| < 05 Nov | 07 Nov > |
2006 Dimitra Mantas, 43, a special education teacher, beaten with a metal baseball bat by her mentally ill son Andrew Mantas, 16, at 01:00 (09:00 UT) in their home in the 3000 block of Swallow Street, Danville, California. —(061113)
2005 Manuel Dzul Huchim, 38, from bullet wounds suffered in the evening of 04 November 2005, when policemen in Tecate, Baja California, Mexico, at the US border, fired at the truck which was taking him and four others to attempt an illegal entry into the US. The truck had failed to stop when ordered. Dzul was a Mayan from Yucatan. He is survived by his wife Estela Xool Chan, and their three children, Genny, 14; Noé, 13; and Kimberly, 2. — (051109)
2005 Ignacio Burgoa Orihuela [13 Mar 1918–], Mexican lawyer, defender of constitutional rights. Author of El Juicio de Amparo (1943), Las Garantías Individuales (1944), Derecho Constitucional Mexicano (1973). — (his web site) — (051107)
2005 At least 6 women in a stampede at the early morning opening of an aid distribution center for flood victims in the Vysarpadi area of Chennai, India, outside which some 300 persons had gathered since 04:30 (23:00 UT on 05 Nov) due to a false rumor that today is the last day for distribution of aid consisting of Rs 2000, 10 kg of rice, a dhoti and a sari for each woman. Some 10 persons are injured. — (051106)
2004 Israeli Corp. Tom Dekel, 20, of Eilat, after his company commander, in the village of Ilar, near Tul Karm, West Bank, fires without authorization at 22:00 (20:00 UT) on the detachment of seven soldiers (of which he was part) rejoining the company, mistaking them for Palestinians. Two other soldiers of the detachment are wounded.
2004 Ala Samara, 14, unarmed Palestinian, shot by Israeli soldiers in Jenin, West Bank, in the afternoon, as he was standing near a group of stone-throwing youths (according to Palestinians) or (according to Israelis) while he was throwing a fire bomb.
2004 Abdel Razeq Shaker al-Garmali, an Iraqi National Guard commander; and 29 other Iraqis, in Samarra, Iraq, in an attack on a police station where 12 policemen were killed; and by a suicide car bomber in a stolen police car near the mayor's office; and by a second car bomb exploded near a US base; and by a mortar round falling on a market. The dead include 17 policemen and 12 civilians. Some 40 persons are wounded.
2003 Sgt. Paul F. Fisher, 39, of Cedar Rapids IA, who was serving in Detachment 1, Company F, 106th Aviation Battalion, Army National Guard, when he became one of the 27 US soldiers wounded on 02 November 2003 when an Army Chinook helicopter was shot down in Iraq, killing 15 US soldiers.
2003 Spc. James A. Chance III, 25, of Kokomo MI, serving in C Company, 890th Engineer Battalion, US Army National Guard, in Husaybah, Iraq, after his vehicle strikes a landmine.
2003 Spc. James R. Wolf, 21, of Scottsbluff NE, serving in Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 52nd Engineer Battalion, US Army, in Mosul, Iraq, after a roadside bomb is detonated next to the convoy in which he was.
2003 Maj. Hieronim Kupzyk, in an ambush near Karbala, Iraq. He is the first to die in combat of the 2400 Polish soldiers in south-central Iraq as part of the occupation forces of USurper president “Dubya” Bush's so-called coalition.
2002 Twenty of the 22 on board a twin-engine Fokker 50 which crashes when about to land at Luxembourg's international airport in thick fog.
2002 Michael J. Noll, born on 06 November 1980, is never seen alive after been told to leave the house of a neighbor into which he stumbled drunk, after celebrating his birthday at the Nasty Habit Saloon, a bar popular with students on weekends, in Eau Claire (near I-94), where he was a student at the University of Wisconsin. He may have drowned in the nearby Chippewa River.
2001 An Israeli soldier and three of the Palestinian gunmen who ambushed an Israeli jeep near Tell, south of Nablus, West Bank. Palestinians say that two of the Palestinians were merely wounded in the clash, and later shot in the head in cold blood, after a Red Crescent ambulance had been denied access to the wounded. This brings the al-Aqsa intifada body count to 744 Palestinians and 195 Israelis.
2001 Ikrima Stateh and Majdi al-Tayeb, in the explosion of a car which they had received the car from an Israeli Arab man in the northern Israeli town of Umm el-Fahm a fow hours earlier, and that Palestinians assume was booby-trapped by Israel. This happens in a Jenin refugee camp where Stateh and al-Tayeb were local leaders of the Al Aqsa Brigade. Palestinian militants often buy stolen cars from Israeli Arabs. The car in question, a new Toyota, had been stolen before it was acquired.
2000 Lyron Sprague de Camp, escritor estadounidense.
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2000 Rosie Attard, 3-month-old conjoined twin,
dies as expected upon being surgically separated from Gracie (named
“Jodie” with no family name, in the press and in court,
to protect privacy; “Mary” is a similarly assumed name
for Rosie), the other twin, upon whose blood supply she depended,
in London, where the Maltese parents had come before their 08 August
birth, seeking the best medical help, yet opposed killing one to save
the other. They were overuled by British courts. Jodie and Mary, conjoined twins, joined at the lower abdomen and sharing a heart and lungs, were born on 08 August 2000 at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester, England. Their parents (revealed months later as unemployed laborer Michael Attard, 44, and chambermaid Rina Attard, 29) are Catholics, from Gozo island, Malta. They came to have the birth in England hoping to get suitable medical help. The doctors soon decided that the twins would die within months if they are not separated, but that separating them would result in Mary's death. The parents refused to authorize the separation, as opposed to their religious beliefs. The doctors took the matter to court and got a High Court ruling, confirmed by London's Court of Appeal on 22 September 2000, authorizing the operation. {I do not understand why the principle of double effect would not apply here. The intent of the operation is to save Jodie, not to kill Mary, though it is certain that Mary will die as a result. The intended effect is moral, so the operation is moral, unless it requires the direct killing of Mary, which does not seem to me to be the case. It is more like the disconnecting of a life support system.} British courts overuling the parents, the operation to separate the twins is performed in London over 20 hours ending at 05:00 on 7 November. As expected, Mary dies. Jodie, expected to recover, will need extensive reconstructive surgery, over a long time, in order to have a somewhat normal life. On 7 November, St. Mary's Hospital in Manchester said that the stronger twin, known only as Jodie, was in critical but stable conditiony. "Unfortunately despite all of the efforts of the medical team Mary sadly died. As with all major surgery, the first few days following an operation are the most critical and our thoughts remain with Jodie and her parents." The hospital provided no details of the complicated procedure, which followed months of legal dispute over whether the parents could refuse surgery and let nature take its course. Jodie and Mary were born at St. Mary's Hospital on 08 August, joined at the lower abdomen and doctors said if they were not separated, both would die within months. Doctors said surgery could allow Jodie to have a normal life, but Mary's heart and lungs were nonfunctional and she would not survive once she was separated from Jodie's aorta. The twins' parents, identified only as Roman Catholics from the Maltese island of Gozo in the Mediterranean, opposed the operation for religious reasons but decided not to contest a 22 September decision by the Court of Appeal that the girls can be separated. The court had struggled with the issue of whether the surgery would amount to intentionally killing Mary. Two medical specialists appointed by the court endorsed surgery. "The sad fact is that Mary lives on borrowed time, all of it borrowed from her sister," Lord Justice Alan Ward said in the Court of Appeal ruling. "She is incapable of independent existence. She is designated for death." The official solicitor's office, which represents children's interests in court, had provided legal representation for both children. On Friday 02 November 2000, judges rejected a last-minute appeal by the Pro-Life Alliance, an anti-abortion group that wanted the case to be decided in the House of Lords. According to testimony at the Court of Appeal, surgeons expected to begin the operation by exploring the twins' anatomy. The separation process was expected to start with the pelvic bones and then go to the spines, where the twins were joined. "Finally and eventually we have a major blood vessel, which is the continuation of Jodie's aorta, which is bringing blood across to Mary, and similarly the vena cava, which is returning blood from Mary to Jodie. Those would need separating, dividing. It is at that point that we would expect that Mary would then die," the court's judgment said, quoting a surgeon who was not identified. Doctors say Jodie will probably need further surgery to reconstruct some organs damaged in the surgery, including her rectum, sexual organs and lower abdomen. She is also expected to need skin grafts. Prof. Lewis Spitz, consultant pediatric surgeon at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, who has separated conjoined twins, said the next 48 hours will be crucial for Jodie. "These babies are extremely critical after surgery and they have to be carefully monitored in intensive care," he said. "They are very unstable, requiring meticulous attention to fluid replacement and other monitoring." Gracie and her parents stay at the hospital until 16 June 2001, when they return home. Gracie's financial future is assured in a cross-media deal worth more than £350'000, which will be paid into a trust fund. |
1996 Charles Blais, who has autism, is drowned by his mother, Danielle, in their Montreal home.
1996 Some 1000 by a cyclone in southeastern India.
1977: 39 persons as an earthen dam bursts sending a wall of water through Toccoa Falls Bible College in Georgia.
1970 Agustín Lara Aguirre, compositor mexicano.
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1968 Charles Butler McVay III, 70, Rear Admiral USN,
was captain of USS Indianapolis, sunk by Japanese sub On 30 July 1945, at 00:14 the USS Indianapolis is torpedoed by three torpedoes of a salvo of six from Japanese Sub I-58 with Commander Machitsura Hashimoto in command. The explosions were against her starboard side and the battle cruiser sinks in 12 minutes. Her location at this time as 12 degrees 02 minutes N., 134 degrees 48 minutes E. in the Philippine Sea.. Of 1196 men on board, approximately 300 go down with the ship. The remainder, about 900 men were left floating in shark infested waters with no lifeboats and most with no food or water. The ship was never missed, and by the time the survivors were spotted by accident four days later only 316 men went on to survive. The ship's captain, the late Charles Butler McVay III, 47, is wounded but survives and would be court-martialed and convicted of "hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag" despite overwhelming evidence that the Navy itself had placed the ship in harm's way,despite testimony from the Japanese submarine commander that zigzagging would have made no difference, and despite that fact that, although 700 navy ships were lost in combat in WWII, McVay was the only captain to be court-martialed. Recently declassified material adds to the evidence that McVay was a scapegoat for the mistakes of others. Though he was restored to duty and retired as a Rear Admiral in 1949, he was hounded by some of the families of the dead sailors and commited suicide on 6 November 1968. He would be rehabilitated posthumously by the US Congress in October 2000. |
1944 Hannah Senesh Jewish poetess, executed by Nazis in Budapest
1920 Arturo Soria y Mata, ingeniero y matemático español.
| ^ 1917 The last of many thousands killed in Third Battle of Ypres, as it ends, after three months of horrific fighting, when Canadian forces take the village of Passchendaele in Belgium. In one of the bloodiest battles of World War I, a combination of over-ambitious aims, terrible weather conditions, and misguided persistence by British Field Marshal Douglas Haig led to nearly 250'000 total casualties suffered by both sides. At the time Canadian and Australian forces were scheduled to begin the long-planned offensive, Allied artillery and unusually heavy rains had turned the battlefield into a sea of mud. Soldiers fought in the mud, slept in the mud, and a fair number drowned in the mud. When the offensive is finally called off after the Canadian victory at Passchendaele, the total Allied advance amounted to only 8 km. |
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1913 William Henry Preece, telephone
pioneer. Welsh electrical engineer William Preece helped introduce the wireless telegraph and telephone in Great Britain. As an engineer for the Post Office, he developed numerous inventions, including a railroad signal and his own wireless telephone. Preece also introduced Alexander Graham Bell's telephone to Great Britain and helped radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi win assistance from the Post Office for his work on the wireless telegraph, later known as radio. |
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1893 (25 Oct
Julian) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, probably by suicide
by poison (but the first cover story was that he drank unboiled water
during a cholera epidemic) to avoid exposure of his affair with a
male member of the imperial family (the second cover story was that
his suicide was motivated by the failure of his last symphony, the
Pathétique). Tchaikowsky, born on 07 May (25 Apr
Julian) 1840, was the leading Russian composer of the late 19th century,
great for melodic inspiration and orchestration. Tchaikovsky was the second of six surviving children of Ilya Tchaikovsky, a manager of the Kamsko-Votkinsk metal works, and Alexandra Assier, a descendant of French émigrés. He manifested a clear interest in music from childhood, and his earliest musical impressions came from an orchestrina in the family home. At age four he made his first recorded attempt at composition, a song written with his younger sister Alexandra. In 1845 he began taking piano lessons with a local tutor, through which he became familiar with the mazurkas of Frédéric Chopin [01 Mar 1810 – 17 Oct 1849] and the piano pieces of Friedrich Kalkbrenner [Nov 1785 – 10 Jun 1849]. Since music education was not available in Russian institutions at that time, Tchaikovsky's parents had not considered that their son might pursue a musical career. Instead, they chose to prepare the high-strung and sensitive boy for a career in the civil service. In 1850 Tchaikovsky entered the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, a boarding institution for young boys, where he spent nine years. He proved a diligent and successful student who was popular among his peers. At the same time Tchaikovsky formed in this all-male environment intense emotional ties with several of his schoolmates. In 1854 his mother fell victim to cholera and died. During the boy's last years at the school, Tchaikovsky's father finally came to realize his son's vocation and invited the professional teacher Rudolph Kündinger to give him piano lessons. At age 17 Tchaikovsky came under the influence of the Italian singing instructor Luigi Piccioli, the first person to appreciate his musical talents, and thereafter Tchaikovsky developed a lifelong passion for Italian music. Don Giovanni of Mozart [27 Jan 1756 – 05 Dec 1791] proved another revelation that deeply affected his musical taste. In the summer of 1861 he traveled outside Russia for the first time, visiting Germany, France, and England, and in October of that year he began attending music classes offered by the recently founded Russian Musical Society. When St. Petersburg Conservatory opened the following fall, Tchaikovsky was among its first students. After making the decision to dedicate his life to music, he resigned from the Ministry of Justice, where he had been employed as a clerk. Tchaikovsky spent nearly three years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, studying harmony and counterpoint with Nikolay Zaremba and composition and instrumentation with Anton Rubinstein [28 Nov 1829 – 20 Nov 1894]. Among his earliest orchestral works was an overture entitled The Storm (composed 1864), a mature attempt at dramatic program music. The first public performance of any of his works took place in August 1865, when Johann Strauss the Younger conducted Tchaikovsky's Characteristic Dances at a concert in Pavlovsk, near St. Petersburg. After graduating in December 1865, Tchaikovsky moved to Moscow to teach music theory at the Russian Musical Society, soon thereafter renamed the Moscow Conservatory. He found teaching difficult, but his friendship with the director, Nikolay Rubinstein, who had offered him the position in the first place, helped make it bearable. Within five years Tchaikovsky had produced his first symphony, Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (composed 1866; Winter Daydreams), and his first opera, The Voyevoda (1868). 
In 1868 Tchaikovsky met a Belgian mezzo-soprano named Désirée
Artôt, with whom he fleetingly contemplated a marriage, but
their engagement ended in failure. The opera The Voyevoda was well
received, even by the The Five, an influential group of nationalistic
Russian composers who never appreciated the cosmopolitanism of Tchaikovsky's
music. In 1869 Tchaikovsky completed Romeo and Juliet, an overture
in which he subtly adapted sonata form to mirror the dramatic structure
of Shakespeare's play. Nikolay Rubinstein conducted a successful performance
of this work the following year, and it became the first of Tchaikovsky's
compositions eventually to enter the standard international classical
repertoire.In March 1871 the audience at Moscow's Hall of Nobility witnessed the successful performance of Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1, and in April 1872 he finished another opera, The Oprichnik. While spending the summer at his sister's estate in Ukraine, he began to work on his Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, later named The Little Russian, which he completed later that year. The Oprichnik was first performed at the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in April 1874. Despite its initial success, the opera did not convince the critics, with whom Tchaikovsky ultimately agreed. His next opera, Vakula the Smith (1874), later revised as Cherevichki (1885; “The Little Shoes”), was similarly judged. In his early operas the young composer experienced difficulty in striking a balance between creative fervor and his ability to assess critically the work in progress. However, his instrumental works began to earn him his reputation, and, at the end of 1874, Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, a work destined for fame despite its initial rejection by Rubinstein. The concerto premiered successfully in Boston in October 1875, with Hans von Bülow as the soloist. During the summer of 1875, Tchaikovsky composed Symphony No. 3 in D Major, which gained almost immediate acclaim in Russia. At the very end of 1875, Tchaikovsky left Russia to travel in Europe. He was powerfully impressed by a performance of the Carmen of Georges Bizet at the Opéra-Comique in Paris; in contrast, the production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, which he attended in Bayreuth, Germany, during the summer of 1876, left him cold. In November 1876 he put the final touches on his symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, a work with which he felt particularly pleased. Earlier that year, Tchaikovsky had completed the composition of Swan Lake , which was the first in his famed trilogy of ballets. The ballet's premiere took place on 20 February 1877, but it was not a success owing to poor staging and choreography, and it was soon dropped from the repertoire. The growing popularity of Tchaikovsky's music both within and outside of Russia inevitably resulted in public interest in him and his personal life. Although homosexuality was officially illegal in Russia, the authorities tolerated it among the upper classes. But social and familial pressures, as well as his discomfort with the fact that his younger brother Modest was exhibiting the same sexual tendencies, led to Tchaikovsky's hasty decision in the summer of 1877 to marry Antonina Milyukova, a young and naive music student who had declared her love for him. Tchaikovsky's homosexuality, combined with an almost complete lack of compatibility between the couple, resulted in matrimonial disaster, within weeks he fled abroad, never again to live with his wife. This experience forced Tchaikovsky to recognize that he could not find respectability through social conventions and that his sexual orientation could not be changed. On 13 February 1878, he wrote his brother Anatoly from Florence: “Only now, especially after the tale of my marriage, have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more fruitless than not wanting to be that which I am by nature.” The year 1876 saw the beginning of the extraordinary relationship that developed between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a wealthy railroad tycoon; it became an important component of their lives for the next 14 years. A great admirer of his work, she chose to become his patroness and eventually arranged for him a regular monthly allowance; this enabled him in 1878 to resign from the conservatory and devote his efforts to writing music. Thereafter he could afford to spend the winters in Europe and return to Russia each summer. Although he and his benefactor agreed never to meet, they engaged in a voluminous correspondence that constitutes a remarkable historical and literary record. In the course of it they frankly exchanged their views on a broad spectrum of issues, starting with politics or ideology and ending with such topics as the psychology of creativity, religious faith, and the nature of love. The period after Tchaikovsky's departure from Moscow proved creatively very productive. Early in 1878 he finished several of his most famous compositions: the opera Eugene Onegin, the Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, and the Violin Concerto in D Major. From December 1878 to August1879 he worked on the opera The Maid of Orleans, which was not particularly well received. Over the next 10 years Tchaikovsky produced his operas Mazepa (1883; based on Poltava by Aleksandr Pushkin) and The Enchantress (1887), as well as the masterly symphonies Manfred (1885) and Symphony No. 5 in E Minor (1888). His other major achievements of this period include Serenade for Strings in C Major, Opus 48 (1880), Capriccio italien (1880), and the 1812 Overture (1880). At the beginning of 1885, tired of his peregrinations, Tchaikovsky settled down in a rented country house near Klin, outside of Moscow. There he adopted a regular daily routine that included reading, walking in the forest, composing in the mornings and the afternoons, and playing piano duets with friends in the evenings. At the January 1887 premiere of his opera Cherevichki, he finally overcame his longstanding fear of conducting. Moreover, at the end of December he embarked upon his first European concert tour as a conductor, which included Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, Paris, and London. He met with great success and made a second tour in 1889. Between October 1888 and August 1889 he composed his second ballet, The Sleeping Beauty. During the winter of 1890, while staying in Florence, he concentrated on his third Pushkin opera, The Queen of Spades, which was written in just 44 days and is considered one of his finest. Later that year Tchaikovsky was informed by Nadezhda von Meck that she was close to ruin and could not continue his allowance. This was followed by the cessation of their correspondence, a circumstance that caused Tchaikovsky considerable anguish. In the spring of 1891 Tchaikovsky was invited to visit the United States on the occasion of the inauguration of Carnegie Hall in New York City. He conducted before enthusiastic audiences in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Upon his return to Russia, he completed his last two compositions for the stage—the one-act opera Iolanta (1891) and a two-act ballet Nutcracker (1892). In February 1893 he began working on his Symphony No. 6 in B Minor (Pathétique), which was destined to become his most celebrated masterpiece. He dedicated it to his nephew Vladimir (Bob) Davydov, who in Tchaikovsky's late years became increasingly an object of his passionate love. His world stature was confirmed by his triumphant European and American tours and his acceptance in June 1893 of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. On 16 October 1893 Tchaikovsky conducted his new symphony's premiere in St. Petersburg. The mixed reaction of the audience, however, did not affect the composer's belief that the symphony belonged among his best work. On 21 October 1893 he suddenly became ill and was diagnosed with cholera, an epidemic that was sweeping through St. Petersburg. Despite all medical efforts to save him, he died four days later from complications arising from the disease. Wild rumors circulated among his contemporaries concerning his possible suicide, which were revived in the late 20th century by some of his biographers, but these allegations cannot be supported by documentary evidence. For most of the 20th century, critics were profoundly unjust in their severe pronouncements regarding Tchaikovsky's life and music. During his lifetime, Russian musicians attacked his style as insufficiently nationalistic. In the Soviet Union, however, he became an official icon, of whom no adverse criticism was tolerated; by the same token, no in-depth studies were made of his personality. But in Europe and North America, Tchaikovsky often was judged on the basis of his sexuality, and his music was interpreted as the manifestation of his deviance.His life was portrayed as an incessant emotional turmoil, his character as morbid, hysterical, or guilt-ridden, and his works were proclaimed vulgar, sentimental, and even pathological. This interpretation was the result of a fallacy that over the course of decades projected the current perception of homosexuality onto the past. At the turn of the 21st century, a close scrutiny of Tchaikovsky's correspondence and diaries, which finally became available to scholars in their uncensored form, led to the realization that this traditional portrayal was fundamentally wrong. As the archival material makes clear, Tchaikovsky eventually succeeded in his adjustment to the social realities of his time, and there is no reason to believe that he was particularly neurotic or that his music possesses any coded messages, as some theorists have claimed. His artistic philosophy gave priority to what may be called “emotional progression”, i.e., the establishment of an immediate rapport with the audience through the anticipation and eventual achievement of catharsis. His music does not claim intellectual depth but conveys the joys, loves, and sorrows of the human heart with striking and poignant sincerity. In his attempt to synthesize the sublime with the introspective, and also in the symbolism of his later music, Tchaikovsky anticipated certain sensibilities that later became prominent in the culture of Russian modernism. Tchaikovsky was the leading exponent of Romanticism in its characteristically Russian mold, which owes as much to the French and Italian musical traditions as it does to the German. Although not as ostentatiously as the nationalist composers, such as Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky was clearly inspired by Russian folk music. In the words of the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky, “Tchaikovsky drew unconsciously from the true, popular sources of our race.” The first great Russian symphonist, he exhibited a particular gift for melody and orchestration. In his best work, the powerful tunes underlining musical themes are harmonized into magnificent, formally innovative compositions. His resourceful use of instruments allows easy identification of most of his works by their characteristic sonority. Tchaikovsky excelled primarily as a master of instrumental music; his operas, often eclectic in subject matter and style, do not find much appreciation in the West, with the exception of Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. Whereas most of his operas met with limited success, Tchaikovsky nonetheless proved eminently successful in transforming ballet, then a grand decorative gesture, into a staged musical drama, and thus he revolutionized the genre. Moreover, Tchaikovsky brought an integrity of design that elevated ballet to the level of symphonic music. To this end, he employed a symphonist's sense of large-scale structure, organizing successive dances through the use of keys to create a cumulative feeling of purpose, in distinction to the more random or decorative layout in the ballets of his predecessors. His special sense of how melody can engender the dance gave his ballets a unique place in the world's theatres. The influence of his experimentation is evident in the ballets of Sergey Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian. Tchaikovsky's symphonic poems are part of the line of development in single-movement programmatic works initiated by Franz Liszt, and they run the gamut of expressive and stylistic features that typify the genre. At one extreme the early Fatum (1868) shows a freedom of form and modernist expression. At the other extreme is the classical poise of the Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, in which passionate Romanticism is counterbalanced by the rigors of the sonata form. Furthermore, Tchaikovsky loosened the strictures of chamber music by introducing unorthodox meter in the scherzo of the Second String Quartet in F Major, Opus 22 (1874), and undermining the sense of key in the finale. His innovation is also evident in the second movement of the string sextet Souvenir de Florence (1890), for which he wrote music that revels in almost pure sound-effect, something more familiar in the orchestral sphere. His skill in counterpoint, the traditional bedrock of chamber music, can also be seen throughout his chamber works. Tchaikovsky's approach to solo piano music, on the other hand, remained mostly traditional, that is, it more or less satisfied the 19th-century taste for short salon pieces with descriptive titles, usually arranged in groups, as in the famous The Seasons (1876). In several of his piano pieces, Tchaikovsky's melodic flair surfaces, but on the whole he was far less committed when composing these works than he was when writing his orchestral music, concertos, operas, and chamber compositions. Tchaikovsky steered an unlikely path between the Russian nationalist tendencies so prominent in the work of his rivals in The Five and the cosmopolitan stance encouraged by his conservatory training. He was both a Russian nationalist and a Westernizer of polished technical skill. He put his personal stamp on the late-19th-century symphony with his last three symphonies; they demonstrate a heightened subjectivity that would influence Gustav Mahler, Sergey Rachmaninoff, and Dmitry Shostakovich and encourage the genre to pass with renewed vigor into the 20th century. Tchaikovsky's oeuvre includes 7 symphonies, 11 operas, 3 ballets, 5 suites, 3 piano concertos, a violin concerto, 11 overtures (strictly speaking, 3 overtures and 8 single movement programmatic orchestral works), 4 cantatas, 20 choral works, 3 string quartets, astring sextet, and more than 100 songs and piano It cannot be denied that the quality of it remains uneven. Some of his music is undistinguished, hastily written, repetitious, or self-indulgent. But in such symphonies as his No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, and Manfred and in many of his overtures, suites, and songs, he achieved the unity of melodic inspiration, dramatic content, and mastery of form that elevates him to the premiere rank of the world's composers. |
1884: William Wells Brown, author. WILLIAM BROWN ONLINE: The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) — Clotel, or The President's Daughter (1835) — Clotelle, or The Colored Heroine — Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave (1849) — The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and his Fidelity
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1872 George Gordon
Meade, born on 31 December 1815, US army general who
played a critical role in the US Civil War by defeating the Confederate
Army at Gettysburg. As commander of the 3rd Military District in the
south, Meade was noted for his firm justice, which helped to make
the Reconstruction period following the war less painful. The son of a US naval agent in Spain, Meade graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point NY in 1835. He was commissioned in the artillery but resigned after a year's service to work for a time as a surveyor. He reentered the army in 1842 and in August 1861 was commissioned brigadier general of volunteers in command of the 2nd Brigade of the Pennsylvania Reserves. After the disastrous Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, he was assigned the V Corps, which participated in the Chancellorsville, Virginia, campaign (April–May 1863). On 28 June 1863, President Lincoln appointed Meade to replace General Joseph Hooker in command of the Army of the Potomac. Meade repulsed General Robert E. Lee [19 Jan 1807 – 12 Oct 1870] at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (01 Jul to 03 Jul 1863), with great tactical skill; however, he has been criticized by some for allowing Lee's army to escape after this decisive victory. Although Meade retained command of the Army of the Potomac until the end of the war, his independence of action was sharply curtailed after March 1864, when General Ulysses S. Grant was placed in command of all Union forces. Meade was respected by his associates though he engaged in frequent quarrels. He was promoted to major general in the regular army (August 1864), and after the war he commanded several military departments. |
1839 Rabbi Hayim Rapoport of Ostrowiec author (Maxim Chayyim)
1837 Luis Candelas, famoso bandolero,es ajusticiado públicamente en Madrid.
1802 José Longinos Martínez, naturalista español.
1793 Dominic Serres, British painter born in 1722. — MORE ON SERRES AT ART “4” NOVEMBER with links to images.
1671 (or 1686 date unknown?} Jan de Bisschop (Johannes Episcopius), Dutch artist born in 1628.
1632 (Julian date) The dead of the Battle of Lützen, covered at 16 November Gregorian.
1510 (on or before 06 November) Giorgio Zorzo da Castelfranco “Giorgione”, Italian painter born in 1477 or 1478. — MORE ON “GIORGIONE” AT ART “4” NOVEMBER with links to images.
1406 Inocencio VII, Papa.
