Friedrich Wilhelm "Will" Quadflieg (German: [vɪl ˈkvat.fliːk] ; 15 September 1914 – 27 November 2003) was a German actor from Oberhausen. He was the father of actor Christian Quadflieg. He is considered one of Germany's best post-war actors. One of his most widely recognized roles was in the title role in the 1960 film Faust. He also starred in a number of other roles. Quadflieg died from a pulmonary embolism.
Irmgard Seefried (9 October 1919 – 24 November 1988) was a distinguished German soprano who sang opera, sacred music, and lieder.
Maria Theresia Irmgard Seefried was born in Köngetried, near Mindelheim, Bavaria, Germany, the daughter of educated Austrian-born parents. She studied at Augsburg University before making her debut in Aachen as the priestess in Verdi's Aida in 1940. She began to sing leading parts in 1942 (Agathe in Weber's Der Freischütz in 1942, and the next year she made her debut at Vienna State Opera with Eva in Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg conducted by Karl Böhm). From then on, she remained with the State Opera until her retirement in 1976.
She sang at the Salzburg Festival every year from 1946 to 1964 (except 1955, 1961 and 1962) in operas (Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Pamina in The Magic Flute, Marzelline in Fidelio and the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos), concerts and recitals.
She appeared at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London from 1947 to 1949, and also La Scala in Milan, the Edinburgh Festival, etc. She made her Metropolitan Opera in New York City debut in November 1953 as Susanna in Mozart's Nozze di Figaro and appeared there for only one season (1953–54), in five performances, all as Susanna.
One of the outstanding singers to emerge immediately after the Second World War, she was noted for her Mozart and Richard Strauss roles. But she also sang in other composers' operas; the title role in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Marie in Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Eva in Meistersinger, Blanche in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites, and the title role in Janáček's Káťa Kabanová. She was also a noted lieder singer, and a number of her Salzburg Festival recitals were recorded. She left many recordings of oratorio and sacred music by Bach, Mozart, Haydn (including at least four different renditions of the Archangel Gabriel in Die Schöpfung), Brahms, Fauré, Beethoven, Dvořák, Verdi and Stravinsky.
Although she was a high soprano, she performed, and recorded, both the trouser roles of the Composer and Octavian in Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos and Der Rosenkavalier, respectively. These roles are usually associated with weightier voices, and today are usually sung by mezzo-sopranos.
She often sang with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who said in interview that Seefried was naturally able to achieve results effortlessly which other singers, including Schwarzkopf herself, had to work hard to produce.She can be seen singing Mahler on a DVD from EMI, with Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
She was married to Austrian violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan, one of the concertmasters of the Vienna Philharmonic, from 1948 until her death. They had three daughters, one of whom is actress Mona Seefried (born 1957).After retirement, she taught students at the Vienna Academy of Music (Wiener Singakademie) and Salzburg Mozarteum. She died at 69 in Vienna in 1988.
Henri Nannen (25 December 1913 in Emden – 13 October 1996 in Hanover) was a German journalist and art collector. He became one of the most prominent journalists and magazine publishers in Germany.
His father was a police officer in Emden who was removed from his post by the NSDAP. After a one-year book dealer apprenticeship he studied the history of art at the University of Munich. In the 1930s he started working as a journalist. During the war he served in SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers, a propaganda unit in Italy. Being large, well-built and fair haired, he corresponded to the racial ideals of the time in Germany. This made him the speaker of the Olympic Oath during the 1936 event in Berlin – for Riefenstahl's film, but not in reality. Many years after the war, he confessed that "I knew what was happening ... but I was too cowardly to do something against it." He got back to journalism while working for the Hannoverschen Neusten Nachrichten, the daily newspaper Abendpost and the youth newspaper Zickzack.
He was the founder of Gruner + Jahr publishing house and the news magazine Der Stern. He led the magazine from 1948 to 1980 to become one of the strongest in Europe. Gruner + Jahr is the largest publisher in Europe as of 2014.
Nannen gained popularity as an art collector and benefactor of the Kunsthalle in Emden, an art museum, that he built in 1983. The annual Henri Nannen Prizes are awarded in his honor by Gruner + Jahr. The Henri-Nannen-Schule (formerly Hamburger Journalistenschule), is the journalist school of Gruner + Jahr and is considered one of the best schools of journalism in Germany, along with the German School of Journalism (Deutsche Journalistenschule) in Munich.He was married to Eske Nannen (born 1942), a former actress. Henri Nannen has a son Christian Nannen (born 1946), co-owner of Hamburg suitcase-producer Travelite.
Giovanni Cheli (4 October 1918 – 8 February 2013) was an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church, who had a career in the diplomatic service of the Holy See and then in the senior ranks of the Roman Curia. He was made a cardinal in 1998.
Wolfgang Windgassen (26 June 1914 – 8 September 1974) was a German heldentenor internationally known for his performances in Wagner operas.
Hans von Benda (22 November 1888, in Strasbourg – 13 August 1972, in Berlin) was a German conductor.
A direct descendant of the eighteenth-century composer Franz Benda, he operated in the shadow of better-known German maestri of his generation, notably Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, and Hans Knappertsbusch. After serving as musical director of Berlin Radio from 1926 to 1934, Benda became (1935) artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, during Furtwängler's tenure as chief conductor. He held this post until 1939. Meanwhile, he conducted the Berlin Chamber Orchestra, which he had founded in 1932, and with which he toured Australia, South America and Asia as well as Europe. He was married to Karin Rosander, a Finnish violinist.
Unlike Furtwängler and Knappertsbusch (or Klemperer, who had fled Germany shortly after Hitler gained power), Benda joined the Nazi Party [1], possibly through fear that the regime would regard his Czech lineage as insufficiently Aryan. That his party card brought a certain amount of foreign obloquy on his head is indicated by the fact that (according to John L. Holmes' Conductors on Record) a pre-war recording Benda conducted of music by Gluck was issued in America without his name on the label. After World War II, Benda gave evidence during Furtwängler's denazification proceedings, avowing that Furtwängler had protected Jews from official persecution.[2] Having worked in Spain from 1948 to 1952, Benda was subsequently employed at Radio Free Berlin (1954–1958).
Benda had a long recording career, lasting from the 1930s until 1968. Composers in his large discography include Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Mozart père and fils, Schubert, Dvořák, Respighi, C. P. E. Bach, Frederick the Great, Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Joachim Quantz, Carl Heinrich Graun, and his own collateral ancestor Georg Benda. His conducting on disc tended towards a hefty, straightforward style wholly at odds with Furtwängler's and Knappertsbusch's improvisational unpredictability.
Charlotte "Lotte" Pauline Sophie Lehmann (February 27, 1888 – August 26, 1976) was a German-American lyric soprano noted for her successful performances with international opera houses, on the recital stage and in teaching.: 5 She gave memorable appearances in the operas of Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Puccini, Mozart, and Massenet. The Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, Sieglinde in Die Walküre and the title-role in Fidelio are considered her greatest roles. During her long career, Lehmann also made almost five hundred recordings in both opera and art song.