October 16 Dateline

Birthdays

1758 - Noah Webster, Jr., American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, prolific writer. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education." His "Blue-backed Speller" books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read.

1821 - Albert Franz Doppler, Polish composer and flautist. He was a flute virtuoso best known for his flute music. He also wrote one German and several Hungarian operas for Budapest, all produced with great success. His ballet music was popular during his lifetime.

1854 - Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, novelist, and poet. A celebrated poet and playwright, he was best known for his wit. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was written in a form of a fable and tells a much darker story. (Oscar Wilde Biography: His "Wild" Life. YouTube, uploaded by Biographics. Accessed October 16, 2018. Here's his "The Happy Prince" from wilde-online.info.)

1925 - Dame Angela (Brigid) Lansbury DBE, British-American-Irish actress in theatre, television and film, Famous for Murder, She Wrote, as Jessica Fletcher, and as Mame in the original 1966 Broadway musical Mame. Her career has spanned eight decades. She received an Honorary Oscar and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and has won five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and an Olivier Award. She was nominated for numerous other awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and various Primetime Emmy Awards on eighteen occasions, and a Grammy Award. In 2014, Lansbury was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. (The Legendary Dame Angela Lansbury Talks about her Career. Uploaded by picturefan2009.  Mame - Angela Lansbury - If He Walked into my Life (Very rare rehearsal take, recorded during the first rehearsal for the musical "Mame." Uploaded by orvgg.  Accessed October 16, 2019.)  

1956 - Marin Alsop,  American conductor, the first woman to win the Koussevitzky Prize for conducting and the first conductor to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She is music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Ravinia Festival. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2020.  (Trailblazing conductor Marin Alsop's message on breaking the glass ceiling. Youtube, uploaded by ABC News.  Oct 16, 2022.  Dvorák: Symphony No. 9, Peabody Symphony Orchestra (PSO), Marin Alsop. Youtube, uploaded by Peabody Institute of the John Hopkins University. Accessed October 16, 2022) 

 

1958 - Tim Francis Robbins, Academy Award winning American actor, screenwriter, director, producer, and musician. He is notable for his portrayal of Andy Dufresne in the film The Shawshank Redemption. His other roles include starring as Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham, Jacob Singer in Jacob's Ladder, Griffin Mill in The Player, Dave Boyle in Mystic River, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and Harlan Ogilvy in War of the Worlds. He also directed the films Bob Roberts and Dead Man Walking. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for Dead Man Walking. For TV, he played Secretary of State Walter Larson in the HBO comedy The Brink, and in Here and Now portrayed Greg Boatwright. 

1962 - Dmitri Aleksandrovich Hvorostovsky, Russian operatic baritone. He came to international prominence in 1989 when he won the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, beating local favourite Bryn Terfel in the final round. His performance included Handel's "Ombra mai fu" and "Per me giunto...O Carlo ascolta" from Verdi's Don Carlos. In later years his repertoire almost entirely consisted of Verdi operas. He won First Prizes at both the Glinka Vocal Competition in 1987 and the Toulouse Singing Competition in 1988. His highest awards in Russia include the Glinka State Prize in 1991 and the People's Artist of Russia honorary title in 1995.

Lefties:
None known

 

More birthdays and historical events, October 16 - On This Day

 

Quote: "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that's all." - Oscar Wilde


Featuring: (Albert) Franz Doppler, Composer & Flautist

Franz Doppler (16 October 1821 - 27 July 1883), was born in Poland in Lemberg (Austrian Empire), now Lviv, Ukraine. He was a flute virtuoso, a composer best known for his flute music, and a brilliant orchestrator. He also wrote one German and Hungarian operas for Budapest, with great success. His ballet music was popular during his lifetime.  Doppler composed chiefly for the flute, as well as opera, composing many pieces including concertos, flute duets, played by himself and his brother Karl. His work contains aspects of Russian and Hungarian music. His operas included Judith (his only German opera), and a Russian work entitled Benyovsky. He wrote seven operas and fifteen ballets in total.

Historical Events

1791 - Wolfgang A Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major,  K.622, is first  performed in Prague (citation needed, refer resource Wiki from the 'clarinet concerto' link.)

1793 - Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI of France, is executed by guillotine, without proof of her crimes.

1847 - Charlotte Brontë publishes her famous classic novel Jane Eyre.

October 15 Dateline

Birthdays

70 B.C.E. -  Virgil or Vergil, ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He wrote three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, are sometimes attributed to him. Virgil is traditionally ranked as one of Rome's greatest poets. His Aeneid has been considered the national epic of ancient Rome since the time of its composition. Modeled after Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas as he struggles to fulfill his destiny and reach Italy, where his descendants Romulus and Remus were to found the city of Rome. Virgil's work has had wide and deep influence on Western literature, most notably Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Virgil appears as Dante's guide through Hell and Purgatory. (Virgil's Rome - The Historical Context of the Aeneid. uploaded by Eric Luttrell. Accessed October 15, 2018.)

1775 - Bernhard Henrik Crusell, Swedish-Finnish composer, clarinetist and translator considered as the the most significant and internationally best-known Finnish-born classical composer and indeed, — the outstanding Finnish composer before Sibelius.

1844 - Friedrich (Wilhelm) Nietzsche, German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. His work has exerted an enormous and  profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history - writings on truth, morality, language, aesthetics, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, consciousness, and the meaning of existence. (Friedrch Nietzsche's Life and Philosophy. Uploaded by Wes Cecil. Accessed October 15, 2019.)  

1880 - Marie Stopes (Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes), British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. She edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. 

 
1920 - Mario Gianluigi Puzo, American author, screenwriter, and journalist. He is known for his crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a film trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the first film in 1972 and Part II in 1974. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for the 1978 Superman film. His final novel, The Family, was released posthumously in 2001.

1924 - Lee Iacocca, (Lido Anthony Iacocca), American automobile executive best known for Ford Mustang and Pinto cars, while at the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s, and for reviving the Chrysler Corporation as its CEO during the 1980s. He was president and CEO of Chrysler until his retirement at the end of 1992. He was one of the few executives to preside over the operations of two of the Big Three automakers. Iacocca authored or co-authored several books, including Iacocca: An Autobiography (with William Novak), and Where Have All the Leaders Gone? Portfolio Magazine named Iacocca the 18th-greatest American CEO of all time. 

1940 - Peter Charles Doherty, AC FRS FMedSci, Australian immunologist, veterinary surgeon and researcher in the field of medicine. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Rolf M. Zinkernagel in 1996 and was named Australian of the Year in 1997, and named a Companion of the Order of Australia for his work with Zinkernagel. He is also a National Trust Australian Living Treasure. In 2009's Q150 celebrations, Doherty's immune system research was one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for its role as an iconic "innovation and invention".

2005 - Christian, Crown Prince of Denmark, Count of Monpezat RE (Christian Valdemar Henri John, the heir apparent to the Danish throne. He is the eldest child of King Frederik X and Queen Mary. He was born during the reign of his paternal grandmother, Queen Margrethe II. He became Crown Prince of Denmark following his grandmother's abdication and his father's subsequent ascension to the Danish throne in January 2024.

Leftie:
None known

 

 

More birthdays and historical events, October 15 - On This Day

Historical Events

1815 - Napoleon I of France begins his exile on St. Helena on the Atlantic Ocean.

1878 - The U.S. Edison Electric Company and American Electric and Illumination in Canada begin operation.