user: Problem: Given the question: This article: Bizet's first opera, the one-act Le docteur Miracle, was written in 1856 when the 18-year-old composer was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris. It was Bizet's winning entry in a competition organised by the celebrated composer Jacques Offenbach, and gained him a cash award, a gold medal, and a performance of the prize work at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. In 1857 Bizet was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome, and as a result spent most of the following three years in Italy, where he wrote Don Procopio, a short opera buffa in the style of Donizetti. By this time Bizet had written several non-stage works, including his Symphony in C, but the poor reception accorded to his 1858 Te Deum, a religious work he composed in Rome, helped convince him that his future lay primarily with the musical theatre. He planned and possibly began several operatic works before his return to Paris in 1860, but none of these projects came to fruition.In Paris, Bizet discovered the difficulties faced by young and relatively unknown composers trying to get their operas performed. Of the capital's two state-subsidised opera houses, the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, the former offered a static repertoire in which works by foreign composers, particularly Rossini and Meyerbeer, were dominant. Even established French composers such as Gounod had difficulty getting works performed there. At the Opéra-Comique, innovation was equally rare; although more French works were performed, the style and character of most productions had hardly changed since the 1830s. However, one condition of the Opéra-Comique's state funding was that from time to time it should produce one-act works by former Prix de Rome laureates. Under this provision, Bizet wrote La guzla de l'Emir, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, and this went into rehearsal early in 1862.In April 1862, as the La guzla rehearsals proceeded, Bizet was approached by Léon Carvalho, manager of the independent Théâtre Lyrique company. Carvalho had been offered an annual... contains an answer for the question: What is the name of the person who wrote Don Procopio while in Italy?, what is it ?
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The answer is:
Bizet


Problem: Given the question: This article: The year 1960 marked another turning point in Shostakovich's life: he joined the Communist Party. The government wanted to appoint him General Secretary of the Composers' Union, but in order to hold that position he was required to attain Party membership. It was understood that Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party from 1953 to 1964, was looking for support from the leading ranks of the intelligentsia in an effort to create a better relationship with the Soviet Union's artists. This event has been interpreted variously as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, the result of political pressure, or his free decision. On the one hand, the apparat was undoubtedly less repressive than it had been before Stalin's death. On the other, his son recalled that the event reduced Shostakovich to tears, and he later told his wife Irina that he had been blackmailed. Lev Lebedinsky has said that the composer was suicidal. From 1962, he served as a delegate in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Once he joined the Party, several articles he did not write denouncing individualism in music were published in Pravda under his name. In joining the party, Shostakovich was also committing himself to finally writing the homage to Lenin that he had promised before. His Twelfth Symphony, which portrays the Bolshevik Revolution and was completed in 1961, was dedicated to Vladimir Lenin and called "The Year 1917." Around this time, his health began to deteriorate. Shostakovich's musical response to these personal crises was the Eighth String Quartet, composed in only three days. He subtitled the piece "To the victims of fascism and war", ostensibly in memory of the Dresden fire bombing that took place in 1945. Yet, like the Tenth Symphony, this quartet incorporates quotations from several of his past works and his musical monogram. Shostakovich confessed to his friend Isaak Glikman, "I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself."... contains an answer for the question: What is the last name of the person who subtitled the piece, Eighth String Quartet, "To the victims of fascism and war," ostensibly in memory of the Dresden fire bombing that took place in 1945?, what is it ?
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The answer is:
Shostakovich


Problem: Given the question: This article: Bowie declared himself gay in an interview with Michael Watts for a 1972 issue of Melody Maker, coinciding with his campaign for stardom as Ziggy Stardust. According to Buckley, "If Ziggy confused both his creator and his audience, a big part of that confusion centred on the topic of sexuality." In a September 1976 interview with Playboy, Bowie said, "It's true—I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me." His first wife, Angie, supports his claim of bisexuality and alleges that Bowie had a relationship with Mick Jagger.In a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, Bowie said his public declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made" and "I was always a closet heterosexual." On other occasions, he said his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture had been more a product of the times and the situation in which he found himself than of his own feelings.Blender asked Bowie in 2002 whether he still believed his public declaration was his biggest mistake. After a long pause, he said, "I don't think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners nor be a representative of any group of people." Bowie said he wanted to be a songwriter and performer rather than a headline for his bisexuality, and in "puritanical" America, "I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do."Buckley wrote that Bowie "mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock", and was probably "never gay, nor even consistently actively bisexual", instead experimenting "out of a sense of curiosity and a genuine allegiance with the 'transgressional'." Biographer Christopher Sandford said, according to Mary Finnigan—with whom Bowie had an affair in 1969—the singer and his first wife Angie "created their bisexual fantasy". Sandford wrote that Bowie "made a positive fetish of repeating the quip that he and his wife had met while 'fucking the... contains an answer for the question: What is the name of the person who thinks that, in America, his public declaration about his bisexuality stood in the way of so much he wanted to do?, what is it ?
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The answer is:


assistant: Bowie