Koster's mother played the piano to accompany the films, leaving the young boy to occupy himself by watching the films. After working initially as a short story writer, Kosterlitz was hired by a Berlin movie company as scenarist, becoming an assistant to director Curtis Bernhardt. Bernhardt became sick one day and asked Kosterlitz to take over a...
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Robert Newton
1905 - 1956 (51 years)
Robert Guy Newton was an English actor. Along with Errol Flynn, Newton was one of the more popular actors among the male juvenile audience of the 1940s and early 1950s, especially with British boys. Known for his hard-living life, he was cited as a role model by the actor Oliver Reed and the Who's drummer Keith Moon.
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William Sterndale Bennett
1816 - 1875 (59 years)
Sir William Sterndale Bennett was an English composer, pianist, conductor and music educator. At the age of ten Bennett was admitted to the London Royal Academy of Music , where he remained for ten years. By the age of twenty, he had begun to make a reputation as a concert pianist, and his compositions received high praise. Among those impressed by Bennett was the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, who invited him to Leipzig. There Bennett became friendly with Robert Schumann, who shared Mendelssohn's admiration for his compositions. Bennett spent three winters composing and performing in Lei...
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Tomás Luis de Victoria
1548 - 1611 (63 years)
Tomás Luis de Victoria was the most famous Spanish composer of the Renaissance. He stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus as among the principal composers of the late Renaissance, and was "admired above all for the intensity of some of his motets and of his Offices for the Dead and for Holy Week". His surviving oeuvre, unlike that of his colleagues, is almost exclusively sacred and polyphonic vocal music, set to Latin texts. As a Catholic priest, as well as an accomplished organist and singer, his career spanned both Spain and Italy. However, he preferred the life ...
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Bob Brown
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Robert Carlton Brown II was an American writer and publisher in many forms from comic squibs to magazine fiction to advertising to avant-garde poetry to business news to cookbooks to political tracts to novelized memoirs to parodies and much more.
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Dorothy Swaine Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Dorothy Swaine Thomas was an American sociologist and economist. She was the 42nd President of the American Sociological Association, the first woman in that role. Life and career Thomas was born on October 24, 1899, in Baltimore, Maryland to John Knight and Sarah Swaine Thomas.
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Karl Aben
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Karl Aben was an Estonian and Latvian linguist and translator. In Estonia, he became known as the country's foremost translator from Latvian at the time , but he also translated from Estonian into Latvian . Aben was born into an Estonian family in Northern Latvia, he studied at the University of Tartu, graduating with a degree in philology in 1940.
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Edmund Rubbra
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Edmund Rubbra was a British composer. He composed both instrumental and vocal works for soloists, chamber groups and full choruses and orchestras. He was greatly esteemed by fellow musicians and was at the peak of his fame in the mid-20th century. The best known of his pieces are his eleven symphonies. Although he was active at a time when many people wrote twelve-tone music, he decided not to write in this idiom; instead, he devised his own distinctive style. His later works were not as popular with the concert-going public as his previous ones had been, although he never lost the respect of his colleagues.
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Vincent Youmans
1898 - 1946 (48 years)
Vincent Millie Youmans was an American Broadway composer and producer. A leading Broadway composer of his day, Youmans collaborated with virtually all the greatest lyricists on Broadway: Ira Gershwin, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Caesar, Anne Caldwell, Leo Robin, Howard Dietz, Clifford Grey, Billy Rose, Edward Eliscu, Edward Heyman, Harold Adamson, Buddy DeSylva and Gus Kahn. Youmans' early songs are remarkable for their economy of melodic material: two-, three- or four-note phrases are constantly repeated and varied by subtle harmonic or rhythmic changes. In later years, however, he turned to longer musical sentences and more rhapsodic melodic lines.
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Fernão de Oliveira
1507 - 1581 (74 years)
Fernão de Oliveira , sometimes named Fernando de Oliveira or Fernando Oliveira, was a Portuguese grammarian, Dominican friar, historian, cartographer, naval pilot and theorist on naval warfare and shipbuilding. An adventurous humanist and renaissance man, he studied and published the first grammar of the Portuguese language, the Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa, in 1536. He was an early critic of slavery and the slave trade.
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Thomas Campion
1567 - 1620 (53 years)
Thomas Campion was an English composer, poet, and physician. He was born in London, educated at Cambridge, studied law in Gray's inn. He wrote over a hundred lute songs, masques for dancing, and an authoritative technical treatise on music.
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Norman Petty
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Norman Petty was an American musician, record producer, publisher, and radio station owner. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of early rock & roll. With Vi Ann Petty—his wife and vocalist—he founded the Norman Petty Trio.
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Humphrey Searle
1915 - 1982 (67 years)
Humphrey Searle was an English composer and writer on music. His music combines aspects of late Romanticism and modernist serialism, particularly reminiscent of his primary influences, Franz Liszt, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, who was briefly his teacher. As a writer on music, Searle published texts on numerous topics; he was an authority on the music of Franz Liszt, and created the initial cataloguing system for his works.
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Joseph Devlin
1871 - 1934 (63 years)
Joseph Devlin was an Irish journalist and influential nationalist politician. He was a Member of Parliament for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom . Later Devlin was an MP and leader of the Nationalist Party in the Parliament of Northern Ireland. He was referred to as "the duodecimo Demosthenes" by the Irish politician Tim Healy which Devlin took as a compliment.
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Meredith Willson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Robert Reiniger Meredith Willson was an American flutist, composer, conductor, musical arranger, bandleader, playwright, and writer. He is perhaps best known for writing the book, music, and lyrics for the 1957 hit Broadway musical The Music Man and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" . Willson wrote three other Broadway musicals and composed symphonies and popular songs. He was twice nominated for Academy Awards for film scores.
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Luigi Nono
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music. Biography Early years Nono, born in Venice, was a member of a wealthy artistic family; his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono began music lessons with Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Venice Conservatory in 1941, where he acquired knowledge of the Renaissance madrigal tradition, amongst other styles. After graduating with a degree in law from the University of Padua, he was given encouragement in composition by Bruno Maderna. Through Maderna, he became acquainted with Hermann Scherchen—then Maderna's conducting teacher—wh...
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Bud Powell
1924 - 1966 (42 years)
Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was an American jazz pianist and composer. A pioneer in the development of bebop, jazz critics have commented that his compositions and playing style "greatly extended the range of jazz harmony," and his application of complex bebop phrasing to the piano influenced both his contemporaries and later pianists including Walter Davis, Jr., Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Barry Harris. Although a severe beating by police in 1945, followed by years of electroconvulsive therapy treatments and hospitalization, impacted his health during the latter half of his career, he continued to compose, record, and perform until shortly before his death in 1966.
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Kai Winding
1922 - 1983 (61 years)
Kai Chresten Winding was a Danish-born American trombonist and jazz composer. He is known for his collaborations with fellow trombonist J. J. Johnson. His version of "More", the theme from the movie Mondo Cane, reached in 1963 number 8 in the Billboard Hot 100 and remained his only entry here.
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Don Ellis
1934 - 1978 (44 years)
Donald Johnson Ellis was an American jazz trumpeter, drummer, composer, and bandleader. He is best known for his extensive musical experimentation, particularly in the area of time signatures. Later in his life he worked as a film composer, contributing a score to 1971's The French Connection and 1973's The Seven-Ups.
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Patsy Cline
1932 - 1963 (31 years)
Patsy Cline was an American singer. She is considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century and was one of the first country music artists to cross over into pop music. Cline had several major hits during her eight-year recording career, including two number-one hits on the Billboard Hot Country and Western Sides chart.
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Lionel Tertis
1876 - 1975 (99 years)
Lionel Tertis, CBE was an English violist. He was one of the first viola players to achieve international fame and a noted teacher. Career Tertis was born in West Hartlepool, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. He first studied violin in Leipzig, Germany and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. There he was encouraged by the principal, Alexander Mackenzie, to take up the viola instead. Under the additional influence of Oskar Nedbal, he did so and rapidly became one of the best known violists of his time, touring Europe and the US as a soloist.
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Karl Richter
1926 - 1981 (55 years)
Karl Richter was a German conductor, choirmaster, organist, and harpsichordist. Early life and education Karl Richter was born in Plauen to Christian Johannes Richter, a Protestant pastor, and Clara Hedwig Richter. He studied first in Dresden, where he was a member of the Dresdner Kreuzchor and later in Leipzig, where he received his degree in 1949. He studied with Günther Ramin , Karl Straube and Rudolf Mauersberger.
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Henryk Szeryng
1918 - 1988 (70 years)
Henryk Szeryng was a Polish-Mexican violinist. Early years He was born in Warsaw, Poland on 22 September 1918 into a wealthy Jewish family. The surname "Szeryng" is a Polish transliteration of his Yiddish surname, which nowadays would be spelled "Shering" in the modern Yiddish-to-English transliteration.
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Joe Venuti
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Giuseppe "Joe" Venuti was an American jazz musician and pioneer jazz violinist. Considered the father of jazz violin, he pioneered the use of string instruments in jazz along with the guitaristist Eddie Lang, a friend since childhood. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, Venuti and Lang made many recordings as leader and as featured soloists. He and Lang became so well known for their 'hot' violin and guitar solos that on many commercial dance recordings they were hired to do 12- or 24-bar duos towards the end of otherwise stock dance arrangements. In 1926, Venuti and Lang started recording for...
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Samuel Silas Curry
1847 - 1921 (74 years)
Samuel Silas Curry was an American professor of elocution and vocal expression. He is the namesake of Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. Early life and education Born on a small farm in Chatata, Tennessee, he was the son of James Campbell Curry and Nancy Young Curry, and shared kinship with famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Growing up on a frontier farm, he learned what it meant to work hard and gained a love of the natural world which would influence his later work. He was a teenager during the tumultuous years of the American Civil War, and experienced hardships when ...
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Alan Bush
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Alan Dudley Bush was a British composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and political activist. A committed communist, his uncompromising political beliefs were often reflected in his music. He composed prolifically across a range of genres, but struggled through his lifetime for recognition from the British musical establishment, which largely ignored his works.
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John Stainer
1840 - 1901 (61 years)
Sir John Stainer was an English composer and organist whose music, though seldom performed today , was very popular during his lifetime. His work as choir trainer and organist set standards for Anglican church music that are still influential. He was also active as an academic, becoming Heather Professor of Music at Oxford.
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Myra Hess
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Dame Julia Myra Hess, was an English pianist best known for her performances of the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. Career Early life Julia Myra Hess was born on 25 February 1890 to a Jewish family in South Hampstead, London. She was the youngest of four children and began piano lessons at the age of five. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and at the Royal Academy of Music under Tobias Matthay, after winning a scholarship to the latter in 1903 at age 12.
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Lee Morgan
1938 - 1972 (34 years)
Edward Lee Morgan was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. One of the key hard bop musicians of the 1960s and a cornerstone of the Blue Note label, Morgan came to prominence in his late teens, recording with bandleaders like John Coltrane, Curtis Fuller, Dizzy Gillespie, Hank Mobley and Wayne Shorter, and playing in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
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Matthias Lexer
1830 - 1892 (62 years)
Matthias Lexer , later Matthias von Lexer , was a German lexicographer, author of the principal dictionary of the Middle High German language, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch von Matthias Lexer, completed in 1878 in three volumes. This dictionary was founded upon the base of the Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch by Benecke, Müller and Zarncke, completed in 1866 in three volumes.
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Ludwig Minkus
1826 - 1917 (91 years)
Ludwig Minkus , also known as Léon Fyodorovich Minkus , was an Austrian composer of ballet music, a violinist and teacher of music. Minkus is noted for the music he composed during his career in St. Petersburg, Russia. Beginning in 1871 Minkus served in the official post of Composer of Ballet Music to the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, a position he held until it was abolished upon his retirement in 1886. During his long career in St. Petersburg, Minkus composed for the original works and revivals staged by the ballet masters Arthur Saint-Léon and Marius Petipa. Among the composer's most celebrated compositions is his score for La source , Don Quixote ; and La Bayadère .
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Ed Wood
1924 - 1978 (54 years)
Edward Davis Wood Jr. was an American filmmaker, actor, and pulp novel author. In the 1950s, Wood directed several low-budget science fiction, crime and horror films that later became cult classics, notably Glen or Glenda , Jail Bait , Bride of the Monster , Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls . In the 1960s and 1970s, he moved towards sexploitation and pornographic films such as The Sinister Urge , Orgy of the Dead and Necromania , and wrote over 80 lurid pulp crime and sex novels.
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Mieczysław Horszowski
1892 - 1993 (101 years)
Mieczysław Horszowski was a Polish-American pianist who had one of the longest careers in the history of the performing arts. Life Early life Horszowski was born in Lwów , Austria-Hungary . He was first taught piano by his mother, a pupil of Karol Mikuli, who had himself been a pupil of Frédéric Chopin. He became a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna at the age of seven; Leschetizky had studied with Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny. Leschetizky's sister-in-law, Angele Potocka, referred to Horszowski as "a wunderkind of high order".
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Thomas Cooper
1517 - 1594 (77 years)
Thomas Cooper was an English bishop, lexicographer, theologian, and writer. Life Cooper was born in Oxford, England, where he was educated at Magdalen College. He became Master of Magdalen College School and afterwards practised as a physician in Oxford.
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Lowell George
1945 - 1979 (34 years)
Lowell Thomas George was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer, who was the primary guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and founder/leader for the rock band Little Feat.
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Michael Haydn
1737 - 1806 (69 years)
Johann Michael Haydn was an Austrian composer of the Classical period, the younger brother of Joseph Haydn. Life Michael Haydn was born in 1737 in the Austrian village of Rohrau, near the Hungarian border. His father was Mathias Haydn, a wheelwright who also served as "Marktrichter", an office akin to village mayor. Haydn's mother Maria, Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Mathias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp, and he also made sure t...
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Balraj Sahni
1913 - 1973 (60 years)
Balraj Sahni was an Indian film and stage actor, who is best known for , Do Bigha Zameen , Chhoti Bahen , Kabuliwala , Waqt and Garam Hawa . He was the brother of Bhisham Sahni, noted Hindi writer, playwright, and actor.
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Charles Vidor
1900 - 1959 (59 years)
Charles Vidor was a Hungarian film director. Among his film successes are The Bridge , The Tuttles of Tahiti , The Desperadoes , Cover Girl , Together Again , A Song to Remember , Over 21 , Gilda , The Loves of Carmen , Rhapsody , Love Me or Leave Me , The Swan , The Joker Is Wild , and A Farewell to Arms .
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Veit Harlan
1899 - 1964 (65 years)
Veit Harlan was a German film director and actor. Harlan reached the highpoint of his career as a director in the Nazi era; most notably his antisemitic film Jud Süß makes him controversial. While viewed critically for his ideologies, a number of critics consider him a capable director on the grounds of such work as his Opfergang .
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Sigismond Thalberg
1812 - 1871 (59 years)
Sigismond Thalberg was an Austrian composer and one of the most distinguished virtuoso pianists of the 19th century. Family Thalberg was born in Pâquis near Geneva on 8 January 1812. According to his own account, he was the illegitimate son of Moritz, Prince of Dietrichstein and Maria Julia Bydeskuty von Ipp, from a Hungarian family of lower nobility. In 1820, Julia married Baron Alexander Ludwig . However, according to his birth certificate, he was the son of Joseph Thalberg and Fortunée Stein, both from Frankfurt-am-Main.
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Colin Cherry
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Edward Colin Cherry was a British cognitive scientist whose main contributions were in focused auditory attention, specifically the cocktail party problem regarding the capacity to follow one conversation while many other conversations are going on in a noisy room. Cherry used shadowing tasks to study this problem, which involve playing two different auditory messages to a participant's left and right ears and instructing them to attend to only one. The participant must then shadow this attended message.
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Kurt Eisner
1867 - 1919 (52 years)
Kurt Eisner was a German politician, revolutionary, journalist, and theatre critic. As a socialist journalist, he organized the socialist revolution that overthrew the Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria in November 1918, which led to his being described as "the symbol of the Bavarian revolution". He is used as an example of charismatic authority by Max Weber. Eisner subsequently proclaimed the People's State of Bavaria but was assassinated by far-right German nationalist Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley in Munich on 21 February 1919.
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Leopold Godowsky
1870 - 1938 (68 years)
Leopold Mordkhelovich Godowsky Sr. was a Lithuanian-born American virtuoso pianist, composer and teacher. He was one of the most highly regarded performers of his time, known for his theories concerning the application of relaxed weight and economy of motion within pianistic technique – principles later propagated by his pupils, such as Heinrich Neuhaus.
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