#15951
Daniel Auber
1782 - 1871 (89 years)
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber was a French composer and director of the Paris Conservatoire. Born into an artistic family, Auber was at first an amateur composer before he took up writing operas professionally when the family's fortunes failed in 1820. He soon established a professional partnership with the librettist Eugène Scribe that lasted for 41 years and produced 39 operas, most of them commercial and critical successes. He is mostly associated with opéra-comique and composed 35 works in that genre. With Scribe he wrote the first French grand opera, La Muette de Portici in 1828, which p...
Go to Profile#15952
Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti
1774 - 1849 (75 years)
Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti was an Italian cardinal and famed hyperpolyglot. Life Born to humble parents in Bologna, he showed exceptional mnemonic skills as well as a flair for music and foreign language learning from a very young age. He studied with the Piarists where he had the chance to meet several missionaries from various countries. By speaking with them he began learning several new languages including Swedish, German, Spanish and South American native languages as well as studying Latin and ancient Greek in school. He completed his theological studies before he had reached the minimum age for ordination as a priest.
Go to Profile#15953
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
1890 - 1998 (108 years)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass , which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring .
Go to Profile#15954
Jules Feller
1859 - 1940 (81 years)
Jules Feller was a Belgian academician and Walloon militant. Biography Jules Feller created the of spelling for the Walloon language. This is also used for writing the Picard language since a consensus arose between universities in favour of the written form known as Feller-Carton .
Go to Profile#15955
Charles Laughton
1899 - 1962 (63 years)
Charles Laughton was an English actor. He was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. In 1927, he was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester, with whom he lived and worked until his death.
Go to Profile#15956
Claudio Monteverdi
1567 - 1643 (76 years)
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, choirmaster and string player. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history.
Go to Profile#15957
Maximus Planudes
1260 - 1305 (45 years)
Maximus Planudes was a Byzantine Greek monk, scholar, anthologist, translator, mathematician, grammarian and theologian at Constantinople. Through his translations from Latin into Greek and from Greek into Latin, he brought the Greek East and the Latin West into closer contact with one another. He is now best known as a compiler of the Greek Anthology.
Go to Profile#15958
Frederic Goudy
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Frederic William Goudy was an American printer, artist and type designer whose typefaces include Copperplate Gothic, Goudy Old Style and Kennerley. He was one of the most prolific of American type designers and his self-named type continues to be one of the most popular in America.
Go to Profile#15959
John Martin
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
John Martin became America's first major dance critic in 1927. Focusing his efforts on propelling the modern dance movement, he greatly influenced the careers of dancers such as Martha Graham. Within his life he wrote several books on the modern dance and received numerous awards for his work.
Go to Profile#15960
Alice Neel
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.
Go to Profile#15961
Leo Amery
1873 - 1955 (82 years)
Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery , also known as L. S. Amery, was a British Conservative politician and journalist. During his career, he was known for his interest in military preparedness, British India and the British Empire and for his opposition to appeasement. After his retirement and death, he was perhaps best known for the remarks he made in the House of Commons on 7 May 1940 during the Norway Debate.
Go to Profile#15962
Joyce Kilmer
1886 - 1918 (32 years)
Alfred Joyce Kilmer was an American writer and poet mainly remembered for a short poem titled "Trees" , which was published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914. Though a prolific poet whose works celebrated the common beauty of the natural world as well as his Catholic faith, Kilmer was also a journalist, literary critic, lecturer, and editor. At the time of his deployment to Europe during World War I, Kilmer was considered the leading American Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, whom critics often compared to British contemporaries G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc .
Go to Profile#15963
Antonino Votto
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Antonino Votto, sometimes spelt Antonio Votto, was an Italian operatic conductor and vocal coach. Votto developed an extensive discography with the Teatro alla Scala in Milan during the 1950s, when EMI produced the bulk of its studio recordings featuring Maria Callas. Though Votto was a dependable conductor , critics frequently faulted his recordings for their lack of emotional immediacy. This may have been an occupational hazard of working in the studio, as his live sets with Callas, including a Norma and La sonnambula are considered to be great performances. Among his pupils was the sopr...
Go to Profile#15964
Alois Walde
1869 - 1924 (55 years)
Alois Walde was an Austrian linguist. Alois Walde studied classical philology and comparative linguistics at the University of Innsbruck where he was awarded a PhD in 1894. The year after, he became a state employee at the university library. In 1895, he was awarded his habilitation and became a professor in 1904 at the University of Innsbruck. 1909-1912, Walde was Professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Giessen, but returned in 1912 to Innsbruck where he became the dean of faculty in 1914 and rector of the university in 1916. The year after, he became a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#15965
Mary Wigman
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Mary Wigman was a German dancer and choreographer, notable as the pioneer of expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes. She is considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance. She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.
Go to Profile#15966
James Cagney
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
James Francis Cagney Jr. was an American actor, dancer and film director. On stage and in film, he was known for his consistently energetic performances, distinctive vocal style, and deadpan comic timing. He won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances.
Go to Profile#15967
Adolphe Pictet
1799 - 1875 (76 years)
Adolphe Pictet was a Swiss linguist, philologist and ethnologist. Pictet, the cousin of the biologist Francois Jules Pictet, is well known for his research in the field of comparative linguistics. He played a crucial formative role in the development of Ferdinand de Saussure; "it was Pictet who introduced the thirteen-year-old Saussure to the theoretical foundations of Indo-European linguistics." But he was also "a dedicated champion of German Romanticism and idealist philosophy":Like French, English, and Russian Romantics since the beginning of the century, he made a journey to Germany, where he became acquainted with A.
Go to Profile#15968
Paul Gallico
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Paul William Gallico was an American novelist and short story and sports writer. Many of his works were adapted for motion pictures. He is perhaps best remembered for The Snow Goose, his most critically successful book, for the novel The Poseidon Adventure, primarily through the 1972 film adaptation, and for four novels about the beloved character of Mrs. Harris.
Go to Profile#15969
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
1915 - 1975 (60 years)
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was an Israeli philosopher, mathematician, and linguist. He was a pioneer in the fields of machine translation and formal linguistics. Biography Born Oscar Westreich in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, he was raised in Berlin. In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine with the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and briefly joined the kibbutz Tirat Zvi before settling in Jerusalem and marrying Shulamith.
Go to Profile#15970
Irving Berlin
1888 - 1989 (101 years)
Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist. His music forms a large part of the Great American Songbook. Berlin received numerous honors including an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, and a Tony Award. He also received Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Gerald R. Ford in 1977. Journalist Walter Cronkite stated he "helped write the story of this country, capturing the best of who we are and the dreams that shape our lives".
Go to Profile#15971
Vladimir I. Georgiev
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Vladimir Ivanov Georgiev was a prominent Bulgarian linguist, philologist, and educational administrator. Biography Vladimir Georgiev was born in the Bulgarian village of Gabare, near Byala Slatina and graduated in philology at Sofia University in 1930. He specialized in Indo-European, Slavic and general linguistics at the University of Vienna , and later at the universities of Berlin , Florence and Paris . Assistant Professor at Sofia University , Associated Professor , Professor , head of the department of general and comparative-historical linguistics at the Faculty of History and Philology at Sofia University , Dean of the Faculty of Philology , Vice-Rector , Rector .
Go to Profile#15972
Martin Hattala
1821 - 1903 (82 years)
Martin Hattala was a Slovak pedagogue, Roman Catholic theologian and linguist. He is best known for his reform of the Štúr's Slovak language, so-called Hodža-Hattala reform, in which he introduced the etymological principle to the Slovak language.
Go to Profile#15973
James Blish
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
James Benjamin Blish was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is best known for his Cities in Flight novels and his series of Star Trek novelizations written with his wife, J. A. Lawrence. His novel A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award. He is credited with creating the term "gas giant" to refer to large planetary bodies.
Go to Profile#15974
Mei Lanfang
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Mei Lan , better known by his stage name Mei Lanfang, was a notable Peking opera artist in modern Chinese theater. Mei was known as "Queen of Peking Opera". Mei was exclusively known for his female lead roles and particularly his "verdant-robed girls" , young or middle-aged women of grace and refinement. He was considered one of the "Four Great Dan", along with Shang Xiaoyun, Cheng Yanqiu, and Xun Huisheng.
Go to Profile#15975
Gerardus Vossius
1577 - 1649 (72 years)
Gerrit Janszoon Vos , often known by his Latin name Gerardus Vossius, was a Dutch classical scholar and theologian. Life He was the son of Johannes Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerardus was born, before friction with the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the University of Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585. Here in Dordrecht the son received his education,...
Go to Profile#15976
Dhondo Keshav Karve
1858 - 1962 (104 years)
Dhondo Keshav Karve , popularly known as Maharshi Karve, was a social reformer in India in the field of women's welfare. He advocated widow remarriage and he himself married a widow. Karve was a pioneer in promoting widows' education. He founded the first women's university in India, the SNDT Women's University in 1916. The Government of India awarded him with the highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna, in 1958, the year of his 100th birthday. He organized a conference against the practice of devdasi. He started 'Anath balikashram' an orphanage for girls. His intention was to give education to all women and make them stand on their own feet.
Go to Profile#15977
Leonard Robert Palmer
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Leonard Robert Palmer was author and Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford from 1952 to 1971. He was also a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Palmer made some significant contributions to the study of Classical languages, and in the area of historical linguistics.
Go to Profile#15978
Guido of Arezzo
992 - 1050 (58 years)
Guido of Arezzo was an Italian music theorist and pedagogue of High medieval music. A Benedictine monk, he is regarded as the inventor—or by some, developer—of the modern staff notation that had a massive influence on the development of Western musical notation and practice. Perhaps the most significant European writer on music between Boethius and Johannes Tinctoris, after the former's De institutione musica, Guido's Micrologus was the most widely distributed medieval treatise on music.
Go to Profile#15979
James Mason
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
James Neville Mason was an English actor. He achieved considerable success in British cinema before becoming a star in Hollywood. He was the top box-office attraction in the UK in 1944 and 1945; his British films included The Seventh Veil and The Wicked Lady . He starred in Odd Man Out , the first recipient of the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.
Go to Profile#15980
Marcel L'Herbier
1888 - 1979 (91 years)
Marcel L'Herbier was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and the first President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques .
Go to Profile#15981
Josef Jungmann
1773 - 1847 (74 years)
Josef Jungmann was a Czech poet and linguist, and a leading figure of the Czech National Revival. Together with Josef Dobrovský, he is considered to be a creator of the modern Czech language. The literary award for the best translation into Czech is named after him.
Go to Profile#15982
Modest Mussorgsky
1839 - 1881 (42 years)
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five". He was an innovator of Russian music in the Romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.
Go to Profile#15983
Franz Bopp
1791 - 1867 (76 years)
Franz Bopp was a German linguist known for extensive and pioneering comparative work on Indo-European languages. Early life Bopp was born in Mainz, but the political disarray in the Republic of Mainz caused his parents' move to Aschaffenburg, the second seat of the Archbishop of Mainz. There he received a liberal education at the Lyceum and Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann drew his attention to the languages and literature of the East. Moreover, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel's book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier , had just begun to exert a powerful influence on the minds ...
Go to Profile#15984
Henry Sweet
1845 - 1912 (67 years)
Henry Sweet was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian. As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic languages, particularly Old English and Old Norse. In addition, Sweet published works on larger issues of phonetics and grammar in language and the teaching of languages. Many of his ideas have remained influential, and a number of his works continue to be in print, being used as course texts at colleges and universities.
Go to Profile#15985
Honoré Daumier
1808 - 1879 (71 years)
Honoré-Victorin Daumier was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, whose many works offer commentary on the social and political life in France, from the Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the second Napoleonic Empire in 1870. He earned a living throughout most of his life producing caricatures and cartoons of political figures and satirizing the behavior of his countrymen in newspapers and periodicals, for which he became well known in his lifetime and is still known today. He was a republican democrat who attacked the bourgeoisie, the church, lawyers and the judiciary, politicians, and the monarchy.
Go to Profile#15986
Peter Behrens
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Peter Behrens was a leading German architect, graphic and industrial designer, best known for his early pioneering AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin in 1909. He had a long career, designing objects, typefaces, and important buildings in a range of styles from the 1900s to the 1930s. He was a foundation member of the German Werkbund in 1907, when he also began designing for AEG, pioneered corporate design, graphic design, producing typefaces, objects, and buildings for the company. In the next few years, he became a successful architect, a leader of the rationalist / classical German Reform Movement of the 1910s.
Go to Profile#15987
John Bunyan
1628 - 1688 (60 years)
John Bunyan was an English writer and Puritan preacher. He is best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress, which also became an influential literary model. In addition to The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons.
Go to Profile#15988
Odilon Redon
1840 - 1916 (76 years)
Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist artist. Early in his career, both before and after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, Redon worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography, works known as his noirs. He gained recognition after his drawings were mentioned in the 1884 novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. During the 1890s, Redon began working in pastel and oil, which quickly became his favorite medium, abandoning his previous style of noirs completely after 1900. He developed a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture, which increasingly showed in his work.
Go to Profile#15989
Jean Giraudoux
1882 - 1944 (62 years)
Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux was a French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright. He is considered among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. His work is noted for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy. Giraudoux's dominant theme is the relationship between man and woman—or in some cases, between man and some unattainable ideal.
Go to Profile#15990
Karl Brugmann
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Karl Brugmann was a German linguist. He is noted for his work in Indo-European linguistics. Biography He was educated at the universities of Halle and Leipzig. He taught at the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Leipzig, and in 1872-77 was assistant at the Russian Institute of Classical Philology at the latter. In 1877 he was lecturer at the University of Leipzig, and in 1882 became professor of comparative philology there. In 1884 he took the same position at the University of Freiburg, but returned to Leipzig in 1887 as successor to Georg Curtius; for the rest of his professional life , Brugmann...
Go to Profile#15991
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770 - 1827 (57 years)
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank among the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the transition from the Classical period to the Romantic era in classical music. His career has conventionally been divided into early, middle, and late periods. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802. From 1802 to around 1812, his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterized as heroic.
Go to Profile#15992
Karl Kautsky
1854 - 1938 (84 years)
Karl Johann Kautsky was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theorist. A leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Second International, Kautsky advocated orthodox Marxism, which emphasized the scientific, materialist, and determinist character of Karl Marx's work. This interpretation dominated European Marxism for two decades, from the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Go to Profile#15993
Jacques Villon
1875 - 1963 (88 years)
Jacques Villon , also known as Gaston Duchamp, was a French Cubist and abstract painter and printmaker. Early life Born Émile Méry Frédéric Gaston Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in Normandy, France, he came from a prosperous and artistically inclined family. While he was a young man, his maternal grandfather Émile Frédéric Nicolle, a successful businessman and artist, educated Villon and his siblings.
Go to Profile#15994
David Livingstone
1813 - 1873 (60 years)
David Livingstone was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer in Africa. David was the husband of Mary Moffat Livingstone, from the prominent 18th-century missionary family, Moffat. Livingstone had a mythic status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion. As a result, Livingstone beca...
Go to Profile#15995
Anthony the Great
251 - 357 (106 years)
Anthony the Great was a Christian monk from Egypt, revered since his death as a saint. He is distinguished from other saints named Anthony, such as , by various epithets: , , , , , and . For his importance among the Desert Fathers and to all later Christian monasticism, he is also known as the . His feast day is celebrated on 17 January among the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches and on Tobi 22 in the Coptic calendar.
Go to Profile#15996
Lucian
120 - 200 (80 years)
Lucian of Samosata was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer who is best known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with which he frequently ridiculed superstition, religious practices, and belief in the paranormal. Although his native language was probably Syriac, all of his extant works are written entirely in ancient Greek .
Go to Profile#15997
André Masson
1896 - 1987 (91 years)
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist. Biography Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but when he was eight his father's work took the family first briefly to Lille and then to Brussels. He began his study of art at the age of eleven at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris. He fought for France during World War I and was seriously injured. Masson shared a Paris studio with Joan Miró.
Go to Profile#15998
Alexander Gode
1906 - 1970 (64 years)
Alexander Gottfried Friedrich Gode-von Aesch was a German-born American linguist, translator and the driving force behind the creation of the auxiliary language Interlingua. Biography Born to a German father and a Swiss mother, Gode studied at the University of Vienna and the University of Paris before leaving for the U.S. and becoming a citizen in 1927. He was an instructor at the University of Chicago as well as Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in Germanic Studies in 1939.
Go to Profile#15999
Richard Wagner
1813 - 1883 (70 years)
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas . Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk , by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852.
Go to Profile#16000
Paul Lafargue
1842 - 1911 (69 years)
Paul Lafargue was a Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist socialist, political writer, economist, journalist, literary critic, and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter, Laura. His best known work is The Right to Be Lazy. Born in Cuba to French and Saint Dominican Creole parents, Lafargue spent most of his life in France, with periods in England and Spain. At the age of 69, he and 66-year-old Laura died together by a suicide pact.
Go to Profile