Freely sharing passions for classical music, literature, and art (intuitive art, including watercolour painting, neurographic art & neurographica), science, biographies, films & soundtracks, icons & legends. (down memory lane, in remembrance...)
1842 - Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan, MVO, English composer of comic operas, famous for operettas written in collaboration with librettist William Gilbert. His works include 24 operas, 11 major orchestral works, ten choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. His hymns and songs include "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "The Lost Chord." Sullivan composed a one-act comic opera, Cox and Box. His first opera with W. S. Gilbert was Thespis. Four years later, the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte engaged Gilbert and Sullivan to create a one-act piece, Trial by Jury. Its box-office success led to a series of twelve full-length
comic operas by the collaborators. After the extraordinary success of H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, Carte used his profits from the partnership to build the Savoy Theatre in 1881, and their joint works became known as the Savoy operas. Among the best known of the later operas are The Mikado and The Gondoliers. Sullivan's most popular choral work is The Golden Legend.
1907 -Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE, English author and playwright. Her parents were the actor/manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and stage actress Muriel Beaumont, and her grandfather was the cartoonist and writer George du Maurier.
Although she is classed as a romantic novelist, her stories have been described as "moody and resonant" with overtones of the paranormal. (Daphne de Maurier, revisited. Uploaded by Nicholas Hoare Books. Accessed May 13, 2019.) Her bestselling works have since earned an enduring reputation for narrative craft. Many
have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn, Hungry Hills and the short stories "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now/Not After Midnight". Du Maurier spent much of her life in Cornwall, where most of her works are set. As her fame increased, she became more reclusive.
1937 - Trinidad "Trini" López III, American singer, guitarist, and actor. His first album included a version of "If I Had a Hammer", which earned a Golden Disc for him. His other hits included "Lemon Tree", "I'm Comin' Home, Cindy" and "Sally Was a Good Old Girl". He designed two guitars for the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which are now collectors’ items.
According to his management, Lopez died from COVID-19 complications at the age of 83.
1944 - Armistead Maupin (born Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr.), American writer who wrote Tales of the City, a series of novels set in San Francisco. They have been translated into ten
languages and there are more than six million copies in print. Several
of the books have been adapted and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His other works include: Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener (both novel and film).
Leftie:
Author Armistead Maupin
More birthdays and historical events today, May 13 - On This Day.
Historical Events
1568 - Mary, Queen of Scots, is defeated by the English at the Battle of Langside.
1754 -Franz Anton Hoffmeister, German composer and music publisher, contemporary of Wolfgang Mozart. His publishing activities reached a peak in 1791 after Mozart passed on, but he appeared to have devoted more time to composition. Most of his operas were composed and staged during the early 1790s and this, combined with an apparent lack of business sense, led to his noticeable decline as a publisher.
1765 - Lady Emma Hamilton, (26 April 1765?; baptised 12 May), English model and actress, best remembered as the mistress of Lord Nelson and as the muse of the portrait artist George Romney.
1820 -Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC, DSt, English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of
modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night. (Florence Nightingale - The Lady with the Lamp. YouTube, uploaded by Biographics. Accessed May 12, 2021.)
1828 - Gabriel Dante Rossetti (also called Dante Gabriel Rossetti), British poet, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais (Dante Gabriel Rossetti Life & Works. Uploaded by Literature Forever. Accessed May 12, 2017. Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828 1882 Painter & Poet. Uploaded by Antony D.I. Barnard. Accesed May 12, 2019. Antony D.I. Barnard. )
1842 - Jules (Émile Frédéric) Massenet, French composer of the Romantic era best known for his operas, Manon and Werther, and famous for "Thais Meditation," from his opera Thais. He wrote more than thirty operas. Aside from his two most frequently staged Manon and Werther, he also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music. He wrote more than forty stage works in a wide variety of styles, from opéra-comique to grand-scale depictions of classical myths, romantic comedies, lyric dramas, as well as oratorios, cantatas and ballets. Massenet had a good sense of the theatre and of what would succeed with the Parisian public. Despite some miscalculations, he
produced a series of successes that made him the leading composer of opera in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although critics do not rank him among the handful of outstanding operatic geniuses such as Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, his operas are now widely accepted. (Antonio Pappano introduces the music of Werther (The Royal Opera). YouTube, uploaded by Royal Opera House. Accessed May 12, 2021.)
1845 - Gabriel (Urbain) Faure, French composer, organist, pianist and teacher, popular with his own Requiem. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, nocturnes for piano and the songs. Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style. (Gabriel FAURE': Pavane, Op. 50 - Paintings By "CLAUDE MONET". YouTube, uploaded by andrewgrummanJC. Accessed May 12, 2020.)
1903 - Sir Lennox Berkeley, English composer, In 1927, he went to Paris to study music with Nadia Boulanger, and there became acquainted with Francis Poulenc, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Albert Roussel. Berkeley studied with Maurice Ravel, often cited as a key influence in Berkeley's technical development as a composer. He was Professor of Composition in the Royal Academy of Music. 1954 saw the premiere of his first opera, Nelson, at Sadler's Wells premiered in 1954. He was knighted in 1974.
1907 - Katharine Hepburn (bornKatharine Houghton Hepburn), American actress who was a leading lady in Hollywood for more than 60 years. She appeared in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and she received a record (for any gender) four Academy Awards for Lead Acting Performances, plus eight further nominations. In 1999, Hepburn was named by the American Film Institute the greatest female star of Classic Hollywood Cinema. She was known for her fierce independence and spirited personality.(Top 10 Katherine Hepburn performance. Updated by MsMojo. Accessed May 12, 2019.)
1928 - Burt Freeman Bacharach, American composer, songwriter, pianist, and record producer. He has composed hundreds of pop songs from the late 1950s through the 1980s, many in collaboration with lyricist Hal David. A six-time Grammy Award winner and three-time Academy Award winner, Bacharach's songs have been recorded by more than
1,000 different artists. He was one of the most important composers of 20th-century popular music. (Burt Bacharach Documentary - His Life and His Music. Uploaded by Brill Videos. Accessed May 13, 2019.)
More birthdays and historical events today, May 12 - On This Day.
Features: 1. OperaThais's 'Meditation' by Jules Massenet. Classic FM M-Tel Radio Symphony Orchestra 13 March 2006. NDK Sofia. Maxim Vengerov, Violin. Conductor: Luciano Di Martino (YouTube, uploaded by The Classicalmusicfan. Accessed 12 May 2018.)
2. Gabriel Rossetti's poem "Sudden Light" set to lovely music by Australian composer and pianist Sally Whitwell, performed by Nicole Thomson, soprano and Rachel Scott, cello.
Sudden Light
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,—
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.
Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
1908 - Wireless Radio Broadcasting is patented by Nathan B. Stubblefield.
1926 - Dmitri Shostakovich's First Symphony premieres in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The composer wrote the piece at the age of 19 as his conservatory graduation project.
