Thursday, January 31, 2013
Composer Franz Schubert was born on January 31, 1797, in Vienna, Austria, the son of a schoolmaster. As a child he could play the piano, violin and organ, and was an excellent singer. While working as a schoolmaster he was a prolific songwriter, and he is largely credited with creating the German Lied (a romantic poem set to music), including two of the most famous for their lyrical beauty, "Der Tod und das Mädchen" ("Death and the Maiden") and "Gretchen am Spinnrade" (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”). By 1822 he was penniless and ill with what is thought to have been syphilis. In his short life of less than 32 years, he wrote 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Schubert revered Beethoven but was too timid to introduce himself when they passed each other on the streets of Vienna.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
January 30, 1882, is the birthdate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would eventually be known by his three initials. FDR was born an only child at Hyde Park, in New York’s Hudson Valley, to parents who were sixth cousins, both from old-line, wealthy families. His mother, Sara Delano, dominated his life and once declared, "My son Franklin is a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all." In 1905 he married his fifth cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt (niece of the President, Theodore), over the objections of Sara. In the next 11 years the couple had six children, though Eleanor was deeply averse to sexual relations. In 1918 Eleanor discovered Franklin’s affair with her own social secretary, Lucy Mercer. She offered him a divorce, but Sara refused to allow it, saying she "would not give him another dollar." Franklin promised never to see Lucy again, but she was with him when he died in 1945. Pictured: FDR ca. 1900 and in 1911.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, near the Black Sea in Russia. He became a doctor in Moscow in 1884 and soon showed symptoms of the tuberculosis that eventually would cause his death. For extra income he wrote short stories for magazines, and by 1887 he began writing for a living. His autobiographical play The Seagull (1895-96) failed at first but became a major success in Moscow in 1898. Other plays followed, notably Uncle Vanya (1896), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). These plays and much of Chekhov’s work focus on the passing of the old order and socioeconomic forces in Russia as the 19th century collided with the 20th – the demise of the aristocracy, the abolition of serfdom, and the struggle of a new, materialistic middle class to emerge amid change that it could not control. Chekhov wrote 17 plays and almost 600 stories.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Type founder and printer John Baskerville was born on January 28, 1706, in Worcestershire, England. In his Birmingham print shop he directed the design of typefaces marked by simplicity and quiet refinement. The Baskerville typeface was an improvement on those of William Caslon, then in wide use. He increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes, made serifs sharper and more tapered, moved rounded letters’ axis more vertical, and made characters more regular and consistent in size and form. This was part of his larger effort to improve legibility, including smoother, whiter paper and innovations in printing and ink production. Though he was an atheist, he printed a remarkable folio Bible in 1763 (pictured) for the University of Cambridge. Baskerville’s typefaces were admired by Benjamin Franklin, who took them back to the United States, where they were adopted for most federal government publishing.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific composer of more than 600 works. He started playing music in public at age 6, and wrote his first symphonies at age 8. Through age 15, he spent half his time on tour in Europe, exhibiting his talents to courts, academicians and the public. He settled in Vienna, and beginning in 1782 with his opera “The Abduction from the Seraglio,” he composed one masterpiece after another in virtually every form and genre of his age. In the years before his death at age 35 in 1791, he wrote his last three symphonies (Nos. 39, 40, and 41) and the last of his three operas with Da Ponte, Così fan tutte (1790). At least 118 causes have been offered for Mozart’s death. His extant letters show he had a peculiar penchant for scatological humor, and he also wrote scatological music that he sang with his friends. Pictured: a portrait from 1780.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
100 years ago: Composer Jimmy Van Heusen was born as Edward Chester Babcock on January 26, 1913, in Syracuse, NY. At age 16, he adopted his on-air radio announcer name, inspired by the Van Heusen shirtmaker. He attended Cazenovia College and Syracuse University, worked in Tin Pan Alley, then wrote songs for Hollywood movies in the 1940s and ‘50s, including "Swinging on a Star" (1944). With lyricist Sammy Cahn he wrote "Love and Marriage" (1955), "All the Way" (1957), "Come Fly with Me" (1957), "High Hopes" (1959), and "Call Me Irresponsible" (1963). Several of his songs became titles of albums by Frank Sinatra, a close friend of Van Heusen’s. He composed more than 800 songs, including "Here's That Rainy Day," "I Thought About You," "Moonlight Becomes You," "Nancy (With the Laughing Face)," "Personality" and "Polka Dots and Moonbeams." Pictured with Sammy Cahn.
Actor, director, businessman and humanitarian Paul Newman was born on January 26, 1925, in Shaker Heights, Ohio. After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, he graduated from Kenyon College, began acting with summer stock companies, attended the Yale School of Drama, studied at the Actors Studio in New York, then worked on Broadway and in television. His first movie was the box office bomb “The Silver Chalice” (1954). But his luck soon changed when he starred in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), then many more films, including “Exodus” (1960), “The Hustler” (1961), “Harper” (1966), “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), “The Sting” (1973) and “Slap Shot” (1977). His support for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and opposition to the Vietnam War won him the No. 19 slot on Richard Nixon's enemies list – which he said was his greatest accomplishment. Pictured: the iconic “Cool Hand Luke” (1967).
Friday, January 25, 2013
English author Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, in London. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a distinguished author. She was alarmingly prone to depression and nervous collapse, which caused the delay of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1913). Between the World Wars she became a major figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group of writers, intellectuals and artists. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) the life of Clarissa Dalloway on a single June day is presented in stream of consciousness. Woolf’s introspective modernist novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), follows Mrs. Ramsay and her family on Scotland’s Isle of Skye and explores the nature of relationships, perception, subjectivity, and human transience and loss. In 1941, deeply depressed at the start of World War II, Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse in the south of England.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Author Edith Wharton was born on January 24, 1862, to a wealthy, old-line New York family. Her parents, George and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, were in fact the people to whom the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” refers. Raised in high-society opulence, she began writing at an early age. Her failed marriage to socialite Edward Wharton, an acute depressive, ended in divorce in 1913. Wharton applied her insider’s understanding of America’s upper classes with themes of unhappy marriages, divorce and society’s expectations. The House of Mirth (1905), a bestselling novel, focuses on socialite Lily Bart, whose social standing is destroyed by a treacherous scandal. Ethan Frome (1911) is based on an actual accident. Ironically titled The Age of Innocence (1920), which won the Pulitzer Prize, is an 1870s novel of morals in which Newland Archer is tragically cornered into a loveless, Old New York marriage.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Revolutionary French painter Édouard Manet was born on January 23, 1832, into an affluent Parisian family. Though pushed into the Navy by his father, he pursued studies in art instead and copied Old Masters in the Louvre and in Holland. He opened a studio in 1856 and was one of the first artists to heed poet Charles Baudelaire's call to paint modern life. His updating of genres and disregard for academic conventions pitted him against the Paris Salon and made him a key figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. Two pivotal works, “The Luncheon on the Grass” (“Le déjeuner sur l'herbe”) and “Olympia,” both shown at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, aroused great controversy, and are considered watershed paintings in the development of modern art. Manet’s loose, roughly painted style and outlining of figures deliberately draw attention to the picture’s “flat” surface and to the nature of the painting itself.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born on January 22, 1788, in Aberdeen, Scotland. He was afflicted with a club foot and displayed, even at a young age, what we would call bipolar disorder and precocious passions for both sexes that led to several highly publicized scandals and charges of incest. From age 14 he wrote poetry, which later included “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” (1812, 1818), a lengthy poem in four parts that expressed a hero’s post-Napoleonic melancholy and disillusionment. This work made Byron stupendously famous. His magnum opus was the long satirical epic poem “Don Juan” (1819, 1824), criticized as immoral but extremely popular. Byron was renowned for his personal beauty (which he enhanced by curling his hair), and he is considered the first “celebrity” in the modern sense, which he fueled through self-promotion. He died of sepsis at age 36 while aiding revolutionaries in Greece.
Monday, January 21, 2013
The first scheduled commercial flights of the Concorde aircraft began on January 21, 1976, departing from London's Heathrow (to Bahrain) and Orly Airport near Paris (to Rio de Janiero). First flown in 1969, the turbojet-powered supersonic transport (SST) was jointly developed by Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) under an Anglo-French treaty. At cruising speeds, Concorde flew well above the sound barrier at 1,350 miles an hour, cutting conventional air travel time by more than half. With only 20 built, the aircraft was an economic drain. Air France and British Airways received subsidies for their purchase and operation. Concorde was retired in 2003 after one crashed in Paris in 2000, followed by an aviation industry downturn after the 9/11 attacks and a decision to stop costly maintenance support. The engineering marvel flew commercial flights for 27 years, catering heavily to celebrities and the wealthy.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.” … Italian film director Federico Fellini was born January 20, 1920, in Rimini, Italy, on the Adriatic Sea. His fascination with circuses and vaudeville performers was evident in many of his films, including his international breakthrough, “La Strada” (1954), starring his wife as a young woman sold by her family to a circus strongman. He is renowned for “La Dolce Vita” (1960), in which Anita Ekberg waded fully clothed into Rome’s Trevi Fountain. The movie spawned the term "paparazzi," from a character named Paparazzo who photographed celebrities. His surreal, often dreamlike and poetic films are landmarks in avant garde cinema, including “8½” (1963), “Juliet of the Spirits” (1965), “Fellini Satyricon” (1969) and “Amarcord” (1973). In his greatest works, Fellini follows unlikely souls in their journey toward salvation.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Hosiery manufacturer Coopers, Inc., sold the world’s first pair of briefs on January 19, 1935, at Marshall Field's State Street store in Chicago. The company named the underwear the “Jockey,” since it offered a type of support previously available only with the jockstrap, which had been invented in 1874 by another Chicago company, Sharp & Smith, for “bicycle jockeys” in Boston. The briefs, designed by an “apparel engineer” named Arthur Kneibler, omitted traditional leg sections and sported a Y-shaped, overlapping fly. The briefs proved to be popular – more than 30,000 were sold within three months. The company, which renamed itself Jockey, claims the undergarment sold out in stores almost immediately, so it flew special deliveries of the "masculine support" Jockey briefs to retailers in what it called a "Mascu-liner" airplane.
Singer-songwriter Janis Joplin would have been 70 years old today. She was born on January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas. She sang in her church choir while discovering the music of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Lead Belly, Odetta, Billie Holiday and Big Mama Thornton. Her ballsy, tough-talking, outrageous persona was evident in the first song she put on tape: "What Good Can Drinkin' Do." In San Francisco in 1966, she joined psychedelic rockers Big Brother and the Holding Company, whose first album, Cheap Thrills (1968), featured two songs, "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime," that launched Joplin's short career. Her first solo effort, I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969), was less successful. But her next album, Pearl (released in 1971), solidified her fame. It included "Move Over," "Mercedes Benz" and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Addicted to heroin, she died of a drug overdose in October 1970, at age 27.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Archibald Alexander Leach, known as the quintessentially debonair Cary Grant, was born on January 18, 1904, in Bristol, England. His father abandoned him at age 10; his mother was institutionalized. In 1920 he traveled to the United States as a stilt walker in a stage troupe. He performed in shows at The Muny in St. Louis in 1931, then shot to stardom in 1932-33 in Hollywood movies with Marlene Dietrich and Mae West. A favorite of director Alfred Hitchcock, Grant starred in “Notorious” (1946), “To Catch a Thief” (1955) and “North by Northwest” (1959). He was sought for the role of James Bond in “Dr. No” (1962) but could commit to only one Bond film. The only Oscar he received was for Lifetime Achievement (1970). Grant had five wives, including wealthy heiress Barbara Hutton. The couple was nicknamed "Cash and Cary," but Grant did not profit from their divorce. Pictured: Publicity still for “Suspicion” (1941).
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Writer, Founding Father, scientist and inventor Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the tenth son of soap maker. A major inventor, he discovered or developed the lightning rod, glass armonica (a musical instrument), the Franklin stove and bifocal eyeglasses. He refused to patent his inventions, believing they should “serve others … freely and generously.” He independently developed bifocals as corrective lenses for everyday use, and wore them regularly after 1776. He had an intense interest in electricity and confirmed the previously mysterious idea that lightning is electrical in nature (via his kite experiment, 1752). He wrote about the lightning rod in 1749, the first of which protected a steeple in 1752. His design was widely used through the 18th and 19th centuries, virtually unchanged. An advocate of “air bathing,” Franklin favored sitting naked each morning before an open window.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
40 years ago: On January 16, 1973, after 14 seasons and 430 episodes, NBC Television broadcast the final hour of the Western drama “Bonanza,” which had become a heavily merchandised hit after its premiere in September 1959. It was the second-longest-running TV Western (behind “Gunsmoke” on CBS). The show’s patriarch, Ben Cartwright, had three ethnically-different sons by three deceased wives: Adam (English), Eric (“Hoss,” Swedish) and “Little Joe” (French Creole), all coping with weekly family problems on the 600,000-acre Ponderosa ranch at Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The series, with its catchy theme song, was unusual in its focus on family and major social issues, which included the environment, substance abuse, domestic violence and assorted forms of bigotry. But, alas, matrimony was off-limits: any woman courted by a Cartwright either became fatally ill, got killed or chose another man.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
The British Museum opened in London on January 15, 1759, as both a museum and a library dedicated to human history and culture, in a mansion on the site where it currently stands. Today’s grand neo-classical building was begun in the 1820s, built around a Great Court. The vast collection spans more than two million years of human history and includes artifacts such as the Rosetta Stone (the code-breaker for Egyptian hieroglyphics), antiquities from ancient Persia and Mesopotamia, surviving parts of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the sole surviving copy of Beowulf, and drawings of Michelangelo. The museum is famous for its stunning but controversial Elgin Marbles (friezes pictured), removed from the Parthenon and other Acropolis buildings between 1801 and 1812 by the 7th Earl of Elgin (British ambassador to the Ottomans). In 1816 the sculptures were displayed in the museum and later placed in the specially built Duveen Gallery.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Photographer and designer Cecil Beaton was born on January 14, 1904, in Hampstead, England, into a prosperous merchant family. He learned to take pictures with his nanny’s Kodak 3A folding pocket camera, and in 1927 began shooting for British Vogue. He gained fame photographing a young, aristocratic group satirized by Evelyn Waugh in his novel Vile Bodies (1930). Known for fashion photos and society and celebrity portraits, Beaton often photographed the Royal Family for official publication. After World War II, Beaton designed sets, costumes and lighting for Broadway, most notably costumes for the stage production of Lerner and Loewe's “My Fair Lady” (1956), which led to the film musicals, “Gigi” (1958) and “My Fair Lady” (1964), both of which earned Oscars for Beaton. Pictured: Beaton’s much-celebrated Ascot Races dress for Audrey Hepburn, and the largest picture hat ever.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Horatio Alger, Jr., proponent of the fundamental American ideal of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” was born on January 13, 1832, in Massachusetts. He became a Unitarian minister but was expelled from the church in 1866 for sexual misconduct with boys. He moved to New York, where his rags-to-riches story, Ragged Dick (pictured), was serialized in 1867 (later expanded as a novel). This story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle class respectability and comfort through hard work, honesty and determination was a huge success. Its plot and theme were repeated wholesale in Alger's other novels. But Alger’s formula for a boy’s transformation frequently was not hard work at all but an act of bravery or honesty that impelled a wealthy older man to take in the boy as a ward. Nonetheless, Alger left a legacy of a moral, humane philosophy that contradicted the corrupt, robber-baron capitalism of his time.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
John Singer Sargent was born on January 12, 1856, in Florence, Italy, where his parents lived as peripatetic American expatriates. He had formal art training there and in Paris, then traveled to Spain, Holland and Venice to study the Old Masters. By the 1880s his talents as a portrait artist increasingly defined his reputation as an aesthetic realist. His best-known portrait, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau, pictured), recalls key facets of works by Velázquez, Titian and Manet. But it caused a scandal at the 1884 Paris Salon for violating conventions of pose, modeling and treatment of space. He moved to London for the rest of his life, where he painted the English aristocracy, businessmen, artists and performers of the luxe Edwardian era. Sargent has been praised, with some irony, as "the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid excessive court to both."
Friday, January 11, 2013
The Grand Canyon was declared a National Monument on January 11, 1908, by President Theodore Roosevelt. One of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, the canyon is 277 miles long and reaches a depth of more than a mile. For at least 17 million years the Colorado River and its tributaries have cut through nearly two billion years of the Earth's history, leaving a record of three of the four geologic eras. Native Americans have inhabited the area for thousands of years, including the Pueblo, who considered it a holy site. In 1540 Coronado’s explorers were the first Europeans to see the canyon. In 1869, geologist John Wesley Powell’s expedition made the first known passage through the Canyon down the Colorado’s rapids in four rowboats. Congress permanently protected the canyon as a national park in 1932. Pictured: From Powell Point, sun strikes Battleship Rock, with Brahma Temple and Zoroaster Temple beyond.
Businessman Ezra Cornell was born on January 11, 1807, north of New York City. A Quaker, he was raised Upstate and settled in Ithaca. As an associate of Samuel F.B. Morse, he made his fortune in the telegraph business by inventing the idea of using glass insulators where telegraph lines connected to supporting poles. He supervised wiring of the nation’s first significant telegraph lines, and later owned the company that became Western Union. As a lifelong devotee of science and agriculture, when he retired from the company he saw the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act (1862) as an opportunity to found a university that would teach practical subjects equally with the classics favored by traditional institutions. Cornell University was chartered in Ithaca in 1865 under Ezra’s motto, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
Thursday, January 10, 2013
January 10, 49 BCE, is understood to be the date on which an ambitious Julius Caesar led his army across the River Rubicon, which separated Roman-controlled northeastern Italy from the province of Gaul, and instantly began the Civil War against his rivals Pompey, elected consuls and the Senate. Caesar’s 10 years of successful campaigns in Gaul (France and Germany) and Hibernia (Britain) had made him wildly popular. Crossing the Rubicon without surrendering his “imperium” (command) was a supreme act of insurrection – and a risky gamble. Historian Suetonius tells us Caesar uttered the words “Alea iacta est” ("The die has been cast"), meaning he was now irrevocably committed to his quest for power and could not turn back. Romans were avid gamblers, so dice were common objects. Pictured: Ancient Roman dice in lapis lazuli, carnelian and bone.