May 7
JOHANNES BRAHMS (May 7, 1833)
May 7 is the birthday of JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897).
"A symphony is no joke."
Brahms "was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the 'Three Bs' of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, voice, and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire." (Wikipedia)
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (May 7, 1843)
May 7 is the birthday of PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1843-1893).
“Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.”
Tchaikovsky " was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin." (Wikipedia)
RABINDRANATH TAGORE (May 7, 1861)
May 7 is the birthday of the great Indian poet RABINDRANATH TAGORE (1861-1941).
"Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark."
"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."
"The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough."
"From the solemn gloom of the temple children run out to sit in the dust, God watches them play and forgets the priest."
"Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come."
Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913). He was greatly admired by Albert Einstein, Henri Bergson, Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Frost and many other luminaries. Alexander Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony is a setting of texts taken from Tagore's poem "The Gardener."
ISHIRŌ HONDA (May 7, 1911)
May 7 is the birthday of Japanese film director ISHIRŌ HONDA (1911-1993).
Honda, who was a lifelong friend and collaborator of Akira Kurosawa and worked with Kurosawa extensively during the 1980s and 1990s, directed many documentaries and war films. But he's best known for his "Kaiju," or monster movies. He directed the original Godzilla along with King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964), Destroy All Monsters (1968), Rodan, Mothra and The War of the Gargantuas and many others. His last feature film was Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975).