#17001
Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern
1833 - 1917 (84 years)
Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern was a Dutch linguist and Orientalist. In the literature, he is usually referred to as H. Kern or Hendrik Kern; a few other scholars bear the same surname. Life Hendrik Kern was born to Dutch parents in the Central-Javanese town of Purworejo in the Dutch East Indies,; however, when he was six, his family repatriated to the Netherlands. When he entered grammar school, he added the extra-curricular subjects of English and Italian to his studies.
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Bruno Walter
1876 - 1962 (86 years)
Bruno Walter was a German-born conductor, pianist and composer. Born in Berlin, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, was naturalised as a French citizen in 1938, and settled in the United States in 1939. He worked closely with Gustav Mahler, whose music he helped to establish in the repertory, held major positions with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Salzburg Festival, Vienna State Opera, Bavarian State Opera, Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Deutsche Oper Berlin, among others, made recordings of historical and artistic significance, and is widely ...
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Wilhelm Bacher
1850 - 1913 (63 years)
Wilhelm Bacher was a Jewish Hungarian scholar, rabbi, Orientalist and linguist, born in Liptó-Szent-Miklós, Hungary to the Hebrew writer Simon Bacher. Wilhelm was himself a prolific writer, authoring or co-authoring approximately 750 works. He was a contributor to many encyclopedias, and was a major contributor to the landmark Jewish Encyclopedia throughout all its 12 volumes . Although almost all of Bacher's works were written in German or Hungarian, at the urging of Hayyim Nahman Bialik many were subsequently translated into Hebrew by Alexander Siskind Rabinovitz.
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Sarah Vaughan
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Sarah Lois Vaughan was an American jazz singer and pianist. Nicknamed "Sassy" and "The Divine One", she won two Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and was nominated for a total of nine Grammy Awards. She was given an NEA Jazz Masters Award in 1989. Critic Scott Yanow wrote that she had "one of the most wondrous voices of the 20th century".
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Sidney Bechet
1897 - 1959 (62 years)
Sidney Joseph Bechet was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer. He was one of the first important soloists in jazz, and first recorded several months before trumpeter Louis Armstrong. His erratic temperament hampered his career, and not until the late 1940s did he earn wide acclaim. Bechet spent much of his later life in France.
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Friedrich Kurschat
1806 - 1884 (78 years)
Friedrich Kurschat was a Prussian Lithuanian linguist and professor at the University of Königsberg. He studied the Lithuanian language and published its grammar in 1876 in which he was the first to describe Lithuanian accentuation in detail.
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Charlie Chaplin
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is considered one of the film industry's most important figures. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, and encompassed both adulation and controversy.
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Clara Schumann
1819 - 1896 (77 years)
Clara Josephine Schumann was a German pianist, composer, and piano teacher. Regarded as one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era, she exerted her influence over the course of a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital by lessening the importance of purely virtuosic works. She also composed solo piano pieces, a piano concerto , chamber music, choral pieces, and songs.
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Mikhail Glinka
1804 - 1857 (53 years)
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition within his own country and is often regarded as the fountainhead of Russian classical music. His compositions were an important influence on other Russian composers, notably the members of The Five, who produced a distinctive Russian style of music.
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Henry Wood
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Sir Henry Joseph Wood was an English conductor best known for his association with London's annual series of promenade concerts, known as the Proms. He conducted them for nearly half a century, introducing hundreds of new works to British audiences. After his death, the concerts were officially renamed in his honour as the "Henry Wood Promenade Concerts", although they continued to be generally referred to as "the Proms".
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Nicholas Ray
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Nicholas Ray was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor best known for the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. He is appreciated for many narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963, including They Live By Night , In A Lonely Place , Johnny Guitar , and Bigger Than Life , as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled We Can't Go Home Again, which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death.
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Virgil Thomson
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of real passion".
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Mario Bava
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Mario Bava was an Italian filmmaker who worked variously as a director, cinematographer, special effects artist and screenwriter, frequently referred to as the "Master of Italian Horror" and the "Master of the Macabre". His low-budget genre films, known for their distinctive visual flair and stylish technical ingenuity, feature recurring themes and imagery concerning the conflict between illusion and reality, as well as the destructive capacity of human nature. He was a pioneer of Italian genre cinema, and is regarded as one of the most influential auteurs of the horror film genre.
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Harinath De
1877 - 1911 (34 years)
Harinath De was an Indian historian, scholar and a polyglot, who later became the first Indian librarian of the National Library of India from 1907 to 1911. In a life span of thirty four years, he learned 34 languages.
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Zoltán Kodály
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Zoltán Kodály was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, music pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is well known internationally as the creator of the Kodály method of music education. Life Born in Kecskemét, Hungary, Kodály learned to play the violin as a child. In 1900, he entered the Department of Languages at the University of Budapest and at the same time Hans von Kössler's composition class at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music. After completing his studies, he studied in Paris with Charles Widor for a year.
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Anton Webern
1883 - 1945 (62 years)
Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern , better known as Anton Webern , was an Austrian composer and conductor. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its stark concision and steadfast embrace and application of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques in an increasingly rigorous manner, somewhat after the Franco-Flemish School of his studies under Guido Adler. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. He was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to wri...
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Robert Siodmak
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Robert Siodmak was a German film director who also worked in the United States. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist and for a series of films noir he made in the 1940s, such as The Killers .
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Arthur Rubinstein
1887 - 1982 (95 years)
Arthur Rubinstein KBE OMRI was a Polish-American pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time. He received international acclaim for his performances of the music written by a variety of composers and many regard him as one of the greatest Chopin interpreters of his time. He played in public for eight decades.
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Nicolás Avellaneda
1837 - 1885 (48 years)
Nicolás Remigio Aurelio Avellaneda Silva was an Argentine politician and journalist, and President of Argentina from 1874 to 1880. Avellaneda's main projects while in office were banking and education reform, leading to Argentina's economic growth. The most important events of his government were the Conquest of the Desert and the transformation of the Buenos Aires into a federal district.
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Carl Seashore
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
Carl Emil Seashore, born Sjöstrand was a prominent American psychologist and educator. He was the author of numerous books and articles principally regarding the fields of speech–language pathology, music education, and the psychology of music and art. He served as Dean of the Graduate College of University of Iowa from 1908–1937. He is most commonly associated with the development of the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability.
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Nikolai Bachtin
1894 - 1950 (56 years)
Nikolai Bachtin was a lecturer in classics and linguistics at the University of Birmingham, England. Bachtin was a friend of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bachtin's papers are held at the University of Birgminham archive.
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William Dieterle
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
William Dieterle was a German-born actor and film director who emigrated to the United States in 1930 to leave a worsening political situation. He worked in Hollywood primarily as a director for much of his career, becoming a United States citizen in 1937. He moved back to Germany in the late 1950s.
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Aaron Florian
1805 - 1887 (82 years)
Aaron Florian was an Imperial Austrian-born Romanian historian, journalist and revolutionary. Biography Early years and teaching The son of Romanian Orthodox priest Ioan Florian, he was born in Rod, a village located in the Mărginimea Sibiului region which at the time belonged to the Austrian Empire’s Principality of Transylvania and is now in Romania. After attending primary school in Sibiu, he studied at the gymnasium in Blaj. He then enrolled at the Royal University of Pest. In 1826, the Wallachian boyar intellectual Dinicu Golescu invited Florian to teach Latin at the school in Golești, where he remained until 1830.
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Giacomo Devoto
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
Giacomo Devoto was an Italian historical linguist and one of the greatest exponents of the twentieth century of the discipline. He was born in Genoa and died in Florence. Career In 1939 he founded with Bruno Migliorini the magazine Lingua Nostra.
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George Stevens
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
George Cooper Stevens was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer. He received two Academy Awards and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1953. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for A Place in the Sun , and Giant . He was also Oscar-nominated for The Talk of the Town, The More the Merrier , Shane , and The Diary of Anne Frank . Among his most notable films are Swing Time , Gunga Din , Woman of the Year , and The Greatest Story Ever Told .
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Nicephorus Gregoras
1295 - 1360 (65 years)
Nicephorus Gregoras was a Byzantine Greek astronomer, historian, and theologian. His 37-volume Byzantine History, a work of erudition, constitutes a primary documentary source for the 14th century. Life Gregoras was born at Heraclea Pontica, where he was raised and educated by his uncle, John, who was the Bishop of Heraclea. At an early age he settled at Constantinople, where his uncle introduced him to Andronicus II Palaeologus, by whom he was appointed chartophylax . In 1326 Gregoras proposed certain reforms in the calendar, which the emperor refused to carry out for fear of disturbances; ...
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Emlyn Williams
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
George Emlyn Williams, CBE was a Welsh writer, dramatist and actor. Early life Williams was born into a Welsh-speaking, working class family at 1 Jones Terrace, Pen-y-ffordd, Ffynnongroyw, Flintshire. He was the eldest of the three surviving sons of Mary a former maid-servant and Richard Williams, a greengrocer. He spoke only Welsh until the age of eight. Later, he said he would probably have begun working in the mines at age 12 if he had not caught the attention of Sarah Grace Cooke, the model for Miss Moffat in The Corn Is Green. She was a teacher of French at the grammar school in Holywell, Flintshire in 1915, where Williams had gone on a scholarship.
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Robert Johnson
1911 - 1938 (27 years)
Robert Leroy Johnson was an American blues musician and songwriter. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generations of musicians. Although his recording career spanned only seven months, he is recognized as a master of the blues, particularly the Delta blues style, and one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as maybe "the first ever rock star".
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Harold Arlen
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Harold Arlen was an American composer of popular music, who composed over 500 songs, a number of which have become known worldwide. In addition to composing the songs for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz , including "Over the Rainbow", Arlen is a highly regarded contributor to the Great American Songbook. "Over the Rainbow" was voted the 20th century's No. 1 song by the RIAA and the NEA.
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Edmond Hamilton
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Edmond Moore Hamilton was an American writer of science fiction during the mid-twentieth century. Early life Born in Youngstown, Ohio, he was raised there and in nearby New Castle, Pennsylvania. Something of a child prodigy, he graduated from high school and entered Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania at the age of 14, but dropped out at 17.
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Phil Ochs
1940 - 1976 (36 years)
Philip David Ochs was an American songwriter and protest singer . Ochs was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, political activism, often alliterative lyrics, and distinctive voice. He wrote hundreds of songs from the 1960s to early 1970s and released eight albums.
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Stan Kenton
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Stanley Newcomb Kenton was an American popular music and jazz artist. As a pianist, composer, arranger and band leader, he led an innovative and influential jazz orchestra for almost four decades. Though Kenton had several pop hits from the early 1940s into the 1960s, his music was always forward-looking. Kenton was also a pioneer in the field of jazz education, creating the Stan Kenton Jazz Camp in 1959 at Indiana University.
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Alexis Korner
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Alexis Andrew Nicholas Koerner , known professionally as Alexis Korner, was a British blues musician and radio broadcaster, who has sometimes been referred to as "a founding father of British blues". A major influence on the sound of the British music scene in the 1960s, he was instrumental in the formation of several notable British bands including The Rolling Stones and Free.
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John Houseman
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
John Houseman was a Romanian-born British-American actor and producer of theatre, film, and television. He became known for his highly publicized collaboration with director Orson Welles from their days in the Federal Theatre Project through to the production of Citizen Kane and his collaboration, as producer of The Blue Dahlia, with writer Raymond Chandler on the screenplay. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Professor Charles W. Kingsfield in the 1973 film The Paper Chase. He reprised the role of Kingsfield in the 1978 television series adaptation.
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Carl Nielsen
1865 - 1931 (66 years)
Carl August Nielsen was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer. Brought up by poor yet musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. He initially played in a military band before attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen from 1884 until December 1886. He premiered his Op. 1, Suite for Strings, in 1888, at the age of 23. The following year, Nielsen began a 16-year stint as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra under the conductor Johan Svendsen, during which he played in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres.
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Jasimuddin
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Jasimuddin , popularly called Palli Kabi , was a Bangladeshi poet, lyricist, composer and writer widely celebrated for his modern ballad sagas in the pastoral mode. Although his full name is Jasim Uddin Mollah, he is known as Jasim Uddin. His Nakshi Kanthar Math and Sojan Badiar Ghat are considered among the best lyrical poems in the Bengali language. He is the key figure for the revivals of pastoral literature in Bengal during the 20th century. As a versatile writer, Jasimuddin wrote poems, ballads, songs, dramas, novel, stories, memoirs, travelogues, etc.
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Thomas E. Watson
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Thomas Edward Watson was an American Populist and white supremacist politician, attorney, newspaper editor, and writer from Georgia. In the 1890s Watson championed poor farmers as a leader of the Populist Party, articulating an agrarian political viewpoint while attacking business, bankers, railroads, Democratic President Grover Cleveland, and the Democratic Party. He was the nominee for vice president with Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 on the Populist ticket.
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Walter Bruno Henning
1908 - 1967 (59 years)
Walter Bruno Henning was a German scholar of Middle Iranian languages and literature, especially of the corpus discovered by the Turpan expeditions of the early 20th century. Biography Walter Henning was born in the ancient fortress town of Ragnit, East Prussia , but grew up in Köslin in Pomerania on the Baltic Sea.
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Andreas Helwig
1572 - 1643 (71 years)
Andreas Helwig was a German classical scholar and linguist. His Origenes dictionum germanicarum was a pioneer etymological work of the German language. Life Helwig was rector of the University of Berlin from 1611 to 1614, then professor of poetry from 1614 to 1616. Subsequently he taught at the Gymnasium at Stralsund.
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Wanda Landowska
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Wanda Aleksandra Landowska was a Polish harpsichordist and pianist whose performances, teaching, writings and especially her many recordings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century. She was the first person to record Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord in 1933. She became a naturalized French citizen in 1938.
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Veselin Čajkanović
1881 - 1946 (65 years)
Veselin Čajkanović was a Serbian classical scholar, philologist, philosopher, ethnologist, orientalist, religious history scholar, and Greek and Latin translator. Biography Čajkanović studied classical philology at Belgrade's Grandes écoles , and received an international scholarship, on the recommendation of professor Pavle Popović, to take post-graduate studies at the University of Leipzig and University of Munich and finished his doctorate under Karl Krumbacher. In 1908 he became a Latin lecturer at the Belgrade University School of Philosophy and published his MA dissertation, Quaestio...
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Hermann Hirt
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Hermann Hirt was a German philologist and Indo-Europeanist. Career Hirt wrote on German metres , edited Schopenhauer's Parerga , and then devoting himself to Indo-Germanic philology made special studies on accent, writing Der indogermanische Accent and Der indogermanische Ablaut, vornehmlich in seinem Verhältnis zur Betonung .
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Kazimieras Jaunius
1848 - 1908 (60 years)
Kazimieras Jaunius was a Lithuanian Catholic priest and linguist. While Jaunius published very little, his major achievements include a well regarded Lithuanian grammar, systematization and classification of the Lithuanian dialects, and descriptions of Lithuanian accentuation. Though most of his conclusions on etymology and comparative linguistics were proven to be incorrect, his works remain valuable for vast observational data.
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Graham Chapman
1941 - 1989 (48 years)
Graham Chapman was a British actor, comedian and writer. He was one of the six members of the surreal comedy group Monty Python. He portrayed authority figures such as The Colonel and the lead role in two Python films, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian .
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E. Adelaide Hahn
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Emma Adelaide Hahn was an American linguist and classicist who specialized in Latin grammar and Indo-European linguistics. She served as chair of the Hunter College Classics department for twenty-seven years and was the first woman to serve as president of the Linguistic Society of America.
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Édouard Lalo
1823 - 1892 (69 years)
Édouard-Victoire-Antoine Lalo was a French composer. His most celebrated piece is the Symphonie Espagnole, a five-movement concerto for violin and orchestra that remains a popular work in the standard repertoire.
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Liberace
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Władziu Valentino Liberace was an American pianist, singer, and actor. He was born in Wisconsin to parents of Italian and Polish origin and enjoyed a career spanning four decades of concerts, recordings, television, motion pictures, and endorsements. At the height of his fame from the 1950s to 1970s, he was the highest-paid entertainer in the world with established concert residencies in Las Vegas and an international touring schedule. He embraced a lifestyle of flamboyant excess both on and off stage.
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Dorothy Day
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics.
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Johann Christian Bach
1735 - 1782 (47 years)
Johann Christian Bach was a German composer of the Classical era, the eighteenth child of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the youngest of his eleven sons. After living in Italy for five years , Bach moved to London, where he became known as "The London Bach". He is also sometimes known as "The English Bach", and during his time spent living in the British capital, he came to be known as John Bach. He is noted for playing a role in influencing the concerto styles of Haydn and Mozart. He contributed significantly to the development of the new sonata principle.
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Isaac Albéniz
1860 - 1909 (49 years)
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual was a Spanish virtuoso pianist, composer, and conductor. He is one of the foremost composers of the Post-Romantic era who also had a significant influence on his contemporaries and younger composers. He is best known for his piano works based on Spanish folk music idioms. Isaac Albéniz was close to the Generation of '98.
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