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Grete Weil
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
There is also version.
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Doris Day
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
There is also version.
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Caroline Maria Annunciata Murat
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born on November 24, 1848 in Würzburg, Germany
died on May 17, 1929 in Berlin, Germany
German singer
175th birthday on November 24, 2023
"Life is too short and the art of singing too difficult to aim for that final and ideal perfection." (Lilli Lehmann)
Thanks to the techniques she had acquired in years of study, Lilli Lehmann was an incredibly versatile singer: "No sooner had she sung Ännchen in Der Freischütz in Berlin than she appeared in London as Isolde - the singspiel soubrette and the highly dramatic heroine in one person." (Honolka)
"She has proved herself in the lyrical, sentimental, heroic-dramatic and comic fields on the stage as well as in the concert hall, and is equally revered as a Lieder singer in all four corners of the world." (Kohut)
In one of her pedagogical essays on singing she wrote (1896): "A good singer must necessarily be able to do both – coloratura and dramatic singing. Both are achieved through hard work, ambition and reflection. ... The only difference between the old and the new vocal training is that in the past people had six to eight years of lessons in acting and singing,…read more
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Gisela Kessler
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Margot Fonteyn
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Jackie Kennedy
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born on February 13, 1889 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary
died on May 19, 1974 in Pretoria, South Africa
Austro-Hungarian actress, stage and film director
50th anniversary of death on May 19, 2024
Today, Leontine Sagan is best known as the director of the original version of the film Mädchen in Uniform, a work that was an exception for her. She had staged Christa Winsloe's play in Berlin in 1931 under the title Yesterday and Today, and she filmed it in the same year. It was the first film she directed, and it immediately made her world-famous.
Leontine Sagan was born Leontine Schlesinger in Budapest in 1889. Her mother belonged to the Jewish bourgeoisie in Vienna; her father worked in the diamond fields of South Africa. She spent her childhood and youth at times in South Africa and at times in Austria-Hungary; she continued to alternate between these two poles throughout her life. A turning point in her life came during one of her trips to Europe when she saw Maxim Gorky’s play Night Asylum, directed by Max Reinhardt, in Berlin and was instantly captivated. For the first time she felt the immediacy of the experience and understood that this was the essential purpose of…read more
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Milena Jesenská
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born on January 18, 1894 in Karolinenthal near Prague (formerly Austria-Hungary, today: Czech Republic)
died on May 17, 1989 in Zollikon near Zurich/ Switzerland
Austrian-Hungarian-British photographer, art theorist, publicist
130th birthday on January 18, 2024
With the adulation of Bauhaus photography remaining unabated over the decades, “almost every piece of trash recovered from the (Bauhaus) darkroom (is) treated as a relic," art historian Rainer K. Wick once sarcastically noted (Wick, 1991, p. 12). It is therefore all the more striking that Lucia Moholy failed to be recognized for what are today the best-known photographs of Germany's favorite art school. Instead, she is a prime example of the biased treatment many female artists have been accorded.
"HE WAS THE ARTIST ... NOT SHE”: LIGHT AND SHADOW
Our image of the Bauhaus—both of its buildings now listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites and of its teachers and students—has been enduringly shaped by Lucia Moholy’s neo-objective black and white photographs. It is difficult to imagine how the Bauhaus products that have made such an impact in design history could ever have become bestsellers without the unfussy photographs Moholy took of Marcel Breuer's stylish tubular steel chair…read more
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born May 16, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland
died on March 27, 2012 in Santa Cruz, California
U.S. poet and essayist
Adrienne Rich is one of the most renowned US-American poets of our time. She was awarded countless honors such as the prestigious National Book Award, an honorary doctorate from Harvard, and the half a million-dollar McArthur Fellowship.
Raised in Baltimore in a culturally refined Southern home, she was encouraged to write poetry at an early age by her father, a pathology professor. Her very first book of poems, A Change of World (1951), was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize.
It was motherhood - Rich gave birth to three sons between 1955 and 1959 - that radically changed her life and writing, as she later described in the book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). The exhausting daily grind of having three young children, whom she loved but who prevented her from writing, meant she felt torn apart. Apart from the decision to have herself sterilized after the birth of her third son it was getting involved in left-wing politics…read more
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born on May 15, 1759 in Vienna, Austria
died on February 1, 1824 in Vienna, Austria
Austrian composer, pianist and teacher
200th anniversary of death on February 1, 2024
265th birthday on May 15, 2024
Maria Theresia Paradis received an exceptional education for a middle-class girl of the 18th century. After being given a spinet at the age of eight and quickly making the most astonishing progress on it, she was taught the fortepiano and organ by Franz Josef Fuchs and Georg Friedrich Richter. Richter, “adhering to Bach’s written instructions, trained her fingers to play so dexterously that she was able to perform all the concertos of the great masters.”
Her skills on the various keyboard instruments also impressed Empress Maria Theresa, who had heard the eleven-year-old play the organ and subsequently provided the girl with financial support. The annual stipend of 200 guilders was used to pay for her further training with prominent Viennese teachers: Leopold Kozeluch, a renowned piano teacher, music publisher and composer who also worked at the Viennese court, the singing teacher Vincenzo Righini, and Antonio Salieri as her teacher of music theory.
Such a comprehensive and…read more
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Monica Bleibtreu
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born on May 18, 1474 in Ferrara
died on February 13, 1539 in Mantua
Italian matron of the arts, politician and regent
485th anniversary of her death on February 13, 2024
550th birthday on June 29, 2024
When Isabella d'Este became Marquise of Mantua by marriage at the age of 16, she soon continued the tradition of her parental home and made her court a vibrant center of literary and artistic life. She was gifted with vitality and intelligence, taste, education, many interests and a special talent for diplomacy. Reigning wisely over long periods of time, she succeeded in mediating and in navigating her state safely through the tangle of often changing family and/or political loyalties, between disputes and wars as well as in protecting it from the ambitions of the Pope, several princes and her brother-in-law Cesare Borgia.
Despite her husband’s hurtful affairs and his later syphilis, she was a faithful wife, nurse and administrator. She cultivated extensive friendships both close to home and internationally, and she corresponded with scholars, politicians, poets and painters. Many of them lived at her court; others informed her from afar about all the latest news in artistic…read more
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Born 10 July 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Canada
Canadian author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2013
Four weeks after the 9/11 attacks Alice Munro’s short story “Comfort,” which has nothing at all to do with terrorism or action, appeared in The New Yorker magazine. It is a very private, quiet story about grief, loss and beginning again. The fiction editor at the magazine declared in an interview that after the disaster he couldn’t have thought of any better story than this.
Literary critics are unanimous in considering Alice Munro to be the most significant living author of short stories—despite the fact that her fiction deals with everyday problems of “ordinary” (and mostly female!) people in seemingly boring Canadian small towns. Munro comments: "There are no such things as big and little subjects. The major things, the evils, that exist in the world have a direct relationship to the evil that exists around a dining room table when people are doing things to each other." And: “The complexity of things—the things within things—just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is…read more
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Born 25 April 1875 in Innsbruck
Died 15 May 1959 in Innsbruck
Cofounder of the Social Democratic women’s movement of Tyrol and the first Social Democratic woman in the Tyrolean Parliament.
50th anniversary of death on 15 May 2009
Maria Ducia was one of the most important women in the Social Democratic women’s movement of Tyrol. She called for the political participation of women at a time when it was against the law for them even to form political associations, let alone vote. In the national parliamentary elections of 1907 all males over 24 were granted the general, equal and direct franchise. Women had to struggle another eleven years; not until 1918 did they gain the right to vote and run for elected office.
In 1910 the “Action Committee of the Free Political Women’s Organisation” was founded. Maria Ducia was involved from the beginning, first as its secretary and after 1911 as its chairwoman. She is mentioned as a politically active woman for the first time in reports of the “Volkszeitung” from 30 May and 15 June 1910. In 1911 she called for active and passive voting rights for all women. She spoke out forcefully and eloquently for woman suffrage at the first Austria-wide International Women’s Day…read more