Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (3 April 1895 – 16 March 1968) was an Italian composer, pianist and writer. He was known as one of the foremost guitar composers in the twentieth century with almost one hundred compositions for that instrument. In 1939 he immigrated to the United States and became a film composer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for some 200 Hollywood movies for the next fifteen years. He also wrote concertos for Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky.
Henri-Gatien Bertrand (28 March 1773 – 31 January 1844) was a French general who served during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Under the Empire he was the third and last Grand marshal of the palace, the head of the Military Household of emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he followed in both the exiles to Elba and Saint-Helena.
Pierre Louis Trouillon-Lacombe (26 November 1818 – 30 September 1884) was a French pianist and composer.
Frederik Willem van Eeden (3 April 1860, Haarlem – 16 June 1932, Bussum) was a late 19th-century and early 20th-century Dutch writer and psychiatrist. He was a leading member of the Tachtigers and the Significs Group, and had top billing among the editors of De Nieuwe Gids (The New Guide) during its celebrated first few years of publication, starting in 1885.
Henri (Hendrik) Conscience (3 December 1812 – 10 September 1883) was a Belgian author. He is considered the pioneer of Dutch-language literature in Flanders, writing at a time when Belgium was dominated by the French language among the upper classes, in literature and government. Conscience fought as a Belgian revolutionary in 1830 and was a notable writer in the Romanticist style popular in the early 19th century. He is best known for his romantic nationalist novel, The Lion of Flanders (1838), inspired by the victory of a Flemish peasant militia over French knights at the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs during the Franco-Flemish War.
Over the course of his career, he published over 100 novels and novellas and achieved considerable popularity. After his death, with the decline of romanticism, his works became less fashionable but are still considered as classics of Flemish literature.
Louis Charles Bonaventure Alfred Bruneau (3 March 1857 – 15 June 1934) was a French composer who played a key role in the introduction of realism in French opera.
Othmar Schoeck (1 September 1886 – 8 March 1957) was a Swiss Romantic classical composer, opera composer, musician, and conductor.
He was known mainly for his considerable output of art songs and song cycles, though he also wrote a number of operas, notably his one-act Penthesilea, which was premiered at the Semperoper in Dresden in 1927 and revived at the Lucerne Festival in 1999. He wrote a handful of instrumental compositions, including two string quartets and concertos for violin (for Stefi Geyer, dedicatee also of Béla Bartók's first concerto), cello and horn.
Giovanni Placido Agostino Pascoli (Italian: [dʒoˈvanni ˈpaskoli]; 31 December 1855 – 6 April 1912) was an Italian poet, classical scholar and an emblematic figure of Italian literature in the late nineteenth century. Alongside Gabriele D'Annunzio, he was one of the greatest Italian decadent poets.
Marcel Michel, Baron Poot (7 May 1901 in Vilvoorde, Belgium – 12 June 1988 in Brussels) was a Belgian composer, professor, and musician.
Francis Planté (2 March 1839 – 19 December 1934) was a French pianist famed as one of the first ever recording artists.
Planté was born in Orthez. He studied piano under Antoine Marmontel, his career beginning at the age of seven in Paris. While there he met and befriended many like-minded musicians who would have a long-lasting effect on his career. These included Franz Liszt, with whom he played arrangements of two of Liszt's symphonic poems (Les Préludes, and Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo) for 2 pianos, Hector Berlioz, Gioachino Rossini, Charles Gounod, Felix Mendelssohn, Sigismond Thalberg and Charles-Marie Widor.
He toured the concert platforms of Europe after leaving Paris, expanding his reputation for quality of tone and virtuosic, emotional interpretations. The death of his wife in 1908 resulted in him retiring from the stage, except for charity performances and concerts in aid of those wounded in the First World War. He had many pupils, including Alexander Brailowsky. He died in Saint-Avit.
Planté is featured in the 1999 DVD The Art of Piano, in which a short excerpt from the film of him playing Chopin's Étude in C, Op. 10 No. 7 can be seen.
Francis Planté's style is considered very different from modern-day recording artists. The recordings available suggest a more paced performance with a more prominent accent on each beat and with the notes more pronounced.
Recordings that Planté made include:
Chopin: Études Op. 10, Nos. 4, 5 and 7
Chopin: Études Op. 25, Nos. 1, 2, 9 and 11
Berlioz: Serenade
Mendelssohn: Scherzo in E, Op. 16, No. 3.
Boccherini: Minuet