livres, manuscrits et écrits
Claude Debussy, full name Achille-Claude Debussy, was a French composer, conductor, pianist and critic, a leading representative of Impressionism in music.
Debussy showed musical talent early and entered the Paris Conservatory. He lived in poverty, but at the same time he learned a luxurious life: the Russian philanthropist and the richest woman, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, took him under her tutelage, he mused with her children and traveled with her around Europe. His sensitive nature could not but respond to all these contrasts. During this period Debussy created one of his masterpieces, Moonlight from the Bergamo Suite.
Debussy spent the summers of 1881 and 1882 near Moscow, at the von Meck estate. In this house Debussy became acquainted with the new Russian music of Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Balakirev and Modest Mussorgsky. His stay in Russia had a beneficial effect on the young musician's development. Debussy was also influenced by the work of Richard Wagner. He developed a highly original system of harmony and musical structure that in many ways expressed the ideals to which the Impressionist and Symbolist artists and writers of his time aspired.
Debussy toured with concerts and conducted his works in England, Italy, Russia and other countries. Claude Debussy's famous works include the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), the operas Pelléas et Mélisande and The Sea (1905), the suite Children's Corner (1906-1908) and the orchestral cycle Images (1912). In 1913 he composed music for the ballet Games, which was performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Seasons company in Paris and London.
Pierre-Joseph Redouté was a French artist and botanist of Belgian origin, a royal painter and lithographer.
Redouté traveled extensively from his youth and carefully studied the pictorial art of various masters, but his main interest eventually became botanical illustration. He gained access to the Botanical Gardens in Paris and the botanical library. Over time, the talented Redouté became a very popular and successful painter of flowers and plants, publishing more and more albums.
In the 1790s, Redouté was internationally recognized as one of the most popular floral artists in the world. His depictions of plants are still as fresh as if they had just been painted. His album of watercolor illustrations, The Lilies, is one of the most expensive printed books in history.
Christoph Willibald Gluck was a German classical composer and reformer of the opera genre.
Christoph showed a talent for music early on, playing violin and cello, leaving home and studying music with various teachers in Prague, Vienna and Milan. In 1741, Gluck had his first significant success with his first opera, Artasers, at the Milan theater. In 1745 Gluck, by then already well known as an opera composer, was invited to England, but in 1750 he settled in Vienna, where he lived for the rest of his life. While in Paris in 1773-79, he won the favor of Louis XVI's wife Marie Antoinette.
Christoph Gluck played a historic role in the formation of a new operatic style, becoming the main reformer in the transition from baroque to classical opera.
During his career, Christoph Gluck composed about 40 operas. Of these, his first "reformist" opera was Orpheus and Eurydice, staged in Vienna in 1762. Next were "Alceste" (1767), "Parida et Helena" (1770), "Iphigenia in Aulida" (1774), a French version of "Orpheus" (1774), and "Iphigenia in Tauris" (1779). He also wrote five ballets, of which Don Giovanni (1761) was one of the first successful action ballets.
Gluck spent the last eight years of his life in Vienna, continuing to work tirelessly. During these years he met several times with Wolfgang Mozart, who by then had already become a bright star.
Giacomo Puccini, full name Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini, was an Italian opera composer, organist and choirmaster.
Puccini was born into the family that for two centuries directed the musical organization of the Cathedral of San Martino in Lucca, and the young musician inherited the position of cathedral organist until his adulthood. He also played organ in small local churches. Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, which he saw in Pisa in 1876, was a boost for him and he entered the Milan Conservatory in 1880.
Puccini carefully studied contemporary operatic compositions, particularly the work of Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. Soon he wrote Triptych (1918), three one-act operas - the melodramatic The Cape, the sentimental Suor Angelica and the comic Gianni Schicchi. Puccini's other mature operas are La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904).
The composer did not manage to finish his last opera, Turandot - he died of cancer with its score in his hands. This work is the only Italian opera in the Impressionist style. Puccini is also considered the greatest representative of opera realism, as well as the Verismo movement in music, attempting to faithfully portray the social and psychological conflicts of the new national-historical reality after the unification of Italy.
Matthieu Bonafous was a prominent French botanist and agronomist.
Bonafous was an innovator in 19th century agronomy, specializing in technical farming, with a particular interest in corn and its economic importance as a food crop. He also studied mulberry trees and created new species for silkworm breeding, and wrote many scientific articles, including one on rice.
As a teacher, Matthieu Bonafous offered a traveling course based on direct contact with practitioners of scientific farming.
Nicolas de Nicolay, Sieur d'Arfeville & de Belair was a French geographer and artist.
He traveled in Germany, Denmark, England, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey and served in the armies of most of these countries. Nicholas was the king's geographer, and in 1551 Henry II sent him to Constantinople to work on the d'Aramont embassy. This enabled Nicolas to see a world hitherto virtually unknown in the West. As a result of his work, Nicolas published Travels in Turkey (1567), which depicts the costumes of the peoples of the Middle East, representatives of various nationalities and ethnicities, including Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and pilgrims to Mecca.
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are together the two pillars of modern physics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation". His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements and originality resulted in "Einstein" becoming synonymous with "genius".