Celebration Day
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Marguerite Duras *IV 4 1914 — The Life You Give
Marguerite Duras, born April 4, 1914, in Gia Dinh, Cochinchina, Vietnam, is the novelist, screenwriter, scenarist, playwright, and film director, internationally known for her screenplays of Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and India Song (1975). The novel L’Amant (1984; The Lover; film, 1992) won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984. Duras spent most of her childhood…
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Maya Angelou *IV 4 1928 — The Life You Give
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson, on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., is the poet, memoirist, and actress whose several volumes of autobiography explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual oppression. Although born in St. Louis, Angelou spent much of her childhood in the care of her paternal grandmother in rural…
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Max Ernst *IV 2 1891 — The Life You Give
Max Ernst, born Maximilian Ethelbert Ernst, on April 2 1891, in Brühl, Germany, was painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to…
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Hans Christian Andersen *IV 2 1805 — The Life You Give
Hans Christian Andersen, born April 2, 1805, in Odense, near Copenhagen, Denmark, is the master of the literary fairy tale whose stories achieved wide renown. He is also the author of plays, novels, poems, travel books, and several autobiographies. While many of those works are almost unknown outside Denmark, his fairy tales are among the…
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Sergei Rachmaninoff *IV 1 1873 — The Life You Give
Sergey Rachmaninoff, born March 20 [April 1, New Style], 1873, in Oneg, near Semyonovo, Russia, is the composer who was the last great figure of the tradition of Russian Romanticism and a leading piano virtuoso of his time. He is especially known for his piano concerti and the piece for piano and orchestra titled Rhapsody…
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Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin *IV 1 1755 — The Life You Give
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, born April 1, 1755, in Belley, France, is the lawyer, politician, and author of the celebrated work on gastronomy, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste). Brillat-Savarin followed the family profession of law. A deputy of the Third Estate at the Estates-General of 1789, he was forced to flee the country during…
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Volker Schlöndorff *III 31 1939 — The Life You Give
Volker Schlöndorff, born March 31, 1939, in Wiesbaden, Germany, is a film director and screenwriter who was a leading member of the postwar cinema movement in West Germany. Schlöndorff studied filmmaking in Paris, serving as an assistant to directors Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville. After directing several projects for French television in the…
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Nagisa Ōshima *III 31 1932 — The Life You Give
Nagisa Oshima’s interest in politics began at a young age. His father, a government official (reportedly of samurai lineage) who died when Oshima was six, left behind an extensive library of Socialist and Communist texts, which the young man read through as he came to maturity. He attended Kyoto University, studying law while dabbling in…
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Joseph Haydn *III 31 1732 — The Life You Give
Joseph Haydn, born Franz Joseph Haydn, on March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Austria, is the composer who was one of the most important figures in the development of the Classical style in music during the 18th century. He helped establish the forms and styles for the string quartet and the symphony. Early years Haydn was…
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The Piano — International Piano Day
The piano, also called pianoforte, French piano or pianoforte, German Klavier, is a keyboard musical instrument having wire strings that sound when struck by felt-covered hammers operated from a keyboard. The standard modern piano contains 88 keys and has a compass of seven full octaves plus a few keys. The vibration of the strings is…
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Pierre Boulez *III 26 1925 — The Life You Give
Pierre Boulez, born March 26, 1925, in Montbrison, France, is the most significant French composer of his generation, as well as a noted conductor and music theorist who championed the work of 20th-century composers. Boulez, the son of a steel manufacturer, majored in mathematics at the Collège de Saint-Étienne, where he also took music lessons;…
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Aretha Franklin *III 25 1942 — The Life You Give
Aretha Franklin, born Aretha Louise Franklin, on March 25 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.A., is the singer who defined the golden age of soul music of the 1960s. Franklin’s mother, Barbara, was a gospel singer and pianist. Her father, C.L. Franklin, presided over the New Bethel Baptist Church of Detroit, Michigan, and was a minister…
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Dario Fo *III 24 1926 — The Life You Give
Dario Fo, born March 24, 1926, in Leggiuno-Sangiano, Italy, is the avant-garde playwright, manager-director, and actor-mime who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997 though he often faced government censure as a theatrical caricaturist with a flair for social agitation. Fo’s first theatrical experience was collaborating on satirical revues for small cabarets and…
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Akira Kurosawa *III 23 1910 — The Life You Give
Kurosawa Akira, born March 23, 1910, in Tokyo, Japan, was the first Japanese film director to win international acclaim, with such films as Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985). Kurosawa’s father, who had once been an army officer, was a teacher who contributed to the…
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Agnes Martin *III 22 1912 — The Life You Give
Agnes Martin, born March 22 1912, in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, is known as a painter. She moved to the U.S. in 1931 and became a U.S. citizen in 1950. She studied at Columbia University and taught at the University of New Mexico. In 1958 she had her first solo exhibition. Martin was a prominent exponent…
Sila Blume 