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Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovidius (Ovid), was an ancient Roman poet who lived during the reign of Emperor Augustus.
Most of the information about the life and work of Ovid, scholars have drawn from his own works, as well as from the works of Seneca the Elder and Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. Ovid was from a fairly high class of "horsemen", studied rhetoric at the maestros of oratory of the ancient Roman Empire, and then went traveling, visiting Athens, Asia Minor and Sicily. As a young man, Ovid held minor public offices, was a member of the college of civil affairs, and served in an office that performed spiritual and secular duties at the state level.
However, Ovid was much more attracted to poetry, and he resigned and about 29-25 BC joined the circle of those chosen under the patronage of Marcus Valerius Messala Corvinus. After publishing Amores, a collection of love-erotic lyrics, around 15-16 BC, Ovid became one of Rome's most popular poets. He became famous for his works in the genre of elegy, as well as for his epic poem Metamorphoses (8 AD), which became one of the most important sources in the study of classical mythology.
For reasons unknown to us, in 8 A.D. Ovid was disgraced and exiled for the rest of his life to Tomes on the Black Sea, where he wrote his "Mournful Elegies" and a poem cycle entitled "Letters from Pontus". A contemporary of Virgil and Horace, Ovid was one of the three canonical representatives of Latin literature.
Felix Mendelssohn (full name Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy) was a German composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, and one of the greatest representatives of Romanticism in music.
Felix was born into a Jewish musical family that later converted to Christianity. He received a versatile education and already as a child wrote many musical compositions, including 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string orchestra, concertos, sonatas and fugues. Mendelssohn's first public performance took place in Berlin in 1818, when he was nine years old. In 1821 Mendelssohn was introduced to J.W. von Goethe, for whom he performed works by J.S. Bach and Mozart and to whom he dedicated his Piano Quartet No. 3 in B minor. A friendship developed between the famous wise poet and the 12-year-old musician.
A few years later, the talented musician began conducting in various orchestras in Europe, and became acquainted with Carl Weber. In England, where Mendelssohn visited very often, by the middle of the 19th century his music had become very popular, even with Queen Victoria he was the most favorite composer. He dedicated his Symphony No. 3 in A minor major (Scottish Symphony) to the Queen.
Among Mendelssohn's most famous works are A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826), the Italian Symphony (1833), a violin concerto (1844), two piano concertos (1831, 1837), the oratorio Elijah (1846) and several chamber pieces. The tradition of playing the "Wedding March" from A Midsummer Night's Dream in wedding processions dates back to its performance at the wedding of a royal princess in 1858, already after Mendelssohn's death.
In 1843, Mendelssohn founded a conservatory in Leipzig, where he taught composition with Schumann. Mendelssohn was one of the first great Romantic composers of the nineteenth century.
