The celebrated medieval troubadour, Bertran De Born, Viscounty of Limoges, c. 1140 to 1212–15, was also a soldier. He accompanied Richard the Lion-Heart, on the crusade to Palestine. After returning to France, he wrote violently militant poetry, egging on Richard in his wars with Philip II of France. Bertran produced some of the most serene and beautiful poetry, as well as some of the most militaristic, in Provençal literature.
Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790),
politician who helped write the Declaration of Independence
and inventor who discovered the connection between lightning and electricity,
also invented the glass harmonica, in which hemispherical glasses were suspended on a treadle-operated spindle,
overlapping so that only their rims were visible.
A trough of water beneath the glasses moistened them as they rotated through it.
The diatonic notes (those of the seven-note scale) were progressively coloured the hues of the spectrum, the sharps being black, as on a piano.
a musical instrument consisting of a set of graduated, tuned glass bowls sounded by the friction of wetted fingers on their rims.
Mozart and Beethoven wrote for the Glass Harmonica.
The vérillon (musical glasses), a set of glasses, holding different amounts of water and thus yielding different notes,
placed on a soundboard and rubbed by moistened fingers or, rarely, struck with rods.
The German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck performed his concerto for this instrument in London in 1746.
Later, in 1761, the Irish virtuoso Richard Pockrich, produced his harmonica,
in which hemispherical glasses were suspended on a treadle-operated spindle, overlapping so that only their rims were visible.
Romanus Hofstetter (1742-1815)
is the true author of the 6 string quartets incorrectly attributed to Haydn as his opus 3,
which includes the famous Serenade.
Hofstetter published 12 string quartets under his own name.
The Adagio by Tomaso Albinoni (1742-1815) was written by Remo Giazotto,
an Italian musicologist whose chief work was cataloguing the works of Albinoni.
The work is base on a 6 bar fragment, discovered in the Dresden State Library shortly after the Second World War.
The fragment contained only the bass line and six bars of the melody and is believed to have been the slow movement of a trio sonata.
So, percentage wise, not much of Albinoni, far more of Giazotto.
Pfaff, maker of the eponymous-named sewing machines and based in the German city of Kaislerslautern,
was first a maker of tubas.
The conductor Zubin Mehta, married the Canadian singer Carmen Lasky, the couple having two children, before divorcing.
She then married Mehta’s brother Zarin,
making Zubin an uncle by marriage to his own children.
Ignaz Joseph Pleyel (1787-1831),
pianist, composer, piano manufacturer,
was the 24th of 38 children in the family of an impoverished schoolteacher.
However he managed a musical education, and thanks to a generous benefactor he was apprenticed to Haydn for five years.
His son Camille, chiefly known as a piano manufacturer,
but also a composer, married (Camille) Marié-Félicité-Denise Moke,
known as Camille Moke, a brilliant young pianist,
who was engaged to Berlioz.
She broke the engagement whilst Berlioz was in Italy as a Prix de Rome laureate in 1831.
The marriage did not last, they separated after a time.
Berlioz’s page gives further details.
Italian composer, Luigi Ricci (1805-1859) initially worked in collaboration with his younger brother, Federico.
He lived openly with the twin sisters Franciska (Fanny) & Ludmilla (Lidia) Stolz.
Both were sopranos from Prague. He eventually married Lidia but continued the menage.
This arrangement understandably led to much confusion with the public, and possibly, domestically.
He went insane, understandable, and was admitted to an asylum in Prague where he died.
His legitimate daughter Adelaide, (by Lidia),worked as a soprano for a few years.
His illegitimate son Luigi Ricci-Stolz (by Fanny), was also a composer of operas.
Joseph Boulogne Chevalier de Saint-Georges, (1739-1799), the son of a wealthy Frenchman and a Negro slave, was born in Santo Domingo. On migrating to Paris aged about 10, Saint-Georges studied boxing and fencing, becoming one of the leading fencers in Europe, then studying violin with Jean-Marie Leclair l’aîné, his fencing skills apparently helping with acquiring violin technique. His fencing activities continued as he led a successful career as a violinist and composer, becoming concertmaster of the Concert des Amateurs in Paris, before becoming its director, and traveling to London in this capacity. In 1792 he became a colonel of the Negro regiment, serving for five years.
Polish pianist and composer André Tchaikowsky, (1935-198?), was born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer in Warsaw, Poland,
was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto with false papers bearing the name Andrzej Czajkowski in 1942,
surviving the war under the supervision of his grandmother.
It was an obvious step to use the more usual spelling of Tchaikowsky.
On his death, a surprise bequest in his will was the that of André's skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company, for use in theatrical performance.
André was passionate about Shakespeare and had attended many performances at the RSC. He wanted, posthumously, to take part on stage in Hamlet.
The bequest was found to be legal, the RSC accepted the skull, agreeing “that when next we played Hamlet, it would be used.”
Leon Theremin, (1896-1993),
created one of the first electronic instruments,
originally called the etherophone but later renamed after the inventor.
The theremin was played without being touched,
the player’s hands hovering above the antenna and near a metal loop,
thus controlling pitch and volume.
Theremin also invented a miniature eavesdropping device for the KGB,
He invented the theremin in 1920, later going to New York, to promote his instrument,
while simultaneously working for the KGB as a spy.
Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner,
who both did substantial work at the Bayreuth Festivals,
were sons of Siegfried Wagner, grandsons of Richard Wagner and great-grandsons of Franz Liszt.
What a musical lineage!