Maurice Duruflé (born Louviers, 11 January 1902; died Louveciennes, 16 June 1986) was a French composer and organist. He was very self-critical and destroyed any of his compositions that he thought were not really good. This is why we now only have a small number of his works. He wrote choral music and music for the organ. His most famous work is his "Requiem".
Duruflé was born in Louviers, Haute-Normandie. In 1912, he joined the choir of Rouen Cathedral where he studied piano and organ. When he was 17 he went to Paris and had private organ lessons with Charles Tournemire. He became Tournemire’s assistant at the Basilique Ste-Clotilde, Paris until 1927. In 1920 Duruflé went to study at the Conservatoire de Paris. His organ teacher was Eugène Gigout. When he graduated he got first prizes in organ, harmony, piano accompaniment, and composition.
In 1929 Duruflé became organist at St. Étienne-du-Mont in Paris, a job he kept for the rest of his life.
In 1939, he gave the first performance of Francis Poulenc's Organ Concerto. In 1943 he became professor of harmony at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he worked until 1970. In 1947, Duruflé wrote his famous "Requiem" op. 9, for soloists, choir, organ and orchestra. In the same year Marie-Madeleine Chevalier became his assistant organist at St-Étienne-du-Mont. They married in 1953 after Duruflé divorced his first wife. The couple often travelled together to give organ recitals together. They always spent many hours practising on the organs on which they had to perform, often practising a lot of the time without the sound so that their fingers were really used to the feel of the organ.
In 1975 Duruflé was badly hurt in a car accident and had to give up performing. His wife, who was not so badly hurt in the accident, was still able to play and continued to play the organ at St-Étienne-du-Mont.
Duruflé died in Louveciennes (near Paris) in 1986, aged 84.
Duruflé only left a few of his works for publication. His two important organ works are the "Suite, op. 5" which has a famous Toccata as last movement, and his "Prelude and Fugue sur le nom d'Alain". His "Requiem" remains a favourite work for choirs. Duruflé’s music uses Gregorian plainchant, modal harmonies and polyphonic writing. He was a great admirer of the music of Louis Vierne and Charles Tournemire and he made transcriptions of some of their improvisations.
Sala São Paulo
The Sala São Paulo is a concert hall in the Julio Prestes Cultural Center in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. It is a very large building. The Cultural Center used to be a railway station and it was rebuilt and changed into a cultural centre in 1999.
Sala São Paulo is big enough for an audience of 1.498 people. The orchestra that perform there is the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo (Osesp).
The Brazilian government wanted to bring more culture to the centre of São Paulo. The rebuilding began in November 1997.
The original train station was called Julio Prestes Station. It was built between 1926 and 1938 so that trains could take coffee to the port of Santos. When motor car transport became more and more popular many stations connecting Brazilian towns closed down.
The station's large hall was the same shape as many 19th century concert halls, that is, it is shaped like a horse shoe.
Sala São Paulo has 22 balconies and a ceiling that is 24 meters high. There is a very large platform so that everyone in the audience can see well. There is an elevator to lift the piano on and off the stage and many other useful modern devices.
New Sweden
New Sweden (, ) was a Swedish colony in North America that existed from 1638 through 1655. It was in the modern day states of Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Its capital was Fort Christina, modern-day Wilmington.
New Sweden was captured by the Dutch in 1655, and incorporated into New Netherland.
Bobby Fischer
Robert James "Bobby" Fischer (March 9, 1943 – January 17, 2008) was an American-Icelandic chess Grandmaster and the eleventh World Chess Champion.
As a teenager, Fischer became well-known worldwide because of his skill at chess. He won the American championship of 1963/64, winning all eleven of his games.
Fischer was born in Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois on March 9, 1943. His birth certificate said that his father was Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German. His mother, Regina Wender Fischer, was a Polish-Jewish American citizen. Born in Switzerland, she grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and later became a teacher, a nurse, and a doctor. The two married in 1933 in Moscow, USSR, where Regina was studying medicine at the First Moscow Medical Institute. They divorced in 1945 when Bobby was two years old, so he grew up with his mother and older sister. In 1948, the family moved to Mobile, Arizona, where Regina taught in an elementary school. The next year, they moved to Brooklyn, New York.
A 2002 article in "The Philadelphia Inquirer" said that Paul Nemenyi, a doctor, was Bobby's biological father, not Hans-Gerhardt. Regina and Nemenyi had had an affair in 1942, and he gave her money to help her raise her child every month, paying for Fischer's schooling until he died in 1952. Fischer later told the chess player Zita Rajcsanyi that Nemenyi sometimes came to his Brooklyn apartment and took him to places.
Fischer learned to play at the age of six. His sister Joan bought him a chess set. Bobby learned how to play from the instructions. Several years later, he began to play at the Manhattan Chess Club. He became well known around the world in 1956. He was 13 when he played a game against an American player named Donald Byrne. In the game, he sacrificed his queen and won. "Chess Review" called this game the "game of the century".
Fischer was 14 when he won the U.S. Championship for the first time. This would be the first of eight U.S. Championships he would win.
In 1972, he became the first and only American to win the World Chess Championship in the 20th century. In the 19th century, Paul Morphy was briefly the leading player. Wilhelm Steinitz was the first official world champion. He became an American citizen while he was champion. To win the title, Fischer beat Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. The match was held in Reykjavík, Iceland. However, Fischer did not agree to a match to defend his title. He lost his title in 1975. The title of world champion was given to Anatoly Karpov.
Fischer did not play in any public matches or tournaments for nearly 20 years. In 1992, he defeated Spassky in a rematch in Yugoslavia. The United States Department of State had told him not to play there because of the events that happened after Yugoslavia began splitting into several new countries. Since he disobeyed this order, he could have been prosecuted if he returned to the U.S. In fact, he never returned there. Fischer's 1992 rematch against Spassky was the only time after becoming the world champion that Fischer played chess in public.
After his match, Fischer promoted a new type of chess called "Fischer Random Chess", where the pieces were randomly shuffled before the game so they would be on different squares to start every game.
In July 2004, Fischer was arrested at an airport in Japan with a bad passport. The United States wanted Japan to send him back to go to trial for playing chess in Yugoslavia in 1992. The government of Iceland eventually granted Fischer asylum, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Fischer died of renal failure on January 17, 2008. He was buried at a small ceremony near the town of Selfoss, Iceland.