the-french-artist/wikipedia_20220301.simple_sentence_split huggingface dataset:
The leader will be the highest paid member of the orchestra.
He has to decide how the violins will play the music and write in the bowing.
He will decide where each member of the violins should sit.
He will probably also interview them and offer them the job in the orchestra.
He will talk to the conductor about anything the orchestra are not happy about (he may have to remind the conductor when it is time to stop the rehearsal!).
If part of the music is marked "solo" then he will play it as a solo while the other violins stop playing.
In the United States it is usual for the concertmaster to be on the platform before the concert and to tell the orchestra to tune their instruments, playing on his A string to give them the correct pitch.
In European orchestras it is usually the oboe that gives an A for tuning.
In Britain the leader usually comes on stage after the orchestra have tuned, and gets an applause.
Some famous orchestral leaders
of the past:
Arnold Rosé (Vienna Philharmonic)
of today:
Gordan Nikolitch (London Symphony Orchestra)
Glenn Dicterow (New York Philharmonic Orchestra)
Peter Manning ( Royal Opera House Orchestra Covent Garden  )
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a military strategy in which two opposing military forces are powerful enough to completely destroy each other.
It should help to avoid a nuclear war.
This usually happens when both forces have nuclear weapons.
If a state attacks another with nuclear weapons, the state attacked will potentially be able to attack back.
The attacker must think that he will be destroyed with his victim if he attacks.
The theory is that no state would start an attack if attacking its enemy means its own destruction.
The concept was discussed by Herman Kahn.
It was part of the background to the film Dr. Strangelove.
Stairway to Heaven was a 1971 song by Led Zeppelin.
It was on the album Led Zeppelin IV.
Hidden Satanic message
Some listeners claim that by reversing the song, a hidden Satanic message is revealed.
The message is:
Oh, here's to my sweet Satan
The one whose little path would make me sad whose power is Satan
He'll give, he'll give you 666
Stairway to Heaven songfacts, tabs, videos and audio , at the Stairway to Heaven website.
1971 songs
Thin Lizzy are an Irish hard rock band that started in Dublin in 1969.
Up to 1984 the band were led by bassist, songwriter and singer Phil Lynott (1949-1986).
The band's famous song "The Boys Are Back in Town" is still played a lot on classic rock radio stations.
Since Lynott's death, other former members have carried on using the band name.
Phil Lynott wrote most of the band's songs.
The band's music showed many musical styles including: country music, psychedelic rock, Celtic music and folk music which Lynott mixed with hard rock and heavy metal styles.
Thin Lizzy were listed at number 51 on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.
Aziz al-Abub (a.k.a.
Ibrahim al-Nadhir or al-Nahdhir) was a Lebanese Hezbollah psychiatrist and mind control expert.
Aziz was a disciple of Ewen Cameron and a graduate of the Soviet Union's Patrice Lumumba Institute that specialized in mind control techniques.
Aziz al-Abub used mind-control, drugs and physical torture in the infamous 444-day (1984-1985) torture and mental derangement of American William Buckley in Beirut.
Year of birth missing
Lebanese Muslims
Lebanese nationalists
Lebanese terrorists
Hobbits are a fictional race in the Middle-earth world invented by J. R. R. Tolkien, also often called halflings.
They appeared in the books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Several important main characters in those books are hobbits, such as Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins.
Hobbits are like small humans between two and four foot tall (between 60 and 120 centimeters).
They have hair/fur on the top side of their feet, leathery foot-soles, and slightly pointed ears.
They tend to be stout and often have brown and curly hair.
Male hobbits do not have beards.
Hobbits live longer compared to humans, and many hobbits reach the age of 100.
A typical hobbit-house has a long hallway with rooms on both sides, and round doors and windows.
Originally these were underground in hills, then the house was called a smial; but this architecture(style of building) is also used for 'normal' houses above ground.
Fictional races
Bilbo Baggins is a Hobbit from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
He is a major protagonist of The Hobbit and a minor protagonist of The Lord of the Rings.
Bilbo Baggins was greeted by Gandalf the Grey and a group of 13 Dwarves known as the Company of Thorin Oakenshield.
He was offered to help them to take back Erebor from the dragon Smaug.
At the Misty Mountain, he landed at a cave and met Gollum.
He took Gollum's One Ring and went back to his Company.
Decades after returning from Erebor, he celebrated his 111th birthday as well as his nephew Frodo's birthday.
He wanted to keep the One Ring.
Peter Jackson adaptations (2001-2003, 2012-2014)
Fictional characters introduced in 1937
Characters in The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings characters
Middle-earth is a fictional fantasy world invented by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Several of his books take place there, such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
It is supposed to be a long gone mythological time of our earth.
Although Middle-earth is only one continent in Tolkien's world, it is often used for the whole fictional world and all stories Tolkien invented for it.
Tolkien created and worked on Middle-earth through most of his life, and it is this creation for which he is most famous.
Middle-earth has its own geography, several different species and peoples (elves, dwarves, humans, hobbits), their languages, and a history that spans thousands of years.
The stories of Middle-earth are also a kind of 'artificial myth'.
"Middle-earth" is called Endor (or Endóre) and Ennor in the fictional Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin.
The oldest people of Middle-earth are the immortal Elves.
Second were the Dwarves.
After them came mortal Men.
In the Third Age, there appeared another people, the Hobbits.
There are also the tree-like Ents.
The history of the Middle-earth world is thousands of years long.
Sometimes, when big historical events happen, a new Age is begun, which starts counting again with the year 1.
First Age: The First Age can be divided into the "First Age of the Trees" and the "First Age of the Sun".
Saying a year and "First Age" often means a year in the "First Age of the Sun".
First Age of the Trees: Begins at the creation of the Two Trees.
During it are the Awakening of the Elves and the Dwarves.
It ends with the destruction of the Two Trees.
First Age of the Sun (590 years): Begins with the creation of the Sun and Moon, and ends with the War of Wrath, the final imprisonment of Morgoth and the destruction of Beleriand.
Second Age (S.A., 3441 years): Begins after the end of the War of Wrath.
During it is the destruction of Númenor (T.A. 3319).
Ends with the defeat of Sauron in the War of the Last Alliance.
Third Age (T.A., 3021 years): Begins after the Last Alliance defeated Sauron.
During it are the events of The Hobbit (T.A. 2941) and the War of the Ring (T.A. 3018-3019).
Ends with the destruction of the One Ring and the defeat of Sauron.
Fourth Age: Follows the defeat of Sauron and the One Ring, but starts officially when the Bearers of the Rings left for the West.
During this Age the Elves become less and leave, while the humans become the dominant people of Middle-earth.
Middle-earth languages
Arnold Josef Rosé (October 24, 1863 – August 25, 1946) was a famous violinist.
He was the leader (concertmaster) of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for 50 years.
Arnold Rosé was born in Iaşi (Jassy) in what is now Romania.
Their name at that time was Rosenblum.
He had three brothers.
All four boys were musical and so his parents decided to move to Vienna which was a big city in Austria where there was lots of music.
Arnold’s father was a carriage builder.
In those days people often travelled by horse and cart.
His father made good quality carriages and he made plenty of money from his business.
When Arnold was seven he started music lessons.
When he was ten he was good enough to study the violin at the Vienna Conservatorium which was a special school for musical pupils.
In 1881 he played a violin solo with a famous orchestra and famous conductor: the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter.
The piece he played was the Violin Concerto by Otto Goldmark.
Soon he was offered the job of orchestral leader.
This was a very important position for such a young man.
He stayed in that job for 50 years!
Rosé did other things as well as playing with the orchestra.
He gave violin lessons to talented pupils.
He like to play string quartets and he got together with three other players to make up the Rosé Quartet.
They were very good and for more than half a century people said they were the best string quartet in Europe.
Arnold’s brother Eduard was the cellist in the quartet.
They played works by lots of composers, especially  Haydn, Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Rosé knew the composer Johannes Brahms and they played some of Brahms’s compositions when they had only just been written, e.g. the clarinet quintet (for clarinet and string quartet).
The Rosé Quartet also knew the composer Schoenberg and helped him to get well known by playing his music.
Another composer Rosé knew very well was Gustav Mahler.
Mahler had two sisters.
Arnold Rosé married one of them, and his brother Eduard married the other.
Arnold was kept very busy at his job as leader of the orchestra.
The orchestra played in the concert hall as well as for the opera.
At one special concert lots of flowers and plants had been brought in to the concert hall.
The orchestra were busy playing when Arnold noticed people were looking at his shoes.
He thought maybe he had an odd pair of shoes on.
When he looked down at his feet he saw a mouse sitting there.
Arnold and his wife Justine had a son and a daughter who both became musicians.
They had plenty of money to live quite comfortably.
He was given the title of Royal and Imperial Court Musician, and he had a special court carriage to take him to the opera.
He also had a carriage of his own with a footman in livery (uniform) to drive him about.
However, things changed in 1938.
The Nazis took over Austria and made life very difficult for Jewish people.
They were in great danger.
In the autumn his wife died and Arnold had to save his life by going to England.
He stayed there for most of his remaining years.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians ed Stanley Sadie;1980; ISBA 1-56159-174-2
Alma Rosé: “Vienna to Auschwitz” by Richard Newman with Karen Kirtley; Amadeus Press 2000;
Austrian violinists
Concertmasters
Jewish musicians
Romanian Jews
Romanian musical entertainers
Caesar Augustus, Roman Emperor (27 BC – 14).
Tiberius, Roman Emperor (14–37).
Germanicus, Roman General
The Roman emperor Caligula assassinated (41), succeeded by his uncle Claudius
Roman conquest of Britain begins under Aulus Plautius, 43
The Pontiac Silverdome is a domed stadium in the town of Pontiac, Michigan, near Detroit.
It opened in 1975 and closed in 2007.
The largest crowds to come to the stadium were for WrestleMania III on March 29, 1987, where the main event was a match between Hulk Hogan and André the Giant.
The crowd attendance for that night reached 93,173, which is also the record for indoor attendance.
The Detroit Lions NFL team played at the stadium from 1975 until 2001.
Sports in Detroit, Michigan
Sports buildings in the United States
WrestleMania host
20th-century establishments in Michigan
Disestablishments in Michigan
Titus Flavius Vespasianus, Roman Emperor (79–81).
Titus Flavius Domitianus, Roman Emperor (81–96)
The Estonian language () is a Uralic language.
It is mainly spoken in Estonia.
The Estonian language is similar to Finnish and is one of the few national languages of Europe not to be an Indo-European language.
The Estonian alphabet uses the Latin alphabet.
It has many vowels, including Ö, Ä, Õ and Ü.
It has been influenced by and adopted many words from German and Swedish.
The Estonian language also has different dialects.
The chromosomes of a cell are in the cell nucleus.
They carry the genetic information.
Chromosomes are made up of DNA and protein combined as chromatin.
Each chromosome contains many genes.
Chromosomes come in pairs: one set from the mother; the other set from the father.
Cytologists label chromosomes with numbers.
Chromosomes are present in every cell nucleus with very few and special exceptions.
This means they are found in all eukaryotes, since only eukaryotes have cell nuclei.
When eukaryote cells divide, the chromosomes also divide.
When a somatic (body) cell (such as a muscle cell) divides, the process is called mitosis.
Before mitosis, the cell copies all the chromosomes and then it can divide.
When they duplicate, chromosomes look like the letter "X".
When they are doubled, the two halves are called chromatids (see diagram).
The chromatids are joined at the centromere.
There are 46 chromosomes in a human, 23 pairs.
Everyone has a set of chromosomes from their father and a matching set from their mother.
They include a pair of sex chromosomes.
The mother's eggs always contain an X chromosome, while the father's sperm contains either a Y chromosome or an X chromosome.
That determines the sex of the child.
To produce sex cells (gametes), the stem cells go through a different division process called meiosis.
This reduces the 23 pairs (diploid) to 23 singles (haploid).
These, when combined by fertilisation, produce the new set of 23 pairs.
Different animals have different numbers of chromosomes.
If a person does not have the usual number of chromosomes, they may die or have one or more peculiarities.
For example, they might get a genetic disorder like Down syndrome (extra chromosome 21) and Klinefelter syndrome (a male with two X chromosomes).
Some genetic disorders are more common than others.
Polytene chromosomes
Polytene chromosomes are over-sized chromosomes which have developed from standard chromosomes.
Specialized cells undergo repeated rounds of DNA replication without cell division (endomitosis).
Polytene chromosomes form when multiple rounds of replication produce many sister chromatids that are stuck together in parallel.
Polytene chromosomes are found in Drosophila species and in nonbiting midges.
They also occur in arthropods of the class Collembola,  Ciliate protozoa, early stages of mammalian embryos, and suspensor cells in plants.
Polytene cells have a metabolic function.
Multiple copies of genes allows a high level of gene expression.
In Drosophila, for example, the chromosomes of the larval salivary glands undergo many rounds of endoreduplication.
This produces large amounts of glue-like mucous (“glue”) before pupation.
Chromosome puffs (seen in diagram) are diffused uncoiled regions of the polytene chromosome.
They are sites of active  transcription.
Mutation#Chromosome mutations
Genetics#Between Mendel and modern genetics
He was very famous in his day and composed a great deal of church music; motets and madrigals.
He lived at the end of the Renaissance period and beginning of the Baroque.
About 1575, Giovanni began working for Orlando di Lasso at the Bavarian court, as his uncle Andres Gabrieli had before him.
Little is known of his time in Munich, and he left in 1579 after the death of his patron, Duke Albrecht.
There is no record of Gabrieli's activities until 1584 when he'd returned to Venice.
That year he replaced organist Claudio Merulo at Basilica di San Marco, church of Venice's patron saint.
Due to Merulo's resignation, a contest was eventually held January 1, 1585 to fill his post, which Gabrieli won, having already occupied the position anyway.
Giovanni and his uncle, who had raised him and taught him music, worked together only a short time at the church before Andres died in August 1585.
Giovanni held his post until he died in 1612.
During all this, he was also a music teacher.
Heinrich Schutz was one of his students.
http://www.goldbergweb.com/en/history/composers/10946.php
http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/appendix/composers/G/GiovanniGabrieli.html
1557 births
1612 deaths
Arcangelo Corelli (b.Fusignano, Imola, 17 Feb.1653; d.Rome, 8 Jan.1713) was an Italian violinist and composer.
He composed some of the most important Italian music of the Baroque period.
He was also very famous as a player.
Other violinists learned from his style of playing and developed the art of playing the violin.
His works include sonatas and concerti grossi.
Perhaps his most famous is the La Folia sonata for Violin.
1653 births
Henry Purcell was an English composer.
He was born in 1659 in Westminster, London; he died 21 November 21 1695, Westminster).
Many musicians think he is the greatest English composer of all times.
Although he only lived until he was 36, he wrote a large amount of music.
His compositions include church music, instrumental music, music for the theatre, even popular drinking songs.
He wrote the first English opera.
He lived in the time called the Baroque period.
He liked Italian and French music, and combined those styles to make something that was typically English.
We do not know very much about Purcell’s childhood.
His mother’s name was Elizabeth.
In 1664, Henry Purcell senior died and the widow took her children to live with her brother in law, Thomas Purcell, who was very kind to them.
Thomas Purcell was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal which meant that he sang in the king’s choir.
Soon Henry was singing in the Chapel Royal.
This was the best musical training a boy could have in England.
His teachers were Captain Henry Cooke, and then Pelham Humfrey.
Henry sang in the choir until his voice broke in 1673.
He was then given the job of looking after the king’s musical instruments.
Purcell may have been composing already when he was nine.
We know that he wrote an ode for the King's birthday in 1670.
When Humfrey died Purcell studied with the famous composer John Blow.
He went to Westminster School.
In 1676 he was made organist at Westminster Abbey.
He started writing music for the theatre.
He also wrote church music, including an anthem for a singer called John Gostling who had a very good, deep bass voice.
Purcell wrote several anthems for him during his life.
One is called "They that go down to the sea in ships".
It goes down to a low D.
Later career and death
In 1680, Blow, who had been made organist of Westminster Abbey in 1669, resigned so that the 22-years-old Purcell could have his job.
Purcell then spent the next six years just writing sacred (religious) music.
Later he went back to writing music for the theatre, including the first English opera Dido and Aeneas.
In 1682 Purcell became organist of the Chapel Royal.
He did this job as well as being organist at Westminster Abbey.
His first printed composition, Twelve Sonatas, was published in 1683.
Music printing was expensive in those days, so it was unusual to have something printed.
He continued to write music including odes to the king and royal family.
In 1685, he wrote two of his finest anthems, "I was glad" and "My heart is inditing", for the coronation of King James II.
In 1687 he wrote more theatre music.
Sometimes this music was for masques (a kind of ballet with some singing as well), sometimes it was music for tragedies, e.g. plays by Dryden.
In 1691, he wrote King Arthur, also written by Dryden.
In 1692, he composed songs and music for The Fairy-Queen (an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream).
Purcell’s music for this was lost for many years, and was rediscovered and published in 1901.
In these works the characters in the plays do not sing, they speak their lines.
Purcell's Te Deum and Jubilate was written for Saint Cecilia's Day, 1693, the first English Te Deum ever composed with orchestral accompaniment.
He composed an anthem and two elegies for Queen Mary II's funeral.
He was very famous when he died in 1695, possibly from tuberculosis.
His wife and two of his six children survived him.
Purcell is buried next to the organ in Westminster Abbey.
His epitaph reads, "Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq.,
who left this life and is gone to that blessed place where only his harmony can be exceeded."
Purcell wrote a lot of music for the theatre.
He was born one year before the time known in England as the “Restoration”.
Before the Restoration Oliver Cromwell had been ruling England for nearly 20 years.
Most music had been banned.
People were therefore very glad to be able to make music again, and they wanted lots of songs and instrumental music in their plays.
Opera, however, was not wanted.
In Europe opera was very popular in countries such as Italy, Germany and France, but it did not become popular in England until Handel came to England in 1709 and introduced Italian opera.
Dido and Aeneas is an exception because it is a real opera: everything is sung, and the words are in English.
It was written for a performance at a girls’ school.
It is quite short, lasting just one hour.
It contains the famous lament When I am laid in earth sung by Dido.
Purcell wrote a very large amount of music for the church.
This includes anthems and service settings.
Although he was an organist he wrote very little for organ.
He wrote chamber music, including some very beautiful fantasias for viols.
Although Purcell was recognized as a great composer at the time he did not have much influence on other composers after his death.
He was the last in a line of great English musicians in the 16th and 17th centuries.
After his death English music was not as important as it had been.
In the 18th century the music heard in England was largely imported from the continent, e.g. Italian opera.
Much later, in the 20th century, English composers were often inspired by Purcell’s music.
Benjamin Britten wrote a piece called The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra which is based on a tune from Purcell's Abdelazar.
The aria "I know a bank" from Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream is inspired by Purcell's aria "Sweeter than Roses".
Sir Michael Tippett loved Purcell’s harmonies and rhythms and they influenced him in his compositions.
1659 births
1695 deaths
Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal
François Couperin (born in Paris on 10 November 1668; died in Paris, on 12 September 1733) was a French composer who lived in the Baroque period.
Many of his relatives were composers.
He is often called François Couperin le Grand (The Great) because he was the most famous of the Couperin family.
He is best known today for his harpsichord music.
He wrote several pieces which he called Ordres meaning the same as the word suite i.e. a collection of dance movements.
Sometimes these movements have strange titles and we cannot always be sure what they mean.
Some of them may have been nicknames of people he knew.
He also wrote important organ music.
He never had a family of his own before he died.
1668 births
1733 deaths
Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (b.Erasbach nr.
Berching, July 2, 1714; d.Vienna, November 15, 1787) was a German composer.
He is famous for his operas which were written in a new and exciting way.
He was not interested in writing operas which were just a series of songs for singers to show off.
He wanted to make his operas into good pieces of drama.
His operas had a big influence on later composers like Mozart, Weber and Wagner.
He wrote Italian operas and French operas.
Orfeo ed Euridice includes song “Che farò senza Euridice” which is one of the best-known opera songs ever written.
Gluck,Christoph W.
1714 births
1787 deaths
Jan Ladislav Dussek (b. Ĉáslav, Bohemia, 12 Feb.1760; d.Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 20 March 1812) was a Bohemian composer of the Classical period.
He travelled a lot, living in Holland, Lithuania, Italy, France and England.
He lived nearly twelve years in London where he was a fashionable teacher and famous composer.
He is best remembered now for his piano music.
1760 births
1812 deaths
Dussek, Jan Ladislav
Johannes Brahms (7 May 1833 - 3 April 1897) was a famous German composer.
He started his career as a pianist.
He was always very self-critical and destroyed any composition he thought was not really good.
He thought that people were expecting him to be the “next Beethoven”, and spent many years on his first symphony before he allowed it to be performed.
In the end, he wrote four symphonies altogether, as well as four concertos and a number of choral works, including a requiem.
He also wrote chamber music, piano music, and German art songs, or Lieder.
One of his best known songs is Wiegenlied ("cradle song"), often called "Brahms' Lullaby," which is often heard in music boxes.
Brahms was born in Germany.
His father was a double bass player in the Hamburg city orchestra.
He probably gave the young boy his first music lessons.
He soon was learning the piano with a teacher named Otto Cossel.
When Brahms played in a public concert in 1843 an American agent asked him to tour America, but his teacher realized he was too young.
He said that Johannes should study with Eduard Marxsen, a well-known teacher in Hamburg.
By 1848 he was playing piano recitals.
He also started to compose, and he sent some of his compositions to Robert Schumann to ask for his advice.
Schumann sent the parcel back unopened.
At this time there were many Hungarian musicians in Hamburg.
Brahms liked their folk music with its unusual rhythms, little triplet figures and sense of rubato.
It was to influence his own style of composition.
One of the Hungarians was called Remenyi.
He played the violin and Brahms often accompanied him at concerts.
They went on tour together and met famous people such as the composer Franz Liszt and the violinist Joseph Joachim who became a close friend of Brahms for many years.
Joachim told Brahms to go and see Schumann and his wife Clara in Düsseldorf.
Schumann liked Brahms and could see that he was going to be a great composer, so he wrote an article in his music journal about him.
The article had the title: Neue Bahnen (New Paths).
Schumann turned out to be correct: Brahms did become a famous composer and found “new paths” (new ways of composing).
Brahms remained a very close friend of Schumann.
When Schumann had a nervous breakdown, Brahms went all the way to Düsseldorf to see him.
Brahms soon fell in love with Clara who was 14 years older than himself.
He continued to be in love with her after Robert Schumann’s death, and they had a close relationship, though Brahms became interested in other women and was briefly engaged.
However, he never married.
Early career in Hamburg
In 1859, Brahms settled in Hamburg.
He founded a women’s choir and wrote and arranged a lot of music for them.
His First Piano Concerto was a great success in Hanover and Hamburg, but not in Leipzig, where a lot of people preferred the wildly Romantic music of Liszt which was quite different from Brahms’s style based on the Classical music style.
Brahms decided to go to Vienna.
He was to stay there for the rest of his life.
First years in Vienna
In Vienna he soon made many friends who liked his music.
For a short time he was director of a choir called the Vienna Singakademie, who sang some of his compositions.
He met Wagner.
Wagner was afraid that Brahms would start to write operas which would be more famous than his own.
So Wagner wrote an article saying that Brahms was a very bad conductor.
Wagner had made himself an enemy of Brahms, who never did write any operas anyway.
In 1870, Brahms became director of a concert series called Vienna Gesellschaftskonzerte.
He became more and more famous as a composer, but he was never very good at conducting, and in 1875 a conductor called Hans Richter took over conducting the concerts.
During these years he finished one of his greatest works: Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), as well as one of his most popular works: the Variations on the St Anthony chorale (sometimes wrongly known as Variations on a Theme by Haydn).
At last, in 1876, he allowed his First Symphony to be performed.
It was not very successful at first, but in Vienna the audience liked it.
He started to compose a lot of his greatest works and received many honours from universities.
In the winter he gave concerts and in the summer he spent his time composing.
He wrote his last symphony (Fourth Symphony) in 1885 and conducted it, going on tour with the orchestra through Germany and the Netherlands.
From 1889, Brahms spent each summer in Ischl where he had many friends.
By 1890 he had decided to stop composing, although he did still write four beautiful works for clarinet after meeting the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld.
In 1896 he wrote Four Serious Songs which were probably inspired by the sad death of Clara Schumann.
The next year Brahms died from cancer in Vienna.
His father had died of the same illness.
Brahms wrote a great deal of vocal music.
The greatest of these works is the German Requiem.
There were many works for choirs, and a large collection of songs with piano accompaniment (Lieder).
He wrote a lot of piano music which includes sonatas and many shorter pieces such as fantasias, rhapsodies, ballades, intermezzos, capriccios and romances.
His chamber music includes string quartets, quintets and sextets and piano trios, quartets and a piano quintet.
He wrote four symphonies and four concertos: two for piano, one for the violin and one for violin and cello (the Double Concerto).
The German Requiem is his greatest vocal work.
For writing his music Brahms was mostly using German and Viennese pianos.
He owned a Conrad Graf piano that he received from Clara Schumann in 1856.
Later in life he was mostly playing on a Streicher piano.
Brahms kept this piano in his house until his death.
German pianists
1897 deaths
Frederick Delius (b.Bradford, 29 Jan.1862; d.Grez-sur-Loing, 10 June 1934) was an English composer.
At first his parents did not let him study music, so he went off to Florida to work on an orange plantation.
He later returned, studied music, and settled in France for the rest of his life.
His music is often quite gentle and atmospheric, with chords that shift about in unusual ways.
One of his best known orchestral works is On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.
In his last years he was very ill, but he still wanted to compose, so he dictated the music he heard in his head to a man called Eric Fenby.
20th-century English composers
Béla Bartók (b. Nagyszentimiklós, Hungary, 25 March 1881; d. New York City 26 September 1945) was a famous Hungarian composer and pianist.
He was one of the most important and original composers of the 20th century.
He became very interested in folk music and travelled a lot in Hungary and other countries, including Romania, listening to the folk songs which the country people sang.
He often used the style of these songs in his music.
He is famous for his piano music, string quartets and several pieces for orchestra including one called Concerto for Orchestra.
Bartók’s harmonies and lively rhythms were sometimes quite new to classical music and some audiences found them difficult to understand at first.
Childhood and early years
Béla Bartók was born in the small town of Nagyszentmiklós.
In those days it was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but today it is in Romania.
When he was very small he showed great musical talent, and his mother taught him to play the piano.
Béla was often ill when he was a child.
When he was seven his father died, and his mother took him and his sister to live in Nagyszőlős (today it is called Vinogradiv and is in the Ukraine), and then to Pozsony (today it is Bratislava in Slovakia).
There he gave his first public recital when he was eleven.
He included some music which he had composed himself.
Early musical career
Soon he was studying the piano with István Thoman who had studied with the famous Franz Liszt.
He had lessons in composition from János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest.
There he met the composer Zoltán Kodály, who was a great influence on him and who became a lifelong friend.
He soon started to compose longer pieces of music.
He liked the music of Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy and these influenced his style of music.
He started to be interested in folk music.
This can be heard in the first of his six string quartets.
Bartók and Kodály travelled together into the countryside to collect and study old Hungarian folk melodies.
People in those days thought that real Magyar (old Hungarian) folk music was Gypsy music.
Bartók and Kodály showed that there were other traditions beside these.
They found music which used pentatonic scales similar to those used in some parts of Asia.
The two composers started to use these folk ideas in their own compositions.
Kodály often quoted (copied) actual folk songs in his own music, while Bartók preferred to compose music which sounded like folksong without actually copying it.
Middle years and career
In 1909, Bartók married Márta Ziegler.
Their son, also named Béla, was born in 1910.
In 1911, Bartók wrote his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle.
There are only two singers in the opera: Bluebeard and his wife Judith.
He also wrote a ballet called The Wooden Prince.
This started to make him famous abroad.
Another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, is even more famous today.
It shows the influence of Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss.
He wrote a lot of chamber music including a total of 6 string quartets, 2 violin sonatas and a Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.
He wrote some pieces for smaller orchestras: Divertimento for strings and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.
Bartók divorced Márta in 1923, and married a piano student, Ditta Pásztory.
His second son, Péter, was born in 1924.
World War II and later career
When World War II broke out Bartók criticized the Nazis.
After they came into power in Germany, he refused to give concerts there and did not use his German publisher.
His political ideas gave him a great deal of trouble in Hungary.
Having first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók felt he had to emigrate to the USA with Ditta Pásztory.
Their son Péter joined them in 1942 and later joined the United States Navy.
Bartók ‘s older son Béla stayed in Hungary.
Bartók did not feel comfortable in the USA, and found it very difficult to compose.
He was also not very well known in America, and not many people were interested in his music.
He and his wife Ditta gave concerts, and for a while, they were given some money to work on a collection of Yugoslav folk songs.
They did not have very much money, although he had some friends who gave them enough to live on.
Serge Koussevitsky asked him to write the  Concerto for Orchestra .
This soon became Bartók's most popular work, and brought him some money.
He was also asked by Yehudi Menuhin to write a Sonata for Solo Violin.
This seemed to make him interested again in composing, and he went on to write his Piano Concerto No.
3 and began work on his  Viola Concerto.
Bartók died by polycythemia in New York City from on 26 September 1945, aged 64.
He left the Viola Concerto unfinished at his death; it was later finished by his pupil Tibor Serly.
Bartók’s music has many modern techniques such atonality, bitonality and modern harmonies.
He often uses different kinds of scales (not just major and minor ones), and very complicated rhythms.
A lot of these are inspired by the folk music he heard.
He wrote a lot of piano music, including some easy pieces for people who are learning the piano.
This includes a collection of pieces in six volumes called Mikrokosmos which are very popular with young musicians today.
Deaths from blood disease
Hungarian composers
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten of Aldeburgh, OM CH (born Lowestoft, 22 November 1913; died Aldeburgh, 4 December 1976) was one of the greatest English composers of his time.
He came from East Anglia (a region in the East of England) and he often thought about the East Anglian landscape and the sea when writing his music.
He wrote a lot of music for his long-term partner, the tenor Peter Pears.
His operas include Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Death in Venice.
His War Requiem was performed in Coventry Cathedral in 1962 after it had been rebuilt because the old cathedral had been destroyed in the war.
He wrote music for children which sounds like proper, adult music.
Britten started the Aldeburgh Festival.
He was an excellent pianist and conductor.
Benjamin Britten started composing music at the age of five although he had no one to help him.
When he was ten years old he took part in an amateur music festival in Norwich.
A composer called Frank Bridge heard him and was so impressed that he offered to teach him composition.
He helped Britten to compose using proper musical techniques.
Britten started to get to know music by a lot of important modern composers including Schoenberg and Bartók.
In 1930 he went to the Royal College of Music.
He had excellent piano teachers but he did not learn much from his composition teacher John Ireland and most of the music he wrote was never performed.
Britten was more interested in music from abroad than in English music.
In 1934 he heard the opera Wozzeck by Alban Berg.
He wanted to go to Austria to study with Berg but he was not allowed to.
Meanwhile, some of his first proper compositions started to be performed.
He wrote some music for movies that were being made by the General Post Office, including one about a train delivering mail.
The music describes the rhythm of the train rushing along.
While working on the movie music he met the writer W. H. Auden.
He started to be interested in political ideas.
These can be heard in some works he wrote at this time such as Our Hunting Fathers (1936) and Ballad of Heroes (1939).
When Auden emigrated to the United States Britten followed him.
With him was the tenor Peter Pears who was to become a lifelong friend and partner, and who was to be the inspiration for many songs and operas.
Britten wrote several compositions in the USA including Sinfonia da Requiem (1940) and his First String Quartet (1941).
The following year he was reading about the poet George Crabbe who came from Suffolk, the same part of England where Britten had grown up.
Britten suddenly became homesick.
He realized that he could not work and be himself in a foreign country.
So he returned with Pears to England.
As soon as he was on the boat sailing back to England he started work on Ceremony of Carols.
Back in England, Britten and Pears gave concerts to audiences of all kinds and took part in opera productions of Sadler's Wells Opera Company, which was having a new theatre built.
On the 7 June 1945 the new theatre was opened with a performance of Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.
This opera was to make Britten into the most famous English composer of his time.
It was soon being performed abroad as well as in England.
Britten was now composing lots of music: songs, chamber music and a very popular piece called Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (also known as Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell).
This piece shows off each instrument of the orchestra in turn so that young people can get to know the sound of the musical instruments.
It is based on a tune written by Henry Purcell 300 years ago.
There were more popular works: St Nicolas and the Spring Symphony.
There were not many opportunities for big operas to be performed, so he wrote some “chamber operas” which only needed small orchestras and a small number of singers.
These were performed in places such as local churches by a group which called themselves English Opera Group.
He wrote The Rape of Lucretia (1946) and Albert Herring (1947).
In 1948 the group helped to start a music festival in Aldeburgh.
Benjamin Britten spent the rest of his life mainly working on music which was to be performed at the Aldeburgh Festival.
He composed some of his greatest works for the festival, and he took part in the performances as conductor and pianist.
One of Britten’s most popular pieces of music for amateurs including children was Noye’s Fludde (1957).
He wrote three “church parables”.
His large operas include Billy Budd (1951) which was soon produced in Covent Garden.
In June 1953 he wrote Gloriana, an opera about Queen Elizabeth I, written for the coronation celebrations of Elizabeth II.
When he travelled with Peter Pears to the Far East he was influenced by the music of Bali and he composed a ballet called The Prince of the Pagodas, performed in Covent Garden in 1957.
Another great work inspired by the East was the parable Curlew River (1964).
The opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for the Aldeburgh Festival in 1960.
In 1962 he wrote the War Requiem to celebrate the new Coventry Cathedral.
This is one of the greatest musical works of the 20th century.
In 1961 he became friends with the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.
He composed a Cello Sonata and a Cello Symphony (1963) (a kind of cello concerto), as well as three suites for solo cello.
He travelled with Pears to the Soviet Union.
In 1967 the Aldeburgh Festival had a new concert hall, the Maltings at Snape.
His next opera was Owen Wingrave (1970), written for television but soon produced in Covent Garden.
In June 1973 Britten produced another great opera Death in Venice.
The main character, called Aschenbach, was perhaps the best music he ever wrote for Peter Pears.
It was performed at the Aldeburgh Festival, but Britten was ill by this time and unable to be at the performance.
His heart condition made it impossible to work on any more large works, but he still wrote some harp music for the harpist Ossian Ellis, a song called Phaedra for Janet Baker, and a Third String Quartet.
He died in Aldeburgh on 4 December 1976.
Britten received many honours both in Britain and in other countries.
He became a Companion of Honour in 1952 a member of the Order of Merit in 1965 and, in the year he died, he was the first musician ever to receive a life peer (the title Lord Britten).
Britten’s early works were often written for instruments.
His Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) for string orchestra is a very popular work today.
He often borrowed and reinvented themes by other composers (this is called “parody” technique).
During his last years he again gave much attention to instrumental music, mainly chamber music.
After he met Peter Pears much of his music was vocal.
This includes more than 100 songs, a number of operas, chamber operas as well as three works for tenor solo and orchestra: Les Illuminations, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the Nocturne.
His songs are often grouped in cycles.
He also wrote many folksong settings.
These were very popular as encore pieces when he accompanied Peter Pears in song recitals.
Britten wrote music for choirs, including Hymn to St Cecilia (Britten was proud of having been born on St Cecilia’s day: 22 November).
The War Requiem is his greatest work which combines writing for choir and orchestra.
It describes the horrors of war (Britten had refused to fight in World War II).
He wrote a lot of work for children.
There are even parts for children in some of his operas, e.g. Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave.
He even wrote an opera in which all the main parts are sung by children: The Little Sweep (1949).
Many of his great operatic roles, from Peter Grimes to Aschenbach in Death in Venice, deal with the theme of the outsider, the person who does not quite fit into society, or who is misunderstood.
Britten’s homosexuality (which was something that was never discussed in his lifetime) may have something to do with this.
He also knew what it was like to be an outsider when he tried to live in the United States, and his refusal to fight in the war may have distanced him from some people.
The Aldeburgh Festival at the Maltings in Snape (a village near Aldeburgh) continue to be a focus for Britten’s music.
Every year the Brittens-Pears School of Music organizes lessons and performance opportunities for young musicians.
A series of “Prom” concerts is held there every year in August.
British conductors
Claudio Monteverdi (b.Cremona, 1567; d.Venice 25 November 1643) was the most important composer of the early Baroque period.
He lived at a time of great change in musical style.
The first opera ever written was composed in 1597 by a composer named Jacopo Peri.
Just eleven years later Monteverdi wrote an opera  Orfeo which was a really great work.
Other important operas of his are Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.
He wrote 9 books of madrigals.
He also wrote a lot of church music including the 1610 Vespers.
He was director of music at St Mark’s, Venice, which was the most important musical job in Italy.
Early life in Cremona
Monteverdi was the son of an apothecary and a doctor.
He was very talented as a young boy and was only 15 when he published his first pieces of music.
In the introduction to this music he says that his music teacher was Marc’ Antonio Ingegneri, the maestro di cappella of Cremona cathedral.
We cannot find anything that shows that he sang in the cathedral choir.
He probably had private music lessons.
He learned composition, singing and how to play string instruments such as the viol and viola da braccio.
He got several compositions published in Venice.
By the time he got his first job he had already published two books of madrigals.
His first job was working at the court of the Duke of Mantua.
In Mantua there was a small band of excellent musicians.
The musical director was the famous Giaches de Wert.
Monteverdi got to know many famous poets, and there were famous singers at Ferrara which was not far away.
At first Monteverdi had a low-paid job.
He married the daughter of one of the court musicians in the string band.
Monteverdi soon became well-known.
He sent several of his compositions to be performed at Ferrara, and he went with the duke to when his army was fighting the Turks.
The young Monteverdi was developing a new musical style.
The old style was known as prima pratica (“first practice”) and the new style was called the seconda pratica (“second practice”).
The prima pratica continued to be used for church music.
In this style of writing the music was thought to be more important than the words.
This meant that the music could be very contrapuntal, with several things going on at once so that the words could not be clearly heard.
However, in the seconda pratica the words were more important than the music, i.e. it was important to be able to hear all the words clearly, and the music had to be simple enough for this to happen.
This was particularly important in opera and in madrigals.
There were a lot of arguments among musicians about these two styles of composition, and this is perhaps the reason why there was a gap of 11 years between Monteverdi’s 3rd and his 4th book of madrigals.
His opera Orfeo (1608) was performed at least twice at court, and several times at Salzburg.
Monteverdi was becoming famous all over Europe.
Monteverdi went back to Cremona.
His wife died, leaving him with their three small children.
It was a terrible tragedy for Monteverdi, and he did not want to go back to Mantua, but the Duke wrote to him telling him he must come back to provide music for the wedding of Prince Francesco Gonzaga and Margharita of Savoy.
Monteverdi returned to Mantua, where he composed his opera Arianna.
The performance was a great success, and the audience were moved to tears by the music Arianna’s lament.
This song is the only part of the opera that has not been lost.
Although Monteverdi’s fame was increasing, there were a lot of arguments with his employer.
Eventually he found another job, this time as a church musician, in the biggest church in Venice.
Monteverdi had a difficult journey from Mantua to Venice.
The passengers were robbed by highwaymen on the way.
He arrived in Venice in October 1613.
The job of maestro (director of music) at San Marco (Saint Mark’s church) in Venice was perhaps the most important job for a church musician in the whole of Europe.
However, the music was in a bad state because previous directors of music had not been very good.
Monteverdi started to reorganize the music there: he bought new music for the library and got some new musicians.
He had to compose music for many special feast days during the year.
He was doing a good job, and in 1616 his salary was increased to 400 ducats (about 44.28 ounces of gold, worth about $73,500USD today).
The duke of Mantua was probably cross that he had lost such a good musician.
He still asked Monteverdi to write music for him.