#16351
Vítězslav Novák
1870 - 1949 (79 years)
Vítězslav Augustín Rudolf Novák was a Czech composer and academic teacher at the Prague Conservatory. Stylistically, he was part of the neo-romantic tradition, and his music is considered an important example of Czech modernism. He worked towards a strong Czech identity in culture after the country became independent in 1918. His compositions include operas and orchestral works.
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Michael Praetorius
1571 - 1621 (50 years)
Michael Praetorius was a German composer, organist, and music theorist. He was one of the most versatile composers of his age, being particularly significant in the development of musical forms based on Protestant hymns.
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Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork
1893 - 1952 (59 years)
Pyotr Nikolayevich Shabelsky-Bork was a Russian officer and writer, active in far-right and anti-Semitic politics in early 20th-century Europe, best known for the attempted assassination of Pavel Milyukov and resulted killing of Vladimir Nabokov, father of the novelist of the same name, in Berlin on 28 March 1922. Shabelsky-Bork collaborated with the Nazi Party until the end of World War II, working thereafter on monarchist and Orthodox Christian publications in South America until his death in 1952.
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Fanny Mendelssohn
1805 - 1847 (42 years)
Fanny Mendelssohn was a German composer and pianist of the early Romantic era who was also known as Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy and, after her marriage, Fanny Hensel . Her compositions include a piano trio, a piano quartet, an orchestral overture, four cantatas, more than 125 pieces for the piano and over 250 lieder, most of which were unpublished in her lifetime. Although lauded for her piano technique, she rarely gave public performances outside her family circle.
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Frederik Vermehren
1823 - 1910 (87 years)
Johan Frederik Nikolai Vermehren, also known as Frederik Vermehren , a genre and portrait painter in the realist style. His artistic career took place during the period of Danish art known as the Golden Age of Danish Painting. Vermehren, along with his fellow artists Christen Dalsgaard and Julius Exner , were prominent in the Danish genre of painting; they depicted ordinary people of the country, especially farmers and other country folk. His idealised depictions helped define and encourage Denmark's period of national romanticism.
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Alexander von Zemlinsky
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Alexander Zemlinsky or Alexander von Zemlinsky was an Austrian composer, conductor, and teacher. Biography Early life Zemlinsky was born in Vienna to a highly diverse family. Zemlinsky's grandfather, Anton Semlinski, emigrated from Žilina, Hungary to Austria and married an Austrian woman. Both were from staunchly Roman Catholic families, and Alexander's father, Adolf, was raised as a Catholic. Alexander's mother was born in Sarajevo to a Sephardic Jewish father and a Bosniak mother. Alexander's entire family converted to the religion of his maternal grandfather, Judaism, and Zemlinsky was born and raised Jewish.
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Pietro Germi
1914 - 1974 (60 years)
Pietro Germi was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and actor, noted for his development of the neorealist and genres. His 1961 film Divorce Italian Style earned him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and a Best Director nomination at the 35th Academy Awards. Seven of his films competed at the Cannes Film Festival, with his 1966 comedy The Birds, the Bees and the Italians winning the .
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Ben Webster
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Benjamin Francis Webster was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Career Early life and career A native of Kansas City, Missouri, he studied violin, learned how to play blues on the piano from Pete Johnson, and received saxophone lessons from Budd Johnson. He played with Lester Young in the Young Family Band. He recorded with Blanche Calloway and became a member of the Bennie Moten Orchestra with Count Basie, Hot Lips Page, and Walter Page. During the 1930s, he played in bands led by Willie Bryant, Benny Carter, Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, Andy Kirk, and Teddy Wilson.
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Ernesto Lecuona
1896 - 1963 (67 years)
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado was a Cuban composer and pianist, many of whose works have become standards of the Latin, jazz and classical repertoires. His over 600 compositions include songs and zarzuelas as well as pieces for piano and symphonic orchestra.
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Ernie Kovacs
1919 - 1962 (43 years)
Ernest Edward Kovacs was an American comedian, actor, and writer. Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Uncle Floyd, among others.
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Evelyn Laye
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Evelyn Laye was an English actress and singer. Born into a theatrical family, she made her professional début in 1915 aged fifteen and quickly established herself in musical comedy. By 1920 she was starring in leading roles in the West End at Daly's and other theatres, becoming London's highest-paid star. Her first marriage, in 1926, to the performer Sonnie Hale was brief and ended in divorce after he abandoned her for the singer Jessie Matthews.
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Oliver Nelson
1932 - 1975 (43 years)
Oliver Edward Nelson was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger, composer, and bandleader. His 1961 Impulse! album The Blues and the Abstract Truth is regarded as one of the most significant recordings of its era. The centerpiece of the album is the definitive version of Nelson's composition, "Stolen Moments". Other important recordings from the 1960s are the albums More Blues and the Abstract Truth and Sound Pieces , both also on Impulse!.
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Hans Pfitzner
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Hans Erich Pfitzner was a German composer, conductor and polemicist who was a self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina , loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and his Missa Papae Marcelli.
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Johann Strauss I
1804 - 1849 (45 years)
Johann Baptist Strauss I , also known as Johann Strauss Sr., the Elder or the Father , was an Austrian composer of the Romantic Period. He was famous for his light music, namely waltzes, polkas, and galops, which he popularized alongside Joseph Lanner, thereby setting the foundations for his sons—Johann, Josef and Eduard—to carry on his musical dynasty. He is best known for his composition of the Radetzky March .
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Maniruzzaman Islamabadi
1875 - 1950 (75 years)
Munīruzzamān Khān Islāmābādī , also known by the epithet Biplobi Maulana , was a Muslim philosopher, nationalist activist and journalist from Islamabad in Bengal Presidency, British India . He was among the founders of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind.
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Alma Mahler
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Alma Mahler-Werfel was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she was the composer of nearly fifty songs for voice and piano, and works in other genres as well. 17 songs are known to have survived. At 15, she was mentored by Max Burckhard.
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Donald Crisp
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Donald William Crisp was an English film actor as well as an early producer, director and screenwriter. His career lasted from the early silent film era into the 1960s. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1942 for his performance in How Green Was My Valley.
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Niccolò Jommelli
1714 - 1774 (60 years)
Niccolò Jommelli was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan School. Along with other composers mainly in the Holy Roman Empire and France, he was responsible for certain operatic reforms including reducing ornateness of style and the primacy of star singers somewhat.
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William S. Hart
1864 - 1946 (82 years)
William Surrey Hart was an American silent film actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He is remembered as a foremost Western star of the silent era who "imbued all of his characters with honor and integrity." During the late 1910s and early 1920s, he was one of the most consistently popular movie stars, frequently ranking high among male actors in popularity contests held by movie fan magazines.
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Abby Whiteside
1881 - 1956 (75 years)
Abby Whiteside was an American piano teacher. She challenged the finger-centric approach of much classical piano teaching and instead advocated a holistic attitude in which the arm and torso are the conductors of a musical image conceived first in the mind.
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Cyril M. Kornbluth
1923 - 1958 (35 years)
Cyril M. Kornbluth was an American science fiction author and a member of the Futurians. He used a variety of pen-names, including Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner, Jordan Park, Arthur Cooke, Paul Dennis Lavond, and Scott Mariner.
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Steve Goodman
1948 - 1984 (36 years)
Steven Benjamin Goodman was an American folk and country singer-songwriter from Chicago. He wrote the song "City of New Orleans", which was recorded by Arlo Guthrie and many others including John Denver, The Highwaymen, and Judy Collins; in 1985, it afforded Goodman the Grammy songwriter award for best country song, as performed by Willie Nelson. Goodman had a small but dedicated group of fans for his albums and concerts during his lifetime. His most frequently sung song, "Go Cubs Go", is about the Chicago Cubs. Goodman died of leukemia in September 1984.
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Leonid Lavrovsky
1905 - 1967 (62 years)
Leonid Mikhailovich Lavrovsky was a Soviet and Russian ballet dancer and choreographer, most famous for choreographing the first full version of Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Early life Lavrovsky was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, the son of an industrial worker named Ivanov. Leonid Ivanov changed his surname to Lavrovsky and graduated in 1922 from the Petrograd Ballet Academy, where he had studied under V.I. Ponomaryov. He danced with the former Mariinsky Theatre, performing such roles as Siegfried in Swan Lake, Jean de Brienne in Raymonda, and the lead in Chopiniana. During the same...
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Uttam Kumar
1926 - 1980 (54 years)
Uttam Kumar , widely known as the Mahanayak , was an Indian film actor, producer, director, screenwriter, composer, and playback singer who predominantly worked in Bengali cinema. His career spanned three decades, from the late 1940s until his death in 1980.
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Roger Sessions
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Roger Huntington Sessions was an American composer, teacher and musicologist. He had initially started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved further towards more complex harmonies and postromanticism, and finally the twelve-tone serialism of the Second Viennese School. Sessions' friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced this, but he would modify the technique to develop a unique style involving rowss to supply melodic thematic material, while composing the subsidiary parts in a free and dissonant manner.
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Leopold Auer
1845 - 1930 (85 years)
Leopold von Auer was a Hungarian violinist, academic, conductor, composer, and instructor. Many of his students went on to become prominent concert performers and teachers. Early life and career Auer was born in Veszprém, Hungary, 7 June 1845, to a poor Jewish household of painters. He first studied violin with a local concertmaster. He later wrote that the violin was a "logical instrument" for any Hungarian boy to take up because it "didn't cost much." At the age of 8 Auer continued his violin studies with Dávid Ridley Kohne, who also came from Veszprém, at the Budapest Conservatory. Kohne was concertmaster of the orchestra of the National Opera.
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Rex Ingram
1892 - 1950 (58 years)
Rex Ingram was an Irish film director, producer, writer, and actor. Director Erich von Stroheim once called him "the world's greatest director". Early life Born in 58 Grosvenor Square, Rathmines, Dublin, Ireland, , Ingram was educated at Saint Columba's College, near Rathfarnham, County Dublin. He spent much of his adolescence living in the Old Rectory, Kinnitty, Birr, County Offaly, where his father, Reverend Francis Hitchcock, was the Church of Ireland rector. Ingram emigrated to the United States in 1911.
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Gerald Finzi
1901 - 1956 (55 years)
Gerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is best known as a choral composer, but also wrote in other genres. Large-scale compositions by Finzi include the cantata Dies natalis for solo voice and string orchestra, and his concertos for cello and clarinet.
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Ernie Royal
1921 - 1983 (62 years)
Ernest Andrew Royal was a jazz trumpeter. His older brother was clarinetist and alto saxophonist Marshal Royal, with whom he appears on the classic Ray Charles big band recording The Genius of Ray Charles .
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Luigi Boccherini
1743 - 1805 (62 years)
Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini was an Italian composer and cellist of the Classical era whose music retained a courtly and galante style even while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. He is best known for a minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 , and the Cello Concerto in B flat major . The latter work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version.
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Eugene Aynsley Goossens
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was an English conductor and composer. Biography He was born in Camden Town, London, the son of the Belgian conductor and violinist Eugène Goossens and Annie Cook, a Carl Rosa Opera Company singer. He was the grandson of the conductor Eugène Goossens . His younger sisters and brothers, all musicians, were Marie, Adolphe, Leon and Sidonie.
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Nikolay Kashkin
1839 - 1920 (81 years)
Nikolay Dmitriyevich Kashkin was a Russian music critic as well as a professor of piano and music theory at the Moscow Conservatory for 33 years . The son of a Voronezh bookseller, Kashkin was a self-taught musician who had started giving piano lessons by the time he was 13 years old. In 1860 he travelled to Moscow for further study in piano with Alexandre Dubuque. There he met Herman Laroche, Nikolai Rubinstein and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
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Gram Parsons
1946 - 1973 (27 years)
Ingram Cecil Connor III , known professionally as Gram Parsons, was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and pianist. He recorded as a solo artist and with the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, popularizing what he called "Cosmic American Music", a hybrid of country, rhythm and blues, soul, folk, and rock.
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Francesco Cilea
1866 - 1950 (84 years)
Francesco Cilea was an Italian composer. Today he is particularly known for his operas L'arlesiana and Adriana Lecouvreur. Biography Born in Palmi near Reggio di Calabria, Cilea was the son of a prominent lawyer and originally intended to follow his father into a law career. He gave an early indication of an aptitude for music when at the age of four he heard a performance of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma and was greatly affected by it. He was sent to study music at the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella in Naples, where he quickly demonstrated his diligence and precocious talent, earning a gol...
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Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon
1854 - 1917 (63 years)
Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon was a Norwegian linguist and historian. He was a professor of Semitic Languages at the University of Oslo from 1907. Knudtzon was born in Trondheim, the son of consul Hans Nicolay Knudtzon and his wife Catharina née Trampe. Having finished his secondary education in 1872, he enrolled at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania. After a short spell at the Cathedral School in Trondheim, he returned to Christiania to study Semitic languages, in particular Akkadian, Arabian and Hebrew, the last of which he also gave lectures on. His first scholarly contribution was Textkritische Bemerkungen zu Lay 17,18, which was published in 1882.
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Ethel Smyth
1858 - 1944 (86 years)
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas.
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Billie Burke
1884 - 1970 (86 years)
Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke was a Canadian-American actress who was famous on Broadway and radio, and in silent and sound films. She is best known to modern audiences as Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie musical The Wizard of Oz .
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Hans Bauer
1878 - 1937 (59 years)
Hans Bauer was a German semitist and professor at the University of Halle in the early 1930s. He was involved in the decipherment of Ugaritic cuneiform on clay tablets discovered in Ras Shamra, Ugarit.
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Janet Craxton
1929 - 1981 (52 years)
Janet Helen Rosemary Craxton was an English oboe player and teacher. She was the youngest of the six children and the only daughter of the pianist and teacher Harold Craxton. Her older brothers included the artist John Craxton. She married the composer Alan Richardson in 1961.
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Rudolph Snellius
1546 - 1613 (67 years)
Rudolph Snel van Royen , Latinized as Rudolphus Snellius, was a Dutch linguist and mathematician who held appointments at the University of Marburg and the University of Leiden. Snellius was an influence on some of the leading political and intellectual forces of the Dutch Golden Age.
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Sergei Parajanov
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Sergei Parajanov was an Armenian film director and screenwriter. Parajanov is regarded by film critics, film historians and filmmakers to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinema history.
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Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg was a German conductor. He began his career in Munich as an assistant to Hans Knappertsbusch at the Bavarian State Opera. After several appointments in Essen, Dortmund, and Kiel, in 1934 he succeeded Herbert von Karajan as first Kapellmeister in Ulm. In 1937 he conducted a complete Beethoven cycle at the invitation of Furtwängler. In 1938 he became director of the Hamburg Lehrergesangsverein and received an appointment at the Hamburg State Opera. In Hamburg he conducted over 700 concerts for schoolchildren. He frequently worked with the Hamburger Symphoniker and the...
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Felix Aylmer
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Sir Felix Edward Aylmer Jones, OBE was an English stage actor who also appeared in the cinema and on television. Aylmer made appearances in films with comedians such as Will Hay and George Formby. Early life Felix Aylmer was born in Corsham, Wiltshire, the son of Lilian and Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Aylmer Jones. He was educated at King James's Grammar School, Almondbury, near Huddersfield, where he was a boarder from 1897 to 1900, Magdalen College School, and Exeter College, Oxford, where he was a member of Oxford University Dramatic Society . He trained under the Victorian-era actre...
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Ściapan Niekraševič
1883 - 1937 (54 years)
Ściapan Niekraševič , also known as Stepan Nekrashevich was a Belarusian academic, political figure and a victim of Stalin's purges. Early years Niekraševič was born in the estate of Daniłoŭka in Minsk province of the Russian Empire into the family of a petty nobleman. He graduated from the Vilna Teachers' Institute in 1913 and embarked on a teaching career.
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Eva Le Gallienne
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne gave up her Broadway appearances to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was director, producer, and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American repertory movement, which enabled today's off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself , Le Gallienne also became a respected stage director, coach, producer and manager.
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Hedley Donovan
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Hedley Donovan was editor in chief of Time Inc. from 1964 to 1979. In this capacity, he oversaw all of the company's magazine publications, including Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Money, and People. Hand-picked by founder Henry Luce, Donovan redirected the magazine from its historically conservative orientation to a more objective editorial stance, particularly with respect to the Vietnam War. The Hedley Donovan Award was created in 1999 by the Minnesota Magazines and Publications Association to recognize individuals who have shown outstanding lifelong dedication and contributions ...
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Daws Butler
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Charles Dawson Butler , professionally known as Daws Butler, was an American voice actor. He worked mostly for the Hanna-Barbera animation production company, where he originated the voices of many familiar characters, including Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Auggie Doggie, Loopy De Loop, Wally Gator, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey, Snooper and Blabber, Hokey Wolf, Elroy Jetson, Peter Potamus, The Funky Phantom and Hair Bear.
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Arthur Nikisch
1855 - 1922 (67 years)
Arthur Nikisch was a Hungarian conductor who performed internationally, holding posts in Boston, London, Leipzig and—most importantly—Berlin. He was considered an outstanding interpreter of the music of Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Liszt. Johannes Brahms praised Nikisch's performance of his Fourth Symphony as "quite exemplary, it's impossible to hear it any better."
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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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