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[
"Weather Report",
"1970: Inception and formation",
"How does that effect us",
"I don't know.",
"do you think the weather is normal",
"I don't know.",
"is miles davis widely known",
"composers",
"was some one else in this band",
"Zawinul"
] |
C_54c9e0273f1c46e2a10d245abac9c168_1
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was anyone else in it?
| 5 |
Besides Zawinul, was anyone else in Weather Report?
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Weather Report
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Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter had first met and become friends in 1959 while they were playing in Maynard Ferguson's Big Band. Zawinul went on to play with Cannonball Adderley's group in the 1960s, while Shorter joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and then, in 1964, Miles Davis' second great quintet. During this decade, both men made names for themselves as being among the best composers in jazz. Zawinul later joined Shorter in contributing to the initial fusion music recordings of Miles Davis, and both men were part of the studio groups, which recorded the key Davis albums In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970). In consequence, Weather Report has often been seen as a spin-off from the Miles Davis bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s, although Zawinul was never part of Davis's touring line-up. Weather Report was initially formed to explore a more impressionistic and individualistic music (or, as Zawinul put it, "away from all that eight bars shit and then you go to the bridge...") Zawinul and Shorter recruited another Miles Davis associate, the classically trained Czech-born bass player Miroslav Vitous, who had previously played with Zawinul, as well as with Herbie Mann, Bob Brookmeyer, Stan Getz, and Chick Corea (Vitous has subsequently claimed that in fact Shorter and he had founded Weather Report, with Shorter bringing in Zawinul afterwards.) All three men composed, and formed the core of the project. To complete the band, the trio brought in former McCoy Tyner drummer Alphonse Mouzon and set about looking for a full-time auxiliary percussionist as they began to record their debut album. The initial recruits were session player Don Alias and symphony orchestra percussionist Barbara Burton. During recording, Alias quarreled with Zawinul (allegedly due to Zawinul being too dictatorial over the percussion approach) and the innovative Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira (yet another Davis alumnus) was brought in to complete the record. John McLaughlin was also invited to join the group, but decided to pursue his solo career, instead. CANNOTANSWER
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Brookmeyer,
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Weather Report was an American jazz fusion band active from 1970 to 1986. The band was founded (and initially co-led) by Austrian keyboard player Joe Zawinul, American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš. Other prominent members at various points in the band's lifespan included Jaco Pastorius, Alphonso Johnson, Victor Bailey, Chester Thompson, Peter Erskine, Airto Moreira, and Alex Acuña. Throughout most of its existence, the band was a quintet consisting of Zawinul, Shorter, a bass guitarist, a drummer, and a percussionist.
The band started as a free improvising jazz group with avant-garde and experimental electronic leanings (pioneered by Zawinul); when Vitouš left Weather Report (due mostly to creative disagreements), Zawinul increasingly steered the band towards a funky, edgy sound incorporating elements of R&B and native musics from around the world. Zawinul used the latest developments in synthesizer technology, and took advantage of a large variety of sounds and tone colors to make the band stand out. During the first half of their career, Weather Report were seen as one of the defining acts in modern jazz, winning the DownBeat "best album award" five times in a row.
Alongside bands such as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters (all with members inspired by and partially responsible for the fusion-era work of Miles Davis), Weather Report is widely considered one of the defining bands of the jazz fusion genre.
Musical style
Over their 16-year career, Weather Report explored various areas of music, predominantly centered on jazz (initially the "free" variety), but also incorporating elements of art music, ethnic music, R&B, funk, and rock. While their work was categorized as "jazz fusion", the band members generally distanced themselves from that term.
From the start, Weather Report took the unusual approach of abandoning the traditional "soloist/accompaniment" demarcation of straight-ahead jazz and featured opportunities for continuous improvisation by every member of the band. That position remained consistent throughout the life of the band. From the point where Alphonso Johnson joined the band, individual solos became more prominent in concert, but were never allowed to overwhelm the collective approach. Initially, the band's music featured an improvisational method (similar to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew-period), but eventually that shifted to a more groove-oriented approach, and catchier compositions (as epitomized by their 1977 hit single "Birdland").
Joe Zawinul's playing style was often dominated by quirky melodic improvisations (simultaneously bebop-, ethnic-, and pop-sounding) combined with sparse but rhythmic big-band chords or bass lines. Having originally made his name as a pioneering electric piano player, he went on to consistently develop the role of the synthesizer in jazz during his time with Weather Report. Working with companies such as ARP and Oberheim, Zawinul developed new ways of voicing and patching electronic tones for textures, ensemble roles (including emulations of traditional band instruments) and soloing. In Weather Report, he often employed a vocoder, as well as recorded sounds played (i.e., filtered and transposed) through a synthesizer, creating a very distinctive, often beautiful, synthesis of jazz harmonics and "noise" (which he referred to as "using all the sounds the world generates"). On some Weather Report tunes, however, Zawinul was criticized for allowing his synthesized arrangements to dominate the sound.
Wayne Shorter came to the group with a reputation as a dominant role as an instrumentalist, drawn from both his solo work and his contributions to Miles Davis' "second great quintet" during the 1960s. His choice not to follow the same approach with Weather Report led to some criticism of the group. During his time with Weather Report, Shorter was noted for generally playing saxophone with an economical, "listening" style. Rather than continually taking the lead, he generally added subtle harmonic, melodic, and/or rhythmic complexity by responding to other member's improvisations (although he could and did sometimes exercise a more frenetic style akin to that of John Coltrane or Michael Brecker). As a composer, he chose a more abstract, sometimes atonal and "free jazz" style of music, opposed to the sometimes flamboyant melodicism of the tunes written by Zawinul or Pastorius. Playing both tenor and soprano saxophones, Shorter continued to develop the role of the latter instrument in jazz, taking his cue from previous work by Coltrane, Sidney Bechet, Lucky Thompson, and Steve Lacy.
Weather Report maintained a consistent interest in a textured sound and developments in music technology and processing. Both Zawinul and original bassist Miroslav Vitouš experimented with electronic effects pedals (as generally used by rock guitarists) with Zawinul using them on electric piano and synthesizers and Vitouš on his upright bass (which he frequently bowed through distortion to create a second horn-like voice). The band's third bass player, Jaco Pastorius, popularized the use of fretless bass guitar, melodic bass soloing and extensive use of string harmonics, as well as consolidating the driving R&B pulse in the band's music (which had been brought in by his predecessor Alphonso Johnson).
With the exception of a brief quartet period between 1978 and 1979 (wherein other members could double on various percussion instruments), Weather Report's instrumentation always included both a drummer and a percussionist. For its first eight years of existence, the group had difficulty finding a permanent drummer, moving through about one drummer per year until Jaco Pastorius helped to recruit Peter Erskine in 1978. Erskine and Omar Hakim were the only drummers who played with Weather Report for more than two years.
History
1970: Inception and formation
Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter had first met and become friends in 1959 while they were playing in Maynard Ferguson's Big Band. Zawinul went on to play with Cannonball Adderley's group in the 1960s, while Shorter joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and then, in 1964, Miles Davis' second great quintet. During this decade, both men made names for themselves as being among the best composers in jazz.
Zawinul later joined Shorter in contributing to the initial fusion music recordings of Miles Davis, and both men were part of the studio groups that recorded the key Davis albums In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970). Weather Report was initially formed to explore a more impressionistic and individualistic music (or, as Zawinul put it, "away from all that eight bars shit and then you go to the bridge...").
There's some dispute over how Weather Report initially formed. According to Zawinul, it began when he and Shorter recruited another Miles Davis associate, the classically trained Czech-born bass player Miroslav Vitouš, who had previously played with each of them separately (as well as with Herbie Mann, Bob Brookmeyer, Stan Getz, and Chick Corea). According to Vitouš himself, it was he and Shorter who actually founded Weather Report, with Shorter bringing in Zawinul afterwards. Whichever story is true, it was those three musicians – all composers – who formed the initial core of the project.
To complete the band, Zawinul, Shorter and Vitouš brought in former McCoy Tyner drummer Alphonse Mouzon and began recording their debut album while looking for a full-time auxiliary percussionist. The initial recruits were session percussion player Don Alias and symphony orchestra percussionist Barbara Burton. During recording, Alias quarreled with Zawinul (allegedly due to Zawinul being too dictatorial over the percussion approach) and the innovative Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira (yet another Davis alumnus) was brought in to complete the record. Guitarist John McLaughlin was also invited to join the group, but decided to pursue his solo career, instead.
1971–1972: Avant-garde collective
Weather Report's debut album Weather Report featured a softer sound than would be the case in later years, predominantly using acoustic bass, with Shorter exclusively playing soprano saxophone. It built on the avant-garde experiments which Zawinul and Shorter had pioneered with Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, including an avoidance of head-and-chorus composition in favor of continuous rhythm and movement. DownBeat magazine described the album as "music beyond category".
In 1972, Weather Report released its second album, I Sing the Body Electric. The first side featured new studio recordings, while the second side was taken from live recordings of a concert in Tokyo, featuring the full-band lineup of Zawinul, Shorter, Vitouš, Gravatt, and Um Romão (and later available in full as the 1972 Japan-only double album Live in Tokyo). The studio side used extended versions of the band including various guest performers, suggesting that Weather Report was not necessarily an integral jazz band, but might possibly work as an expandable project set up to realise the music of its three composers. The album also featured Zawinul's first use of a synthesizer (an instrument with which he would become synonymous within jazz) and of sound effects.
I Sing the Body Electric also showed the first signs of a shift in the balance of control within the band, away from the more collective approach of the debut album. During the following year, this tendency would develop further.
1973: Move towards groove
On 1973's Sweetnighter, Weather Report began to abandon the primarily acoustic group improvisation format, and the band started to take a new direction. Primarily at Zawinul's instigation, Weather Report became more jazz funk- and groove-oriented, drawing more heavily on R&B influences and dense electric keyboard work while adding more structure to both the prewritten and the improvisational sections.
Gravatt took his replacement in the studio sessions badly and quit the band at the end of recording, moving to Minneapolis to join the band Natural Life. Many years later, Zawinul paid tribute to Gravatt's skills and stated that he had been the finest of the band's "pure jazz" drummers as well as being "from the jazz side... my favorite of them all". With Gravatt gone and Dwellingham unavailable for touring, former Sly & the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico played on the Sweetnighter tour, but did not stay with the band afterwards.
At this point, Vitouš and Zawinul found themselves at creative loggerheads, since the former preferred Weather Report's original approach and the latter wished to continue further along the road to funk. Retrospectively, Zawinul accused Vitouš of being unable to play funk convincingly (something which Greg Errico corroborated) and claimed that he had not provided enough music for the band. Vitouš countered that he had in fact brought in compositions, but that Zawinul had been unable to play them. Vitouš has also accused Zawinul of having been "a first-class manipulator" primarily interested in commercial success. When Shorter sided with Zawinul, the original three-man partnership broke down acrimoniously and Vitouš left Weather Report, moving on to an illustrious career leading his own band and winning respect as a composer. His final contribution to Weather Report was to play bass on a single track, which appeared on the band's 1974 album Mysterious Traveller ("American Tango", which he had co-written with Zawinul).
Vitouš' departure marked the end of the first phase of Weather Report and the shift of overall creative dominance of the band to Josef Zawinul, although Shorter remained an integral, influential, and vital part of the project. Vitouš has subsequently accused both Zawinul and Shorter of having used foul play to edge him out of the band, to deny the scale of his contribution to Weather Report's history and creative approach, and to cheat him out of remuneration.
1974–1975: Further into groove
Vitouš' replacement was the Philadelphian electric bass guitarist Alphonso Johnson (formerly a sideman for the pop-fusion player Chuck Mangione). Recruited by Shorter, Johnson was a supple player more than capable of providing the funk element which Zawinul desired. He was also an early advocate of the Chapman Stick, which he can be heard playing on some of the live Weather Report recordings of the period.
According to Zawinul, Wilburn apparently "lost heart" on tour (despite performing well in the studio). To shore up the music, the band hired another drummer, Darryl Brown, to play alongside him. At the end of the tour, both Wilburn and Brown left the band (as did Dom Um Romão) and Weather Report was, once again, drummerless.
For the next set of studio sessions, Weather Report added a new Brazilian percussionist (Alyrio Lima) and a new drummer – Chuck Bazemore of The Delfonics.
The new album, Tale Spinnin', was released in 1975. It was the first Weather Report album to feature a consistent rhythm section (rather than a varied set of drummers, percussionists, and bass players) since their debut. The album also made further strides in using technological improvements in synthesizers, even making use of the gigantic studio-based TONTO array.
During the same year, Shorter also recorded Native Dancer under his own name (with the Brazilian composer and vocalist Milton Nascimento). Tale Spinnin won the DownBeat best album award for 1975 (the third Weather Report album to do so) and Native Dancer was the runner-up.
1976: In transition
1976's Black Market album was perhaps the most rock-oriented work which the group had produced to date. Weather Report's music had evolved further from open-ended funk jams into more melody-oriented, concise forms, which also offered a greater mass-market appeal. Zawinul further consolidated his use of keyboard synthesizers, while Shorter experimented with an early form of wind synthesizer, the Lyricon.
However, the album was recorded during yet another period of change for the group, with multiple personnel shuffles. Although Alyrio Lima played percussion on one track, he was replaced during the sessions by Don Alias (his first appearance with the group since the debut album debacle) and by Alex Acuña (a Peruvian drummer and conga player based in Las Vegas, who had played with Elvis Presley and Ike Turner, among others). Alphonso Johnson was also worn out from the strain put on the rhythm by the band's frequent changes of drummer. During a break in activity halfway through the recording of Black Market, Johnson opted to leave Weather Report to play with the Billy Cobham/George Duke Band (which featured a young John Scofield on guitar).
Prior to his departure, Johnson played on all but two of the new album's tracks. His replacement was Jaco Pastorius, a virtuoso fretless bass guitarist from Florida, who had been in touch with Zawinul for several years, and who came in to play on "Cannon Ball" and his own composition "Barbary Coast". Zawinul and Shorter had assumed that Chester Thompson would be departing alongside his friend Johnson, and for the second set of sessions they replaced him (on Pastorius' recommendation) with the former Mahavishnu Orchestra drummer Narada Michael Walden. Although Walden played on several album tracks, he ultimately proved unsuitable. Thompson returned for the final Black Market sessions, but left again after failing to gel as a rhythm section with Pastorius (whose style was much busier than that of Johnson). Thompson subsequently joined Genesis as their touring drummer.
Black Market continued Weather Report's ongoing run of success, selling well and being the fourth of the band's albums to win the album of the year award from DownBeat magazine. For the subsequent tour, Alex Acuña moved from percussion to the drum kit, and Don Alias was replaced by the young Puerto Rican percussionist Manolo Badrena, who had previously played with various Latin rock bands and with Art Blakey. The band made a very well-received appearance in July at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1976, which was filmed for future release.
1977–1979: Jazz-rock stars
The recruitment of Jaco Pastorius helped to push Weather Report to the height of its popularity. Already a rising star in his own right, Pastorius brought a very musical, melodic quality to the bass. He could play muscular, lightning-fast groove lines influenced by R&B or funk, as well as demonstrating an extraordinary solo control of tone and string harmonics, often sounding more like a horn player. Pastorius was also a multi-instrumentalist (contributing drums, steel pan, and mandocello to the latest recording sessions), a gifted composer (eventually responsible for some signature Weather Report pieces such as "Teen Town" and "Three Views of a Secret"), and a useful production foil for Zawinul due to his knowledge of recording studios and techniques. Finally, Pastorius' stagecraft and aggressive showmanship helped the band to bring in a new audience.
The band's next album was 1977's acclaimed Heavy Weather, which proved to be the band's most successful recording in terms of sales, while still retaining wide critical acclaim. It contained the band's biggest hit, the propulsive and danceable "Birdland" (highlighting Pastorius' singing bass lines and Zawinul's synthesized ensemble brass), which became a pop hit and later became a jazz standard. Weather Report appeared on the Burt Sugarman-produced series The Midnight Special, performing both "Birdland" and "Teen Town". Heavy Weather dominated Weather Report's disc awards, including their last DownBeat Album of the Year award.
During this period, Pastorius' strong professional connection with Joni Mitchell (for whom he played bass throughout the latter half of the 1970s) led to another musical connection. Over the next few years, Mitchell hired the Weather Report line-up en masse (although without Zawinul in each case) to play on her studio albums Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977) and Mingus (1979).
During August 1978 the band joined Maurice White's vanity label ARC at Columbia. At the time they were once again without either a full-time drummer and percussionist, with Alex Acuña having returned to Las Vegas for a career as a studio musician and Manolo Badrena having been fired for "non-musical reasons". Shorter had been focusing most of his attention and compositional ideas into his solo work, while Zawinul was sketching out ideas for a solo album of his own, which involved moving away from a raw group sound in favor of constructing a far more orchestrated and experimental studio-based recording with multiple overdubs. However, Weather Report's contract and work schedule required another album, so Zawinul's solo work was absorbed into what became Weather Report's eighth album, Mr. Gone (1978).
The studio sessions made use of a variety of drummers – Pastorius played the kit on two tracks and further contributions came from Tony Williams, Steve Gadd, and Peter Erskine (the latter an ex-Stan Kenton/Maynard Ferguson drummer recruited to the project by Pastorius). Erskine became a full member of the band for the next tour and remained with Weather Report until 1982. The album also featured guest appearances from Deniece Williams and Earth Wind and Fire leader Maurice White.
The album rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart.
Notoriously, Mr. Gone (1978) received only a one-star review rating from DownBeat after a string of group releases which had all pulled a five-star rating. The group arranged for a rebuttal interview with the magazine to defend their efforts. Zawinul and Pastorius were defiant in their responses to the interviewer, Shorter more philosophical, and Erskine the most reticent of the four.
By the late '70s, Weather Report was a quartet of Zawinul, Shorter, Pastorius, and Erskine, and (for the first time) had dispensed with the auxiliary percussionist role, which had been integral since the band's inception. Instead, all four members doubled on percussion at various points in live performances. Zawinul commented that this sleeker, less crowded sound provided more listening range and made the music less chaotic now that the band were focusing more on melody and harmony.
The larger scale and multimedia staging of the band's tours (complete with stagehands, laser and film projections) began to take on the kind of rock-star proportions mostly unknown in jazz circles. The 1979 double live album 8:30 (which won that year's Best Jazz Fusion Performance) was recorded on the Mr. Gone tour and captured the direct power and energy of this lineup of Weather Report. Zawinul would later describe this lineup as "one of the greatest bands of all time! That band was a hummer!"
Between March 2 and 4, 1979, Weather Report traveled to Havana, Cuba, to participate in the historic Havana Jam festival, a break in mutual Cuban/American political hostilities, which had American artists such as Stephen Stills, the CBS Jazz All-Stars, Bonnie Bramlett, Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, and Billy Joel play alongside Cuban artists such as Irakere, Pacho Alonso, Tata Güines, and Orquesta Aragón. Another featured performance was by the Trio of Doom (a short-lived teaming of Pastorius with John McLaughlin and Tony Williams). Weather Report's performance featured in Havana Jam '79, Ernesto Juan Castellanos' documentary celebrating the event.
1980–1982: A tighter arrangement
At the beginning of 1980, Pastorius recruited hand-drummer Robert Thomas Jr. (a fellow Floridan, with whom he had jammed previously) into the band. Thomas featured on the 1980 album Night Passage. A tighter and more traditional recording than previous releases, the record featured a more prominent role for Shorter, a strong element of bebop, and a nod to jazz's golden age via a high-speed cover of Duke Ellington's "Rockin' in Rhythm" (showing off Zawinul's pioneering and ever-increasing ability to create synthetic big-band sounds on his synthesizers).
By now, Pastorius was displaying signs of the mental instability and substance abuse problems that ultimately wrecked his career; and the close relationship he'd previously shared with Zawinul was becoming strained as Zawinul grew tired of Pastorius' showmanship onstage (beginning to feel that it detracted from the music). Towards the end of the year, Pastorius began working on his long-delayed second solo album (Word of Mouth) (1981) in New York, while Zawinul worked on new Weather Report material in California.
Weather Report's next album Weather Report (1982) – their second eponymous release following their 1971 debut – was recorded in 1981, although it was not released for another year. Zawinul's dominance as instrumentalist and composer (as well as group director) was even more pronounced on this album. Much of the band's music was increasingly written out rather than improvised. In the event, Pastorius spent more of his creative attention on the Word of Mouth project: his only writing for the Weather Report album being his contribution to a single, group-composed piece. Shorter (who only contributed one whole composition to the 1982 album beyond group-written work) was already taking a more philosophical approach. He later commented, "for a long time in Weather Report, I abstained. I elected not to do things."
Erskine's own commitment to Word of Mouth (and a subsequent summer commitment to Steps Ahead) meant that he, too, had to be replaced, while Robert Thomas Jr., was simply dismissed. Reduced to a duo, and with tour commitments looming, Zawinul and Shorter were obliged to quickly assemble a new band.
1982–1985: A new band
On the recommendation of Michał Urbaniak, Zawinul and Shorter recruited 23-year-old drummer Omar Hakim, a talented session player and multi-instrumentalist, who had played with a variety of musicians including Mike Mainieri, David Bowie, and Carly Simon. Hakim was immediately entrusted with recruiting the rest of the new lineup. Having failed to secure Marcus Miller as bass guitarist, he selected Victor Bailey (a recent graduate from the Berklee College of Music, with whom Hakim had played while backing Miriam Makeba). Hakim also recruited percussion/concertina player José Rossy, with whom he had worked in Labelle.
The new Weather Report went straight onto tour. The music developed on tour was later recorded for the 1983 album Procession, which showed the band beginning to make something of a return to the "world music" approach which it had pioneered in the mid-1970s, and featured a cameo appearance from The Manhattan Transfer.
Continuing with the same lineup, Weather Report recorded the Domino Theory album in 1984, with Hakim stepping into Jaco Pastorius' old role as Zawinul's co-producer. The album was Weather Report's first album to employ drum machines and samplers (the Emulator), deepening the band's involvement with cutting-edge music technology, and also featured a guest vocal from Carl Anderson.
Percussionist and singer Mino Cinélu replaced Rossy in the spring of 1984 and appeared on the band's video release Live in Japan (reissued on DVD in 2007). The same lineup played on 1985's Sportin' Life album, which included a cover of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" and appearances by singers Bobby McFerrin and Carl Anderson. In keeping with Zawinul's technological curiosity, the album heralded the arrival of MIDI, which allowed him to rapidly and inexpensively write, demonstrate, and record music via a set of synthesizers.
1986: Final split
Both Zawinul and Shorter were beginning to realise that the refreshing nature of other projects was more satisfying than Weather Report work, and both generally felt that the band had run its course.
In February 1986, the San Diego Union-Tribune announced that Shorter had left the band to concentrate on solo work. Having reluctantly agreed with Shorter that he would no longer use the band name, Zawinul then ended Weather Report. The final album under the Weather Report name, This is This!, was released in June 1986 and fulfilled the band's contract with Columbia Records. Two of its tracks featured guitar work from Carlos Santana, and it also marked the return of Peter Erskine on drums, with Hakim only appearing on one track.
1986–present: After Weather Report
Having split the band, Zawinul promptly attempted to reform it – after a fashion – as Weather Update. For this project, he reunited with recent Weather Report alumni Victor Bailey, Mino Cinélu, and Peter Erskine, but replaced Shorter with guitarist John Scofield. This lineup was short-lived, with Los Angeles session guitarist Steve Khan and former Weather Report percussionist Robert Thomas Jr. replacing Scofield and Cinélu prior to live appearances. Weather Update toured in 1986 and 1987 before Zawinul dissolved the band. From 1988 onwards, Zawinul went on to enjoy a successful nineteen-year career leading the world music/jazz ensemble The Zawinul Syndicate (which has continued, following Zawinul's death, as The Syndicate).
Rather than form another collective band, Wayne Shorter concentrated on his solo career and on work as a bandleader, which continues to the present day.
In spite of the band's enduring popularity, a Weather Report reunion never occurred. The nearest that the band ever came to reuniting was when Zawinul and Shorter both played live with Miles Davis on July 10, 1991, in Paris (the only time when Zawinul is known to have shared a live stage with Davis). A projected mid-'90s reunion CD for Verve never materialized; according to Zawinul, disappointing sales for Shorter's 1995 CD High Life may have played a part in ending the idea.
Five of the band's members have since died. Zawinul himself died on September 11, 2007, in Vienna from skin cancer (Merkel cell carcinoma). He was predeceased by mid-period bass player Jaco Pastorius, who died on September 21, 1987, following a fatal beating in his hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Pastorius' successor on bass guitar, Victor Bailey, died on November 11, 2016 (apparently from complications from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Alphonse Mouzon, the first drummer, died on December 25, 2016 from cardiac arrest after neuroendocrine cancer. Dom Um Romão, the group's drummer from 1971 to 1974, died in 2005 aged 79.
Lineups
Timeline
Releases since the band's breakup
A "post band" Weather Report double CD called Live and Unreleased was made available in 2002, featuring vintage live recordings made during the late 1970s/early 1980s with various personnel. In September 2006, Columbia/Legacy released a Weather Report boxed set, Forecast: Tomorrow. It includes three CDs of mostly previously released material (from 1970 to 1985, excluding This is This!) and a DVD of the entire September 28, 1978, performance (with Erskine and Pastorius) in Offenbach, Germany, not previously available. A DVD video of the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival performance (featuring the Heavy Weather lineup of Pastorius, Acuna, and Badrena) has become available, as well. Columbia/Legacy have also re-released the 1984 Live in Japan concert on DVD.
In 2011, the Zawinul estate, in conjunction with an independent label, released a 40th-anniversary commemorative trilogy of previously unavailable Weather Report live shows: In March Live in Berlin 1975 was released both on vinyl and as a CD/DVD set; in June the Live in Offenbach 1978 DVD was re-released together with a previously unavailable double CD of the complete show; in October Live in Cologne 1983 was released as both DVD and double CD.
Grammy Awards
The Grammy Awards are awarded annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States. Weather Report has won one Grammy from six nominations.
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!1972
|"I Sing The Body Electric"
|Best Jazz Performance by a Group
|
|-
!1979
|"8:30"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
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|-
!1981
|"Night Passage"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
|-
!1982
|"Weather Report"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
|-
!1983
|"Procession"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
|-
!1985
||"Sportin' Life"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
Discography
Studio albums
References
External links
Weather Report's official website www.WeatherReportMusic.com
Weather Report biography by Richard S. Ginell, discography and album reviews, credits & releases at AllMusic
The Weather Report Annotated Discography
Weather Report discography, album releases & credits at Discogs
Weather Report albums to be listened on Spotify
Weather Report albums to be listened on YouTube
Musical groups established in 1970
Musical groups disestablished in 1986
Jazz fusion ensembles
American jazz ensembles from New York City
Musical groups from New York City
Grammy Award winners
Jazz musicians from New York (state)
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[
"\"Anyone Else\" is a song written by Radney Foster, and recorded by American country music artist Collin Raye. It was released in January 1999 as the third and final single from Raye's 1998 album The Walls Came Down. The song reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart in May 1999 and No. 1 on the RPM Country Tracks chart in Canada.\n\nChart performance\n\"Anyone Else\" debuted at number 66 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks for the week of January 30, 1999.\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n1998 songs\n1999 singles\nCollin Raye songs\nSongs written by Radney Foster\nSong recordings produced by Paul Worley\nSong recordings produced by Billy Joe Walker Jr.\nEpic Records singles",
"The Moldy Peaches were an American indie group founded by Adam Green and Kimya Dawson. Leading proponents of the anti-folk scene, the band has been on hiatus since 2004. The appearance of their song \"Anyone Else but You\" in the film Juno significantly raised their profile; Dawson and Green made a handful of reunion appearances together in December 2007.\n\nHistory\nGreen and Dawson met at Exile on Main Street Records in Mount Kisco, New York, and began working together. Green put out a 7\" Ep called \"X-Ray Vision\" under the name The Moldy Peaches, featuring recordings he made from 1994–96 with Dawson and various other friends, notably Jules Sheridan, a songwriter based in Scotland. Green and Dawson recorded a CDR album in 1998 under the name Moldy Peaches 2000 called FER THE KIDS before Dawson moved to Port Townsend, Washington. In early 1999 Green joined her there, and more home and live recordings transpired. The band returned to NYC as a 4 piece later in the year (including Jest Commons, guitar, and Justin Campbell, drums). They became active on the NYC anti-folk scene, playing at the SideWalk Cafe before the band broke up. Dawson and Green both recorded solo albums. The band reformed in August 2000 with Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors on lead guitar, Brian Piltin on bass guitar, and Strictly Beats (Brent Cole) on drums. (The \"2000\" was dropped from their name around this time). A new 11 song album was recorded, which led to a deal with Rough Trade in the UK. They gained recognition after their initial 7\" 'Who's Got the Crack\" was named 'Single of the Week' in NME. Rough Trade released the album The Moldy Peaches in 2001. Released in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, it contained the song \"NYC Is Like a Graveyard\". The band expanded to a six-piece, with guitarists Jack Dishel and Aaron Wilkinson, bass player Steven Mertens, and drummer Strictly Beats, augmenting the original duo of Dawson and Green. They toured internationally with The Strokes with whom they shared record label and management.\n\nAaron Wilkinson left the band and was replaced by Toby Goodshank. Wilkinson died from an overdose in July 2003. The Strokes dedicated their album Room on Fire to his memory.\n\nIn 2003 a second album Moldy Peaches 2000 was released, a double-CD compilation of various scraps and live recordings.\n\nAfter an extensive US headlining tour in the winter of 2003, the band went into hiatus in early 2004. However, the band reunited in late 2004 for a one-off show to benefit Accidental CDs, Records and Tapes, a hole-in-the-wall record store on Ave A in NYC. That store was an early supporter of the band and helped hook them up with the gig that ultimately got them their record deal. Both central members embarked on solo careers.\n\nOn December 2, 2007, Dawson and Green played an impromptu set together at Los Angeles' The Smell to end a show where Dawson was headlining. They changed the lyrics of the song \"Who's Got The Crack\" to \"Who's Got The Blues\". On December 3, 2007, the Moldy Peaches played at the Juno film premiere.\n\nThe band was booked to appear on the Conan O'Brien television show on January 14, 2008, but they canceled because of the writer's strike. Dawson has said that she is not keen to reform the band at present. However, Dawson and Green did appear together on the NPR radio show Bryant Park Project on January 16, 2008. and appeared on television show The View on January 21, 2008.\n\nSubsequent to the success of the Juno soundtrack, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 on its third week of physical release, the song \"Anyone Else but You\" was released as a UK single on February 25, 2008.\n\nOn November 13, 2011, The Moldy Peaches played a short set at the Knitting Factory in New York.\n\nSolo projects\nGreen released his seventh solo album and accompanying film, Aladdin, in 2016 via Fat Possum. His initial band included a 3-piece string section.\n\nDawson has continued to tour playing small clubs and house parties. Her album Remember That I Love You on K Records has been well received. Dawson collaborated with Aesop Rock on the album Hokey Fright under the name The Uncluded.\n\nDishel's former outfit Stipplicon having broken up, he formed a new band, Only Son, who have toured with Regina Spektor. Dishel also plays in Spektor's band.\n\nMertens has his own group SpaceCamp and plays in Green's backing band.\n\nCole is in the boyband Candy Boys and has performed with numerous acts including Dufus, Jeffrey Lewis, Only Son, Sandra Bernhard, and Toby Goodshank.\n\nGoodshank plays solo shows and is also in a duo, Double Deuce, with his sister Angela.\n\nNotable appearances\n The song \"Anyone Else but You\" was used in the Academy Award-nominated documentary film Murderball (film).\n The song \"Anyone Else but You\" was used in a mobile phone TV-ad in France during World Cup 2006, featuring French star Zinedine Zidane.\n The song \"Anyone Else but You\" is central to the 2007 Academy Award-winning film Juno and a version is also performed by the two main characters (Elliot Page and Michael Cera).\n A re-written version of \"Anyone Else but You\" was featured in a commercial for Atlantis Resorts in the Bahamas.\n The song \"Jorge Regula\" was used in a Pepsodent commercial in Hispanic America, without the group's permission.\n A version of the song \"Jorge Regula\" also appears in the 2006 indie film The Guatemalan Handshake.\n\nPersonnel\nKimya Dawson – vocals, guitars (1994–2004, 2007–2008)\nAdam Green – vocals, guitars (1994–2004, 2007–2008)\nJustice Campbell – drums (1999)\nJest Commons – guitars (1999)\nBrent Cole – drums (2000–2004)\nChris Barron – guitars (2000–2001)\nBrian Piltin – bass (2000–2001)\nJack Dishel – guitars (2001–2004)\nSteven Mertens – bass (2001–2004)\nAaron Wilkinson – guitars (2001–2002; died 2003)\nToby Goodshank – guitars (2002–2004)\n\nTimeline\n\nDiscography\nAfter releasing their first few records themselves, The Moldy Peaches have released music internationally through Rough Trade. In the United States records were originally released under the Sanctuary Records banner but, since the demise of Sanctuary and the takeover of Rough Trade by the Beggars Group, U.S. releases are now also on Rough Trade.\n\n X-Ray Vision (EP) – Average Cabbage Records – 1996\n Moldy Peaches 2000: Fer the Kids/ Live 1999 (Cassette/CD) – Average Cabbage Records – 1999\n\"The Love Boat\" - Live!!! (Cassette) – Average Cabbage Records – 1999\n The Moldy Peaches (CD-R) – Pro-Anti Records – 2000 (11-song CD, similar cover to next release, all songs included on later albums or singles).\n The Moldy Peaches (CD/LP) – Sanctuary Records/Rough Trade – 2001 (compilation from previous self-releases plus 1 re-recording of \"Nothing Came Out\")\n \"County Fair/Rainbows\" (CD single) – Sanctuary Records/Rough Trade – 2002\n Moldy Peaches 2000: Unreleased Cutz and Live Jamz 1994-2002 (CD) – Sanctuary Records/Rough Trade – 2003\n \"Anyone Else but You\" (single) – Rough Trade – 2008\n Origin Story: 1994–1999 (CD/LP/Cassette) – Org Music – 2022\n\nCompilation appearances\n Music from the Film Garage Days (\"Lucky Number Nine\") – Festival Mushroom Records 2002\nMusic from the Film Murderball (\"Anyone Else but You\") – Commotion 2005\nMusic from the Motion Picture Juno (\"Anyone Else but You\") – Rhino Records 2007\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n www.moldypeaches.com Official site.\n MP2K The original official site (archive.org)\nThe Moldy Peaches Beggars Group USA page\n\nAnti-folk groups\nMusical groups established in 1994\nMusical groups disestablished in 2008\nIndie rock musical groups from New York (state)\nPsychedelic folk groups\nRough Trade Records artists\nMusical groups from Washington (state)"
] |
[
"Weather Report",
"1970: Inception and formation",
"How does that effect us",
"I don't know.",
"do you think the weather is normal",
"I don't know.",
"is miles davis widely known",
"composers",
"was some one else in this band",
"Zawinul",
"was anyone else in it?",
"Brookmeyer,"
] |
C_54c9e0273f1c46e2a10d245abac9c168_1
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was this their first gig
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Was 1970 Weather Report's first gig?
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Weather Report
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Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter had first met and become friends in 1959 while they were playing in Maynard Ferguson's Big Band. Zawinul went on to play with Cannonball Adderley's group in the 1960s, while Shorter joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and then, in 1964, Miles Davis' second great quintet. During this decade, both men made names for themselves as being among the best composers in jazz. Zawinul later joined Shorter in contributing to the initial fusion music recordings of Miles Davis, and both men were part of the studio groups, which recorded the key Davis albums In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970). In consequence, Weather Report has often been seen as a spin-off from the Miles Davis bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s, although Zawinul was never part of Davis's touring line-up. Weather Report was initially formed to explore a more impressionistic and individualistic music (or, as Zawinul put it, "away from all that eight bars shit and then you go to the bridge...") Zawinul and Shorter recruited another Miles Davis associate, the classically trained Czech-born bass player Miroslav Vitous, who had previously played with Zawinul, as well as with Herbie Mann, Bob Brookmeyer, Stan Getz, and Chick Corea (Vitous has subsequently claimed that in fact Shorter and he had founded Weather Report, with Shorter bringing in Zawinul afterwards.) All three men composed, and formed the core of the project. To complete the band, the trio brought in former McCoy Tyner drummer Alphonse Mouzon and set about looking for a full-time auxiliary percussionist as they began to record their debut album. The initial recruits were session player Don Alias and symphony orchestra percussionist Barbara Burton. During recording, Alias quarreled with Zawinul (allegedly due to Zawinul being too dictatorial over the percussion approach) and the innovative Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira (yet another Davis alumnus) was brought in to complete the record. John McLaughlin was also invited to join the group, but decided to pursue his solo career, instead. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Weather Report was an American jazz fusion band active from 1970 to 1986. The band was founded (and initially co-led) by Austrian keyboard player Joe Zawinul, American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš. Other prominent members at various points in the band's lifespan included Jaco Pastorius, Alphonso Johnson, Victor Bailey, Chester Thompson, Peter Erskine, Airto Moreira, and Alex Acuña. Throughout most of its existence, the band was a quintet consisting of Zawinul, Shorter, a bass guitarist, a drummer, and a percussionist.
The band started as a free improvising jazz group with avant-garde and experimental electronic leanings (pioneered by Zawinul); when Vitouš left Weather Report (due mostly to creative disagreements), Zawinul increasingly steered the band towards a funky, edgy sound incorporating elements of R&B and native musics from around the world. Zawinul used the latest developments in synthesizer technology, and took advantage of a large variety of sounds and tone colors to make the band stand out. During the first half of their career, Weather Report were seen as one of the defining acts in modern jazz, winning the DownBeat "best album award" five times in a row.
Alongside bands such as Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters (all with members inspired by and partially responsible for the fusion-era work of Miles Davis), Weather Report is widely considered one of the defining bands of the jazz fusion genre.
Musical style
Over their 16-year career, Weather Report explored various areas of music, predominantly centered on jazz (initially the "free" variety), but also incorporating elements of art music, ethnic music, R&B, funk, and rock. While their work was categorized as "jazz fusion", the band members generally distanced themselves from that term.
From the start, Weather Report took the unusual approach of abandoning the traditional "soloist/accompaniment" demarcation of straight-ahead jazz and featured opportunities for continuous improvisation by every member of the band. That position remained consistent throughout the life of the band. From the point where Alphonso Johnson joined the band, individual solos became more prominent in concert, but were never allowed to overwhelm the collective approach. Initially, the band's music featured an improvisational method (similar to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew-period), but eventually that shifted to a more groove-oriented approach, and catchier compositions (as epitomized by their 1977 hit single "Birdland").
Joe Zawinul's playing style was often dominated by quirky melodic improvisations (simultaneously bebop-, ethnic-, and pop-sounding) combined with sparse but rhythmic big-band chords or bass lines. Having originally made his name as a pioneering electric piano player, he went on to consistently develop the role of the synthesizer in jazz during his time with Weather Report. Working with companies such as ARP and Oberheim, Zawinul developed new ways of voicing and patching electronic tones for textures, ensemble roles (including emulations of traditional band instruments) and soloing. In Weather Report, he often employed a vocoder, as well as recorded sounds played (i.e., filtered and transposed) through a synthesizer, creating a very distinctive, often beautiful, synthesis of jazz harmonics and "noise" (which he referred to as "using all the sounds the world generates"). On some Weather Report tunes, however, Zawinul was criticized for allowing his synthesized arrangements to dominate the sound.
Wayne Shorter came to the group with a reputation as a dominant role as an instrumentalist, drawn from both his solo work and his contributions to Miles Davis' "second great quintet" during the 1960s. His choice not to follow the same approach with Weather Report led to some criticism of the group. During his time with Weather Report, Shorter was noted for generally playing saxophone with an economical, "listening" style. Rather than continually taking the lead, he generally added subtle harmonic, melodic, and/or rhythmic complexity by responding to other member's improvisations (although he could and did sometimes exercise a more frenetic style akin to that of John Coltrane or Michael Brecker). As a composer, he chose a more abstract, sometimes atonal and "free jazz" style of music, opposed to the sometimes flamboyant melodicism of the tunes written by Zawinul or Pastorius. Playing both tenor and soprano saxophones, Shorter continued to develop the role of the latter instrument in jazz, taking his cue from previous work by Coltrane, Sidney Bechet, Lucky Thompson, and Steve Lacy.
Weather Report maintained a consistent interest in a textured sound and developments in music technology and processing. Both Zawinul and original bassist Miroslav Vitouš experimented with electronic effects pedals (as generally used by rock guitarists) with Zawinul using them on electric piano and synthesizers and Vitouš on his upright bass (which he frequently bowed through distortion to create a second horn-like voice). The band's third bass player, Jaco Pastorius, popularized the use of fretless bass guitar, melodic bass soloing and extensive use of string harmonics, as well as consolidating the driving R&B pulse in the band's music (which had been brought in by his predecessor Alphonso Johnson).
With the exception of a brief quartet period between 1978 and 1979 (wherein other members could double on various percussion instruments), Weather Report's instrumentation always included both a drummer and a percussionist. For its first eight years of existence, the group had difficulty finding a permanent drummer, moving through about one drummer per year until Jaco Pastorius helped to recruit Peter Erskine in 1978. Erskine and Omar Hakim were the only drummers who played with Weather Report for more than two years.
History
1970: Inception and formation
Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter had first met and become friends in 1959 while they were playing in Maynard Ferguson's Big Band. Zawinul went on to play with Cannonball Adderley's group in the 1960s, while Shorter joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and then, in 1964, Miles Davis' second great quintet. During this decade, both men made names for themselves as being among the best composers in jazz.
Zawinul later joined Shorter in contributing to the initial fusion music recordings of Miles Davis, and both men were part of the studio groups that recorded the key Davis albums In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970). Weather Report was initially formed to explore a more impressionistic and individualistic music (or, as Zawinul put it, "away from all that eight bars shit and then you go to the bridge...").
There's some dispute over how Weather Report initially formed. According to Zawinul, it began when he and Shorter recruited another Miles Davis associate, the classically trained Czech-born bass player Miroslav Vitouš, who had previously played with each of them separately (as well as with Herbie Mann, Bob Brookmeyer, Stan Getz, and Chick Corea). According to Vitouš himself, it was he and Shorter who actually founded Weather Report, with Shorter bringing in Zawinul afterwards. Whichever story is true, it was those three musicians – all composers – who formed the initial core of the project.
To complete the band, Zawinul, Shorter and Vitouš brought in former McCoy Tyner drummer Alphonse Mouzon and began recording their debut album while looking for a full-time auxiliary percussionist. The initial recruits were session percussion player Don Alias and symphony orchestra percussionist Barbara Burton. During recording, Alias quarreled with Zawinul (allegedly due to Zawinul being too dictatorial over the percussion approach) and the innovative Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira (yet another Davis alumnus) was brought in to complete the record. Guitarist John McLaughlin was also invited to join the group, but decided to pursue his solo career, instead.
1971–1972: Avant-garde collective
Weather Report's debut album Weather Report featured a softer sound than would be the case in later years, predominantly using acoustic bass, with Shorter exclusively playing soprano saxophone. It built on the avant-garde experiments which Zawinul and Shorter had pioneered with Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, including an avoidance of head-and-chorus composition in favor of continuous rhythm and movement. DownBeat magazine described the album as "music beyond category".
In 1972, Weather Report released its second album, I Sing the Body Electric. The first side featured new studio recordings, while the second side was taken from live recordings of a concert in Tokyo, featuring the full-band lineup of Zawinul, Shorter, Vitouš, Gravatt, and Um Romão (and later available in full as the 1972 Japan-only double album Live in Tokyo). The studio side used extended versions of the band including various guest performers, suggesting that Weather Report was not necessarily an integral jazz band, but might possibly work as an expandable project set up to realise the music of its three composers. The album also featured Zawinul's first use of a synthesizer (an instrument with which he would become synonymous within jazz) and of sound effects.
I Sing the Body Electric also showed the first signs of a shift in the balance of control within the band, away from the more collective approach of the debut album. During the following year, this tendency would develop further.
1973: Move towards groove
On 1973's Sweetnighter, Weather Report began to abandon the primarily acoustic group improvisation format, and the band started to take a new direction. Primarily at Zawinul's instigation, Weather Report became more jazz funk- and groove-oriented, drawing more heavily on R&B influences and dense electric keyboard work while adding more structure to both the prewritten and the improvisational sections.
Gravatt took his replacement in the studio sessions badly and quit the band at the end of recording, moving to Minneapolis to join the band Natural Life. Many years later, Zawinul paid tribute to Gravatt's skills and stated that he had been the finest of the band's "pure jazz" drummers as well as being "from the jazz side... my favorite of them all". With Gravatt gone and Dwellingham unavailable for touring, former Sly & the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico played on the Sweetnighter tour, but did not stay with the band afterwards.
At this point, Vitouš and Zawinul found themselves at creative loggerheads, since the former preferred Weather Report's original approach and the latter wished to continue further along the road to funk. Retrospectively, Zawinul accused Vitouš of being unable to play funk convincingly (something which Greg Errico corroborated) and claimed that he had not provided enough music for the band. Vitouš countered that he had in fact brought in compositions, but that Zawinul had been unable to play them. Vitouš has also accused Zawinul of having been "a first-class manipulator" primarily interested in commercial success. When Shorter sided with Zawinul, the original three-man partnership broke down acrimoniously and Vitouš left Weather Report, moving on to an illustrious career leading his own band and winning respect as a composer. His final contribution to Weather Report was to play bass on a single track, which appeared on the band's 1974 album Mysterious Traveller ("American Tango", which he had co-written with Zawinul).
Vitouš' departure marked the end of the first phase of Weather Report and the shift of overall creative dominance of the band to Josef Zawinul, although Shorter remained an integral, influential, and vital part of the project. Vitouš has subsequently accused both Zawinul and Shorter of having used foul play to edge him out of the band, to deny the scale of his contribution to Weather Report's history and creative approach, and to cheat him out of remuneration.
1974–1975: Further into groove
Vitouš' replacement was the Philadelphian electric bass guitarist Alphonso Johnson (formerly a sideman for the pop-fusion player Chuck Mangione). Recruited by Shorter, Johnson was a supple player more than capable of providing the funk element which Zawinul desired. He was also an early advocate of the Chapman Stick, which he can be heard playing on some of the live Weather Report recordings of the period.
According to Zawinul, Wilburn apparently "lost heart" on tour (despite performing well in the studio). To shore up the music, the band hired another drummer, Darryl Brown, to play alongside him. At the end of the tour, both Wilburn and Brown left the band (as did Dom Um Romão) and Weather Report was, once again, drummerless.
For the next set of studio sessions, Weather Report added a new Brazilian percussionist (Alyrio Lima) and a new drummer – Chuck Bazemore of The Delfonics.
The new album, Tale Spinnin', was released in 1975. It was the first Weather Report album to feature a consistent rhythm section (rather than a varied set of drummers, percussionists, and bass players) since their debut. The album also made further strides in using technological improvements in synthesizers, even making use of the gigantic studio-based TONTO array.
During the same year, Shorter also recorded Native Dancer under his own name (with the Brazilian composer and vocalist Milton Nascimento). Tale Spinnin won the DownBeat best album award for 1975 (the third Weather Report album to do so) and Native Dancer was the runner-up.
1976: In transition
1976's Black Market album was perhaps the most rock-oriented work which the group had produced to date. Weather Report's music had evolved further from open-ended funk jams into more melody-oriented, concise forms, which also offered a greater mass-market appeal. Zawinul further consolidated his use of keyboard synthesizers, while Shorter experimented with an early form of wind synthesizer, the Lyricon.
However, the album was recorded during yet another period of change for the group, with multiple personnel shuffles. Although Alyrio Lima played percussion on one track, he was replaced during the sessions by Don Alias (his first appearance with the group since the debut album debacle) and by Alex Acuña (a Peruvian drummer and conga player based in Las Vegas, who had played with Elvis Presley and Ike Turner, among others). Alphonso Johnson was also worn out from the strain put on the rhythm by the band's frequent changes of drummer. During a break in activity halfway through the recording of Black Market, Johnson opted to leave Weather Report to play with the Billy Cobham/George Duke Band (which featured a young John Scofield on guitar).
Prior to his departure, Johnson played on all but two of the new album's tracks. His replacement was Jaco Pastorius, a virtuoso fretless bass guitarist from Florida, who had been in touch with Zawinul for several years, and who came in to play on "Cannon Ball" and his own composition "Barbary Coast". Zawinul and Shorter had assumed that Chester Thompson would be departing alongside his friend Johnson, and for the second set of sessions they replaced him (on Pastorius' recommendation) with the former Mahavishnu Orchestra drummer Narada Michael Walden. Although Walden played on several album tracks, he ultimately proved unsuitable. Thompson returned for the final Black Market sessions, but left again after failing to gel as a rhythm section with Pastorius (whose style was much busier than that of Johnson). Thompson subsequently joined Genesis as their touring drummer.
Black Market continued Weather Report's ongoing run of success, selling well and being the fourth of the band's albums to win the album of the year award from DownBeat magazine. For the subsequent tour, Alex Acuña moved from percussion to the drum kit, and Don Alias was replaced by the young Puerto Rican percussionist Manolo Badrena, who had previously played with various Latin rock bands and with Art Blakey. The band made a very well-received appearance in July at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1976, which was filmed for future release.
1977–1979: Jazz-rock stars
The recruitment of Jaco Pastorius helped to push Weather Report to the height of its popularity. Already a rising star in his own right, Pastorius brought a very musical, melodic quality to the bass. He could play muscular, lightning-fast groove lines influenced by R&B or funk, as well as demonstrating an extraordinary solo control of tone and string harmonics, often sounding more like a horn player. Pastorius was also a multi-instrumentalist (contributing drums, steel pan, and mandocello to the latest recording sessions), a gifted composer (eventually responsible for some signature Weather Report pieces such as "Teen Town" and "Three Views of a Secret"), and a useful production foil for Zawinul due to his knowledge of recording studios and techniques. Finally, Pastorius' stagecraft and aggressive showmanship helped the band to bring in a new audience.
The band's next album was 1977's acclaimed Heavy Weather, which proved to be the band's most successful recording in terms of sales, while still retaining wide critical acclaim. It contained the band's biggest hit, the propulsive and danceable "Birdland" (highlighting Pastorius' singing bass lines and Zawinul's synthesized ensemble brass), which became a pop hit and later became a jazz standard. Weather Report appeared on the Burt Sugarman-produced series The Midnight Special, performing both "Birdland" and "Teen Town". Heavy Weather dominated Weather Report's disc awards, including their last DownBeat Album of the Year award.
During this period, Pastorius' strong professional connection with Joni Mitchell (for whom he played bass throughout the latter half of the 1970s) led to another musical connection. Over the next few years, Mitchell hired the Weather Report line-up en masse (although without Zawinul in each case) to play on her studio albums Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977) and Mingus (1979).
During August 1978 the band joined Maurice White's vanity label ARC at Columbia. At the time they were once again without either a full-time drummer and percussionist, with Alex Acuña having returned to Las Vegas for a career as a studio musician and Manolo Badrena having been fired for "non-musical reasons". Shorter had been focusing most of his attention and compositional ideas into his solo work, while Zawinul was sketching out ideas for a solo album of his own, which involved moving away from a raw group sound in favor of constructing a far more orchestrated and experimental studio-based recording with multiple overdubs. However, Weather Report's contract and work schedule required another album, so Zawinul's solo work was absorbed into what became Weather Report's eighth album, Mr. Gone (1978).
The studio sessions made use of a variety of drummers – Pastorius played the kit on two tracks and further contributions came from Tony Williams, Steve Gadd, and Peter Erskine (the latter an ex-Stan Kenton/Maynard Ferguson drummer recruited to the project by Pastorius). Erskine became a full member of the band for the next tour and remained with Weather Report until 1982. The album also featured guest appearances from Deniece Williams and Earth Wind and Fire leader Maurice White.
The album rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart.
Notoriously, Mr. Gone (1978) received only a one-star review rating from DownBeat after a string of group releases which had all pulled a five-star rating. The group arranged for a rebuttal interview with the magazine to defend their efforts. Zawinul and Pastorius were defiant in their responses to the interviewer, Shorter more philosophical, and Erskine the most reticent of the four.
By the late '70s, Weather Report was a quartet of Zawinul, Shorter, Pastorius, and Erskine, and (for the first time) had dispensed with the auxiliary percussionist role, which had been integral since the band's inception. Instead, all four members doubled on percussion at various points in live performances. Zawinul commented that this sleeker, less crowded sound provided more listening range and made the music less chaotic now that the band were focusing more on melody and harmony.
The larger scale and multimedia staging of the band's tours (complete with stagehands, laser and film projections) began to take on the kind of rock-star proportions mostly unknown in jazz circles. The 1979 double live album 8:30 (which won that year's Best Jazz Fusion Performance) was recorded on the Mr. Gone tour and captured the direct power and energy of this lineup of Weather Report. Zawinul would later describe this lineup as "one of the greatest bands of all time! That band was a hummer!"
Between March 2 and 4, 1979, Weather Report traveled to Havana, Cuba, to participate in the historic Havana Jam festival, a break in mutual Cuban/American political hostilities, which had American artists such as Stephen Stills, the CBS Jazz All-Stars, Bonnie Bramlett, Kris Kristofferson, Rita Coolidge, and Billy Joel play alongside Cuban artists such as Irakere, Pacho Alonso, Tata Güines, and Orquesta Aragón. Another featured performance was by the Trio of Doom (a short-lived teaming of Pastorius with John McLaughlin and Tony Williams). Weather Report's performance featured in Havana Jam '79, Ernesto Juan Castellanos' documentary celebrating the event.
1980–1982: A tighter arrangement
At the beginning of 1980, Pastorius recruited hand-drummer Robert Thomas Jr. (a fellow Floridan, with whom he had jammed previously) into the band. Thomas featured on the 1980 album Night Passage. A tighter and more traditional recording than previous releases, the record featured a more prominent role for Shorter, a strong element of bebop, and a nod to jazz's golden age via a high-speed cover of Duke Ellington's "Rockin' in Rhythm" (showing off Zawinul's pioneering and ever-increasing ability to create synthetic big-band sounds on his synthesizers).
By now, Pastorius was displaying signs of the mental instability and substance abuse problems that ultimately wrecked his career; and the close relationship he'd previously shared with Zawinul was becoming strained as Zawinul grew tired of Pastorius' showmanship onstage (beginning to feel that it detracted from the music). Towards the end of the year, Pastorius began working on his long-delayed second solo album (Word of Mouth) (1981) in New York, while Zawinul worked on new Weather Report material in California.
Weather Report's next album Weather Report (1982) – their second eponymous release following their 1971 debut – was recorded in 1981, although it was not released for another year. Zawinul's dominance as instrumentalist and composer (as well as group director) was even more pronounced on this album. Much of the band's music was increasingly written out rather than improvised. In the event, Pastorius spent more of his creative attention on the Word of Mouth project: his only writing for the Weather Report album being his contribution to a single, group-composed piece. Shorter (who only contributed one whole composition to the 1982 album beyond group-written work) was already taking a more philosophical approach. He later commented, "for a long time in Weather Report, I abstained. I elected not to do things."
Erskine's own commitment to Word of Mouth (and a subsequent summer commitment to Steps Ahead) meant that he, too, had to be replaced, while Robert Thomas Jr., was simply dismissed. Reduced to a duo, and with tour commitments looming, Zawinul and Shorter were obliged to quickly assemble a new band.
1982–1985: A new band
On the recommendation of Michał Urbaniak, Zawinul and Shorter recruited 23-year-old drummer Omar Hakim, a talented session player and multi-instrumentalist, who had played with a variety of musicians including Mike Mainieri, David Bowie, and Carly Simon. Hakim was immediately entrusted with recruiting the rest of the new lineup. Having failed to secure Marcus Miller as bass guitarist, he selected Victor Bailey (a recent graduate from the Berklee College of Music, with whom Hakim had played while backing Miriam Makeba). Hakim also recruited percussion/concertina player José Rossy, with whom he had worked in Labelle.
The new Weather Report went straight onto tour. The music developed on tour was later recorded for the 1983 album Procession, which showed the band beginning to make something of a return to the "world music" approach which it had pioneered in the mid-1970s, and featured a cameo appearance from The Manhattan Transfer.
Continuing with the same lineup, Weather Report recorded the Domino Theory album in 1984, with Hakim stepping into Jaco Pastorius' old role as Zawinul's co-producer. The album was Weather Report's first album to employ drum machines and samplers (the Emulator), deepening the band's involvement with cutting-edge music technology, and also featured a guest vocal from Carl Anderson.
Percussionist and singer Mino Cinélu replaced Rossy in the spring of 1984 and appeared on the band's video release Live in Japan (reissued on DVD in 2007). The same lineup played on 1985's Sportin' Life album, which included a cover of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" and appearances by singers Bobby McFerrin and Carl Anderson. In keeping with Zawinul's technological curiosity, the album heralded the arrival of MIDI, which allowed him to rapidly and inexpensively write, demonstrate, and record music via a set of synthesizers.
1986: Final split
Both Zawinul and Shorter were beginning to realise that the refreshing nature of other projects was more satisfying than Weather Report work, and both generally felt that the band had run its course.
In February 1986, the San Diego Union-Tribune announced that Shorter had left the band to concentrate on solo work. Having reluctantly agreed with Shorter that he would no longer use the band name, Zawinul then ended Weather Report. The final album under the Weather Report name, This is This!, was released in June 1986 and fulfilled the band's contract with Columbia Records. Two of its tracks featured guitar work from Carlos Santana, and it also marked the return of Peter Erskine on drums, with Hakim only appearing on one track.
1986–present: After Weather Report
Having split the band, Zawinul promptly attempted to reform it – after a fashion – as Weather Update. For this project, he reunited with recent Weather Report alumni Victor Bailey, Mino Cinélu, and Peter Erskine, but replaced Shorter with guitarist John Scofield. This lineup was short-lived, with Los Angeles session guitarist Steve Khan and former Weather Report percussionist Robert Thomas Jr. replacing Scofield and Cinélu prior to live appearances. Weather Update toured in 1986 and 1987 before Zawinul dissolved the band. From 1988 onwards, Zawinul went on to enjoy a successful nineteen-year career leading the world music/jazz ensemble The Zawinul Syndicate (which has continued, following Zawinul's death, as The Syndicate).
Rather than form another collective band, Wayne Shorter concentrated on his solo career and on work as a bandleader, which continues to the present day.
In spite of the band's enduring popularity, a Weather Report reunion never occurred. The nearest that the band ever came to reuniting was when Zawinul and Shorter both played live with Miles Davis on July 10, 1991, in Paris (the only time when Zawinul is known to have shared a live stage with Davis). A projected mid-'90s reunion CD for Verve never materialized; according to Zawinul, disappointing sales for Shorter's 1995 CD High Life may have played a part in ending the idea.
Five of the band's members have since died. Zawinul himself died on September 11, 2007, in Vienna from skin cancer (Merkel cell carcinoma). He was predeceased by mid-period bass player Jaco Pastorius, who died on September 21, 1987, following a fatal beating in his hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Pastorius' successor on bass guitar, Victor Bailey, died on November 11, 2016 (apparently from complications from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Alphonse Mouzon, the first drummer, died on December 25, 2016 from cardiac arrest after neuroendocrine cancer. Dom Um Romão, the group's drummer from 1971 to 1974, died in 2005 aged 79.
Lineups
Timeline
Releases since the band's breakup
A "post band" Weather Report double CD called Live and Unreleased was made available in 2002, featuring vintage live recordings made during the late 1970s/early 1980s with various personnel. In September 2006, Columbia/Legacy released a Weather Report boxed set, Forecast: Tomorrow. It includes three CDs of mostly previously released material (from 1970 to 1985, excluding This is This!) and a DVD of the entire September 28, 1978, performance (with Erskine and Pastorius) in Offenbach, Germany, not previously available. A DVD video of the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival performance (featuring the Heavy Weather lineup of Pastorius, Acuna, and Badrena) has become available, as well. Columbia/Legacy have also re-released the 1984 Live in Japan concert on DVD.
In 2011, the Zawinul estate, in conjunction with an independent label, released a 40th-anniversary commemorative trilogy of previously unavailable Weather Report live shows: In March Live in Berlin 1975 was released both on vinyl and as a CD/DVD set; in June the Live in Offenbach 1978 DVD was re-released together with a previously unavailable double CD of the complete show; in October Live in Cologne 1983 was released as both DVD and double CD.
Grammy Awards
The Grammy Awards are awarded annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States. Weather Report has won one Grammy from six nominations.
|-
!1972
|"I Sing The Body Electric"
|Best Jazz Performance by a Group
|
|-
!1979
|"8:30"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
|-
!1981
|"Night Passage"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
|-
!1982
|"Weather Report"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
|-
!1983
|"Procession"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
|-
!1985
||"Sportin' Life"
|Best Jazz Fusion Performance, Vocal or Instrumental
|
Discography
Studio albums
References
External links
Weather Report's official website www.WeatherReportMusic.com
Weather Report biography by Richard S. Ginell, discography and album reviews, credits & releases at AllMusic
The Weather Report Annotated Discography
Weather Report discography, album releases & credits at Discogs
Weather Report albums to be listened on Spotify
Weather Report albums to be listened on YouTube
Musical groups established in 1970
Musical groups disestablished in 1986
Jazz fusion ensembles
American jazz ensembles from New York City
Musical groups from New York City
Grammy Award winners
Jazz musicians from New York (state)
| false |
[
"The Cornish Pilot Gig Association (or CPGA) is a body which governs the sport of Cornish pilot gig racing. As of August 2006 the association consists of 44 clubs and 115 registered gigs. This does not include gigs used in the Isles of Scilly.\n\nHistory of the Cornish Pilot Gig Association\nThe first 'gigs' were built in the late 18th century and were used to carry the 'pilot' out to ships waiting off the Cornish coasts.\n\nThe pilot would then navigate the ship through the potentially hazardous rocks into the harbour.\n\nPilots needed to row out to the ships quickly - it was a competitive career as the first man to reach the waiting ship would receive the pilot's fee. Gig racing evolved both from this competition and from the testing of newly built gigs against others to measure their performance.\n\nCompetitive gig racing was popular in Cornwall during the mid-19th century, but by the end of the century began to decline as the industrial revolution gathered speed and engines increasingly replaced sails and oars.\n\nMany gigs were subsequently broken up or left to rot, but Newquay in Cornwall managed to retain a few and formed Newquay Rowing Club in 1921.\n\nOne of their boats, 'Treffry' built in 1838 still races and is used as the standard measurement for the construction of all new boats.\n\nNewquay Rowing Club also owns two other historic gigs: 'Dove' built in 1820 and 'Newquay' built in 1812 - which is considered to be the oldest rowing boat in the world.\n\nBetween 1985 and 1986 four new gig clubs were formed (Truro, Cadgwith, Roseland and Mount's Bay). This was in addition to Newquay Rowing Club (formed in 1922) and the small number of rowing clubs that existed around the coast.\n\nDuring 1986 George Northey (Newquay Rowing Club), John Bawden and Ralph Bird all felt that a specification should be laid down as to how the new gigs should be built.\n\nA meeting was called for 5 December 1986, with total of 14 gentlemen attending. It was decided that the new gigs would be built to the specification laid down by the Peters family, which built the gigs 'Treffry' (1838), which is still actively rowed by the Newquay Rowing Club. It was decided that there would only be one officer which would be elected as the chairperson and he would carry out the measuring of the gig during the construction phase to make sure the gig complied with the new specifications.\n\nThe committee met again in the January 1987 at the Royal Hotel in Truro and accepted the plans that had been drawn up by Ralph Bird. In the meeting it was decided that the association would be called the Cornish Pilot Gig Association.\n\nExternal links\n\nThe official homepage of the Cornish Pilot Gig Association\nSwanage Sea Rowing Club\nZennor Gig Club (Penzance)\n\nReferences\n\"Cornish Pilot Gig Association - About us\" by information supplied by Ralph Bird - President of the Cornish Pilot Gig Association and life member of the CPGA, retrieved 25 August 2006\n\nRowing governing bodies\nPilot Gig\nRowing in England\nTraditional boats",
"Finish the Story were formed in Evesham, England, in 1981. The original members were Nicola Mumford, Garry Smout and Peter Bright (aka This Window). Finish the Story were very much a part of the 'Evesham Scene' which included bands The Photos and The Dancing Did\n\nFormed as a cathartic reaction to the death of Nicola's boyfriend, Stuart Dyke, who was killed in a car crash in 1981. Stuart was the bass player with The Dancing Did . Tim Harrison the singer with The Dancing Did invited Nicola to put her angst into words and music and support his band at their next gig. With only a handful of songs, a home-made video and under-rehearsed, Finish the Story appeared for a one-off gig at The Phoenix Club, in Great Malvern (UK) as the support act for The Dancing Did\n\nIn the audience was freelance journalist Mick Mercer who was there to review the main act for Record Mirror. A review of the same gig appeared in ZigZag (magazine) written by Sara Jones who said, Finish the Story's debut gig was better than the second coming of Jesus Christ.\n\nWith only a few gigs to their credit they supported The Cure at Hammersmith Odeon. Other bands they have appeared with include Blurt and And Also The Trees. Headlining in towns and cities like London, Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter. Finish the Story refused to compromise their artistic intensity to a record label which ultimately forced them apart.\n\nTheir first release was on Gunfire and Pianos (SITU 17) released by ZigZag/Situation Two. Also appearing on this album were Psychic TV, Jazz Butcher and All About Eve (band).\n\nArticles \nClipping of 'one-off' Malvern gig in Record Mirror 8 August 1981 by Mick Mercer\n ZigZag (magazine) clipping of 'one-off' Malvern gig September 1981 by Sara Jones \nReview of gig in Bristol by Dave Massey in Sounds (magazine) 2 July 1983 \nInterview in 'Women In Rock' published by The Daily Mirror 1983\nReview and interview with the BBC in 2005. There is a link on this page to an audio clip of the interview.\nCollection of a few reviews and quotes.\n\nExternal links\nBand website which includes the early DIY videos shot on a domestic VHS video camera which were shown before their gigs in 1981 website\nList of releases in Europe on Discogs.com \n\nEnglish rock music groups\n1981 establishments in England"
] |
[
"Miriam Makeba",
"Return to South Africa, final years and death"
] |
C_be942cd9bfc84a1eb32a2739a1edbbc7_0
|
When did Makeba return to Aftrica?
| 1 |
When did Miriam Makeba return to Aftrica?
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Miriam Makeba
|
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990. Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina!, which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity". On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graca Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances. On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her. CANNOTANSWER
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He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.
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Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother's funeral was prevented by the country's government.
Makeba's career flourished in the United States, and she released several albums and songs, her most popular being "Pata Pata" (1967). Along with Belafonte she received a Grammy Award for her 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She testified against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement. She married Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party, in 1968. As a result, she lost support among white Americans. The US government cancelled her visa while she was travelling abroad, leading her and Carmichael to move to Guinea. She continued to perform, mostly in African countries, including at several independence celebrations. She began to write and perform music more explicitly critical of apartheid; the 1977 song "Soweto Blues", written by her former husband Hugh Masekela, was about the Soweto uprising. After apartheid was dismantled in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She continued recording and performing, including a 1991 album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, and appeared in the 1992 film Sarafina!. She was named a UN goodwill ambassador in 1999, and campaigned for humanitarian causes. She died of a heart attack during a 2008 concert in Italy.
Makeba was among the first African musicians to receive worldwide recognition. She brought African music to a Western audience, and popularized the world music and Afropop genres. She also made popular several songs critical of apartheid, and became a symbol of opposition to the system, particularly after her right to return was revoked. Upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Early years
Childhood and family
Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in the black township of Prospect, near Johannesburg. Her Swazi mother, Christina Makeba, was a sangoma, or traditional healer, and a domestic worker. Her Xhosa father, Caswell Makeba, was a teacher; he died when she was six years old. Makeba later said that before she was conceived, her mother had been warned that any future pregnancy could be fatal. Neither Miriam nor her mother seemed likely to survive after a difficult labour and delivery. Miriam's grandmother, who attended the birth, often muttered "uzenzile", a Xhosa word that means "you brought this on yourself", to Miriam's mother during her recovery, which inspired her to give her daughter the name "Zenzile".
When Makeba was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested and sentenced to a six-month prison term for selling umqombothi, a homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. The family could not afford the small fine required to avoid a jail term, and Miriam spent the first six months of her life in jail. As a child, Makeba sang in the choir of the Kilnerton Training Institute in Pretoria, an all-black Methodist primary school that she attended for eight years. Her talent for singing earned her praise at school. Makeba was baptised a Protestant, and sang in church choirs, in English, Xhosa, Sotho, and Zulu; she later said that she learned to sing in English before she could speak the language.
The family moved to the Transvaal when Makeba was a child. After her father's death, she was forced to find employment; she did domestic work, and worked as a nanny. She described herself as a shy person at the time. Her mother worked for white families in Johannesburg, and had to live away from her six children. Makeba lived for a while with her grandmother and a large number of cousins in Pretoria. Makeba was influenced by her family's musical tastes; her mother played several traditional instruments, and her elder brother collected records, including those of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and taught Makeba songs. Her father played the piano, and his musical inclination was later a factor in Makeba's family accepting what was seen as a risque choice of career.
In 1949, Makeba married James Kubay, a policeman in training, with whom she had her only child, Bongi Makeba, in 1950. Makeba was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband, who was said to have beaten her, left her shortly afterwards, after a two-year marriage. A decade later she overcame cervical cancer via a hysterectomy.
Early career
Makeba began her professional musical career with the Cuban Brothers, a South African all-male close harmony group, with whom she sang covers of popular American songs. Soon afterwards, at the age of 21, she joined a jazz group, the Manhattan Brothers, who sang a mixture of South African songs and pieces from popular African-American groups. Makeba was the only woman in the group. With the Manhattan Brothers she recorded her first hit, "Laku Tshoni Ilanga", in 1953, and developed a national reputation as a musician. In 1956 she joined a new all-woman group, the Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional South African melodies. Formed by Gallotone Records, the group was also known as the Sunbeams. Makeba sang with the Skylarks when the Manhattan Brothers were travelling abroad; later, she also travelled with the Manhattan Brothers. In the Skylarks, Makeba sang alongside Rhodesian-born musician Dorothy Masuka, whose music Makeba had followed, along with that of Dolly Rathebe. Several of the Skylarks' pieces from this period became popular; the music historian Rob Allingham later described the group as "real trendsetters, with harmonisation that had never been heard before." Makeba received no royalties from her work with the Skylarks.
While performing with the Manhattan Brothers in 1955, Makeba met Nelson Mandela, then a young lawyer; he later remembered the meeting, and that he felt that the girl he met "was going to be someone." In 1956, Gallotone Records released "Lovely Lies", Makeba's first solo success; the Xhosa lyric about a man looking for his beloved in jails and hospitals was replaced with the unrelated and innocuous line "You tell such lovely lies with your two lovely eyes" in the English version. The record became the first South African record to chart on the United States Billboard Top 100. In 1957, Makeba was featured on the cover of Drum magazine.
In 1959, Makeba sang the lead female role in the Broadway-inspired South African jazz opera King Kong; among those in the cast was the musician Hugh Masekela. The musical was performed to racially integrated audiences, raising her profile among white South Africans. Also in 1959, she had a short guest appearance in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film produced and directed by the American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. Rogosin cast her after seeing her on stage in African Jazz and Variety show, on which Makeba was a performer for 18 months. The film blended elements of documentary and fiction and had to be filmed in secret as the government was expected to be hostile to it. Makeba appeared on stage, and sang two songs: her appearance lasted four minutes. The cameo made an enormous impression on viewers, and Rogosin organised a visa for her to attend the premiere of the film at the twenty-fourth Venice Film Festival in Italy, where the film won the prestigious Critics' Choice Award. Makeba's presence has been described as crucial to the film, as an emblem of cosmopolitan black identity that also connected with working-class black people due to the dialogue being in Zulu.
Makeba's role in Come Back, Africa brought her international recognition and she travelled to London and New York to perform. In London she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor, helping her with her first solo recordings. These included "Pata Pata", which would be released many years later, and a version of the traditional Xhosa song "Qongqothwane", which she had first performed with the Skylarks. Though "Pata Pata"—described by Musician magazine as a "groundbreaking Afropop gem"—became her most famous song, Makeba described it as "one of my most insignificant songs". While in England, she married Sonny Pillay, a South African ballad singer of Indian descent; they divorced within a few months.
Makeba then moved to New York, making her US music debut on 1 November 1959 on The Steve Allen Show in Los Angeles for a television audience of 60 million. Her New York debut at the Village Vanguard occurred soon after; she sang in Xhosa and Zulu, and performed a Yiddish folk song. Her audience at this concert included Miles Davis and Duke Ellington; her performance received strongly positive reviews from critics. She first came to popular and critical attention in jazz clubs, after which her reputation grew rapidly. Belafonte, who had helped Makeba with her move to the US, handled the logistics for her first performances. When she first moved to the US, Makeba lived in Greenwich Village, along with other musicians and actors. As was common in her profession, she experienced some financial insecurity, and worked as a babysitter for a period.
Exile
United States
Breakthrough
Soon after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Makeba learned that her mother had died. When she tried to return home for the funeral, she found that her South African passport had been cancelled. Two of Makeba's family members were killed in the massacre. The incident left her concerned about her family, many of whom were still in South Africa, including her daughter: the nine-year-old Bongi joined her mother in the US in August 1960. During her first few years in the US, Makeba had rarely sung explicitly political music, but her popularity had led to an increase in awareness of apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement. Following the Sharpeville killings, Makeba felt a responsibility to help, as she had been able to leave the country while others had not. From this point, she became an increasingly outspoken critic of apartheid and the white-minority government; before the massacre, she had taken care to avoid overtly political statements in South Africa.
Her musical career in the US continued to flourish. She signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, and released Miriam Makeba, her first studio album, in 1960, backed by Belafonte's band. RCA Victor chose to buy out Makeba's contract with Gallotone Records, and despite the fact that Makeba was unable to perform in South Africa, Gallotone received US$45,000 in the deal, which meant that Makeba received no royalties for her debut album. The album included one of her most famous hits in the US, "Qongqothwane", which was known in English as "The Click Song" because Makeba's audiences could not pronounce the Xhosa name. Time magazine called her the "most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years", and Newsweek compared her voice to "the smoky tones and delicate phrasing" of Ella Fitzgerald and the "intimate warmth" of Frank Sinatra. The album was not commercially successful, and Makeba was briefly dropped from RCA Victor: she was re-signed soon after as the label recognised the commercial possibilities of the growing interest in African culture. Her South African identity had been downplayed during her first signing, but it was strongly emphasised the second time to take advantage of this interest. Makeba made several appearances on television, often in the company of Belafonte. In 1962, Makeba and Belafonte sang at the birthday party for US President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, but Makeba did not go to the party afterwards because she was ill. Kennedy nevertheless insisted on meeting her, so Belafonte sent a car to pick her up.
In 1964, Makeba released her second studio album for RCA Victor, The World of Miriam Makeba. An early example of world music, the album peaked at number eighty-six on the Billboard 200. Makeba's music had a cross-racial appeal in the US; white Americans were attracted to her image as an "exotic" African performer, and black Americans related their own experiences of racial segregation to Makeba's struggle against apartheid. Makeba found company among other African exiles and émigrés in New York, including Hugh Masekela, to whom she was married from 1963 to 1968. During their marriage, Makeba and Masekela were neighbours of the jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie in Englewood, New Jersey; they spent much of their time in Harlem. She also came to know actors Marlon Brando and Lauren Bacall, and musicians Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles. Fellow singer-activist Nina Simone became friendly with Makeba, as did actor Cicely Tyson; Makeba and Simone performed together at Carnegie Hall. Makeba was among black entertainers, activists, and intellectuals in New York at the time who believed that the civil rights movement and popular culture could reinforce each other, creating "a sense of intertwined political and cultural vibrancy"; other examples included Maya Angelou and Sidney Poitier. She later described her difficulty living with racial segregation, saying "There wasn't much difference in America; it was a country that had abolished slavery but there was apartheid in its own way."
Travel and activism
Makeba's music was also popular in Europe, and she travelled and performed there frequently. Acting on the advice of Belafonte, she added songs from Latin America, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere in Africa to her repertoire. She visited Kenya in 1962 in support of the country's independence from British colonial rule, and raised funds for its independence leader Jomo Kenyatta. Later that year she testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid about the effects of the system, asking for economic sanctions against South Africa's National Party government. She requested an arms embargo against South Africa, on the basis that weapons sold to the government would likely be used against black women and children. As a result, her music was banned in South Africa, and her South African citizenship and right to return were revoked. Makeba thus became a stateless person, but she was soon issued passports by Algeria, Guinea, Belgium and Ghana. In her life, she held nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.
Soon after her testimony, Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, invited her to sing at the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity, the only performer to be invited. As the fact of her ban from South Africa became well known she became a cause célèbre for Western liberals, and her presence in the civil rights movement provided a link between that movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1964 she was taught the song "Malaika" by a Kenyan student while backstage at a performance in San Francisco; the song later became a staple of her performances.
Throughout the 1960s, Makeba strengthened her involvement with a range of black-centred political movements, including the civil rights, anti-apartheid, Black Consciousness, and Black Power movements. She briefly met the Trinidadian-American activist Stokely Carmichael—the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a prominent figure in the Black Panther Party—after Belafonte invited him to one of Makeba's concerts; they met again in Conakry six years later. They entered a relationship, initially kept secret from all but their closest friends and family. Makeba participated in fundraising activities for various civil rights groups, including a benefit concert for the 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference that civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the "event of the year". Following a concert and rally in Atlanta in support of King, Makeba and others were denied entrance to a restaurant as a result of Jim Crow laws, leading to a televised protest in front of the establishment. She also criticised King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its investment in South African companies, informing press that "Now my friend of long standing supports the country's persecution of my people and I must find a new idol". Her identity as an African woman in the civil rights movement helped create "an emerging liberal consensus" that extreme racial discrimination, whether domestically or internationally, was harmful. In 1964 she testified at the UN for a second time, quoting a song by Vanessa Redgrave in calling for quick action against the South African government.
On 15 March 1966, Makeba and Belafonte received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid, including several songs critical of the South African government, such as "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" ("Watch our Verwoerd", a reference to Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid). It sold widely and raised Makeba's profile in the US; Belafonte and Makeba's concert tour following its release was often sold out, and the album has been described as the best they made together. Makeba's use of lyrics in Swahili, Xhosa, and Sotho led to her being seen as a representation of an "authentic" Africa by American audiences. In 1967, more than ten years after she first recorded the song, the single "Pata Pata" was released in the US on an album of the same title, and became a worldwide hit. During its recording, she and Belafonte had a disagreement, after which they stopped recording together.
Guinea
Makeba married Carmichael in March 1968; this caused her popularity in the US to decline markedly. Conservatives came to regard her as a militant and an extremist, an image that alienated much of her fanbase. Her performances were cancelled and her coverage in the press declined despite her efforts to portray her marriage as apolitical. White American audiences stopped supporting her, and the US government took an interest in her activities. The Central Intelligence Agency began following her, and placed hidden microphones in her apartment; the Federal Bureau of Investigation also placed her under surveillance. While she and her husband were travelling in the Bahamas, she was banned from returning to the US, and was refused a visa. As a result, the couple moved to Guinea, where Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Touré. Makeba did not return to the US until 1987.
Guinea remained Makeba's home for the next 15 years, and she and her husband became close to President Ahmed Sékou Touré and his wife, Andrée. Touré wanted to create a new style of African music, creating his own record label Syliphone for this purpose, and all musicians received a minimum wage if they practised for several hours every day. Makeba later stated that "I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists." After her rejection from the US she began to write music more directly critical of the US government's racial policies, recording and singing songs such as "Lumumba" in 1970 (referring to Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated Prime Minister of the Congo), and "Malcolm X" in 1974.
Makeba performed more frequently in African countries, and as countries became independent of European colonial powers, was invited to sing at independence ceremonies, including in Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanganyika, and Mozambique. In September 1974 she performed alongside a multitude of well-known African and American musicians at the Zaire 74 festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (formerly the Congo). She also became a diplomat for Ghana, and was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the UN in 1975; that year, she addressed the United Nations General Assembly. She continued to perform in Europe and Asia, as well as her African concerts, but not in the US, where a de facto boycott was in effect. Her performances in Africa were immensely popular: she was described as the highlight of FESTAC 77, a Pan-African arts festival in Nigeria in 1977, and during a Liberian performance of "Pata Pata", the stadium proved so loud that she was unable to complete the song. "Pata Pata", like her other songs, had been banned in South Africa. Another song she sang frequently in this period was "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", though she never recorded it. Makeba later stated that it was during this period that she accepted the label "Mama Africa".
In 1976, the South African government replaced English with Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all schools, setting off the Soweto uprising. Between 15,000 and 20,000 students took part; caught unprepared, the police opened fire on the protesting children, killing hundreds and injuring more than a thousand. Hugh Masekela wrote "Soweto Blues" in response to the massacre, and the song was performed by Makeba, becoming a staple of her live performances for many years. A review in the magazine Musician said that the song had "searingly righteous lyrics" about the uprising that "cut to the bone". She had separated from Carmichael in 1973; in 1978 they divorced and in 1981 she married Bageot Bah, an airline executive.
Belgium
Makeba's daughter Bongi, who was a singer in her own right and had often accompanied her mother on stage, died in childbirth in 1985. Makeba was left responsible for her two grandchildren, and decided to move out of Guinea. She settled in the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert district of the Belgian capital Brussels. In the following year, Masekela introduced Makeba to Paul Simon, and a few months later she embarked on Simon's very successful Graceland Tour. The tour concluded with two concerts held in Harare, Zimbabwe, which were filmed in 1987 for release as Graceland: The African Concert. After touring the world with Simon, Warner Bros. Records signed Makeba and she released Sangoma ("Healer"), an album of healing chants named in honour of her sangoma mother. Her involvement with Simon caused controversy: Graceland had been recorded in South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott of the country, and thus Makeba's participation in the tour was regarded as contravening the boycott (which Makeba herself endorsed).
In preparation for the Graceland tour, she worked with journalist James Hall to write an autobiography titled Makeba: My Story. The book contained descriptions of her experience with apartheid, and was also critical of the commodification and consumerism she experienced in the US. The book was translated into five languages. She took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, a popular-music concert staged on 11 June 1988 at London's Wembley Stadium, and broadcast to an audience of 600 million across 67 countries. Political aspects of the concert were heavily censored in the US by the Fox television network. The use of music to raise awareness of apartheid paid off: a survey after the concert found that among people aged between 16 and 24, three-quarters knew of Mandela, and supported his release from prison.
Return to South Africa, final years and death
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.
Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina! which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity".
On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graça Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances.
On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her.
Music and image
Musical style
The groups with which Makeba began her career performed mbube, a style of vocal harmony which drew on American jazz, ragtime, and Anglican church hymns, as well as indigenous styles of music. Johannesburg musician Dolly Rathebe was an early influence on Makeba's music, as were female jazz singers from the US. Historian David Coplan writes that the "African jazz" made popular by Makeba and others was "inherently hybridized" rather than derivative of any particular genre, blending as it did marabi and jazz, and was "Americanized African music, not Africanized American music". The music that she performed was described by British writer Robin Denselow as a "unique blend of rousing township styles and jazz-influenced balladry".
Makeba released more than 30 albums during her career. The dominant styles of these shifted over time, moving from African jazz to recordings influenced by Belafonte's "crooning" to music drawing from traditional South African musical forms. She has been associated with the genres of world music and Afropop. She also incorporated Latin American musical styles into her performances. Historian Ruth Feldstein described her music as "[crossing] the borders between what many people associated with avant-garde and 'quality' culture and the commercial mainstream"; the latter aspect often drew criticism. She was able to appeal to audiences from many political, racial, and national backgrounds.
She was known for having a dynamic vocal range, and was described as having an emotional awareness during her performances. She occasionally danced during her shows, and was described as having a sensuous presence on stage. She was able to vary her voice considerably: an obituary remarked that she "could soar like an opera singer, but she could also whisper, roar, hiss, growl and shout. She could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language." She sang in English and several African languages, but never in Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid government in South Africa. She once stated "When Afrikaaners sing in my language, then I will sing theirs." English was seen as the language of political resistance by black South Africans due to the educational barriers they faced under apartheid; the Manhattan Brothers, with whom Makeba had sung in Sophiatown, had been prohibited from recording in English. Her songs in African languages have been described as reaffirming black pride.
Politics and perception
Makeba said that she did not perform political music, but music about her personal life in South Africa, which included describing the pain she felt living under apartheid. She once stated "people say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth", an example of the mixing of personal and political issues for musicians living during apartheid. When she first entered the US, she avoided discussing apartheid explicitly, partly out of concern for her family still in South Africa. Nonetheless, she is known for using her voice to convey the political message of opposition to apartheid, performing widely and frequently for civil rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Even songs that did not carry an explicitly political message were seen as subversive, due to their being banned in South Africa. Makeba saw her music as a tool of activism, saying "In our struggle, songs are not simply entertainment for us. They are the way we communicate."
Makeba's use of the clicks common in languages such as Xhosa and Zulu (as in "Qongqothwane", "The Click Song") was frequently remarked upon by Western audiences. It contributed to her popularity and her exotic image, which scholars have described as a kind of othering, exacerbated by the fact that Western audiences often could not understand her lyrics. Critics in the US described her as the "African tribeswoman" and as an "import from South Africa", often depicting her in condescending terms as a product of a more primitive society. Commentators also frequently described her in terms of the prominent men she was associated with, despite her own prominence. During her early career in South Africa she had been seen as a sex symbol, an image that received considerably less attention in the US.
Makeba was described as a style icon, both in her home country and the US. She wore no makeup and refused to straighten her hair for shows, thus helping establish a style that came to be known internationally as the "Afro look". According to music scholar Tanisha Ford, her hairstyle represented a "liberated African beauty aesthetic". She was seen as a beauty icon by South African schoolgirls, who were compelled to shorten their hair by the apartheid government. Makeba stuck to wearing African jewellery; she disapproved of the skin-lighteners commonly used by South African women at the time, and refused to appear in advertisements for them. Her self-presentation has been characterised by scholars as a rejection of the predominantly white standards of beauty that women in the US were held to, which allowed Makeba to partially escape the sexualisation directed at women performers during this period. Nonetheless, the terms used to describe her in the US media have been identified by scholars as frequently used to "sexualize, infantalize, and animalize" people of African heritage.
Legacy
Musical influence
Makeba was among the most visible Africans in the US; as a result, she was often emblematic of the continent of Africa for Americans. Her music earned her the moniker "Mama Africa", and she was variously described as the "Empress of African Song", the "Queen of South African music", and Africa's "first superstar". Music scholar J. U. Jacobs said that Makeba's music had "both been shaped by and given shape to black South African and American music". The jazz musician Abbey Lincoln is among those identified as being influenced by Makeba. Makeba and Simone were among a group of artists who helped shape soul music. Longtime collaborator Belafonte called her "the most revolutionary new talent to appear in any medium in the last decade". Speaking after her death, Mandela called her "South Africa's first lady of song", and said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Outside her home country Makeba was credited with bringing African music to a Western audience, and along with artists such as Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Baaba Maal and Angélique Kidjo, with popularising the genre of world music. Her work with Belafonte in the 1960s has been described as creating the genre of world music before the concept entered the popular imagination, and also as highlighting the diversity and cultural pluralism within African music. Within South Africa, Makeba has been described as influencing artists such as kwaito musician Thandiswa Mazwai and her band Bongo Maffin, whose track "De Makeba" was a modified version of Makeba's "Pata Pata", and one of several tribute recordings released after her return to South Africa. South African jazz musician Simphiwe Dana has been described as "the new Miriam Makeba". South African singer Lira has frequently been compared with Makeba, particularly for her performance of "Pata Pata" during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Football World Cup. A year later, Kidjo dedicated her concert in New York to Makeba, as a musician who had "paved the way for her success". In an obituary, scholar Lara Allen referred to Makeba as "arguably South Africa's most famous musical export". In 2016 the French singer Jain released "Makeba", a tribute.
Activism
Makeba was among the most visible people campaigning against the apartheid system in South Africa, and was responsible for popularising several anti-apartheid songs, including "Meadowlands" by Strike Vilakezi and "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" (Watch out, Verwoerd) by Vuyisile Mini. Due to her high profile, she became a spokesperson of sorts for Africans living under oppressive governments, and in particular for black South Africans living under apartheid. When the South African government prevented her from entering her home country, she became a symbol of "apartheid's cruelty", and she used her position as a celebrity by testifying against apartheid before the UN in 1962 and 1964. Many of her songs were banned within South Africa, leading to Makeba's records being distributed underground, and even her apolitical songs being seen as subversive. She thus became a symbol of resistance to the white-minority government both within and outside South Africa. In an interview in 2000, Masekela said that "there [was] nobody in Africa who made the world more aware of what was happening in South Africa than Miriam Makeba."
Makeba has also been associated with the movement against colonialism, with the civil rights and black power movements in the US, and with the Pan-African movement. She called for unity between black people of African descent across the world: "Africans who live everywhere should fight everywhere. The struggle is no different in South Africa, the streets of Chicago, Trinidad or Canada. The Black people are the victims of capitalism, racism and oppression, period". After marrying Carmichael she often appeared with him during his speeches; Carmichael later described her presence at these events as an asset, and Feldstein wrote that Makeba enhanced Carmichael's message that "black is beautiful". Along with performers such as Simone, Lena Horne, and Abbey Lincoln, she used her position as a prominent musician to advocate for civil rights. Their activism has been described as simultaneously calling attention to racial and gender disparities, and highlighting "that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex". Makeba's critique of second-wave feminism as being the product of luxury led to observers being unwilling to call her a feminist. Scholar Ruth Feldstein stated that Makeba and others influenced both black feminism and second-wave feminism through their advocacy, and the historian Jacqueline Castledine referred to her as one of the "most steadfast voices for social justice".
Awards and recognition
Makeba's 1965 collaboration with Harry Belafonte won a Grammy Award, making her the first African recording artist to win this award. Makeba shared the 2001 Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. They received their prize from Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, during a nationally televised ceremony at Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, on 27 May 2002.
Makeba won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986, and in 2001 was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". She also received several honorary doctorates. In 2004, she was voted 38th in a poll ranking 100 Great South Africans.
Mama Africa, a musical about Makeba, was produced in South Africa by Niyi Coker. Originally titled Zenzi!, the musical premiered to a sold-out crowd in Cape Town on 26 May 2016. It was performed in the US in St. Louis, Missouri and at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City between October and December 2016. The musical returned to South Africa in February 2017 for what would have been Makeba's 85th birthday.
From 25 to 27 September 2009, a tribute television show to Makeba entitled Hommage à Miriam Makeba and curated by Beninoise singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo, was held at the Cirque d'hiver in Paris. The show was presented as Mama Africa: Celebrating Miriam Makeba at the Barbican in London on 21 November 2009. A documentary film titled Mama Africa, about Makeba's life, co-written and directed by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, was released in 2011. On 4 March 2013, and again on International Women's Day in 2017, Google honoured her with a Google Doodle on their homepage. In 2014 she was honoured (along with Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Steve Biko) in the Belgian city of Ghent, which named a square after her, the "Miriam Makebaplein". Makeba was named 1967's "woman of the year" by Time magazine in 2020, as one of a list of 100 "women of the year" for the years 1920–2019.
Notable songs and albums
This is a list of albums and songs, including covers, by Miriam Makeba that have received significant mention in commentary about her or about the musical and political movements she participated in.
Albums
Miriam Makeba (1960)
The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba (1962)
An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965)
Comme une symphonie d'amour (1979)
The Queen of African Music (1987)
Sangoma (1988)
Welela (1989)
Eyes on Tomorrow (1991)
Homeland (2000)
Songs
"Lakutshn, Ilanga"/Lovely Lies" (1956)
"Sophiatown is Gone"
"The Click Song" / "Mbube" (1963)
"Pata Pata" (1967)
"Lumumba" (1970)
"Malcolm X" (1974)
"Soweto Blues" (1977)
"Thula Sizwe/I Shall Be Released" (1991)
"Malaika"
See also
Culture of South Africa
Notes and references
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Miriam Makeba at National Public Radio
1932 births
2008 deaths
20th-century South African women singers
21st-century South African women singers
Anti-apartheid activists
FAO Goodwill ambassadors
Grammy Award winners
Heads Up International artists
Music in the movement against apartheid
Musicians who died on stage
Musicians from Johannesburg
South African actresses
South African exiles
South African people of Swazi descent
World music musicians
Wrasse Records artists
Xhosa people
| true |
[
"Sing Me a Song is a 1994 album by Miriam Makeba. It was her first album recorded in South Africa, in a studio in Mmabatho, Bophuthatswana.\n\nTrack listing\nSing Me a Song\t\nBass Rap\t\nN'Diarabi\t\nMoody Moods\t\nThula Mntanami\t\nGeneration Rap\t\nKnown Unsung Hero\t\nI Long to Return\t\nSerenade Me\t\nBambarana\t\nChoo Choo Train / Shuku Shuku\t\nIvory Song\t\nMy People\t\nLaktushona Ilanga\t\nGood Grunge\t\nPrendre Un Enfant\n\nReferences\n\n1994 albums\nMiriam Makeba albums\nMercury Records albums",
"Bongi Makeba (20 December 1950 – 17 March 1985) was a South African singer/songwriter. She was the only child of singer Miriam Makeba with her first husband, James Kubay.\n\nBiography\nAngela Sibongile Makeba was born in South Africa in 1950, when her mother was 18 years old. The name Bongi by which she became known is a shortened version of her middle name Sibongile, which means \"We are grateful\". In 1959 her mother's career took her to New York, where she remained in exile after being barred from returning to South Africa, and in 1960 was joined by Bongi, who stayed with friends while her mother toured the world.\n\nIn 1967 she and Judy White, daughter of Josh White, signed to Buddha Records as \"Bongi and Judy\", their first release being \"Runnin' Out\" and \"Let's Get Together\". At the age of 17, Makeba met her American husband Harold Nelson Lee, with whom in the early to mid-1970s she made two 7\" records as \"Bongi and Nelson\", featuring two soul tracks arranged by George Butcher: \"That's the Kind of Love\" backed by \"I Was So Glad\" (France: Syliphone SYL 533), and \"Everything, For My Love\" with \"Do You Remember, Malcolm?\" (France: Syliphone SYL 532). She recorded only one solo album, Bongi Makeba, Blow On Wind (pläne-records), in 1980. Some of her songs could be heard years later in her mother's repertoire. Two of them, \"Malcolm X\" (1965, 1972) and \"Lumumba\" (1970), extol assassinated black leaders.\n\nMakeba had three children: Nelson Lumumba Lee (born 1968), Zenzi Monique Lee (born 1971), and a son, Themba, who died as a young child.\n\nShe died aged 34 in 1985 of complications following childbirth and was buried in Conakry, Guinea, where her mother had moved after her 1968 marriage to Stokely Carmichael.\n\nDiscography\n Blow On Wind (1980; Germany: pläne – 88234)\n Miriam Makeba & Bongi (1975; LP with Miriam Makeba; Guinea: Editions Syliphone Conakry SLP 48)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nMention in Miriam Makeba's biography\n\n1950 births\n1985 deaths\n20th-century South African women singers\nXhosa people\nDeaths in childbirth\nSouth African singer-songwriters"
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"He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990."
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C_be942cd9bfc84a1eb32a2739a1edbbc7_0
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Who persuaded Makeba to return to Africa?
| 2 |
Who persuaded Makeba to return to Africa?
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Miriam Makeba
|
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990. Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina!, which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity". On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graca Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances. On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her. CANNOTANSWER
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Willem de Klerk
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Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother's funeral was prevented by the country's government.
Makeba's career flourished in the United States, and she released several albums and songs, her most popular being "Pata Pata" (1967). Along with Belafonte she received a Grammy Award for her 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She testified against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement. She married Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party, in 1968. As a result, she lost support among white Americans. The US government cancelled her visa while she was travelling abroad, leading her and Carmichael to move to Guinea. She continued to perform, mostly in African countries, including at several independence celebrations. She began to write and perform music more explicitly critical of apartheid; the 1977 song "Soweto Blues", written by her former husband Hugh Masekela, was about the Soweto uprising. After apartheid was dismantled in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She continued recording and performing, including a 1991 album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, and appeared in the 1992 film Sarafina!. She was named a UN goodwill ambassador in 1999, and campaigned for humanitarian causes. She died of a heart attack during a 2008 concert in Italy.
Makeba was among the first African musicians to receive worldwide recognition. She brought African music to a Western audience, and popularized the world music and Afropop genres. She also made popular several songs critical of apartheid, and became a symbol of opposition to the system, particularly after her right to return was revoked. Upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Early years
Childhood and family
Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in the black township of Prospect, near Johannesburg. Her Swazi mother, Christina Makeba, was a sangoma, or traditional healer, and a domestic worker. Her Xhosa father, Caswell Makeba, was a teacher; he died when she was six years old. Makeba later said that before she was conceived, her mother had been warned that any future pregnancy could be fatal. Neither Miriam nor her mother seemed likely to survive after a difficult labour and delivery. Miriam's grandmother, who attended the birth, often muttered "uzenzile", a Xhosa word that means "you brought this on yourself", to Miriam's mother during her recovery, which inspired her to give her daughter the name "Zenzile".
When Makeba was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested and sentenced to a six-month prison term for selling umqombothi, a homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. The family could not afford the small fine required to avoid a jail term, and Miriam spent the first six months of her life in jail. As a child, Makeba sang in the choir of the Kilnerton Training Institute in Pretoria, an all-black Methodist primary school that she attended for eight years. Her talent for singing earned her praise at school. Makeba was baptised a Protestant, and sang in church choirs, in English, Xhosa, Sotho, and Zulu; she later said that she learned to sing in English before she could speak the language.
The family moved to the Transvaal when Makeba was a child. After her father's death, she was forced to find employment; she did domestic work, and worked as a nanny. She described herself as a shy person at the time. Her mother worked for white families in Johannesburg, and had to live away from her six children. Makeba lived for a while with her grandmother and a large number of cousins in Pretoria. Makeba was influenced by her family's musical tastes; her mother played several traditional instruments, and her elder brother collected records, including those of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and taught Makeba songs. Her father played the piano, and his musical inclination was later a factor in Makeba's family accepting what was seen as a risque choice of career.
In 1949, Makeba married James Kubay, a policeman in training, with whom she had her only child, Bongi Makeba, in 1950. Makeba was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband, who was said to have beaten her, left her shortly afterwards, after a two-year marriage. A decade later she overcame cervical cancer via a hysterectomy.
Early career
Makeba began her professional musical career with the Cuban Brothers, a South African all-male close harmony group, with whom she sang covers of popular American songs. Soon afterwards, at the age of 21, she joined a jazz group, the Manhattan Brothers, who sang a mixture of South African songs and pieces from popular African-American groups. Makeba was the only woman in the group. With the Manhattan Brothers she recorded her first hit, "Laku Tshoni Ilanga", in 1953, and developed a national reputation as a musician. In 1956 she joined a new all-woman group, the Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional South African melodies. Formed by Gallotone Records, the group was also known as the Sunbeams. Makeba sang with the Skylarks when the Manhattan Brothers were travelling abroad; later, she also travelled with the Manhattan Brothers. In the Skylarks, Makeba sang alongside Rhodesian-born musician Dorothy Masuka, whose music Makeba had followed, along with that of Dolly Rathebe. Several of the Skylarks' pieces from this period became popular; the music historian Rob Allingham later described the group as "real trendsetters, with harmonisation that had never been heard before." Makeba received no royalties from her work with the Skylarks.
While performing with the Manhattan Brothers in 1955, Makeba met Nelson Mandela, then a young lawyer; he later remembered the meeting, and that he felt that the girl he met "was going to be someone." In 1956, Gallotone Records released "Lovely Lies", Makeba's first solo success; the Xhosa lyric about a man looking for his beloved in jails and hospitals was replaced with the unrelated and innocuous line "You tell such lovely lies with your two lovely eyes" in the English version. The record became the first South African record to chart on the United States Billboard Top 100. In 1957, Makeba was featured on the cover of Drum magazine.
In 1959, Makeba sang the lead female role in the Broadway-inspired South African jazz opera King Kong; among those in the cast was the musician Hugh Masekela. The musical was performed to racially integrated audiences, raising her profile among white South Africans. Also in 1959, she had a short guest appearance in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film produced and directed by the American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. Rogosin cast her after seeing her on stage in African Jazz and Variety show, on which Makeba was a performer for 18 months. The film blended elements of documentary and fiction and had to be filmed in secret as the government was expected to be hostile to it. Makeba appeared on stage, and sang two songs: her appearance lasted four minutes. The cameo made an enormous impression on viewers, and Rogosin organised a visa for her to attend the premiere of the film at the twenty-fourth Venice Film Festival in Italy, where the film won the prestigious Critics' Choice Award. Makeba's presence has been described as crucial to the film, as an emblem of cosmopolitan black identity that also connected with working-class black people due to the dialogue being in Zulu.
Makeba's role in Come Back, Africa brought her international recognition and she travelled to London and New York to perform. In London she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor, helping her with her first solo recordings. These included "Pata Pata", which would be released many years later, and a version of the traditional Xhosa song "Qongqothwane", which she had first performed with the Skylarks. Though "Pata Pata"—described by Musician magazine as a "groundbreaking Afropop gem"—became her most famous song, Makeba described it as "one of my most insignificant songs". While in England, she married Sonny Pillay, a South African ballad singer of Indian descent; they divorced within a few months.
Makeba then moved to New York, making her US music debut on 1 November 1959 on The Steve Allen Show in Los Angeles for a television audience of 60 million. Her New York debut at the Village Vanguard occurred soon after; she sang in Xhosa and Zulu, and performed a Yiddish folk song. Her audience at this concert included Miles Davis and Duke Ellington; her performance received strongly positive reviews from critics. She first came to popular and critical attention in jazz clubs, after which her reputation grew rapidly. Belafonte, who had helped Makeba with her move to the US, handled the logistics for her first performances. When she first moved to the US, Makeba lived in Greenwich Village, along with other musicians and actors. As was common in her profession, she experienced some financial insecurity, and worked as a babysitter for a period.
Exile
United States
Breakthrough
Soon after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Makeba learned that her mother had died. When she tried to return home for the funeral, she found that her South African passport had been cancelled. Two of Makeba's family members were killed in the massacre. The incident left her concerned about her family, many of whom were still in South Africa, including her daughter: the nine-year-old Bongi joined her mother in the US in August 1960. During her first few years in the US, Makeba had rarely sung explicitly political music, but her popularity had led to an increase in awareness of apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement. Following the Sharpeville killings, Makeba felt a responsibility to help, as she had been able to leave the country while others had not. From this point, she became an increasingly outspoken critic of apartheid and the white-minority government; before the massacre, she had taken care to avoid overtly political statements in South Africa.
Her musical career in the US continued to flourish. She signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, and released Miriam Makeba, her first studio album, in 1960, backed by Belafonte's band. RCA Victor chose to buy out Makeba's contract with Gallotone Records, and despite the fact that Makeba was unable to perform in South Africa, Gallotone received US$45,000 in the deal, which meant that Makeba received no royalties for her debut album. The album included one of her most famous hits in the US, "Qongqothwane", which was known in English as "The Click Song" because Makeba's audiences could not pronounce the Xhosa name. Time magazine called her the "most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years", and Newsweek compared her voice to "the smoky tones and delicate phrasing" of Ella Fitzgerald and the "intimate warmth" of Frank Sinatra. The album was not commercially successful, and Makeba was briefly dropped from RCA Victor: she was re-signed soon after as the label recognised the commercial possibilities of the growing interest in African culture. Her South African identity had been downplayed during her first signing, but it was strongly emphasised the second time to take advantage of this interest. Makeba made several appearances on television, often in the company of Belafonte. In 1962, Makeba and Belafonte sang at the birthday party for US President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, but Makeba did not go to the party afterwards because she was ill. Kennedy nevertheless insisted on meeting her, so Belafonte sent a car to pick her up.
In 1964, Makeba released her second studio album for RCA Victor, The World of Miriam Makeba. An early example of world music, the album peaked at number eighty-six on the Billboard 200. Makeba's music had a cross-racial appeal in the US; white Americans were attracted to her image as an "exotic" African performer, and black Americans related their own experiences of racial segregation to Makeba's struggle against apartheid. Makeba found company among other African exiles and émigrés in New York, including Hugh Masekela, to whom she was married from 1963 to 1968. During their marriage, Makeba and Masekela were neighbours of the jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie in Englewood, New Jersey; they spent much of their time in Harlem. She also came to know actors Marlon Brando and Lauren Bacall, and musicians Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles. Fellow singer-activist Nina Simone became friendly with Makeba, as did actor Cicely Tyson; Makeba and Simone performed together at Carnegie Hall. Makeba was among black entertainers, activists, and intellectuals in New York at the time who believed that the civil rights movement and popular culture could reinforce each other, creating "a sense of intertwined political and cultural vibrancy"; other examples included Maya Angelou and Sidney Poitier. She later described her difficulty living with racial segregation, saying "There wasn't much difference in America; it was a country that had abolished slavery but there was apartheid in its own way."
Travel and activism
Makeba's music was also popular in Europe, and she travelled and performed there frequently. Acting on the advice of Belafonte, she added songs from Latin America, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere in Africa to her repertoire. She visited Kenya in 1962 in support of the country's independence from British colonial rule, and raised funds for its independence leader Jomo Kenyatta. Later that year she testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid about the effects of the system, asking for economic sanctions against South Africa's National Party government. She requested an arms embargo against South Africa, on the basis that weapons sold to the government would likely be used against black women and children. As a result, her music was banned in South Africa, and her South African citizenship and right to return were revoked. Makeba thus became a stateless person, but she was soon issued passports by Algeria, Guinea, Belgium and Ghana. In her life, she held nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.
Soon after her testimony, Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, invited her to sing at the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity, the only performer to be invited. As the fact of her ban from South Africa became well known she became a cause célèbre for Western liberals, and her presence in the civil rights movement provided a link between that movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1964 she was taught the song "Malaika" by a Kenyan student while backstage at a performance in San Francisco; the song later became a staple of her performances.
Throughout the 1960s, Makeba strengthened her involvement with a range of black-centred political movements, including the civil rights, anti-apartheid, Black Consciousness, and Black Power movements. She briefly met the Trinidadian-American activist Stokely Carmichael—the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a prominent figure in the Black Panther Party—after Belafonte invited him to one of Makeba's concerts; they met again in Conakry six years later. They entered a relationship, initially kept secret from all but their closest friends and family. Makeba participated in fundraising activities for various civil rights groups, including a benefit concert for the 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference that civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the "event of the year". Following a concert and rally in Atlanta in support of King, Makeba and others were denied entrance to a restaurant as a result of Jim Crow laws, leading to a televised protest in front of the establishment. She also criticised King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its investment in South African companies, informing press that "Now my friend of long standing supports the country's persecution of my people and I must find a new idol". Her identity as an African woman in the civil rights movement helped create "an emerging liberal consensus" that extreme racial discrimination, whether domestically or internationally, was harmful. In 1964 she testified at the UN for a second time, quoting a song by Vanessa Redgrave in calling for quick action against the South African government.
On 15 March 1966, Makeba and Belafonte received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid, including several songs critical of the South African government, such as "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" ("Watch our Verwoerd", a reference to Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid). It sold widely and raised Makeba's profile in the US; Belafonte and Makeba's concert tour following its release was often sold out, and the album has been described as the best they made together. Makeba's use of lyrics in Swahili, Xhosa, and Sotho led to her being seen as a representation of an "authentic" Africa by American audiences. In 1967, more than ten years after she first recorded the song, the single "Pata Pata" was released in the US on an album of the same title, and became a worldwide hit. During its recording, she and Belafonte had a disagreement, after which they stopped recording together.
Guinea
Makeba married Carmichael in March 1968; this caused her popularity in the US to decline markedly. Conservatives came to regard her as a militant and an extremist, an image that alienated much of her fanbase. Her performances were cancelled and her coverage in the press declined despite her efforts to portray her marriage as apolitical. White American audiences stopped supporting her, and the US government took an interest in her activities. The Central Intelligence Agency began following her, and placed hidden microphones in her apartment; the Federal Bureau of Investigation also placed her under surveillance. While she and her husband were travelling in the Bahamas, she was banned from returning to the US, and was refused a visa. As a result, the couple moved to Guinea, where Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Touré. Makeba did not return to the US until 1987.
Guinea remained Makeba's home for the next 15 years, and she and her husband became close to President Ahmed Sékou Touré and his wife, Andrée. Touré wanted to create a new style of African music, creating his own record label Syliphone for this purpose, and all musicians received a minimum wage if they practised for several hours every day. Makeba later stated that "I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists." After her rejection from the US she began to write music more directly critical of the US government's racial policies, recording and singing songs such as "Lumumba" in 1970 (referring to Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated Prime Minister of the Congo), and "Malcolm X" in 1974.
Makeba performed more frequently in African countries, and as countries became independent of European colonial powers, was invited to sing at independence ceremonies, including in Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanganyika, and Mozambique. In September 1974 she performed alongside a multitude of well-known African and American musicians at the Zaire 74 festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (formerly the Congo). She also became a diplomat for Ghana, and was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the UN in 1975; that year, she addressed the United Nations General Assembly. She continued to perform in Europe and Asia, as well as her African concerts, but not in the US, where a de facto boycott was in effect. Her performances in Africa were immensely popular: she was described as the highlight of FESTAC 77, a Pan-African arts festival in Nigeria in 1977, and during a Liberian performance of "Pata Pata", the stadium proved so loud that she was unable to complete the song. "Pata Pata", like her other songs, had been banned in South Africa. Another song she sang frequently in this period was "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", though she never recorded it. Makeba later stated that it was during this period that she accepted the label "Mama Africa".
In 1976, the South African government replaced English with Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all schools, setting off the Soweto uprising. Between 15,000 and 20,000 students took part; caught unprepared, the police opened fire on the protesting children, killing hundreds and injuring more than a thousand. Hugh Masekela wrote "Soweto Blues" in response to the massacre, and the song was performed by Makeba, becoming a staple of her live performances for many years. A review in the magazine Musician said that the song had "searingly righteous lyrics" about the uprising that "cut to the bone". She had separated from Carmichael in 1973; in 1978 they divorced and in 1981 she married Bageot Bah, an airline executive.
Belgium
Makeba's daughter Bongi, who was a singer in her own right and had often accompanied her mother on stage, died in childbirth in 1985. Makeba was left responsible for her two grandchildren, and decided to move out of Guinea. She settled in the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert district of the Belgian capital Brussels. In the following year, Masekela introduced Makeba to Paul Simon, and a few months later she embarked on Simon's very successful Graceland Tour. The tour concluded with two concerts held in Harare, Zimbabwe, which were filmed in 1987 for release as Graceland: The African Concert. After touring the world with Simon, Warner Bros. Records signed Makeba and she released Sangoma ("Healer"), an album of healing chants named in honour of her sangoma mother. Her involvement with Simon caused controversy: Graceland had been recorded in South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott of the country, and thus Makeba's participation in the tour was regarded as contravening the boycott (which Makeba herself endorsed).
In preparation for the Graceland tour, she worked with journalist James Hall to write an autobiography titled Makeba: My Story. The book contained descriptions of her experience with apartheid, and was also critical of the commodification and consumerism she experienced in the US. The book was translated into five languages. She took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, a popular-music concert staged on 11 June 1988 at London's Wembley Stadium, and broadcast to an audience of 600 million across 67 countries. Political aspects of the concert were heavily censored in the US by the Fox television network. The use of music to raise awareness of apartheid paid off: a survey after the concert found that among people aged between 16 and 24, three-quarters knew of Mandela, and supported his release from prison.
Return to South Africa, final years and death
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.
Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina! which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity".
On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graça Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances.
On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her.
Music and image
Musical style
The groups with which Makeba began her career performed mbube, a style of vocal harmony which drew on American jazz, ragtime, and Anglican church hymns, as well as indigenous styles of music. Johannesburg musician Dolly Rathebe was an early influence on Makeba's music, as were female jazz singers from the US. Historian David Coplan writes that the "African jazz" made popular by Makeba and others was "inherently hybridized" rather than derivative of any particular genre, blending as it did marabi and jazz, and was "Americanized African music, not Africanized American music". The music that she performed was described by British writer Robin Denselow as a "unique blend of rousing township styles and jazz-influenced balladry".
Makeba released more than 30 albums during her career. The dominant styles of these shifted over time, moving from African jazz to recordings influenced by Belafonte's "crooning" to music drawing from traditional South African musical forms. She has been associated with the genres of world music and Afropop. She also incorporated Latin American musical styles into her performances. Historian Ruth Feldstein described her music as "[crossing] the borders between what many people associated with avant-garde and 'quality' culture and the commercial mainstream"; the latter aspect often drew criticism. She was able to appeal to audiences from many political, racial, and national backgrounds.
She was known for having a dynamic vocal range, and was described as having an emotional awareness during her performances. She occasionally danced during her shows, and was described as having a sensuous presence on stage. She was able to vary her voice considerably: an obituary remarked that she "could soar like an opera singer, but she could also whisper, roar, hiss, growl and shout. She could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language." She sang in English and several African languages, but never in Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid government in South Africa. She once stated "When Afrikaaners sing in my language, then I will sing theirs." English was seen as the language of political resistance by black South Africans due to the educational barriers they faced under apartheid; the Manhattan Brothers, with whom Makeba had sung in Sophiatown, had been prohibited from recording in English. Her songs in African languages have been described as reaffirming black pride.
Politics and perception
Makeba said that she did not perform political music, but music about her personal life in South Africa, which included describing the pain she felt living under apartheid. She once stated "people say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth", an example of the mixing of personal and political issues for musicians living during apartheid. When she first entered the US, she avoided discussing apartheid explicitly, partly out of concern for her family still in South Africa. Nonetheless, she is known for using her voice to convey the political message of opposition to apartheid, performing widely and frequently for civil rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Even songs that did not carry an explicitly political message were seen as subversive, due to their being banned in South Africa. Makeba saw her music as a tool of activism, saying "In our struggle, songs are not simply entertainment for us. They are the way we communicate."
Makeba's use of the clicks common in languages such as Xhosa and Zulu (as in "Qongqothwane", "The Click Song") was frequently remarked upon by Western audiences. It contributed to her popularity and her exotic image, which scholars have described as a kind of othering, exacerbated by the fact that Western audiences often could not understand her lyrics. Critics in the US described her as the "African tribeswoman" and as an "import from South Africa", often depicting her in condescending terms as a product of a more primitive society. Commentators also frequently described her in terms of the prominent men she was associated with, despite her own prominence. During her early career in South Africa she had been seen as a sex symbol, an image that received considerably less attention in the US.
Makeba was described as a style icon, both in her home country and the US. She wore no makeup and refused to straighten her hair for shows, thus helping establish a style that came to be known internationally as the "Afro look". According to music scholar Tanisha Ford, her hairstyle represented a "liberated African beauty aesthetic". She was seen as a beauty icon by South African schoolgirls, who were compelled to shorten their hair by the apartheid government. Makeba stuck to wearing African jewellery; she disapproved of the skin-lighteners commonly used by South African women at the time, and refused to appear in advertisements for them. Her self-presentation has been characterised by scholars as a rejection of the predominantly white standards of beauty that women in the US were held to, which allowed Makeba to partially escape the sexualisation directed at women performers during this period. Nonetheless, the terms used to describe her in the US media have been identified by scholars as frequently used to "sexualize, infantalize, and animalize" people of African heritage.
Legacy
Musical influence
Makeba was among the most visible Africans in the US; as a result, she was often emblematic of the continent of Africa for Americans. Her music earned her the moniker "Mama Africa", and she was variously described as the "Empress of African Song", the "Queen of South African music", and Africa's "first superstar". Music scholar J. U. Jacobs said that Makeba's music had "both been shaped by and given shape to black South African and American music". The jazz musician Abbey Lincoln is among those identified as being influenced by Makeba. Makeba and Simone were among a group of artists who helped shape soul music. Longtime collaborator Belafonte called her "the most revolutionary new talent to appear in any medium in the last decade". Speaking after her death, Mandela called her "South Africa's first lady of song", and said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Outside her home country Makeba was credited with bringing African music to a Western audience, and along with artists such as Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Baaba Maal and Angélique Kidjo, with popularising the genre of world music. Her work with Belafonte in the 1960s has been described as creating the genre of world music before the concept entered the popular imagination, and also as highlighting the diversity and cultural pluralism within African music. Within South Africa, Makeba has been described as influencing artists such as kwaito musician Thandiswa Mazwai and her band Bongo Maffin, whose track "De Makeba" was a modified version of Makeba's "Pata Pata", and one of several tribute recordings released after her return to South Africa. South African jazz musician Simphiwe Dana has been described as "the new Miriam Makeba". South African singer Lira has frequently been compared with Makeba, particularly for her performance of "Pata Pata" during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Football World Cup. A year later, Kidjo dedicated her concert in New York to Makeba, as a musician who had "paved the way for her success". In an obituary, scholar Lara Allen referred to Makeba as "arguably South Africa's most famous musical export". In 2016 the French singer Jain released "Makeba", a tribute.
Activism
Makeba was among the most visible people campaigning against the apartheid system in South Africa, and was responsible for popularising several anti-apartheid songs, including "Meadowlands" by Strike Vilakezi and "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" (Watch out, Verwoerd) by Vuyisile Mini. Due to her high profile, she became a spokesperson of sorts for Africans living under oppressive governments, and in particular for black South Africans living under apartheid. When the South African government prevented her from entering her home country, she became a symbol of "apartheid's cruelty", and she used her position as a celebrity by testifying against apartheid before the UN in 1962 and 1964. Many of her songs were banned within South Africa, leading to Makeba's records being distributed underground, and even her apolitical songs being seen as subversive. She thus became a symbol of resistance to the white-minority government both within and outside South Africa. In an interview in 2000, Masekela said that "there [was] nobody in Africa who made the world more aware of what was happening in South Africa than Miriam Makeba."
Makeba has also been associated with the movement against colonialism, with the civil rights and black power movements in the US, and with the Pan-African movement. She called for unity between black people of African descent across the world: "Africans who live everywhere should fight everywhere. The struggle is no different in South Africa, the streets of Chicago, Trinidad or Canada. The Black people are the victims of capitalism, racism and oppression, period". After marrying Carmichael she often appeared with him during his speeches; Carmichael later described her presence at these events as an asset, and Feldstein wrote that Makeba enhanced Carmichael's message that "black is beautiful". Along with performers such as Simone, Lena Horne, and Abbey Lincoln, she used her position as a prominent musician to advocate for civil rights. Their activism has been described as simultaneously calling attention to racial and gender disparities, and highlighting "that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex". Makeba's critique of second-wave feminism as being the product of luxury led to observers being unwilling to call her a feminist. Scholar Ruth Feldstein stated that Makeba and others influenced both black feminism and second-wave feminism through their advocacy, and the historian Jacqueline Castledine referred to her as one of the "most steadfast voices for social justice".
Awards and recognition
Makeba's 1965 collaboration with Harry Belafonte won a Grammy Award, making her the first African recording artist to win this award. Makeba shared the 2001 Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. They received their prize from Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, during a nationally televised ceremony at Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, on 27 May 2002.
Makeba won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986, and in 2001 was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". She also received several honorary doctorates. In 2004, she was voted 38th in a poll ranking 100 Great South Africans.
Mama Africa, a musical about Makeba, was produced in South Africa by Niyi Coker. Originally titled Zenzi!, the musical premiered to a sold-out crowd in Cape Town on 26 May 2016. It was performed in the US in St. Louis, Missouri and at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City between October and December 2016. The musical returned to South Africa in February 2017 for what would have been Makeba's 85th birthday.
From 25 to 27 September 2009, a tribute television show to Makeba entitled Hommage à Miriam Makeba and curated by Beninoise singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo, was held at the Cirque d'hiver in Paris. The show was presented as Mama Africa: Celebrating Miriam Makeba at the Barbican in London on 21 November 2009. A documentary film titled Mama Africa, about Makeba's life, co-written and directed by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, was released in 2011. On 4 March 2013, and again on International Women's Day in 2017, Google honoured her with a Google Doodle on their homepage. In 2014 she was honoured (along with Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Steve Biko) in the Belgian city of Ghent, which named a square after her, the "Miriam Makebaplein". Makeba was named 1967's "woman of the year" by Time magazine in 2020, as one of a list of 100 "women of the year" for the years 1920–2019.
Notable songs and albums
This is a list of albums and songs, including covers, by Miriam Makeba that have received significant mention in commentary about her or about the musical and political movements she participated in.
Albums
Miriam Makeba (1960)
The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba (1962)
An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965)
Comme une symphonie d'amour (1979)
The Queen of African Music (1987)
Sangoma (1988)
Welela (1989)
Eyes on Tomorrow (1991)
Homeland (2000)
Songs
"Lakutshn, Ilanga"/Lovely Lies" (1956)
"Sophiatown is Gone"
"The Click Song" / "Mbube" (1963)
"Pata Pata" (1967)
"Lumumba" (1970)
"Malcolm X" (1974)
"Soweto Blues" (1977)
"Thula Sizwe/I Shall Be Released" (1991)
"Malaika"
See also
Culture of South Africa
Notes and references
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Miriam Makeba at National Public Radio
1932 births
2008 deaths
20th-century South African women singers
21st-century South African women singers
Anti-apartheid activists
FAO Goodwill ambassadors
Grammy Award winners
Heads Up International artists
Music in the movement against apartheid
Musicians who died on stage
Musicians from Johannesburg
South African actresses
South African exiles
South African people of Swazi descent
World music musicians
Wrasse Records artists
Xhosa people
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[
"Sing Me a Song is a 1994 album by Miriam Makeba. It was her first album recorded in South Africa, in a studio in Mmabatho, Bophuthatswana.\n\nTrack listing\nSing Me a Song\t\nBass Rap\t\nN'Diarabi\t\nMoody Moods\t\nThula Mntanami\t\nGeneration Rap\t\nKnown Unsung Hero\t\nI Long to Return\t\nSerenade Me\t\nBambarana\t\nChoo Choo Train / Shuku Shuku\t\nIvory Song\t\nMy People\t\nLaktushona Ilanga\t\nGood Grunge\t\nPrendre Un Enfant\n\nReferences\n\n1994 albums\nMiriam Makeba albums\nMercury Records albums",
"\"Soweto Blues\" is a protest song written by Hugh Masekela and performed by Miriam Makeba. The song is about the Soweto uprising that occurred in 1976, following the decision by the apartheid government of South Africa to make Afrikaans a medium of instruction at school. The uprising was forcefully put down by the police, leading to the death of between 176 and 700 people. The song was released in 1977 as part of Masekela's album You Told Your Mama Not to Worry. The song became a staple at Makeba's live concerts, and is considered a notable example of music in the movement against apartheid.\n\nBackground\n\nIn 1976 the apartheid government of South Africa decided to implement the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all schools instead of English. In response, high school students began a series of protests on the morning of 16 June that came to be known as the Soweto Uprising. Students from numerous Sowetan schools began to protest in the streets of Soweto in response to the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in local schools. An estimated 15,000–20,000 students took part in the protests. The police were caught unawares by the protests. After initially asking the students to disperse, the police opened fire on the protesting children in order to quell the protest. The number of people who died is usually given as 176, with estimates of up to 700, while several hundred more were injured. The killings sparked off several months of rioting in the Soweto townships, and the protests became an important moment for the anti-Apartheid movement.\n\nLyrics and music\nThe lyrics of \"Soweto Blues\" refer to the children's protests and the resulting massacre in the 1976 Soweto uprising. A review in the magazine Musician said that the song had \"searingly righteous lyrics\" that \"cut to the bone.\" \"Soweto Blues\" was also one of many melancholic songs by Masekela that expressed his commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle, along with \"Bring Him Back Home (Nelson Mandela),\" \"Been Gone Far Too Long,\" \"Mama,\" and \"The Coal Train.\" Musically, the song has a background of Mbaqanga guitar, bass, and multi-grooved percussion. Makeba uses this as a platform for vocals that are half-sung and half-spoken, similar to blues music.\n\nPerformances\nThe song became a standard part of Makeba's live performances for many years after its release. It was also performed by Makeba on the tour for Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland, along with many other anti-apartheid songs. Makeba was unable to perform the song in her native South Africa until after her return to the country in June 1990, only a few months after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. She was given a strong welcome back to her home country and regained her South African citizenship in 1992, the same year that she starred in the film Sarafina! about the Soweto uprising.\n\nReferences\n\nHugh Masekela songs\nMiriam Makeba songs\n1976 songs\n1976 in South Africa\nSoweto\nMusic in the movement against apartheid\nSongs about Johannesburg"
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[
"Miriam Makeba",
"Return to South Africa, final years and death",
"When did Makeba return to Aftrica?",
"He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.",
"Who persuaded Makeba to return to Africa?",
"Willem de Klerk"
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C_be942cd9bfc84a1eb32a2739a1edbbc7_0
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What did Makeba do upon her return to South Africa?
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What did Makeba do upon her return to South Africa?
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Miriam Makeba
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Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990. Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina!, which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity". On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graca Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances. On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her. CANNOTANSWER
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Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album,
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Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother's funeral was prevented by the country's government.
Makeba's career flourished in the United States, and she released several albums and songs, her most popular being "Pata Pata" (1967). Along with Belafonte she received a Grammy Award for her 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She testified against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement. She married Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party, in 1968. As a result, she lost support among white Americans. The US government cancelled her visa while she was travelling abroad, leading her and Carmichael to move to Guinea. She continued to perform, mostly in African countries, including at several independence celebrations. She began to write and perform music more explicitly critical of apartheid; the 1977 song "Soweto Blues", written by her former husband Hugh Masekela, was about the Soweto uprising. After apartheid was dismantled in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She continued recording and performing, including a 1991 album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, and appeared in the 1992 film Sarafina!. She was named a UN goodwill ambassador in 1999, and campaigned for humanitarian causes. She died of a heart attack during a 2008 concert in Italy.
Makeba was among the first African musicians to receive worldwide recognition. She brought African music to a Western audience, and popularized the world music and Afropop genres. She also made popular several songs critical of apartheid, and became a symbol of opposition to the system, particularly after her right to return was revoked. Upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Early years
Childhood and family
Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in the black township of Prospect, near Johannesburg. Her Swazi mother, Christina Makeba, was a sangoma, or traditional healer, and a domestic worker. Her Xhosa father, Caswell Makeba, was a teacher; he died when she was six years old. Makeba later said that before she was conceived, her mother had been warned that any future pregnancy could be fatal. Neither Miriam nor her mother seemed likely to survive after a difficult labour and delivery. Miriam's grandmother, who attended the birth, often muttered "uzenzile", a Xhosa word that means "you brought this on yourself", to Miriam's mother during her recovery, which inspired her to give her daughter the name "Zenzile".
When Makeba was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested and sentenced to a six-month prison term for selling umqombothi, a homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. The family could not afford the small fine required to avoid a jail term, and Miriam spent the first six months of her life in jail. As a child, Makeba sang in the choir of the Kilnerton Training Institute in Pretoria, an all-black Methodist primary school that she attended for eight years. Her talent for singing earned her praise at school. Makeba was baptised a Protestant, and sang in church choirs, in English, Xhosa, Sotho, and Zulu; she later said that she learned to sing in English before she could speak the language.
The family moved to the Transvaal when Makeba was a child. After her father's death, she was forced to find employment; she did domestic work, and worked as a nanny. She described herself as a shy person at the time. Her mother worked for white families in Johannesburg, and had to live away from her six children. Makeba lived for a while with her grandmother and a large number of cousins in Pretoria. Makeba was influenced by her family's musical tastes; her mother played several traditional instruments, and her elder brother collected records, including those of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and taught Makeba songs. Her father played the piano, and his musical inclination was later a factor in Makeba's family accepting what was seen as a risque choice of career.
In 1949, Makeba married James Kubay, a policeman in training, with whom she had her only child, Bongi Makeba, in 1950. Makeba was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband, who was said to have beaten her, left her shortly afterwards, after a two-year marriage. A decade later she overcame cervical cancer via a hysterectomy.
Early career
Makeba began her professional musical career with the Cuban Brothers, a South African all-male close harmony group, with whom she sang covers of popular American songs. Soon afterwards, at the age of 21, she joined a jazz group, the Manhattan Brothers, who sang a mixture of South African songs and pieces from popular African-American groups. Makeba was the only woman in the group. With the Manhattan Brothers she recorded her first hit, "Laku Tshoni Ilanga", in 1953, and developed a national reputation as a musician. In 1956 she joined a new all-woman group, the Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional South African melodies. Formed by Gallotone Records, the group was also known as the Sunbeams. Makeba sang with the Skylarks when the Manhattan Brothers were travelling abroad; later, she also travelled with the Manhattan Brothers. In the Skylarks, Makeba sang alongside Rhodesian-born musician Dorothy Masuka, whose music Makeba had followed, along with that of Dolly Rathebe. Several of the Skylarks' pieces from this period became popular; the music historian Rob Allingham later described the group as "real trendsetters, with harmonisation that had never been heard before." Makeba received no royalties from her work with the Skylarks.
While performing with the Manhattan Brothers in 1955, Makeba met Nelson Mandela, then a young lawyer; he later remembered the meeting, and that he felt that the girl he met "was going to be someone." In 1956, Gallotone Records released "Lovely Lies", Makeba's first solo success; the Xhosa lyric about a man looking for his beloved in jails and hospitals was replaced with the unrelated and innocuous line "You tell such lovely lies with your two lovely eyes" in the English version. The record became the first South African record to chart on the United States Billboard Top 100. In 1957, Makeba was featured on the cover of Drum magazine.
In 1959, Makeba sang the lead female role in the Broadway-inspired South African jazz opera King Kong; among those in the cast was the musician Hugh Masekela. The musical was performed to racially integrated audiences, raising her profile among white South Africans. Also in 1959, she had a short guest appearance in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film produced and directed by the American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. Rogosin cast her after seeing her on stage in African Jazz and Variety show, on which Makeba was a performer for 18 months. The film blended elements of documentary and fiction and had to be filmed in secret as the government was expected to be hostile to it. Makeba appeared on stage, and sang two songs: her appearance lasted four minutes. The cameo made an enormous impression on viewers, and Rogosin organised a visa for her to attend the premiere of the film at the twenty-fourth Venice Film Festival in Italy, where the film won the prestigious Critics' Choice Award. Makeba's presence has been described as crucial to the film, as an emblem of cosmopolitan black identity that also connected with working-class black people due to the dialogue being in Zulu.
Makeba's role in Come Back, Africa brought her international recognition and she travelled to London and New York to perform. In London she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor, helping her with her first solo recordings. These included "Pata Pata", which would be released many years later, and a version of the traditional Xhosa song "Qongqothwane", which she had first performed with the Skylarks. Though "Pata Pata"—described by Musician magazine as a "groundbreaking Afropop gem"—became her most famous song, Makeba described it as "one of my most insignificant songs". While in England, she married Sonny Pillay, a South African ballad singer of Indian descent; they divorced within a few months.
Makeba then moved to New York, making her US music debut on 1 November 1959 on The Steve Allen Show in Los Angeles for a television audience of 60 million. Her New York debut at the Village Vanguard occurred soon after; she sang in Xhosa and Zulu, and performed a Yiddish folk song. Her audience at this concert included Miles Davis and Duke Ellington; her performance received strongly positive reviews from critics. She first came to popular and critical attention in jazz clubs, after which her reputation grew rapidly. Belafonte, who had helped Makeba with her move to the US, handled the logistics for her first performances. When she first moved to the US, Makeba lived in Greenwich Village, along with other musicians and actors. As was common in her profession, she experienced some financial insecurity, and worked as a babysitter for a period.
Exile
United States
Breakthrough
Soon after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Makeba learned that her mother had died. When she tried to return home for the funeral, she found that her South African passport had been cancelled. Two of Makeba's family members were killed in the massacre. The incident left her concerned about her family, many of whom were still in South Africa, including her daughter: the nine-year-old Bongi joined her mother in the US in August 1960. During her first few years in the US, Makeba had rarely sung explicitly political music, but her popularity had led to an increase in awareness of apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement. Following the Sharpeville killings, Makeba felt a responsibility to help, as she had been able to leave the country while others had not. From this point, she became an increasingly outspoken critic of apartheid and the white-minority government; before the massacre, she had taken care to avoid overtly political statements in South Africa.
Her musical career in the US continued to flourish. She signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, and released Miriam Makeba, her first studio album, in 1960, backed by Belafonte's band. RCA Victor chose to buy out Makeba's contract with Gallotone Records, and despite the fact that Makeba was unable to perform in South Africa, Gallotone received US$45,000 in the deal, which meant that Makeba received no royalties for her debut album. The album included one of her most famous hits in the US, "Qongqothwane", which was known in English as "The Click Song" because Makeba's audiences could not pronounce the Xhosa name. Time magazine called her the "most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years", and Newsweek compared her voice to "the smoky tones and delicate phrasing" of Ella Fitzgerald and the "intimate warmth" of Frank Sinatra. The album was not commercially successful, and Makeba was briefly dropped from RCA Victor: she was re-signed soon after as the label recognised the commercial possibilities of the growing interest in African culture. Her South African identity had been downplayed during her first signing, but it was strongly emphasised the second time to take advantage of this interest. Makeba made several appearances on television, often in the company of Belafonte. In 1962, Makeba and Belafonte sang at the birthday party for US President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, but Makeba did not go to the party afterwards because she was ill. Kennedy nevertheless insisted on meeting her, so Belafonte sent a car to pick her up.
In 1964, Makeba released her second studio album for RCA Victor, The World of Miriam Makeba. An early example of world music, the album peaked at number eighty-six on the Billboard 200. Makeba's music had a cross-racial appeal in the US; white Americans were attracted to her image as an "exotic" African performer, and black Americans related their own experiences of racial segregation to Makeba's struggle against apartheid. Makeba found company among other African exiles and émigrés in New York, including Hugh Masekela, to whom she was married from 1963 to 1968. During their marriage, Makeba and Masekela were neighbours of the jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie in Englewood, New Jersey; they spent much of their time in Harlem. She also came to know actors Marlon Brando and Lauren Bacall, and musicians Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles. Fellow singer-activist Nina Simone became friendly with Makeba, as did actor Cicely Tyson; Makeba and Simone performed together at Carnegie Hall. Makeba was among black entertainers, activists, and intellectuals in New York at the time who believed that the civil rights movement and popular culture could reinforce each other, creating "a sense of intertwined political and cultural vibrancy"; other examples included Maya Angelou and Sidney Poitier. She later described her difficulty living with racial segregation, saying "There wasn't much difference in America; it was a country that had abolished slavery but there was apartheid in its own way."
Travel and activism
Makeba's music was also popular in Europe, and she travelled and performed there frequently. Acting on the advice of Belafonte, she added songs from Latin America, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere in Africa to her repertoire. She visited Kenya in 1962 in support of the country's independence from British colonial rule, and raised funds for its independence leader Jomo Kenyatta. Later that year she testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid about the effects of the system, asking for economic sanctions against South Africa's National Party government. She requested an arms embargo against South Africa, on the basis that weapons sold to the government would likely be used against black women and children. As a result, her music was banned in South Africa, and her South African citizenship and right to return were revoked. Makeba thus became a stateless person, but she was soon issued passports by Algeria, Guinea, Belgium and Ghana. In her life, she held nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.
Soon after her testimony, Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, invited her to sing at the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity, the only performer to be invited. As the fact of her ban from South Africa became well known she became a cause célèbre for Western liberals, and her presence in the civil rights movement provided a link between that movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1964 she was taught the song "Malaika" by a Kenyan student while backstage at a performance in San Francisco; the song later became a staple of her performances.
Throughout the 1960s, Makeba strengthened her involvement with a range of black-centred political movements, including the civil rights, anti-apartheid, Black Consciousness, and Black Power movements. She briefly met the Trinidadian-American activist Stokely Carmichael—the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a prominent figure in the Black Panther Party—after Belafonte invited him to one of Makeba's concerts; they met again in Conakry six years later. They entered a relationship, initially kept secret from all but their closest friends and family. Makeba participated in fundraising activities for various civil rights groups, including a benefit concert for the 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference that civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the "event of the year". Following a concert and rally in Atlanta in support of King, Makeba and others were denied entrance to a restaurant as a result of Jim Crow laws, leading to a televised protest in front of the establishment. She also criticised King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its investment in South African companies, informing press that "Now my friend of long standing supports the country's persecution of my people and I must find a new idol". Her identity as an African woman in the civil rights movement helped create "an emerging liberal consensus" that extreme racial discrimination, whether domestically or internationally, was harmful. In 1964 she testified at the UN for a second time, quoting a song by Vanessa Redgrave in calling for quick action against the South African government.
On 15 March 1966, Makeba and Belafonte received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid, including several songs critical of the South African government, such as "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" ("Watch our Verwoerd", a reference to Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid). It sold widely and raised Makeba's profile in the US; Belafonte and Makeba's concert tour following its release was often sold out, and the album has been described as the best they made together. Makeba's use of lyrics in Swahili, Xhosa, and Sotho led to her being seen as a representation of an "authentic" Africa by American audiences. In 1967, more than ten years after she first recorded the song, the single "Pata Pata" was released in the US on an album of the same title, and became a worldwide hit. During its recording, she and Belafonte had a disagreement, after which they stopped recording together.
Guinea
Makeba married Carmichael in March 1968; this caused her popularity in the US to decline markedly. Conservatives came to regard her as a militant and an extremist, an image that alienated much of her fanbase. Her performances were cancelled and her coverage in the press declined despite her efforts to portray her marriage as apolitical. White American audiences stopped supporting her, and the US government took an interest in her activities. The Central Intelligence Agency began following her, and placed hidden microphones in her apartment; the Federal Bureau of Investigation also placed her under surveillance. While she and her husband were travelling in the Bahamas, she was banned from returning to the US, and was refused a visa. As a result, the couple moved to Guinea, where Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Touré. Makeba did not return to the US until 1987.
Guinea remained Makeba's home for the next 15 years, and she and her husband became close to President Ahmed Sékou Touré and his wife, Andrée. Touré wanted to create a new style of African music, creating his own record label Syliphone for this purpose, and all musicians received a minimum wage if they practised for several hours every day. Makeba later stated that "I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists." After her rejection from the US she began to write music more directly critical of the US government's racial policies, recording and singing songs such as "Lumumba" in 1970 (referring to Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated Prime Minister of the Congo), and "Malcolm X" in 1974.
Makeba performed more frequently in African countries, and as countries became independent of European colonial powers, was invited to sing at independence ceremonies, including in Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanganyika, and Mozambique. In September 1974 she performed alongside a multitude of well-known African and American musicians at the Zaire 74 festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (formerly the Congo). She also became a diplomat for Ghana, and was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the UN in 1975; that year, she addressed the United Nations General Assembly. She continued to perform in Europe and Asia, as well as her African concerts, but not in the US, where a de facto boycott was in effect. Her performances in Africa were immensely popular: she was described as the highlight of FESTAC 77, a Pan-African arts festival in Nigeria in 1977, and during a Liberian performance of "Pata Pata", the stadium proved so loud that she was unable to complete the song. "Pata Pata", like her other songs, had been banned in South Africa. Another song she sang frequently in this period was "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", though she never recorded it. Makeba later stated that it was during this period that she accepted the label "Mama Africa".
In 1976, the South African government replaced English with Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all schools, setting off the Soweto uprising. Between 15,000 and 20,000 students took part; caught unprepared, the police opened fire on the protesting children, killing hundreds and injuring more than a thousand. Hugh Masekela wrote "Soweto Blues" in response to the massacre, and the song was performed by Makeba, becoming a staple of her live performances for many years. A review in the magazine Musician said that the song had "searingly righteous lyrics" about the uprising that "cut to the bone". She had separated from Carmichael in 1973; in 1978 they divorced and in 1981 she married Bageot Bah, an airline executive.
Belgium
Makeba's daughter Bongi, who was a singer in her own right and had often accompanied her mother on stage, died in childbirth in 1985. Makeba was left responsible for her two grandchildren, and decided to move out of Guinea. She settled in the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert district of the Belgian capital Brussels. In the following year, Masekela introduced Makeba to Paul Simon, and a few months later she embarked on Simon's very successful Graceland Tour. The tour concluded with two concerts held in Harare, Zimbabwe, which were filmed in 1987 for release as Graceland: The African Concert. After touring the world with Simon, Warner Bros. Records signed Makeba and she released Sangoma ("Healer"), an album of healing chants named in honour of her sangoma mother. Her involvement with Simon caused controversy: Graceland had been recorded in South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott of the country, and thus Makeba's participation in the tour was regarded as contravening the boycott (which Makeba herself endorsed).
In preparation for the Graceland tour, she worked with journalist James Hall to write an autobiography titled Makeba: My Story. The book contained descriptions of her experience with apartheid, and was also critical of the commodification and consumerism she experienced in the US. The book was translated into five languages. She took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, a popular-music concert staged on 11 June 1988 at London's Wembley Stadium, and broadcast to an audience of 600 million across 67 countries. Political aspects of the concert were heavily censored in the US by the Fox television network. The use of music to raise awareness of apartheid paid off: a survey after the concert found that among people aged between 16 and 24, three-quarters knew of Mandela, and supported his release from prison.
Return to South Africa, final years and death
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.
Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina! which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity".
On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graça Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances.
On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her.
Music and image
Musical style
The groups with which Makeba began her career performed mbube, a style of vocal harmony which drew on American jazz, ragtime, and Anglican church hymns, as well as indigenous styles of music. Johannesburg musician Dolly Rathebe was an early influence on Makeba's music, as were female jazz singers from the US. Historian David Coplan writes that the "African jazz" made popular by Makeba and others was "inherently hybridized" rather than derivative of any particular genre, blending as it did marabi and jazz, and was "Americanized African music, not Africanized American music". The music that she performed was described by British writer Robin Denselow as a "unique blend of rousing township styles and jazz-influenced balladry".
Makeba released more than 30 albums during her career. The dominant styles of these shifted over time, moving from African jazz to recordings influenced by Belafonte's "crooning" to music drawing from traditional South African musical forms. She has been associated with the genres of world music and Afropop. She also incorporated Latin American musical styles into her performances. Historian Ruth Feldstein described her music as "[crossing] the borders between what many people associated with avant-garde and 'quality' culture and the commercial mainstream"; the latter aspect often drew criticism. She was able to appeal to audiences from many political, racial, and national backgrounds.
She was known for having a dynamic vocal range, and was described as having an emotional awareness during her performances. She occasionally danced during her shows, and was described as having a sensuous presence on stage. She was able to vary her voice considerably: an obituary remarked that she "could soar like an opera singer, but she could also whisper, roar, hiss, growl and shout. She could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language." She sang in English and several African languages, but never in Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid government in South Africa. She once stated "When Afrikaaners sing in my language, then I will sing theirs." English was seen as the language of political resistance by black South Africans due to the educational barriers they faced under apartheid; the Manhattan Brothers, with whom Makeba had sung in Sophiatown, had been prohibited from recording in English. Her songs in African languages have been described as reaffirming black pride.
Politics and perception
Makeba said that she did not perform political music, but music about her personal life in South Africa, which included describing the pain she felt living under apartheid. She once stated "people say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth", an example of the mixing of personal and political issues for musicians living during apartheid. When she first entered the US, she avoided discussing apartheid explicitly, partly out of concern for her family still in South Africa. Nonetheless, she is known for using her voice to convey the political message of opposition to apartheid, performing widely and frequently for civil rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Even songs that did not carry an explicitly political message were seen as subversive, due to their being banned in South Africa. Makeba saw her music as a tool of activism, saying "In our struggle, songs are not simply entertainment for us. They are the way we communicate."
Makeba's use of the clicks common in languages such as Xhosa and Zulu (as in "Qongqothwane", "The Click Song") was frequently remarked upon by Western audiences. It contributed to her popularity and her exotic image, which scholars have described as a kind of othering, exacerbated by the fact that Western audiences often could not understand her lyrics. Critics in the US described her as the "African tribeswoman" and as an "import from South Africa", often depicting her in condescending terms as a product of a more primitive society. Commentators also frequently described her in terms of the prominent men she was associated with, despite her own prominence. During her early career in South Africa she had been seen as a sex symbol, an image that received considerably less attention in the US.
Makeba was described as a style icon, both in her home country and the US. She wore no makeup and refused to straighten her hair for shows, thus helping establish a style that came to be known internationally as the "Afro look". According to music scholar Tanisha Ford, her hairstyle represented a "liberated African beauty aesthetic". She was seen as a beauty icon by South African schoolgirls, who were compelled to shorten their hair by the apartheid government. Makeba stuck to wearing African jewellery; she disapproved of the skin-lighteners commonly used by South African women at the time, and refused to appear in advertisements for them. Her self-presentation has been characterised by scholars as a rejection of the predominantly white standards of beauty that women in the US were held to, which allowed Makeba to partially escape the sexualisation directed at women performers during this period. Nonetheless, the terms used to describe her in the US media have been identified by scholars as frequently used to "sexualize, infantalize, and animalize" people of African heritage.
Legacy
Musical influence
Makeba was among the most visible Africans in the US; as a result, she was often emblematic of the continent of Africa for Americans. Her music earned her the moniker "Mama Africa", and she was variously described as the "Empress of African Song", the "Queen of South African music", and Africa's "first superstar". Music scholar J. U. Jacobs said that Makeba's music had "both been shaped by and given shape to black South African and American music". The jazz musician Abbey Lincoln is among those identified as being influenced by Makeba. Makeba and Simone were among a group of artists who helped shape soul music. Longtime collaborator Belafonte called her "the most revolutionary new talent to appear in any medium in the last decade". Speaking after her death, Mandela called her "South Africa's first lady of song", and said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Outside her home country Makeba was credited with bringing African music to a Western audience, and along with artists such as Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Baaba Maal and Angélique Kidjo, with popularising the genre of world music. Her work with Belafonte in the 1960s has been described as creating the genre of world music before the concept entered the popular imagination, and also as highlighting the diversity and cultural pluralism within African music. Within South Africa, Makeba has been described as influencing artists such as kwaito musician Thandiswa Mazwai and her band Bongo Maffin, whose track "De Makeba" was a modified version of Makeba's "Pata Pata", and one of several tribute recordings released after her return to South Africa. South African jazz musician Simphiwe Dana has been described as "the new Miriam Makeba". South African singer Lira has frequently been compared with Makeba, particularly for her performance of "Pata Pata" during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Football World Cup. A year later, Kidjo dedicated her concert in New York to Makeba, as a musician who had "paved the way for her success". In an obituary, scholar Lara Allen referred to Makeba as "arguably South Africa's most famous musical export". In 2016 the French singer Jain released "Makeba", a tribute.
Activism
Makeba was among the most visible people campaigning against the apartheid system in South Africa, and was responsible for popularising several anti-apartheid songs, including "Meadowlands" by Strike Vilakezi and "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" (Watch out, Verwoerd) by Vuyisile Mini. Due to her high profile, she became a spokesperson of sorts for Africans living under oppressive governments, and in particular for black South Africans living under apartheid. When the South African government prevented her from entering her home country, she became a symbol of "apartheid's cruelty", and she used her position as a celebrity by testifying against apartheid before the UN in 1962 and 1964. Many of her songs were banned within South Africa, leading to Makeba's records being distributed underground, and even her apolitical songs being seen as subversive. She thus became a symbol of resistance to the white-minority government both within and outside South Africa. In an interview in 2000, Masekela said that "there [was] nobody in Africa who made the world more aware of what was happening in South Africa than Miriam Makeba."
Makeba has also been associated with the movement against colonialism, with the civil rights and black power movements in the US, and with the Pan-African movement. She called for unity between black people of African descent across the world: "Africans who live everywhere should fight everywhere. The struggle is no different in South Africa, the streets of Chicago, Trinidad or Canada. The Black people are the victims of capitalism, racism and oppression, period". After marrying Carmichael she often appeared with him during his speeches; Carmichael later described her presence at these events as an asset, and Feldstein wrote that Makeba enhanced Carmichael's message that "black is beautiful". Along with performers such as Simone, Lena Horne, and Abbey Lincoln, she used her position as a prominent musician to advocate for civil rights. Their activism has been described as simultaneously calling attention to racial and gender disparities, and highlighting "that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex". Makeba's critique of second-wave feminism as being the product of luxury led to observers being unwilling to call her a feminist. Scholar Ruth Feldstein stated that Makeba and others influenced both black feminism and second-wave feminism through their advocacy, and the historian Jacqueline Castledine referred to her as one of the "most steadfast voices for social justice".
Awards and recognition
Makeba's 1965 collaboration with Harry Belafonte won a Grammy Award, making her the first African recording artist to win this award. Makeba shared the 2001 Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. They received their prize from Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, during a nationally televised ceremony at Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, on 27 May 2002.
Makeba won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986, and in 2001 was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". She also received several honorary doctorates. In 2004, she was voted 38th in a poll ranking 100 Great South Africans.
Mama Africa, a musical about Makeba, was produced in South Africa by Niyi Coker. Originally titled Zenzi!, the musical premiered to a sold-out crowd in Cape Town on 26 May 2016. It was performed in the US in St. Louis, Missouri and at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City between October and December 2016. The musical returned to South Africa in February 2017 for what would have been Makeba's 85th birthday.
From 25 to 27 September 2009, a tribute television show to Makeba entitled Hommage à Miriam Makeba and curated by Beninoise singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo, was held at the Cirque d'hiver in Paris. The show was presented as Mama Africa: Celebrating Miriam Makeba at the Barbican in London on 21 November 2009. A documentary film titled Mama Africa, about Makeba's life, co-written and directed by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, was released in 2011. On 4 March 2013, and again on International Women's Day in 2017, Google honoured her with a Google Doodle on their homepage. In 2014 she was honoured (along with Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Steve Biko) in the Belgian city of Ghent, which named a square after her, the "Miriam Makebaplein". Makeba was named 1967's "woman of the year" by Time magazine in 2020, as one of a list of 100 "women of the year" for the years 1920–2019.
Notable songs and albums
This is a list of albums and songs, including covers, by Miriam Makeba that have received significant mention in commentary about her or about the musical and political movements she participated in.
Albums
Miriam Makeba (1960)
The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba (1962)
An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965)
Comme une symphonie d'amour (1979)
The Queen of African Music (1987)
Sangoma (1988)
Welela (1989)
Eyes on Tomorrow (1991)
Homeland (2000)
Songs
"Lakutshn, Ilanga"/Lovely Lies" (1956)
"Sophiatown is Gone"
"The Click Song" / "Mbube" (1963)
"Pata Pata" (1967)
"Lumumba" (1970)
"Malcolm X" (1974)
"Soweto Blues" (1977)
"Thula Sizwe/I Shall Be Released" (1991)
"Malaika"
See also
Culture of South Africa
Notes and references
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Miriam Makeba at National Public Radio
1932 births
2008 deaths
20th-century South African women singers
21st-century South African women singers
Anti-apartheid activists
FAO Goodwill ambassadors
Grammy Award winners
Heads Up International artists
Music in the movement against apartheid
Musicians who died on stage
Musicians from Johannesburg
South African actresses
South African exiles
South African people of Swazi descent
World music musicians
Wrasse Records artists
Xhosa people
| true |
[
"Bongi Makeba (20 December 1950 – 17 March 1985) was a South African singer/songwriter. She was the only child of singer Miriam Makeba with her first husband, James Kubay.\n\nBiography\nAngela Sibongile Makeba was born in South Africa in 1950, when her mother was 18 years old. The name Bongi by which she became known is a shortened version of her middle name Sibongile, which means \"We are grateful\". In 1959 her mother's career took her to New York, where she remained in exile after being barred from returning to South Africa, and in 1960 was joined by Bongi, who stayed with friends while her mother toured the world.\n\nIn 1967 she and Judy White, daughter of Josh White, signed to Buddha Records as \"Bongi and Judy\", their first release being \"Runnin' Out\" and \"Let's Get Together\". At the age of 17, Makeba met her American husband Harold Nelson Lee, with whom in the early to mid-1970s she made two 7\" records as \"Bongi and Nelson\", featuring two soul tracks arranged by George Butcher: \"That's the Kind of Love\" backed by \"I Was So Glad\" (France: Syliphone SYL 533), and \"Everything, For My Love\" with \"Do You Remember, Malcolm?\" (France: Syliphone SYL 532). She recorded only one solo album, Bongi Makeba, Blow On Wind (pläne-records), in 1980. Some of her songs could be heard years later in her mother's repertoire. Two of them, \"Malcolm X\" (1965, 1972) and \"Lumumba\" (1970), extol assassinated black leaders.\n\nMakeba had three children: Nelson Lumumba Lee (born 1968), Zenzi Monique Lee (born 1971), and a son, Themba, who died as a young child.\n\nShe died aged 34 in 1985 of complications following childbirth and was buried in Conakry, Guinea, where her mother had moved after her 1968 marriage to Stokely Carmichael.\n\nDiscography\n Blow On Wind (1980; Germany: pläne – 88234)\n Miriam Makeba & Bongi (1975; LP with Miriam Makeba; Guinea: Editions Syliphone Conakry SLP 48)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nMention in Miriam Makeba's biography\n\n1950 births\n1985 deaths\n20th-century South African women singers\nXhosa people\nDeaths in childbirth\nSouth African singer-songwriters",
"Sing Me a Song is a 1994 album by Miriam Makeba. It was her first album recorded in South Africa, in a studio in Mmabatho, Bophuthatswana.\n\nTrack listing\nSing Me a Song\t\nBass Rap\t\nN'Diarabi\t\nMoody Moods\t\nThula Mntanami\t\nGeneration Rap\t\nKnown Unsung Hero\t\nI Long to Return\t\nSerenade Me\t\nBambarana\t\nChoo Choo Train / Shuku Shuku\t\nIvory Song\t\nMy People\t\nLaktushona Ilanga\t\nGood Grunge\t\nPrendre Un Enfant\n\nReferences\n\n1994 albums\nMiriam Makeba albums\nMercury Records albums"
] |
[
"Miriam Makeba",
"Return to South Africa, final years and death",
"When did Makeba return to Aftrica?",
"He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.",
"Who persuaded Makeba to return to Africa?",
"Willem de Klerk",
"What did Makeba do upon her return to South Africa?",
"Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album,"
] |
C_be942cd9bfc84a1eb32a2739a1edbbc7_0
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What was the name of the album?
| 4 |
What was the name of the album that Makeba, Gilespie, Simone, and Mesekela released?
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Miriam Makeba
|
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990. Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina!, which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity". On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graca Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances. On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her. CANNOTANSWER
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Eyes on Tomorrow,
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Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother's funeral was prevented by the country's government.
Makeba's career flourished in the United States, and she released several albums and songs, her most popular being "Pata Pata" (1967). Along with Belafonte she received a Grammy Award for her 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She testified against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement. She married Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party, in 1968. As a result, she lost support among white Americans. The US government cancelled her visa while she was travelling abroad, leading her and Carmichael to move to Guinea. She continued to perform, mostly in African countries, including at several independence celebrations. She began to write and perform music more explicitly critical of apartheid; the 1977 song "Soweto Blues", written by her former husband Hugh Masekela, was about the Soweto uprising. After apartheid was dismantled in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She continued recording and performing, including a 1991 album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, and appeared in the 1992 film Sarafina!. She was named a UN goodwill ambassador in 1999, and campaigned for humanitarian causes. She died of a heart attack during a 2008 concert in Italy.
Makeba was among the first African musicians to receive worldwide recognition. She brought African music to a Western audience, and popularized the world music and Afropop genres. She also made popular several songs critical of apartheid, and became a symbol of opposition to the system, particularly after her right to return was revoked. Upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Early years
Childhood and family
Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in the black township of Prospect, near Johannesburg. Her Swazi mother, Christina Makeba, was a sangoma, or traditional healer, and a domestic worker. Her Xhosa father, Caswell Makeba, was a teacher; he died when she was six years old. Makeba later said that before she was conceived, her mother had been warned that any future pregnancy could be fatal. Neither Miriam nor her mother seemed likely to survive after a difficult labour and delivery. Miriam's grandmother, who attended the birth, often muttered "uzenzile", a Xhosa word that means "you brought this on yourself", to Miriam's mother during her recovery, which inspired her to give her daughter the name "Zenzile".
When Makeba was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested and sentenced to a six-month prison term for selling umqombothi, a homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. The family could not afford the small fine required to avoid a jail term, and Miriam spent the first six months of her life in jail. As a child, Makeba sang in the choir of the Kilnerton Training Institute in Pretoria, an all-black Methodist primary school that she attended for eight years. Her talent for singing earned her praise at school. Makeba was baptised a Protestant, and sang in church choirs, in English, Xhosa, Sotho, and Zulu; she later said that she learned to sing in English before she could speak the language.
The family moved to the Transvaal when Makeba was a child. After her father's death, she was forced to find employment; she did domestic work, and worked as a nanny. She described herself as a shy person at the time. Her mother worked for white families in Johannesburg, and had to live away from her six children. Makeba lived for a while with her grandmother and a large number of cousins in Pretoria. Makeba was influenced by her family's musical tastes; her mother played several traditional instruments, and her elder brother collected records, including those of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and taught Makeba songs. Her father played the piano, and his musical inclination was later a factor in Makeba's family accepting what was seen as a risque choice of career.
In 1949, Makeba married James Kubay, a policeman in training, with whom she had her only child, Bongi Makeba, in 1950. Makeba was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband, who was said to have beaten her, left her shortly afterwards, after a two-year marriage. A decade later she overcame cervical cancer via a hysterectomy.
Early career
Makeba began her professional musical career with the Cuban Brothers, a South African all-male close harmony group, with whom she sang covers of popular American songs. Soon afterwards, at the age of 21, she joined a jazz group, the Manhattan Brothers, who sang a mixture of South African songs and pieces from popular African-American groups. Makeba was the only woman in the group. With the Manhattan Brothers she recorded her first hit, "Laku Tshoni Ilanga", in 1953, and developed a national reputation as a musician. In 1956 she joined a new all-woman group, the Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional South African melodies. Formed by Gallotone Records, the group was also known as the Sunbeams. Makeba sang with the Skylarks when the Manhattan Brothers were travelling abroad; later, she also travelled with the Manhattan Brothers. In the Skylarks, Makeba sang alongside Rhodesian-born musician Dorothy Masuka, whose music Makeba had followed, along with that of Dolly Rathebe. Several of the Skylarks' pieces from this period became popular; the music historian Rob Allingham later described the group as "real trendsetters, with harmonisation that had never been heard before." Makeba received no royalties from her work with the Skylarks.
While performing with the Manhattan Brothers in 1955, Makeba met Nelson Mandela, then a young lawyer; he later remembered the meeting, and that he felt that the girl he met "was going to be someone." In 1956, Gallotone Records released "Lovely Lies", Makeba's first solo success; the Xhosa lyric about a man looking for his beloved in jails and hospitals was replaced with the unrelated and innocuous line "You tell such lovely lies with your two lovely eyes" in the English version. The record became the first South African record to chart on the United States Billboard Top 100. In 1957, Makeba was featured on the cover of Drum magazine.
In 1959, Makeba sang the lead female role in the Broadway-inspired South African jazz opera King Kong; among those in the cast was the musician Hugh Masekela. The musical was performed to racially integrated audiences, raising her profile among white South Africans. Also in 1959, she had a short guest appearance in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film produced and directed by the American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. Rogosin cast her after seeing her on stage in African Jazz and Variety show, on which Makeba was a performer for 18 months. The film blended elements of documentary and fiction and had to be filmed in secret as the government was expected to be hostile to it. Makeba appeared on stage, and sang two songs: her appearance lasted four minutes. The cameo made an enormous impression on viewers, and Rogosin organised a visa for her to attend the premiere of the film at the twenty-fourth Venice Film Festival in Italy, where the film won the prestigious Critics' Choice Award. Makeba's presence has been described as crucial to the film, as an emblem of cosmopolitan black identity that also connected with working-class black people due to the dialogue being in Zulu.
Makeba's role in Come Back, Africa brought her international recognition and she travelled to London and New York to perform. In London she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor, helping her with her first solo recordings. These included "Pata Pata", which would be released many years later, and a version of the traditional Xhosa song "Qongqothwane", which she had first performed with the Skylarks. Though "Pata Pata"—described by Musician magazine as a "groundbreaking Afropop gem"—became her most famous song, Makeba described it as "one of my most insignificant songs". While in England, she married Sonny Pillay, a South African ballad singer of Indian descent; they divorced within a few months.
Makeba then moved to New York, making her US music debut on 1 November 1959 on The Steve Allen Show in Los Angeles for a television audience of 60 million. Her New York debut at the Village Vanguard occurred soon after; she sang in Xhosa and Zulu, and performed a Yiddish folk song. Her audience at this concert included Miles Davis and Duke Ellington; her performance received strongly positive reviews from critics. She first came to popular and critical attention in jazz clubs, after which her reputation grew rapidly. Belafonte, who had helped Makeba with her move to the US, handled the logistics for her first performances. When she first moved to the US, Makeba lived in Greenwich Village, along with other musicians and actors. As was common in her profession, she experienced some financial insecurity, and worked as a babysitter for a period.
Exile
United States
Breakthrough
Soon after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Makeba learned that her mother had died. When she tried to return home for the funeral, she found that her South African passport had been cancelled. Two of Makeba's family members were killed in the massacre. The incident left her concerned about her family, many of whom were still in South Africa, including her daughter: the nine-year-old Bongi joined her mother in the US in August 1960. During her first few years in the US, Makeba had rarely sung explicitly political music, but her popularity had led to an increase in awareness of apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement. Following the Sharpeville killings, Makeba felt a responsibility to help, as she had been able to leave the country while others had not. From this point, she became an increasingly outspoken critic of apartheid and the white-minority government; before the massacre, she had taken care to avoid overtly political statements in South Africa.
Her musical career in the US continued to flourish. She signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, and released Miriam Makeba, her first studio album, in 1960, backed by Belafonte's band. RCA Victor chose to buy out Makeba's contract with Gallotone Records, and despite the fact that Makeba was unable to perform in South Africa, Gallotone received US$45,000 in the deal, which meant that Makeba received no royalties for her debut album. The album included one of her most famous hits in the US, "Qongqothwane", which was known in English as "The Click Song" because Makeba's audiences could not pronounce the Xhosa name. Time magazine called her the "most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years", and Newsweek compared her voice to "the smoky tones and delicate phrasing" of Ella Fitzgerald and the "intimate warmth" of Frank Sinatra. The album was not commercially successful, and Makeba was briefly dropped from RCA Victor: she was re-signed soon after as the label recognised the commercial possibilities of the growing interest in African culture. Her South African identity had been downplayed during her first signing, but it was strongly emphasised the second time to take advantage of this interest. Makeba made several appearances on television, often in the company of Belafonte. In 1962, Makeba and Belafonte sang at the birthday party for US President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, but Makeba did not go to the party afterwards because she was ill. Kennedy nevertheless insisted on meeting her, so Belafonte sent a car to pick her up.
In 1964, Makeba released her second studio album for RCA Victor, The World of Miriam Makeba. An early example of world music, the album peaked at number eighty-six on the Billboard 200. Makeba's music had a cross-racial appeal in the US; white Americans were attracted to her image as an "exotic" African performer, and black Americans related their own experiences of racial segregation to Makeba's struggle against apartheid. Makeba found company among other African exiles and émigrés in New York, including Hugh Masekela, to whom she was married from 1963 to 1968. During their marriage, Makeba and Masekela were neighbours of the jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie in Englewood, New Jersey; they spent much of their time in Harlem. She also came to know actors Marlon Brando and Lauren Bacall, and musicians Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles. Fellow singer-activist Nina Simone became friendly with Makeba, as did actor Cicely Tyson; Makeba and Simone performed together at Carnegie Hall. Makeba was among black entertainers, activists, and intellectuals in New York at the time who believed that the civil rights movement and popular culture could reinforce each other, creating "a sense of intertwined political and cultural vibrancy"; other examples included Maya Angelou and Sidney Poitier. She later described her difficulty living with racial segregation, saying "There wasn't much difference in America; it was a country that had abolished slavery but there was apartheid in its own way."
Travel and activism
Makeba's music was also popular in Europe, and she travelled and performed there frequently. Acting on the advice of Belafonte, she added songs from Latin America, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere in Africa to her repertoire. She visited Kenya in 1962 in support of the country's independence from British colonial rule, and raised funds for its independence leader Jomo Kenyatta. Later that year she testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid about the effects of the system, asking for economic sanctions against South Africa's National Party government. She requested an arms embargo against South Africa, on the basis that weapons sold to the government would likely be used against black women and children. As a result, her music was banned in South Africa, and her South African citizenship and right to return were revoked. Makeba thus became a stateless person, but she was soon issued passports by Algeria, Guinea, Belgium and Ghana. In her life, she held nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.
Soon after her testimony, Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, invited her to sing at the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity, the only performer to be invited. As the fact of her ban from South Africa became well known she became a cause célèbre for Western liberals, and her presence in the civil rights movement provided a link between that movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1964 she was taught the song "Malaika" by a Kenyan student while backstage at a performance in San Francisco; the song later became a staple of her performances.
Throughout the 1960s, Makeba strengthened her involvement with a range of black-centred political movements, including the civil rights, anti-apartheid, Black Consciousness, and Black Power movements. She briefly met the Trinidadian-American activist Stokely Carmichael—the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a prominent figure in the Black Panther Party—after Belafonte invited him to one of Makeba's concerts; they met again in Conakry six years later. They entered a relationship, initially kept secret from all but their closest friends and family. Makeba participated in fundraising activities for various civil rights groups, including a benefit concert for the 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference that civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the "event of the year". Following a concert and rally in Atlanta in support of King, Makeba and others were denied entrance to a restaurant as a result of Jim Crow laws, leading to a televised protest in front of the establishment. She also criticised King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its investment in South African companies, informing press that "Now my friend of long standing supports the country's persecution of my people and I must find a new idol". Her identity as an African woman in the civil rights movement helped create "an emerging liberal consensus" that extreme racial discrimination, whether domestically or internationally, was harmful. In 1964 she testified at the UN for a second time, quoting a song by Vanessa Redgrave in calling for quick action against the South African government.
On 15 March 1966, Makeba and Belafonte received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid, including several songs critical of the South African government, such as "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" ("Watch our Verwoerd", a reference to Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid). It sold widely and raised Makeba's profile in the US; Belafonte and Makeba's concert tour following its release was often sold out, and the album has been described as the best they made together. Makeba's use of lyrics in Swahili, Xhosa, and Sotho led to her being seen as a representation of an "authentic" Africa by American audiences. In 1967, more than ten years after she first recorded the song, the single "Pata Pata" was released in the US on an album of the same title, and became a worldwide hit. During its recording, she and Belafonte had a disagreement, after which they stopped recording together.
Guinea
Makeba married Carmichael in March 1968; this caused her popularity in the US to decline markedly. Conservatives came to regard her as a militant and an extremist, an image that alienated much of her fanbase. Her performances were cancelled and her coverage in the press declined despite her efforts to portray her marriage as apolitical. White American audiences stopped supporting her, and the US government took an interest in her activities. The Central Intelligence Agency began following her, and placed hidden microphones in her apartment; the Federal Bureau of Investigation also placed her under surveillance. While she and her husband were travelling in the Bahamas, she was banned from returning to the US, and was refused a visa. As a result, the couple moved to Guinea, where Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Touré. Makeba did not return to the US until 1987.
Guinea remained Makeba's home for the next 15 years, and she and her husband became close to President Ahmed Sékou Touré and his wife, Andrée. Touré wanted to create a new style of African music, creating his own record label Syliphone for this purpose, and all musicians received a minimum wage if they practised for several hours every day. Makeba later stated that "I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists." After her rejection from the US she began to write music more directly critical of the US government's racial policies, recording and singing songs such as "Lumumba" in 1970 (referring to Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated Prime Minister of the Congo), and "Malcolm X" in 1974.
Makeba performed more frequently in African countries, and as countries became independent of European colonial powers, was invited to sing at independence ceremonies, including in Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanganyika, and Mozambique. In September 1974 she performed alongside a multitude of well-known African and American musicians at the Zaire 74 festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (formerly the Congo). She also became a diplomat for Ghana, and was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the UN in 1975; that year, she addressed the United Nations General Assembly. She continued to perform in Europe and Asia, as well as her African concerts, but not in the US, where a de facto boycott was in effect. Her performances in Africa were immensely popular: she was described as the highlight of FESTAC 77, a Pan-African arts festival in Nigeria in 1977, and during a Liberian performance of "Pata Pata", the stadium proved so loud that she was unable to complete the song. "Pata Pata", like her other songs, had been banned in South Africa. Another song she sang frequently in this period was "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", though she never recorded it. Makeba later stated that it was during this period that she accepted the label "Mama Africa".
In 1976, the South African government replaced English with Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all schools, setting off the Soweto uprising. Between 15,000 and 20,000 students took part; caught unprepared, the police opened fire on the protesting children, killing hundreds and injuring more than a thousand. Hugh Masekela wrote "Soweto Blues" in response to the massacre, and the song was performed by Makeba, becoming a staple of her live performances for many years. A review in the magazine Musician said that the song had "searingly righteous lyrics" about the uprising that "cut to the bone". She had separated from Carmichael in 1973; in 1978 they divorced and in 1981 she married Bageot Bah, an airline executive.
Belgium
Makeba's daughter Bongi, who was a singer in her own right and had often accompanied her mother on stage, died in childbirth in 1985. Makeba was left responsible for her two grandchildren, and decided to move out of Guinea. She settled in the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert district of the Belgian capital Brussels. In the following year, Masekela introduced Makeba to Paul Simon, and a few months later she embarked on Simon's very successful Graceland Tour. The tour concluded with two concerts held in Harare, Zimbabwe, which were filmed in 1987 for release as Graceland: The African Concert. After touring the world with Simon, Warner Bros. Records signed Makeba and she released Sangoma ("Healer"), an album of healing chants named in honour of her sangoma mother. Her involvement with Simon caused controversy: Graceland had been recorded in South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott of the country, and thus Makeba's participation in the tour was regarded as contravening the boycott (which Makeba herself endorsed).
In preparation for the Graceland tour, she worked with journalist James Hall to write an autobiography titled Makeba: My Story. The book contained descriptions of her experience with apartheid, and was also critical of the commodification and consumerism she experienced in the US. The book was translated into five languages. She took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, a popular-music concert staged on 11 June 1988 at London's Wembley Stadium, and broadcast to an audience of 600 million across 67 countries. Political aspects of the concert were heavily censored in the US by the Fox television network. The use of music to raise awareness of apartheid paid off: a survey after the concert found that among people aged between 16 and 24, three-quarters knew of Mandela, and supported his release from prison.
Return to South Africa, final years and death
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.
Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina! which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity".
On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graça Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances.
On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her.
Music and image
Musical style
The groups with which Makeba began her career performed mbube, a style of vocal harmony which drew on American jazz, ragtime, and Anglican church hymns, as well as indigenous styles of music. Johannesburg musician Dolly Rathebe was an early influence on Makeba's music, as were female jazz singers from the US. Historian David Coplan writes that the "African jazz" made popular by Makeba and others was "inherently hybridized" rather than derivative of any particular genre, blending as it did marabi and jazz, and was "Americanized African music, not Africanized American music". The music that she performed was described by British writer Robin Denselow as a "unique blend of rousing township styles and jazz-influenced balladry".
Makeba released more than 30 albums during her career. The dominant styles of these shifted over time, moving from African jazz to recordings influenced by Belafonte's "crooning" to music drawing from traditional South African musical forms. She has been associated with the genres of world music and Afropop. She also incorporated Latin American musical styles into her performances. Historian Ruth Feldstein described her music as "[crossing] the borders between what many people associated with avant-garde and 'quality' culture and the commercial mainstream"; the latter aspect often drew criticism. She was able to appeal to audiences from many political, racial, and national backgrounds.
She was known for having a dynamic vocal range, and was described as having an emotional awareness during her performances. She occasionally danced during her shows, and was described as having a sensuous presence on stage. She was able to vary her voice considerably: an obituary remarked that she "could soar like an opera singer, but she could also whisper, roar, hiss, growl and shout. She could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language." She sang in English and several African languages, but never in Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid government in South Africa. She once stated "When Afrikaaners sing in my language, then I will sing theirs." English was seen as the language of political resistance by black South Africans due to the educational barriers they faced under apartheid; the Manhattan Brothers, with whom Makeba had sung in Sophiatown, had been prohibited from recording in English. Her songs in African languages have been described as reaffirming black pride.
Politics and perception
Makeba said that she did not perform political music, but music about her personal life in South Africa, which included describing the pain she felt living under apartheid. She once stated "people say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth", an example of the mixing of personal and political issues for musicians living during apartheid. When she first entered the US, she avoided discussing apartheid explicitly, partly out of concern for her family still in South Africa. Nonetheless, she is known for using her voice to convey the political message of opposition to apartheid, performing widely and frequently for civil rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Even songs that did not carry an explicitly political message were seen as subversive, due to their being banned in South Africa. Makeba saw her music as a tool of activism, saying "In our struggle, songs are not simply entertainment for us. They are the way we communicate."
Makeba's use of the clicks common in languages such as Xhosa and Zulu (as in "Qongqothwane", "The Click Song") was frequently remarked upon by Western audiences. It contributed to her popularity and her exotic image, which scholars have described as a kind of othering, exacerbated by the fact that Western audiences often could not understand her lyrics. Critics in the US described her as the "African tribeswoman" and as an "import from South Africa", often depicting her in condescending terms as a product of a more primitive society. Commentators also frequently described her in terms of the prominent men she was associated with, despite her own prominence. During her early career in South Africa she had been seen as a sex symbol, an image that received considerably less attention in the US.
Makeba was described as a style icon, both in her home country and the US. She wore no makeup and refused to straighten her hair for shows, thus helping establish a style that came to be known internationally as the "Afro look". According to music scholar Tanisha Ford, her hairstyle represented a "liberated African beauty aesthetic". She was seen as a beauty icon by South African schoolgirls, who were compelled to shorten their hair by the apartheid government. Makeba stuck to wearing African jewellery; she disapproved of the skin-lighteners commonly used by South African women at the time, and refused to appear in advertisements for them. Her self-presentation has been characterised by scholars as a rejection of the predominantly white standards of beauty that women in the US were held to, which allowed Makeba to partially escape the sexualisation directed at women performers during this period. Nonetheless, the terms used to describe her in the US media have been identified by scholars as frequently used to "sexualize, infantalize, and animalize" people of African heritage.
Legacy
Musical influence
Makeba was among the most visible Africans in the US; as a result, she was often emblematic of the continent of Africa for Americans. Her music earned her the moniker "Mama Africa", and she was variously described as the "Empress of African Song", the "Queen of South African music", and Africa's "first superstar". Music scholar J. U. Jacobs said that Makeba's music had "both been shaped by and given shape to black South African and American music". The jazz musician Abbey Lincoln is among those identified as being influenced by Makeba. Makeba and Simone were among a group of artists who helped shape soul music. Longtime collaborator Belafonte called her "the most revolutionary new talent to appear in any medium in the last decade". Speaking after her death, Mandela called her "South Africa's first lady of song", and said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Outside her home country Makeba was credited with bringing African music to a Western audience, and along with artists such as Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Baaba Maal and Angélique Kidjo, with popularising the genre of world music. Her work with Belafonte in the 1960s has been described as creating the genre of world music before the concept entered the popular imagination, and also as highlighting the diversity and cultural pluralism within African music. Within South Africa, Makeba has been described as influencing artists such as kwaito musician Thandiswa Mazwai and her band Bongo Maffin, whose track "De Makeba" was a modified version of Makeba's "Pata Pata", and one of several tribute recordings released after her return to South Africa. South African jazz musician Simphiwe Dana has been described as "the new Miriam Makeba". South African singer Lira has frequently been compared with Makeba, particularly for her performance of "Pata Pata" during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Football World Cup. A year later, Kidjo dedicated her concert in New York to Makeba, as a musician who had "paved the way for her success". In an obituary, scholar Lara Allen referred to Makeba as "arguably South Africa's most famous musical export". In 2016 the French singer Jain released "Makeba", a tribute.
Activism
Makeba was among the most visible people campaigning against the apartheid system in South Africa, and was responsible for popularising several anti-apartheid songs, including "Meadowlands" by Strike Vilakezi and "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" (Watch out, Verwoerd) by Vuyisile Mini. Due to her high profile, she became a spokesperson of sorts for Africans living under oppressive governments, and in particular for black South Africans living under apartheid. When the South African government prevented her from entering her home country, she became a symbol of "apartheid's cruelty", and she used her position as a celebrity by testifying against apartheid before the UN in 1962 and 1964. Many of her songs were banned within South Africa, leading to Makeba's records being distributed underground, and even her apolitical songs being seen as subversive. She thus became a symbol of resistance to the white-minority government both within and outside South Africa. In an interview in 2000, Masekela said that "there [was] nobody in Africa who made the world more aware of what was happening in South Africa than Miriam Makeba."
Makeba has also been associated with the movement against colonialism, with the civil rights and black power movements in the US, and with the Pan-African movement. She called for unity between black people of African descent across the world: "Africans who live everywhere should fight everywhere. The struggle is no different in South Africa, the streets of Chicago, Trinidad or Canada. The Black people are the victims of capitalism, racism and oppression, period". After marrying Carmichael she often appeared with him during his speeches; Carmichael later described her presence at these events as an asset, and Feldstein wrote that Makeba enhanced Carmichael's message that "black is beautiful". Along with performers such as Simone, Lena Horne, and Abbey Lincoln, she used her position as a prominent musician to advocate for civil rights. Their activism has been described as simultaneously calling attention to racial and gender disparities, and highlighting "that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex". Makeba's critique of second-wave feminism as being the product of luxury led to observers being unwilling to call her a feminist. Scholar Ruth Feldstein stated that Makeba and others influenced both black feminism and second-wave feminism through their advocacy, and the historian Jacqueline Castledine referred to her as one of the "most steadfast voices for social justice".
Awards and recognition
Makeba's 1965 collaboration with Harry Belafonte won a Grammy Award, making her the first African recording artist to win this award. Makeba shared the 2001 Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. They received their prize from Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, during a nationally televised ceremony at Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, on 27 May 2002.
Makeba won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986, and in 2001 was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". She also received several honorary doctorates. In 2004, she was voted 38th in a poll ranking 100 Great South Africans.
Mama Africa, a musical about Makeba, was produced in South Africa by Niyi Coker. Originally titled Zenzi!, the musical premiered to a sold-out crowd in Cape Town on 26 May 2016. It was performed in the US in St. Louis, Missouri and at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City between October and December 2016. The musical returned to South Africa in February 2017 for what would have been Makeba's 85th birthday.
From 25 to 27 September 2009, a tribute television show to Makeba entitled Hommage à Miriam Makeba and curated by Beninoise singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo, was held at the Cirque d'hiver in Paris. The show was presented as Mama Africa: Celebrating Miriam Makeba at the Barbican in London on 21 November 2009. A documentary film titled Mama Africa, about Makeba's life, co-written and directed by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, was released in 2011. On 4 March 2013, and again on International Women's Day in 2017, Google honoured her with a Google Doodle on their homepage. In 2014 she was honoured (along with Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Steve Biko) in the Belgian city of Ghent, which named a square after her, the "Miriam Makebaplein". Makeba was named 1967's "woman of the year" by Time magazine in 2020, as one of a list of 100 "women of the year" for the years 1920–2019.
Notable songs and albums
This is a list of albums and songs, including covers, by Miriam Makeba that have received significant mention in commentary about her or about the musical and political movements she participated in.
Albums
Miriam Makeba (1960)
The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba (1962)
An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965)
Comme une symphonie d'amour (1979)
The Queen of African Music (1987)
Sangoma (1988)
Welela (1989)
Eyes on Tomorrow (1991)
Homeland (2000)
Songs
"Lakutshn, Ilanga"/Lovely Lies" (1956)
"Sophiatown is Gone"
"The Click Song" / "Mbube" (1963)
"Pata Pata" (1967)
"Lumumba" (1970)
"Malcolm X" (1974)
"Soweto Blues" (1977)
"Thula Sizwe/I Shall Be Released" (1991)
"Malaika"
See also
Culture of South Africa
Notes and references
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Miriam Makeba at National Public Radio
1932 births
2008 deaths
20th-century South African women singers
21st-century South African women singers
Anti-apartheid activists
FAO Goodwill ambassadors
Grammy Award winners
Heads Up International artists
Music in the movement against apartheid
Musicians who died on stage
Musicians from Johannesburg
South African actresses
South African exiles
South African people of Swazi descent
World music musicians
Wrasse Records artists
Xhosa people
| true |
[
"White Witch is the title of the second studio album by the group Andrea True Connection. It was released in 1977. The album had two singles: and \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\" and \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\". This was the last album released by the group and the vocalist Andrea True would release a new album as a solo release only in 1980.\n\nBackground and production\nAfter the success of her first album and the gold-certified single More, More, More, the band begun to prepeare for their second release. The album production included studio musicians with a new band assembled for the tour, the second line-up, which included future Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick, it was also produce by the disco pioneers Michael Zager and Jerry Love.\n\nSingles\nThe first single of the album was \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\", it was released in 1977 and became True's second biggest hit, reaching No. 27 on Billboard's pop chart, and #4 on the U.S. club chart, it also peaked #89 in the Canadian RPM's chart. \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\" was released as the second and last single of the album (and also of the group) in 1978 and reached #9 on the U.S. club chart, #34 in the UK and #56 on the Billboard Hot 100\n\nCritical reception\n\nThe album received mixed reviews from music critics. Alex Henderson from the Allmusic website gave the album two and a half stars out of five in a mixed review which he wrote that \"while White Witch isn't a bad album, it falls short of the excellence her first album, More, More, More.\" He also stated that there are a few gems in the album \"including the Michael Zager-produced \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\" and the exuberant, Gregg Diamond-produced \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\"\" according to him they're both \"exercises in unapologetically campy fun.\" He concluded that the album \"LP is strictly for diehard disco collectors.\"\n\nTrack listing\nsource:\n\nReferences\n\n1977 albums\nAndrea True albums\nBuddah Records albums",
"Third Eye Open is a 1992 album by American funk/rock supergroup Hardware. Hardware consists of lead guitarist Stevie Salas, P-Funk bassist Bootsy Collins, and drummer Buddy Miles, formerly of the Band of Gypsys. The album was produced by Bill Laswell and Salas, and was the first release to be part of Laswell's Black Arc Series, which includes Lord of the Harvest by Zillatron, Out of the Dark by O.G. Funk, and Under the 6 by Slave Master.\n\nAlbum history\nWhen the album was first released in Japan on the Polystar label, the band was called The Third Eye and the name of the album was \"Hardware\". When the album secured distribution in the U.S., it was found that another band had owned the name \"The Third Eye\". To avoid any further legal hassles, it was opted that the title of the album and the name of band would simply be switched, thus the name of the band would be Hardware and the title of the album became Third Eye Open.\n\nThe song \"Leakin'\" is a version of a track that appeared on Collins' 1988 album What's Bootsy Doin'?, which featured Salas playing guitar. On this album, the song is credited to Salas, whereas the previous version is credited to Collins, George Clinton and Trey Stone.\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nStevie Salas – guitars, vocals\nBootsy Collins – space bass, vocals\nBuddy Miles – drums, fuzz bass, vocals\nGeorge Clinton, Gary \"Mudbone\" Cooper, Bernard Fowler – background vocals\nDavid Friendly, Vince McClean, Matt Stein – digital bollocks\n\nHardware (band) albums\n1992 albums\nAlbums produced by Bill Laswell\nRykodisc albums"
] |
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"Miriam Makeba",
"Return to South Africa, final years and death",
"When did Makeba return to Aftrica?",
"He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.",
"Who persuaded Makeba to return to Africa?",
"Willem de Klerk",
"What did Makeba do upon her return to South Africa?",
"Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album,",
"What was the name of the album?",
"Eyes on Tomorrow,"
] |
C_be942cd9bfc84a1eb32a2739a1edbbc7_0
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What else did Makeba do while in South Africa?
| 5 |
What else did Makeba do while in South Africa aside from release the album Eyes on Tomorrow?
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Miriam Makeba
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Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990. Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina!, which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity". On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graca Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances. On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her. CANNOTANSWER
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Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it.
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Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother's funeral was prevented by the country's government.
Makeba's career flourished in the United States, and she released several albums and songs, her most popular being "Pata Pata" (1967). Along with Belafonte she received a Grammy Award for her 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She testified against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement. She married Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party, in 1968. As a result, she lost support among white Americans. The US government cancelled her visa while she was travelling abroad, leading her and Carmichael to move to Guinea. She continued to perform, mostly in African countries, including at several independence celebrations. She began to write and perform music more explicitly critical of apartheid; the 1977 song "Soweto Blues", written by her former husband Hugh Masekela, was about the Soweto uprising. After apartheid was dismantled in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She continued recording and performing, including a 1991 album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, and appeared in the 1992 film Sarafina!. She was named a UN goodwill ambassador in 1999, and campaigned for humanitarian causes. She died of a heart attack during a 2008 concert in Italy.
Makeba was among the first African musicians to receive worldwide recognition. She brought African music to a Western audience, and popularized the world music and Afropop genres. She also made popular several songs critical of apartheid, and became a symbol of opposition to the system, particularly after her right to return was revoked. Upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Early years
Childhood and family
Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in the black township of Prospect, near Johannesburg. Her Swazi mother, Christina Makeba, was a sangoma, or traditional healer, and a domestic worker. Her Xhosa father, Caswell Makeba, was a teacher; he died when she was six years old. Makeba later said that before she was conceived, her mother had been warned that any future pregnancy could be fatal. Neither Miriam nor her mother seemed likely to survive after a difficult labour and delivery. Miriam's grandmother, who attended the birth, often muttered "uzenzile", a Xhosa word that means "you brought this on yourself", to Miriam's mother during her recovery, which inspired her to give her daughter the name "Zenzile".
When Makeba was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested and sentenced to a six-month prison term for selling umqombothi, a homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. The family could not afford the small fine required to avoid a jail term, and Miriam spent the first six months of her life in jail. As a child, Makeba sang in the choir of the Kilnerton Training Institute in Pretoria, an all-black Methodist primary school that she attended for eight years. Her talent for singing earned her praise at school. Makeba was baptised a Protestant, and sang in church choirs, in English, Xhosa, Sotho, and Zulu; she later said that she learned to sing in English before she could speak the language.
The family moved to the Transvaal when Makeba was a child. After her father's death, she was forced to find employment; she did domestic work, and worked as a nanny. She described herself as a shy person at the time. Her mother worked for white families in Johannesburg, and had to live away from her six children. Makeba lived for a while with her grandmother and a large number of cousins in Pretoria. Makeba was influenced by her family's musical tastes; her mother played several traditional instruments, and her elder brother collected records, including those of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and taught Makeba songs. Her father played the piano, and his musical inclination was later a factor in Makeba's family accepting what was seen as a risque choice of career.
In 1949, Makeba married James Kubay, a policeman in training, with whom she had her only child, Bongi Makeba, in 1950. Makeba was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband, who was said to have beaten her, left her shortly afterwards, after a two-year marriage. A decade later she overcame cervical cancer via a hysterectomy.
Early career
Makeba began her professional musical career with the Cuban Brothers, a South African all-male close harmony group, with whom she sang covers of popular American songs. Soon afterwards, at the age of 21, she joined a jazz group, the Manhattan Brothers, who sang a mixture of South African songs and pieces from popular African-American groups. Makeba was the only woman in the group. With the Manhattan Brothers she recorded her first hit, "Laku Tshoni Ilanga", in 1953, and developed a national reputation as a musician. In 1956 she joined a new all-woman group, the Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional South African melodies. Formed by Gallotone Records, the group was also known as the Sunbeams. Makeba sang with the Skylarks when the Manhattan Brothers were travelling abroad; later, she also travelled with the Manhattan Brothers. In the Skylarks, Makeba sang alongside Rhodesian-born musician Dorothy Masuka, whose music Makeba had followed, along with that of Dolly Rathebe. Several of the Skylarks' pieces from this period became popular; the music historian Rob Allingham later described the group as "real trendsetters, with harmonisation that had never been heard before." Makeba received no royalties from her work with the Skylarks.
While performing with the Manhattan Brothers in 1955, Makeba met Nelson Mandela, then a young lawyer; he later remembered the meeting, and that he felt that the girl he met "was going to be someone." In 1956, Gallotone Records released "Lovely Lies", Makeba's first solo success; the Xhosa lyric about a man looking for his beloved in jails and hospitals was replaced with the unrelated and innocuous line "You tell such lovely lies with your two lovely eyes" in the English version. The record became the first South African record to chart on the United States Billboard Top 100. In 1957, Makeba was featured on the cover of Drum magazine.
In 1959, Makeba sang the lead female role in the Broadway-inspired South African jazz opera King Kong; among those in the cast was the musician Hugh Masekela. The musical was performed to racially integrated audiences, raising her profile among white South Africans. Also in 1959, she had a short guest appearance in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film produced and directed by the American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. Rogosin cast her after seeing her on stage in African Jazz and Variety show, on which Makeba was a performer for 18 months. The film blended elements of documentary and fiction and had to be filmed in secret as the government was expected to be hostile to it. Makeba appeared on stage, and sang two songs: her appearance lasted four minutes. The cameo made an enormous impression on viewers, and Rogosin organised a visa for her to attend the premiere of the film at the twenty-fourth Venice Film Festival in Italy, where the film won the prestigious Critics' Choice Award. Makeba's presence has been described as crucial to the film, as an emblem of cosmopolitan black identity that also connected with working-class black people due to the dialogue being in Zulu.
Makeba's role in Come Back, Africa brought her international recognition and she travelled to London and New York to perform. In London she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor, helping her with her first solo recordings. These included "Pata Pata", which would be released many years later, and a version of the traditional Xhosa song "Qongqothwane", which she had first performed with the Skylarks. Though "Pata Pata"—described by Musician magazine as a "groundbreaking Afropop gem"—became her most famous song, Makeba described it as "one of my most insignificant songs". While in England, she married Sonny Pillay, a South African ballad singer of Indian descent; they divorced within a few months.
Makeba then moved to New York, making her US music debut on 1 November 1959 on The Steve Allen Show in Los Angeles for a television audience of 60 million. Her New York debut at the Village Vanguard occurred soon after; she sang in Xhosa and Zulu, and performed a Yiddish folk song. Her audience at this concert included Miles Davis and Duke Ellington; her performance received strongly positive reviews from critics. She first came to popular and critical attention in jazz clubs, after which her reputation grew rapidly. Belafonte, who had helped Makeba with her move to the US, handled the logistics for her first performances. When she first moved to the US, Makeba lived in Greenwich Village, along with other musicians and actors. As was common in her profession, she experienced some financial insecurity, and worked as a babysitter for a period.
Exile
United States
Breakthrough
Soon after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Makeba learned that her mother had died. When she tried to return home for the funeral, she found that her South African passport had been cancelled. Two of Makeba's family members were killed in the massacre. The incident left her concerned about her family, many of whom were still in South Africa, including her daughter: the nine-year-old Bongi joined her mother in the US in August 1960. During her first few years in the US, Makeba had rarely sung explicitly political music, but her popularity had led to an increase in awareness of apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement. Following the Sharpeville killings, Makeba felt a responsibility to help, as she had been able to leave the country while others had not. From this point, she became an increasingly outspoken critic of apartheid and the white-minority government; before the massacre, she had taken care to avoid overtly political statements in South Africa.
Her musical career in the US continued to flourish. She signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, and released Miriam Makeba, her first studio album, in 1960, backed by Belafonte's band. RCA Victor chose to buy out Makeba's contract with Gallotone Records, and despite the fact that Makeba was unable to perform in South Africa, Gallotone received US$45,000 in the deal, which meant that Makeba received no royalties for her debut album. The album included one of her most famous hits in the US, "Qongqothwane", which was known in English as "The Click Song" because Makeba's audiences could not pronounce the Xhosa name. Time magazine called her the "most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years", and Newsweek compared her voice to "the smoky tones and delicate phrasing" of Ella Fitzgerald and the "intimate warmth" of Frank Sinatra. The album was not commercially successful, and Makeba was briefly dropped from RCA Victor: she was re-signed soon after as the label recognised the commercial possibilities of the growing interest in African culture. Her South African identity had been downplayed during her first signing, but it was strongly emphasised the second time to take advantage of this interest. Makeba made several appearances on television, often in the company of Belafonte. In 1962, Makeba and Belafonte sang at the birthday party for US President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, but Makeba did not go to the party afterwards because she was ill. Kennedy nevertheless insisted on meeting her, so Belafonte sent a car to pick her up.
In 1964, Makeba released her second studio album for RCA Victor, The World of Miriam Makeba. An early example of world music, the album peaked at number eighty-six on the Billboard 200. Makeba's music had a cross-racial appeal in the US; white Americans were attracted to her image as an "exotic" African performer, and black Americans related their own experiences of racial segregation to Makeba's struggle against apartheid. Makeba found company among other African exiles and émigrés in New York, including Hugh Masekela, to whom she was married from 1963 to 1968. During their marriage, Makeba and Masekela were neighbours of the jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie in Englewood, New Jersey; they spent much of their time in Harlem. She also came to know actors Marlon Brando and Lauren Bacall, and musicians Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles. Fellow singer-activist Nina Simone became friendly with Makeba, as did actor Cicely Tyson; Makeba and Simone performed together at Carnegie Hall. Makeba was among black entertainers, activists, and intellectuals in New York at the time who believed that the civil rights movement and popular culture could reinforce each other, creating "a sense of intertwined political and cultural vibrancy"; other examples included Maya Angelou and Sidney Poitier. She later described her difficulty living with racial segregation, saying "There wasn't much difference in America; it was a country that had abolished slavery but there was apartheid in its own way."
Travel and activism
Makeba's music was also popular in Europe, and she travelled and performed there frequently. Acting on the advice of Belafonte, she added songs from Latin America, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere in Africa to her repertoire. She visited Kenya in 1962 in support of the country's independence from British colonial rule, and raised funds for its independence leader Jomo Kenyatta. Later that year she testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid about the effects of the system, asking for economic sanctions against South Africa's National Party government. She requested an arms embargo against South Africa, on the basis that weapons sold to the government would likely be used against black women and children. As a result, her music was banned in South Africa, and her South African citizenship and right to return were revoked. Makeba thus became a stateless person, but she was soon issued passports by Algeria, Guinea, Belgium and Ghana. In her life, she held nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.
Soon after her testimony, Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, invited her to sing at the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity, the only performer to be invited. As the fact of her ban from South Africa became well known she became a cause célèbre for Western liberals, and her presence in the civil rights movement provided a link between that movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1964 she was taught the song "Malaika" by a Kenyan student while backstage at a performance in San Francisco; the song later became a staple of her performances.
Throughout the 1960s, Makeba strengthened her involvement with a range of black-centred political movements, including the civil rights, anti-apartheid, Black Consciousness, and Black Power movements. She briefly met the Trinidadian-American activist Stokely Carmichael—the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a prominent figure in the Black Panther Party—after Belafonte invited him to one of Makeba's concerts; they met again in Conakry six years later. They entered a relationship, initially kept secret from all but their closest friends and family. Makeba participated in fundraising activities for various civil rights groups, including a benefit concert for the 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference that civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the "event of the year". Following a concert and rally in Atlanta in support of King, Makeba and others were denied entrance to a restaurant as a result of Jim Crow laws, leading to a televised protest in front of the establishment. She also criticised King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its investment in South African companies, informing press that "Now my friend of long standing supports the country's persecution of my people and I must find a new idol". Her identity as an African woman in the civil rights movement helped create "an emerging liberal consensus" that extreme racial discrimination, whether domestically or internationally, was harmful. In 1964 she testified at the UN for a second time, quoting a song by Vanessa Redgrave in calling for quick action against the South African government.
On 15 March 1966, Makeba and Belafonte received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid, including several songs critical of the South African government, such as "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" ("Watch our Verwoerd", a reference to Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid). It sold widely and raised Makeba's profile in the US; Belafonte and Makeba's concert tour following its release was often sold out, and the album has been described as the best they made together. Makeba's use of lyrics in Swahili, Xhosa, and Sotho led to her being seen as a representation of an "authentic" Africa by American audiences. In 1967, more than ten years after she first recorded the song, the single "Pata Pata" was released in the US on an album of the same title, and became a worldwide hit. During its recording, she and Belafonte had a disagreement, after which they stopped recording together.
Guinea
Makeba married Carmichael in March 1968; this caused her popularity in the US to decline markedly. Conservatives came to regard her as a militant and an extremist, an image that alienated much of her fanbase. Her performances were cancelled and her coverage in the press declined despite her efforts to portray her marriage as apolitical. White American audiences stopped supporting her, and the US government took an interest in her activities. The Central Intelligence Agency began following her, and placed hidden microphones in her apartment; the Federal Bureau of Investigation also placed her under surveillance. While she and her husband were travelling in the Bahamas, she was banned from returning to the US, and was refused a visa. As a result, the couple moved to Guinea, where Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Touré. Makeba did not return to the US until 1987.
Guinea remained Makeba's home for the next 15 years, and she and her husband became close to President Ahmed Sékou Touré and his wife, Andrée. Touré wanted to create a new style of African music, creating his own record label Syliphone for this purpose, and all musicians received a minimum wage if they practised for several hours every day. Makeba later stated that "I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists." After her rejection from the US she began to write music more directly critical of the US government's racial policies, recording and singing songs such as "Lumumba" in 1970 (referring to Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated Prime Minister of the Congo), and "Malcolm X" in 1974.
Makeba performed more frequently in African countries, and as countries became independent of European colonial powers, was invited to sing at independence ceremonies, including in Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanganyika, and Mozambique. In September 1974 she performed alongside a multitude of well-known African and American musicians at the Zaire 74 festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (formerly the Congo). She also became a diplomat for Ghana, and was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the UN in 1975; that year, she addressed the United Nations General Assembly. She continued to perform in Europe and Asia, as well as her African concerts, but not in the US, where a de facto boycott was in effect. Her performances in Africa were immensely popular: she was described as the highlight of FESTAC 77, a Pan-African arts festival in Nigeria in 1977, and during a Liberian performance of "Pata Pata", the stadium proved so loud that she was unable to complete the song. "Pata Pata", like her other songs, had been banned in South Africa. Another song she sang frequently in this period was "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", though she never recorded it. Makeba later stated that it was during this period that she accepted the label "Mama Africa".
In 1976, the South African government replaced English with Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all schools, setting off the Soweto uprising. Between 15,000 and 20,000 students took part; caught unprepared, the police opened fire on the protesting children, killing hundreds and injuring more than a thousand. Hugh Masekela wrote "Soweto Blues" in response to the massacre, and the song was performed by Makeba, becoming a staple of her live performances for many years. A review in the magazine Musician said that the song had "searingly righteous lyrics" about the uprising that "cut to the bone". She had separated from Carmichael in 1973; in 1978 they divorced and in 1981 she married Bageot Bah, an airline executive.
Belgium
Makeba's daughter Bongi, who was a singer in her own right and had often accompanied her mother on stage, died in childbirth in 1985. Makeba was left responsible for her two grandchildren, and decided to move out of Guinea. She settled in the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert district of the Belgian capital Brussels. In the following year, Masekela introduced Makeba to Paul Simon, and a few months later she embarked on Simon's very successful Graceland Tour. The tour concluded with two concerts held in Harare, Zimbabwe, which were filmed in 1987 for release as Graceland: The African Concert. After touring the world with Simon, Warner Bros. Records signed Makeba and she released Sangoma ("Healer"), an album of healing chants named in honour of her sangoma mother. Her involvement with Simon caused controversy: Graceland had been recorded in South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott of the country, and thus Makeba's participation in the tour was regarded as contravening the boycott (which Makeba herself endorsed).
In preparation for the Graceland tour, she worked with journalist James Hall to write an autobiography titled Makeba: My Story. The book contained descriptions of her experience with apartheid, and was also critical of the commodification and consumerism she experienced in the US. The book was translated into five languages. She took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, a popular-music concert staged on 11 June 1988 at London's Wembley Stadium, and broadcast to an audience of 600 million across 67 countries. Political aspects of the concert were heavily censored in the US by the Fox television network. The use of music to raise awareness of apartheid paid off: a survey after the concert found that among people aged between 16 and 24, three-quarters knew of Mandela, and supported his release from prison.
Return to South Africa, final years and death
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.
Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina! which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity".
On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graça Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances.
On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her.
Music and image
Musical style
The groups with which Makeba began her career performed mbube, a style of vocal harmony which drew on American jazz, ragtime, and Anglican church hymns, as well as indigenous styles of music. Johannesburg musician Dolly Rathebe was an early influence on Makeba's music, as were female jazz singers from the US. Historian David Coplan writes that the "African jazz" made popular by Makeba and others was "inherently hybridized" rather than derivative of any particular genre, blending as it did marabi and jazz, and was "Americanized African music, not Africanized American music". The music that she performed was described by British writer Robin Denselow as a "unique blend of rousing township styles and jazz-influenced balladry".
Makeba released more than 30 albums during her career. The dominant styles of these shifted over time, moving from African jazz to recordings influenced by Belafonte's "crooning" to music drawing from traditional South African musical forms. She has been associated with the genres of world music and Afropop. She also incorporated Latin American musical styles into her performances. Historian Ruth Feldstein described her music as "[crossing] the borders between what many people associated with avant-garde and 'quality' culture and the commercial mainstream"; the latter aspect often drew criticism. She was able to appeal to audiences from many political, racial, and national backgrounds.
She was known for having a dynamic vocal range, and was described as having an emotional awareness during her performances. She occasionally danced during her shows, and was described as having a sensuous presence on stage. She was able to vary her voice considerably: an obituary remarked that she "could soar like an opera singer, but she could also whisper, roar, hiss, growl and shout. She could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language." She sang in English and several African languages, but never in Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid government in South Africa. She once stated "When Afrikaaners sing in my language, then I will sing theirs." English was seen as the language of political resistance by black South Africans due to the educational barriers they faced under apartheid; the Manhattan Brothers, with whom Makeba had sung in Sophiatown, had been prohibited from recording in English. Her songs in African languages have been described as reaffirming black pride.
Politics and perception
Makeba said that she did not perform political music, but music about her personal life in South Africa, which included describing the pain she felt living under apartheid. She once stated "people say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth", an example of the mixing of personal and political issues for musicians living during apartheid. When she first entered the US, she avoided discussing apartheid explicitly, partly out of concern for her family still in South Africa. Nonetheless, she is known for using her voice to convey the political message of opposition to apartheid, performing widely and frequently for civil rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Even songs that did not carry an explicitly political message were seen as subversive, due to their being banned in South Africa. Makeba saw her music as a tool of activism, saying "In our struggle, songs are not simply entertainment for us. They are the way we communicate."
Makeba's use of the clicks common in languages such as Xhosa and Zulu (as in "Qongqothwane", "The Click Song") was frequently remarked upon by Western audiences. It contributed to her popularity and her exotic image, which scholars have described as a kind of othering, exacerbated by the fact that Western audiences often could not understand her lyrics. Critics in the US described her as the "African tribeswoman" and as an "import from South Africa", often depicting her in condescending terms as a product of a more primitive society. Commentators also frequently described her in terms of the prominent men she was associated with, despite her own prominence. During her early career in South Africa she had been seen as a sex symbol, an image that received considerably less attention in the US.
Makeba was described as a style icon, both in her home country and the US. She wore no makeup and refused to straighten her hair for shows, thus helping establish a style that came to be known internationally as the "Afro look". According to music scholar Tanisha Ford, her hairstyle represented a "liberated African beauty aesthetic". She was seen as a beauty icon by South African schoolgirls, who were compelled to shorten their hair by the apartheid government. Makeba stuck to wearing African jewellery; she disapproved of the skin-lighteners commonly used by South African women at the time, and refused to appear in advertisements for them. Her self-presentation has been characterised by scholars as a rejection of the predominantly white standards of beauty that women in the US were held to, which allowed Makeba to partially escape the sexualisation directed at women performers during this period. Nonetheless, the terms used to describe her in the US media have been identified by scholars as frequently used to "sexualize, infantalize, and animalize" people of African heritage.
Legacy
Musical influence
Makeba was among the most visible Africans in the US; as a result, she was often emblematic of the continent of Africa for Americans. Her music earned her the moniker "Mama Africa", and she was variously described as the "Empress of African Song", the "Queen of South African music", and Africa's "first superstar". Music scholar J. U. Jacobs said that Makeba's music had "both been shaped by and given shape to black South African and American music". The jazz musician Abbey Lincoln is among those identified as being influenced by Makeba. Makeba and Simone were among a group of artists who helped shape soul music. Longtime collaborator Belafonte called her "the most revolutionary new talent to appear in any medium in the last decade". Speaking after her death, Mandela called her "South Africa's first lady of song", and said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Outside her home country Makeba was credited with bringing African music to a Western audience, and along with artists such as Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Baaba Maal and Angélique Kidjo, with popularising the genre of world music. Her work with Belafonte in the 1960s has been described as creating the genre of world music before the concept entered the popular imagination, and also as highlighting the diversity and cultural pluralism within African music. Within South Africa, Makeba has been described as influencing artists such as kwaito musician Thandiswa Mazwai and her band Bongo Maffin, whose track "De Makeba" was a modified version of Makeba's "Pata Pata", and one of several tribute recordings released after her return to South Africa. South African jazz musician Simphiwe Dana has been described as "the new Miriam Makeba". South African singer Lira has frequently been compared with Makeba, particularly for her performance of "Pata Pata" during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Football World Cup. A year later, Kidjo dedicated her concert in New York to Makeba, as a musician who had "paved the way for her success". In an obituary, scholar Lara Allen referred to Makeba as "arguably South Africa's most famous musical export". In 2016 the French singer Jain released "Makeba", a tribute.
Activism
Makeba was among the most visible people campaigning against the apartheid system in South Africa, and was responsible for popularising several anti-apartheid songs, including "Meadowlands" by Strike Vilakezi and "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" (Watch out, Verwoerd) by Vuyisile Mini. Due to her high profile, she became a spokesperson of sorts for Africans living under oppressive governments, and in particular for black South Africans living under apartheid. When the South African government prevented her from entering her home country, she became a symbol of "apartheid's cruelty", and she used her position as a celebrity by testifying against apartheid before the UN in 1962 and 1964. Many of her songs were banned within South Africa, leading to Makeba's records being distributed underground, and even her apolitical songs being seen as subversive. She thus became a symbol of resistance to the white-minority government both within and outside South Africa. In an interview in 2000, Masekela said that "there [was] nobody in Africa who made the world more aware of what was happening in South Africa than Miriam Makeba."
Makeba has also been associated with the movement against colonialism, with the civil rights and black power movements in the US, and with the Pan-African movement. She called for unity between black people of African descent across the world: "Africans who live everywhere should fight everywhere. The struggle is no different in South Africa, the streets of Chicago, Trinidad or Canada. The Black people are the victims of capitalism, racism and oppression, period". After marrying Carmichael she often appeared with him during his speeches; Carmichael later described her presence at these events as an asset, and Feldstein wrote that Makeba enhanced Carmichael's message that "black is beautiful". Along with performers such as Simone, Lena Horne, and Abbey Lincoln, she used her position as a prominent musician to advocate for civil rights. Their activism has been described as simultaneously calling attention to racial and gender disparities, and highlighting "that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex". Makeba's critique of second-wave feminism as being the product of luxury led to observers being unwilling to call her a feminist. Scholar Ruth Feldstein stated that Makeba and others influenced both black feminism and second-wave feminism through their advocacy, and the historian Jacqueline Castledine referred to her as one of the "most steadfast voices for social justice".
Awards and recognition
Makeba's 1965 collaboration with Harry Belafonte won a Grammy Award, making her the first African recording artist to win this award. Makeba shared the 2001 Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. They received their prize from Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, during a nationally televised ceremony at Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, on 27 May 2002.
Makeba won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986, and in 2001 was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". She also received several honorary doctorates. In 2004, she was voted 38th in a poll ranking 100 Great South Africans.
Mama Africa, a musical about Makeba, was produced in South Africa by Niyi Coker. Originally titled Zenzi!, the musical premiered to a sold-out crowd in Cape Town on 26 May 2016. It was performed in the US in St. Louis, Missouri and at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City between October and December 2016. The musical returned to South Africa in February 2017 for what would have been Makeba's 85th birthday.
From 25 to 27 September 2009, a tribute television show to Makeba entitled Hommage à Miriam Makeba and curated by Beninoise singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo, was held at the Cirque d'hiver in Paris. The show was presented as Mama Africa: Celebrating Miriam Makeba at the Barbican in London on 21 November 2009. A documentary film titled Mama Africa, about Makeba's life, co-written and directed by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, was released in 2011. On 4 March 2013, and again on International Women's Day in 2017, Google honoured her with a Google Doodle on their homepage. In 2014 she was honoured (along with Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Steve Biko) in the Belgian city of Ghent, which named a square after her, the "Miriam Makebaplein". Makeba was named 1967's "woman of the year" by Time magazine in 2020, as one of a list of 100 "women of the year" for the years 1920–2019.
Notable songs and albums
This is a list of albums and songs, including covers, by Miriam Makeba that have received significant mention in commentary about her or about the musical and political movements she participated in.
Albums
Miriam Makeba (1960)
The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba (1962)
An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965)
Comme une symphonie d'amour (1979)
The Queen of African Music (1987)
Sangoma (1988)
Welela (1989)
Eyes on Tomorrow (1991)
Homeland (2000)
Songs
"Lakutshn, Ilanga"/Lovely Lies" (1956)
"Sophiatown is Gone"
"The Click Song" / "Mbube" (1963)
"Pata Pata" (1967)
"Lumumba" (1970)
"Malcolm X" (1974)
"Soweto Blues" (1977)
"Thula Sizwe/I Shall Be Released" (1991)
"Malaika"
See also
Culture of South Africa
Notes and references
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Miriam Makeba at National Public Radio
1932 births
2008 deaths
20th-century South African women singers
21st-century South African women singers
Anti-apartheid activists
FAO Goodwill ambassadors
Grammy Award winners
Heads Up International artists
Music in the movement against apartheid
Musicians who died on stage
Musicians from Johannesburg
South African actresses
South African exiles
South African people of Swazi descent
World music musicians
Wrasse Records artists
Xhosa people
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[
"Bongi Makeba (20 December 1950 – 17 March 1985) was a South African singer/songwriter. She was the only child of singer Miriam Makeba with her first husband, James Kubay.\n\nBiography\nAngela Sibongile Makeba was born in South Africa in 1950, when her mother was 18 years old. The name Bongi by which she became known is a shortened version of her middle name Sibongile, which means \"We are grateful\". In 1959 her mother's career took her to New York, where she remained in exile after being barred from returning to South Africa, and in 1960 was joined by Bongi, who stayed with friends while her mother toured the world.\n\nIn 1967 she and Judy White, daughter of Josh White, signed to Buddha Records as \"Bongi and Judy\", their first release being \"Runnin' Out\" and \"Let's Get Together\". At the age of 17, Makeba met her American husband Harold Nelson Lee, with whom in the early to mid-1970s she made two 7\" records as \"Bongi and Nelson\", featuring two soul tracks arranged by George Butcher: \"That's the Kind of Love\" backed by \"I Was So Glad\" (France: Syliphone SYL 533), and \"Everything, For My Love\" with \"Do You Remember, Malcolm?\" (France: Syliphone SYL 532). She recorded only one solo album, Bongi Makeba, Blow On Wind (pläne-records), in 1980. Some of her songs could be heard years later in her mother's repertoire. Two of them, \"Malcolm X\" (1965, 1972) and \"Lumumba\" (1970), extol assassinated black leaders.\n\nMakeba had three children: Nelson Lumumba Lee (born 1968), Zenzi Monique Lee (born 1971), and a son, Themba, who died as a young child.\n\nShe died aged 34 in 1985 of complications following childbirth and was buried in Conakry, Guinea, where her mother had moved after her 1968 marriage to Stokely Carmichael.\n\nDiscography\n Blow On Wind (1980; Germany: pläne – 88234)\n Miriam Makeba & Bongi (1975; LP with Miriam Makeba; Guinea: Editions Syliphone Conakry SLP 48)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nMention in Miriam Makeba's biography\n\n1950 births\n1985 deaths\n20th-century South African women singers\nXhosa people\nDeaths in childbirth\nSouth African singer-songwriters",
"This is a discography of South African musician Miriam Makeba (1953-2008).\n\nStudio albums\n Miriam Makeba (1960) (LP RCA Victor LPM/LSP-2267)\n The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba (1962) (LP Kapp KL1274)\n The World of Miriam Makeba (1963) (LP RCA Victor LPM/LSP-2750) #86 (US)\n The Voice of Africa (1964) (LP RCA Victor LPM/LSP-2845) #122 (US)\n Makeba Sings! (1965) (LP RCA Victor LPM/LSP-3321)\n An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965) (LP with Harry Belafonte; RCA Victor LPM/LSP-3420; Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording) #85 (US)\n The Magic of Makeba (1965) (LP RCA Victor LPM/LSP-3512)\n The Magnificent Miriam Makeba (1966) (LP Mercury 134016)\n All About Miriam (1966) (LP Mercury 134029)\n Pata Pata (1967) (LP Reprise RS6274) #74 (US)\n Makeba! (1968) (LP Reprise RS6310)\n Keep Me in Mind (1970) (LP Reprise RS6381)\n A Promise (1974) (LP RCA YSPL1-544)\n Miriam Makeba & Bongi (1975) (LP with Bongi Makeba; Guinea: Editions Syliphone Conakry SLP 48)\n Country Girl (1978) (LP Sonodisc ESP165518)\n Comme une symphonie d'amour (1979) (LP Sonodisc ESP 7501)\n Sangoma (1988) (CD Warner Bros. 25673)\n Welela (1989) (CD Gallo CDGSP3084) #6 (US World Music Albums)\n Eyes on Tomorrow (1991) (CD Gallo CDGSP3086) #10 (US World Music Albums)\n Sing Me a Song (1993) (CD CDS12702)\n Homeland (2000) (CD Putumayo PUTU1642)\n Reflections (2004) (CD Gallo Music GWVCD-51) #12 (US World Music Albums)\n Forever (2006) (CD Gallo Music CDGURB-082) - compilation\n\nLive albums\n Miriam Makeba in Concert! (1967) (LP) (Reprise RS6253) #182 (US)\n Live in Tokyo (1968) (LP) (Reprise SJET8082)\n Live in Conakry: Appel a l'Afrique (1974) (LP) (Sonodisc SLP22)\n Enregistrement public au Theatre des Champs-Elysées (1977) (LP) (released on CD6508 as Pata Pata: Live in Paris in 1998)\n Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm, Sweden, 1966 (2003) (CD and DVD) (Gallo Music GWVCD-49)\n\nCompilations\n The Best of Miriam Makeba (LP) Canada: RCA Victor LSP-3982, 1968\n Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba (2xLP) RCA International (Camden) PJL2-8042, 1975\n Miriam Makeba (LP) Italy: Record Bazaar RB 254, 1980\n The Queen of African Music (CD) Verlag Pläne 831 655–938, 1987\n Africa (CD) Germany: Novus 3155-2-N/ND 83155, 1991\n Miriam Makeba and The Skylarks: Volume 1 (as Miriam Makeba and The Skylarks; Remastered from 78/45 RPM recorded between 1956 and 1959) (CD) TELCD 2303, 1991\n Folk Songs from Africa (CD) SAAR CD 12514, 1994\n En public à Paris et Conakry (CD), 1996\n Hits and Highlights (CD), 1997\n Miriam Makeba and The Skylarks: Volume 2 (as Miriam Makeba and The Skylarks; Remastered from 78/45 RPM recorded between 1956 and 1959) (CD) TELCD 2315, 1997\n The Best of Miriam Makeba (CD) BMG/RCA, 2000\n Legend (CD) Next Music CDSL21, 2001\n Mama Africa: The Very Best of Miriam Makeba (CD), 2001\n The Guinea Years (CD/LP) STCD3017/SLP48, 2001\n Mother Africa: The Black Anthology (CD), 2002\n The Best of Miriam Makeba: The Early Years (CD) Wrasse WRASS 088, 2002\n The Definitive Collection (CD) UK: Wrasse WRASS 062, 2002\n Her Essential Recordings (2xCD) Manteca MANTDBL502, 2006\n Mama Afrika 1932–2008 (CD) Gallo, 2009\n\nExtended plays\n Makeba – Belafonte (as Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte) (Vinyl, 7\", 45 RPM) Germany: RCA Victor EPA 9035, 1961\n The Click Song (Vinyl, 7\", EP) France: London RE 10.145, 1963\n Chants d'Afrique'' (Vinyl, 7\") France: RCA Victor 86.374, 1964\n\nSingles\n \"Duze\" (1956) (10-inch shellac 78 rpm mono Gallotone GB.2062)\n \"Pass Office Special\" (1957) (10-inch shellac 78 rpm mono Gallotone GB.2134)\n \"The Click Song\" / \"Mbube\" (1963) (7-inch vinyl London HL 9747)\n \"Malaika\" / \"Malcolm X\" (1965) (7-inch vinyl Kenya: Sonafric SYL 565)\n \"Pata Pata\" (1967) (7-inch vinyl Reprise 0606) #12 (US)\t\n \"Malayisha\" (1967) (7-inch vinyl Reprise)\n \"What is Love\" (1968)\n \"Emavungwini\" (1968) (7-inch vinyl France, Spain: Reprise)\n \"I Shall Be Released\" / \"Iphi Ndilela (Show Me the Way)\" (1969) (7-inch vinyl Germany: Reprise RA 0804)\n \"Pata Pata\" / \"Click Song Number 1\" (1972) (7-inch vinyl Germany, Netherlands: Reprise REP 14 217)\n \"We Got to Make It\" / \"Promise\" (1975) 7-inch vinyl with Instrumentalgruppe German Democratic Republic: AMIGA 4 56 044, 1974, and France: Disques Espérance\n \"Pata Pata\" / \"Malayisha\" (1976) (7-inch vinyl Italy: Reprise 14 267, released in France in 1978)\n \"Hauteng\" / \"Talking and Dialoging\" (1978) (7-inch vinyl France: Disques Espérance ESP 155027)\n \"Comme une symphonie d'amour\" (1979) (7-inch vinyl France: Disques Espérance ESP 65.009)\n \"Give Me a Reason\" / \"Africa\" (1989) (7-inch vinyl Italy: Philips 875 308-7)\n \"Pata Pata 2000\" (2000) (CD Putumayo PUTU 919-S)\n\nReferences\n\nMiriam Makeba albums\nMiriam Makeba songs\nM"
] |
[
"Miriam Makeba",
"Return to South Africa, final years and death",
"When did Makeba return to Aftrica?",
"He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.",
"Who persuaded Makeba to return to Africa?",
"Willem de Klerk",
"What did Makeba do upon her return to South Africa?",
"Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album,",
"What was the name of the album?",
"Eyes on Tomorrow,",
"What else did Makeba do while in South Africa?",
"Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it."
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C_be942cd9bfc84a1eb32a2739a1edbbc7_0
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Was there anything else significant about her final years in South Africa?
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Was there anything else significant about Makeba's final years in South Africa aside from the album with and world tour with Gillespie?
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Miriam Makeba
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Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990. Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina!, which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity". On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graca Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances. On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her. CANNOTANSWER
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On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
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Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother's funeral was prevented by the country's government.
Makeba's career flourished in the United States, and she released several albums and songs, her most popular being "Pata Pata" (1967). Along with Belafonte she received a Grammy Award for her 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She testified against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement. She married Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party, in 1968. As a result, she lost support among white Americans. The US government cancelled her visa while she was travelling abroad, leading her and Carmichael to move to Guinea. She continued to perform, mostly in African countries, including at several independence celebrations. She began to write and perform music more explicitly critical of apartheid; the 1977 song "Soweto Blues", written by her former husband Hugh Masekela, was about the Soweto uprising. After apartheid was dismantled in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She continued recording and performing, including a 1991 album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, and appeared in the 1992 film Sarafina!. She was named a UN goodwill ambassador in 1999, and campaigned for humanitarian causes. She died of a heart attack during a 2008 concert in Italy.
Makeba was among the first African musicians to receive worldwide recognition. She brought African music to a Western audience, and popularized the world music and Afropop genres. She also made popular several songs critical of apartheid, and became a symbol of opposition to the system, particularly after her right to return was revoked. Upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Early years
Childhood and family
Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in the black township of Prospect, near Johannesburg. Her Swazi mother, Christina Makeba, was a sangoma, or traditional healer, and a domestic worker. Her Xhosa father, Caswell Makeba, was a teacher; he died when she was six years old. Makeba later said that before she was conceived, her mother had been warned that any future pregnancy could be fatal. Neither Miriam nor her mother seemed likely to survive after a difficult labour and delivery. Miriam's grandmother, who attended the birth, often muttered "uzenzile", a Xhosa word that means "you brought this on yourself", to Miriam's mother during her recovery, which inspired her to give her daughter the name "Zenzile".
When Makeba was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested and sentenced to a six-month prison term for selling umqombothi, a homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. The family could not afford the small fine required to avoid a jail term, and Miriam spent the first six months of her life in jail. As a child, Makeba sang in the choir of the Kilnerton Training Institute in Pretoria, an all-black Methodist primary school that she attended for eight years. Her talent for singing earned her praise at school. Makeba was baptised a Protestant, and sang in church choirs, in English, Xhosa, Sotho, and Zulu; she later said that she learned to sing in English before she could speak the language.
The family moved to the Transvaal when Makeba was a child. After her father's death, she was forced to find employment; she did domestic work, and worked as a nanny. She described herself as a shy person at the time. Her mother worked for white families in Johannesburg, and had to live away from her six children. Makeba lived for a while with her grandmother and a large number of cousins in Pretoria. Makeba was influenced by her family's musical tastes; her mother played several traditional instruments, and her elder brother collected records, including those of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and taught Makeba songs. Her father played the piano, and his musical inclination was later a factor in Makeba's family accepting what was seen as a risque choice of career.
In 1949, Makeba married James Kubay, a policeman in training, with whom she had her only child, Bongi Makeba, in 1950. Makeba was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband, who was said to have beaten her, left her shortly afterwards, after a two-year marriage. A decade later she overcame cervical cancer via a hysterectomy.
Early career
Makeba began her professional musical career with the Cuban Brothers, a South African all-male close harmony group, with whom she sang covers of popular American songs. Soon afterwards, at the age of 21, she joined a jazz group, the Manhattan Brothers, who sang a mixture of South African songs and pieces from popular African-American groups. Makeba was the only woman in the group. With the Manhattan Brothers she recorded her first hit, "Laku Tshoni Ilanga", in 1953, and developed a national reputation as a musician. In 1956 she joined a new all-woman group, the Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional South African melodies. Formed by Gallotone Records, the group was also known as the Sunbeams. Makeba sang with the Skylarks when the Manhattan Brothers were travelling abroad; later, she also travelled with the Manhattan Brothers. In the Skylarks, Makeba sang alongside Rhodesian-born musician Dorothy Masuka, whose music Makeba had followed, along with that of Dolly Rathebe. Several of the Skylarks' pieces from this period became popular; the music historian Rob Allingham later described the group as "real trendsetters, with harmonisation that had never been heard before." Makeba received no royalties from her work with the Skylarks.
While performing with the Manhattan Brothers in 1955, Makeba met Nelson Mandela, then a young lawyer; he later remembered the meeting, and that he felt that the girl he met "was going to be someone." In 1956, Gallotone Records released "Lovely Lies", Makeba's first solo success; the Xhosa lyric about a man looking for his beloved in jails and hospitals was replaced with the unrelated and innocuous line "You tell such lovely lies with your two lovely eyes" in the English version. The record became the first South African record to chart on the United States Billboard Top 100. In 1957, Makeba was featured on the cover of Drum magazine.
In 1959, Makeba sang the lead female role in the Broadway-inspired South African jazz opera King Kong; among those in the cast was the musician Hugh Masekela. The musical was performed to racially integrated audiences, raising her profile among white South Africans. Also in 1959, she had a short guest appearance in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film produced and directed by the American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. Rogosin cast her after seeing her on stage in African Jazz and Variety show, on which Makeba was a performer for 18 months. The film blended elements of documentary and fiction and had to be filmed in secret as the government was expected to be hostile to it. Makeba appeared on stage, and sang two songs: her appearance lasted four minutes. The cameo made an enormous impression on viewers, and Rogosin organised a visa for her to attend the premiere of the film at the twenty-fourth Venice Film Festival in Italy, where the film won the prestigious Critics' Choice Award. Makeba's presence has been described as crucial to the film, as an emblem of cosmopolitan black identity that also connected with working-class black people due to the dialogue being in Zulu.
Makeba's role in Come Back, Africa brought her international recognition and she travelled to London and New York to perform. In London she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor, helping her with her first solo recordings. These included "Pata Pata", which would be released many years later, and a version of the traditional Xhosa song "Qongqothwane", which she had first performed with the Skylarks. Though "Pata Pata"—described by Musician magazine as a "groundbreaking Afropop gem"—became her most famous song, Makeba described it as "one of my most insignificant songs". While in England, she married Sonny Pillay, a South African ballad singer of Indian descent; they divorced within a few months.
Makeba then moved to New York, making her US music debut on 1 November 1959 on The Steve Allen Show in Los Angeles for a television audience of 60 million. Her New York debut at the Village Vanguard occurred soon after; she sang in Xhosa and Zulu, and performed a Yiddish folk song. Her audience at this concert included Miles Davis and Duke Ellington; her performance received strongly positive reviews from critics. She first came to popular and critical attention in jazz clubs, after which her reputation grew rapidly. Belafonte, who had helped Makeba with her move to the US, handled the logistics for her first performances. When she first moved to the US, Makeba lived in Greenwich Village, along with other musicians and actors. As was common in her profession, she experienced some financial insecurity, and worked as a babysitter for a period.
Exile
United States
Breakthrough
Soon after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Makeba learned that her mother had died. When she tried to return home for the funeral, she found that her South African passport had been cancelled. Two of Makeba's family members were killed in the massacre. The incident left her concerned about her family, many of whom were still in South Africa, including her daughter: the nine-year-old Bongi joined her mother in the US in August 1960. During her first few years in the US, Makeba had rarely sung explicitly political music, but her popularity had led to an increase in awareness of apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement. Following the Sharpeville killings, Makeba felt a responsibility to help, as she had been able to leave the country while others had not. From this point, she became an increasingly outspoken critic of apartheid and the white-minority government; before the massacre, she had taken care to avoid overtly political statements in South Africa.
Her musical career in the US continued to flourish. She signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, and released Miriam Makeba, her first studio album, in 1960, backed by Belafonte's band. RCA Victor chose to buy out Makeba's contract with Gallotone Records, and despite the fact that Makeba was unable to perform in South Africa, Gallotone received US$45,000 in the deal, which meant that Makeba received no royalties for her debut album. The album included one of her most famous hits in the US, "Qongqothwane", which was known in English as "The Click Song" because Makeba's audiences could not pronounce the Xhosa name. Time magazine called her the "most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years", and Newsweek compared her voice to "the smoky tones and delicate phrasing" of Ella Fitzgerald and the "intimate warmth" of Frank Sinatra. The album was not commercially successful, and Makeba was briefly dropped from RCA Victor: she was re-signed soon after as the label recognised the commercial possibilities of the growing interest in African culture. Her South African identity had been downplayed during her first signing, but it was strongly emphasised the second time to take advantage of this interest. Makeba made several appearances on television, often in the company of Belafonte. In 1962, Makeba and Belafonte sang at the birthday party for US President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, but Makeba did not go to the party afterwards because she was ill. Kennedy nevertheless insisted on meeting her, so Belafonte sent a car to pick her up.
In 1964, Makeba released her second studio album for RCA Victor, The World of Miriam Makeba. An early example of world music, the album peaked at number eighty-six on the Billboard 200. Makeba's music had a cross-racial appeal in the US; white Americans were attracted to her image as an "exotic" African performer, and black Americans related their own experiences of racial segregation to Makeba's struggle against apartheid. Makeba found company among other African exiles and émigrés in New York, including Hugh Masekela, to whom she was married from 1963 to 1968. During their marriage, Makeba and Masekela were neighbours of the jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie in Englewood, New Jersey; they spent much of their time in Harlem. She also came to know actors Marlon Brando and Lauren Bacall, and musicians Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles. Fellow singer-activist Nina Simone became friendly with Makeba, as did actor Cicely Tyson; Makeba and Simone performed together at Carnegie Hall. Makeba was among black entertainers, activists, and intellectuals in New York at the time who believed that the civil rights movement and popular culture could reinforce each other, creating "a sense of intertwined political and cultural vibrancy"; other examples included Maya Angelou and Sidney Poitier. She later described her difficulty living with racial segregation, saying "There wasn't much difference in America; it was a country that had abolished slavery but there was apartheid in its own way."
Travel and activism
Makeba's music was also popular in Europe, and she travelled and performed there frequently. Acting on the advice of Belafonte, she added songs from Latin America, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere in Africa to her repertoire. She visited Kenya in 1962 in support of the country's independence from British colonial rule, and raised funds for its independence leader Jomo Kenyatta. Later that year she testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid about the effects of the system, asking for economic sanctions against South Africa's National Party government. She requested an arms embargo against South Africa, on the basis that weapons sold to the government would likely be used against black women and children. As a result, her music was banned in South Africa, and her South African citizenship and right to return were revoked. Makeba thus became a stateless person, but she was soon issued passports by Algeria, Guinea, Belgium and Ghana. In her life, she held nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.
Soon after her testimony, Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, invited her to sing at the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity, the only performer to be invited. As the fact of her ban from South Africa became well known she became a cause célèbre for Western liberals, and her presence in the civil rights movement provided a link between that movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1964 she was taught the song "Malaika" by a Kenyan student while backstage at a performance in San Francisco; the song later became a staple of her performances.
Throughout the 1960s, Makeba strengthened her involvement with a range of black-centred political movements, including the civil rights, anti-apartheid, Black Consciousness, and Black Power movements. She briefly met the Trinidadian-American activist Stokely Carmichael—the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a prominent figure in the Black Panther Party—after Belafonte invited him to one of Makeba's concerts; they met again in Conakry six years later. They entered a relationship, initially kept secret from all but their closest friends and family. Makeba participated in fundraising activities for various civil rights groups, including a benefit concert for the 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference that civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the "event of the year". Following a concert and rally in Atlanta in support of King, Makeba and others were denied entrance to a restaurant as a result of Jim Crow laws, leading to a televised protest in front of the establishment. She also criticised King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its investment in South African companies, informing press that "Now my friend of long standing supports the country's persecution of my people and I must find a new idol". Her identity as an African woman in the civil rights movement helped create "an emerging liberal consensus" that extreme racial discrimination, whether domestically or internationally, was harmful. In 1964 she testified at the UN for a second time, quoting a song by Vanessa Redgrave in calling for quick action against the South African government.
On 15 March 1966, Makeba and Belafonte received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid, including several songs critical of the South African government, such as "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" ("Watch our Verwoerd", a reference to Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid). It sold widely and raised Makeba's profile in the US; Belafonte and Makeba's concert tour following its release was often sold out, and the album has been described as the best they made together. Makeba's use of lyrics in Swahili, Xhosa, and Sotho led to her being seen as a representation of an "authentic" Africa by American audiences. In 1967, more than ten years after she first recorded the song, the single "Pata Pata" was released in the US on an album of the same title, and became a worldwide hit. During its recording, she and Belafonte had a disagreement, after which they stopped recording together.
Guinea
Makeba married Carmichael in March 1968; this caused her popularity in the US to decline markedly. Conservatives came to regard her as a militant and an extremist, an image that alienated much of her fanbase. Her performances were cancelled and her coverage in the press declined despite her efforts to portray her marriage as apolitical. White American audiences stopped supporting her, and the US government took an interest in her activities. The Central Intelligence Agency began following her, and placed hidden microphones in her apartment; the Federal Bureau of Investigation also placed her under surveillance. While she and her husband were travelling in the Bahamas, she was banned from returning to the US, and was refused a visa. As a result, the couple moved to Guinea, where Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Touré. Makeba did not return to the US until 1987.
Guinea remained Makeba's home for the next 15 years, and she and her husband became close to President Ahmed Sékou Touré and his wife, Andrée. Touré wanted to create a new style of African music, creating his own record label Syliphone for this purpose, and all musicians received a minimum wage if they practised for several hours every day. Makeba later stated that "I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists." After her rejection from the US she began to write music more directly critical of the US government's racial policies, recording and singing songs such as "Lumumba" in 1970 (referring to Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated Prime Minister of the Congo), and "Malcolm X" in 1974.
Makeba performed more frequently in African countries, and as countries became independent of European colonial powers, was invited to sing at independence ceremonies, including in Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanganyika, and Mozambique. In September 1974 she performed alongside a multitude of well-known African and American musicians at the Zaire 74 festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (formerly the Congo). She also became a diplomat for Ghana, and was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the UN in 1975; that year, she addressed the United Nations General Assembly. She continued to perform in Europe and Asia, as well as her African concerts, but not in the US, where a de facto boycott was in effect. Her performances in Africa were immensely popular: she was described as the highlight of FESTAC 77, a Pan-African arts festival in Nigeria in 1977, and during a Liberian performance of "Pata Pata", the stadium proved so loud that she was unable to complete the song. "Pata Pata", like her other songs, had been banned in South Africa. Another song she sang frequently in this period was "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", though she never recorded it. Makeba later stated that it was during this period that she accepted the label "Mama Africa".
In 1976, the South African government replaced English with Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all schools, setting off the Soweto uprising. Between 15,000 and 20,000 students took part; caught unprepared, the police opened fire on the protesting children, killing hundreds and injuring more than a thousand. Hugh Masekela wrote "Soweto Blues" in response to the massacre, and the song was performed by Makeba, becoming a staple of her live performances for many years. A review in the magazine Musician said that the song had "searingly righteous lyrics" about the uprising that "cut to the bone". She had separated from Carmichael in 1973; in 1978 they divorced and in 1981 she married Bageot Bah, an airline executive.
Belgium
Makeba's daughter Bongi, who was a singer in her own right and had often accompanied her mother on stage, died in childbirth in 1985. Makeba was left responsible for her two grandchildren, and decided to move out of Guinea. She settled in the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert district of the Belgian capital Brussels. In the following year, Masekela introduced Makeba to Paul Simon, and a few months later she embarked on Simon's very successful Graceland Tour. The tour concluded with two concerts held in Harare, Zimbabwe, which were filmed in 1987 for release as Graceland: The African Concert. After touring the world with Simon, Warner Bros. Records signed Makeba and she released Sangoma ("Healer"), an album of healing chants named in honour of her sangoma mother. Her involvement with Simon caused controversy: Graceland had been recorded in South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott of the country, and thus Makeba's participation in the tour was regarded as contravening the boycott (which Makeba herself endorsed).
In preparation for the Graceland tour, she worked with journalist James Hall to write an autobiography titled Makeba: My Story. The book contained descriptions of her experience with apartheid, and was also critical of the commodification and consumerism she experienced in the US. The book was translated into five languages. She took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, a popular-music concert staged on 11 June 1988 at London's Wembley Stadium, and broadcast to an audience of 600 million across 67 countries. Political aspects of the concert were heavily censored in the US by the Fox television network. The use of music to raise awareness of apartheid paid off: a survey after the concert found that among people aged between 16 and 24, three-quarters knew of Mandela, and supported his release from prison.
Return to South Africa, final years and death
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.
Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina! which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity".
On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graça Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances.
On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her.
Music and image
Musical style
The groups with which Makeba began her career performed mbube, a style of vocal harmony which drew on American jazz, ragtime, and Anglican church hymns, as well as indigenous styles of music. Johannesburg musician Dolly Rathebe was an early influence on Makeba's music, as were female jazz singers from the US. Historian David Coplan writes that the "African jazz" made popular by Makeba and others was "inherently hybridized" rather than derivative of any particular genre, blending as it did marabi and jazz, and was "Americanized African music, not Africanized American music". The music that she performed was described by British writer Robin Denselow as a "unique blend of rousing township styles and jazz-influenced balladry".
Makeba released more than 30 albums during her career. The dominant styles of these shifted over time, moving from African jazz to recordings influenced by Belafonte's "crooning" to music drawing from traditional South African musical forms. She has been associated with the genres of world music and Afropop. She also incorporated Latin American musical styles into her performances. Historian Ruth Feldstein described her music as "[crossing] the borders between what many people associated with avant-garde and 'quality' culture and the commercial mainstream"; the latter aspect often drew criticism. She was able to appeal to audiences from many political, racial, and national backgrounds.
She was known for having a dynamic vocal range, and was described as having an emotional awareness during her performances. She occasionally danced during her shows, and was described as having a sensuous presence on stage. She was able to vary her voice considerably: an obituary remarked that she "could soar like an opera singer, but she could also whisper, roar, hiss, growl and shout. She could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language." She sang in English and several African languages, but never in Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid government in South Africa. She once stated "When Afrikaaners sing in my language, then I will sing theirs." English was seen as the language of political resistance by black South Africans due to the educational barriers they faced under apartheid; the Manhattan Brothers, with whom Makeba had sung in Sophiatown, had been prohibited from recording in English. Her songs in African languages have been described as reaffirming black pride.
Politics and perception
Makeba said that she did not perform political music, but music about her personal life in South Africa, which included describing the pain she felt living under apartheid. She once stated "people say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth", an example of the mixing of personal and political issues for musicians living during apartheid. When she first entered the US, she avoided discussing apartheid explicitly, partly out of concern for her family still in South Africa. Nonetheless, she is known for using her voice to convey the political message of opposition to apartheid, performing widely and frequently for civil rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Even songs that did not carry an explicitly political message were seen as subversive, due to their being banned in South Africa. Makeba saw her music as a tool of activism, saying "In our struggle, songs are not simply entertainment for us. They are the way we communicate."
Makeba's use of the clicks common in languages such as Xhosa and Zulu (as in "Qongqothwane", "The Click Song") was frequently remarked upon by Western audiences. It contributed to her popularity and her exotic image, which scholars have described as a kind of othering, exacerbated by the fact that Western audiences often could not understand her lyrics. Critics in the US described her as the "African tribeswoman" and as an "import from South Africa", often depicting her in condescending terms as a product of a more primitive society. Commentators also frequently described her in terms of the prominent men she was associated with, despite her own prominence. During her early career in South Africa she had been seen as a sex symbol, an image that received considerably less attention in the US.
Makeba was described as a style icon, both in her home country and the US. She wore no makeup and refused to straighten her hair for shows, thus helping establish a style that came to be known internationally as the "Afro look". According to music scholar Tanisha Ford, her hairstyle represented a "liberated African beauty aesthetic". She was seen as a beauty icon by South African schoolgirls, who were compelled to shorten their hair by the apartheid government. Makeba stuck to wearing African jewellery; she disapproved of the skin-lighteners commonly used by South African women at the time, and refused to appear in advertisements for them. Her self-presentation has been characterised by scholars as a rejection of the predominantly white standards of beauty that women in the US were held to, which allowed Makeba to partially escape the sexualisation directed at women performers during this period. Nonetheless, the terms used to describe her in the US media have been identified by scholars as frequently used to "sexualize, infantalize, and animalize" people of African heritage.
Legacy
Musical influence
Makeba was among the most visible Africans in the US; as a result, she was often emblematic of the continent of Africa for Americans. Her music earned her the moniker "Mama Africa", and she was variously described as the "Empress of African Song", the "Queen of South African music", and Africa's "first superstar". Music scholar J. U. Jacobs said that Makeba's music had "both been shaped by and given shape to black South African and American music". The jazz musician Abbey Lincoln is among those identified as being influenced by Makeba. Makeba and Simone were among a group of artists who helped shape soul music. Longtime collaborator Belafonte called her "the most revolutionary new talent to appear in any medium in the last decade". Speaking after her death, Mandela called her "South Africa's first lady of song", and said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Outside her home country Makeba was credited with bringing African music to a Western audience, and along with artists such as Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Baaba Maal and Angélique Kidjo, with popularising the genre of world music. Her work with Belafonte in the 1960s has been described as creating the genre of world music before the concept entered the popular imagination, and also as highlighting the diversity and cultural pluralism within African music. Within South Africa, Makeba has been described as influencing artists such as kwaito musician Thandiswa Mazwai and her band Bongo Maffin, whose track "De Makeba" was a modified version of Makeba's "Pata Pata", and one of several tribute recordings released after her return to South Africa. South African jazz musician Simphiwe Dana has been described as "the new Miriam Makeba". South African singer Lira has frequently been compared with Makeba, particularly for her performance of "Pata Pata" during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Football World Cup. A year later, Kidjo dedicated her concert in New York to Makeba, as a musician who had "paved the way for her success". In an obituary, scholar Lara Allen referred to Makeba as "arguably South Africa's most famous musical export". In 2016 the French singer Jain released "Makeba", a tribute.
Activism
Makeba was among the most visible people campaigning against the apartheid system in South Africa, and was responsible for popularising several anti-apartheid songs, including "Meadowlands" by Strike Vilakezi and "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" (Watch out, Verwoerd) by Vuyisile Mini. Due to her high profile, she became a spokesperson of sorts for Africans living under oppressive governments, and in particular for black South Africans living under apartheid. When the South African government prevented her from entering her home country, she became a symbol of "apartheid's cruelty", and she used her position as a celebrity by testifying against apartheid before the UN in 1962 and 1964. Many of her songs were banned within South Africa, leading to Makeba's records being distributed underground, and even her apolitical songs being seen as subversive. She thus became a symbol of resistance to the white-minority government both within and outside South Africa. In an interview in 2000, Masekela said that "there [was] nobody in Africa who made the world more aware of what was happening in South Africa than Miriam Makeba."
Makeba has also been associated with the movement against colonialism, with the civil rights and black power movements in the US, and with the Pan-African movement. She called for unity between black people of African descent across the world: "Africans who live everywhere should fight everywhere. The struggle is no different in South Africa, the streets of Chicago, Trinidad or Canada. The Black people are the victims of capitalism, racism and oppression, period". After marrying Carmichael she often appeared with him during his speeches; Carmichael later described her presence at these events as an asset, and Feldstein wrote that Makeba enhanced Carmichael's message that "black is beautiful". Along with performers such as Simone, Lena Horne, and Abbey Lincoln, she used her position as a prominent musician to advocate for civil rights. Their activism has been described as simultaneously calling attention to racial and gender disparities, and highlighting "that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex". Makeba's critique of second-wave feminism as being the product of luxury led to observers being unwilling to call her a feminist. Scholar Ruth Feldstein stated that Makeba and others influenced both black feminism and second-wave feminism through their advocacy, and the historian Jacqueline Castledine referred to her as one of the "most steadfast voices for social justice".
Awards and recognition
Makeba's 1965 collaboration with Harry Belafonte won a Grammy Award, making her the first African recording artist to win this award. Makeba shared the 2001 Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. They received their prize from Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, during a nationally televised ceremony at Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, on 27 May 2002.
Makeba won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986, and in 2001 was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". She also received several honorary doctorates. In 2004, she was voted 38th in a poll ranking 100 Great South Africans.
Mama Africa, a musical about Makeba, was produced in South Africa by Niyi Coker. Originally titled Zenzi!, the musical premiered to a sold-out crowd in Cape Town on 26 May 2016. It was performed in the US in St. Louis, Missouri and at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City between October and December 2016. The musical returned to South Africa in February 2017 for what would have been Makeba's 85th birthday.
From 25 to 27 September 2009, a tribute television show to Makeba entitled Hommage à Miriam Makeba and curated by Beninoise singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo, was held at the Cirque d'hiver in Paris. The show was presented as Mama Africa: Celebrating Miriam Makeba at the Barbican in London on 21 November 2009. A documentary film titled Mama Africa, about Makeba's life, co-written and directed by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, was released in 2011. On 4 March 2013, and again on International Women's Day in 2017, Google honoured her with a Google Doodle on their homepage. In 2014 she was honoured (along with Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Steve Biko) in the Belgian city of Ghent, which named a square after her, the "Miriam Makebaplein". Makeba was named 1967's "woman of the year" by Time magazine in 2020, as one of a list of 100 "women of the year" for the years 1920–2019.
Notable songs and albums
This is a list of albums and songs, including covers, by Miriam Makeba that have received significant mention in commentary about her or about the musical and political movements she participated in.
Albums
Miriam Makeba (1960)
The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba (1962)
An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965)
Comme une symphonie d'amour (1979)
The Queen of African Music (1987)
Sangoma (1988)
Welela (1989)
Eyes on Tomorrow (1991)
Homeland (2000)
Songs
"Lakutshn, Ilanga"/Lovely Lies" (1956)
"Sophiatown is Gone"
"The Click Song" / "Mbube" (1963)
"Pata Pata" (1967)
"Lumumba" (1970)
"Malcolm X" (1974)
"Soweto Blues" (1977)
"Thula Sizwe/I Shall Be Released" (1991)
"Malaika"
See also
Culture of South Africa
Notes and references
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Miriam Makeba at National Public Radio
1932 births
2008 deaths
20th-century South African women singers
21st-century South African women singers
Anti-apartheid activists
FAO Goodwill ambassadors
Grammy Award winners
Heads Up International artists
Music in the movement against apartheid
Musicians who died on stage
Musicians from Johannesburg
South African actresses
South African exiles
South African people of Swazi descent
World music musicians
Wrasse Records artists
Xhosa people
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[
"Jackie Queens is a Zimbabwean-born singer and songwriter. Her music is a combination of House containing elements from deep house and Soulful house. She’s also the founder of Bae Electronica, a record label she launched to release her own music and also showcase other black women house musicians.\n\nEarly life and career\nJackie Queens was born in Zimbabwe. She has spent 12 years in South Africa where she developed her love for writing and performing.\n\nIn 2015, she released her single \"Conqueror\". The single caught the attention of the South African DJ, Black Coffee and became a prominent fixture on the DJ’s sets across the world. Explaining her single:\nCertainly the thought to make Conqueror official was not something I had in mind. At that time I was deeply questioning my path in music. Before anything else music, for me, is about community. You don’t make music or become who you are on your own. In the grand scheme of things it’s a belief system, it’s spiritual, and a channel for empowerment. Indeed Conqueror itself, and the trajectory of Enoo Napa’s Opaque Mix signifies all of those things for me.\n\nOn 19 September 2017, she released a three-track EP titled Women of House which featured vocalists Sió and Zipho, and formed part of her larger project of amplifying the voices of women in house music. \n\nIn 2018, she released her single \"Feel It\" produced by South African music producer Cornelius SA, which was nominated in the 2018 Dance Music Awards South Africa for Best House Record of the Year and Best EDM Record of the Year. She was also nominated for Best female vocalist of the Year at the 2018 Dance Music Awards South Africa and her single \"Mwanangu\" was nominated at the 24th South African Music Awards.\n\nIn April 2020, she was set to perform at the Boiler room in Johannesburg but the event was cancelled due to COVID-19.\n\nIn September 2020, she collaborated with South African producer Miz Dee on the EP Back To Us. The EP was released to highlight a message against the violence of women, ongoing femicide, and the global #MeToo and #TimesUp movements in South Africa where she provides platforms for artists who are unseen, and in doing so, fulfils a crucial role in the education of the South African dance music scene. She has been recognised by Resident Advisor on their 2021 Re-record list celebrating 120 Black artists in the past decade.\n\nShe has been featured on Kaya FM's Platinum Friday with T-Bose and has also performed in music festivals and venues such as the Red Bull Beyond The Sound on Red Bull TV in Johannesburg and Oppikoppi.\n\nAwards and nominations\n\nDiscography\nWomen of House (2017)\nBack To Us EP (2020)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n[https://www.discogs.com/artist/6736592-Jackie-Queens Jackie Queens on Discogs\n\nLiving people\n21st-century Zimbabwean women singers\n]\nYear of birth missing (living people)",
"Liezel Gouws (born 1998) is a South African female Paralympic athlete and a world record holder of 800m event under T37 classification for women (2:42.39) which was set in 2015 at Johannesburg, South Africa during the national Championships. She also competed in the 2016 Summer Paralympics. She was also part of team South Africa for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games where she finished fifth in the 400m final.\n\nBiography \nGouws was born in 1998 not as a disabled child in Klerksdorp. Gouws had to confront cerebral palsy which was resulted due to a stroke she had in 2004, when she was just five years old. She see her recovery process and abilities that she has today as miracle on miracle. There where doctors who gave her just two years to live. Currently she competed at three World Championships and two Paralympic Games for South Africa. She is also a Pharmacy student at the NWU.\n\nCareer \nLiezel Gouws started to involve in Para Athletics in 2012 and went on to make her international debut in 2013. She broke the world record for the 800m event under the T37 classification in 2015. In 2016, she was awarded the Para Sportswoman of the Year. She was part of team South Africa at the 2017 and 2019 World Championships as well. She competed at the 2016 and 2020 Paralympic Games as well.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Profile at Paralympic.org\n\n1998 births\nLiving people\nSouth African female middle-distance runners\nParalympic athletes of South Africa\nAthletes (track and field) at the 2016 Summer Paralympics"
] |
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"Miriam Makeba",
"Return to South Africa, final years and death",
"When did Makeba return to Aftrica?",
"He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.",
"Who persuaded Makeba to return to Africa?",
"Willem de Klerk",
"What did Makeba do upon her return to South Africa?",
"Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album,",
"What was the name of the album?",
"Eyes on Tomorrow,",
"What else did Makeba do while in South Africa?",
"Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it.",
"Was there anything else significant about her final years in South Africa?",
"On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations."
] |
C_be942cd9bfc84a1eb32a2739a1edbbc7_0
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Did she do anything else in the community?
| 7 |
Did Makeba do anything else in the community besides being named Goodwill ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations?
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Miriam Makeba
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Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990. Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina!, which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity". On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graca Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances. On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her. CANNOTANSWER
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She worked closely with Graca Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers,
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Zenzile Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 9 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.
Born in Johannesburg to Swazi and Xhosa parents, Makeba was forced to find employment as a child after the death of her father. She had a brief and allegedly abusive first marriage at the age of 17, gave birth to her only child in 1950, and survived breast cancer. Her vocal talent had been recognized when she was a child, and she began singing professionally in the 1950s, with the Cuban Brothers, the Manhattan Brothers, and an all-woman group, the Skylarks, performing a mixture of jazz, traditional African melodies, and Western popular music. In 1959, Makeba had a brief role in the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, which brought her international attention, and led to her performing in Venice, London, and New York City. In London, she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became a mentor and colleague. She moved to New York City, where she became immediately popular, and recorded her first solo album in 1960. Her attempt to return to South Africa that year for her mother's funeral was prevented by the country's government.
Makeba's career flourished in the United States, and she released several albums and songs, her most popular being "Pata Pata" (1967). Along with Belafonte she received a Grammy Award for her 1965 album An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. She testified against the South African government at the United Nations and became involved in the civil rights movement. She married Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther Party, in 1968. As a result, she lost support among white Americans. The US government cancelled her visa while she was travelling abroad, leading her and Carmichael to move to Guinea. She continued to perform, mostly in African countries, including at several independence celebrations. She began to write and perform music more explicitly critical of apartheid; the 1977 song "Soweto Blues", written by her former husband Hugh Masekela, was about the Soweto uprising. After apartheid was dismantled in 1990, Makeba returned to South Africa. She continued recording and performing, including a 1991 album with Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, and appeared in the 1992 film Sarafina!. She was named a UN goodwill ambassador in 1999, and campaigned for humanitarian causes. She died of a heart attack during a 2008 concert in Italy.
Makeba was among the first African musicians to receive worldwide recognition. She brought African music to a Western audience, and popularized the world music and Afropop genres. She also made popular several songs critical of apartheid, and became a symbol of opposition to the system, particularly after her right to return was revoked. Upon her death, former South African President Nelson Mandela said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Early years
Childhood and family
Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born on 4 March 1932 in the black township of Prospect, near Johannesburg. Her Swazi mother, Christina Makeba, was a sangoma, or traditional healer, and a domestic worker. Her Xhosa father, Caswell Makeba, was a teacher; he died when she was six years old. Makeba later said that before she was conceived, her mother had been warned that any future pregnancy could be fatal. Neither Miriam nor her mother seemed likely to survive after a difficult labour and delivery. Miriam's grandmother, who attended the birth, often muttered "uzenzile", a Xhosa word that means "you brought this on yourself", to Miriam's mother during her recovery, which inspired her to give her daughter the name "Zenzile".
When Makeba was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested and sentenced to a six-month prison term for selling umqombothi, a homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. The family could not afford the small fine required to avoid a jail term, and Miriam spent the first six months of her life in jail. As a child, Makeba sang in the choir of the Kilnerton Training Institute in Pretoria, an all-black Methodist primary school that she attended for eight years. Her talent for singing earned her praise at school. Makeba was baptised a Protestant, and sang in church choirs, in English, Xhosa, Sotho, and Zulu; she later said that she learned to sing in English before she could speak the language.
The family moved to the Transvaal when Makeba was a child. After her father's death, she was forced to find employment; she did domestic work, and worked as a nanny. She described herself as a shy person at the time. Her mother worked for white families in Johannesburg, and had to live away from her six children. Makeba lived for a while with her grandmother and a large number of cousins in Pretoria. Makeba was influenced by her family's musical tastes; her mother played several traditional instruments, and her elder brother collected records, including those of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and taught Makeba songs. Her father played the piano, and his musical inclination was later a factor in Makeba's family accepting what was seen as a risque choice of career.
In 1949, Makeba married James Kubay, a policeman in training, with whom she had her only child, Bongi Makeba, in 1950. Makeba was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband, who was said to have beaten her, left her shortly afterwards, after a two-year marriage. A decade later she overcame cervical cancer via a hysterectomy.
Early career
Makeba began her professional musical career with the Cuban Brothers, a South African all-male close harmony group, with whom she sang covers of popular American songs. Soon afterwards, at the age of 21, she joined a jazz group, the Manhattan Brothers, who sang a mixture of South African songs and pieces from popular African-American groups. Makeba was the only woman in the group. With the Manhattan Brothers she recorded her first hit, "Laku Tshoni Ilanga", in 1953, and developed a national reputation as a musician. In 1956 she joined a new all-woman group, the Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional South African melodies. Formed by Gallotone Records, the group was also known as the Sunbeams. Makeba sang with the Skylarks when the Manhattan Brothers were travelling abroad; later, she also travelled with the Manhattan Brothers. In the Skylarks, Makeba sang alongside Rhodesian-born musician Dorothy Masuka, whose music Makeba had followed, along with that of Dolly Rathebe. Several of the Skylarks' pieces from this period became popular; the music historian Rob Allingham later described the group as "real trendsetters, with harmonisation that had never been heard before." Makeba received no royalties from her work with the Skylarks.
While performing with the Manhattan Brothers in 1955, Makeba met Nelson Mandela, then a young lawyer; he later remembered the meeting, and that he felt that the girl he met "was going to be someone." In 1956, Gallotone Records released "Lovely Lies", Makeba's first solo success; the Xhosa lyric about a man looking for his beloved in jails and hospitals was replaced with the unrelated and innocuous line "You tell such lovely lies with your two lovely eyes" in the English version. The record became the first South African record to chart on the United States Billboard Top 100. In 1957, Makeba was featured on the cover of Drum magazine.
In 1959, Makeba sang the lead female role in the Broadway-inspired South African jazz opera King Kong; among those in the cast was the musician Hugh Masekela. The musical was performed to racially integrated audiences, raising her profile among white South Africans. Also in 1959, she had a short guest appearance in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film produced and directed by the American independent filmmaker Lionel Rogosin. Rogosin cast her after seeing her on stage in African Jazz and Variety show, on which Makeba was a performer for 18 months. The film blended elements of documentary and fiction and had to be filmed in secret as the government was expected to be hostile to it. Makeba appeared on stage, and sang two songs: her appearance lasted four minutes. The cameo made an enormous impression on viewers, and Rogosin organised a visa for her to attend the premiere of the film at the twenty-fourth Venice Film Festival in Italy, where the film won the prestigious Critics' Choice Award. Makeba's presence has been described as crucial to the film, as an emblem of cosmopolitan black identity that also connected with working-class black people due to the dialogue being in Zulu.
Makeba's role in Come Back, Africa brought her international recognition and she travelled to London and New York to perform. In London she met the American singer Harry Belafonte, who became her mentor, helping her with her first solo recordings. These included "Pata Pata", which would be released many years later, and a version of the traditional Xhosa song "Qongqothwane", which she had first performed with the Skylarks. Though "Pata Pata"—described by Musician magazine as a "groundbreaking Afropop gem"—became her most famous song, Makeba described it as "one of my most insignificant songs". While in England, she married Sonny Pillay, a South African ballad singer of Indian descent; they divorced within a few months.
Makeba then moved to New York, making her US music debut on 1 November 1959 on The Steve Allen Show in Los Angeles for a television audience of 60 million. Her New York debut at the Village Vanguard occurred soon after; she sang in Xhosa and Zulu, and performed a Yiddish folk song. Her audience at this concert included Miles Davis and Duke Ellington; her performance received strongly positive reviews from critics. She first came to popular and critical attention in jazz clubs, after which her reputation grew rapidly. Belafonte, who had helped Makeba with her move to the US, handled the logistics for her first performances. When she first moved to the US, Makeba lived in Greenwich Village, along with other musicians and actors. As was common in her profession, she experienced some financial insecurity, and worked as a babysitter for a period.
Exile
United States
Breakthrough
Soon after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Makeba learned that her mother had died. When she tried to return home for the funeral, she found that her South African passport had been cancelled. Two of Makeba's family members were killed in the massacre. The incident left her concerned about her family, many of whom were still in South Africa, including her daughter: the nine-year-old Bongi joined her mother in the US in August 1960. During her first few years in the US, Makeba had rarely sung explicitly political music, but her popularity had led to an increase in awareness of apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement. Following the Sharpeville killings, Makeba felt a responsibility to help, as she had been able to leave the country while others had not. From this point, she became an increasingly outspoken critic of apartheid and the white-minority government; before the massacre, she had taken care to avoid overtly political statements in South Africa.
Her musical career in the US continued to flourish. She signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, and released Miriam Makeba, her first studio album, in 1960, backed by Belafonte's band. RCA Victor chose to buy out Makeba's contract with Gallotone Records, and despite the fact that Makeba was unable to perform in South Africa, Gallotone received US$45,000 in the deal, which meant that Makeba received no royalties for her debut album. The album included one of her most famous hits in the US, "Qongqothwane", which was known in English as "The Click Song" because Makeba's audiences could not pronounce the Xhosa name. Time magazine called her the "most exciting new singing talent to appear in many years", and Newsweek compared her voice to "the smoky tones and delicate phrasing" of Ella Fitzgerald and the "intimate warmth" of Frank Sinatra. The album was not commercially successful, and Makeba was briefly dropped from RCA Victor: she was re-signed soon after as the label recognised the commercial possibilities of the growing interest in African culture. Her South African identity had been downplayed during her first signing, but it was strongly emphasised the second time to take advantage of this interest. Makeba made several appearances on television, often in the company of Belafonte. In 1962, Makeba and Belafonte sang at the birthday party for US President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, but Makeba did not go to the party afterwards because she was ill. Kennedy nevertheless insisted on meeting her, so Belafonte sent a car to pick her up.
In 1964, Makeba released her second studio album for RCA Victor, The World of Miriam Makeba. An early example of world music, the album peaked at number eighty-six on the Billboard 200. Makeba's music had a cross-racial appeal in the US; white Americans were attracted to her image as an "exotic" African performer, and black Americans related their own experiences of racial segregation to Makeba's struggle against apartheid. Makeba found company among other African exiles and émigrés in New York, including Hugh Masekela, to whom she was married from 1963 to 1968. During their marriage, Makeba and Masekela were neighbours of the jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie in Englewood, New Jersey; they spent much of their time in Harlem. She also came to know actors Marlon Brando and Lauren Bacall, and musicians Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles. Fellow singer-activist Nina Simone became friendly with Makeba, as did actor Cicely Tyson; Makeba and Simone performed together at Carnegie Hall. Makeba was among black entertainers, activists, and intellectuals in New York at the time who believed that the civil rights movement and popular culture could reinforce each other, creating "a sense of intertwined political and cultural vibrancy"; other examples included Maya Angelou and Sidney Poitier. She later described her difficulty living with racial segregation, saying "There wasn't much difference in America; it was a country that had abolished slavery but there was apartheid in its own way."
Travel and activism
Makeba's music was also popular in Europe, and she travelled and performed there frequently. Acting on the advice of Belafonte, she added songs from Latin America, Europe, Israel, and elsewhere in Africa to her repertoire. She visited Kenya in 1962 in support of the country's independence from British colonial rule, and raised funds for its independence leader Jomo Kenyatta. Later that year she testified before the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid about the effects of the system, asking for economic sanctions against South Africa's National Party government. She requested an arms embargo against South Africa, on the basis that weapons sold to the government would likely be used against black women and children. As a result, her music was banned in South Africa, and her South African citizenship and right to return were revoked. Makeba thus became a stateless person, but she was soon issued passports by Algeria, Guinea, Belgium and Ghana. In her life, she held nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship in ten countries.
Soon after her testimony, Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, invited her to sing at the inauguration of the Organisation of African Unity, the only performer to be invited. As the fact of her ban from South Africa became well known she became a cause célèbre for Western liberals, and her presence in the civil rights movement provided a link between that movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. In 1964 she was taught the song "Malaika" by a Kenyan student while backstage at a performance in San Francisco; the song later became a staple of her performances.
Throughout the 1960s, Makeba strengthened her involvement with a range of black-centred political movements, including the civil rights, anti-apartheid, Black Consciousness, and Black Power movements. She briefly met the Trinidadian-American activist Stokely Carmichael—the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a prominent figure in the Black Panther Party—after Belafonte invited him to one of Makeba's concerts; they met again in Conakry six years later. They entered a relationship, initially kept secret from all but their closest friends and family. Makeba participated in fundraising activities for various civil rights groups, including a benefit concert for the 1962 Southern Christian Leadership Conference that civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the "event of the year". Following a concert and rally in Atlanta in support of King, Makeba and others were denied entrance to a restaurant as a result of Jim Crow laws, leading to a televised protest in front of the establishment. She also criticised King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its investment in South African companies, informing press that "Now my friend of long standing supports the country's persecution of my people and I must find a new idol". Her identity as an African woman in the civil rights movement helped create "an emerging liberal consensus" that extreme racial discrimination, whether domestically or internationally, was harmful. In 1964 she testified at the UN for a second time, quoting a song by Vanessa Redgrave in calling for quick action against the South African government.
On 15 March 1966, Makeba and Belafonte received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid, including several songs critical of the South African government, such as "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" ("Watch our Verwoerd", a reference to Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid). It sold widely and raised Makeba's profile in the US; Belafonte and Makeba's concert tour following its release was often sold out, and the album has been described as the best they made together. Makeba's use of lyrics in Swahili, Xhosa, and Sotho led to her being seen as a representation of an "authentic" Africa by American audiences. In 1967, more than ten years after she first recorded the song, the single "Pata Pata" was released in the US on an album of the same title, and became a worldwide hit. During its recording, she and Belafonte had a disagreement, after which they stopped recording together.
Guinea
Makeba married Carmichael in March 1968; this caused her popularity in the US to decline markedly. Conservatives came to regard her as a militant and an extremist, an image that alienated much of her fanbase. Her performances were cancelled and her coverage in the press declined despite her efforts to portray her marriage as apolitical. White American audiences stopped supporting her, and the US government took an interest in her activities. The Central Intelligence Agency began following her, and placed hidden microphones in her apartment; the Federal Bureau of Investigation also placed her under surveillance. While she and her husband were travelling in the Bahamas, she was banned from returning to the US, and was refused a visa. As a result, the couple moved to Guinea, where Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Touré. Makeba did not return to the US until 1987.
Guinea remained Makeba's home for the next 15 years, and she and her husband became close to President Ahmed Sékou Touré and his wife, Andrée. Touré wanted to create a new style of African music, creating his own record label Syliphone for this purpose, and all musicians received a minimum wage if they practised for several hours every day. Makeba later stated that "I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists." After her rejection from the US she began to write music more directly critical of the US government's racial policies, recording and singing songs such as "Lumumba" in 1970 (referring to Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated Prime Minister of the Congo), and "Malcolm X" in 1974.
Makeba performed more frequently in African countries, and as countries became independent of European colonial powers, was invited to sing at independence ceremonies, including in Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanganyika, and Mozambique. In September 1974 she performed alongside a multitude of well-known African and American musicians at the Zaire 74 festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (formerly the Congo). She also became a diplomat for Ghana, and was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the UN in 1975; that year, she addressed the United Nations General Assembly. She continued to perform in Europe and Asia, as well as her African concerts, but not in the US, where a de facto boycott was in effect. Her performances in Africa were immensely popular: she was described as the highlight of FESTAC 77, a Pan-African arts festival in Nigeria in 1977, and during a Liberian performance of "Pata Pata", the stadium proved so loud that she was unable to complete the song. "Pata Pata", like her other songs, had been banned in South Africa. Another song she sang frequently in this period was "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", though she never recorded it. Makeba later stated that it was during this period that she accepted the label "Mama Africa".
In 1976, the South African government replaced English with Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all schools, setting off the Soweto uprising. Between 15,000 and 20,000 students took part; caught unprepared, the police opened fire on the protesting children, killing hundreds and injuring more than a thousand. Hugh Masekela wrote "Soweto Blues" in response to the massacre, and the song was performed by Makeba, becoming a staple of her live performances for many years. A review in the magazine Musician said that the song had "searingly righteous lyrics" about the uprising that "cut to the bone". She had separated from Carmichael in 1973; in 1978 they divorced and in 1981 she married Bageot Bah, an airline executive.
Belgium
Makeba's daughter Bongi, who was a singer in her own right and had often accompanied her mother on stage, died in childbirth in 1985. Makeba was left responsible for her two grandchildren, and decided to move out of Guinea. She settled in the Woluwe-Saint-Lambert district of the Belgian capital Brussels. In the following year, Masekela introduced Makeba to Paul Simon, and a few months later she embarked on Simon's very successful Graceland Tour. The tour concluded with two concerts held in Harare, Zimbabwe, which were filmed in 1987 for release as Graceland: The African Concert. After touring the world with Simon, Warner Bros. Records signed Makeba and she released Sangoma ("Healer"), an album of healing chants named in honour of her sangoma mother. Her involvement with Simon caused controversy: Graceland had been recorded in South Africa, breaking the cultural boycott of the country, and thus Makeba's participation in the tour was regarded as contravening the boycott (which Makeba herself endorsed).
In preparation for the Graceland tour, she worked with journalist James Hall to write an autobiography titled Makeba: My Story. The book contained descriptions of her experience with apartheid, and was also critical of the commodification and consumerism she experienced in the US. The book was translated into five languages. She took part in the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, a popular-music concert staged on 11 June 1988 at London's Wembley Stadium, and broadcast to an audience of 600 million across 67 countries. Political aspects of the concert were heavily censored in the US by the Fox television network. The use of music to raise awareness of apartheid paid off: a survey after the concert found that among people aged between 16 and 24, three-quarters knew of Mandela, and supported his release from prison.
Return to South Africa, final years and death
Following growing pressure from the anti-apartheid movement both domestically and internationally, in 1990 State President Frederik Willem de Klerk reversed the ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid organisations, and announced that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Mandela was released in February 1990. He persuaded Makeba to return to South Africa, which she did, using her French passport, on 10 June 1990.
Makeba, Gillespie, Simone, and Masekela recorded and released her studio album, Eyes on Tomorrow, in 1991. It combined jazz, R&B, pop, and traditional African music, and was a hit across Africa. Makeba and Gillespie then toured the world together to promote it. In November she made a guest appearance on a US sitcom, The Cosby Show. In 1992, she starred in the film Sarafina! which centred on students involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. Makeba portrayed the title character's mother, Angelina, a role which The New York Times described as having been performed with "immense dignity".
On 16 October 1999, Makeba was named a Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by the New York City based record label Putumayo World Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category. She worked closely with Graça Machel-Mandela, the South African first lady, advocating for children suffering from HIV/AIDS, child soldiers, and the physically handicapped. She established the Makeba Centre for Girls, a home for orphans, described in an obituary as her most personal project. She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, which examined the struggles of black South Africans against apartheid through the music of the period. Makeba's second autobiography, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story, was published in 2004. In 2005 she announced that she would retire and began a farewell tour, but despite having osteoarthritis, continued to perform until her death. During this period, her grandchildren Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Lee, and her great-grandchild Lindelani, occasionally joined her performances.
On 9 November 2008, Makeba fell ill during a concert in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy. The concert had been organised to support the writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a criminal organisation active in the Campania region. She suffered a heart attack after singing her hit song "Pata Pata", and was taken to the Pineta Grande clinic, where doctors were unable to revive her.
Music and image
Musical style
The groups with which Makeba began her career performed mbube, a style of vocal harmony which drew on American jazz, ragtime, and Anglican church hymns, as well as indigenous styles of music. Johannesburg musician Dolly Rathebe was an early influence on Makeba's music, as were female jazz singers from the US. Historian David Coplan writes that the "African jazz" made popular by Makeba and others was "inherently hybridized" rather than derivative of any particular genre, blending as it did marabi and jazz, and was "Americanized African music, not Africanized American music". The music that she performed was described by British writer Robin Denselow as a "unique blend of rousing township styles and jazz-influenced balladry".
Makeba released more than 30 albums during her career. The dominant styles of these shifted over time, moving from African jazz to recordings influenced by Belafonte's "crooning" to music drawing from traditional South African musical forms. She has been associated with the genres of world music and Afropop. She also incorporated Latin American musical styles into her performances. Historian Ruth Feldstein described her music as "[crossing] the borders between what many people associated with avant-garde and 'quality' culture and the commercial mainstream"; the latter aspect often drew criticism. She was able to appeal to audiences from many political, racial, and national backgrounds.
She was known for having a dynamic vocal range, and was described as having an emotional awareness during her performances. She occasionally danced during her shows, and was described as having a sensuous presence on stage. She was able to vary her voice considerably: an obituary remarked that she "could soar like an opera singer, but she could also whisper, roar, hiss, growl and shout. She could sing while making the epiglottal clicks of the Xhosa language." She sang in English and several African languages, but never in Afrikaans, the language of the apartheid government in South Africa. She once stated "When Afrikaaners sing in my language, then I will sing theirs." English was seen as the language of political resistance by black South Africans due to the educational barriers they faced under apartheid; the Manhattan Brothers, with whom Makeba had sung in Sophiatown, had been prohibited from recording in English. Her songs in African languages have been described as reaffirming black pride.
Politics and perception
Makeba said that she did not perform political music, but music about her personal life in South Africa, which included describing the pain she felt living under apartheid. She once stated "people say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth", an example of the mixing of personal and political issues for musicians living during apartheid. When she first entered the US, she avoided discussing apartheid explicitly, partly out of concern for her family still in South Africa. Nonetheless, she is known for using her voice to convey the political message of opposition to apartheid, performing widely and frequently for civil rights and anti-apartheid organisations. Even songs that did not carry an explicitly political message were seen as subversive, due to their being banned in South Africa. Makeba saw her music as a tool of activism, saying "In our struggle, songs are not simply entertainment for us. They are the way we communicate."
Makeba's use of the clicks common in languages such as Xhosa and Zulu (as in "Qongqothwane", "The Click Song") was frequently remarked upon by Western audiences. It contributed to her popularity and her exotic image, which scholars have described as a kind of othering, exacerbated by the fact that Western audiences often could not understand her lyrics. Critics in the US described her as the "African tribeswoman" and as an "import from South Africa", often depicting her in condescending terms as a product of a more primitive society. Commentators also frequently described her in terms of the prominent men she was associated with, despite her own prominence. During her early career in South Africa she had been seen as a sex symbol, an image that received considerably less attention in the US.
Makeba was described as a style icon, both in her home country and the US. She wore no makeup and refused to straighten her hair for shows, thus helping establish a style that came to be known internationally as the "Afro look". According to music scholar Tanisha Ford, her hairstyle represented a "liberated African beauty aesthetic". She was seen as a beauty icon by South African schoolgirls, who were compelled to shorten their hair by the apartheid government. Makeba stuck to wearing African jewellery; she disapproved of the skin-lighteners commonly used by South African women at the time, and refused to appear in advertisements for them. Her self-presentation has been characterised by scholars as a rejection of the predominantly white standards of beauty that women in the US were held to, which allowed Makeba to partially escape the sexualisation directed at women performers during this period. Nonetheless, the terms used to describe her in the US media have been identified by scholars as frequently used to "sexualize, infantalize, and animalize" people of African heritage.
Legacy
Musical influence
Makeba was among the most visible Africans in the US; as a result, she was often emblematic of the continent of Africa for Americans. Her music earned her the moniker "Mama Africa", and she was variously described as the "Empress of African Song", the "Queen of South African music", and Africa's "first superstar". Music scholar J. U. Jacobs said that Makeba's music had "both been shaped by and given shape to black South African and American music". The jazz musician Abbey Lincoln is among those identified as being influenced by Makeba. Makeba and Simone were among a group of artists who helped shape soul music. Longtime collaborator Belafonte called her "the most revolutionary new talent to appear in any medium in the last decade". Speaking after her death, Mandela called her "South Africa's first lady of song", and said that "her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Outside her home country Makeba was credited with bringing African music to a Western audience, and along with artists such as Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Baaba Maal and Angélique Kidjo, with popularising the genre of world music. Her work with Belafonte in the 1960s has been described as creating the genre of world music before the concept entered the popular imagination, and also as highlighting the diversity and cultural pluralism within African music. Within South Africa, Makeba has been described as influencing artists such as kwaito musician Thandiswa Mazwai and her band Bongo Maffin, whose track "De Makeba" was a modified version of Makeba's "Pata Pata", and one of several tribute recordings released after her return to South Africa. South African jazz musician Simphiwe Dana has been described as "the new Miriam Makeba". South African singer Lira has frequently been compared with Makeba, particularly for her performance of "Pata Pata" during the opening ceremony of the 2010 Football World Cup. A year later, Kidjo dedicated her concert in New York to Makeba, as a musician who had "paved the way for her success". In an obituary, scholar Lara Allen referred to Makeba as "arguably South Africa's most famous musical export". In 2016 the French singer Jain released "Makeba", a tribute.
Activism
Makeba was among the most visible people campaigning against the apartheid system in South Africa, and was responsible for popularising several anti-apartheid songs, including "Meadowlands" by Strike Vilakezi and "Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd" (Watch out, Verwoerd) by Vuyisile Mini. Due to her high profile, she became a spokesperson of sorts for Africans living under oppressive governments, and in particular for black South Africans living under apartheid. When the South African government prevented her from entering her home country, she became a symbol of "apartheid's cruelty", and she used her position as a celebrity by testifying against apartheid before the UN in 1962 and 1964. Many of her songs were banned within South Africa, leading to Makeba's records being distributed underground, and even her apolitical songs being seen as subversive. She thus became a symbol of resistance to the white-minority government both within and outside South Africa. In an interview in 2000, Masekela said that "there [was] nobody in Africa who made the world more aware of what was happening in South Africa than Miriam Makeba."
Makeba has also been associated with the movement against colonialism, with the civil rights and black power movements in the US, and with the Pan-African movement. She called for unity between black people of African descent across the world: "Africans who live everywhere should fight everywhere. The struggle is no different in South Africa, the streets of Chicago, Trinidad or Canada. The Black people are the victims of capitalism, racism and oppression, period". After marrying Carmichael she often appeared with him during his speeches; Carmichael later described her presence at these events as an asset, and Feldstein wrote that Makeba enhanced Carmichael's message that "black is beautiful". Along with performers such as Simone, Lena Horne, and Abbey Lincoln, she used her position as a prominent musician to advocate for civil rights. Their activism has been described as simultaneously calling attention to racial and gender disparities, and highlighting "that the liberation they desired could not separate race from sex". Makeba's critique of second-wave feminism as being the product of luxury led to observers being unwilling to call her a feminist. Scholar Ruth Feldstein stated that Makeba and others influenced both black feminism and second-wave feminism through their advocacy, and the historian Jacqueline Castledine referred to her as one of the "most steadfast voices for social justice".
Awards and recognition
Makeba's 1965 collaboration with Harry Belafonte won a Grammy Award, making her the first African recording artist to win this award. Makeba shared the 2001 Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. They received their prize from Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, during a nationally televised ceremony at Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, on 27 May 2002.
Makeba won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986, and in 2001 was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". She also received several honorary doctorates. In 2004, she was voted 38th in a poll ranking 100 Great South Africans.
Mama Africa, a musical about Makeba, was produced in South Africa by Niyi Coker. Originally titled Zenzi!, the musical premiered to a sold-out crowd in Cape Town on 26 May 2016. It was performed in the US in St. Louis, Missouri and at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City between October and December 2016. The musical returned to South Africa in February 2017 for what would have been Makeba's 85th birthday.
From 25 to 27 September 2009, a tribute television show to Makeba entitled Hommage à Miriam Makeba and curated by Beninoise singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo, was held at the Cirque d'hiver in Paris. The show was presented as Mama Africa: Celebrating Miriam Makeba at the Barbican in London on 21 November 2009. A documentary film titled Mama Africa, about Makeba's life, co-written and directed by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, was released in 2011. On 4 March 2013, and again on International Women's Day in 2017, Google honoured her with a Google Doodle on their homepage. In 2014 she was honoured (along with Nelson Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Steve Biko) in the Belgian city of Ghent, which named a square after her, the "Miriam Makebaplein". Makeba was named 1967's "woman of the year" by Time magazine in 2020, as one of a list of 100 "women of the year" for the years 1920–2019.
Notable songs and albums
This is a list of albums and songs, including covers, by Miriam Makeba that have received significant mention in commentary about her or about the musical and political movements she participated in.
Albums
Miriam Makeba (1960)
The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba (1962)
An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba (1965)
Comme une symphonie d'amour (1979)
The Queen of African Music (1987)
Sangoma (1988)
Welela (1989)
Eyes on Tomorrow (1991)
Homeland (2000)
Songs
"Lakutshn, Ilanga"/Lovely Lies" (1956)
"Sophiatown is Gone"
"The Click Song" / "Mbube" (1963)
"Pata Pata" (1967)
"Lumumba" (1970)
"Malcolm X" (1974)
"Soweto Blues" (1977)
"Thula Sizwe/I Shall Be Released" (1991)
"Malaika"
See also
Culture of South Africa
Notes and references
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Miriam Makeba at National Public Radio
1932 births
2008 deaths
20th-century South African women singers
21st-century South African women singers
Anti-apartheid activists
FAO Goodwill ambassadors
Grammy Award winners
Heads Up International artists
Music in the movement against apartheid
Musicians who died on stage
Musicians from Johannesburg
South African actresses
South African exiles
South African people of Swazi descent
World music musicians
Wrasse Records artists
Xhosa people
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"\"If You Can Do Anything Else\" is a song written by Billy Livsey and Don Schlitz, and recorded by American country music artist George Strait. It was released in February 2001 as the third and final single from his self-titled album. The song reached number 5 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart in July 2001. It also peaked at number 51 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.\n\nContent\nThe song is about man who is giving his woman the option to leave him. He gives her many different options for all the things she can do. At the end he gives her the option to stay with him if she really can’t find anything else to do. He says he will be alright if she leaves, but really it seems he wants her to stay.\n\nChart performance\n\"If You Can Do Anything Else\" debuted at number 60 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks for the week of March 3, 2001.\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n2001 singles\n2000 songs\nGeorge Strait songs\nSongs written by Billy Livsey\nSongs written by Don Schlitz\nSong recordings produced by Tony Brown (record producer)\nMCA Nashville Records singles",
"Lorraine Crosby (born 27 November 1960) is an English singer and songwriter. She was the female vocalist on Meat Loaf's 1993 hit single \"I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)\". Her debut album, Mrs Loud was released in 2008.\n\nEarly life\nCrosby was born in Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne. Her father died in a road accident when his car collided with a bus when she was two years old, leaving her mother to raise Lorraine, her two sisters, and one brother. She attended Walker Comprehensive school. She sang in school and church choirs and played the violin in the orchestra, but did not start singing professionally until she was 20.\n\nWork with Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman\nInspired by Tina Turner, Crosby searched the noticeboard for bands wanting singers at the guitar shop Rock City in Newcastle. After joining several bands she set up a five-piece cabaret band which toured extensively, playing to British and American servicemen throughout the early 1980s.\n\nBack in Newcastle, she met Stuart Emerson, who was looking for a singer for his band. They began writing together, and also became a couple. In the early 1990s, Crosby sent songwriter and producer Jim Steinman some demos of songs she had written with Emerson. Steinman asked to meet them so they decided to move to New York. They then followed Steinman after he moved to Los Angeles. Steinman became their manager and secured them a contract with Meat Loaf's recording label MCA. While visiting the label's recording studios on Sunset Boulevard, Crosby was asked to provide guide vocals for Meat Loaf, who was recording the song \"I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)\". Cher, Melissa Etheridge and Bonnie Tyler were considered for the role. The song was a commercial success, becoming number one in 28 countries. However, as Crosby had recorded her part as guide vocals, she did not receive any payment for the recording but she receives royalties from PRS, and so the credit \"Mrs. Loud\" was used on the album. Also, Crosby did not appear in the Michael Bay-directed music video, where model Dana Patrick mimed her vocals. Meat Loaf promoted the single with American vocalist Patti Russo performing the live female vocals of this song at his promotional appearances and concerts. Crosby also sang additional and backing vocals on the songs \"Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back\", \"Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are\", and \"Everything Louder Than Everything Else\" from the album Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell. On these three selections, she was credited under her real name rather than the alias of Mrs. Loud.\n\nSolo work\nCrosby regularly performed at holiday camps and social clubs in England until April 2005 when she took a break from live work.\n\nIn 2005, she sang a duet with Bonnie Tyler for the track \"I'll Stand by You\" from the album Wings. The song was written and composed by Stuart Emerson about Crosby's and Tyler's relationship. Also in 2005, Crosby appeared as a contestant on ITV's The X Factor. She performed \"You've Got a Friend\" and progressed to the second round after impressing judges Louis Walsh and Sharon Osbourne but Simon Cowell expressed doubt saying she \"lacked star quality.\"\n\nCrosby returned to live performances in April 2007. In November 2007, she appeared on the BBC Three television show Most Annoying Pop Songs We Hate to Love discussing the Meat Loaf track \"I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)\" which featured at No. 76.\n\nIn November 2008, Crosby appeared at Newcastle City Hall with special guest Bonnie Tyler to launch her self-produced album entitled Mrs Loud. The concert was later repeated in March 2011. In April 2009, she was also featured on The Justin Lee Collins Show and performed a duet with Justin, singing the Meat Loaf song \"Dead Ringer for Love\". She also performed \"I'd Do Anything for Love\" with Tim Healy for Sunday for Sammy in 2012.\n\nCrosby performs in cabaret shows with her band along with her partner Stuart Emerson.\n\nCrosby appeared in the first round of BBC's second series of The Voice on 6 April 2013. She failed to progress when she was rejected by all four coaches.\n\nOther work\nIn the mid-1990s, Crosby appeared as an extra in several television series episodes.\n\nIn 2019, she joined Steve Steinman Productions in the show Steve Steinman's Anything for Love which toured the UK during 2019 and 2020, performing hits such as \"Good Girls Go to Heaven\", \"Holding Out for a Hero\" and dueting with Steinman on \"What About Love\" and \"I'd Do Anything for Love\", amongst others.\n\nIn 2020, she released a duet with Bonnie Tyler, \"Through Thick and Thin (I'll Stand by You)\" as a charity single in aid of the charity Teenage Cancer Trust.\n\nDiscography\nCrosby has provided backing vocals on Bonnie Tyler's albums Free Spirit (1995) and Wings (2005).\n\nStudio albums\n Mrs Loud (2008)\n\nSingles\n \"I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)\" (with Meat Loaf) (1993)\n \"Through Thick and Thin (I'll Stand by You)\" (with Bonnie Tyler) (2020)\n\nOther recordings\n \"I'll Stand by You\" (with Bonnie Tyler) (2005)\n \"Double Take\" (with Frankie Miller) (2018)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n \n\n1960 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Newcastle upon Tyne (district)\nThe Voice UK contestants\n21st-century English women singers"
] |
[
"Captain Beefheart",
"Mirror Man"
] |
C_62dc9c09bb4e4c4c88ce70a1c9567957_0
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What was mirror man?
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What was Captain Beefheart's mirror man?
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Captain Beefheart
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In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in "...one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues-rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series. During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, the group was permitted to re-enter the UK, when they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel on Saturday January 20. By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France. Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later. CANNOTANSWER
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In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man,
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Don Van Vliet (; born Don Glen Vliet; January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. Conducting a rotating ensemble called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, known separately as "The Magic Band", he recorded 13 studio albums between 1964 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, and his wide vocal range. Known for his enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians. Although he achieved little commercial success, he sustained a cult following as a "highly significant" and "incalculable" influence on an array of new wave, punk, and experimental rock artists.
An artistic prodigy in his childhood, Van Vliet developed an eclectic musical taste during his teen years in Lancaster, California, and formed "a mutually useful but volatile" friendship with musician Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated. He began performing with his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964 and joined the original Magic Band line-up, initiated by Alexis Snouffer, the same year. The group released their debut album Safe as Milk in 1967 on Buddah Records. After being dropped by two consecutive record labels they signed to Zappa's Straight Records, where they released 1969's Trout Mask Replica; the album would later rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1974, frustrated by lack of commercial success, he pursued a more conventional rock sound, but the ensuing albums were critically panned; this move, combined with not having been paid for a European tour, and years of enduring Beefheart's abusive behavior, led the entire band to quit.
Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982). Van Vliet made few public appearances after his retirement from music in 1982. He pursued a career in art, an interest that originated in his childhood talent for sculpture, and a venture which proved to be his most financially secure. His expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world. Van Vliet died in 2010, having suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years.
Biography
Early life and musical influences, 1941–62
Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner of Dutch ancestry from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet (née Warfield), who was from Arkansas. He said that he was descended from Peter van Vliet, a Dutch painter who knew Rembrandt. Van Vliet also said that he was related to adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and cowboy actor Slim Pickens, and he said that he remembered being born.
Van Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three. His subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs. At the age of nine, he won a children's sculpting competition organised for the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park by a local tutor, Agostinho Rodrigues. Local newspaper cuttings of his junior sculpting achievements can be found reproduced in the Splinters book, included in the Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh boxed CD work, released in 2004. The sprawling park, with its zoo and observatory, had a strong influence on young Vliet, as it was a short distance from his home on Waverly Drive. The track "Observatory Crest" on Bluejeans & Moonbeams reflects this continued interest. A portrait photo of school-age Vliet can be seen on the front of the lyric sheet within the first issue of the US release of Trout Mask Replica.
For some time during the 1950s, Van Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a child prodigy. Van Vliet said that he was a lecturer at the Barnsdall Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven, although it is likely he simply gave a form of artistic dissertation. Accounts of Van Vliet's precocious achievement in art often include his statement that he sculpted on a weekly television show. He said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, based upon their perception of artists as "queer". They declined several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture. Van Vliet later admitted personal hesitation to take the scholarship based upon the bitterness of his parents' discouragement.
Van Vliet's artistic enthusiasm became so fervent, he said that his parents were forced to feed him through the door in the room where he sculpted. When he was thirteen the family moved from the Los Angeles area to the more remote farming town of Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, where there was a growing aerospace industry supported by nearby Edwards Air Force Base. It was an environment that would greatly influence him creatively from then on. Van Vliet remained interested in art; several of his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline were later used as front covers for his music albums. Meanwhile, he developed his taste and interest in music, listening "intensively" to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, and the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. During his early teenage years, Vliet would sometimes socialize with members of local bands such as the Omens and the Blackouts, although his interests were still focused upon an art career. The Omens' guitarists Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley would later become founders of "the Magic Band" and the Blackouts' drummer, Frank Zappa, would later capture Vliet's vocal capabilities on record for the first time. This first known recording, when he was simply "Don Vliet", is "Lost In A Whirlpool" – one of Zappa's early "field recordings" made in his college classroom with brother Bobby on guitar. It is featured on Zappa's posthumously released The Lost Episodes (1996).
Van Vliet said that he never attended public school, alleging "half a day of kindergarten" to be the extent of his formal education and saying that "if you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school". His associates said that he only dropped out during his senior year of high school to help support the family after his father's heart attack. His graduation picture appears in the school's yearbook. His statements that he never attended school – and his general disavowals of education – may have been related to his experience of dyslexia which, although never officially diagnosed, was obvious to sidemen such as John French and Denny Walley, who observed his difficulty reading cue-cards on stage, and his frequent need to be read aloud to. While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, Van Vliet became close friends with fellow teenager Frank Zappa, the pair bonding through their interest in Chicago blues and R&B. Van Vliet is portrayed in both The Real Frank Zappa Book and Barry Miles' biography Zappa as fairly spoiled at this stage of his life, the center of attention as an only child. He spent most of his time locked in his room listening to records, often with Zappa, into the early hours in the morning, eating leftover food from his father's Helms bread truck and demanding that his mother bring him a Pepsi. His parents tolerated such behavior under the belief that their child was truly gifted. Vliet's "Pepsi-moods" were ever a source of amusement to band members, leading Zappa to later write the wry tune "Why Doesn't Someone Give Him A Pepsi?" that featured on the Bongo Fury tour.
After Zappa began regular occupation at Paul Buff's PAL Studio in Cucamonga he and Van Vliet began collaborating, tentatively as the Soots (pronounced "suits"). By the time Zappa had turned the venue into Studio Z the duo had completed some songs. These were Cheryl's Canon, Metal Man Has Won His Wings and a Howlin' Wolf styled rendition of Little Richard's Slippin' and Slidin'. Further songs, on Zappa's Mystery Disc (1996), I Was a Teen-Age Malt Shop and The Birth of Captain Beefheart also provide an insight to Zappa's "teenage movie" script titled Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People, the first appearances of the Beefheart name. It has been suggested this name came from a term used by Vliet's Uncle Alan who had a habit of exposing himself to Don's girlfriend, Laurie Stone. He would urinate with the bathroom door open and, if she was walking by, would mumble about his penis, saying "Ahh, what a beauty! It looks just like a big, fine beef heart". In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Van Vliet requests "don't ask me why or how" he and Zappa came up with the name. Johnny Carson also asked him the same question to which Van Vliet replied that one day he was standing on the pier and saw fishermen cutting the bills off pelicans. He said it made him sad and put "a beef in his heart". Carson appeared nervous and uncomfortable interviewing Van Vliet and after the next commercial break Van Vliet was gone. He would later say in an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman that the name referred to "a beef in my heart against this society". In the "Grunt People" draft script Beefheart and his mother play themselves, with his father played by Howlin' Wolf. Grace Slick is penned in as a "celestial seductress" and there are also roles for future Magic Band members Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston.
Van Vliet enrolled at Antelope Valley College as an art major, but decided to leave the following year. He once worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, and sold a vacuum cleaner to the writer Aldous Huxley at his home in Llano, pointing to it and declaring, "Well I assure you sir, this thing sucks." After managing a Kinney's shoe store, Van Vliet relocated to Rancho Cucamonga, California, to reconnect with Zappa, who inspired his entry into musical performance. Van Vliet was quite shy but was eventually able to imitate the deep voice of Howlin' Wolf with his wide vocal range. He eventually grew comfortable with public performance and, after learning to play the harmonica, began playing at dances and small clubs in Southern California.
Initial recordings, 1962–69
In early 1965 Alex Snouffer, a Lancaster rhythm and blues guitarist, invited Vliet to sing with a group that he was assembling. Vliet joined the first Magic Band and changed his name to Don Van Vliet, while Snouffer became Alex St. Clair (sometimes spelled Claire). Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band signed to A&M and released two singles in 1966. The first was a version of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" that became a regional hit in Los Angeles. The followup, "Moonchild" (written by David Gates, later of the band Bread) was less well received. The band played music venues that catered to underground artists, such as the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
Safe as Milk
After fulfilling their deal for two singles the band presented demos to A&M during 1966 for what would become the Safe as Milk album. A&M's Jerry Moss reportedly described this new direction as "too negative" and dropped the band from the label, although still under contract. Much of the demo recording was accomplished at Art Laboe's Original Sound Studio, then with Gary Marker on the controls at Sunset Sound on 8-track. By the end of 1966 they were signed to Buddah Records and much of the demo work was transferred to 4-track, at the behest of Krasnow and Perry, in the RCA Studio in Hollywood, where the recording was finalized. Tracks that were originally laid down in the demo by Doug Moon are therefore taken up by Ry Cooder's work in the release, as Moon had departed over "musical differences" at this juncture.
Drummer John French had now joined the group and it would later (notably on Trout Mask Replica) be his patience that was required to transcribe Van Vliet's creative ideas (often expressed by whistling or banging on the piano) into musical form for the other group members. On French's departure this role was taken over by Bill Harkleroad for Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Many of the lyrics on the Safe as Milk album were written by Van Vliet in collaboration with the writer Herb Bermann, who befriended Van Vliet after seeing him perform at a bar-gig in Lancaster in 1966. The song "Electricity" was a poem written by Bermann, who gave Van Vliet permission to adapt it to music. Unlike the album's mostly blues rock sound, songs such as "Electricity" illustrated the band's unconventional instrumentation and Van Vliet's unusual vocals, which guitarist Doug Moon described as "hinting of things to come".
Much of the Safe as Milk material was honed and arranged by the arrival of 20-year–old guitar prodigy Ry Cooder, who had been brought into the group after much pressure from Vliet. The band began recording in spring 1967, with Richard Perry cutting his teeth in his first job as producer. The album was released in September 1967. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic called the album "blues–rock gone slightly askew, with jagged, fractured rhythms, soulful, twisting vocals from Van Vliet, and more doo wop, soul, straight blues, and folk–rock influences than he would employ on his more avant garde outings".
Recognition
Among those who took notice were the Beatles. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney were known as great admirers of Beefheart. Lennon displayed two of the album's promotional "baby bumper stickers" in the sunroom at his home. Later, the Beatles planned to sign Beefheart to their experimental Zapple label (plans that were scrapped after Allen Klein took over the group's management). Van Vliet was often critical of the Beatles, however. He considered the lyric "I'd love to turn you on" from their song A Day in the Life, to be ridiculous and conceited. Tiring of their "lullabies", he lampooned them with the Strictly Personal song Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones, that featured the sardonic refrain of "strawberry fields, all the winged eels slither on the heels of today's children, strawberry fields forever". Vliet spoke badly of Lennon after getting no response when he sent a telegram of support to him and wife Yoko Ono during their 1969 "Bed-In for peace". Vliet and the band met McCartney in a Cannes hotel nightclub during their tour of Europe on January 27, 1968, urinated together on a statue outside the hotel at the prodding of journalists and photographers, and participated in a jam session together with McCartney and Penny Nichols. Producer attempts to convince McCartney to switch labels to Kama Sutra obstructed the possibility of a pleasant evening. McCartney later said he had no recollection of this meeting.
The flipside of success
Doug Moon left the band because of his dislike of the band's increasing experimentation outside his preferred blues genre. Ry Cooder told of Moon's becoming so angered by Van Vliet's unrelenting criticism that he walked into the room pointing a loaded crossbow at him, only to have Van Vliet tell him, "Get that fucking thing out of here, get out of here and get back in your room", which he did. (Other band members dispute this account, though Moon is likely to have "passed through" the studio with a weapon.) Moon was present during the early demo sessions at Original Sound studio, above the Kama Sutra/Buddah offices. The works Moon laid down did not see the light of day, as he was replaced by Cooder when they continued on material at Sunset Sound with Marker. Marker then fell by the wayside when recording was moved by Krasnow and Perry to RCA Studio. This would have a profound effect on the quality of the Safe as Milk work, as the former studio was 8-track and the subsequent studio a 4-track.
To support the album's release the group had been scheduled to play at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. During this period Vliet suffered severe anxiety attacks that made him convinced that he was having a heart attack, possibly exacerbated by his heavy LSD use and the fact that his father had died of heart failure a few years earlier. At a vital "warm-up" performance at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival (June 10–11) shortly before the scheduled Monterey Festival (June 16–18), the band began to play "Electricity" and Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the stage and landed on manager Bob Krasnow. He later claimed he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth. This aborted any opportunity of breakthrough success at Monterey, as Cooder immediately decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet, effectively quitting both the event and the band on the spot. With such complex guitar parts there was no means for the band to find a competent replacement in time for Monterey. Cooder's spot was eventually filled for a short spell by Gerry McGee, who had played with the Monkees. According to French the band did two gigs with McGee, one of which was at The Peppermint Twist near Long Beach. The other was at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, August 7, 1967, as opening act for the Yardbirds. McGee was in the group long enough to have an outfit made by a Santa Monica boutique that also created the gear worn by the band on the Strictly Personal cover stamps.
Strictly Personal
In August 1967, guitarist Jeff Cotton filled the guitar spot vacated, in turn, by Cooder and McGee. In October and November 1967 the Snouffer/Cotton/Handley/French line–up recorded material for what was planned to be the second album. Originally intended to be a double album called It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper for the label, it was released later in pieces in 1971 and 1995. After rejection from Buddah, Bob Krasnow encouraged the band to re-record four of the shorter numbers, add two more, and make shorter versions of "Mirror Man" and "Kandy Korn". Krasnow created a strange mix full of "phasing" that, by most accounts (including Beefheart's), diminished the music's strength. This was released in October 1968 as Strictly Personal on Krasnow's Blue Thumb label. Stewart Mason in his Allmusic review of the album described it as a "terrific album" and a "fascinating, underrated release ... every bit the equal of Safe as Milk and Trout Mask Replica". Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone called Strictly Personal "an excellent album. The guitars of the Magic Band mercilessly bend and stretch notes in a way that suggests that the world of music has wobbled clear off its axis", with the lyrics demonstrating "Beefheart's ability to juxtapose delightful humor with frightening insights".
Mirror Man
In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note stating that the material had been recorded in "one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues–rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series.
During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, press coverage and public outcry resulted in the band being permitted to re-enter the UK, where they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and on Friday January 19 appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel, where they played tracks from Safe as Milk and some of the experimental blues tracks from Mirror Man. The band was met by an enthusiastic audience; French recalled the event as a rare high moment for the band: "After the show, we were taken to the dressing room where we sat for hours as a line of what seemed like hundreds of people walked in one by one to shake our hand or get an autograph. Many brought imports of Safe as Milk with them for us to autograph ... It seemed like we had finally gained some reward ... Suddenly all the criticizing and intimidation and eccentricities seemed very unimportant. It was a glorious moment, one of the very few I ever experienced". By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France.
Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later.
The 'Brown Wrapper' Sessions
After their Euro tour and the Cannes beach performance the band returned to the US. Moves were already in the air for them to leave Buddah and sign to MGM and, prior to their May tour – mainly in the UK – they re-recorded some Buddah material of the partial Mirror Man sessions at Sunset Sound with Bruce Botnick. Beefheart had also been conceptualizing new band names, including 25th Century Quaker and Blue Thumb, while making suggestions to other musicians that they might get involved. The thought-process of 25th Century Quaker was that it would be a "blues band" alias for the more avant-garde work of the Magic Band. Photographer Guy Webster photographed the band in Quaker-style outfits, and the picture appears in The Mirror Man Sessions CD insert. It would later transpire that much of this situation was transient and that Buddah's Bob Krasnow was to set up his own label. The label that was unsurprisingly named Blue Thumb launched with its first release Strictly Personal, a truncated version of the original Beefheart vision of a double album. Thus "25th Century Quaker" became a track and a potential band-name became a label.
In overview, the works for the double album in this period were intended to be packaged in a plain brown wrapper, with a "strictly personal" over-stamp and addressed in a manner that could have connotations of drug content, pornographic or illicit material; as per the small ads of the time: "It comes to you in a plain brown wrapper." Given that Krasnow had effectively poached the band from Buddah there were limitations on what material could be released. Strictly Personal was the result, contained in its enigmatically-addressed parcel sleeve. The raft of material left behind eventually emerged, firstly on CD as I May Be Hungry, But I Sure Ain't Weird and later on vinyl, implemented by John French, as It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper (which has two tracks that are missing from the former release). Both Blue Thumb and the stamps on the cover of Strictly Personal have LSD connotations, as does the track Ah Feel Like Ahcid, although Beefheart himself refuted this (claiming that this is a rendering of "I feel like I said").
Trout Mask Replica, 1969
Critically acclaimed as Van Vliet's magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica was released as a 28 track double album in June 1969 on Frank Zappa's newly formed Straight Records label. First issues, in the US, were auto-coupled and housed in the black "Straight" liners along with a 6-page lyric sheet illustrated by the Mascara Snake. A school-age portrait of Van Vliet appears on the front of this sheet, while the cover of the gatefold enigmatically shows Beefheart in a 'Quaker' hat, obscuring his face with the head of a fish. The fish is a carp – arguably a "replica" for a trout, photographed by Cal Schenkel. The inner spread "infra-red" photography is by Ed Caraeff, whose Beefheart vacuum cleaner images from this session also appear on Zappa's Hot Rats release (a month earlier) to accompany "Willie The Pimp" lyrics sung by Vliet. Alex St. Clair had now left the band and, after Junior Madeo from the Blackouts was considered, the role was filled by Bill Harkleroad. Bassist Jerry Handley had also departed, with Gary Marker stepping in. Thus the long rehearsals for the album began in the house on Ensenada Drive in Woodland Hills, L.A., that would become the Magic Band House.
The Magic Band began recordings for Trout Mask Replica with bassist Gary "Magic" Marker at T.T.G. (on "Moonlight on Vermont" and "Veteran's Day Poppy"), but later enlisted bassist Mark Boston after his departure. The remainder of the album was recorded at Whitney Studios, with some field recordings made at the house. Boston was acquainted with French and Harkleroad via past bands. Van Vliet had also begun assigning nicknames to his band members, so Harkleroad became Zoot Horn Rollo, and Boston became Rockette Morton, while John French assumed the name Drumbo, and Jeff Cotton became Antennae Jimmy Semens. Van Vliet's cousin Victor Hayden, the Mascara Snake, performed as a bass clarinetist later in the proceedings. Vliet's girlfriend Laurie Stone, who can be heard laughing at the beginning of Fallin' Ditch, became an audio typist at the Magic Band house.
Van Vliet wanted the whole band to "live" the Trout Mask Replica album. The group rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in their small rented house in the Woodland Hills suburb of Los Angeles. With only two bedrooms in the house, band members would find sleep in various corners of one, while Vliet occupied the other, and rehearsals were accomplished in the main living area. Van Vliet implemented his vision by completely dominating his musicians, artistically and emotionally. At various times one or another of the group members was "put in the barrel", with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission. Guitarist Bill Harkleroad complained that his fingers were a "bloody mess" as a result of Beefheart's orders that he use heavy strings. Drummer John French described the situation as "cultlike" and a visiting friend said "the environment in that house was positively Mansonesque". Their material circumstances were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the group barely survived and were even arrested for shoplifting food (Zappa bailed them out). French has recalled living on no more than a small cup of beans a day for a month. A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health". Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for 14 or more hours a day.
John French's 2010 book Through the Eyes of Magic describes some of the "talks", which were initiated by his doing such things as playing a Frank Zappa drum part ("The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)") in his drumming shed, and not having finished drum parts as quickly as Beefheart wanted. French writes of being punched by band members, thrown into walls, kicked, punched in the face by Beefheart hard enough to draw blood, being attacked with a sharp broomstick. Eventually Beefheart, French says, threatened to throw him out an upper floor window. He admits complicity in similarly attacking his bandmates during "talks" aimed at them. In the end, after the album's recording, Beefheart ejected French from the band by throwing him down a set of stairs, telling him to "Take a walk, man" after not responding in a desired manner to a request to "play a strawberry" on the drums. Beefheart replaced French with drummer Jeff Bruschel, an acquaintance of Hayden. Referred to as "Fake Drumbo" (playing on French's drumset) this final act resulted in French's name not appearing on the album credits, either as a player or arranger. Bruschel toured with the band to Europe but was replaced by the next recording.
According to Van Vliet, the 28 songs on the album were written in a single 8½ hour session at the piano, an instrument he had no skill in playing, an approach Mike Barnes compared to John Cage's "maverick irreverence toward classical tradition", though band members have stated that the songs were written over the course of about a year, beginning around December 1967. (The band did watch Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½ during the creation of the album). It took the band about eight months to mold the songs into shape, with French bearing primary responsibility for transposing and shaping Vliet's piano fragments into guitar and bass lines, which were mostly notated on paper. Harkleroad in 1998 said in retrospect: "We're dealing with a strange person, coming from a place of being a sculptor/painter, using music as his idiom. He was getting more into that part of who he was instead of this blues singer." The band had rehearsed the songs so thoroughly that the instrumental tracks for 21 of the songs were recorded in a single four and a half hour recording session. Van Vliet spent the next few days overdubbing the vocals. The album's cover artwork was photographed and designed by Cal Schenkel and shows Van Vliet wearing the raw head of a carp, bought from a local fish market and fashioned into a mask by Schenkel.
Trout Mask Replica incorporated a wide variety of musical styles, including blues, avant garde/experimental, and rock. The relentless practice prior to recording blended the music into an iconoclastic whole of contrapuntal tempos, featuring slide guitar, polyrhythmic drumming (with French's drums and cymbals covered in cardboard), honking saxophone and bass clarinet. Van Vliet's vocals range from his signature Howlin' Wolf-inspired growl to frenzied falsetto to laconic, casual ramblings.
The instrumental backing was effectively recorded live in the studio, while Van Vliet overdubbed most of the vocals in only partial sync with the music by hearing the slight sound leakage through the studio window. Zappa said of Van Vliet's approach, "[it was] impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not."
Van Vliet used the ensuing publicity, particularly with a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Langdon Winner, to promulgate a number of myths that were subsequently quoted as fact. Winner's article stated, for instance, that neither Van Vliet nor the members of the Magic Band ever took drugs, but Harkleroad later contradicted this. Van Vliet claimed to have taught both Harkleroad and Boston to play their instruments from scratch; in fact the pair were already accomplished young musicians before joining the band. Last, Van Vliet claimed to have gone a year and half without sleeping. When asked how this was possible, he claimed to have only eaten fruit.
Critic Steve Huey of AllMusic writes that the album's influence "was felt more in spirit than in direct copycatting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point. However, its inspiring reimagining of what was possible in a rock context laid the groundwork for countless experiments in rock surrealism to follow, especially during the punk and new wave era." In 2003, the album was ranked sixtieth by Rolling Stone in their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: "On first listen, Trout Mask Replica sounds like raw Delta blues", with Beefheart "singing and ranting and reciting poetry over fractured guitar licks. But the seeming sonic chaos is an illusion—to construct the songs, the Magic Band rehearsed twelve hours a day for months on end in a house with the windows blacked out. (Producer Frank Zappa was then able to record most of the album in less than five hours.) Tracks such as 'Ella Guru' and 'My Human Gets Me Blues' are the direct predecessors of modern musical primitives such as Tom Waits and PJ Harvey." Guitarist Fred Frith noted that during this process "forces that usually emerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable".
Critic Robert Christgau gave the album a B+, saying, "I find it impossible to give this record an A because it is just too weird. But I'd like to. Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record." BBC disc jockey John Peel said of the album: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." It was inducted into the United States National Recording Registry in 2011.
Later recordings, 1970–82
Lick My Decals Off, Baby
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) continued in a similarly experimental vein. An album with "a very coherent structure" in the Magic Band's "most experimental and visionary stage", it was Van Vliet's most commercially successful in the United Kingdom, spending twenty weeks on the UK Albums Chart and peaking at number 20. An early promotional music video was made of its title song, and a bizarre television commercial was also filmed that included excerpts from Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop, silent footage of masked Magic Band members using kitchen utensils as musical instruments, and Beefheart kicking over a bowl of what appears to be porridge onto a dividing stripe in the middle of a road. The video was rarely played but was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several programs related to music.
On this LP Art Tripp III, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, played drums and marimba. Lick My Decals Off, Baby was the first record on which the band was credited as "The" Magic Band, rather than "His" Magic Band. Journalist Irwin Chusid interprets this change as "a grudging concession of its members' at least semiautonomous humanity". Robert Christgau gave the album an A−, commenting, "Beefheart's famous five-octave range and covert totalitarian structures have taken on a playful undertone, repulsive and engrossing and slapstick funny." Due to licensing disputes, Lick My Decals Off, Baby was unavailable on CD for many years, though it remained in print on vinyl. It was ranked second in Uncut magazine's May 2010 list of The 50 Greatest Lost Albums. In 2011, the album became available for download on the iTunes Store.
He toured in 1970 with Ry Cooder on the bill to promote the album.
The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot
The next two records, The Spotlight Kid (simply credited to "Captain Beefheart") and Clear Spot (credited to "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band"), were both released in 1972. The atmosphere of The Spotlight Kid is, according to one critic, "definitely relaxed and fun, maybe one step up from a jam". And though "things do sound maybe just a little too blasé", "Beefheart at his worst still has something more than most groups at their best." The music is simpler and slower than on the group's two previous releases, the uncompromisingly original Trout Mask Replica and the frenetic Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This was in part an attempt by Van Vliet to become a more appealing commercial proposition as the band had made virtually no money during the previous two years—at the time of recording, the band members were subsisting on welfare food handouts and remittances from their parents. Van Vliet offered that he "got tired of scaring people with what I was doing ... I realized that I had to give them something to hang their hat on, so I started working more of a beat into the music". Magic Band members have also said that the slower performances were due in part to Van Vliet's inability to fit his lyrics with the instrumental backing of the faster material on the earlier albums, a problem that was exacerbated in that he almost never rehearsed with the group. In the period leading up to the recording the band lived communally, first at a compound near Ben Lomond, California and then in northern California near Trinidad. The situation saw a return to the physical violence and psychological manipulation that had taken place during the band's previous communal residence while composing and rehearsing Trout Mask Replica. According to John French, the worst of this was directed toward Harkleroad. In his autobiography Harkleroad recalls being thrown into a dumpster, an act he interpreted as having metaphorical intent.
Clear Spot'''s production credit of Ted Templeman made AllMusic consider "why in the world [it] wasn't more of a commercial success than it was", and that while fans "of the fully all-out side of Beefheart might find the end result not fully up to snuff as a result, but those less concerned with pushing back all borders all the time will enjoy his unexpected blend of everything tempered with a new accessibility". The review called the song "Big Eyed Beans from Venus" "a fantastically strange piece of aggression". A Clear Spot song, "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", appeared on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' cult comedy film The Big Lebowski (1998).
Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams
In 1974, immediately after the recording of Unconditionally Guaranteed, which markedly continued the trend towards a more commercial sound heard on some of the Clear Spot tracks, the Magic Band's original members departed. Disgruntled and past members worked together for a period, gigging at Blue Lake and putting together their own ideas and demos, with John French earmarked as the vocalist. These concepts eventually coalesced around the core of Art Tripp III, Harkleroad and Boston, with the formation of Mallard, helped by finance and UK recording facilities from Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson.Harkleroad, Bill. Lunar Notes pp.132–133. Some of French's compositions were used in the band's work, but the group's singer was Sam Galpin and the role of keyboardist was eventually taken by John Thomas, who had shared a house with French in Eureka at the time. At this time Vliet attempted to recruit both French and Harkleroad as producers for his next album, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Andy Di Martino produced both of these Virgin label albums.
Vliet was forced to quickly form a new Magic Band to complete support-tour dates, with studio musicians who had no experience with his music and in fact had never heard it. Having no knowledge of the previous Magic Band style, they simply improvised what they thought would go with each song, playing much slicker versions that have been described as "bar band" versions of Beefheart songs. A review described this incarnation of the Magic Band as the "Tragic Band", a term that has stuck over the years.
Robert 'Fuzzy' Fuscaldo – guitar
Dean Smith – guitar
Del Simmons – saxophone; flute
Michael 'Bucky' Smotherman – keyboards; vocals
Paul Uhrig – bass
Ty Grimes – drums
Mike Barnes said that the description of the new band "grooving along pleasantly", was "...an appropriately banal description of the music of a man who only a few years ago composed with the expressed intent of shaking listeners out of their torpor". The one album they recorded, Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974) has, like its predecessor, a completely different, almost soft rock sound from any other Beefheart record. Neither was well received; drummer Art Tripp recalled that when he and the original Magic Band listened to Unconditionally Guaranteed, they "...were horrified. As we listened, it was as though each song was worse than the one which preceded it". Beefheart later disowned both albums, calling them "horrible and vulgar", asking that they not be considered part of his musical output and urging fans who bought them to "take copies back for a refund".
Bongo Fury to Bat Chain Puller
By the fall of 1975 the band had completed their European tour, with further US dates in the New Year of 1976, supporting Zappa along with Dr. John. Van Vliet now found himself stuck in a web of contractual hang-ups. At this point Zappa had begun to extend a helping hand, with Vliet already having performed incognito as "Rollin' Red" on Zappa's One Size Fits All (1975) and then joining with him on the Bongo Fury album and its later support tour. Two Vliet-penned numbers on the Bongo Fury album are "Sam with the Showing Scalp Flat Top" and "Man with the Woman Head". The form, texture and imagery of this album's first track, "Debra Kadabra", sung by Vliet, has 'angular similarities' to the work he would later produce in his next three albums. On the Bongo Fury album Vliet also sings "Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead", harmonizes on "200 Years Old" and "Muffin Man", and plays harmonica and soprano saxophone.
In early 1976 Zappa put on his producer hat and, once again, opened up his studio facilities and finance to Vliet. This was for the production of an album provisionally titled Bat Chain Puller. The band were John French (drums), John Thomas (keyboards) and Jeff Moris Tepper and Denny Walley (guitars). Much of the work on this album had been finalized and some demos had been circulated when fate once again struck the Beefheart camp. In May 1976 the long association between Zappa and his manager/business partner Herb Cohen ceased. This resulted in Zappa's finances and ongoing works becoming part of protracted legal negotiations. The Bat Chain Puller project went "on ice" and did not see an official release until 2012. After this recording John Thomas joined ex-Magic Band members in Mallard.
Prior to his next album Beefheart appeared in 1977 on the Tubes' album Now, playing saxophone on the song "Cathy's Clone", and the album also featured a cover of the Clear Spot song "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains". In 1978 he appeared on Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack to the film Blue Collar.
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Having extricated himself from a mire of contractual difficulties Beefheart emerged with this new album, in 1978, on the Warner Bros label. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) contained re-workings of the shelved Bat Chain Puller album and still retained its original guitarist, Jeff Moris Tepper. However, he and Vliet were now joined by a whole new line-up of Richard Redus (guitar, bass and accordion), Eric Drew Feldman (bass, piano and synthesizer), Bruce Lambourne Fowler (trombone and air bass), Art Tripp (percussion and marimba) and Robert Arthur Williams (drums). The album was co-produced by Vliet with Pete Johnson. Members of this Magic Band and the "Bat Chain" elements would later feature on Beefheart's last two albums. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) was described by Ned Raggett of Allmusic to be "...manna from heaven for those feeling Beefheart had lost his way on his two Mercury albums". Following Vliet's death, John French claimed the 40-second spoken word track "Apes-Ma" to be an analogy of Van Vliet's deteriorating physical condition. The album's sleeve features Van Vliet's 1976 painting Green Tom, one of the many works that would mark out his longed-for career as a painter of note.
Doc at the Radar StationDoc at the Radar Station (1980) helped establish Beefheart's late resurgence. Released by Virgin Records during the post-punk scene, the music was now accessible to a younger, more receptive audience. He was interviewed in a feature report on KABC-TV's Channel 7 Eyewitness News in which he was hailed as "the father of the new wave. One of the most important American composers of the last fifty years, [and] a primitive genius"; Van Vliet said at this period, "I'm doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state ... and I think there is one right now." Huey of Allmusic cited the Doc at the Radar Station as being "...generally acclaimed as the strongest album of his comeback, and by some as his best since Trout Mask Replica", "even if the Captain's voice isn't quite what it once was, Doc at the Radar Station is an excellent, focused consolidation of Beefheart's past and then-present". Van Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes speaks of "revamping work built on skeletal ideas and fragments that would have mouldered away in the vaults had they not been exhumed and transformed into full-blown, totally convincing new material". During this period, Van Vliet made two appearances on David Letterman's late night television program on NBC, and also performed on Saturday Night Live.
Richard Redus and Art Tripp departed on this album, with slide guitar and marimba duties taken up by the reappearance of John French. The guitar skills of Gary Lucas also feature on the track Flavor Bud Living.
Ice Cream for Crow
The final Beefheart record, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), was recorded with Gary Lucas (who was also Van Vliet's manager), Jeff Moris Tepper, Richard Snyder and Cliff Martinez. This line-up made a video to promote the title track, directed by Van Vliet and Ken Schreiber, with cinematography by Daniel Pearl, which was rejected by MTV for being "too weird". However, the video was included in the Letterman broadcast on NBC-TV, and was also accepted into the Museum of Modern Art. Van Vliet announced "I don't want my MTV if they don't want my video" during his interview with Letterman, in reference to MTV's "I want my MTV" marketing campaign of the time. Ice Cream for Crow, along with songs such as its title track, features instrumental performances by the Magic Band with performance poetry readings by Van Vliet. Raggett of AllMusic called the album a "last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact", with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results". Barnes writes that, "The most original and vital tracks (on the album) are the newer ones", saying that it "feels like an hors-d'oeuvre for a main course that never came". Michael Galucci of Goldmine praised the album, describing it as "the single, most bizarre entry in Van Vliet's long, odd career." Promotional work proposed to Beefheart by Virgin Records was as unorthodox as him making an appearance in the 1987 film Grizzly II: The Predator. Soon after, Van Vliet retired from music and began a new career as a painter. Gary Lucas tried to convince him to record one more album, but to no avail.
Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh
Released in 2004 by Rhino Handmade in a limited edition of 1,500 copies, this signed and numbered box set contains a "Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh" CD of Vliet-recited poetry, the Anton Corbijn film of Vliet Some YoYo Stuff on DVD and two art books. One book, entitled Splinters, gives a visual "scrapbook" insight into Vliet's life, from an early age to his painting in retirement. The second, eponymously titled, book is packed with art pages of Vliet's work. The first is bound in green linen, the second in yellow. These colors are counterpointed throughout the package, which comes in a green slipcase measuring 235 mm × 325 mm × 70 mm. An onion-skin wallet, nestling at the package's inner sanctum, contains a matching-numbered Vliet lithograph on hand-rolled paper, signed by the artist. The two books are by publishers Artist Ink Editions.
Paintings
Throughout his musical career, Van Vliet remained interested in visual art. He placed his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline, on several of his albums. In 1987, Van Vliet published Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush, a collection of his poetry, paintings and drawings.
In the mid-1980s, Van Vliet became reclusive and abandoned music, stating he had gotten "too good at the horn" and could make far more money painting. Beefheart's first exhibition had been at Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery during the Magic Band's 1972 tour of the UK. He was interviewed on Granada regional television standing in front of his bold black and white canvases. He was inspired to begin an art career when a fan, Julian Schnabel, who admired the artwork seen on his album covers, asked to buy a drawing from him. His debut exhibition as a serious painter was at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1985 and was initially regarded as that of "another rock musician dabbling in art for ego's sake", though his primitive, non-conformist work has received more sympathetic and serious attention since then, with some sales approaching $25,000. Two books have been published specifically devoted to critique and analysis of his artwork: Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet (1999) by W. C. Bamberger and Stand Up To Be Discontinued, first published in 1993, a now rare collection of essays on Van Vliet's work. The limited edition version of the book contains a CD of Van Vliet reading six of his poems: Fallin' Ditch, The Tired Plain, Skeleton Makes Good, Safe Sex Drill, Tulip and Gill. A deluxe edition was published in 1994; only 60 were printed, with etchings of Van Vliet's signature, costing £180.
In the early 1980s Van Vliet established an association with the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. Eric Feldman stated later in an interview that at that time Michael Werner told Van Vliet he needed to stop playing music if he wanted to be respected as a painter, warning him that otherwise he would only be considered a "musician who paints". In doing so, it was said that he had effectively "succeeded in leaving his past behind". Van Vliet has been described as a modernist, a primitivist, an abstract expressionist, and, "in a sense" an outsider artist. Morgan Falconer of Artforum concurs, mentioning both a "neo-primitivist aesthetic" and further stating that his work is influenced by the CoBrA painters. The resemblance to the CoBrA painters is also recognized by art critic Roberto Ohrt, while others have compared his paintings to the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko.
According to Dr. John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 1997, although Van Vliet's work has associations with mainstream abstract expressionist painting, more importantly he was a self-taught artist and his painting "has that same kind of edge the music has". Curator David Breuer asserts that in contrast to the busied, bohemian urban lives of the New York abstract expressionists, the rural desert environment Van Vliet was influenced by is a distinctly naturalistic one, making him a distinguished figure in contemporary art, whose work will survive in canon. Van Vliet stated of his own work, "I'm trying to turn myself inside out on the canvas. I'm trying to completely bare what I think at that moment" and "I paint for the simple reason that I have to. I feel a sense of relief after I do." When asked about his artistic influences he stated that there were none. "I just paint like I paint and that's enough influence." He did however state his admiration of Georg Baselitz, the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian, and Vincent van Gogh; after seeing van Gogh's paintings in person, Van Vliet quoted himself as saying, "The sun disappoints me so."
Exhibits of his paintings from the late 1990s were held in New York in 2009 and 2010. Falconer stated that the most recent exhibitions showed "evidence of a serious, committed artist". It was claimed that he stopped painting in the late 1990s. A 2007 interview with Van Vliet through email by Anthony Haden-Guest, however, showed him to still be active artistically. He exhibited only few of his paintings because he immediately destroyed any that did not satisfy him.
Life in retirement
After his retirement from music, Van Vliet rarely appeared in public. He resided near Trinidad, California, with his wife Janet "Jan" Van Vliet. By the early 1990s he was using a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis. The severity of his illness was sometimes disputed. Many of his art contractors and friends considered him to be in good health. Other associates such as his longtime drummer and musical director John French and bassist Richard Snyder have stated that they had noticed symptoms consistent with the onset of multiple sclerosis, such as sensitivity to heat, loss of balance, and stiffness of gait, by the late 1970s.
One of Van Vliet's last public appearances was in the 1993 short documentary Some Yo Yo Stuff by filmmaker Anton Corbijn, described as an "observation of his observations". Around 13 minutes and shot entirely in black and white, with appearances by his mother and David Lynch, the film showed a noticeably weakened and dysarthric Van Vliet at his residence in California, reading poetry, and philosophically discussing his life, environment, music and art. In 2000, he appeared on Gary Lucas's album Improve the Shining Hour and Moris Tepper's Moth to Mouth, and spoke on Tepper's 2004 song "Ricochet Man" from the album Head Off. He is credited for naming Tepper's 2010 album A Singer Named Shotgun Throat.
Van Vliet often voiced concern over and support for environmentalist issues and causes, particularly the welfare of animals. He often referred to Earth as "God's Golfball" and this expression can be found on a number of his later albums. In 2003 he was heard on the compilation album Where We Live: Stand for What You Stand On: A Benefit CD for EarthJustice singing a version of "Happy Birthday to You" retitled "Happy Earthday". The track lasts 34 seconds and was recorded over the telephone.
Death
Van Vliet died at a hospital in Arcata, California, on Friday, December 17, 2010, about a month before his 70th birthday. The cause was named as complications from multiple sclerosis. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan commented on his death, praising him: "Wondrous, secret ... and profound, he was a diviner of the highest order."
Dweezil Zappa dedicated the song "Willie the Pimp" to Beefheart at the "Zappa Plays Zappa" show at the Beacon Theater in New York City on the day of his death, while Jeff Bridges exclaimed "Rest in peace, Captain Beefheart!" at the conclusion of the December 18, 2010, episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live.
Relationship with Frank Zappa
Van Vliet met Frank Zappa when they were both teenagers and shared an interest in rhythm and blues and Chicago blues. They collaborated from this early stage, with Zappa's scripts for "teenage operettas" such as "Captain Beefheart & the Grunt People" helping to elevate Van Vliet's Captain Beefheart persona. In 1963, the pair recorded a demo at the Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga as the Soots, seeking support from a major label. Their efforts were unsuccessful, as "Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf vocal style and Zappa's distorted guitar" were "not on the agenda" at the time.
The friendship between Zappa and Van Vliet over the years was sometimes expressed in the form of rivalry as musicians drifted back and forth between their groups. Van Vliet embarked on the 1975 Bongo Fury tour with Zappa and the Mothers, mainly because conflicting contractual obligations made him unable to tour or record independently. Their relationship grew acrimonious on the tour to the point that they refused to talk to one another. Zappa became irritated by Van Vliet, who drew constantly, including while on stage, filling one of his large sketch books with rapidly executed portraits and warped caricatures of Zappa. Musically, Van Vliet's primitive style contrasted sharply with Zappa's compositional discipline and abundant technique. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black described the situation as "two geniuses" on "ego trips". Estranged for years afterwards, they reconnected at the end of Zappa's life, after his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer. Their collaborative work appears on the Zappa rarity collections The Lost Episodes (1996) and Mystery Disc (1996). Particularly notable is their song "Muffin Man", included on the Zappa/Beefheart Bongo Fury album, as well as Zappa's compilation album Strictly Commercial (1995). Zappa finished concerts with the song for many years afterwards. Beefheart also provided vocals for "Willie the Pimp" on Zappa's otherwise instrumental album Hot Rats (1969). One track on Trout Mask Replica, "The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)", features Magic Band guitarist Jeff Cotton talking on the telephone to Zappa superimposed onto an unrelated live recording of the Mothers of Invention (the backing track was later released in 1992 as "Charles Ives" on You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 ). Van Vliet also played the harmonica on two songs on Zappa albums: "San Ber'dino" (credited as "Bloodshot Rollin' Red") on One Size Fits All (1975) and "Find Her Finer" on Zoot Allures (1976). He is also the vocalist on "The Torture Never Stops (Original Version)" on Zappa's You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 4.
The Magic Band
Influence
Van Vliet has been the subject of at least two documentaries, the BBC's 1997 The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart narrated by John Peel, and the 2006 independent production Captain Beefheart: Under Review.
According to Peel, "If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it's Beefheart ... I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week and I'll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week." His narration added: "A psychedelic shaman who frequently bullied his musicians and sometimes alarmed his fans, Don somehow remained one of rock's great innocents." Mike Barnes referred to him as an "iconic counterculture hero" who, with the Magic Band, "went on to stake out startling new possibilities for rock music". Lester Bangs cited Beefheart as "one of the four or five unqualified geniuses to rise from the hothouses of American music in the Sixties", while John Harris of The Guardian praised the music's "pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together". A Rolling Stone biography described his work as "a sort of modern chamber music for [a] rock band, since he plans every note and teaches the band their parts by ear. Because it breaks so many of rock's conventions at once, Beefheart's music has always been more influential than popular." In this context, it is performed by the classical group, the Meridian Arts Ensemble. Nicholas E. Tawa, in his 2005 book Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th Century: Styles and Singers and What They Said About America, included Beefheart among the prominent progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, while the Encyclopædia Britannica describes Beefheart's songs as conveying "deep distrust of modern civilization, a yearning for ecological balance, and that belief that all animals in the wild are far superior to human beings". Many of his works have been classified as "art rock".
Many artists have cited Van Vliet as an influence, beginning with the Edgar Broughton Band, who covered "Dropout Boogie" as Apache Drop Out (mixed with the Shadows' "Apache") as early as 1970, as did the Kills 32 years later. The Minutemen were fans of Beefheart, and were arguably among the few to effectively synthesize his music with their own, especially in their early output, which featured disjointed guitar and irregular, galloping rhythms. Michael Azerrad describes the Minutemen's early output as "highly caffeinated Captain Beefheart running down James Brown tunes", and notes that Beefheart was the group's "idol". Others who arguably conveyed the same influence around the same time or before include John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Little Feat, Laurie Anderson, the Residents and Henry Cow. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and poet mystic Z'EV, both pioneers of industrial music, cited Van Vliet along with Zappa among their influences. More notable were those emerging during the early days of punk rock, such as the Clash and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols (reportedly to manager Malcolm McLaren's disapproval), later of the post-punk band Public Image Ltd. Frank Discussion of punk rock band The Feederz learned to play guitar from listening to Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me—and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Groening served as the curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that reunited the post–Beefheart Magic Band.
Van Vliet's influence on post–punk bands was demonstrated by Magazine's recording of "I Love You You Big Dummy" in 1978 and the tribute album Fast 'n' Bulbous – A Tribute to Captain Beefheart in 1988, featuring the likes of artists such as the Dog Faced Hermans, the Scientists, the Membranes, Simon Fisher Turner, That Petrol Emotion, the Primevals, the Mock Turtles, XTC, and Sonic Youth, who included a cover of Beefheart's "Electricity" which would later be re-released as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their 1988 album Daydream Nation. Other post-punk bands influenced by Beefheart include Gang of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pere Ubu, Babe the Blue Ox and Mark E. Smith of the Fall. The Fall covered "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones" in their 1993 session for John Peel. Beefheart is considered to have "greatly influenced" new wave artists, such as David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, the Bongos, and the B-52s.
Tom Waits' shift in artistic direction, starting with 1983's Swordfishtrombones, was, Waits claims, a result of his wife Kathleen Brennan introducing him to Van Vliet's music. "Once you've heard Beefheart", said Waits, "it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." More recently, Waits has described Beefheart's work as "glimpse into the future; like curatives, recipes for ancient oils". Guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cited Van Vliet as a prominent influence on the band's 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik as well as his debut solo album Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and stated that during his drug-induced absence, after leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he "would paint and listen to Trout Mask Replica". Black Francis of the Pixies cited Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid as one of the albums he listened to regularly when first writing songs for the band, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana acknowledged Van Vliet's influence, mentioning him among his notoriously eclectic range.
The White Stripes in 2000 released a 7" tribute single, "Party of Special Things to Do", containing covers of that Beefheart song plus "China Pig" and "Ashtray Heart". The Kills included a cover of "Dropout Boogie" on their debut Black Rooster EP (2002). The Black Keys in 2008 released a free cover of Beefheart's "I'm Glad" from Safe as Milk. The 2002 LCD Soundsystem song "Losing My Edge" has a verse which James Murphy says, "I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band". In 2005 Genus Records produced Mama Kangaroos – Philly Women Sing Captain Beefheart, a 20-track tribute to Captain Beefheart. Beck included Safe as Milk and Ella Guru in a playlist of songs as part of his website's Planned Obsolescence series of mashups of songs by the musicians that influenced him. Franz Ferdinand cited Beefheart's Doc at the Radar Station as a strong influence on their second LP, You Could Have It So Much Better. Placebo briefly named themselves Ashtray Heart, after the track on Doc at the Radar Station; the band's album Battle for the Sun contains a track, "Ashtray Heart". Joan Osborne covered Beefheart's "(His) Eyes are a Blue Million Miles", which appears on Early Recordings. She cited Van Vliet as one of her influences.
PJ Harvey and John Parish discussed Beefheart's influence in an interview together. Harvey's first experience of Beefheart's music was as a child. Her parents had all of his albums; listening to them made her "feel ill". Harvey was reintroduced to Beefheart's music by Parish, who lent her a cassette copy of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) at the age of 16. She cited him as one of her greatest influences since. Parish described Beefheart's music as a "combination of raw blues and abstract jazz. There was humour in there, but you could tell that it wasn't [intended as] a joke. I felt that there was a depth to what he did that very few other rock artists have managed [to achieve]." Ty Segall covered "Drop Out Boogie" on his 2009 album Lemons.
Discography
Safe as Milk (1967)
Strictly Personal (1968)
Trout Mask Replica (1969)
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)
Mirror Man (1971)
The Spotlight Kid (1972)
Clear Spot (1972)
Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974)
Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974)
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978)
Doc at the Radar Station (1980)
Ice Cream for Crow (1982)
Bat Chain Puller (2012, recorded in 1976)
References
Further reading
Bamberger, W.C. (1999). Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet.
Beaugrand, Andreas and various (1994). Stand Up to Be Discontinued. (Paperback) .
Courrier, Kevin (2007). Trout Mask Replica. New York: Continuum.
Delville, Michel & Norris, Andrew (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. .
Harkleroad, Bill (1998). Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Interlink Publishing. .
Van Vliet, Don (Captain Beefheart) (1987). Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush. (All poems in English, preface in German and English.) Bern-Berlin: Gachnang & Springer.
Zappa, Frank & Occhiogrosso, Peter; The Real Frank Zappa Book, Poseidon Press (1989),
External links
Beefheart.com – The Captain Beefheart Radar Station
[ Captain Beefheart] at AllMusic
Captain Beefheart at Rolling Stone''
Some Yo Yo Stuff by Anton Corbijn
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[
"Mirror Man is the name of three different characters appearing in comic books published by DC Comics.\n\nFictional character biography\n\nFloyd Ventris\n\nFloyd Ventris is a criminal who was detained at Gotham State Penitentiary. Using broken mirror shards, he distracts the guards long enough to escape from prison. Inspired by the mirrors, he becomes Mirror Man. Upon creating a machine that would enable him to see through objects, Mirror Man began targeting Batman so that he can find out his secret identity. He was able to see under Batman's cowl and discover his identity of Bruce Wayne. Batman writes a letter to the Gotham Gazette about the times they thought he was falsely exposed as Bruce Wayne. This causes Mirror Man to try to get a similar image of Batman which fails as Mirror Man is defeated. When Mirror Man is incarcerated at Gotham State Penitentiary, Batman revealed that he used a special cowl made of mirrors which was the reason why Mirror Man failed to get another image of Batman's identity.\n\nMirror Man later escapes from prison and begins another plan to expose Bruce Wayne as the true identity of Batman. Bruce Wayne outwits Mirror Man's thugs at the Gotham Museum which is witnessed by Vicki Vale. Despite Batwoman's efforts to stop them, Mirror Man and his thugs escape. By Mirror Man's next attack, Vicki Vale hires an actor to pose as Bruce Wayne in order to keep Batman's identity a secret even though she was unaware that Bruce had asked Alfred Pennyworth to impersonate Batman. When one of Mirror Man's thugs finds out about Vicki's hoax, Mirror Man and his thugs are defeated by Batman and taken to GCPD Headquarters. Wayne appears at the police department causing Mirror Man's theory to be dropped.\n\nFollowing the \"Crisis on Infinite Earths\" storyline, Mirror Man is among the villains that were sprung from Gotham State Penitentiary by Ra's al Ghul. However, Ventris was one of the freed villains who chose not to take part in the mass attack on Batman staged by Ra's and instead went into hiding, and has not been seen since.\n\nMirror Man II\nIn the three-part miniseries Arkham Reborn, a different Mirror Man appeared. This person has an obsession with mirrors and has also used the alias of \"Narcissus\". Nothing else was known about him other than the fact that he was first seen walking out of a forest in Haiti, the intelligible words that he spoke were repeated by him like an echo, and he had a human appearance. Mirror Man is one of the Arkham Asylum inmates alongside No-Face and the Hamburger Lady that are labeled as Jeremiah Arkham's \"special subjects\" that nobody knows about.\n\nMirror Man III\nThe third Mirror Man appears during the \"Gotham Underground\" storyline. He is an unnamed African-American man who is a part of the New Rogues which were assembled by the Penguin. As this group is modeled after the Rogues, Mirror Man is modeled after the Mirror Master.\n\nDuring the Final Crisis storyline, Mirror Man and the New Rogues are enlisted by Libra to get the Rogues back into the Secret Society of Super Villains. He fought the Mirror Master, who was able to use his mirrors to blind Mirror Man and then strangle him with one of the Trickster's springs.\n\nPowers and abilities\nThe Floyd Ventris version of Mirror Man has genius-level intellect and uses devices that are themed with mirrors.\n\nThe New Rogues version of Mirror Man uses Mirror Master's special mirrors in battle.\n\nIn other media\n A version of Mirror Man, under the name Lloyd Ventrix appears in the Batman: The Animated Series appeared in \"See No Evil\", voiced by Michael Gross. Lloyd Ventrix was an ex-con who became divorced from Helen Ventrix, who had the custody of their daughter, Kimberly. Using a suit that allowed him to turn invisible that he acquired from a place he worked at on parole, Lloyd sneaked into Kimberly's bedroom and posed as her imaginary friend \"Mojo\". During one of these meetings, Lloyd learned that Helen and Kim were going to be moving away from Gotham soon and he did not like the idea. Using the invisibility suit, he started a crime spree to acquire more of the wealth he was giving to Kimberly as Mojo and convince Helen to stay in Gotham, but his actions only attracted the attention of Batman, who deduced Ventrix's identity after a quick research. However, by the time he warned Helen about her ex-husband's scheme, Lloyd, now driven chemically insane by the suit, had taken Kim away. Batman followed Lloyd and stopped him from kidnapping the little girl. Lloyd tried to escape using his invisible technology and after a long chase, he was forced to fight the Dark Knight. For the most part, Lloyd got the upper hand of the fight, mostly because of his invisibility, but once Batman figured a way to spot him, Lloyd was knocked unconscious in a few seconds.\n The Pre-Crisis Mirror Man appears in the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode \"A Bat Divided!\". He is seen at the 8 Bar, where the villains hang out, when Firestorm and the three Batmen arrive.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Mirror Man (Floyd Ventris) at DC Comics Wiki\n Mirror Man (New Rogues version) at DC Comics Wiki\n\nCharacters created by Bill Finger\nCharacters created by Sheldon Moldoff\nComics characters introduced in 1954\nDC Comics male supervillains\nFictional professional thieves\nFictional gangsters\nFictional criminals",
"\"Mirror Man\" is a song recorded by English singer and songwriter Ella Henderson for her debut studio album, Chapter One (2014). It was released in the UK on 8 March 2015 via Syco Music as the fourth single off the album. The song was written by Henderson, Al Shuckburgh, and Laura Pergolizzi, and was produced by Shuckburgh under his production moniker Al Shux. \"Mirror Man\" entered the UK Singles Chart at number 96.\n\nContent\n\"Mirror Man\" is a mid-tempo blues and funk song whose lyrics discuss a selfish lover who puts him or herself before anyone else. Henderson revealed to the Official Charts Company that the song was written about \"the most self-centred person I’ve ever met,\" and that she enjoys singing the tune due to its sassy attitude.\n\nMusic video \nThe official music video for \"Mirror Man\" was directed by Colin Tilley and premiered on 9 March 2015. Henderson has described the aesthetic of the video as \"graphic\" and \"edgy\", noting that it shows a different side of herself. The video features a panther, whose shapeshifting is meant to symbolize the vanity of the titular \"mirror man\", and uses special effects to depict Henderson being consumed by fire, sand, and smoke, amongst other elements.\n\nTrack listings\nDigital download — Remixes EP\n\"Mirror Man\" – 3:39\n\"Mirror Man\" – 3:51\n\"Mirror Man\" – 3:15\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2014 songs\n2015 singles\nSyco Music singles\nSongs written by LP (singer)\nElla Henderson songs\nSongs written by Al Shux\nSong recordings produced by Al Shux\nSongs written by Ella Henderson\nFunk songs\nMusic videos directed by Colin Tilley"
] |
[
"Captain Beefheart",
"Mirror Man",
"What was mirror man?",
"In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man,"
] |
C_62dc9c09bb4e4c4c88ce70a1c9567957_0
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Is there anything notable about the album?
| 2 |
Other than the fact that Mirror man had some recordings done for Buddah, is there anything notable about the album?
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Captain Beefheart
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In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in "...one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues-rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series. During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, the group was permitted to re-enter the UK, when they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel on Saturday January 20. By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France. Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later. CANNOTANSWER
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bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in "...one night in Los Angeles in 1965".
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Don Van Vliet (; born Don Glen Vliet; January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. Conducting a rotating ensemble called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, known separately as "The Magic Band", he recorded 13 studio albums between 1964 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, and his wide vocal range. Known for his enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians. Although he achieved little commercial success, he sustained a cult following as a "highly significant" and "incalculable" influence on an array of new wave, punk, and experimental rock artists.
An artistic prodigy in his childhood, Van Vliet developed an eclectic musical taste during his teen years in Lancaster, California, and formed "a mutually useful but volatile" friendship with musician Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated. He began performing with his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964 and joined the original Magic Band line-up, initiated by Alexis Snouffer, the same year. The group released their debut album Safe as Milk in 1967 on Buddah Records. After being dropped by two consecutive record labels they signed to Zappa's Straight Records, where they released 1969's Trout Mask Replica; the album would later rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1974, frustrated by lack of commercial success, he pursued a more conventional rock sound, but the ensuing albums were critically panned; this move, combined with not having been paid for a European tour, and years of enduring Beefheart's abusive behavior, led the entire band to quit.
Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982). Van Vliet made few public appearances after his retirement from music in 1982. He pursued a career in art, an interest that originated in his childhood talent for sculpture, and a venture which proved to be his most financially secure. His expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world. Van Vliet died in 2010, having suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years.
Biography
Early life and musical influences, 1941–62
Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner of Dutch ancestry from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet (née Warfield), who was from Arkansas. He said that he was descended from Peter van Vliet, a Dutch painter who knew Rembrandt. Van Vliet also said that he was related to adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and cowboy actor Slim Pickens, and he said that he remembered being born.
Van Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three. His subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs. At the age of nine, he won a children's sculpting competition organised for the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park by a local tutor, Agostinho Rodrigues. Local newspaper cuttings of his junior sculpting achievements can be found reproduced in the Splinters book, included in the Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh boxed CD work, released in 2004. The sprawling park, with its zoo and observatory, had a strong influence on young Vliet, as it was a short distance from his home on Waverly Drive. The track "Observatory Crest" on Bluejeans & Moonbeams reflects this continued interest. A portrait photo of school-age Vliet can be seen on the front of the lyric sheet within the first issue of the US release of Trout Mask Replica.
For some time during the 1950s, Van Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a child prodigy. Van Vliet said that he was a lecturer at the Barnsdall Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven, although it is likely he simply gave a form of artistic dissertation. Accounts of Van Vliet's precocious achievement in art often include his statement that he sculpted on a weekly television show. He said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, based upon their perception of artists as "queer". They declined several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture. Van Vliet later admitted personal hesitation to take the scholarship based upon the bitterness of his parents' discouragement.
Van Vliet's artistic enthusiasm became so fervent, he said that his parents were forced to feed him through the door in the room where he sculpted. When he was thirteen the family moved from the Los Angeles area to the more remote farming town of Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, where there was a growing aerospace industry supported by nearby Edwards Air Force Base. It was an environment that would greatly influence him creatively from then on. Van Vliet remained interested in art; several of his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline were later used as front covers for his music albums. Meanwhile, he developed his taste and interest in music, listening "intensively" to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, and the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. During his early teenage years, Vliet would sometimes socialize with members of local bands such as the Omens and the Blackouts, although his interests were still focused upon an art career. The Omens' guitarists Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley would later become founders of "the Magic Band" and the Blackouts' drummer, Frank Zappa, would later capture Vliet's vocal capabilities on record for the first time. This first known recording, when he was simply "Don Vliet", is "Lost In A Whirlpool" – one of Zappa's early "field recordings" made in his college classroom with brother Bobby on guitar. It is featured on Zappa's posthumously released The Lost Episodes (1996).
Van Vliet said that he never attended public school, alleging "half a day of kindergarten" to be the extent of his formal education and saying that "if you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school". His associates said that he only dropped out during his senior year of high school to help support the family after his father's heart attack. His graduation picture appears in the school's yearbook. His statements that he never attended school – and his general disavowals of education – may have been related to his experience of dyslexia which, although never officially diagnosed, was obvious to sidemen such as John French and Denny Walley, who observed his difficulty reading cue-cards on stage, and his frequent need to be read aloud to. While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, Van Vliet became close friends with fellow teenager Frank Zappa, the pair bonding through their interest in Chicago blues and R&B. Van Vliet is portrayed in both The Real Frank Zappa Book and Barry Miles' biography Zappa as fairly spoiled at this stage of his life, the center of attention as an only child. He spent most of his time locked in his room listening to records, often with Zappa, into the early hours in the morning, eating leftover food from his father's Helms bread truck and demanding that his mother bring him a Pepsi. His parents tolerated such behavior under the belief that their child was truly gifted. Vliet's "Pepsi-moods" were ever a source of amusement to band members, leading Zappa to later write the wry tune "Why Doesn't Someone Give Him A Pepsi?" that featured on the Bongo Fury tour.
After Zappa began regular occupation at Paul Buff's PAL Studio in Cucamonga he and Van Vliet began collaborating, tentatively as the Soots (pronounced "suits"). By the time Zappa had turned the venue into Studio Z the duo had completed some songs. These were Cheryl's Canon, Metal Man Has Won His Wings and a Howlin' Wolf styled rendition of Little Richard's Slippin' and Slidin'. Further songs, on Zappa's Mystery Disc (1996), I Was a Teen-Age Malt Shop and The Birth of Captain Beefheart also provide an insight to Zappa's "teenage movie" script titled Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People, the first appearances of the Beefheart name. It has been suggested this name came from a term used by Vliet's Uncle Alan who had a habit of exposing himself to Don's girlfriend, Laurie Stone. He would urinate with the bathroom door open and, if she was walking by, would mumble about his penis, saying "Ahh, what a beauty! It looks just like a big, fine beef heart". In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Van Vliet requests "don't ask me why or how" he and Zappa came up with the name. Johnny Carson also asked him the same question to which Van Vliet replied that one day he was standing on the pier and saw fishermen cutting the bills off pelicans. He said it made him sad and put "a beef in his heart". Carson appeared nervous and uncomfortable interviewing Van Vliet and after the next commercial break Van Vliet was gone. He would later say in an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman that the name referred to "a beef in my heart against this society". In the "Grunt People" draft script Beefheart and his mother play themselves, with his father played by Howlin' Wolf. Grace Slick is penned in as a "celestial seductress" and there are also roles for future Magic Band members Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston.
Van Vliet enrolled at Antelope Valley College as an art major, but decided to leave the following year. He once worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, and sold a vacuum cleaner to the writer Aldous Huxley at his home in Llano, pointing to it and declaring, "Well I assure you sir, this thing sucks." After managing a Kinney's shoe store, Van Vliet relocated to Rancho Cucamonga, California, to reconnect with Zappa, who inspired his entry into musical performance. Van Vliet was quite shy but was eventually able to imitate the deep voice of Howlin' Wolf with his wide vocal range. He eventually grew comfortable with public performance and, after learning to play the harmonica, began playing at dances and small clubs in Southern California.
Initial recordings, 1962–69
In early 1965 Alex Snouffer, a Lancaster rhythm and blues guitarist, invited Vliet to sing with a group that he was assembling. Vliet joined the first Magic Band and changed his name to Don Van Vliet, while Snouffer became Alex St. Clair (sometimes spelled Claire). Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band signed to A&M and released two singles in 1966. The first was a version of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" that became a regional hit in Los Angeles. The followup, "Moonchild" (written by David Gates, later of the band Bread) was less well received. The band played music venues that catered to underground artists, such as the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
Safe as Milk
After fulfilling their deal for two singles the band presented demos to A&M during 1966 for what would become the Safe as Milk album. A&M's Jerry Moss reportedly described this new direction as "too negative" and dropped the band from the label, although still under contract. Much of the demo recording was accomplished at Art Laboe's Original Sound Studio, then with Gary Marker on the controls at Sunset Sound on 8-track. By the end of 1966 they were signed to Buddah Records and much of the demo work was transferred to 4-track, at the behest of Krasnow and Perry, in the RCA Studio in Hollywood, where the recording was finalized. Tracks that were originally laid down in the demo by Doug Moon are therefore taken up by Ry Cooder's work in the release, as Moon had departed over "musical differences" at this juncture.
Drummer John French had now joined the group and it would later (notably on Trout Mask Replica) be his patience that was required to transcribe Van Vliet's creative ideas (often expressed by whistling or banging on the piano) into musical form for the other group members. On French's departure this role was taken over by Bill Harkleroad for Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Many of the lyrics on the Safe as Milk album were written by Van Vliet in collaboration with the writer Herb Bermann, who befriended Van Vliet after seeing him perform at a bar-gig in Lancaster in 1966. The song "Electricity" was a poem written by Bermann, who gave Van Vliet permission to adapt it to music. Unlike the album's mostly blues rock sound, songs such as "Electricity" illustrated the band's unconventional instrumentation and Van Vliet's unusual vocals, which guitarist Doug Moon described as "hinting of things to come".
Much of the Safe as Milk material was honed and arranged by the arrival of 20-year–old guitar prodigy Ry Cooder, who had been brought into the group after much pressure from Vliet. The band began recording in spring 1967, with Richard Perry cutting his teeth in his first job as producer. The album was released in September 1967. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic called the album "blues–rock gone slightly askew, with jagged, fractured rhythms, soulful, twisting vocals from Van Vliet, and more doo wop, soul, straight blues, and folk–rock influences than he would employ on his more avant garde outings".
Recognition
Among those who took notice were the Beatles. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney were known as great admirers of Beefheart. Lennon displayed two of the album's promotional "baby bumper stickers" in the sunroom at his home. Later, the Beatles planned to sign Beefheart to their experimental Zapple label (plans that were scrapped after Allen Klein took over the group's management). Van Vliet was often critical of the Beatles, however. He considered the lyric "I'd love to turn you on" from their song A Day in the Life, to be ridiculous and conceited. Tiring of their "lullabies", he lampooned them with the Strictly Personal song Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones, that featured the sardonic refrain of "strawberry fields, all the winged eels slither on the heels of today's children, strawberry fields forever". Vliet spoke badly of Lennon after getting no response when he sent a telegram of support to him and wife Yoko Ono during their 1969 "Bed-In for peace". Vliet and the band met McCartney in a Cannes hotel nightclub during their tour of Europe on January 27, 1968, urinated together on a statue outside the hotel at the prodding of journalists and photographers, and participated in a jam session together with McCartney and Penny Nichols. Producer attempts to convince McCartney to switch labels to Kama Sutra obstructed the possibility of a pleasant evening. McCartney later said he had no recollection of this meeting.
The flipside of success
Doug Moon left the band because of his dislike of the band's increasing experimentation outside his preferred blues genre. Ry Cooder told of Moon's becoming so angered by Van Vliet's unrelenting criticism that he walked into the room pointing a loaded crossbow at him, only to have Van Vliet tell him, "Get that fucking thing out of here, get out of here and get back in your room", which he did. (Other band members dispute this account, though Moon is likely to have "passed through" the studio with a weapon.) Moon was present during the early demo sessions at Original Sound studio, above the Kama Sutra/Buddah offices. The works Moon laid down did not see the light of day, as he was replaced by Cooder when they continued on material at Sunset Sound with Marker. Marker then fell by the wayside when recording was moved by Krasnow and Perry to RCA Studio. This would have a profound effect on the quality of the Safe as Milk work, as the former studio was 8-track and the subsequent studio a 4-track.
To support the album's release the group had been scheduled to play at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. During this period Vliet suffered severe anxiety attacks that made him convinced that he was having a heart attack, possibly exacerbated by his heavy LSD use and the fact that his father had died of heart failure a few years earlier. At a vital "warm-up" performance at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival (June 10–11) shortly before the scheduled Monterey Festival (June 16–18), the band began to play "Electricity" and Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the stage and landed on manager Bob Krasnow. He later claimed he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth. This aborted any opportunity of breakthrough success at Monterey, as Cooder immediately decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet, effectively quitting both the event and the band on the spot. With such complex guitar parts there was no means for the band to find a competent replacement in time for Monterey. Cooder's spot was eventually filled for a short spell by Gerry McGee, who had played with the Monkees. According to French the band did two gigs with McGee, one of which was at The Peppermint Twist near Long Beach. The other was at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, August 7, 1967, as opening act for the Yardbirds. McGee was in the group long enough to have an outfit made by a Santa Monica boutique that also created the gear worn by the band on the Strictly Personal cover stamps.
Strictly Personal
In August 1967, guitarist Jeff Cotton filled the guitar spot vacated, in turn, by Cooder and McGee. In October and November 1967 the Snouffer/Cotton/Handley/French line–up recorded material for what was planned to be the second album. Originally intended to be a double album called It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper for the label, it was released later in pieces in 1971 and 1995. After rejection from Buddah, Bob Krasnow encouraged the band to re-record four of the shorter numbers, add two more, and make shorter versions of "Mirror Man" and "Kandy Korn". Krasnow created a strange mix full of "phasing" that, by most accounts (including Beefheart's), diminished the music's strength. This was released in October 1968 as Strictly Personal on Krasnow's Blue Thumb label. Stewart Mason in his Allmusic review of the album described it as a "terrific album" and a "fascinating, underrated release ... every bit the equal of Safe as Milk and Trout Mask Replica". Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone called Strictly Personal "an excellent album. The guitars of the Magic Band mercilessly bend and stretch notes in a way that suggests that the world of music has wobbled clear off its axis", with the lyrics demonstrating "Beefheart's ability to juxtapose delightful humor with frightening insights".
Mirror Man
In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note stating that the material had been recorded in "one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues–rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series.
During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, press coverage and public outcry resulted in the band being permitted to re-enter the UK, where they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and on Friday January 19 appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel, where they played tracks from Safe as Milk and some of the experimental blues tracks from Mirror Man. The band was met by an enthusiastic audience; French recalled the event as a rare high moment for the band: "After the show, we were taken to the dressing room where we sat for hours as a line of what seemed like hundreds of people walked in one by one to shake our hand or get an autograph. Many brought imports of Safe as Milk with them for us to autograph ... It seemed like we had finally gained some reward ... Suddenly all the criticizing and intimidation and eccentricities seemed very unimportant. It was a glorious moment, one of the very few I ever experienced". By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France.
Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later.
The 'Brown Wrapper' Sessions
After their Euro tour and the Cannes beach performance the band returned to the US. Moves were already in the air for them to leave Buddah and sign to MGM and, prior to their May tour – mainly in the UK – they re-recorded some Buddah material of the partial Mirror Man sessions at Sunset Sound with Bruce Botnick. Beefheart had also been conceptualizing new band names, including 25th Century Quaker and Blue Thumb, while making suggestions to other musicians that they might get involved. The thought-process of 25th Century Quaker was that it would be a "blues band" alias for the more avant-garde work of the Magic Band. Photographer Guy Webster photographed the band in Quaker-style outfits, and the picture appears in The Mirror Man Sessions CD insert. It would later transpire that much of this situation was transient and that Buddah's Bob Krasnow was to set up his own label. The label that was unsurprisingly named Blue Thumb launched with its first release Strictly Personal, a truncated version of the original Beefheart vision of a double album. Thus "25th Century Quaker" became a track and a potential band-name became a label.
In overview, the works for the double album in this period were intended to be packaged in a plain brown wrapper, with a "strictly personal" over-stamp and addressed in a manner that could have connotations of drug content, pornographic or illicit material; as per the small ads of the time: "It comes to you in a plain brown wrapper." Given that Krasnow had effectively poached the band from Buddah there were limitations on what material could be released. Strictly Personal was the result, contained in its enigmatically-addressed parcel sleeve. The raft of material left behind eventually emerged, firstly on CD as I May Be Hungry, But I Sure Ain't Weird and later on vinyl, implemented by John French, as It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper (which has two tracks that are missing from the former release). Both Blue Thumb and the stamps on the cover of Strictly Personal have LSD connotations, as does the track Ah Feel Like Ahcid, although Beefheart himself refuted this (claiming that this is a rendering of "I feel like I said").
Trout Mask Replica, 1969
Critically acclaimed as Van Vliet's magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica was released as a 28 track double album in June 1969 on Frank Zappa's newly formed Straight Records label. First issues, in the US, were auto-coupled and housed in the black "Straight" liners along with a 6-page lyric sheet illustrated by the Mascara Snake. A school-age portrait of Van Vliet appears on the front of this sheet, while the cover of the gatefold enigmatically shows Beefheart in a 'Quaker' hat, obscuring his face with the head of a fish. The fish is a carp – arguably a "replica" for a trout, photographed by Cal Schenkel. The inner spread "infra-red" photography is by Ed Caraeff, whose Beefheart vacuum cleaner images from this session also appear on Zappa's Hot Rats release (a month earlier) to accompany "Willie The Pimp" lyrics sung by Vliet. Alex St. Clair had now left the band and, after Junior Madeo from the Blackouts was considered, the role was filled by Bill Harkleroad. Bassist Jerry Handley had also departed, with Gary Marker stepping in. Thus the long rehearsals for the album began in the house on Ensenada Drive in Woodland Hills, L.A., that would become the Magic Band House.
The Magic Band began recordings for Trout Mask Replica with bassist Gary "Magic" Marker at T.T.G. (on "Moonlight on Vermont" and "Veteran's Day Poppy"), but later enlisted bassist Mark Boston after his departure. The remainder of the album was recorded at Whitney Studios, with some field recordings made at the house. Boston was acquainted with French and Harkleroad via past bands. Van Vliet had also begun assigning nicknames to his band members, so Harkleroad became Zoot Horn Rollo, and Boston became Rockette Morton, while John French assumed the name Drumbo, and Jeff Cotton became Antennae Jimmy Semens. Van Vliet's cousin Victor Hayden, the Mascara Snake, performed as a bass clarinetist later in the proceedings. Vliet's girlfriend Laurie Stone, who can be heard laughing at the beginning of Fallin' Ditch, became an audio typist at the Magic Band house.
Van Vliet wanted the whole band to "live" the Trout Mask Replica album. The group rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in their small rented house in the Woodland Hills suburb of Los Angeles. With only two bedrooms in the house, band members would find sleep in various corners of one, while Vliet occupied the other, and rehearsals were accomplished in the main living area. Van Vliet implemented his vision by completely dominating his musicians, artistically and emotionally. At various times one or another of the group members was "put in the barrel", with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission. Guitarist Bill Harkleroad complained that his fingers were a "bloody mess" as a result of Beefheart's orders that he use heavy strings. Drummer John French described the situation as "cultlike" and a visiting friend said "the environment in that house was positively Mansonesque". Their material circumstances were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the group barely survived and were even arrested for shoplifting food (Zappa bailed them out). French has recalled living on no more than a small cup of beans a day for a month. A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health". Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for 14 or more hours a day.
John French's 2010 book Through the Eyes of Magic describes some of the "talks", which were initiated by his doing such things as playing a Frank Zappa drum part ("The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)") in his drumming shed, and not having finished drum parts as quickly as Beefheart wanted. French writes of being punched by band members, thrown into walls, kicked, punched in the face by Beefheart hard enough to draw blood, being attacked with a sharp broomstick. Eventually Beefheart, French says, threatened to throw him out an upper floor window. He admits complicity in similarly attacking his bandmates during "talks" aimed at them. In the end, after the album's recording, Beefheart ejected French from the band by throwing him down a set of stairs, telling him to "Take a walk, man" after not responding in a desired manner to a request to "play a strawberry" on the drums. Beefheart replaced French with drummer Jeff Bruschel, an acquaintance of Hayden. Referred to as "Fake Drumbo" (playing on French's drumset) this final act resulted in French's name not appearing on the album credits, either as a player or arranger. Bruschel toured with the band to Europe but was replaced by the next recording.
According to Van Vliet, the 28 songs on the album were written in a single 8½ hour session at the piano, an instrument he had no skill in playing, an approach Mike Barnes compared to John Cage's "maverick irreverence toward classical tradition", though band members have stated that the songs were written over the course of about a year, beginning around December 1967. (The band did watch Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½ during the creation of the album). It took the band about eight months to mold the songs into shape, with French bearing primary responsibility for transposing and shaping Vliet's piano fragments into guitar and bass lines, which were mostly notated on paper. Harkleroad in 1998 said in retrospect: "We're dealing with a strange person, coming from a place of being a sculptor/painter, using music as his idiom. He was getting more into that part of who he was instead of this blues singer." The band had rehearsed the songs so thoroughly that the instrumental tracks for 21 of the songs were recorded in a single four and a half hour recording session. Van Vliet spent the next few days overdubbing the vocals. The album's cover artwork was photographed and designed by Cal Schenkel and shows Van Vliet wearing the raw head of a carp, bought from a local fish market and fashioned into a mask by Schenkel.
Trout Mask Replica incorporated a wide variety of musical styles, including blues, avant garde/experimental, and rock. The relentless practice prior to recording blended the music into an iconoclastic whole of contrapuntal tempos, featuring slide guitar, polyrhythmic drumming (with French's drums and cymbals covered in cardboard), honking saxophone and bass clarinet. Van Vliet's vocals range from his signature Howlin' Wolf-inspired growl to frenzied falsetto to laconic, casual ramblings.
The instrumental backing was effectively recorded live in the studio, while Van Vliet overdubbed most of the vocals in only partial sync with the music by hearing the slight sound leakage through the studio window. Zappa said of Van Vliet's approach, "[it was] impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not."
Van Vliet used the ensuing publicity, particularly with a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Langdon Winner, to promulgate a number of myths that were subsequently quoted as fact. Winner's article stated, for instance, that neither Van Vliet nor the members of the Magic Band ever took drugs, but Harkleroad later contradicted this. Van Vliet claimed to have taught both Harkleroad and Boston to play their instruments from scratch; in fact the pair were already accomplished young musicians before joining the band. Last, Van Vliet claimed to have gone a year and half without sleeping. When asked how this was possible, he claimed to have only eaten fruit.
Critic Steve Huey of AllMusic writes that the album's influence "was felt more in spirit than in direct copycatting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point. However, its inspiring reimagining of what was possible in a rock context laid the groundwork for countless experiments in rock surrealism to follow, especially during the punk and new wave era." In 2003, the album was ranked sixtieth by Rolling Stone in their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: "On first listen, Trout Mask Replica sounds like raw Delta blues", with Beefheart "singing and ranting and reciting poetry over fractured guitar licks. But the seeming sonic chaos is an illusion—to construct the songs, the Magic Band rehearsed twelve hours a day for months on end in a house with the windows blacked out. (Producer Frank Zappa was then able to record most of the album in less than five hours.) Tracks such as 'Ella Guru' and 'My Human Gets Me Blues' are the direct predecessors of modern musical primitives such as Tom Waits and PJ Harvey." Guitarist Fred Frith noted that during this process "forces that usually emerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable".
Critic Robert Christgau gave the album a B+, saying, "I find it impossible to give this record an A because it is just too weird. But I'd like to. Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record." BBC disc jockey John Peel said of the album: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." It was inducted into the United States National Recording Registry in 2011.
Later recordings, 1970–82
Lick My Decals Off, Baby
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) continued in a similarly experimental vein. An album with "a very coherent structure" in the Magic Band's "most experimental and visionary stage", it was Van Vliet's most commercially successful in the United Kingdom, spending twenty weeks on the UK Albums Chart and peaking at number 20. An early promotional music video was made of its title song, and a bizarre television commercial was also filmed that included excerpts from Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop, silent footage of masked Magic Band members using kitchen utensils as musical instruments, and Beefheart kicking over a bowl of what appears to be porridge onto a dividing stripe in the middle of a road. The video was rarely played but was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several programs related to music.
On this LP Art Tripp III, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, played drums and marimba. Lick My Decals Off, Baby was the first record on which the band was credited as "The" Magic Band, rather than "His" Magic Band. Journalist Irwin Chusid interprets this change as "a grudging concession of its members' at least semiautonomous humanity". Robert Christgau gave the album an A−, commenting, "Beefheart's famous five-octave range and covert totalitarian structures have taken on a playful undertone, repulsive and engrossing and slapstick funny." Due to licensing disputes, Lick My Decals Off, Baby was unavailable on CD for many years, though it remained in print on vinyl. It was ranked second in Uncut magazine's May 2010 list of The 50 Greatest Lost Albums. In 2011, the album became available for download on the iTunes Store.
He toured in 1970 with Ry Cooder on the bill to promote the album.
The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot
The next two records, The Spotlight Kid (simply credited to "Captain Beefheart") and Clear Spot (credited to "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band"), were both released in 1972. The atmosphere of The Spotlight Kid is, according to one critic, "definitely relaxed and fun, maybe one step up from a jam". And though "things do sound maybe just a little too blasé", "Beefheart at his worst still has something more than most groups at their best." The music is simpler and slower than on the group's two previous releases, the uncompromisingly original Trout Mask Replica and the frenetic Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This was in part an attempt by Van Vliet to become a more appealing commercial proposition as the band had made virtually no money during the previous two years—at the time of recording, the band members were subsisting on welfare food handouts and remittances from their parents. Van Vliet offered that he "got tired of scaring people with what I was doing ... I realized that I had to give them something to hang their hat on, so I started working more of a beat into the music". Magic Band members have also said that the slower performances were due in part to Van Vliet's inability to fit his lyrics with the instrumental backing of the faster material on the earlier albums, a problem that was exacerbated in that he almost never rehearsed with the group. In the period leading up to the recording the band lived communally, first at a compound near Ben Lomond, California and then in northern California near Trinidad. The situation saw a return to the physical violence and psychological manipulation that had taken place during the band's previous communal residence while composing and rehearsing Trout Mask Replica. According to John French, the worst of this was directed toward Harkleroad. In his autobiography Harkleroad recalls being thrown into a dumpster, an act he interpreted as having metaphorical intent.
Clear Spot'''s production credit of Ted Templeman made AllMusic consider "why in the world [it] wasn't more of a commercial success than it was", and that while fans "of the fully all-out side of Beefheart might find the end result not fully up to snuff as a result, but those less concerned with pushing back all borders all the time will enjoy his unexpected blend of everything tempered with a new accessibility". The review called the song "Big Eyed Beans from Venus" "a fantastically strange piece of aggression". A Clear Spot song, "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", appeared on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' cult comedy film The Big Lebowski (1998).
Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams
In 1974, immediately after the recording of Unconditionally Guaranteed, which markedly continued the trend towards a more commercial sound heard on some of the Clear Spot tracks, the Magic Band's original members departed. Disgruntled and past members worked together for a period, gigging at Blue Lake and putting together their own ideas and demos, with John French earmarked as the vocalist. These concepts eventually coalesced around the core of Art Tripp III, Harkleroad and Boston, with the formation of Mallard, helped by finance and UK recording facilities from Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson.Harkleroad, Bill. Lunar Notes pp.132–133. Some of French's compositions were used in the band's work, but the group's singer was Sam Galpin and the role of keyboardist was eventually taken by John Thomas, who had shared a house with French in Eureka at the time. At this time Vliet attempted to recruit both French and Harkleroad as producers for his next album, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Andy Di Martino produced both of these Virgin label albums.
Vliet was forced to quickly form a new Magic Band to complete support-tour dates, with studio musicians who had no experience with his music and in fact had never heard it. Having no knowledge of the previous Magic Band style, they simply improvised what they thought would go with each song, playing much slicker versions that have been described as "bar band" versions of Beefheart songs. A review described this incarnation of the Magic Band as the "Tragic Band", a term that has stuck over the years.
Robert 'Fuzzy' Fuscaldo – guitar
Dean Smith – guitar
Del Simmons – saxophone; flute
Michael 'Bucky' Smotherman – keyboards; vocals
Paul Uhrig – bass
Ty Grimes – drums
Mike Barnes said that the description of the new band "grooving along pleasantly", was "...an appropriately banal description of the music of a man who only a few years ago composed with the expressed intent of shaking listeners out of their torpor". The one album they recorded, Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974) has, like its predecessor, a completely different, almost soft rock sound from any other Beefheart record. Neither was well received; drummer Art Tripp recalled that when he and the original Magic Band listened to Unconditionally Guaranteed, they "...were horrified. As we listened, it was as though each song was worse than the one which preceded it". Beefheart later disowned both albums, calling them "horrible and vulgar", asking that they not be considered part of his musical output and urging fans who bought them to "take copies back for a refund".
Bongo Fury to Bat Chain Puller
By the fall of 1975 the band had completed their European tour, with further US dates in the New Year of 1976, supporting Zappa along with Dr. John. Van Vliet now found himself stuck in a web of contractual hang-ups. At this point Zappa had begun to extend a helping hand, with Vliet already having performed incognito as "Rollin' Red" on Zappa's One Size Fits All (1975) and then joining with him on the Bongo Fury album and its later support tour. Two Vliet-penned numbers on the Bongo Fury album are "Sam with the Showing Scalp Flat Top" and "Man with the Woman Head". The form, texture and imagery of this album's first track, "Debra Kadabra", sung by Vliet, has 'angular similarities' to the work he would later produce in his next three albums. On the Bongo Fury album Vliet also sings "Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead", harmonizes on "200 Years Old" and "Muffin Man", and plays harmonica and soprano saxophone.
In early 1976 Zappa put on his producer hat and, once again, opened up his studio facilities and finance to Vliet. This was for the production of an album provisionally titled Bat Chain Puller. The band were John French (drums), John Thomas (keyboards) and Jeff Moris Tepper and Denny Walley (guitars). Much of the work on this album had been finalized and some demos had been circulated when fate once again struck the Beefheart camp. In May 1976 the long association between Zappa and his manager/business partner Herb Cohen ceased. This resulted in Zappa's finances and ongoing works becoming part of protracted legal negotiations. The Bat Chain Puller project went "on ice" and did not see an official release until 2012. After this recording John Thomas joined ex-Magic Band members in Mallard.
Prior to his next album Beefheart appeared in 1977 on the Tubes' album Now, playing saxophone on the song "Cathy's Clone", and the album also featured a cover of the Clear Spot song "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains". In 1978 he appeared on Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack to the film Blue Collar.
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Having extricated himself from a mire of contractual difficulties Beefheart emerged with this new album, in 1978, on the Warner Bros label. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) contained re-workings of the shelved Bat Chain Puller album and still retained its original guitarist, Jeff Moris Tepper. However, he and Vliet were now joined by a whole new line-up of Richard Redus (guitar, bass and accordion), Eric Drew Feldman (bass, piano and synthesizer), Bruce Lambourne Fowler (trombone and air bass), Art Tripp (percussion and marimba) and Robert Arthur Williams (drums). The album was co-produced by Vliet with Pete Johnson. Members of this Magic Band and the "Bat Chain" elements would later feature on Beefheart's last two albums. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) was described by Ned Raggett of Allmusic to be "...manna from heaven for those feeling Beefheart had lost his way on his two Mercury albums". Following Vliet's death, John French claimed the 40-second spoken word track "Apes-Ma" to be an analogy of Van Vliet's deteriorating physical condition. The album's sleeve features Van Vliet's 1976 painting Green Tom, one of the many works that would mark out his longed-for career as a painter of note.
Doc at the Radar StationDoc at the Radar Station (1980) helped establish Beefheart's late resurgence. Released by Virgin Records during the post-punk scene, the music was now accessible to a younger, more receptive audience. He was interviewed in a feature report on KABC-TV's Channel 7 Eyewitness News in which he was hailed as "the father of the new wave. One of the most important American composers of the last fifty years, [and] a primitive genius"; Van Vliet said at this period, "I'm doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state ... and I think there is one right now." Huey of Allmusic cited the Doc at the Radar Station as being "...generally acclaimed as the strongest album of his comeback, and by some as his best since Trout Mask Replica", "even if the Captain's voice isn't quite what it once was, Doc at the Radar Station is an excellent, focused consolidation of Beefheart's past and then-present". Van Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes speaks of "revamping work built on skeletal ideas and fragments that would have mouldered away in the vaults had they not been exhumed and transformed into full-blown, totally convincing new material". During this period, Van Vliet made two appearances on David Letterman's late night television program on NBC, and also performed on Saturday Night Live.
Richard Redus and Art Tripp departed on this album, with slide guitar and marimba duties taken up by the reappearance of John French. The guitar skills of Gary Lucas also feature on the track Flavor Bud Living.
Ice Cream for Crow
The final Beefheart record, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), was recorded with Gary Lucas (who was also Van Vliet's manager), Jeff Moris Tepper, Richard Snyder and Cliff Martinez. This line-up made a video to promote the title track, directed by Van Vliet and Ken Schreiber, with cinematography by Daniel Pearl, which was rejected by MTV for being "too weird". However, the video was included in the Letterman broadcast on NBC-TV, and was also accepted into the Museum of Modern Art. Van Vliet announced "I don't want my MTV if they don't want my video" during his interview with Letterman, in reference to MTV's "I want my MTV" marketing campaign of the time. Ice Cream for Crow, along with songs such as its title track, features instrumental performances by the Magic Band with performance poetry readings by Van Vliet. Raggett of AllMusic called the album a "last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact", with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results". Barnes writes that, "The most original and vital tracks (on the album) are the newer ones", saying that it "feels like an hors-d'oeuvre for a main course that never came". Michael Galucci of Goldmine praised the album, describing it as "the single, most bizarre entry in Van Vliet's long, odd career." Promotional work proposed to Beefheart by Virgin Records was as unorthodox as him making an appearance in the 1987 film Grizzly II: The Predator. Soon after, Van Vliet retired from music and began a new career as a painter. Gary Lucas tried to convince him to record one more album, but to no avail.
Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh
Released in 2004 by Rhino Handmade in a limited edition of 1,500 copies, this signed and numbered box set contains a "Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh" CD of Vliet-recited poetry, the Anton Corbijn film of Vliet Some YoYo Stuff on DVD and two art books. One book, entitled Splinters, gives a visual "scrapbook" insight into Vliet's life, from an early age to his painting in retirement. The second, eponymously titled, book is packed with art pages of Vliet's work. The first is bound in green linen, the second in yellow. These colors are counterpointed throughout the package, which comes in a green slipcase measuring 235 mm × 325 mm × 70 mm. An onion-skin wallet, nestling at the package's inner sanctum, contains a matching-numbered Vliet lithograph on hand-rolled paper, signed by the artist. The two books are by publishers Artist Ink Editions.
Paintings
Throughout his musical career, Van Vliet remained interested in visual art. He placed his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline, on several of his albums. In 1987, Van Vliet published Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush, a collection of his poetry, paintings and drawings.
In the mid-1980s, Van Vliet became reclusive and abandoned music, stating he had gotten "too good at the horn" and could make far more money painting. Beefheart's first exhibition had been at Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery during the Magic Band's 1972 tour of the UK. He was interviewed on Granada regional television standing in front of his bold black and white canvases. He was inspired to begin an art career when a fan, Julian Schnabel, who admired the artwork seen on his album covers, asked to buy a drawing from him. His debut exhibition as a serious painter was at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1985 and was initially regarded as that of "another rock musician dabbling in art for ego's sake", though his primitive, non-conformist work has received more sympathetic and serious attention since then, with some sales approaching $25,000. Two books have been published specifically devoted to critique and analysis of his artwork: Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet (1999) by W. C. Bamberger and Stand Up To Be Discontinued, first published in 1993, a now rare collection of essays on Van Vliet's work. The limited edition version of the book contains a CD of Van Vliet reading six of his poems: Fallin' Ditch, The Tired Plain, Skeleton Makes Good, Safe Sex Drill, Tulip and Gill. A deluxe edition was published in 1994; only 60 were printed, with etchings of Van Vliet's signature, costing £180.
In the early 1980s Van Vliet established an association with the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. Eric Feldman stated later in an interview that at that time Michael Werner told Van Vliet he needed to stop playing music if he wanted to be respected as a painter, warning him that otherwise he would only be considered a "musician who paints". In doing so, it was said that he had effectively "succeeded in leaving his past behind". Van Vliet has been described as a modernist, a primitivist, an abstract expressionist, and, "in a sense" an outsider artist. Morgan Falconer of Artforum concurs, mentioning both a "neo-primitivist aesthetic" and further stating that his work is influenced by the CoBrA painters. The resemblance to the CoBrA painters is also recognized by art critic Roberto Ohrt, while others have compared his paintings to the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko.
According to Dr. John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 1997, although Van Vliet's work has associations with mainstream abstract expressionist painting, more importantly he was a self-taught artist and his painting "has that same kind of edge the music has". Curator David Breuer asserts that in contrast to the busied, bohemian urban lives of the New York abstract expressionists, the rural desert environment Van Vliet was influenced by is a distinctly naturalistic one, making him a distinguished figure in contemporary art, whose work will survive in canon. Van Vliet stated of his own work, "I'm trying to turn myself inside out on the canvas. I'm trying to completely bare what I think at that moment" and "I paint for the simple reason that I have to. I feel a sense of relief after I do." When asked about his artistic influences he stated that there were none. "I just paint like I paint and that's enough influence." He did however state his admiration of Georg Baselitz, the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian, and Vincent van Gogh; after seeing van Gogh's paintings in person, Van Vliet quoted himself as saying, "The sun disappoints me so."
Exhibits of his paintings from the late 1990s were held in New York in 2009 and 2010. Falconer stated that the most recent exhibitions showed "evidence of a serious, committed artist". It was claimed that he stopped painting in the late 1990s. A 2007 interview with Van Vliet through email by Anthony Haden-Guest, however, showed him to still be active artistically. He exhibited only few of his paintings because he immediately destroyed any that did not satisfy him.
Life in retirement
After his retirement from music, Van Vliet rarely appeared in public. He resided near Trinidad, California, with his wife Janet "Jan" Van Vliet. By the early 1990s he was using a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis. The severity of his illness was sometimes disputed. Many of his art contractors and friends considered him to be in good health. Other associates such as his longtime drummer and musical director John French and bassist Richard Snyder have stated that they had noticed symptoms consistent with the onset of multiple sclerosis, such as sensitivity to heat, loss of balance, and stiffness of gait, by the late 1970s.
One of Van Vliet's last public appearances was in the 1993 short documentary Some Yo Yo Stuff by filmmaker Anton Corbijn, described as an "observation of his observations". Around 13 minutes and shot entirely in black and white, with appearances by his mother and David Lynch, the film showed a noticeably weakened and dysarthric Van Vliet at his residence in California, reading poetry, and philosophically discussing his life, environment, music and art. In 2000, he appeared on Gary Lucas's album Improve the Shining Hour and Moris Tepper's Moth to Mouth, and spoke on Tepper's 2004 song "Ricochet Man" from the album Head Off. He is credited for naming Tepper's 2010 album A Singer Named Shotgun Throat.
Van Vliet often voiced concern over and support for environmentalist issues and causes, particularly the welfare of animals. He often referred to Earth as "God's Golfball" and this expression can be found on a number of his later albums. In 2003 he was heard on the compilation album Where We Live: Stand for What You Stand On: A Benefit CD for EarthJustice singing a version of "Happy Birthday to You" retitled "Happy Earthday". The track lasts 34 seconds and was recorded over the telephone.
Death
Van Vliet died at a hospital in Arcata, California, on Friday, December 17, 2010, about a month before his 70th birthday. The cause was named as complications from multiple sclerosis. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan commented on his death, praising him: "Wondrous, secret ... and profound, he was a diviner of the highest order."
Dweezil Zappa dedicated the song "Willie the Pimp" to Beefheart at the "Zappa Plays Zappa" show at the Beacon Theater in New York City on the day of his death, while Jeff Bridges exclaimed "Rest in peace, Captain Beefheart!" at the conclusion of the December 18, 2010, episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live.
Relationship with Frank Zappa
Van Vliet met Frank Zappa when they were both teenagers and shared an interest in rhythm and blues and Chicago blues. They collaborated from this early stage, with Zappa's scripts for "teenage operettas" such as "Captain Beefheart & the Grunt People" helping to elevate Van Vliet's Captain Beefheart persona. In 1963, the pair recorded a demo at the Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga as the Soots, seeking support from a major label. Their efforts were unsuccessful, as "Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf vocal style and Zappa's distorted guitar" were "not on the agenda" at the time.
The friendship between Zappa and Van Vliet over the years was sometimes expressed in the form of rivalry as musicians drifted back and forth between their groups. Van Vliet embarked on the 1975 Bongo Fury tour with Zappa and the Mothers, mainly because conflicting contractual obligations made him unable to tour or record independently. Their relationship grew acrimonious on the tour to the point that they refused to talk to one another. Zappa became irritated by Van Vliet, who drew constantly, including while on stage, filling one of his large sketch books with rapidly executed portraits and warped caricatures of Zappa. Musically, Van Vliet's primitive style contrasted sharply with Zappa's compositional discipline and abundant technique. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black described the situation as "two geniuses" on "ego trips". Estranged for years afterwards, they reconnected at the end of Zappa's life, after his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer. Their collaborative work appears on the Zappa rarity collections The Lost Episodes (1996) and Mystery Disc (1996). Particularly notable is their song "Muffin Man", included on the Zappa/Beefheart Bongo Fury album, as well as Zappa's compilation album Strictly Commercial (1995). Zappa finished concerts with the song for many years afterwards. Beefheart also provided vocals for "Willie the Pimp" on Zappa's otherwise instrumental album Hot Rats (1969). One track on Trout Mask Replica, "The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)", features Magic Band guitarist Jeff Cotton talking on the telephone to Zappa superimposed onto an unrelated live recording of the Mothers of Invention (the backing track was later released in 1992 as "Charles Ives" on You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 ). Van Vliet also played the harmonica on two songs on Zappa albums: "San Ber'dino" (credited as "Bloodshot Rollin' Red") on One Size Fits All (1975) and "Find Her Finer" on Zoot Allures (1976). He is also the vocalist on "The Torture Never Stops (Original Version)" on Zappa's You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 4.
The Magic Band
Influence
Van Vliet has been the subject of at least two documentaries, the BBC's 1997 The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart narrated by John Peel, and the 2006 independent production Captain Beefheart: Under Review.
According to Peel, "If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it's Beefheart ... I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week and I'll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week." His narration added: "A psychedelic shaman who frequently bullied his musicians and sometimes alarmed his fans, Don somehow remained one of rock's great innocents." Mike Barnes referred to him as an "iconic counterculture hero" who, with the Magic Band, "went on to stake out startling new possibilities for rock music". Lester Bangs cited Beefheart as "one of the four or five unqualified geniuses to rise from the hothouses of American music in the Sixties", while John Harris of The Guardian praised the music's "pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together". A Rolling Stone biography described his work as "a sort of modern chamber music for [a] rock band, since he plans every note and teaches the band their parts by ear. Because it breaks so many of rock's conventions at once, Beefheart's music has always been more influential than popular." In this context, it is performed by the classical group, the Meridian Arts Ensemble. Nicholas E. Tawa, in his 2005 book Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th Century: Styles and Singers and What They Said About America, included Beefheart among the prominent progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, while the Encyclopædia Britannica describes Beefheart's songs as conveying "deep distrust of modern civilization, a yearning for ecological balance, and that belief that all animals in the wild are far superior to human beings". Many of his works have been classified as "art rock".
Many artists have cited Van Vliet as an influence, beginning with the Edgar Broughton Band, who covered "Dropout Boogie" as Apache Drop Out (mixed with the Shadows' "Apache") as early as 1970, as did the Kills 32 years later. The Minutemen were fans of Beefheart, and were arguably among the few to effectively synthesize his music with their own, especially in their early output, which featured disjointed guitar and irregular, galloping rhythms. Michael Azerrad describes the Minutemen's early output as "highly caffeinated Captain Beefheart running down James Brown tunes", and notes that Beefheart was the group's "idol". Others who arguably conveyed the same influence around the same time or before include John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Little Feat, Laurie Anderson, the Residents and Henry Cow. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and poet mystic Z'EV, both pioneers of industrial music, cited Van Vliet along with Zappa among their influences. More notable were those emerging during the early days of punk rock, such as the Clash and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols (reportedly to manager Malcolm McLaren's disapproval), later of the post-punk band Public Image Ltd. Frank Discussion of punk rock band The Feederz learned to play guitar from listening to Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me—and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Groening served as the curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that reunited the post–Beefheart Magic Band.
Van Vliet's influence on post–punk bands was demonstrated by Magazine's recording of "I Love You You Big Dummy" in 1978 and the tribute album Fast 'n' Bulbous – A Tribute to Captain Beefheart in 1988, featuring the likes of artists such as the Dog Faced Hermans, the Scientists, the Membranes, Simon Fisher Turner, That Petrol Emotion, the Primevals, the Mock Turtles, XTC, and Sonic Youth, who included a cover of Beefheart's "Electricity" which would later be re-released as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their 1988 album Daydream Nation. Other post-punk bands influenced by Beefheart include Gang of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pere Ubu, Babe the Blue Ox and Mark E. Smith of the Fall. The Fall covered "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones" in their 1993 session for John Peel. Beefheart is considered to have "greatly influenced" new wave artists, such as David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, the Bongos, and the B-52s.
Tom Waits' shift in artistic direction, starting with 1983's Swordfishtrombones, was, Waits claims, a result of his wife Kathleen Brennan introducing him to Van Vliet's music. "Once you've heard Beefheart", said Waits, "it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." More recently, Waits has described Beefheart's work as "glimpse into the future; like curatives, recipes for ancient oils". Guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cited Van Vliet as a prominent influence on the band's 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik as well as his debut solo album Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and stated that during his drug-induced absence, after leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he "would paint and listen to Trout Mask Replica". Black Francis of the Pixies cited Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid as one of the albums he listened to regularly when first writing songs for the band, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana acknowledged Van Vliet's influence, mentioning him among his notoriously eclectic range.
The White Stripes in 2000 released a 7" tribute single, "Party of Special Things to Do", containing covers of that Beefheart song plus "China Pig" and "Ashtray Heart". The Kills included a cover of "Dropout Boogie" on their debut Black Rooster EP (2002). The Black Keys in 2008 released a free cover of Beefheart's "I'm Glad" from Safe as Milk. The 2002 LCD Soundsystem song "Losing My Edge" has a verse which James Murphy says, "I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band". In 2005 Genus Records produced Mama Kangaroos – Philly Women Sing Captain Beefheart, a 20-track tribute to Captain Beefheart. Beck included Safe as Milk and Ella Guru in a playlist of songs as part of his website's Planned Obsolescence series of mashups of songs by the musicians that influenced him. Franz Ferdinand cited Beefheart's Doc at the Radar Station as a strong influence on their second LP, You Could Have It So Much Better. Placebo briefly named themselves Ashtray Heart, after the track on Doc at the Radar Station; the band's album Battle for the Sun contains a track, "Ashtray Heart". Joan Osborne covered Beefheart's "(His) Eyes are a Blue Million Miles", which appears on Early Recordings. She cited Van Vliet as one of her influences.
PJ Harvey and John Parish discussed Beefheart's influence in an interview together. Harvey's first experience of Beefheart's music was as a child. Her parents had all of his albums; listening to them made her "feel ill". Harvey was reintroduced to Beefheart's music by Parish, who lent her a cassette copy of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) at the age of 16. She cited him as one of her greatest influences since. Parish described Beefheart's music as a "combination of raw blues and abstract jazz. There was humour in there, but you could tell that it wasn't [intended as] a joke. I felt that there was a depth to what he did that very few other rock artists have managed [to achieve]." Ty Segall covered "Drop Out Boogie" on his 2009 album Lemons.
Discography
Safe as Milk (1967)
Strictly Personal (1968)
Trout Mask Replica (1969)
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)
Mirror Man (1971)
The Spotlight Kid (1972)
Clear Spot (1972)
Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974)
Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974)
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978)
Doc at the Radar Station (1980)
Ice Cream for Crow (1982)
Bat Chain Puller (2012, recorded in 1976)
References
Further reading
Bamberger, W.C. (1999). Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet.
Beaugrand, Andreas and various (1994). Stand Up to Be Discontinued. (Paperback) .
Courrier, Kevin (2007). Trout Mask Replica. New York: Continuum.
Delville, Michel & Norris, Andrew (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. .
Harkleroad, Bill (1998). Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Interlink Publishing. .
Van Vliet, Don (Captain Beefheart) (1987). Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush. (All poems in English, preface in German and English.) Bern-Berlin: Gachnang & Springer.
Zappa, Frank & Occhiogrosso, Peter; The Real Frank Zappa Book, Poseidon Press (1989),
External links
Beefheart.com – The Captain Beefheart Radar Station
[ Captain Beefheart] at AllMusic
Captain Beefheart at Rolling Stone''
Some Yo Yo Stuff by Anton Corbijn
1941 births
2010 deaths
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The Magic Band members
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[
"Is There Anything About? is the sixth studio album by British jazz fusion group Brand X. It is the last album to feature longstanding members Robin Lumley and Phil Collins. It was assembled from outtakes from the 1979 Product sessions. These sessions produced around twenty tracks which became Product (1979), Do They Hurt? (1980) and Is There Anything About? (1982). \"Modern, Noisy and Effective\" is the backing track to \"Soho\" with a new keyboard line overdubbed over the top of it. \"A Longer April\" is just an extended version of \"April\" from Product, with a bit of synth noise added in the middle. \"TMIU-ATGA\" is taken from an old cassette tape running in the studio while the band were improvising; the title is an acronym for 'They Make It Up As They Go Along'.\n\nTrack listing\n\nSide one\n\"Ipanaemia\" (Goodsall) – 4:30\n\"A Longer April\" (Giblin) – 7:00\n\"Modern, Noisy and Effective\" (Goodsall, Lumley, Short) – 3:56\n\nSide two\n\"Swan Song\" (Collins, Giblin, Lumley, Short) – 5:37\n\"Is There Anything About?\" (Collins, Goodsall, Jones) – 7:53\n\"TMIU-ATGA\" (Giblin, Lumley, Robinson) – 5:09\n\nReissue on CD\n \"Ipanemia\" (Goodsall) – 4:13\n \"A Longer April\" (Giblin) – 7:23\n \"TMIU-ATGA\" (Giblin, Lumley, Robinson) – 5:09\n \"Swan Song\" (Collins, Giblin, Lumley, Short) – 5:37\n \"Is There Anything About?\" (Collins, Goodsall, Jones) – 7:53\n \"Modern, Noisy and Effective\" (Goodsall, Lumley, Short) – 3:58\n\nPersonnel\n John Goodsall – electric guitar\n Robin Lumley – keyboards, backing vocals\n J. Peter Robinson – keyboards (track 6)\n John Giblin – bass (except track 5), backing vocals\n Percy Jones – bass (track 5)\n Phil Collins – drums, percussion\n\nAdditional personnel\n Raphael Ravenscroft – saxophone (track 2)\n Steve Short – syndrums (track 4), backing vocals\n Ed Carson – handclaps (track 3)\n\nCharts\n\nNotes\n This album is outtakes from the Product (1979) sessions. \n \"A Longer April\" is a re-engineered version of \"April\" from the Product (1979) sessions.\n \"Modern, Noisy, and Effective\" is a recycling of the backing track of \"Soho\" from the Product (1979) album; that track had been engineered by Collins, who was described as \"modern, noisy, and effective\". This phrase, in fact, first appears in the film Three Dates with Genesis (1978); the narrator describes the scene in which the stage has been torn down and all the equipment loaded into trucks thus: \"Like the rock band they service, the trucks are noisy, modern, and effective; at 2:30 on a Friday morning, they leave Mannheim to drive halfway across Europe to the Dutch border.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\nBrand X albums\n1982 albums\nPassport Records albums\nCBS Records albums\nColumbia Records albums\nVertigo Records albums\nEpic Records albums",
"Best of SWV is a compilation album by the R&B group SWV, released in 2001. The collection gathers the majority of SWV's hits, as well as a few select album tracks. It is the group's third compilation album, after Greatest Hits (RCA) and Greatest Hits (Simitar). Notably, one of the group's biggest hits, \"Can We,\" is not included, and the version of \"Anything\" that opens the album is the original album version from It's About Time, as opposed to the more popular Old Skool remix as featured on The Remixes. It is likely that the group had little to no say in the tracks that were chosen for the album, as it was released three years after their 1998 break-up, and another four years before their 2005 re-formation.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Anything\" - 2:48\n\"Right Here\" [Human Nature Radio Mix] - 3:49\n\"Weak\" - 4:54\n\"What's It Gonna Be\" - 4:34\n\"It's All About U\" - 3:46\n\"When U Cry\" - 4:36\n\"I'm So into You\" - 4:41\n\"You're Always on My Mind\" - 5:20\n\"Someone\" (featuring Puff Daddy) - 4:09\n\"Downtown\" - 5:14\n\"Rain\" - 4:27\n\"Lose My Cool\" (featuring Redman) - 4:40\n\"Use Your Heart\" - 4:51\n\"You're the One\" - 4:45\n\"Here for You\" - 4:57\n\"Love Is So Amazin'\" - 6:02\n\nReferences\n\nSWV compilation albums\nAlbums produced by Troy Taylor (record producer)\n2001 greatest hits albums"
] |
[
"Captain Beefheart",
"Mirror Man",
"What was mirror man?",
"In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man,",
"Is there anything notable about the album?",
"bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in \"...one night in Los Angeles in 1965\"."
] |
C_62dc9c09bb4e4c4c88ce70a1c9567957_0
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Why was it recorded in only one night?
| 3 |
Why was the Mirror Man recorded in only one night?
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Captain Beefheart
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In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in "...one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues-rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series. During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, the group was permitted to re-enter the UK, when they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel on Saturday January 20. By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France. Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later. CANNOTANSWER
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This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues.
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Don Van Vliet (; born Don Glen Vliet; January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. Conducting a rotating ensemble called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, known separately as "The Magic Band", he recorded 13 studio albums between 1964 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, and his wide vocal range. Known for his enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians. Although he achieved little commercial success, he sustained a cult following as a "highly significant" and "incalculable" influence on an array of new wave, punk, and experimental rock artists.
An artistic prodigy in his childhood, Van Vliet developed an eclectic musical taste during his teen years in Lancaster, California, and formed "a mutually useful but volatile" friendship with musician Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated. He began performing with his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964 and joined the original Magic Band line-up, initiated by Alexis Snouffer, the same year. The group released their debut album Safe as Milk in 1967 on Buddah Records. After being dropped by two consecutive record labels they signed to Zappa's Straight Records, where they released 1969's Trout Mask Replica; the album would later rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1974, frustrated by lack of commercial success, he pursued a more conventional rock sound, but the ensuing albums were critically panned; this move, combined with not having been paid for a European tour, and years of enduring Beefheart's abusive behavior, led the entire band to quit.
Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982). Van Vliet made few public appearances after his retirement from music in 1982. He pursued a career in art, an interest that originated in his childhood talent for sculpture, and a venture which proved to be his most financially secure. His expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world. Van Vliet died in 2010, having suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years.
Biography
Early life and musical influences, 1941–62
Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner of Dutch ancestry from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet (née Warfield), who was from Arkansas. He said that he was descended from Peter van Vliet, a Dutch painter who knew Rembrandt. Van Vliet also said that he was related to adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and cowboy actor Slim Pickens, and he said that he remembered being born.
Van Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three. His subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs. At the age of nine, he won a children's sculpting competition organised for the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park by a local tutor, Agostinho Rodrigues. Local newspaper cuttings of his junior sculpting achievements can be found reproduced in the Splinters book, included in the Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh boxed CD work, released in 2004. The sprawling park, with its zoo and observatory, had a strong influence on young Vliet, as it was a short distance from his home on Waverly Drive. The track "Observatory Crest" on Bluejeans & Moonbeams reflects this continued interest. A portrait photo of school-age Vliet can be seen on the front of the lyric sheet within the first issue of the US release of Trout Mask Replica.
For some time during the 1950s, Van Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a child prodigy. Van Vliet said that he was a lecturer at the Barnsdall Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven, although it is likely he simply gave a form of artistic dissertation. Accounts of Van Vliet's precocious achievement in art often include his statement that he sculpted on a weekly television show. He said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, based upon their perception of artists as "queer". They declined several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture. Van Vliet later admitted personal hesitation to take the scholarship based upon the bitterness of his parents' discouragement.
Van Vliet's artistic enthusiasm became so fervent, he said that his parents were forced to feed him through the door in the room where he sculpted. When he was thirteen the family moved from the Los Angeles area to the more remote farming town of Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, where there was a growing aerospace industry supported by nearby Edwards Air Force Base. It was an environment that would greatly influence him creatively from then on. Van Vliet remained interested in art; several of his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline were later used as front covers for his music albums. Meanwhile, he developed his taste and interest in music, listening "intensively" to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, and the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. During his early teenage years, Vliet would sometimes socialize with members of local bands such as the Omens and the Blackouts, although his interests were still focused upon an art career. The Omens' guitarists Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley would later become founders of "the Magic Band" and the Blackouts' drummer, Frank Zappa, would later capture Vliet's vocal capabilities on record for the first time. This first known recording, when he was simply "Don Vliet", is "Lost In A Whirlpool" – one of Zappa's early "field recordings" made in his college classroom with brother Bobby on guitar. It is featured on Zappa's posthumously released The Lost Episodes (1996).
Van Vliet said that he never attended public school, alleging "half a day of kindergarten" to be the extent of his formal education and saying that "if you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school". His associates said that he only dropped out during his senior year of high school to help support the family after his father's heart attack. His graduation picture appears in the school's yearbook. His statements that he never attended school – and his general disavowals of education – may have been related to his experience of dyslexia which, although never officially diagnosed, was obvious to sidemen such as John French and Denny Walley, who observed his difficulty reading cue-cards on stage, and his frequent need to be read aloud to. While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, Van Vliet became close friends with fellow teenager Frank Zappa, the pair bonding through their interest in Chicago blues and R&B. Van Vliet is portrayed in both The Real Frank Zappa Book and Barry Miles' biography Zappa as fairly spoiled at this stage of his life, the center of attention as an only child. He spent most of his time locked in his room listening to records, often with Zappa, into the early hours in the morning, eating leftover food from his father's Helms bread truck and demanding that his mother bring him a Pepsi. His parents tolerated such behavior under the belief that their child was truly gifted. Vliet's "Pepsi-moods" were ever a source of amusement to band members, leading Zappa to later write the wry tune "Why Doesn't Someone Give Him A Pepsi?" that featured on the Bongo Fury tour.
After Zappa began regular occupation at Paul Buff's PAL Studio in Cucamonga he and Van Vliet began collaborating, tentatively as the Soots (pronounced "suits"). By the time Zappa had turned the venue into Studio Z the duo had completed some songs. These were Cheryl's Canon, Metal Man Has Won His Wings and a Howlin' Wolf styled rendition of Little Richard's Slippin' and Slidin'. Further songs, on Zappa's Mystery Disc (1996), I Was a Teen-Age Malt Shop and The Birth of Captain Beefheart also provide an insight to Zappa's "teenage movie" script titled Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People, the first appearances of the Beefheart name. It has been suggested this name came from a term used by Vliet's Uncle Alan who had a habit of exposing himself to Don's girlfriend, Laurie Stone. He would urinate with the bathroom door open and, if she was walking by, would mumble about his penis, saying "Ahh, what a beauty! It looks just like a big, fine beef heart". In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Van Vliet requests "don't ask me why or how" he and Zappa came up with the name. Johnny Carson also asked him the same question to which Van Vliet replied that one day he was standing on the pier and saw fishermen cutting the bills off pelicans. He said it made him sad and put "a beef in his heart". Carson appeared nervous and uncomfortable interviewing Van Vliet and after the next commercial break Van Vliet was gone. He would later say in an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman that the name referred to "a beef in my heart against this society". In the "Grunt People" draft script Beefheart and his mother play themselves, with his father played by Howlin' Wolf. Grace Slick is penned in as a "celestial seductress" and there are also roles for future Magic Band members Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston.
Van Vliet enrolled at Antelope Valley College as an art major, but decided to leave the following year. He once worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, and sold a vacuum cleaner to the writer Aldous Huxley at his home in Llano, pointing to it and declaring, "Well I assure you sir, this thing sucks." After managing a Kinney's shoe store, Van Vliet relocated to Rancho Cucamonga, California, to reconnect with Zappa, who inspired his entry into musical performance. Van Vliet was quite shy but was eventually able to imitate the deep voice of Howlin' Wolf with his wide vocal range. He eventually grew comfortable with public performance and, after learning to play the harmonica, began playing at dances and small clubs in Southern California.
Initial recordings, 1962–69
In early 1965 Alex Snouffer, a Lancaster rhythm and blues guitarist, invited Vliet to sing with a group that he was assembling. Vliet joined the first Magic Band and changed his name to Don Van Vliet, while Snouffer became Alex St. Clair (sometimes spelled Claire). Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band signed to A&M and released two singles in 1966. The first was a version of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" that became a regional hit in Los Angeles. The followup, "Moonchild" (written by David Gates, later of the band Bread) was less well received. The band played music venues that catered to underground artists, such as the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
Safe as Milk
After fulfilling their deal for two singles the band presented demos to A&M during 1966 for what would become the Safe as Milk album. A&M's Jerry Moss reportedly described this new direction as "too negative" and dropped the band from the label, although still under contract. Much of the demo recording was accomplished at Art Laboe's Original Sound Studio, then with Gary Marker on the controls at Sunset Sound on 8-track. By the end of 1966 they were signed to Buddah Records and much of the demo work was transferred to 4-track, at the behest of Krasnow and Perry, in the RCA Studio in Hollywood, where the recording was finalized. Tracks that were originally laid down in the demo by Doug Moon are therefore taken up by Ry Cooder's work in the release, as Moon had departed over "musical differences" at this juncture.
Drummer John French had now joined the group and it would later (notably on Trout Mask Replica) be his patience that was required to transcribe Van Vliet's creative ideas (often expressed by whistling or banging on the piano) into musical form for the other group members. On French's departure this role was taken over by Bill Harkleroad for Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Many of the lyrics on the Safe as Milk album were written by Van Vliet in collaboration with the writer Herb Bermann, who befriended Van Vliet after seeing him perform at a bar-gig in Lancaster in 1966. The song "Electricity" was a poem written by Bermann, who gave Van Vliet permission to adapt it to music. Unlike the album's mostly blues rock sound, songs such as "Electricity" illustrated the band's unconventional instrumentation and Van Vliet's unusual vocals, which guitarist Doug Moon described as "hinting of things to come".
Much of the Safe as Milk material was honed and arranged by the arrival of 20-year–old guitar prodigy Ry Cooder, who had been brought into the group after much pressure from Vliet. The band began recording in spring 1967, with Richard Perry cutting his teeth in his first job as producer. The album was released in September 1967. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic called the album "blues–rock gone slightly askew, with jagged, fractured rhythms, soulful, twisting vocals from Van Vliet, and more doo wop, soul, straight blues, and folk–rock influences than he would employ on his more avant garde outings".
Recognition
Among those who took notice were the Beatles. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney were known as great admirers of Beefheart. Lennon displayed two of the album's promotional "baby bumper stickers" in the sunroom at his home. Later, the Beatles planned to sign Beefheart to their experimental Zapple label (plans that were scrapped after Allen Klein took over the group's management). Van Vliet was often critical of the Beatles, however. He considered the lyric "I'd love to turn you on" from their song A Day in the Life, to be ridiculous and conceited. Tiring of their "lullabies", he lampooned them with the Strictly Personal song Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones, that featured the sardonic refrain of "strawberry fields, all the winged eels slither on the heels of today's children, strawberry fields forever". Vliet spoke badly of Lennon after getting no response when he sent a telegram of support to him and wife Yoko Ono during their 1969 "Bed-In for peace". Vliet and the band met McCartney in a Cannes hotel nightclub during their tour of Europe on January 27, 1968, urinated together on a statue outside the hotel at the prodding of journalists and photographers, and participated in a jam session together with McCartney and Penny Nichols. Producer attempts to convince McCartney to switch labels to Kama Sutra obstructed the possibility of a pleasant evening. McCartney later said he had no recollection of this meeting.
The flipside of success
Doug Moon left the band because of his dislike of the band's increasing experimentation outside his preferred blues genre. Ry Cooder told of Moon's becoming so angered by Van Vliet's unrelenting criticism that he walked into the room pointing a loaded crossbow at him, only to have Van Vliet tell him, "Get that fucking thing out of here, get out of here and get back in your room", which he did. (Other band members dispute this account, though Moon is likely to have "passed through" the studio with a weapon.) Moon was present during the early demo sessions at Original Sound studio, above the Kama Sutra/Buddah offices. The works Moon laid down did not see the light of day, as he was replaced by Cooder when they continued on material at Sunset Sound with Marker. Marker then fell by the wayside when recording was moved by Krasnow and Perry to RCA Studio. This would have a profound effect on the quality of the Safe as Milk work, as the former studio was 8-track and the subsequent studio a 4-track.
To support the album's release the group had been scheduled to play at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. During this period Vliet suffered severe anxiety attacks that made him convinced that he was having a heart attack, possibly exacerbated by his heavy LSD use and the fact that his father had died of heart failure a few years earlier. At a vital "warm-up" performance at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival (June 10–11) shortly before the scheduled Monterey Festival (June 16–18), the band began to play "Electricity" and Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the stage and landed on manager Bob Krasnow. He later claimed he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth. This aborted any opportunity of breakthrough success at Monterey, as Cooder immediately decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet, effectively quitting both the event and the band on the spot. With such complex guitar parts there was no means for the band to find a competent replacement in time for Monterey. Cooder's spot was eventually filled for a short spell by Gerry McGee, who had played with the Monkees. According to French the band did two gigs with McGee, one of which was at The Peppermint Twist near Long Beach. The other was at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, August 7, 1967, as opening act for the Yardbirds. McGee was in the group long enough to have an outfit made by a Santa Monica boutique that also created the gear worn by the band on the Strictly Personal cover stamps.
Strictly Personal
In August 1967, guitarist Jeff Cotton filled the guitar spot vacated, in turn, by Cooder and McGee. In October and November 1967 the Snouffer/Cotton/Handley/French line–up recorded material for what was planned to be the second album. Originally intended to be a double album called It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper for the label, it was released later in pieces in 1971 and 1995. After rejection from Buddah, Bob Krasnow encouraged the band to re-record four of the shorter numbers, add two more, and make shorter versions of "Mirror Man" and "Kandy Korn". Krasnow created a strange mix full of "phasing" that, by most accounts (including Beefheart's), diminished the music's strength. This was released in October 1968 as Strictly Personal on Krasnow's Blue Thumb label. Stewart Mason in his Allmusic review of the album described it as a "terrific album" and a "fascinating, underrated release ... every bit the equal of Safe as Milk and Trout Mask Replica". Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone called Strictly Personal "an excellent album. The guitars of the Magic Band mercilessly bend and stretch notes in a way that suggests that the world of music has wobbled clear off its axis", with the lyrics demonstrating "Beefheart's ability to juxtapose delightful humor with frightening insights".
Mirror Man
In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note stating that the material had been recorded in "one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues–rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series.
During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, press coverage and public outcry resulted in the band being permitted to re-enter the UK, where they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and on Friday January 19 appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel, where they played tracks from Safe as Milk and some of the experimental blues tracks from Mirror Man. The band was met by an enthusiastic audience; French recalled the event as a rare high moment for the band: "After the show, we were taken to the dressing room where we sat for hours as a line of what seemed like hundreds of people walked in one by one to shake our hand or get an autograph. Many brought imports of Safe as Milk with them for us to autograph ... It seemed like we had finally gained some reward ... Suddenly all the criticizing and intimidation and eccentricities seemed very unimportant. It was a glorious moment, one of the very few I ever experienced". By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France.
Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later.
The 'Brown Wrapper' Sessions
After their Euro tour and the Cannes beach performance the band returned to the US. Moves were already in the air for them to leave Buddah and sign to MGM and, prior to their May tour – mainly in the UK – they re-recorded some Buddah material of the partial Mirror Man sessions at Sunset Sound with Bruce Botnick. Beefheart had also been conceptualizing new band names, including 25th Century Quaker and Blue Thumb, while making suggestions to other musicians that they might get involved. The thought-process of 25th Century Quaker was that it would be a "blues band" alias for the more avant-garde work of the Magic Band. Photographer Guy Webster photographed the band in Quaker-style outfits, and the picture appears in The Mirror Man Sessions CD insert. It would later transpire that much of this situation was transient and that Buddah's Bob Krasnow was to set up his own label. The label that was unsurprisingly named Blue Thumb launched with its first release Strictly Personal, a truncated version of the original Beefheart vision of a double album. Thus "25th Century Quaker" became a track and a potential band-name became a label.
In overview, the works for the double album in this period were intended to be packaged in a plain brown wrapper, with a "strictly personal" over-stamp and addressed in a manner that could have connotations of drug content, pornographic or illicit material; as per the small ads of the time: "It comes to you in a plain brown wrapper." Given that Krasnow had effectively poached the band from Buddah there were limitations on what material could be released. Strictly Personal was the result, contained in its enigmatically-addressed parcel sleeve. The raft of material left behind eventually emerged, firstly on CD as I May Be Hungry, But I Sure Ain't Weird and later on vinyl, implemented by John French, as It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper (which has two tracks that are missing from the former release). Both Blue Thumb and the stamps on the cover of Strictly Personal have LSD connotations, as does the track Ah Feel Like Ahcid, although Beefheart himself refuted this (claiming that this is a rendering of "I feel like I said").
Trout Mask Replica, 1969
Critically acclaimed as Van Vliet's magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica was released as a 28 track double album in June 1969 on Frank Zappa's newly formed Straight Records label. First issues, in the US, were auto-coupled and housed in the black "Straight" liners along with a 6-page lyric sheet illustrated by the Mascara Snake. A school-age portrait of Van Vliet appears on the front of this sheet, while the cover of the gatefold enigmatically shows Beefheart in a 'Quaker' hat, obscuring his face with the head of a fish. The fish is a carp – arguably a "replica" for a trout, photographed by Cal Schenkel. The inner spread "infra-red" photography is by Ed Caraeff, whose Beefheart vacuum cleaner images from this session also appear on Zappa's Hot Rats release (a month earlier) to accompany "Willie The Pimp" lyrics sung by Vliet. Alex St. Clair had now left the band and, after Junior Madeo from the Blackouts was considered, the role was filled by Bill Harkleroad. Bassist Jerry Handley had also departed, with Gary Marker stepping in. Thus the long rehearsals for the album began in the house on Ensenada Drive in Woodland Hills, L.A., that would become the Magic Band House.
The Magic Band began recordings for Trout Mask Replica with bassist Gary "Magic" Marker at T.T.G. (on "Moonlight on Vermont" and "Veteran's Day Poppy"), but later enlisted bassist Mark Boston after his departure. The remainder of the album was recorded at Whitney Studios, with some field recordings made at the house. Boston was acquainted with French and Harkleroad via past bands. Van Vliet had also begun assigning nicknames to his band members, so Harkleroad became Zoot Horn Rollo, and Boston became Rockette Morton, while John French assumed the name Drumbo, and Jeff Cotton became Antennae Jimmy Semens. Van Vliet's cousin Victor Hayden, the Mascara Snake, performed as a bass clarinetist later in the proceedings. Vliet's girlfriend Laurie Stone, who can be heard laughing at the beginning of Fallin' Ditch, became an audio typist at the Magic Band house.
Van Vliet wanted the whole band to "live" the Trout Mask Replica album. The group rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in their small rented house in the Woodland Hills suburb of Los Angeles. With only two bedrooms in the house, band members would find sleep in various corners of one, while Vliet occupied the other, and rehearsals were accomplished in the main living area. Van Vliet implemented his vision by completely dominating his musicians, artistically and emotionally. At various times one or another of the group members was "put in the barrel", with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission. Guitarist Bill Harkleroad complained that his fingers were a "bloody mess" as a result of Beefheart's orders that he use heavy strings. Drummer John French described the situation as "cultlike" and a visiting friend said "the environment in that house was positively Mansonesque". Their material circumstances were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the group barely survived and were even arrested for shoplifting food (Zappa bailed them out). French has recalled living on no more than a small cup of beans a day for a month. A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health". Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for 14 or more hours a day.
John French's 2010 book Through the Eyes of Magic describes some of the "talks", which were initiated by his doing such things as playing a Frank Zappa drum part ("The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)") in his drumming shed, and not having finished drum parts as quickly as Beefheart wanted. French writes of being punched by band members, thrown into walls, kicked, punched in the face by Beefheart hard enough to draw blood, being attacked with a sharp broomstick. Eventually Beefheart, French says, threatened to throw him out an upper floor window. He admits complicity in similarly attacking his bandmates during "talks" aimed at them. In the end, after the album's recording, Beefheart ejected French from the band by throwing him down a set of stairs, telling him to "Take a walk, man" after not responding in a desired manner to a request to "play a strawberry" on the drums. Beefheart replaced French with drummer Jeff Bruschel, an acquaintance of Hayden. Referred to as "Fake Drumbo" (playing on French's drumset) this final act resulted in French's name not appearing on the album credits, either as a player or arranger. Bruschel toured with the band to Europe but was replaced by the next recording.
According to Van Vliet, the 28 songs on the album were written in a single 8½ hour session at the piano, an instrument he had no skill in playing, an approach Mike Barnes compared to John Cage's "maverick irreverence toward classical tradition", though band members have stated that the songs were written over the course of about a year, beginning around December 1967. (The band did watch Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½ during the creation of the album). It took the band about eight months to mold the songs into shape, with French bearing primary responsibility for transposing and shaping Vliet's piano fragments into guitar and bass lines, which were mostly notated on paper. Harkleroad in 1998 said in retrospect: "We're dealing with a strange person, coming from a place of being a sculptor/painter, using music as his idiom. He was getting more into that part of who he was instead of this blues singer." The band had rehearsed the songs so thoroughly that the instrumental tracks for 21 of the songs were recorded in a single four and a half hour recording session. Van Vliet spent the next few days overdubbing the vocals. The album's cover artwork was photographed and designed by Cal Schenkel and shows Van Vliet wearing the raw head of a carp, bought from a local fish market and fashioned into a mask by Schenkel.
Trout Mask Replica incorporated a wide variety of musical styles, including blues, avant garde/experimental, and rock. The relentless practice prior to recording blended the music into an iconoclastic whole of contrapuntal tempos, featuring slide guitar, polyrhythmic drumming (with French's drums and cymbals covered in cardboard), honking saxophone and bass clarinet. Van Vliet's vocals range from his signature Howlin' Wolf-inspired growl to frenzied falsetto to laconic, casual ramblings.
The instrumental backing was effectively recorded live in the studio, while Van Vliet overdubbed most of the vocals in only partial sync with the music by hearing the slight sound leakage through the studio window. Zappa said of Van Vliet's approach, "[it was] impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not."
Van Vliet used the ensuing publicity, particularly with a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Langdon Winner, to promulgate a number of myths that were subsequently quoted as fact. Winner's article stated, for instance, that neither Van Vliet nor the members of the Magic Band ever took drugs, but Harkleroad later contradicted this. Van Vliet claimed to have taught both Harkleroad and Boston to play their instruments from scratch; in fact the pair were already accomplished young musicians before joining the band. Last, Van Vliet claimed to have gone a year and half without sleeping. When asked how this was possible, he claimed to have only eaten fruit.
Critic Steve Huey of AllMusic writes that the album's influence "was felt more in spirit than in direct copycatting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point. However, its inspiring reimagining of what was possible in a rock context laid the groundwork for countless experiments in rock surrealism to follow, especially during the punk and new wave era." In 2003, the album was ranked sixtieth by Rolling Stone in their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: "On first listen, Trout Mask Replica sounds like raw Delta blues", with Beefheart "singing and ranting and reciting poetry over fractured guitar licks. But the seeming sonic chaos is an illusion—to construct the songs, the Magic Band rehearsed twelve hours a day for months on end in a house with the windows blacked out. (Producer Frank Zappa was then able to record most of the album in less than five hours.) Tracks such as 'Ella Guru' and 'My Human Gets Me Blues' are the direct predecessors of modern musical primitives such as Tom Waits and PJ Harvey." Guitarist Fred Frith noted that during this process "forces that usually emerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable".
Critic Robert Christgau gave the album a B+, saying, "I find it impossible to give this record an A because it is just too weird. But I'd like to. Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record." BBC disc jockey John Peel said of the album: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." It was inducted into the United States National Recording Registry in 2011.
Later recordings, 1970–82
Lick My Decals Off, Baby
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) continued in a similarly experimental vein. An album with "a very coherent structure" in the Magic Band's "most experimental and visionary stage", it was Van Vliet's most commercially successful in the United Kingdom, spending twenty weeks on the UK Albums Chart and peaking at number 20. An early promotional music video was made of its title song, and a bizarre television commercial was also filmed that included excerpts from Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop, silent footage of masked Magic Band members using kitchen utensils as musical instruments, and Beefheart kicking over a bowl of what appears to be porridge onto a dividing stripe in the middle of a road. The video was rarely played but was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several programs related to music.
On this LP Art Tripp III, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, played drums and marimba. Lick My Decals Off, Baby was the first record on which the band was credited as "The" Magic Band, rather than "His" Magic Band. Journalist Irwin Chusid interprets this change as "a grudging concession of its members' at least semiautonomous humanity". Robert Christgau gave the album an A−, commenting, "Beefheart's famous five-octave range and covert totalitarian structures have taken on a playful undertone, repulsive and engrossing and slapstick funny." Due to licensing disputes, Lick My Decals Off, Baby was unavailable on CD for many years, though it remained in print on vinyl. It was ranked second in Uncut magazine's May 2010 list of The 50 Greatest Lost Albums. In 2011, the album became available for download on the iTunes Store.
He toured in 1970 with Ry Cooder on the bill to promote the album.
The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot
The next two records, The Spotlight Kid (simply credited to "Captain Beefheart") and Clear Spot (credited to "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band"), were both released in 1972. The atmosphere of The Spotlight Kid is, according to one critic, "definitely relaxed and fun, maybe one step up from a jam". And though "things do sound maybe just a little too blasé", "Beefheart at his worst still has something more than most groups at their best." The music is simpler and slower than on the group's two previous releases, the uncompromisingly original Trout Mask Replica and the frenetic Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This was in part an attempt by Van Vliet to become a more appealing commercial proposition as the band had made virtually no money during the previous two years—at the time of recording, the band members were subsisting on welfare food handouts and remittances from their parents. Van Vliet offered that he "got tired of scaring people with what I was doing ... I realized that I had to give them something to hang their hat on, so I started working more of a beat into the music". Magic Band members have also said that the slower performances were due in part to Van Vliet's inability to fit his lyrics with the instrumental backing of the faster material on the earlier albums, a problem that was exacerbated in that he almost never rehearsed with the group. In the period leading up to the recording the band lived communally, first at a compound near Ben Lomond, California and then in northern California near Trinidad. The situation saw a return to the physical violence and psychological manipulation that had taken place during the band's previous communal residence while composing and rehearsing Trout Mask Replica. According to John French, the worst of this was directed toward Harkleroad. In his autobiography Harkleroad recalls being thrown into a dumpster, an act he interpreted as having metaphorical intent.
Clear Spot'''s production credit of Ted Templeman made AllMusic consider "why in the world [it] wasn't more of a commercial success than it was", and that while fans "of the fully all-out side of Beefheart might find the end result not fully up to snuff as a result, but those less concerned with pushing back all borders all the time will enjoy his unexpected blend of everything tempered with a new accessibility". The review called the song "Big Eyed Beans from Venus" "a fantastically strange piece of aggression". A Clear Spot song, "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", appeared on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' cult comedy film The Big Lebowski (1998).
Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams
In 1974, immediately after the recording of Unconditionally Guaranteed, which markedly continued the trend towards a more commercial sound heard on some of the Clear Spot tracks, the Magic Band's original members departed. Disgruntled and past members worked together for a period, gigging at Blue Lake and putting together their own ideas and demos, with John French earmarked as the vocalist. These concepts eventually coalesced around the core of Art Tripp III, Harkleroad and Boston, with the formation of Mallard, helped by finance and UK recording facilities from Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson.Harkleroad, Bill. Lunar Notes pp.132–133. Some of French's compositions were used in the band's work, but the group's singer was Sam Galpin and the role of keyboardist was eventually taken by John Thomas, who had shared a house with French in Eureka at the time. At this time Vliet attempted to recruit both French and Harkleroad as producers for his next album, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Andy Di Martino produced both of these Virgin label albums.
Vliet was forced to quickly form a new Magic Band to complete support-tour dates, with studio musicians who had no experience with his music and in fact had never heard it. Having no knowledge of the previous Magic Band style, they simply improvised what they thought would go with each song, playing much slicker versions that have been described as "bar band" versions of Beefheart songs. A review described this incarnation of the Magic Band as the "Tragic Band", a term that has stuck over the years.
Robert 'Fuzzy' Fuscaldo – guitar
Dean Smith – guitar
Del Simmons – saxophone; flute
Michael 'Bucky' Smotherman – keyboards; vocals
Paul Uhrig – bass
Ty Grimes – drums
Mike Barnes said that the description of the new band "grooving along pleasantly", was "...an appropriately banal description of the music of a man who only a few years ago composed with the expressed intent of shaking listeners out of their torpor". The one album they recorded, Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974) has, like its predecessor, a completely different, almost soft rock sound from any other Beefheart record. Neither was well received; drummer Art Tripp recalled that when he and the original Magic Band listened to Unconditionally Guaranteed, they "...were horrified. As we listened, it was as though each song was worse than the one which preceded it". Beefheart later disowned both albums, calling them "horrible and vulgar", asking that they not be considered part of his musical output and urging fans who bought them to "take copies back for a refund".
Bongo Fury to Bat Chain Puller
By the fall of 1975 the band had completed their European tour, with further US dates in the New Year of 1976, supporting Zappa along with Dr. John. Van Vliet now found himself stuck in a web of contractual hang-ups. At this point Zappa had begun to extend a helping hand, with Vliet already having performed incognito as "Rollin' Red" on Zappa's One Size Fits All (1975) and then joining with him on the Bongo Fury album and its later support tour. Two Vliet-penned numbers on the Bongo Fury album are "Sam with the Showing Scalp Flat Top" and "Man with the Woman Head". The form, texture and imagery of this album's first track, "Debra Kadabra", sung by Vliet, has 'angular similarities' to the work he would later produce in his next three albums. On the Bongo Fury album Vliet also sings "Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead", harmonizes on "200 Years Old" and "Muffin Man", and plays harmonica and soprano saxophone.
In early 1976 Zappa put on his producer hat and, once again, opened up his studio facilities and finance to Vliet. This was for the production of an album provisionally titled Bat Chain Puller. The band were John French (drums), John Thomas (keyboards) and Jeff Moris Tepper and Denny Walley (guitars). Much of the work on this album had been finalized and some demos had been circulated when fate once again struck the Beefheart camp. In May 1976 the long association between Zappa and his manager/business partner Herb Cohen ceased. This resulted in Zappa's finances and ongoing works becoming part of protracted legal negotiations. The Bat Chain Puller project went "on ice" and did not see an official release until 2012. After this recording John Thomas joined ex-Magic Band members in Mallard.
Prior to his next album Beefheart appeared in 1977 on the Tubes' album Now, playing saxophone on the song "Cathy's Clone", and the album also featured a cover of the Clear Spot song "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains". In 1978 he appeared on Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack to the film Blue Collar.
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Having extricated himself from a mire of contractual difficulties Beefheart emerged with this new album, in 1978, on the Warner Bros label. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) contained re-workings of the shelved Bat Chain Puller album and still retained its original guitarist, Jeff Moris Tepper. However, he and Vliet were now joined by a whole new line-up of Richard Redus (guitar, bass and accordion), Eric Drew Feldman (bass, piano and synthesizer), Bruce Lambourne Fowler (trombone and air bass), Art Tripp (percussion and marimba) and Robert Arthur Williams (drums). The album was co-produced by Vliet with Pete Johnson. Members of this Magic Band and the "Bat Chain" elements would later feature on Beefheart's last two albums. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) was described by Ned Raggett of Allmusic to be "...manna from heaven for those feeling Beefheart had lost his way on his two Mercury albums". Following Vliet's death, John French claimed the 40-second spoken word track "Apes-Ma" to be an analogy of Van Vliet's deteriorating physical condition. The album's sleeve features Van Vliet's 1976 painting Green Tom, one of the many works that would mark out his longed-for career as a painter of note.
Doc at the Radar StationDoc at the Radar Station (1980) helped establish Beefheart's late resurgence. Released by Virgin Records during the post-punk scene, the music was now accessible to a younger, more receptive audience. He was interviewed in a feature report on KABC-TV's Channel 7 Eyewitness News in which he was hailed as "the father of the new wave. One of the most important American composers of the last fifty years, [and] a primitive genius"; Van Vliet said at this period, "I'm doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state ... and I think there is one right now." Huey of Allmusic cited the Doc at the Radar Station as being "...generally acclaimed as the strongest album of his comeback, and by some as his best since Trout Mask Replica", "even if the Captain's voice isn't quite what it once was, Doc at the Radar Station is an excellent, focused consolidation of Beefheart's past and then-present". Van Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes speaks of "revamping work built on skeletal ideas and fragments that would have mouldered away in the vaults had they not been exhumed and transformed into full-blown, totally convincing new material". During this period, Van Vliet made two appearances on David Letterman's late night television program on NBC, and also performed on Saturday Night Live.
Richard Redus and Art Tripp departed on this album, with slide guitar and marimba duties taken up by the reappearance of John French. The guitar skills of Gary Lucas also feature on the track Flavor Bud Living.
Ice Cream for Crow
The final Beefheart record, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), was recorded with Gary Lucas (who was also Van Vliet's manager), Jeff Moris Tepper, Richard Snyder and Cliff Martinez. This line-up made a video to promote the title track, directed by Van Vliet and Ken Schreiber, with cinematography by Daniel Pearl, which was rejected by MTV for being "too weird". However, the video was included in the Letterman broadcast on NBC-TV, and was also accepted into the Museum of Modern Art. Van Vliet announced "I don't want my MTV if they don't want my video" during his interview with Letterman, in reference to MTV's "I want my MTV" marketing campaign of the time. Ice Cream for Crow, along with songs such as its title track, features instrumental performances by the Magic Band with performance poetry readings by Van Vliet. Raggett of AllMusic called the album a "last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact", with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results". Barnes writes that, "The most original and vital tracks (on the album) are the newer ones", saying that it "feels like an hors-d'oeuvre for a main course that never came". Michael Galucci of Goldmine praised the album, describing it as "the single, most bizarre entry in Van Vliet's long, odd career." Promotional work proposed to Beefheart by Virgin Records was as unorthodox as him making an appearance in the 1987 film Grizzly II: The Predator. Soon after, Van Vliet retired from music and began a new career as a painter. Gary Lucas tried to convince him to record one more album, but to no avail.
Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh
Released in 2004 by Rhino Handmade in a limited edition of 1,500 copies, this signed and numbered box set contains a "Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh" CD of Vliet-recited poetry, the Anton Corbijn film of Vliet Some YoYo Stuff on DVD and two art books. One book, entitled Splinters, gives a visual "scrapbook" insight into Vliet's life, from an early age to his painting in retirement. The second, eponymously titled, book is packed with art pages of Vliet's work. The first is bound in green linen, the second in yellow. These colors are counterpointed throughout the package, which comes in a green slipcase measuring 235 mm × 325 mm × 70 mm. An onion-skin wallet, nestling at the package's inner sanctum, contains a matching-numbered Vliet lithograph on hand-rolled paper, signed by the artist. The two books are by publishers Artist Ink Editions.
Paintings
Throughout his musical career, Van Vliet remained interested in visual art. He placed his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline, on several of his albums. In 1987, Van Vliet published Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush, a collection of his poetry, paintings and drawings.
In the mid-1980s, Van Vliet became reclusive and abandoned music, stating he had gotten "too good at the horn" and could make far more money painting. Beefheart's first exhibition had been at Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery during the Magic Band's 1972 tour of the UK. He was interviewed on Granada regional television standing in front of his bold black and white canvases. He was inspired to begin an art career when a fan, Julian Schnabel, who admired the artwork seen on his album covers, asked to buy a drawing from him. His debut exhibition as a serious painter was at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1985 and was initially regarded as that of "another rock musician dabbling in art for ego's sake", though his primitive, non-conformist work has received more sympathetic and serious attention since then, with some sales approaching $25,000. Two books have been published specifically devoted to critique and analysis of his artwork: Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet (1999) by W. C. Bamberger and Stand Up To Be Discontinued, first published in 1993, a now rare collection of essays on Van Vliet's work. The limited edition version of the book contains a CD of Van Vliet reading six of his poems: Fallin' Ditch, The Tired Plain, Skeleton Makes Good, Safe Sex Drill, Tulip and Gill. A deluxe edition was published in 1994; only 60 were printed, with etchings of Van Vliet's signature, costing £180.
In the early 1980s Van Vliet established an association with the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. Eric Feldman stated later in an interview that at that time Michael Werner told Van Vliet he needed to stop playing music if he wanted to be respected as a painter, warning him that otherwise he would only be considered a "musician who paints". In doing so, it was said that he had effectively "succeeded in leaving his past behind". Van Vliet has been described as a modernist, a primitivist, an abstract expressionist, and, "in a sense" an outsider artist. Morgan Falconer of Artforum concurs, mentioning both a "neo-primitivist aesthetic" and further stating that his work is influenced by the CoBrA painters. The resemblance to the CoBrA painters is also recognized by art critic Roberto Ohrt, while others have compared his paintings to the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko.
According to Dr. John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 1997, although Van Vliet's work has associations with mainstream abstract expressionist painting, more importantly he was a self-taught artist and his painting "has that same kind of edge the music has". Curator David Breuer asserts that in contrast to the busied, bohemian urban lives of the New York abstract expressionists, the rural desert environment Van Vliet was influenced by is a distinctly naturalistic one, making him a distinguished figure in contemporary art, whose work will survive in canon. Van Vliet stated of his own work, "I'm trying to turn myself inside out on the canvas. I'm trying to completely bare what I think at that moment" and "I paint for the simple reason that I have to. I feel a sense of relief after I do." When asked about his artistic influences he stated that there were none. "I just paint like I paint and that's enough influence." He did however state his admiration of Georg Baselitz, the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian, and Vincent van Gogh; after seeing van Gogh's paintings in person, Van Vliet quoted himself as saying, "The sun disappoints me so."
Exhibits of his paintings from the late 1990s were held in New York in 2009 and 2010. Falconer stated that the most recent exhibitions showed "evidence of a serious, committed artist". It was claimed that he stopped painting in the late 1990s. A 2007 interview with Van Vliet through email by Anthony Haden-Guest, however, showed him to still be active artistically. He exhibited only few of his paintings because he immediately destroyed any that did not satisfy him.
Life in retirement
After his retirement from music, Van Vliet rarely appeared in public. He resided near Trinidad, California, with his wife Janet "Jan" Van Vliet. By the early 1990s he was using a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis. The severity of his illness was sometimes disputed. Many of his art contractors and friends considered him to be in good health. Other associates such as his longtime drummer and musical director John French and bassist Richard Snyder have stated that they had noticed symptoms consistent with the onset of multiple sclerosis, such as sensitivity to heat, loss of balance, and stiffness of gait, by the late 1970s.
One of Van Vliet's last public appearances was in the 1993 short documentary Some Yo Yo Stuff by filmmaker Anton Corbijn, described as an "observation of his observations". Around 13 minutes and shot entirely in black and white, with appearances by his mother and David Lynch, the film showed a noticeably weakened and dysarthric Van Vliet at his residence in California, reading poetry, and philosophically discussing his life, environment, music and art. In 2000, he appeared on Gary Lucas's album Improve the Shining Hour and Moris Tepper's Moth to Mouth, and spoke on Tepper's 2004 song "Ricochet Man" from the album Head Off. He is credited for naming Tepper's 2010 album A Singer Named Shotgun Throat.
Van Vliet often voiced concern over and support for environmentalist issues and causes, particularly the welfare of animals. He often referred to Earth as "God's Golfball" and this expression can be found on a number of his later albums. In 2003 he was heard on the compilation album Where We Live: Stand for What You Stand On: A Benefit CD for EarthJustice singing a version of "Happy Birthday to You" retitled "Happy Earthday". The track lasts 34 seconds and was recorded over the telephone.
Death
Van Vliet died at a hospital in Arcata, California, on Friday, December 17, 2010, about a month before his 70th birthday. The cause was named as complications from multiple sclerosis. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan commented on his death, praising him: "Wondrous, secret ... and profound, he was a diviner of the highest order."
Dweezil Zappa dedicated the song "Willie the Pimp" to Beefheart at the "Zappa Plays Zappa" show at the Beacon Theater in New York City on the day of his death, while Jeff Bridges exclaimed "Rest in peace, Captain Beefheart!" at the conclusion of the December 18, 2010, episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live.
Relationship with Frank Zappa
Van Vliet met Frank Zappa when they were both teenagers and shared an interest in rhythm and blues and Chicago blues. They collaborated from this early stage, with Zappa's scripts for "teenage operettas" such as "Captain Beefheart & the Grunt People" helping to elevate Van Vliet's Captain Beefheart persona. In 1963, the pair recorded a demo at the Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga as the Soots, seeking support from a major label. Their efforts were unsuccessful, as "Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf vocal style and Zappa's distorted guitar" were "not on the agenda" at the time.
The friendship between Zappa and Van Vliet over the years was sometimes expressed in the form of rivalry as musicians drifted back and forth between their groups. Van Vliet embarked on the 1975 Bongo Fury tour with Zappa and the Mothers, mainly because conflicting contractual obligations made him unable to tour or record independently. Their relationship grew acrimonious on the tour to the point that they refused to talk to one another. Zappa became irritated by Van Vliet, who drew constantly, including while on stage, filling one of his large sketch books with rapidly executed portraits and warped caricatures of Zappa. Musically, Van Vliet's primitive style contrasted sharply with Zappa's compositional discipline and abundant technique. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black described the situation as "two geniuses" on "ego trips". Estranged for years afterwards, they reconnected at the end of Zappa's life, after his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer. Their collaborative work appears on the Zappa rarity collections The Lost Episodes (1996) and Mystery Disc (1996). Particularly notable is their song "Muffin Man", included on the Zappa/Beefheart Bongo Fury album, as well as Zappa's compilation album Strictly Commercial (1995). Zappa finished concerts with the song for many years afterwards. Beefheart also provided vocals for "Willie the Pimp" on Zappa's otherwise instrumental album Hot Rats (1969). One track on Trout Mask Replica, "The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)", features Magic Band guitarist Jeff Cotton talking on the telephone to Zappa superimposed onto an unrelated live recording of the Mothers of Invention (the backing track was later released in 1992 as "Charles Ives" on You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 ). Van Vliet also played the harmonica on two songs on Zappa albums: "San Ber'dino" (credited as "Bloodshot Rollin' Red") on One Size Fits All (1975) and "Find Her Finer" on Zoot Allures (1976). He is also the vocalist on "The Torture Never Stops (Original Version)" on Zappa's You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 4.
The Magic Band
Influence
Van Vliet has been the subject of at least two documentaries, the BBC's 1997 The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart narrated by John Peel, and the 2006 independent production Captain Beefheart: Under Review.
According to Peel, "If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it's Beefheart ... I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week and I'll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week." His narration added: "A psychedelic shaman who frequently bullied his musicians and sometimes alarmed his fans, Don somehow remained one of rock's great innocents." Mike Barnes referred to him as an "iconic counterculture hero" who, with the Magic Band, "went on to stake out startling new possibilities for rock music". Lester Bangs cited Beefheart as "one of the four or five unqualified geniuses to rise from the hothouses of American music in the Sixties", while John Harris of The Guardian praised the music's "pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together". A Rolling Stone biography described his work as "a sort of modern chamber music for [a] rock band, since he plans every note and teaches the band their parts by ear. Because it breaks so many of rock's conventions at once, Beefheart's music has always been more influential than popular." In this context, it is performed by the classical group, the Meridian Arts Ensemble. Nicholas E. Tawa, in his 2005 book Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th Century: Styles and Singers and What They Said About America, included Beefheart among the prominent progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, while the Encyclopædia Britannica describes Beefheart's songs as conveying "deep distrust of modern civilization, a yearning for ecological balance, and that belief that all animals in the wild are far superior to human beings". Many of his works have been classified as "art rock".
Many artists have cited Van Vliet as an influence, beginning with the Edgar Broughton Band, who covered "Dropout Boogie" as Apache Drop Out (mixed with the Shadows' "Apache") as early as 1970, as did the Kills 32 years later. The Minutemen were fans of Beefheart, and were arguably among the few to effectively synthesize his music with their own, especially in their early output, which featured disjointed guitar and irregular, galloping rhythms. Michael Azerrad describes the Minutemen's early output as "highly caffeinated Captain Beefheart running down James Brown tunes", and notes that Beefheart was the group's "idol". Others who arguably conveyed the same influence around the same time or before include John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Little Feat, Laurie Anderson, the Residents and Henry Cow. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and poet mystic Z'EV, both pioneers of industrial music, cited Van Vliet along with Zappa among their influences. More notable were those emerging during the early days of punk rock, such as the Clash and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols (reportedly to manager Malcolm McLaren's disapproval), later of the post-punk band Public Image Ltd. Frank Discussion of punk rock band The Feederz learned to play guitar from listening to Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me—and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Groening served as the curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that reunited the post–Beefheart Magic Band.
Van Vliet's influence on post–punk bands was demonstrated by Magazine's recording of "I Love You You Big Dummy" in 1978 and the tribute album Fast 'n' Bulbous – A Tribute to Captain Beefheart in 1988, featuring the likes of artists such as the Dog Faced Hermans, the Scientists, the Membranes, Simon Fisher Turner, That Petrol Emotion, the Primevals, the Mock Turtles, XTC, and Sonic Youth, who included a cover of Beefheart's "Electricity" which would later be re-released as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their 1988 album Daydream Nation. Other post-punk bands influenced by Beefheart include Gang of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pere Ubu, Babe the Blue Ox and Mark E. Smith of the Fall. The Fall covered "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones" in their 1993 session for John Peel. Beefheart is considered to have "greatly influenced" new wave artists, such as David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, the Bongos, and the B-52s.
Tom Waits' shift in artistic direction, starting with 1983's Swordfishtrombones, was, Waits claims, a result of his wife Kathleen Brennan introducing him to Van Vliet's music. "Once you've heard Beefheart", said Waits, "it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." More recently, Waits has described Beefheart's work as "glimpse into the future; like curatives, recipes for ancient oils". Guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cited Van Vliet as a prominent influence on the band's 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik as well as his debut solo album Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and stated that during his drug-induced absence, after leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he "would paint and listen to Trout Mask Replica". Black Francis of the Pixies cited Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid as one of the albums he listened to regularly when first writing songs for the band, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana acknowledged Van Vliet's influence, mentioning him among his notoriously eclectic range.
The White Stripes in 2000 released a 7" tribute single, "Party of Special Things to Do", containing covers of that Beefheart song plus "China Pig" and "Ashtray Heart". The Kills included a cover of "Dropout Boogie" on their debut Black Rooster EP (2002). The Black Keys in 2008 released a free cover of Beefheart's "I'm Glad" from Safe as Milk. The 2002 LCD Soundsystem song "Losing My Edge" has a verse which James Murphy says, "I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band". In 2005 Genus Records produced Mama Kangaroos – Philly Women Sing Captain Beefheart, a 20-track tribute to Captain Beefheart. Beck included Safe as Milk and Ella Guru in a playlist of songs as part of his website's Planned Obsolescence series of mashups of songs by the musicians that influenced him. Franz Ferdinand cited Beefheart's Doc at the Radar Station as a strong influence on their second LP, You Could Have It So Much Better. Placebo briefly named themselves Ashtray Heart, after the track on Doc at the Radar Station; the band's album Battle for the Sun contains a track, "Ashtray Heart". Joan Osborne covered Beefheart's "(His) Eyes are a Blue Million Miles", which appears on Early Recordings. She cited Van Vliet as one of her influences.
PJ Harvey and John Parish discussed Beefheart's influence in an interview together. Harvey's first experience of Beefheart's music was as a child. Her parents had all of his albums; listening to them made her "feel ill". Harvey was reintroduced to Beefheart's music by Parish, who lent her a cassette copy of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) at the age of 16. She cited him as one of her greatest influences since. Parish described Beefheart's music as a "combination of raw blues and abstract jazz. There was humour in there, but you could tell that it wasn't [intended as] a joke. I felt that there was a depth to what he did that very few other rock artists have managed [to achieve]." Ty Segall covered "Drop Out Boogie" on his 2009 album Lemons.
Discography
Safe as Milk (1967)
Strictly Personal (1968)
Trout Mask Replica (1969)
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)
Mirror Man (1971)
The Spotlight Kid (1972)
Clear Spot (1972)
Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974)
Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974)
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978)
Doc at the Radar Station (1980)
Ice Cream for Crow (1982)
Bat Chain Puller (2012, recorded in 1976)
References
Further reading
Bamberger, W.C. (1999). Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet.
Beaugrand, Andreas and various (1994). Stand Up to Be Discontinued. (Paperback) .
Courrier, Kevin (2007). Trout Mask Replica. New York: Continuum.
Delville, Michel & Norris, Andrew (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. .
Harkleroad, Bill (1998). Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Interlink Publishing. .
Van Vliet, Don (Captain Beefheart) (1987). Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush. (All poems in English, preface in German and English.) Bern-Berlin: Gachnang & Springer.
Zappa, Frank & Occhiogrosso, Peter; The Real Frank Zappa Book, Poseidon Press (1989),
External links
Beefheart.com – The Captain Beefheart Radar Station
[ Captain Beefheart] at AllMusic
Captain Beefheart at Rolling Stone''
Some Yo Yo Stuff by Anton Corbijn
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"\"Tell Me Why\" is a song by English rock band the Beatles from their album A Hard Day's Night. In North America, it was released on both the American version of A Hard Day's Night and the album Something New. Credited to Lennon–McCartney, it was written by John Lennon in either Paris or New York City and recorded in eight takes on 27 February 1964.\n\nComposition \nPaul McCartney said: \n \n \nLennon described the song as resembling \"a black New York girl-group song\". Its basic structure of simple doo-wop chord changes and block harmonies over a walking bass line \"creates an illusion of sincerity through its sheer attack.\"\n\nThe song is in the key of D major. John, Paul, and George sing a three-part harmony. On the chorus, John's lead vocal part sits higher than George's, and more unusual in this case, Paul's harmonies.\n\nRelease \n\"Tell Me Why\" was performed in the Beatles' debut feature film, A Hard Day's Night. The song was part of the 'studio performance' sequence, which was filmed at the Scala Theatre, London, on 31 March 1964. This marks the only time the song was ever performed in front of a live audience, which consisted of 350 paid actors, one of which was a thirteen-year old Phil Collins. The song was mimed by the Beatles and the words were lip-synced on stage.\n\nReleases \n Included on the British LP A Hard Day's Night.\n Included on the British EP Extracts from the Film A Hard Day's Night.\n Included on the North American LP A Hard Day's Night.\n Included on the North American LP Something New.\n B-side of the Parlophone single \"If I Fell\". This was one of three singles that Parlophone produced for export but not for release in the U.K.\n On Italian and French releases, \"Tell Me Why\" is featured as the B-side of \"I Should Have Known Better.\"\n\nPersonnel \nJohn Lennon – lead vocal, rhythm guitar\nLennon's vocal is double-tracked in the stereo version, but single-tracked in the mono mix.\nPaul McCartney – harmony vocal, bass\nGeorge Harrison – harmony vocal, lead guitar\nRingo Starr – drums\nGeorge Martin – piano\nPersonnel per MacDonald\n\nCovers \n In 1965, the Beach Boys covered \"Tell Me Why\" on their Beach Boys' Party! album.\n In 1982, April Wine covered it on their album Power Play. It reached #46 in Canada.\n In 2002, The Punkles did a cover of this song on their second album, Punk!.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n Dave Rybaczewski's analysis of \"Tell Me Why\"\n \n\n1964 songs\nThe Beatles songs\nThe Beach Boys songs\nSong recordings produced by George Martin\nSongs written by Lennon–McCartney\nSongs published by Northern Songs\nApril Wine songs\n1982 singles\nCapitol Records singles\nSongs about betrayal",
"\"Why Me\" is an American country and gospel song written and recorded by American country music singer and songwriter Kris Kristofferson.\n\nSong history\nKristofferson had become the toast of Nashville in the early 1970s, with the massive success of compositions including \"For the Good Times\", \"Me and Bobby McGee\", \"Sunday Morning Coming Down\", and \"Help Me Make It Through the Night\", among many others. He had a hit of his own as well, with \"Lovin' Her Was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again)\".\n\n\"Why Me\" was recorded by Kristofferson in 1972, featuring backing vocals by soon-to-be wife Rita Coolidge and up-and-coming singer-songwriter Larry Gatlin. It was released on the album Jesus Was a Capricorn in 1973, and became the biggest hit of his career.\n\nAccording to country music historian Bill Malone, Kristofferson wrote the song during an emotionally low period of his life after having attended a religious service conducted by the Rev. Jimmie Rogers Snow. Malone wrote, \"'Why Me, Lord'\" - as the song is sometimes known - \"may seem greatly out of character for Kristofferson, but it can be interpreted as his own personal religious rephrasing of 'Sunday Morning Coming Down.' In this case, he is 'coming down' not from drugs, but from the whole hedonistic euphoria of the (1960s).\" Malone described Kristofferson's gruff vocal styling as \"perfect\" for the song, since \"he sounds like a man who has lived a lot but is now humbling himself before God.\"\n\nKristofferson said he went with friends to the church service where he was moved by Larry Gatlin's song \"Help Me (Lord)\". He said that he had never thought of needing help, but he was at a low point in his life. When the pastor asked the congregation, \"Is anybody feeling lost?\" \"Up goes my hand,\" Kristofferson says. The Pastor then asked, \"Are you ready to accept Christ? Kneel down there.\" \"I'm kneeling there,\" Kristofferson continues, \"and I carry a big load of guilt around...and I was just out of control, crying. It was a release. It really shook me up.\" Kristofferson later said, \"It was just a personal thing I was going through at the time. I had some kind of experience that I can't even explain.\"\n\nKristofferson met June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash in a hotel room in 1972 to play them two songs he had written. Kristofferson had just attended a rough screening of a movie Johnny and June were heavily involved in, entitled The Gospel Road. Johnny Cash's memoir Man in Black reiterated the story that Larry Gatlin sang \"Help Me\" at the Evangel Temple, which inspired Kristofferson to write the song. Kristofferson also played Cash the song \"Burden of Freedom\", which was used in The Gospel Road.\n\nRecognition and awards\n\"Why Me\" was Kristofferson's lone major country hit as a solo recording artist, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in July 1973. The song peaked only at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, but had at that time one of the longer runs (19 weeks) in the top 40 and the most chart reversals (6) in one run on the Hot 100. The song spent 38 weeks in the Hot 100 consecutively, almost tying the record set by Johnny Mathis' song \"Wonderful! Wonderful!\" on the charts for 39 weeks. The song ranked sixth on the list of Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1973.\n\n\"Why Me\" was certified gold for sales of one million units by the Recording Industry Association of America.\n\nChart performance\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCover versions\nElvis Presley incorporated the song, retitled \"Why Me Lord\", into his live shows beginning in January 1974 up until his last concert tour. It was first released on the live album, Elvis Recorded Live On Stage In Memphis in June 1974. The recording is from his March 20, 1974 concert in Memphis, Tennessee. He often introduced the song for J.D. Sumner to sing \"one of his favorite songs.\" Sumner would sing the verses and Elvis would join on the chorus along with the back-up singers. Presley also recorded the \"B\" side of the single, \"Help Me\", written by Larry Gatlin, in December 1973, and it remained part of his live shows as well.\nConnie Smith recorded a version of \"Why Me\" on her 1973 album God Is Abundant.\nMelba Montgomery recorded \"Why Me\" in 1973 on her album Melba Montgomery.\nTanya Tucker included \"Why Me Lord\" on her 1974 album Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone).\nGeorge Jones recorded a version for his 1974 album In a Gospel Way.\nDavid Allan Coe included \"Why Me\" on his 1977 album Texas Moon.\nBritish singer Cliff Richard recorded a version for his 1978 album Small Corners.\nWillie Nelson included a version of \"Why Me\" alongside several other covers of songs written by Kris Kristofferson on his aptly titled 1979 album Sings Kristofferson.\nMerle Haggard recorded a version, released on his 1981 album What a Friend We Have in Jesus.\nBell Gardens released a version of \"Why Me Lord\" on their 2014 album \"Slow Dawns For Lost Conclusions\" \nSlovenian a capella group New Swing Quartet recorded a version, released on the 1985 album Oh, Happy Day, titled \"Why Me Lord\".\nCarlene Davis recorded a version entitled \"Why Me Lord\" on her 1992 album Jesus Is Only A Prayer Away.\nJohnny Cash also recorded a version of the song titled \"Why Me Lord\" on his 1994 album American Recordings.\nConway Twitty released a version on his 1975 album, Linda on My Mind, and then another longer version on his 1994 The Conway Twitty Collection box set.\nChicago punk band The Smoking Popes recorded a version of this song for their 2001 album The Party's Over.\nThe Gaither Vocal Band performed a powerful version of the song during a 2006 Homecoming performance in Toronto. The song was performed with pianist Anthony Burger.\nDavid Crowder Band recorded a version for their final album, Give Us Rest, which was released in 2012.\nGospel artist CeCe Winans recorded a version on her 2017 album Let Them Fall In Love.\nWolfgang Hildebrandt also recorded a version of the song titled \"Why Me Lord\" on his 2018 album Country Love Songs.\nJosh Turner recorded the song as a duet with Kristofferson on his 2020 album Country State of Mind (album)\n\nReferences\n\n1973 songs\n1973 singles\nKris Kristofferson songs\nNumber-one singles in South Africa\nSongs written by Kris Kristofferson\nMonument Records singles"
] |
[
"Captain Beefheart",
"Mirror Man",
"What was mirror man?",
"In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man,",
"Is there anything notable about the album?",
"bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in \"...one night in Los Angeles in 1965\".",
"Why was it recorded in only one night?",
"This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues."
] |
C_62dc9c09bb4e4c4c88ce70a1c9567957_0
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Why did they need to circumvent copyright issues?
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Why did Captain Beefheart need to circumvent copyright issues for Mirror Man's production?
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Captain Beefheart
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In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in "...one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues-rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series. During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, the group was permitted to re-enter the UK, when they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel on Saturday January 20. By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France. Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later. CANNOTANSWER
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The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album,
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Don Van Vliet (; born Don Glen Vliet; January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. Conducting a rotating ensemble called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, known separately as "The Magic Band", he recorded 13 studio albums between 1964 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, and his wide vocal range. Known for his enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians. Although he achieved little commercial success, he sustained a cult following as a "highly significant" and "incalculable" influence on an array of new wave, punk, and experimental rock artists.
An artistic prodigy in his childhood, Van Vliet developed an eclectic musical taste during his teen years in Lancaster, California, and formed "a mutually useful but volatile" friendship with musician Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated. He began performing with his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964 and joined the original Magic Band line-up, initiated by Alexis Snouffer, the same year. The group released their debut album Safe as Milk in 1967 on Buddah Records. After being dropped by two consecutive record labels they signed to Zappa's Straight Records, where they released 1969's Trout Mask Replica; the album would later rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1974, frustrated by lack of commercial success, he pursued a more conventional rock sound, but the ensuing albums were critically panned; this move, combined with not having been paid for a European tour, and years of enduring Beefheart's abusive behavior, led the entire band to quit.
Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982). Van Vliet made few public appearances after his retirement from music in 1982. He pursued a career in art, an interest that originated in his childhood talent for sculpture, and a venture which proved to be his most financially secure. His expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world. Van Vliet died in 2010, having suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years.
Biography
Early life and musical influences, 1941–62
Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner of Dutch ancestry from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet (née Warfield), who was from Arkansas. He said that he was descended from Peter van Vliet, a Dutch painter who knew Rembrandt. Van Vliet also said that he was related to adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and cowboy actor Slim Pickens, and he said that he remembered being born.
Van Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three. His subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs. At the age of nine, he won a children's sculpting competition organised for the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park by a local tutor, Agostinho Rodrigues. Local newspaper cuttings of his junior sculpting achievements can be found reproduced in the Splinters book, included in the Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh boxed CD work, released in 2004. The sprawling park, with its zoo and observatory, had a strong influence on young Vliet, as it was a short distance from his home on Waverly Drive. The track "Observatory Crest" on Bluejeans & Moonbeams reflects this continued interest. A portrait photo of school-age Vliet can be seen on the front of the lyric sheet within the first issue of the US release of Trout Mask Replica.
For some time during the 1950s, Van Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a child prodigy. Van Vliet said that he was a lecturer at the Barnsdall Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven, although it is likely he simply gave a form of artistic dissertation. Accounts of Van Vliet's precocious achievement in art often include his statement that he sculpted on a weekly television show. He said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, based upon their perception of artists as "queer". They declined several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture. Van Vliet later admitted personal hesitation to take the scholarship based upon the bitterness of his parents' discouragement.
Van Vliet's artistic enthusiasm became so fervent, he said that his parents were forced to feed him through the door in the room where he sculpted. When he was thirteen the family moved from the Los Angeles area to the more remote farming town of Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, where there was a growing aerospace industry supported by nearby Edwards Air Force Base. It was an environment that would greatly influence him creatively from then on. Van Vliet remained interested in art; several of his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline were later used as front covers for his music albums. Meanwhile, he developed his taste and interest in music, listening "intensively" to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, and the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. During his early teenage years, Vliet would sometimes socialize with members of local bands such as the Omens and the Blackouts, although his interests were still focused upon an art career. The Omens' guitarists Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley would later become founders of "the Magic Band" and the Blackouts' drummer, Frank Zappa, would later capture Vliet's vocal capabilities on record for the first time. This first known recording, when he was simply "Don Vliet", is "Lost In A Whirlpool" – one of Zappa's early "field recordings" made in his college classroom with brother Bobby on guitar. It is featured on Zappa's posthumously released The Lost Episodes (1996).
Van Vliet said that he never attended public school, alleging "half a day of kindergarten" to be the extent of his formal education and saying that "if you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school". His associates said that he only dropped out during his senior year of high school to help support the family after his father's heart attack. His graduation picture appears in the school's yearbook. His statements that he never attended school – and his general disavowals of education – may have been related to his experience of dyslexia which, although never officially diagnosed, was obvious to sidemen such as John French and Denny Walley, who observed his difficulty reading cue-cards on stage, and his frequent need to be read aloud to. While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, Van Vliet became close friends with fellow teenager Frank Zappa, the pair bonding through their interest in Chicago blues and R&B. Van Vliet is portrayed in both The Real Frank Zappa Book and Barry Miles' biography Zappa as fairly spoiled at this stage of his life, the center of attention as an only child. He spent most of his time locked in his room listening to records, often with Zappa, into the early hours in the morning, eating leftover food from his father's Helms bread truck and demanding that his mother bring him a Pepsi. His parents tolerated such behavior under the belief that their child was truly gifted. Vliet's "Pepsi-moods" were ever a source of amusement to band members, leading Zappa to later write the wry tune "Why Doesn't Someone Give Him A Pepsi?" that featured on the Bongo Fury tour.
After Zappa began regular occupation at Paul Buff's PAL Studio in Cucamonga he and Van Vliet began collaborating, tentatively as the Soots (pronounced "suits"). By the time Zappa had turned the venue into Studio Z the duo had completed some songs. These were Cheryl's Canon, Metal Man Has Won His Wings and a Howlin' Wolf styled rendition of Little Richard's Slippin' and Slidin'. Further songs, on Zappa's Mystery Disc (1996), I Was a Teen-Age Malt Shop and The Birth of Captain Beefheart also provide an insight to Zappa's "teenage movie" script titled Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People, the first appearances of the Beefheart name. It has been suggested this name came from a term used by Vliet's Uncle Alan who had a habit of exposing himself to Don's girlfriend, Laurie Stone. He would urinate with the bathroom door open and, if she was walking by, would mumble about his penis, saying "Ahh, what a beauty! It looks just like a big, fine beef heart". In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Van Vliet requests "don't ask me why or how" he and Zappa came up with the name. Johnny Carson also asked him the same question to which Van Vliet replied that one day he was standing on the pier and saw fishermen cutting the bills off pelicans. He said it made him sad and put "a beef in his heart". Carson appeared nervous and uncomfortable interviewing Van Vliet and after the next commercial break Van Vliet was gone. He would later say in an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman that the name referred to "a beef in my heart against this society". In the "Grunt People" draft script Beefheart and his mother play themselves, with his father played by Howlin' Wolf. Grace Slick is penned in as a "celestial seductress" and there are also roles for future Magic Band members Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston.
Van Vliet enrolled at Antelope Valley College as an art major, but decided to leave the following year. He once worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, and sold a vacuum cleaner to the writer Aldous Huxley at his home in Llano, pointing to it and declaring, "Well I assure you sir, this thing sucks." After managing a Kinney's shoe store, Van Vliet relocated to Rancho Cucamonga, California, to reconnect with Zappa, who inspired his entry into musical performance. Van Vliet was quite shy but was eventually able to imitate the deep voice of Howlin' Wolf with his wide vocal range. He eventually grew comfortable with public performance and, after learning to play the harmonica, began playing at dances and small clubs in Southern California.
Initial recordings, 1962–69
In early 1965 Alex Snouffer, a Lancaster rhythm and blues guitarist, invited Vliet to sing with a group that he was assembling. Vliet joined the first Magic Band and changed his name to Don Van Vliet, while Snouffer became Alex St. Clair (sometimes spelled Claire). Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band signed to A&M and released two singles in 1966. The first was a version of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" that became a regional hit in Los Angeles. The followup, "Moonchild" (written by David Gates, later of the band Bread) was less well received. The band played music venues that catered to underground artists, such as the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
Safe as Milk
After fulfilling their deal for two singles the band presented demos to A&M during 1966 for what would become the Safe as Milk album. A&M's Jerry Moss reportedly described this new direction as "too negative" and dropped the band from the label, although still under contract. Much of the demo recording was accomplished at Art Laboe's Original Sound Studio, then with Gary Marker on the controls at Sunset Sound on 8-track. By the end of 1966 they were signed to Buddah Records and much of the demo work was transferred to 4-track, at the behest of Krasnow and Perry, in the RCA Studio in Hollywood, where the recording was finalized. Tracks that were originally laid down in the demo by Doug Moon are therefore taken up by Ry Cooder's work in the release, as Moon had departed over "musical differences" at this juncture.
Drummer John French had now joined the group and it would later (notably on Trout Mask Replica) be his patience that was required to transcribe Van Vliet's creative ideas (often expressed by whistling or banging on the piano) into musical form for the other group members. On French's departure this role was taken over by Bill Harkleroad for Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Many of the lyrics on the Safe as Milk album were written by Van Vliet in collaboration with the writer Herb Bermann, who befriended Van Vliet after seeing him perform at a bar-gig in Lancaster in 1966. The song "Electricity" was a poem written by Bermann, who gave Van Vliet permission to adapt it to music. Unlike the album's mostly blues rock sound, songs such as "Electricity" illustrated the band's unconventional instrumentation and Van Vliet's unusual vocals, which guitarist Doug Moon described as "hinting of things to come".
Much of the Safe as Milk material was honed and arranged by the arrival of 20-year–old guitar prodigy Ry Cooder, who had been brought into the group after much pressure from Vliet. The band began recording in spring 1967, with Richard Perry cutting his teeth in his first job as producer. The album was released in September 1967. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic called the album "blues–rock gone slightly askew, with jagged, fractured rhythms, soulful, twisting vocals from Van Vliet, and more doo wop, soul, straight blues, and folk–rock influences than he would employ on his more avant garde outings".
Recognition
Among those who took notice were the Beatles. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney were known as great admirers of Beefheart. Lennon displayed two of the album's promotional "baby bumper stickers" in the sunroom at his home. Later, the Beatles planned to sign Beefheart to their experimental Zapple label (plans that were scrapped after Allen Klein took over the group's management). Van Vliet was often critical of the Beatles, however. He considered the lyric "I'd love to turn you on" from their song A Day in the Life, to be ridiculous and conceited. Tiring of their "lullabies", he lampooned them with the Strictly Personal song Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones, that featured the sardonic refrain of "strawberry fields, all the winged eels slither on the heels of today's children, strawberry fields forever". Vliet spoke badly of Lennon after getting no response when he sent a telegram of support to him and wife Yoko Ono during their 1969 "Bed-In for peace". Vliet and the band met McCartney in a Cannes hotel nightclub during their tour of Europe on January 27, 1968, urinated together on a statue outside the hotel at the prodding of journalists and photographers, and participated in a jam session together with McCartney and Penny Nichols. Producer attempts to convince McCartney to switch labels to Kama Sutra obstructed the possibility of a pleasant evening. McCartney later said he had no recollection of this meeting.
The flipside of success
Doug Moon left the band because of his dislike of the band's increasing experimentation outside his preferred blues genre. Ry Cooder told of Moon's becoming so angered by Van Vliet's unrelenting criticism that he walked into the room pointing a loaded crossbow at him, only to have Van Vliet tell him, "Get that fucking thing out of here, get out of here and get back in your room", which he did. (Other band members dispute this account, though Moon is likely to have "passed through" the studio with a weapon.) Moon was present during the early demo sessions at Original Sound studio, above the Kama Sutra/Buddah offices. The works Moon laid down did not see the light of day, as he was replaced by Cooder when they continued on material at Sunset Sound with Marker. Marker then fell by the wayside when recording was moved by Krasnow and Perry to RCA Studio. This would have a profound effect on the quality of the Safe as Milk work, as the former studio was 8-track and the subsequent studio a 4-track.
To support the album's release the group had been scheduled to play at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. During this period Vliet suffered severe anxiety attacks that made him convinced that he was having a heart attack, possibly exacerbated by his heavy LSD use and the fact that his father had died of heart failure a few years earlier. At a vital "warm-up" performance at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival (June 10–11) shortly before the scheduled Monterey Festival (June 16–18), the band began to play "Electricity" and Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the stage and landed on manager Bob Krasnow. He later claimed he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth. This aborted any opportunity of breakthrough success at Monterey, as Cooder immediately decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet, effectively quitting both the event and the band on the spot. With such complex guitar parts there was no means for the band to find a competent replacement in time for Monterey. Cooder's spot was eventually filled for a short spell by Gerry McGee, who had played with the Monkees. According to French the band did two gigs with McGee, one of which was at The Peppermint Twist near Long Beach. The other was at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, August 7, 1967, as opening act for the Yardbirds. McGee was in the group long enough to have an outfit made by a Santa Monica boutique that also created the gear worn by the band on the Strictly Personal cover stamps.
Strictly Personal
In August 1967, guitarist Jeff Cotton filled the guitar spot vacated, in turn, by Cooder and McGee. In October and November 1967 the Snouffer/Cotton/Handley/French line–up recorded material for what was planned to be the second album. Originally intended to be a double album called It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper for the label, it was released later in pieces in 1971 and 1995. After rejection from Buddah, Bob Krasnow encouraged the band to re-record four of the shorter numbers, add two more, and make shorter versions of "Mirror Man" and "Kandy Korn". Krasnow created a strange mix full of "phasing" that, by most accounts (including Beefheart's), diminished the music's strength. This was released in October 1968 as Strictly Personal on Krasnow's Blue Thumb label. Stewart Mason in his Allmusic review of the album described it as a "terrific album" and a "fascinating, underrated release ... every bit the equal of Safe as Milk and Trout Mask Replica". Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone called Strictly Personal "an excellent album. The guitars of the Magic Band mercilessly bend and stretch notes in a way that suggests that the world of music has wobbled clear off its axis", with the lyrics demonstrating "Beefheart's ability to juxtapose delightful humor with frightening insights".
Mirror Man
In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note stating that the material had been recorded in "one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues–rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series.
During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, press coverage and public outcry resulted in the band being permitted to re-enter the UK, where they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and on Friday January 19 appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel, where they played tracks from Safe as Milk and some of the experimental blues tracks from Mirror Man. The band was met by an enthusiastic audience; French recalled the event as a rare high moment for the band: "After the show, we were taken to the dressing room where we sat for hours as a line of what seemed like hundreds of people walked in one by one to shake our hand or get an autograph. Many brought imports of Safe as Milk with them for us to autograph ... It seemed like we had finally gained some reward ... Suddenly all the criticizing and intimidation and eccentricities seemed very unimportant. It was a glorious moment, one of the very few I ever experienced". By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France.
Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later.
The 'Brown Wrapper' Sessions
After their Euro tour and the Cannes beach performance the band returned to the US. Moves were already in the air for them to leave Buddah and sign to MGM and, prior to their May tour – mainly in the UK – they re-recorded some Buddah material of the partial Mirror Man sessions at Sunset Sound with Bruce Botnick. Beefheart had also been conceptualizing new band names, including 25th Century Quaker and Blue Thumb, while making suggestions to other musicians that they might get involved. The thought-process of 25th Century Quaker was that it would be a "blues band" alias for the more avant-garde work of the Magic Band. Photographer Guy Webster photographed the band in Quaker-style outfits, and the picture appears in The Mirror Man Sessions CD insert. It would later transpire that much of this situation was transient and that Buddah's Bob Krasnow was to set up his own label. The label that was unsurprisingly named Blue Thumb launched with its first release Strictly Personal, a truncated version of the original Beefheart vision of a double album. Thus "25th Century Quaker" became a track and a potential band-name became a label.
In overview, the works for the double album in this period were intended to be packaged in a plain brown wrapper, with a "strictly personal" over-stamp and addressed in a manner that could have connotations of drug content, pornographic or illicit material; as per the small ads of the time: "It comes to you in a plain brown wrapper." Given that Krasnow had effectively poached the band from Buddah there were limitations on what material could be released. Strictly Personal was the result, contained in its enigmatically-addressed parcel sleeve. The raft of material left behind eventually emerged, firstly on CD as I May Be Hungry, But I Sure Ain't Weird and later on vinyl, implemented by John French, as It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper (which has two tracks that are missing from the former release). Both Blue Thumb and the stamps on the cover of Strictly Personal have LSD connotations, as does the track Ah Feel Like Ahcid, although Beefheart himself refuted this (claiming that this is a rendering of "I feel like I said").
Trout Mask Replica, 1969
Critically acclaimed as Van Vliet's magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica was released as a 28 track double album in June 1969 on Frank Zappa's newly formed Straight Records label. First issues, in the US, were auto-coupled and housed in the black "Straight" liners along with a 6-page lyric sheet illustrated by the Mascara Snake. A school-age portrait of Van Vliet appears on the front of this sheet, while the cover of the gatefold enigmatically shows Beefheart in a 'Quaker' hat, obscuring his face with the head of a fish. The fish is a carp – arguably a "replica" for a trout, photographed by Cal Schenkel. The inner spread "infra-red" photography is by Ed Caraeff, whose Beefheart vacuum cleaner images from this session also appear on Zappa's Hot Rats release (a month earlier) to accompany "Willie The Pimp" lyrics sung by Vliet. Alex St. Clair had now left the band and, after Junior Madeo from the Blackouts was considered, the role was filled by Bill Harkleroad. Bassist Jerry Handley had also departed, with Gary Marker stepping in. Thus the long rehearsals for the album began in the house on Ensenada Drive in Woodland Hills, L.A., that would become the Magic Band House.
The Magic Band began recordings for Trout Mask Replica with bassist Gary "Magic" Marker at T.T.G. (on "Moonlight on Vermont" and "Veteran's Day Poppy"), but later enlisted bassist Mark Boston after his departure. The remainder of the album was recorded at Whitney Studios, with some field recordings made at the house. Boston was acquainted with French and Harkleroad via past bands. Van Vliet had also begun assigning nicknames to his band members, so Harkleroad became Zoot Horn Rollo, and Boston became Rockette Morton, while John French assumed the name Drumbo, and Jeff Cotton became Antennae Jimmy Semens. Van Vliet's cousin Victor Hayden, the Mascara Snake, performed as a bass clarinetist later in the proceedings. Vliet's girlfriend Laurie Stone, who can be heard laughing at the beginning of Fallin' Ditch, became an audio typist at the Magic Band house.
Van Vliet wanted the whole band to "live" the Trout Mask Replica album. The group rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in their small rented house in the Woodland Hills suburb of Los Angeles. With only two bedrooms in the house, band members would find sleep in various corners of one, while Vliet occupied the other, and rehearsals were accomplished in the main living area. Van Vliet implemented his vision by completely dominating his musicians, artistically and emotionally. At various times one or another of the group members was "put in the barrel", with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission. Guitarist Bill Harkleroad complained that his fingers were a "bloody mess" as a result of Beefheart's orders that he use heavy strings. Drummer John French described the situation as "cultlike" and a visiting friend said "the environment in that house was positively Mansonesque". Their material circumstances were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the group barely survived and were even arrested for shoplifting food (Zappa bailed them out). French has recalled living on no more than a small cup of beans a day for a month. A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health". Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for 14 or more hours a day.
John French's 2010 book Through the Eyes of Magic describes some of the "talks", which were initiated by his doing such things as playing a Frank Zappa drum part ("The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)") in his drumming shed, and not having finished drum parts as quickly as Beefheart wanted. French writes of being punched by band members, thrown into walls, kicked, punched in the face by Beefheart hard enough to draw blood, being attacked with a sharp broomstick. Eventually Beefheart, French says, threatened to throw him out an upper floor window. He admits complicity in similarly attacking his bandmates during "talks" aimed at them. In the end, after the album's recording, Beefheart ejected French from the band by throwing him down a set of stairs, telling him to "Take a walk, man" after not responding in a desired manner to a request to "play a strawberry" on the drums. Beefheart replaced French with drummer Jeff Bruschel, an acquaintance of Hayden. Referred to as "Fake Drumbo" (playing on French's drumset) this final act resulted in French's name not appearing on the album credits, either as a player or arranger. Bruschel toured with the band to Europe but was replaced by the next recording.
According to Van Vliet, the 28 songs on the album were written in a single 8½ hour session at the piano, an instrument he had no skill in playing, an approach Mike Barnes compared to John Cage's "maverick irreverence toward classical tradition", though band members have stated that the songs were written over the course of about a year, beginning around December 1967. (The band did watch Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½ during the creation of the album). It took the band about eight months to mold the songs into shape, with French bearing primary responsibility for transposing and shaping Vliet's piano fragments into guitar and bass lines, which were mostly notated on paper. Harkleroad in 1998 said in retrospect: "We're dealing with a strange person, coming from a place of being a sculptor/painter, using music as his idiom. He was getting more into that part of who he was instead of this blues singer." The band had rehearsed the songs so thoroughly that the instrumental tracks for 21 of the songs were recorded in a single four and a half hour recording session. Van Vliet spent the next few days overdubbing the vocals. The album's cover artwork was photographed and designed by Cal Schenkel and shows Van Vliet wearing the raw head of a carp, bought from a local fish market and fashioned into a mask by Schenkel.
Trout Mask Replica incorporated a wide variety of musical styles, including blues, avant garde/experimental, and rock. The relentless practice prior to recording blended the music into an iconoclastic whole of contrapuntal tempos, featuring slide guitar, polyrhythmic drumming (with French's drums and cymbals covered in cardboard), honking saxophone and bass clarinet. Van Vliet's vocals range from his signature Howlin' Wolf-inspired growl to frenzied falsetto to laconic, casual ramblings.
The instrumental backing was effectively recorded live in the studio, while Van Vliet overdubbed most of the vocals in only partial sync with the music by hearing the slight sound leakage through the studio window. Zappa said of Van Vliet's approach, "[it was] impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not."
Van Vliet used the ensuing publicity, particularly with a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Langdon Winner, to promulgate a number of myths that were subsequently quoted as fact. Winner's article stated, for instance, that neither Van Vliet nor the members of the Magic Band ever took drugs, but Harkleroad later contradicted this. Van Vliet claimed to have taught both Harkleroad and Boston to play their instruments from scratch; in fact the pair were already accomplished young musicians before joining the band. Last, Van Vliet claimed to have gone a year and half without sleeping. When asked how this was possible, he claimed to have only eaten fruit.
Critic Steve Huey of AllMusic writes that the album's influence "was felt more in spirit than in direct copycatting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point. However, its inspiring reimagining of what was possible in a rock context laid the groundwork for countless experiments in rock surrealism to follow, especially during the punk and new wave era." In 2003, the album was ranked sixtieth by Rolling Stone in their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: "On first listen, Trout Mask Replica sounds like raw Delta blues", with Beefheart "singing and ranting and reciting poetry over fractured guitar licks. But the seeming sonic chaos is an illusion—to construct the songs, the Magic Band rehearsed twelve hours a day for months on end in a house with the windows blacked out. (Producer Frank Zappa was then able to record most of the album in less than five hours.) Tracks such as 'Ella Guru' and 'My Human Gets Me Blues' are the direct predecessors of modern musical primitives such as Tom Waits and PJ Harvey." Guitarist Fred Frith noted that during this process "forces that usually emerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable".
Critic Robert Christgau gave the album a B+, saying, "I find it impossible to give this record an A because it is just too weird. But I'd like to. Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record." BBC disc jockey John Peel said of the album: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." It was inducted into the United States National Recording Registry in 2011.
Later recordings, 1970–82
Lick My Decals Off, Baby
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) continued in a similarly experimental vein. An album with "a very coherent structure" in the Magic Band's "most experimental and visionary stage", it was Van Vliet's most commercially successful in the United Kingdom, spending twenty weeks on the UK Albums Chart and peaking at number 20. An early promotional music video was made of its title song, and a bizarre television commercial was also filmed that included excerpts from Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop, silent footage of masked Magic Band members using kitchen utensils as musical instruments, and Beefheart kicking over a bowl of what appears to be porridge onto a dividing stripe in the middle of a road. The video was rarely played but was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several programs related to music.
On this LP Art Tripp III, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, played drums and marimba. Lick My Decals Off, Baby was the first record on which the band was credited as "The" Magic Band, rather than "His" Magic Band. Journalist Irwin Chusid interprets this change as "a grudging concession of its members' at least semiautonomous humanity". Robert Christgau gave the album an A−, commenting, "Beefheart's famous five-octave range and covert totalitarian structures have taken on a playful undertone, repulsive and engrossing and slapstick funny." Due to licensing disputes, Lick My Decals Off, Baby was unavailable on CD for many years, though it remained in print on vinyl. It was ranked second in Uncut magazine's May 2010 list of The 50 Greatest Lost Albums. In 2011, the album became available for download on the iTunes Store.
He toured in 1970 with Ry Cooder on the bill to promote the album.
The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot
The next two records, The Spotlight Kid (simply credited to "Captain Beefheart") and Clear Spot (credited to "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band"), were both released in 1972. The atmosphere of The Spotlight Kid is, according to one critic, "definitely relaxed and fun, maybe one step up from a jam". And though "things do sound maybe just a little too blasé", "Beefheart at his worst still has something more than most groups at their best." The music is simpler and slower than on the group's two previous releases, the uncompromisingly original Trout Mask Replica and the frenetic Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This was in part an attempt by Van Vliet to become a more appealing commercial proposition as the band had made virtually no money during the previous two years—at the time of recording, the band members were subsisting on welfare food handouts and remittances from their parents. Van Vliet offered that he "got tired of scaring people with what I was doing ... I realized that I had to give them something to hang their hat on, so I started working more of a beat into the music". Magic Band members have also said that the slower performances were due in part to Van Vliet's inability to fit his lyrics with the instrumental backing of the faster material on the earlier albums, a problem that was exacerbated in that he almost never rehearsed with the group. In the period leading up to the recording the band lived communally, first at a compound near Ben Lomond, California and then in northern California near Trinidad. The situation saw a return to the physical violence and psychological manipulation that had taken place during the band's previous communal residence while composing and rehearsing Trout Mask Replica. According to John French, the worst of this was directed toward Harkleroad. In his autobiography Harkleroad recalls being thrown into a dumpster, an act he interpreted as having metaphorical intent.
Clear Spot'''s production credit of Ted Templeman made AllMusic consider "why in the world [it] wasn't more of a commercial success than it was", and that while fans "of the fully all-out side of Beefheart might find the end result not fully up to snuff as a result, but those less concerned with pushing back all borders all the time will enjoy his unexpected blend of everything tempered with a new accessibility". The review called the song "Big Eyed Beans from Venus" "a fantastically strange piece of aggression". A Clear Spot song, "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", appeared on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' cult comedy film The Big Lebowski (1998).
Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams
In 1974, immediately after the recording of Unconditionally Guaranteed, which markedly continued the trend towards a more commercial sound heard on some of the Clear Spot tracks, the Magic Band's original members departed. Disgruntled and past members worked together for a period, gigging at Blue Lake and putting together their own ideas and demos, with John French earmarked as the vocalist. These concepts eventually coalesced around the core of Art Tripp III, Harkleroad and Boston, with the formation of Mallard, helped by finance and UK recording facilities from Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson.Harkleroad, Bill. Lunar Notes pp.132–133. Some of French's compositions were used in the band's work, but the group's singer was Sam Galpin and the role of keyboardist was eventually taken by John Thomas, who had shared a house with French in Eureka at the time. At this time Vliet attempted to recruit both French and Harkleroad as producers for his next album, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Andy Di Martino produced both of these Virgin label albums.
Vliet was forced to quickly form a new Magic Band to complete support-tour dates, with studio musicians who had no experience with his music and in fact had never heard it. Having no knowledge of the previous Magic Band style, they simply improvised what they thought would go with each song, playing much slicker versions that have been described as "bar band" versions of Beefheart songs. A review described this incarnation of the Magic Band as the "Tragic Band", a term that has stuck over the years.
Robert 'Fuzzy' Fuscaldo – guitar
Dean Smith – guitar
Del Simmons – saxophone; flute
Michael 'Bucky' Smotherman – keyboards; vocals
Paul Uhrig – bass
Ty Grimes – drums
Mike Barnes said that the description of the new band "grooving along pleasantly", was "...an appropriately banal description of the music of a man who only a few years ago composed with the expressed intent of shaking listeners out of their torpor". The one album they recorded, Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974) has, like its predecessor, a completely different, almost soft rock sound from any other Beefheart record. Neither was well received; drummer Art Tripp recalled that when he and the original Magic Band listened to Unconditionally Guaranteed, they "...were horrified. As we listened, it was as though each song was worse than the one which preceded it". Beefheart later disowned both albums, calling them "horrible and vulgar", asking that they not be considered part of his musical output and urging fans who bought them to "take copies back for a refund".
Bongo Fury to Bat Chain Puller
By the fall of 1975 the band had completed their European tour, with further US dates in the New Year of 1976, supporting Zappa along with Dr. John. Van Vliet now found himself stuck in a web of contractual hang-ups. At this point Zappa had begun to extend a helping hand, with Vliet already having performed incognito as "Rollin' Red" on Zappa's One Size Fits All (1975) and then joining with him on the Bongo Fury album and its later support tour. Two Vliet-penned numbers on the Bongo Fury album are "Sam with the Showing Scalp Flat Top" and "Man with the Woman Head". The form, texture and imagery of this album's first track, "Debra Kadabra", sung by Vliet, has 'angular similarities' to the work he would later produce in his next three albums. On the Bongo Fury album Vliet also sings "Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead", harmonizes on "200 Years Old" and "Muffin Man", and plays harmonica and soprano saxophone.
In early 1976 Zappa put on his producer hat and, once again, opened up his studio facilities and finance to Vliet. This was for the production of an album provisionally titled Bat Chain Puller. The band were John French (drums), John Thomas (keyboards) and Jeff Moris Tepper and Denny Walley (guitars). Much of the work on this album had been finalized and some demos had been circulated when fate once again struck the Beefheart camp. In May 1976 the long association between Zappa and his manager/business partner Herb Cohen ceased. This resulted in Zappa's finances and ongoing works becoming part of protracted legal negotiations. The Bat Chain Puller project went "on ice" and did not see an official release until 2012. After this recording John Thomas joined ex-Magic Band members in Mallard.
Prior to his next album Beefheart appeared in 1977 on the Tubes' album Now, playing saxophone on the song "Cathy's Clone", and the album also featured a cover of the Clear Spot song "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains". In 1978 he appeared on Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack to the film Blue Collar.
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Having extricated himself from a mire of contractual difficulties Beefheart emerged with this new album, in 1978, on the Warner Bros label. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) contained re-workings of the shelved Bat Chain Puller album and still retained its original guitarist, Jeff Moris Tepper. However, he and Vliet were now joined by a whole new line-up of Richard Redus (guitar, bass and accordion), Eric Drew Feldman (bass, piano and synthesizer), Bruce Lambourne Fowler (trombone and air bass), Art Tripp (percussion and marimba) and Robert Arthur Williams (drums). The album was co-produced by Vliet with Pete Johnson. Members of this Magic Band and the "Bat Chain" elements would later feature on Beefheart's last two albums. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) was described by Ned Raggett of Allmusic to be "...manna from heaven for those feeling Beefheart had lost his way on his two Mercury albums". Following Vliet's death, John French claimed the 40-second spoken word track "Apes-Ma" to be an analogy of Van Vliet's deteriorating physical condition. The album's sleeve features Van Vliet's 1976 painting Green Tom, one of the many works that would mark out his longed-for career as a painter of note.
Doc at the Radar StationDoc at the Radar Station (1980) helped establish Beefheart's late resurgence. Released by Virgin Records during the post-punk scene, the music was now accessible to a younger, more receptive audience. He was interviewed in a feature report on KABC-TV's Channel 7 Eyewitness News in which he was hailed as "the father of the new wave. One of the most important American composers of the last fifty years, [and] a primitive genius"; Van Vliet said at this period, "I'm doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state ... and I think there is one right now." Huey of Allmusic cited the Doc at the Radar Station as being "...generally acclaimed as the strongest album of his comeback, and by some as his best since Trout Mask Replica", "even if the Captain's voice isn't quite what it once was, Doc at the Radar Station is an excellent, focused consolidation of Beefheart's past and then-present". Van Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes speaks of "revamping work built on skeletal ideas and fragments that would have mouldered away in the vaults had they not been exhumed and transformed into full-blown, totally convincing new material". During this period, Van Vliet made two appearances on David Letterman's late night television program on NBC, and also performed on Saturday Night Live.
Richard Redus and Art Tripp departed on this album, with slide guitar and marimba duties taken up by the reappearance of John French. The guitar skills of Gary Lucas also feature on the track Flavor Bud Living.
Ice Cream for Crow
The final Beefheart record, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), was recorded with Gary Lucas (who was also Van Vliet's manager), Jeff Moris Tepper, Richard Snyder and Cliff Martinez. This line-up made a video to promote the title track, directed by Van Vliet and Ken Schreiber, with cinematography by Daniel Pearl, which was rejected by MTV for being "too weird". However, the video was included in the Letterman broadcast on NBC-TV, and was also accepted into the Museum of Modern Art. Van Vliet announced "I don't want my MTV if they don't want my video" during his interview with Letterman, in reference to MTV's "I want my MTV" marketing campaign of the time. Ice Cream for Crow, along with songs such as its title track, features instrumental performances by the Magic Band with performance poetry readings by Van Vliet. Raggett of AllMusic called the album a "last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact", with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results". Barnes writes that, "The most original and vital tracks (on the album) are the newer ones", saying that it "feels like an hors-d'oeuvre for a main course that never came". Michael Galucci of Goldmine praised the album, describing it as "the single, most bizarre entry in Van Vliet's long, odd career." Promotional work proposed to Beefheart by Virgin Records was as unorthodox as him making an appearance in the 1987 film Grizzly II: The Predator. Soon after, Van Vliet retired from music and began a new career as a painter. Gary Lucas tried to convince him to record one more album, but to no avail.
Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh
Released in 2004 by Rhino Handmade in a limited edition of 1,500 copies, this signed and numbered box set contains a "Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh" CD of Vliet-recited poetry, the Anton Corbijn film of Vliet Some YoYo Stuff on DVD and two art books. One book, entitled Splinters, gives a visual "scrapbook" insight into Vliet's life, from an early age to his painting in retirement. The second, eponymously titled, book is packed with art pages of Vliet's work. The first is bound in green linen, the second in yellow. These colors are counterpointed throughout the package, which comes in a green slipcase measuring 235 mm × 325 mm × 70 mm. An onion-skin wallet, nestling at the package's inner sanctum, contains a matching-numbered Vliet lithograph on hand-rolled paper, signed by the artist. The two books are by publishers Artist Ink Editions.
Paintings
Throughout his musical career, Van Vliet remained interested in visual art. He placed his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline, on several of his albums. In 1987, Van Vliet published Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush, a collection of his poetry, paintings and drawings.
In the mid-1980s, Van Vliet became reclusive and abandoned music, stating he had gotten "too good at the horn" and could make far more money painting. Beefheart's first exhibition had been at Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery during the Magic Band's 1972 tour of the UK. He was interviewed on Granada regional television standing in front of his bold black and white canvases. He was inspired to begin an art career when a fan, Julian Schnabel, who admired the artwork seen on his album covers, asked to buy a drawing from him. His debut exhibition as a serious painter was at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1985 and was initially regarded as that of "another rock musician dabbling in art for ego's sake", though his primitive, non-conformist work has received more sympathetic and serious attention since then, with some sales approaching $25,000. Two books have been published specifically devoted to critique and analysis of his artwork: Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet (1999) by W. C. Bamberger and Stand Up To Be Discontinued, first published in 1993, a now rare collection of essays on Van Vliet's work. The limited edition version of the book contains a CD of Van Vliet reading six of his poems: Fallin' Ditch, The Tired Plain, Skeleton Makes Good, Safe Sex Drill, Tulip and Gill. A deluxe edition was published in 1994; only 60 were printed, with etchings of Van Vliet's signature, costing £180.
In the early 1980s Van Vliet established an association with the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. Eric Feldman stated later in an interview that at that time Michael Werner told Van Vliet he needed to stop playing music if he wanted to be respected as a painter, warning him that otherwise he would only be considered a "musician who paints". In doing so, it was said that he had effectively "succeeded in leaving his past behind". Van Vliet has been described as a modernist, a primitivist, an abstract expressionist, and, "in a sense" an outsider artist. Morgan Falconer of Artforum concurs, mentioning both a "neo-primitivist aesthetic" and further stating that his work is influenced by the CoBrA painters. The resemblance to the CoBrA painters is also recognized by art critic Roberto Ohrt, while others have compared his paintings to the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko.
According to Dr. John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 1997, although Van Vliet's work has associations with mainstream abstract expressionist painting, more importantly he was a self-taught artist and his painting "has that same kind of edge the music has". Curator David Breuer asserts that in contrast to the busied, bohemian urban lives of the New York abstract expressionists, the rural desert environment Van Vliet was influenced by is a distinctly naturalistic one, making him a distinguished figure in contemporary art, whose work will survive in canon. Van Vliet stated of his own work, "I'm trying to turn myself inside out on the canvas. I'm trying to completely bare what I think at that moment" and "I paint for the simple reason that I have to. I feel a sense of relief after I do." When asked about his artistic influences he stated that there were none. "I just paint like I paint and that's enough influence." He did however state his admiration of Georg Baselitz, the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian, and Vincent van Gogh; after seeing van Gogh's paintings in person, Van Vliet quoted himself as saying, "The sun disappoints me so."
Exhibits of his paintings from the late 1990s were held in New York in 2009 and 2010. Falconer stated that the most recent exhibitions showed "evidence of a serious, committed artist". It was claimed that he stopped painting in the late 1990s. A 2007 interview with Van Vliet through email by Anthony Haden-Guest, however, showed him to still be active artistically. He exhibited only few of his paintings because he immediately destroyed any that did not satisfy him.
Life in retirement
After his retirement from music, Van Vliet rarely appeared in public. He resided near Trinidad, California, with his wife Janet "Jan" Van Vliet. By the early 1990s he was using a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis. The severity of his illness was sometimes disputed. Many of his art contractors and friends considered him to be in good health. Other associates such as his longtime drummer and musical director John French and bassist Richard Snyder have stated that they had noticed symptoms consistent with the onset of multiple sclerosis, such as sensitivity to heat, loss of balance, and stiffness of gait, by the late 1970s.
One of Van Vliet's last public appearances was in the 1993 short documentary Some Yo Yo Stuff by filmmaker Anton Corbijn, described as an "observation of his observations". Around 13 minutes and shot entirely in black and white, with appearances by his mother and David Lynch, the film showed a noticeably weakened and dysarthric Van Vliet at his residence in California, reading poetry, and philosophically discussing his life, environment, music and art. In 2000, he appeared on Gary Lucas's album Improve the Shining Hour and Moris Tepper's Moth to Mouth, and spoke on Tepper's 2004 song "Ricochet Man" from the album Head Off. He is credited for naming Tepper's 2010 album A Singer Named Shotgun Throat.
Van Vliet often voiced concern over and support for environmentalist issues and causes, particularly the welfare of animals. He often referred to Earth as "God's Golfball" and this expression can be found on a number of his later albums. In 2003 he was heard on the compilation album Where We Live: Stand for What You Stand On: A Benefit CD for EarthJustice singing a version of "Happy Birthday to You" retitled "Happy Earthday". The track lasts 34 seconds and was recorded over the telephone.
Death
Van Vliet died at a hospital in Arcata, California, on Friday, December 17, 2010, about a month before his 70th birthday. The cause was named as complications from multiple sclerosis. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan commented on his death, praising him: "Wondrous, secret ... and profound, he was a diviner of the highest order."
Dweezil Zappa dedicated the song "Willie the Pimp" to Beefheart at the "Zappa Plays Zappa" show at the Beacon Theater in New York City on the day of his death, while Jeff Bridges exclaimed "Rest in peace, Captain Beefheart!" at the conclusion of the December 18, 2010, episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live.
Relationship with Frank Zappa
Van Vliet met Frank Zappa when they were both teenagers and shared an interest in rhythm and blues and Chicago blues. They collaborated from this early stage, with Zappa's scripts for "teenage operettas" such as "Captain Beefheart & the Grunt People" helping to elevate Van Vliet's Captain Beefheart persona. In 1963, the pair recorded a demo at the Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga as the Soots, seeking support from a major label. Their efforts were unsuccessful, as "Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf vocal style and Zappa's distorted guitar" were "not on the agenda" at the time.
The friendship between Zappa and Van Vliet over the years was sometimes expressed in the form of rivalry as musicians drifted back and forth between their groups. Van Vliet embarked on the 1975 Bongo Fury tour with Zappa and the Mothers, mainly because conflicting contractual obligations made him unable to tour or record independently. Their relationship grew acrimonious on the tour to the point that they refused to talk to one another. Zappa became irritated by Van Vliet, who drew constantly, including while on stage, filling one of his large sketch books with rapidly executed portraits and warped caricatures of Zappa. Musically, Van Vliet's primitive style contrasted sharply with Zappa's compositional discipline and abundant technique. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black described the situation as "two geniuses" on "ego trips". Estranged for years afterwards, they reconnected at the end of Zappa's life, after his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer. Their collaborative work appears on the Zappa rarity collections The Lost Episodes (1996) and Mystery Disc (1996). Particularly notable is their song "Muffin Man", included on the Zappa/Beefheart Bongo Fury album, as well as Zappa's compilation album Strictly Commercial (1995). Zappa finished concerts with the song for many years afterwards. Beefheart also provided vocals for "Willie the Pimp" on Zappa's otherwise instrumental album Hot Rats (1969). One track on Trout Mask Replica, "The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)", features Magic Band guitarist Jeff Cotton talking on the telephone to Zappa superimposed onto an unrelated live recording of the Mothers of Invention (the backing track was later released in 1992 as "Charles Ives" on You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 ). Van Vliet also played the harmonica on two songs on Zappa albums: "San Ber'dino" (credited as "Bloodshot Rollin' Red") on One Size Fits All (1975) and "Find Her Finer" on Zoot Allures (1976). He is also the vocalist on "The Torture Never Stops (Original Version)" on Zappa's You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 4.
The Magic Band
Influence
Van Vliet has been the subject of at least two documentaries, the BBC's 1997 The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart narrated by John Peel, and the 2006 independent production Captain Beefheart: Under Review.
According to Peel, "If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it's Beefheart ... I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week and I'll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week." His narration added: "A psychedelic shaman who frequently bullied his musicians and sometimes alarmed his fans, Don somehow remained one of rock's great innocents." Mike Barnes referred to him as an "iconic counterculture hero" who, with the Magic Band, "went on to stake out startling new possibilities for rock music". Lester Bangs cited Beefheart as "one of the four or five unqualified geniuses to rise from the hothouses of American music in the Sixties", while John Harris of The Guardian praised the music's "pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together". A Rolling Stone biography described his work as "a sort of modern chamber music for [a] rock band, since he plans every note and teaches the band their parts by ear. Because it breaks so many of rock's conventions at once, Beefheart's music has always been more influential than popular." In this context, it is performed by the classical group, the Meridian Arts Ensemble. Nicholas E. Tawa, in his 2005 book Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th Century: Styles and Singers and What They Said About America, included Beefheart among the prominent progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, while the Encyclopædia Britannica describes Beefheart's songs as conveying "deep distrust of modern civilization, a yearning for ecological balance, and that belief that all animals in the wild are far superior to human beings". Many of his works have been classified as "art rock".
Many artists have cited Van Vliet as an influence, beginning with the Edgar Broughton Band, who covered "Dropout Boogie" as Apache Drop Out (mixed with the Shadows' "Apache") as early as 1970, as did the Kills 32 years later. The Minutemen were fans of Beefheart, and were arguably among the few to effectively synthesize his music with their own, especially in their early output, which featured disjointed guitar and irregular, galloping rhythms. Michael Azerrad describes the Minutemen's early output as "highly caffeinated Captain Beefheart running down James Brown tunes", and notes that Beefheart was the group's "idol". Others who arguably conveyed the same influence around the same time or before include John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Little Feat, Laurie Anderson, the Residents and Henry Cow. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and poet mystic Z'EV, both pioneers of industrial music, cited Van Vliet along with Zappa among their influences. More notable were those emerging during the early days of punk rock, such as the Clash and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols (reportedly to manager Malcolm McLaren's disapproval), later of the post-punk band Public Image Ltd. Frank Discussion of punk rock band The Feederz learned to play guitar from listening to Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me—and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Groening served as the curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that reunited the post–Beefheart Magic Band.
Van Vliet's influence on post–punk bands was demonstrated by Magazine's recording of "I Love You You Big Dummy" in 1978 and the tribute album Fast 'n' Bulbous – A Tribute to Captain Beefheart in 1988, featuring the likes of artists such as the Dog Faced Hermans, the Scientists, the Membranes, Simon Fisher Turner, That Petrol Emotion, the Primevals, the Mock Turtles, XTC, and Sonic Youth, who included a cover of Beefheart's "Electricity" which would later be re-released as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their 1988 album Daydream Nation. Other post-punk bands influenced by Beefheart include Gang of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pere Ubu, Babe the Blue Ox and Mark E. Smith of the Fall. The Fall covered "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones" in their 1993 session for John Peel. Beefheart is considered to have "greatly influenced" new wave artists, such as David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, the Bongos, and the B-52s.
Tom Waits' shift in artistic direction, starting with 1983's Swordfishtrombones, was, Waits claims, a result of his wife Kathleen Brennan introducing him to Van Vliet's music. "Once you've heard Beefheart", said Waits, "it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." More recently, Waits has described Beefheart's work as "glimpse into the future; like curatives, recipes for ancient oils". Guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cited Van Vliet as a prominent influence on the band's 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik as well as his debut solo album Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and stated that during his drug-induced absence, after leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he "would paint and listen to Trout Mask Replica". Black Francis of the Pixies cited Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid as one of the albums he listened to regularly when first writing songs for the band, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana acknowledged Van Vliet's influence, mentioning him among his notoriously eclectic range.
The White Stripes in 2000 released a 7" tribute single, "Party of Special Things to Do", containing covers of that Beefheart song plus "China Pig" and "Ashtray Heart". The Kills included a cover of "Dropout Boogie" on their debut Black Rooster EP (2002). The Black Keys in 2008 released a free cover of Beefheart's "I'm Glad" from Safe as Milk. The 2002 LCD Soundsystem song "Losing My Edge" has a verse which James Murphy says, "I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band". In 2005 Genus Records produced Mama Kangaroos – Philly Women Sing Captain Beefheart, a 20-track tribute to Captain Beefheart. Beck included Safe as Milk and Ella Guru in a playlist of songs as part of his website's Planned Obsolescence series of mashups of songs by the musicians that influenced him. Franz Ferdinand cited Beefheart's Doc at the Radar Station as a strong influence on their second LP, You Could Have It So Much Better. Placebo briefly named themselves Ashtray Heart, after the track on Doc at the Radar Station; the band's album Battle for the Sun contains a track, "Ashtray Heart". Joan Osborne covered Beefheart's "(His) Eyes are a Blue Million Miles", which appears on Early Recordings. She cited Van Vliet as one of her influences.
PJ Harvey and John Parish discussed Beefheart's influence in an interview together. Harvey's first experience of Beefheart's music was as a child. Her parents had all of his albums; listening to them made her "feel ill". Harvey was reintroduced to Beefheart's music by Parish, who lent her a cassette copy of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) at the age of 16. She cited him as one of her greatest influences since. Parish described Beefheart's music as a "combination of raw blues and abstract jazz. There was humour in there, but you could tell that it wasn't [intended as] a joke. I felt that there was a depth to what he did that very few other rock artists have managed [to achieve]." Ty Segall covered "Drop Out Boogie" on his 2009 album Lemons.
Discography
Safe as Milk (1967)
Strictly Personal (1968)
Trout Mask Replica (1969)
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)
Mirror Man (1971)
The Spotlight Kid (1972)
Clear Spot (1972)
Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974)
Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974)
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978)
Doc at the Radar Station (1980)
Ice Cream for Crow (1982)
Bat Chain Puller (2012, recorded in 1976)
References
Further reading
Bamberger, W.C. (1999). Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet.
Beaugrand, Andreas and various (1994). Stand Up to Be Discontinued. (Paperback) .
Courrier, Kevin (2007). Trout Mask Replica. New York: Continuum.
Delville, Michel & Norris, Andrew (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. .
Harkleroad, Bill (1998). Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Interlink Publishing. .
Van Vliet, Don (Captain Beefheart) (1987). Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush. (All poems in English, preface in German and English.) Bern-Berlin: Gachnang & Springer.
Zappa, Frank & Occhiogrosso, Peter; The Real Frank Zappa Book, Poseidon Press (1989),
External links
Beefheart.com – The Captain Beefheart Radar Station
[ Captain Beefheart] at AllMusic
Captain Beefheart at Rolling Stone''
Some Yo Yo Stuff by Anton Corbijn
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| true |
[
"Authors Alliance is a non-profit organization based in Berkley, California that facilitates widespread access to works of authorship by assisting and representing authors who want to disseminate knowledge and products of the imagination broadly.\n\nMain issues\n\nThe Authors Alliance's main issues are Managing Authors' Rights, Authorship Law & Policy, Reaching Audiences, and Authorial Reputation & Integrity.\n\nRights reversion\n\nThe Author's Alliance has released a how-to guide on authors' rights reversion, \"Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available,\" a guide that arms authors with the information and strategies they need to revive their books, authored by Nicole Cabrera, Jordyn Ostroff and Brianna Schofield.\n\nSee also\nList of works available under a Creative Commons license\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nComputer law organizations\nCopyleft\nCopyright law organizations\nIntellectual property organizations\nOrganizations established in 2014\n501(c)(3) organizations\nOrganizations based in Culver City, California",
"Anti-circumvention refers to laws which prohibit the circumvention of technological barriers for using a digital good in certain ways which the rightsholders do not wish to allow. The requirement for anti-circumvention laws was globalized in 1996 with the creation of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Copyright Treaty.\n\nBackground \nArticle 11 of WIPO Copyright Treaty \"Obligations concerning Technological Measures\" requires contracting parties to\n\"...provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.\"\n\nArticle 12 of WIPO Copyright Treaty \"Obligations concerning Rights Management Information\"\nrequires contracting parties to\n\"...provide adequate and effective legal remedies against any person knowingly performing any of the following acts knowing, or with respect to civil remedies having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate or conceal an infringement of any right covered by this Treaty or the Berne Convention:\n\n(i) to remove or alter any electronic rights management information without permission;\n\n(ii) to distribute, import for distribution, broadcast or communicate to the public, without authority, works or copies of works knowing that electronic rights management information has been removed or altered without authority.\"\n\nLaw by region\n\nEuropean Union\nThe following anti-circumventing rules were implemented in European Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the council of on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.\n\nThis directive states in article 6, 'Obligations as to technological measures':\n Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective.\n Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, rental, advertisement for sale or rental, or possession for commercial purposes of devices, products or components or the provision of services which:\n(a) are promoted, advertised or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of, or\n(b) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or\n(c) are primarily designed, produced, adapted or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of, any effective technological measures.\n For the purposes of this Directive, the expression 'technological measures' means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts, in respect of works or other subject matter, which are not authorised by the rights holder of any copyright or any right related to copyright as provided for by law or the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC. Technological measures shall be deemed 'effective' where the use of a protected work or other subject matter is controlled by the rights holders through application of an access control or protection process, such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work or other subject-matter or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection objective.\n Notwithstanding the legal protection provided for in paragraph 1, in the absence of voluntary measures taken by rights holders, including agreements between rights holders and other parties concerned, Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that rights holders make available to the beneficiary of an exception or limitation provided for in national law in accordance with Article 5(2)(a), (2)(c), (2)(d), (2)(e), (3)(a), (3)(b) or (3)(e) the means of benefiting from that exception or limitation, to the extent necessary to benefit from that exception or limitation and where that beneficiary has legal access to the protected work or subject-matter concerned. (...)\n\nUnited States\nIn the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (\"DMCA\") has implemented the treaty provisions regarding the circumvention of some technological barriers to copying intellectual property.\n\nCircumvention of Access Controls\nSection 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:\n\nNo person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.\n\nThe Act defines what it means in Section 1201(a)(3):\n\n(3) As used in this subsection—\n(A) to \"circumvent a technological measure\" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and\n(B) a technological measure \"effectively controls access to a work\" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.\n\nThus, if there is some \"technological measure that effectively controls access to a work\", it is illegal to circumvent that measure. However, Section 1201 creates several exceptions to this rule, and the Library of Congress is empowered to create additional exceptions.\n\nDistribution of Circumvention Tools\nThe Act also prohibits the distribution of tools that enable a user to circumvent access controls or controls that protect a right of the copyright holder.\n\nAccess Controls\n17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201 (a)(2) provides:\n\n(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—\n(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;\n(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or\n(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.\n\nRights Controls\nDistribution of tools intended to circumvent controls that protect a right of the copyright holder is also prohibited. 17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201 (b) states:\n (1) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—\n(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof;\n\n(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; or\n\n(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof.\n\nA rights control is defined in 17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201 (b)(2) (B):\na technological measure \"effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title\" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title.\n\nUnlike access controls, the DMCA does not ban the circumvention of rights controls. It was thought that traditional copyright law was sufficient to protect the interests of copyright holders in cases of individual acts of circumvention.\n\nOther Rights\nThe Act states that its provisions are not intended to modify a number of already existing rights. Section 1201(c) provides:\n\n(c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected.—\n(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.\n(2) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish vicarious or contributory liability for copyright infringement in connection with any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof.\n(3) Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1).\n(4) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing products.\n\nFair Use and Circumvention\nCritics of the DMCA have often noted the absence of an explicit exception for circumvention to enable fair use.\n\nSection 103(c)(1) of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201 (c)(1)) does state that [n]othing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title. However, a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA is not itself copyright infringement and therefore it is unclear whether fair use can be raised as a defense in circumvention cases.\n\nCourts have come out both ways on the issue. Some have held that the anti-circumvention provisions can only be violated when the circumvention has a connection to copyright infringement. For example, in Storage Tech. Corp. v. Custom Hardware Eng'g & Consulting, Inc., 421 F.3d 1307, 1318-19 (Fed. Cir. 2005) the Federal Circuit held that a copyright holder must show a connection to copyright infringement in order to succeed in a claim under the DMCA.\n\nSimilarly, in Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc. 381 F.3d 1178 (Fed. Cir. 2004) the court held that distribution of a circumvention device (in that case a garage door opener) did not violate the anti-circumvention provisions because its use did not lead to any copyright violation.\n\nHowever, in a number of cases involving DVD decryption courts have held that there is no fair use defense in circumvention cases. In Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d 294, 322 (S.D.N.Y. 2000), the court stated that \"[i]f Congress had meant the fair use defense to apply to such actions, it would have said so.\"\n\nReverse Engineering and Circumvention\nSec. 103(f) of the DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 1201 (f)) says that you are allowed to reverse-engineer a protected program in order to figure out how to get it to interoperate (i.e., exchange and make use of information) with other programs.. The section states:\n\n(f) Reverse Engineering.—\n (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.\n (2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.\n (3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.\n (4) For purposes of this subsection, the term \"interoperability\" means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.\n\nNotable cases\n Universal v. Reimerdes\n United States v. ElcomSoft and Sklyarov\n\nCriticism\nThe Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) criticized DMCA anti-circumvention clauses, saying it \"chills free expression and scientific research\", jeopardizes fair use, impedes competition and innovation, and interferes with computer intrusion laws.\n\nAustralia\n\nAustralia prohibits circumvention of \"access control technical protection measures\" in Section 116 of the Copyright Act. The law currently imposes penalties for circumvention of such measures as well as the manufacturing and distribution of tools to enable it.\n\nDRM may be legally circumvented under a few distinct circumstances which are named as exceptions in the law:\npermission of the rightsholder\nenabling interoperability with copyrighted software\nencryption research\nsecurity testing\ndisabling access to private information (circumvention only)\nnational security or law enforcement\nlibrary acquisition decisions (circumvention only)\nacts prescribed by regulation (circumvention only)\n\nA person circumventing the access control bears the burden of proof that one of these exceptions apply.\n\nPenalties for violation of the anti-circumvention laws include an injunction, monetary damages, and destruction of enabling devices.\n\nNotable cases\n Stevens v. Sony, holding that a device allowing PlayStations to play games with a different region code did not violate the anti-circumvention laws, because the mechanism in the PlayStation did not directly prevent the infringement of copyright.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nWIPO Copyright Treaty Article 11, 12\nUS Copyright Office - Exceptions for Libraries and Archives\nOverview of DRM protection in Europe\n\nCopyright law\nCircumvention\nSoftware law"
] |
[
"Captain Beefheart",
"Mirror Man",
"What was mirror man?",
"In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man,",
"Is there anything notable about the album?",
"bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in \"...one night in Los Angeles in 1965\".",
"Why was it recorded in only one night?",
"This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues.",
"Why did they need to circumvent copyright issues?",
"The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a \"jam\" album,"
] |
C_62dc9c09bb4e4c4c88ce70a1c9567957_0
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Who did they jam with on the album?
| 5 |
Who did Captain Beefheart jam with on the Mirror Man album?
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Captain Beefheart
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In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note claiming that the material had been recorded in "...one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues-rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series. During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, the group was permitted to re-enter the UK, when they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel on Saturday January 20. By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France. Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Don Van Vliet (; born Don Glen Vliet; January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. Conducting a rotating ensemble called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, known separately as "The Magic Band", he recorded 13 studio albums between 1964 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, and his wide vocal range. Known for his enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians. Although he achieved little commercial success, he sustained a cult following as a "highly significant" and "incalculable" influence on an array of new wave, punk, and experimental rock artists.
An artistic prodigy in his childhood, Van Vliet developed an eclectic musical taste during his teen years in Lancaster, California, and formed "a mutually useful but volatile" friendship with musician Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated. He began performing with his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964 and joined the original Magic Band line-up, initiated by Alexis Snouffer, the same year. The group released their debut album Safe as Milk in 1967 on Buddah Records. After being dropped by two consecutive record labels they signed to Zappa's Straight Records, where they released 1969's Trout Mask Replica; the album would later rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 1974, frustrated by lack of commercial success, he pursued a more conventional rock sound, but the ensuing albums were critically panned; this move, combined with not having been paid for a European tour, and years of enduring Beefheart's abusive behavior, led the entire band to quit.
Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982). Van Vliet made few public appearances after his retirement from music in 1982. He pursued a career in art, an interest that originated in his childhood talent for sculpture, and a venture which proved to be his most financially secure. His expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world. Van Vliet died in 2010, having suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years.
Biography
Early life and musical influences, 1941–62
Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner of Dutch ancestry from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet (née Warfield), who was from Arkansas. He said that he was descended from Peter van Vliet, a Dutch painter who knew Rembrandt. Van Vliet also said that he was related to adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and cowboy actor Slim Pickens, and he said that he remembered being born.
Van Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three. His subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs. At the age of nine, he won a children's sculpting competition organised for the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park by a local tutor, Agostinho Rodrigues. Local newspaper cuttings of his junior sculpting achievements can be found reproduced in the Splinters book, included in the Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh boxed CD work, released in 2004. The sprawling park, with its zoo and observatory, had a strong influence on young Vliet, as it was a short distance from his home on Waverly Drive. The track "Observatory Crest" on Bluejeans & Moonbeams reflects this continued interest. A portrait photo of school-age Vliet can be seen on the front of the lyric sheet within the first issue of the US release of Trout Mask Replica.
For some time during the 1950s, Van Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a child prodigy. Van Vliet said that he was a lecturer at the Barnsdall Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven, although it is likely he simply gave a form of artistic dissertation. Accounts of Van Vliet's precocious achievement in art often include his statement that he sculpted on a weekly television show. He said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, based upon their perception of artists as "queer". They declined several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture. Van Vliet later admitted personal hesitation to take the scholarship based upon the bitterness of his parents' discouragement.
Van Vliet's artistic enthusiasm became so fervent, he said that his parents were forced to feed him through the door in the room where he sculpted. When he was thirteen the family moved from the Los Angeles area to the more remote farming town of Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, where there was a growing aerospace industry supported by nearby Edwards Air Force Base. It was an environment that would greatly influence him creatively from then on. Van Vliet remained interested in art; several of his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline were later used as front covers for his music albums. Meanwhile, he developed his taste and interest in music, listening "intensively" to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, and the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. During his early teenage years, Vliet would sometimes socialize with members of local bands such as the Omens and the Blackouts, although his interests were still focused upon an art career. The Omens' guitarists Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley would later become founders of "the Magic Band" and the Blackouts' drummer, Frank Zappa, would later capture Vliet's vocal capabilities on record for the first time. This first known recording, when he was simply "Don Vliet", is "Lost In A Whirlpool" – one of Zappa's early "field recordings" made in his college classroom with brother Bobby on guitar. It is featured on Zappa's posthumously released The Lost Episodes (1996).
Van Vliet said that he never attended public school, alleging "half a day of kindergarten" to be the extent of his formal education and saying that "if you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school". His associates said that he only dropped out during his senior year of high school to help support the family after his father's heart attack. His graduation picture appears in the school's yearbook. His statements that he never attended school – and his general disavowals of education – may have been related to his experience of dyslexia which, although never officially diagnosed, was obvious to sidemen such as John French and Denny Walley, who observed his difficulty reading cue-cards on stage, and his frequent need to be read aloud to. While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, Van Vliet became close friends with fellow teenager Frank Zappa, the pair bonding through their interest in Chicago blues and R&B. Van Vliet is portrayed in both The Real Frank Zappa Book and Barry Miles' biography Zappa as fairly spoiled at this stage of his life, the center of attention as an only child. He spent most of his time locked in his room listening to records, often with Zappa, into the early hours in the morning, eating leftover food from his father's Helms bread truck and demanding that his mother bring him a Pepsi. His parents tolerated such behavior under the belief that their child was truly gifted. Vliet's "Pepsi-moods" were ever a source of amusement to band members, leading Zappa to later write the wry tune "Why Doesn't Someone Give Him A Pepsi?" that featured on the Bongo Fury tour.
After Zappa began regular occupation at Paul Buff's PAL Studio in Cucamonga he and Van Vliet began collaborating, tentatively as the Soots (pronounced "suits"). By the time Zappa had turned the venue into Studio Z the duo had completed some songs. These were Cheryl's Canon, Metal Man Has Won His Wings and a Howlin' Wolf styled rendition of Little Richard's Slippin' and Slidin'. Further songs, on Zappa's Mystery Disc (1996), I Was a Teen-Age Malt Shop and The Birth of Captain Beefheart also provide an insight to Zappa's "teenage movie" script titled Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People, the first appearances of the Beefheart name. It has been suggested this name came from a term used by Vliet's Uncle Alan who had a habit of exposing himself to Don's girlfriend, Laurie Stone. He would urinate with the bathroom door open and, if she was walking by, would mumble about his penis, saying "Ahh, what a beauty! It looks just like a big, fine beef heart". In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Van Vliet requests "don't ask me why or how" he and Zappa came up with the name. Johnny Carson also asked him the same question to which Van Vliet replied that one day he was standing on the pier and saw fishermen cutting the bills off pelicans. He said it made him sad and put "a beef in his heart". Carson appeared nervous and uncomfortable interviewing Van Vliet and after the next commercial break Van Vliet was gone. He would later say in an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman that the name referred to "a beef in my heart against this society". In the "Grunt People" draft script Beefheart and his mother play themselves, with his father played by Howlin' Wolf. Grace Slick is penned in as a "celestial seductress" and there are also roles for future Magic Band members Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston.
Van Vliet enrolled at Antelope Valley College as an art major, but decided to leave the following year. He once worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, and sold a vacuum cleaner to the writer Aldous Huxley at his home in Llano, pointing to it and declaring, "Well I assure you sir, this thing sucks." After managing a Kinney's shoe store, Van Vliet relocated to Rancho Cucamonga, California, to reconnect with Zappa, who inspired his entry into musical performance. Van Vliet was quite shy but was eventually able to imitate the deep voice of Howlin' Wolf with his wide vocal range. He eventually grew comfortable with public performance and, after learning to play the harmonica, began playing at dances and small clubs in Southern California.
Initial recordings, 1962–69
In early 1965 Alex Snouffer, a Lancaster rhythm and blues guitarist, invited Vliet to sing with a group that he was assembling. Vliet joined the first Magic Band and changed his name to Don Van Vliet, while Snouffer became Alex St. Clair (sometimes spelled Claire). Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band signed to A&M and released two singles in 1966. The first was a version of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" that became a regional hit in Los Angeles. The followup, "Moonchild" (written by David Gates, later of the band Bread) was less well received. The band played music venues that catered to underground artists, such as the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.
Safe as Milk
After fulfilling their deal for two singles the band presented demos to A&M during 1966 for what would become the Safe as Milk album. A&M's Jerry Moss reportedly described this new direction as "too negative" and dropped the band from the label, although still under contract. Much of the demo recording was accomplished at Art Laboe's Original Sound Studio, then with Gary Marker on the controls at Sunset Sound on 8-track. By the end of 1966 they were signed to Buddah Records and much of the demo work was transferred to 4-track, at the behest of Krasnow and Perry, in the RCA Studio in Hollywood, where the recording was finalized. Tracks that were originally laid down in the demo by Doug Moon are therefore taken up by Ry Cooder's work in the release, as Moon had departed over "musical differences" at this juncture.
Drummer John French had now joined the group and it would later (notably on Trout Mask Replica) be his patience that was required to transcribe Van Vliet's creative ideas (often expressed by whistling or banging on the piano) into musical form for the other group members. On French's departure this role was taken over by Bill Harkleroad for Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Many of the lyrics on the Safe as Milk album were written by Van Vliet in collaboration with the writer Herb Bermann, who befriended Van Vliet after seeing him perform at a bar-gig in Lancaster in 1966. The song "Electricity" was a poem written by Bermann, who gave Van Vliet permission to adapt it to music. Unlike the album's mostly blues rock sound, songs such as "Electricity" illustrated the band's unconventional instrumentation and Van Vliet's unusual vocals, which guitarist Doug Moon described as "hinting of things to come".
Much of the Safe as Milk material was honed and arranged by the arrival of 20-year–old guitar prodigy Ry Cooder, who had been brought into the group after much pressure from Vliet. The band began recording in spring 1967, with Richard Perry cutting his teeth in his first job as producer. The album was released in September 1967. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic called the album "blues–rock gone slightly askew, with jagged, fractured rhythms, soulful, twisting vocals from Van Vliet, and more doo wop, soul, straight blues, and folk–rock influences than he would employ on his more avant garde outings".
Recognition
Among those who took notice were the Beatles. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney were known as great admirers of Beefheart. Lennon displayed two of the album's promotional "baby bumper stickers" in the sunroom at his home. Later, the Beatles planned to sign Beefheart to their experimental Zapple label (plans that were scrapped after Allen Klein took over the group's management). Van Vliet was often critical of the Beatles, however. He considered the lyric "I'd love to turn you on" from their song A Day in the Life, to be ridiculous and conceited. Tiring of their "lullabies", he lampooned them with the Strictly Personal song Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones, that featured the sardonic refrain of "strawberry fields, all the winged eels slither on the heels of today's children, strawberry fields forever". Vliet spoke badly of Lennon after getting no response when he sent a telegram of support to him and wife Yoko Ono during their 1969 "Bed-In for peace". Vliet and the band met McCartney in a Cannes hotel nightclub during their tour of Europe on January 27, 1968, urinated together on a statue outside the hotel at the prodding of journalists and photographers, and participated in a jam session together with McCartney and Penny Nichols. Producer attempts to convince McCartney to switch labels to Kama Sutra obstructed the possibility of a pleasant evening. McCartney later said he had no recollection of this meeting.
The flipside of success
Doug Moon left the band because of his dislike of the band's increasing experimentation outside his preferred blues genre. Ry Cooder told of Moon's becoming so angered by Van Vliet's unrelenting criticism that he walked into the room pointing a loaded crossbow at him, only to have Van Vliet tell him, "Get that fucking thing out of here, get out of here and get back in your room", which he did. (Other band members dispute this account, though Moon is likely to have "passed through" the studio with a weapon.) Moon was present during the early demo sessions at Original Sound studio, above the Kama Sutra/Buddah offices. The works Moon laid down did not see the light of day, as he was replaced by Cooder when they continued on material at Sunset Sound with Marker. Marker then fell by the wayside when recording was moved by Krasnow and Perry to RCA Studio. This would have a profound effect on the quality of the Safe as Milk work, as the former studio was 8-track and the subsequent studio a 4-track.
To support the album's release the group had been scheduled to play at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. During this period Vliet suffered severe anxiety attacks that made him convinced that he was having a heart attack, possibly exacerbated by his heavy LSD use and the fact that his father had died of heart failure a few years earlier. At a vital "warm-up" performance at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival (June 10–11) shortly before the scheduled Monterey Festival (June 16–18), the band began to play "Electricity" and Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the stage and landed on manager Bob Krasnow. He later claimed he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth. This aborted any opportunity of breakthrough success at Monterey, as Cooder immediately decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet, effectively quitting both the event and the band on the spot. With such complex guitar parts there was no means for the band to find a competent replacement in time for Monterey. Cooder's spot was eventually filled for a short spell by Gerry McGee, who had played with the Monkees. According to French the band did two gigs with McGee, one of which was at The Peppermint Twist near Long Beach. The other was at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, August 7, 1967, as opening act for the Yardbirds. McGee was in the group long enough to have an outfit made by a Santa Monica boutique that also created the gear worn by the band on the Strictly Personal cover stamps.
Strictly Personal
In August 1967, guitarist Jeff Cotton filled the guitar spot vacated, in turn, by Cooder and McGee. In October and November 1967 the Snouffer/Cotton/Handley/French line–up recorded material for what was planned to be the second album. Originally intended to be a double album called It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper for the label, it was released later in pieces in 1971 and 1995. After rejection from Buddah, Bob Krasnow encouraged the band to re-record four of the shorter numbers, add two more, and make shorter versions of "Mirror Man" and "Kandy Korn". Krasnow created a strange mix full of "phasing" that, by most accounts (including Beefheart's), diminished the music's strength. This was released in October 1968 as Strictly Personal on Krasnow's Blue Thumb label. Stewart Mason in his Allmusic review of the album described it as a "terrific album" and a "fascinating, underrated release ... every bit the equal of Safe as Milk and Trout Mask Replica". Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone called Strictly Personal "an excellent album. The guitars of the Magic Band mercilessly bend and stretch notes in a way that suggests that the world of music has wobbled clear off its axis", with the lyrics demonstrating "Beefheart's ability to juxtapose delightful humor with frightening insights".
Mirror Man
In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a liner note stating that the material had been recorded in "one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues. The material was recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues–rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose." The album's "miss-credit errors" also state band members as "Alex St. Clare Snouffer" (Alex St. Clare/Alexis Snouffer), "Antennae Jimmy Simmons" (Semens/Jeff Cotton) and "Jerry Handsley" (Handley). First vinyl was issued in both a die-cut gatefold (revealing a "cracked" mirror) and a single sleeve with same image. The UK Buddah issue was part of the Polydor-manufactured "Select" series.
During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented in the UK by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of the Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, press coverage and public outcry resulted in the band being permitted to re-enter the UK, where they recorded material for John Peel's radio show and on Friday January 19 appeared at the Middle Earth venue, introduced by Peel, where they played tracks from Safe as Milk and some of the experimental blues tracks from Mirror Man. The band was met by an enthusiastic audience; French recalled the event as a rare high moment for the band: "After the show, we were taken to the dressing room where we sat for hours as a line of what seemed like hundreds of people walked in one by one to shake our hand or get an autograph. Many brought imports of Safe as Milk with them for us to autograph ... It seemed like we had finally gained some reward ... Suddenly all the criticizing and intimidation and eccentricities seemed very unimportant. It was a glorious moment, one of the very few I ever experienced". By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. On January 27, 1968, Beefheart performed in the MIDEM Music Festival on the beach at Cannes, France.
Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad; bassist Jerry Handley left a few weeks later.
The 'Brown Wrapper' Sessions
After their Euro tour and the Cannes beach performance the band returned to the US. Moves were already in the air for them to leave Buddah and sign to MGM and, prior to their May tour – mainly in the UK – they re-recorded some Buddah material of the partial Mirror Man sessions at Sunset Sound with Bruce Botnick. Beefheart had also been conceptualizing new band names, including 25th Century Quaker and Blue Thumb, while making suggestions to other musicians that they might get involved. The thought-process of 25th Century Quaker was that it would be a "blues band" alias for the more avant-garde work of the Magic Band. Photographer Guy Webster photographed the band in Quaker-style outfits, and the picture appears in The Mirror Man Sessions CD insert. It would later transpire that much of this situation was transient and that Buddah's Bob Krasnow was to set up his own label. The label that was unsurprisingly named Blue Thumb launched with its first release Strictly Personal, a truncated version of the original Beefheart vision of a double album. Thus "25th Century Quaker" became a track and a potential band-name became a label.
In overview, the works for the double album in this period were intended to be packaged in a plain brown wrapper, with a "strictly personal" over-stamp and addressed in a manner that could have connotations of drug content, pornographic or illicit material; as per the small ads of the time: "It comes to you in a plain brown wrapper." Given that Krasnow had effectively poached the band from Buddah there were limitations on what material could be released. Strictly Personal was the result, contained in its enigmatically-addressed parcel sleeve. The raft of material left behind eventually emerged, firstly on CD as I May Be Hungry, But I Sure Ain't Weird and later on vinyl, implemented by John French, as It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper (which has two tracks that are missing from the former release). Both Blue Thumb and the stamps on the cover of Strictly Personal have LSD connotations, as does the track Ah Feel Like Ahcid, although Beefheart himself refuted this (claiming that this is a rendering of "I feel like I said").
Trout Mask Replica, 1969
Critically acclaimed as Van Vliet's magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica was released as a 28 track double album in June 1969 on Frank Zappa's newly formed Straight Records label. First issues, in the US, were auto-coupled and housed in the black "Straight" liners along with a 6-page lyric sheet illustrated by the Mascara Snake. A school-age portrait of Van Vliet appears on the front of this sheet, while the cover of the gatefold enigmatically shows Beefheart in a 'Quaker' hat, obscuring his face with the head of a fish. The fish is a carp – arguably a "replica" for a trout, photographed by Cal Schenkel. The inner spread "infra-red" photography is by Ed Caraeff, whose Beefheart vacuum cleaner images from this session also appear on Zappa's Hot Rats release (a month earlier) to accompany "Willie The Pimp" lyrics sung by Vliet. Alex St. Clair had now left the band and, after Junior Madeo from the Blackouts was considered, the role was filled by Bill Harkleroad. Bassist Jerry Handley had also departed, with Gary Marker stepping in. Thus the long rehearsals for the album began in the house on Ensenada Drive in Woodland Hills, L.A., that would become the Magic Band House.
The Magic Band began recordings for Trout Mask Replica with bassist Gary "Magic" Marker at T.T.G. (on "Moonlight on Vermont" and "Veteran's Day Poppy"), but later enlisted bassist Mark Boston after his departure. The remainder of the album was recorded at Whitney Studios, with some field recordings made at the house. Boston was acquainted with French and Harkleroad via past bands. Van Vliet had also begun assigning nicknames to his band members, so Harkleroad became Zoot Horn Rollo, and Boston became Rockette Morton, while John French assumed the name Drumbo, and Jeff Cotton became Antennae Jimmy Semens. Van Vliet's cousin Victor Hayden, the Mascara Snake, performed as a bass clarinetist later in the proceedings. Vliet's girlfriend Laurie Stone, who can be heard laughing at the beginning of Fallin' Ditch, became an audio typist at the Magic Band house.
Van Vliet wanted the whole band to "live" the Trout Mask Replica album. The group rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in their small rented house in the Woodland Hills suburb of Los Angeles. With only two bedrooms in the house, band members would find sleep in various corners of one, while Vliet occupied the other, and rehearsals were accomplished in the main living area. Van Vliet implemented his vision by completely dominating his musicians, artistically and emotionally. At various times one or another of the group members was "put in the barrel", with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission. Guitarist Bill Harkleroad complained that his fingers were a "bloody mess" as a result of Beefheart's orders that he use heavy strings. Drummer John French described the situation as "cultlike" and a visiting friend said "the environment in that house was positively Mansonesque". Their material circumstances were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the group barely survived and were even arrested for shoplifting food (Zappa bailed them out). French has recalled living on no more than a small cup of beans a day for a month. A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health". Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for 14 or more hours a day.
John French's 2010 book Through the Eyes of Magic describes some of the "talks", which were initiated by his doing such things as playing a Frank Zappa drum part ("The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)") in his drumming shed, and not having finished drum parts as quickly as Beefheart wanted. French writes of being punched by band members, thrown into walls, kicked, punched in the face by Beefheart hard enough to draw blood, being attacked with a sharp broomstick. Eventually Beefheart, French says, threatened to throw him out an upper floor window. He admits complicity in similarly attacking his bandmates during "talks" aimed at them. In the end, after the album's recording, Beefheart ejected French from the band by throwing him down a set of stairs, telling him to "Take a walk, man" after not responding in a desired manner to a request to "play a strawberry" on the drums. Beefheart replaced French with drummer Jeff Bruschel, an acquaintance of Hayden. Referred to as "Fake Drumbo" (playing on French's drumset) this final act resulted in French's name not appearing on the album credits, either as a player or arranger. Bruschel toured with the band to Europe but was replaced by the next recording.
According to Van Vliet, the 28 songs on the album were written in a single 8½ hour session at the piano, an instrument he had no skill in playing, an approach Mike Barnes compared to John Cage's "maverick irreverence toward classical tradition", though band members have stated that the songs were written over the course of about a year, beginning around December 1967. (The band did watch Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½ during the creation of the album). It took the band about eight months to mold the songs into shape, with French bearing primary responsibility for transposing and shaping Vliet's piano fragments into guitar and bass lines, which were mostly notated on paper. Harkleroad in 1998 said in retrospect: "We're dealing with a strange person, coming from a place of being a sculptor/painter, using music as his idiom. He was getting more into that part of who he was instead of this blues singer." The band had rehearsed the songs so thoroughly that the instrumental tracks for 21 of the songs were recorded in a single four and a half hour recording session. Van Vliet spent the next few days overdubbing the vocals. The album's cover artwork was photographed and designed by Cal Schenkel and shows Van Vliet wearing the raw head of a carp, bought from a local fish market and fashioned into a mask by Schenkel.
Trout Mask Replica incorporated a wide variety of musical styles, including blues, avant garde/experimental, and rock. The relentless practice prior to recording blended the music into an iconoclastic whole of contrapuntal tempos, featuring slide guitar, polyrhythmic drumming (with French's drums and cymbals covered in cardboard), honking saxophone and bass clarinet. Van Vliet's vocals range from his signature Howlin' Wolf-inspired growl to frenzied falsetto to laconic, casual ramblings.
The instrumental backing was effectively recorded live in the studio, while Van Vliet overdubbed most of the vocals in only partial sync with the music by hearing the slight sound leakage through the studio window. Zappa said of Van Vliet's approach, "[it was] impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not."
Van Vliet used the ensuing publicity, particularly with a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Langdon Winner, to promulgate a number of myths that were subsequently quoted as fact. Winner's article stated, for instance, that neither Van Vliet nor the members of the Magic Band ever took drugs, but Harkleroad later contradicted this. Van Vliet claimed to have taught both Harkleroad and Boston to play their instruments from scratch; in fact the pair were already accomplished young musicians before joining the band. Last, Van Vliet claimed to have gone a year and half without sleeping. When asked how this was possible, he claimed to have only eaten fruit.
Critic Steve Huey of AllMusic writes that the album's influence "was felt more in spirit than in direct copycatting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point. However, its inspiring reimagining of what was possible in a rock context laid the groundwork for countless experiments in rock surrealism to follow, especially during the punk and new wave era." In 2003, the album was ranked sixtieth by Rolling Stone in their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: "On first listen, Trout Mask Replica sounds like raw Delta blues", with Beefheart "singing and ranting and reciting poetry over fractured guitar licks. But the seeming sonic chaos is an illusion—to construct the songs, the Magic Band rehearsed twelve hours a day for months on end in a house with the windows blacked out. (Producer Frank Zappa was then able to record most of the album in less than five hours.) Tracks such as 'Ella Guru' and 'My Human Gets Me Blues' are the direct predecessors of modern musical primitives such as Tom Waits and PJ Harvey." Guitarist Fred Frith noted that during this process "forces that usually emerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable".
Critic Robert Christgau gave the album a B+, saying, "I find it impossible to give this record an A because it is just too weird. But I'd like to. Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record." BBC disc jockey John Peel said of the album: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." It was inducted into the United States National Recording Registry in 2011.
Later recordings, 1970–82
Lick My Decals Off, Baby
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) continued in a similarly experimental vein. An album with "a very coherent structure" in the Magic Band's "most experimental and visionary stage", it was Van Vliet's most commercially successful in the United Kingdom, spending twenty weeks on the UK Albums Chart and peaking at number 20. An early promotional music video was made of its title song, and a bizarre television commercial was also filmed that included excerpts from Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop, silent footage of masked Magic Band members using kitchen utensils as musical instruments, and Beefheart kicking over a bowl of what appears to be porridge onto a dividing stripe in the middle of a road. The video was rarely played but was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several programs related to music.
On this LP Art Tripp III, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, played drums and marimba. Lick My Decals Off, Baby was the first record on which the band was credited as "The" Magic Band, rather than "His" Magic Band. Journalist Irwin Chusid interprets this change as "a grudging concession of its members' at least semiautonomous humanity". Robert Christgau gave the album an A−, commenting, "Beefheart's famous five-octave range and covert totalitarian structures have taken on a playful undertone, repulsive and engrossing and slapstick funny." Due to licensing disputes, Lick My Decals Off, Baby was unavailable on CD for many years, though it remained in print on vinyl. It was ranked second in Uncut magazine's May 2010 list of The 50 Greatest Lost Albums. In 2011, the album became available for download on the iTunes Store.
He toured in 1970 with Ry Cooder on the bill to promote the album.
The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot
The next two records, The Spotlight Kid (simply credited to "Captain Beefheart") and Clear Spot (credited to "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band"), were both released in 1972. The atmosphere of The Spotlight Kid is, according to one critic, "definitely relaxed and fun, maybe one step up from a jam". And though "things do sound maybe just a little too blasé", "Beefheart at his worst still has something more than most groups at their best." The music is simpler and slower than on the group's two previous releases, the uncompromisingly original Trout Mask Replica and the frenetic Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This was in part an attempt by Van Vliet to become a more appealing commercial proposition as the band had made virtually no money during the previous two years—at the time of recording, the band members were subsisting on welfare food handouts and remittances from their parents. Van Vliet offered that he "got tired of scaring people with what I was doing ... I realized that I had to give them something to hang their hat on, so I started working more of a beat into the music". Magic Band members have also said that the slower performances were due in part to Van Vliet's inability to fit his lyrics with the instrumental backing of the faster material on the earlier albums, a problem that was exacerbated in that he almost never rehearsed with the group. In the period leading up to the recording the band lived communally, first at a compound near Ben Lomond, California and then in northern California near Trinidad. The situation saw a return to the physical violence and psychological manipulation that had taken place during the band's previous communal residence while composing and rehearsing Trout Mask Replica. According to John French, the worst of this was directed toward Harkleroad. In his autobiography Harkleroad recalls being thrown into a dumpster, an act he interpreted as having metaphorical intent.
Clear Spot'''s production credit of Ted Templeman made AllMusic consider "why in the world [it] wasn't more of a commercial success than it was", and that while fans "of the fully all-out side of Beefheart might find the end result not fully up to snuff as a result, but those less concerned with pushing back all borders all the time will enjoy his unexpected blend of everything tempered with a new accessibility". The review called the song "Big Eyed Beans from Venus" "a fantastically strange piece of aggression". A Clear Spot song, "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", appeared on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' cult comedy film The Big Lebowski (1998).
Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams
In 1974, immediately after the recording of Unconditionally Guaranteed, which markedly continued the trend towards a more commercial sound heard on some of the Clear Spot tracks, the Magic Band's original members departed. Disgruntled and past members worked together for a period, gigging at Blue Lake and putting together their own ideas and demos, with John French earmarked as the vocalist. These concepts eventually coalesced around the core of Art Tripp III, Harkleroad and Boston, with the formation of Mallard, helped by finance and UK recording facilities from Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson.Harkleroad, Bill. Lunar Notes pp.132–133. Some of French's compositions were used in the band's work, but the group's singer was Sam Galpin and the role of keyboardist was eventually taken by John Thomas, who had shared a house with French in Eureka at the time. At this time Vliet attempted to recruit both French and Harkleroad as producers for his next album, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Andy Di Martino produced both of these Virgin label albums.
Vliet was forced to quickly form a new Magic Band to complete support-tour dates, with studio musicians who had no experience with his music and in fact had never heard it. Having no knowledge of the previous Magic Band style, they simply improvised what they thought would go with each song, playing much slicker versions that have been described as "bar band" versions of Beefheart songs. A review described this incarnation of the Magic Band as the "Tragic Band", a term that has stuck over the years.
Robert 'Fuzzy' Fuscaldo – guitar
Dean Smith – guitar
Del Simmons – saxophone; flute
Michael 'Bucky' Smotherman – keyboards; vocals
Paul Uhrig – bass
Ty Grimes – drums
Mike Barnes said that the description of the new band "grooving along pleasantly", was "...an appropriately banal description of the music of a man who only a few years ago composed with the expressed intent of shaking listeners out of their torpor". The one album they recorded, Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974) has, like its predecessor, a completely different, almost soft rock sound from any other Beefheart record. Neither was well received; drummer Art Tripp recalled that when he and the original Magic Band listened to Unconditionally Guaranteed, they "...were horrified. As we listened, it was as though each song was worse than the one which preceded it". Beefheart later disowned both albums, calling them "horrible and vulgar", asking that they not be considered part of his musical output and urging fans who bought them to "take copies back for a refund".
Bongo Fury to Bat Chain Puller
By the fall of 1975 the band had completed their European tour, with further US dates in the New Year of 1976, supporting Zappa along with Dr. John. Van Vliet now found himself stuck in a web of contractual hang-ups. At this point Zappa had begun to extend a helping hand, with Vliet already having performed incognito as "Rollin' Red" on Zappa's One Size Fits All (1975) and then joining with him on the Bongo Fury album and its later support tour. Two Vliet-penned numbers on the Bongo Fury album are "Sam with the Showing Scalp Flat Top" and "Man with the Woman Head". The form, texture and imagery of this album's first track, "Debra Kadabra", sung by Vliet, has 'angular similarities' to the work he would later produce in his next three albums. On the Bongo Fury album Vliet also sings "Poofter's Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead", harmonizes on "200 Years Old" and "Muffin Man", and plays harmonica and soprano saxophone.
In early 1976 Zappa put on his producer hat and, once again, opened up his studio facilities and finance to Vliet. This was for the production of an album provisionally titled Bat Chain Puller. The band were John French (drums), John Thomas (keyboards) and Jeff Moris Tepper and Denny Walley (guitars). Much of the work on this album had been finalized and some demos had been circulated when fate once again struck the Beefheart camp. In May 1976 the long association between Zappa and his manager/business partner Herb Cohen ceased. This resulted in Zappa's finances and ongoing works becoming part of protracted legal negotiations. The Bat Chain Puller project went "on ice" and did not see an official release until 2012. After this recording John Thomas joined ex-Magic Band members in Mallard.
Prior to his next album Beefheart appeared in 1977 on the Tubes' album Now, playing saxophone on the song "Cathy's Clone", and the album also featured a cover of the Clear Spot song "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains". In 1978 he appeared on Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack to the film Blue Collar.
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Having extricated himself from a mire of contractual difficulties Beefheart emerged with this new album, in 1978, on the Warner Bros label. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) contained re-workings of the shelved Bat Chain Puller album and still retained its original guitarist, Jeff Moris Tepper. However, he and Vliet were now joined by a whole new line-up of Richard Redus (guitar, bass and accordion), Eric Drew Feldman (bass, piano and synthesizer), Bruce Lambourne Fowler (trombone and air bass), Art Tripp (percussion and marimba) and Robert Arthur Williams (drums). The album was co-produced by Vliet with Pete Johnson. Members of this Magic Band and the "Bat Chain" elements would later feature on Beefheart's last two albums. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) was described by Ned Raggett of Allmusic to be "...manna from heaven for those feeling Beefheart had lost his way on his two Mercury albums". Following Vliet's death, John French claimed the 40-second spoken word track "Apes-Ma" to be an analogy of Van Vliet's deteriorating physical condition. The album's sleeve features Van Vliet's 1976 painting Green Tom, one of the many works that would mark out his longed-for career as a painter of note.
Doc at the Radar StationDoc at the Radar Station (1980) helped establish Beefheart's late resurgence. Released by Virgin Records during the post-punk scene, the music was now accessible to a younger, more receptive audience. He was interviewed in a feature report on KABC-TV's Channel 7 Eyewitness News in which he was hailed as "the father of the new wave. One of the most important American composers of the last fifty years, [and] a primitive genius"; Van Vliet said at this period, "I'm doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state ... and I think there is one right now." Huey of Allmusic cited the Doc at the Radar Station as being "...generally acclaimed as the strongest album of his comeback, and by some as his best since Trout Mask Replica", "even if the Captain's voice isn't quite what it once was, Doc at the Radar Station is an excellent, focused consolidation of Beefheart's past and then-present". Van Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes speaks of "revamping work built on skeletal ideas and fragments that would have mouldered away in the vaults had they not been exhumed and transformed into full-blown, totally convincing new material". During this period, Van Vliet made two appearances on David Letterman's late night television program on NBC, and also performed on Saturday Night Live.
Richard Redus and Art Tripp departed on this album, with slide guitar and marimba duties taken up by the reappearance of John French. The guitar skills of Gary Lucas also feature on the track Flavor Bud Living.
Ice Cream for Crow
The final Beefheart record, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), was recorded with Gary Lucas (who was also Van Vliet's manager), Jeff Moris Tepper, Richard Snyder and Cliff Martinez. This line-up made a video to promote the title track, directed by Van Vliet and Ken Schreiber, with cinematography by Daniel Pearl, which was rejected by MTV for being "too weird". However, the video was included in the Letterman broadcast on NBC-TV, and was also accepted into the Museum of Modern Art. Van Vliet announced "I don't want my MTV if they don't want my video" during his interview with Letterman, in reference to MTV's "I want my MTV" marketing campaign of the time. Ice Cream for Crow, along with songs such as its title track, features instrumental performances by the Magic Band with performance poetry readings by Van Vliet. Raggett of AllMusic called the album a "last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact", with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results". Barnes writes that, "The most original and vital tracks (on the album) are the newer ones", saying that it "feels like an hors-d'oeuvre for a main course that never came". Michael Galucci of Goldmine praised the album, describing it as "the single, most bizarre entry in Van Vliet's long, odd career." Promotional work proposed to Beefheart by Virgin Records was as unorthodox as him making an appearance in the 1987 film Grizzly II: The Predator. Soon after, Van Vliet retired from music and began a new career as a painter. Gary Lucas tried to convince him to record one more album, but to no avail.
Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh
Released in 2004 by Rhino Handmade in a limited edition of 1,500 copies, this signed and numbered box set contains a "Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh" CD of Vliet-recited poetry, the Anton Corbijn film of Vliet Some YoYo Stuff on DVD and two art books. One book, entitled Splinters, gives a visual "scrapbook" insight into Vliet's life, from an early age to his painting in retirement. The second, eponymously titled, book is packed with art pages of Vliet's work. The first is bound in green linen, the second in yellow. These colors are counterpointed throughout the package, which comes in a green slipcase measuring 235 mm × 325 mm × 70 mm. An onion-skin wallet, nestling at the package's inner sanctum, contains a matching-numbered Vliet lithograph on hand-rolled paper, signed by the artist. The two books are by publishers Artist Ink Editions.
Paintings
Throughout his musical career, Van Vliet remained interested in visual art. He placed his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline, on several of his albums. In 1987, Van Vliet published Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush, a collection of his poetry, paintings and drawings.
In the mid-1980s, Van Vliet became reclusive and abandoned music, stating he had gotten "too good at the horn" and could make far more money painting. Beefheart's first exhibition had been at Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery during the Magic Band's 1972 tour of the UK. He was interviewed on Granada regional television standing in front of his bold black and white canvases. He was inspired to begin an art career when a fan, Julian Schnabel, who admired the artwork seen on his album covers, asked to buy a drawing from him. His debut exhibition as a serious painter was at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1985 and was initially regarded as that of "another rock musician dabbling in art for ego's sake", though his primitive, non-conformist work has received more sympathetic and serious attention since then, with some sales approaching $25,000. Two books have been published specifically devoted to critique and analysis of his artwork: Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet (1999) by W. C. Bamberger and Stand Up To Be Discontinued, first published in 1993, a now rare collection of essays on Van Vliet's work. The limited edition version of the book contains a CD of Van Vliet reading six of his poems: Fallin' Ditch, The Tired Plain, Skeleton Makes Good, Safe Sex Drill, Tulip and Gill. A deluxe edition was published in 1994; only 60 were printed, with etchings of Van Vliet's signature, costing £180.
In the early 1980s Van Vliet established an association with the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. Eric Feldman stated later in an interview that at that time Michael Werner told Van Vliet he needed to stop playing music if he wanted to be respected as a painter, warning him that otherwise he would only be considered a "musician who paints". In doing so, it was said that he had effectively "succeeded in leaving his past behind". Van Vliet has been described as a modernist, a primitivist, an abstract expressionist, and, "in a sense" an outsider artist. Morgan Falconer of Artforum concurs, mentioning both a "neo-primitivist aesthetic" and further stating that his work is influenced by the CoBrA painters. The resemblance to the CoBrA painters is also recognized by art critic Roberto Ohrt, while others have compared his paintings to the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko.
According to Dr. John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 1997, although Van Vliet's work has associations with mainstream abstract expressionist painting, more importantly he was a self-taught artist and his painting "has that same kind of edge the music has". Curator David Breuer asserts that in contrast to the busied, bohemian urban lives of the New York abstract expressionists, the rural desert environment Van Vliet was influenced by is a distinctly naturalistic one, making him a distinguished figure in contemporary art, whose work will survive in canon. Van Vliet stated of his own work, "I'm trying to turn myself inside out on the canvas. I'm trying to completely bare what I think at that moment" and "I paint for the simple reason that I have to. I feel a sense of relief after I do." When asked about his artistic influences he stated that there were none. "I just paint like I paint and that's enough influence." He did however state his admiration of Georg Baselitz, the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian, and Vincent van Gogh; after seeing van Gogh's paintings in person, Van Vliet quoted himself as saying, "The sun disappoints me so."
Exhibits of his paintings from the late 1990s were held in New York in 2009 and 2010. Falconer stated that the most recent exhibitions showed "evidence of a serious, committed artist". It was claimed that he stopped painting in the late 1990s. A 2007 interview with Van Vliet through email by Anthony Haden-Guest, however, showed him to still be active artistically. He exhibited only few of his paintings because he immediately destroyed any that did not satisfy him.
Life in retirement
After his retirement from music, Van Vliet rarely appeared in public. He resided near Trinidad, California, with his wife Janet "Jan" Van Vliet. By the early 1990s he was using a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis. The severity of his illness was sometimes disputed. Many of his art contractors and friends considered him to be in good health. Other associates such as his longtime drummer and musical director John French and bassist Richard Snyder have stated that they had noticed symptoms consistent with the onset of multiple sclerosis, such as sensitivity to heat, loss of balance, and stiffness of gait, by the late 1970s.
One of Van Vliet's last public appearances was in the 1993 short documentary Some Yo Yo Stuff by filmmaker Anton Corbijn, described as an "observation of his observations". Around 13 minutes and shot entirely in black and white, with appearances by his mother and David Lynch, the film showed a noticeably weakened and dysarthric Van Vliet at his residence in California, reading poetry, and philosophically discussing his life, environment, music and art. In 2000, he appeared on Gary Lucas's album Improve the Shining Hour and Moris Tepper's Moth to Mouth, and spoke on Tepper's 2004 song "Ricochet Man" from the album Head Off. He is credited for naming Tepper's 2010 album A Singer Named Shotgun Throat.
Van Vliet often voiced concern over and support for environmentalist issues and causes, particularly the welfare of animals. He often referred to Earth as "God's Golfball" and this expression can be found on a number of his later albums. In 2003 he was heard on the compilation album Where We Live: Stand for What You Stand On: A Benefit CD for EarthJustice singing a version of "Happy Birthday to You" retitled "Happy Earthday". The track lasts 34 seconds and was recorded over the telephone.
Death
Van Vliet died at a hospital in Arcata, California, on Friday, December 17, 2010, about a month before his 70th birthday. The cause was named as complications from multiple sclerosis. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan commented on his death, praising him: "Wondrous, secret ... and profound, he was a diviner of the highest order."
Dweezil Zappa dedicated the song "Willie the Pimp" to Beefheart at the "Zappa Plays Zappa" show at the Beacon Theater in New York City on the day of his death, while Jeff Bridges exclaimed "Rest in peace, Captain Beefheart!" at the conclusion of the December 18, 2010, episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live.
Relationship with Frank Zappa
Van Vliet met Frank Zappa when they were both teenagers and shared an interest in rhythm and blues and Chicago blues. They collaborated from this early stage, with Zappa's scripts for "teenage operettas" such as "Captain Beefheart & the Grunt People" helping to elevate Van Vliet's Captain Beefheart persona. In 1963, the pair recorded a demo at the Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga as the Soots, seeking support from a major label. Their efforts were unsuccessful, as "Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf vocal style and Zappa's distorted guitar" were "not on the agenda" at the time.
The friendship between Zappa and Van Vliet over the years was sometimes expressed in the form of rivalry as musicians drifted back and forth between their groups. Van Vliet embarked on the 1975 Bongo Fury tour with Zappa and the Mothers, mainly because conflicting contractual obligations made him unable to tour or record independently. Their relationship grew acrimonious on the tour to the point that they refused to talk to one another. Zappa became irritated by Van Vliet, who drew constantly, including while on stage, filling one of his large sketch books with rapidly executed portraits and warped caricatures of Zappa. Musically, Van Vliet's primitive style contrasted sharply with Zappa's compositional discipline and abundant technique. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black described the situation as "two geniuses" on "ego trips". Estranged for years afterwards, they reconnected at the end of Zappa's life, after his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer. Their collaborative work appears on the Zappa rarity collections The Lost Episodes (1996) and Mystery Disc (1996). Particularly notable is their song "Muffin Man", included on the Zappa/Beefheart Bongo Fury album, as well as Zappa's compilation album Strictly Commercial (1995). Zappa finished concerts with the song for many years afterwards. Beefheart also provided vocals for "Willie the Pimp" on Zappa's otherwise instrumental album Hot Rats (1969). One track on Trout Mask Replica, "The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)", features Magic Band guitarist Jeff Cotton talking on the telephone to Zappa superimposed onto an unrelated live recording of the Mothers of Invention (the backing track was later released in 1992 as "Charles Ives" on You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 ). Van Vliet also played the harmonica on two songs on Zappa albums: "San Ber'dino" (credited as "Bloodshot Rollin' Red") on One Size Fits All (1975) and "Find Her Finer" on Zoot Allures (1976). He is also the vocalist on "The Torture Never Stops (Original Version)" on Zappa's You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 4.
The Magic Band
Influence
Van Vliet has been the subject of at least two documentaries, the BBC's 1997 The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart narrated by John Peel, and the 2006 independent production Captain Beefheart: Under Review.
According to Peel, "If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it's Beefheart ... I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week and I'll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week." His narration added: "A psychedelic shaman who frequently bullied his musicians and sometimes alarmed his fans, Don somehow remained one of rock's great innocents." Mike Barnes referred to him as an "iconic counterculture hero" who, with the Magic Band, "went on to stake out startling new possibilities for rock music". Lester Bangs cited Beefheart as "one of the four or five unqualified geniuses to rise from the hothouses of American music in the Sixties", while John Harris of The Guardian praised the music's "pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together". A Rolling Stone biography described his work as "a sort of modern chamber music for [a] rock band, since he plans every note and teaches the band their parts by ear. Because it breaks so many of rock's conventions at once, Beefheart's music has always been more influential than popular." In this context, it is performed by the classical group, the Meridian Arts Ensemble. Nicholas E. Tawa, in his 2005 book Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th Century: Styles and Singers and What They Said About America, included Beefheart among the prominent progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, while the Encyclopædia Britannica describes Beefheart's songs as conveying "deep distrust of modern civilization, a yearning for ecological balance, and that belief that all animals in the wild are far superior to human beings". Many of his works have been classified as "art rock".
Many artists have cited Van Vliet as an influence, beginning with the Edgar Broughton Band, who covered "Dropout Boogie" as Apache Drop Out (mixed with the Shadows' "Apache") as early as 1970, as did the Kills 32 years later. The Minutemen were fans of Beefheart, and were arguably among the few to effectively synthesize his music with their own, especially in their early output, which featured disjointed guitar and irregular, galloping rhythms. Michael Azerrad describes the Minutemen's early output as "highly caffeinated Captain Beefheart running down James Brown tunes", and notes that Beefheart was the group's "idol". Others who arguably conveyed the same influence around the same time or before include John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Little Feat, Laurie Anderson, the Residents and Henry Cow. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and poet mystic Z'EV, both pioneers of industrial music, cited Van Vliet along with Zappa among their influences. More notable were those emerging during the early days of punk rock, such as the Clash and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols (reportedly to manager Malcolm McLaren's disapproval), later of the post-punk band Public Image Ltd. Frank Discussion of punk rock band The Feederz learned to play guitar from listening to Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me—and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Groening served as the curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that reunited the post–Beefheart Magic Band.
Van Vliet's influence on post–punk bands was demonstrated by Magazine's recording of "I Love You You Big Dummy" in 1978 and the tribute album Fast 'n' Bulbous – A Tribute to Captain Beefheart in 1988, featuring the likes of artists such as the Dog Faced Hermans, the Scientists, the Membranes, Simon Fisher Turner, That Petrol Emotion, the Primevals, the Mock Turtles, XTC, and Sonic Youth, who included a cover of Beefheart's "Electricity" which would later be re-released as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their 1988 album Daydream Nation. Other post-punk bands influenced by Beefheart include Gang of Four, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pere Ubu, Babe the Blue Ox and Mark E. Smith of the Fall. The Fall covered "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones" in their 1993 session for John Peel. Beefheart is considered to have "greatly influenced" new wave artists, such as David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, the Bongos, and the B-52s.
Tom Waits' shift in artistic direction, starting with 1983's Swordfishtrombones, was, Waits claims, a result of his wife Kathleen Brennan introducing him to Van Vliet's music. "Once you've heard Beefheart", said Waits, "it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." More recently, Waits has described Beefheart's work as "glimpse into the future; like curatives, recipes for ancient oils". Guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cited Van Vliet as a prominent influence on the band's 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik as well as his debut solo album Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and stated that during his drug-induced absence, after leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he "would paint and listen to Trout Mask Replica". Black Francis of the Pixies cited Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid as one of the albums he listened to regularly when first writing songs for the band, and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana acknowledged Van Vliet's influence, mentioning him among his notoriously eclectic range.
The White Stripes in 2000 released a 7" tribute single, "Party of Special Things to Do", containing covers of that Beefheart song plus "China Pig" and "Ashtray Heart". The Kills included a cover of "Dropout Boogie" on their debut Black Rooster EP (2002). The Black Keys in 2008 released a free cover of Beefheart's "I'm Glad" from Safe as Milk. The 2002 LCD Soundsystem song "Losing My Edge" has a verse which James Murphy says, "I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band". In 2005 Genus Records produced Mama Kangaroos – Philly Women Sing Captain Beefheart, a 20-track tribute to Captain Beefheart. Beck included Safe as Milk and Ella Guru in a playlist of songs as part of his website's Planned Obsolescence series of mashups of songs by the musicians that influenced him. Franz Ferdinand cited Beefheart's Doc at the Radar Station as a strong influence on their second LP, You Could Have It So Much Better. Placebo briefly named themselves Ashtray Heart, after the track on Doc at the Radar Station; the band's album Battle for the Sun contains a track, "Ashtray Heart". Joan Osborne covered Beefheart's "(His) Eyes are a Blue Million Miles", which appears on Early Recordings. She cited Van Vliet as one of her influences.
PJ Harvey and John Parish discussed Beefheart's influence in an interview together. Harvey's first experience of Beefheart's music was as a child. Her parents had all of his albums; listening to them made her "feel ill". Harvey was reintroduced to Beefheart's music by Parish, who lent her a cassette copy of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) at the age of 16. She cited him as one of her greatest influences since. Parish described Beefheart's music as a "combination of raw blues and abstract jazz. There was humour in there, but you could tell that it wasn't [intended as] a joke. I felt that there was a depth to what he did that very few other rock artists have managed [to achieve]." Ty Segall covered "Drop Out Boogie" on his 2009 album Lemons.
Discography
Safe as Milk (1967)
Strictly Personal (1968)
Trout Mask Replica (1969)
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)
Mirror Man (1971)
The Spotlight Kid (1972)
Clear Spot (1972)
Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974)
Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974)
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978)
Doc at the Radar Station (1980)
Ice Cream for Crow (1982)
Bat Chain Puller (2012, recorded in 1976)
References
Further reading
Bamberger, W.C. (1999). Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet.
Beaugrand, Andreas and various (1994). Stand Up to Be Discontinued. (Paperback) .
Courrier, Kevin (2007). Trout Mask Replica. New York: Continuum.
Delville, Michel & Norris, Andrew (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. .
Harkleroad, Bill (1998). Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Interlink Publishing. .
Van Vliet, Don (Captain Beefheart) (1987). Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush. (All poems in English, preface in German and English.) Bern-Berlin: Gachnang & Springer.
Zappa, Frank & Occhiogrosso, Peter; The Real Frank Zappa Book, Poseidon Press (1989),
External links
Beefheart.com – The Captain Beefheart Radar Station
[ Captain Beefheart] at AllMusic
Captain Beefheart at Rolling Stone''
Some Yo Yo Stuff by Anton Corbijn
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"Timeless Journey is the fifteenth studio album by American singer Patti LaBelle. Her first release with Def Soul Classics, it was released on May 4, 2004 in the United States. One of her most commercially successful albums, it reached number five on the US Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, also hitting the top 20 on the Billboard 200. Timeless Journey produced the singles \"New Day\" and \"2 Steps Away\".\n\nBackground\nBy 2002, Patti LaBelle had been with MCA Records for seventeen years. The label had helped to increase LaBelle's popularity with both pop and R&B audiences resulting in 2 platinum album and four subsequent gold-selling follow-ups. However, LaBelle's last album with the label, 2000's solemnly-produced When a Woman Loves failed to generate a hit record or even go gold. In 2003, MCA Records was absorbed by Geffen Records. As a result, LaBelle signed with The Island Def Jam Music Group's Def Soul Classics division, joining The Isley Brothers as the two first acts on Antonio \"L.A.\" Reid's new Def Jam imprint. LaBelle went to work on her new album in 2003 and by 2004, LaBelle and Def Jam released Timeless Journey. By the end of the year the album went gold with sales shipping past the 500,000 mark.\n\nRelease\nFueled by the release of LaBelle's first hit single in seven years, \"New Day\", the album eventually did well on the pop and R&B charts reaching number 18 on the former and number 5 on the latter. However, LaBelle and Def Jam fell into problems immediately after its release. Shortly after releasing 2005's Classic Moments, LaBelle told reporters that she was \"unceremoniously\" kicked out of the label by Reid. After a public spat, Reid renegotiated a new contract with LaBelle in 2007 releasing a Christmas album. Though the album did go gold, it did receive some popularity. Five years later, the ballad \"2 Steps Away\", written by Philadelphia songwriter and friend Jon DeLise, was featured on Dancing with the Stars. Two Steps Away also aired multiple times on \"So you think you can dance\" among other network shows and was re-released on the Care for Haiti compilation with notable artists such as Wycleaf Jean and Natasha Beddingfield. The success of the song eventually helped it reach Billboard's Digital Singles chart, her first charted single on that chart. \"New Day\" topped the Billboard Hot Dance Songs chart in 2004.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n2004 albums\nDef Jam Recordings albums\nPatti LaBelle albums",
"Jam on Revenge is a studio album by the American group Newcleus. It was released in 1984 by Sunnyview Records. The group was formed originally as Positive Messengers following DJ shows in parks and blocks as Jam-On Productions. Positive Messengers' members were all Christian, which led to them creating songs with a message. Group member Ben “Cosmo D” Cenac attempted to bring some recordings made with Positive Messengers to music labels with little success. Following the lack of success, he was encouraged by a member of Jam On Productions to make a hip hop song, which led to the song \"Jam-On's Revenge\", a song Cenac described as an \"anti-rap\" song, as he felt hip hop music of the period was corny.\n\nAfter bringing the songs \"Computer Age\" and \"Jam-On's Revenge\" to Joe Webb, The group then renamed themselves Newcleus and Webb released the single re-titled as \"Jam On Revenge\" which was released on Webb's label May Hew Records in 1983. The group's music was then brought to Sunnyview Records by Webb, who requested a second rap song from the group, which led to them making another hip hop song titled \"Jam On It\". Following the commercial success of both single, Sunnview then suggested to record an album. Cenac and his crew signed a contract which led to them not getting any royalties from the record, while Cenac still managed to get publishing. As the records were developed, the group was locked out of the studio mixing sessions which were handled by Jonathan Fearing.\n\nProduction\n\nBackground\nPrior to producing music, a group called Jam-On Productions were doing music shows in Brooklyn performing DJ shows playing funk and disco music. These shows began ending around late 1979, which led to group member Ben “Cosmo D” Cenac to buy a cheap synthesizer and began working on songs with Lady E (Yvette Cook)). By 1980, Cenac along with Al T. (aka MC Harmony) joined Cenac and Cook and a few others to make a hip hop recording called \"Freak City Rapping\". Cenac sent the release to various labels who all ignored the tape as they had to leave it for them to listen to, which Cenac did not do as it was his only copy of the song. Cenac eventually went to a label called Reflection, where Joe Webb listened to the recording, stating that he heard something in the song, but it needed better sound quality. \n\nFollowing the response from Webb, Cenac borrowed money to buy a Tascam Portastudio, which led to collaborations with Bob Crafton who also went by the name Chilly B. This led to the origination of the group, Positive Messenger, a group Cenac described as \"all deeply Christian, although in a much more spiritual than religious sense.\"\n\nProduction\nTwo years later, the group had recorded \"Computer Age\", and felt they had a hit song on their hand, especially after hearing the success of \"Planet Rock\". The group was encouraged by Salvadore Smooth, a member of Jam-On Productions, to have the group record a hip hop track. Cenac was not a big fan of hip hop music of the time, finding it corny, but stated that he was going to make a record similar to that of Parliament and Funkadelic which was an \"anti-rap\" record that made fun of hip hop, which led to recording \"Jam On's Revenge\". \"Jam-On's Revenge\" was only included on the groups demo work as they had space to fill in at the end of their tape.\n\nCenac sought out Webb again, only to find that Reflection Records had folded, but found Webb through a phone book. Cenac recalled that Webb enjoyed both songs, but particularly \"Jam-On's Revenge\". As \"Jam-On's Revenge\" did not reflect Positive Messenger's themes, the group decided to re-name themselves Nucleus as the members of the group all lived in the same house. Webb changed the spelling to Newcleus.\n\n\"Jam-On's Revenge\" was re-recorded in 1982 which Webb released the song on his own label May Hew Records, where the song was mistitled as \"Jam-On Revenge\" in 1983. As the song grew popular through DJ Jonathan Fearing playing it on weekends on WBLS. This led to Webb making a deal with Sunnyview Records who had Fearing edit the song to have it arranged similarly the ones played on the radio. When Sunnyview released the single, it was again mislabeled as \"Jam On Revenge\". After Fearing helped make \"Jam-On Revenge\" a hit, Cenac stated that the label \"rewarded him by saying his touch is gold and gave him everything. The next thing we knew, he had complete control of our music—once it got in his hands.\" \nCenac recalled that Fearing was \"good at mixing, he was fantastic with effects\" noting \"it's a blessing what he did with \"Jam On It\" and \"Computer Age,\" yunno, basically he left them alone but he mixed them well and added nice effects.\" but that \"He didn't understand hip hop, and we understood what the streets loved. He knew nothing about the streets; he knew what worked in clubs.\" Cenac and the rest of Newcleus were not allowed in the mixing room. Cenac and his crew had also signed contracts which gave them no royalties for their music. The publishing was out of Joe Webb's hands, as it was between Cenac and Sunnyview, leading Cenac to attest that he \"got songwriting [credits]. So that paid my bills for a long, long time.\"\n\nThe original plan was to have \"Computer Age\" be the group's second single, but Sunnyview requested a second hip hop song which led to \"Jam On Revenge\", a song adapted from rhymes adapted from the days when Jam-On played parties in parks. Following the success of \"Jam On It\", Sunnyview requested an album from the group. Cenac reflected on the album stating that \"a lot of the stuff I wanted to put on the album, I didn't; the record company only wanted dance music.\"\n\nAmong the tracks added was \"Where's the Beat\" which Cenac stated \"wasn't our song\", as it was based on the Wendy's commercial that had the catchphrase \"Where's the beef?\", which led to Webb suggesting them to make the \"Where's the Beat\" song. Cenac regretting making the recording. Towards the end of production, Cenac recalled that the group felt \"disgusted\" about how they were treated by the label and cut themselves off from them. They were told by Sunnyview's owners Adam Levy and Henry Stone that they could not be Newcleus anymore but could still go out and produce music.\n\nRelease and reception\n\nJam on Revenge was distributed by Sunnyview in 1984. “Computer Age (Push The Button)” was released in August 1984, followed by “I Wanna Be A B-Boy” and “Let's Jam”. The group's second album Space is the Place was released in 1985.\n\nBrian Chin of Billboard stated the album was \"quite an exemplary project\" noting the range of songs, opining that the \"atmosphere ranges from speedy (\"Computor (sic) Age\") to almost moody (\"Destination Earth). Our favourite was \"Auto Man,\" sporting a tough beat and a good vocal; also check \"Where's the Beat,\" the one and only even the vaguely funny song of a whole bunch\". Chin complimented mixer Jonathan Fearing who \" gives the entire album an exceptionally glossy finish.\" An anonymous reviewer in Cashbox declared the album \"a monster debut LP\" and that it \"shows off simple and effective bass playing and rapping which made \"Newcleus a distinctive new sound in a genre rapidly becoming overplayed.\" Ken Tucker reviewed the album in The Philadelphia Inquirer, giving the album a three out of four stars rating. Tucker compared the group to The Gap Band and Afrika Bambaataa proclaiming that the group made \"tuneful dance music, with a sense of structure and drama that too much dance music lacks. A tad repetitive, though.\"\n\nTrack listing\nTracklisting and credits are adapted from the sleeve and sticker of Jam on Revenge.\n\nSide A\n \"Computer Age (Push the Button)\" (M.B. Cenac) - 7:35\n \"Auto Man\" (Cenac) - 3:49 \n \"I'm Not a Robot\" (Cenac, Robert Carfton III) - 4:51\n \"Destination Earth\" (Cenac, Crafton III) - 5:08\n\nSide B\n \"Jam On Revenge (Special Re-Mix)\" (Cenac) - 6:35\n \"Jam On It\" (Cenac) - 6:26\n \"Where's the Beat\" (B. Redmon, S. Robert, T. Greene, Joe Webb) - 5:30\n \"No More Running\" (Cenac) - 4:58\n\nPersonnel\nCredits are adapted from the sleeve of Jam on Revenge.\n Jay Mark – engineer (on \"Computer Age (Push the Button)\", \"I'm Not a Robot\", and \"Where's the Beat\")\n Jim Dougherty – engineer (on \"Auto Man\", \"Destination Earth\", \"No More Runnin\")\n Jonathan Fearing – mixing\n Frank Fair – producer and selecter\n Joe Webb – producer and selecter\n Bob Camp – cover art\n Pat Redding – cover art\n Don Hunstein – back cover photography\n\nSee also\n 1984 in hip hop music\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n1984 debut albums\nNewcleus albums\nSunnyview Records albums"
] |
[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life"
] |
C_fbbb2e9b40cf4db49c95bd62d63ff913_0
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Who did he marry
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Who did Edmund Hillary marry?
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Edmund Hillary
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Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
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Hillary married Louise Mary Rose
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Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
| true |
[
"I Told You So is a 1970 Ghanaian movie. The movie portrays Ghanaians and their way of life in a satirical style. It also gives insight into the life of a young lady who did not take the advice of her father when about to marry a man, she did not know anything about the man she was going to marry, but rather took her mother's and uncle's advice because of the wealth and power the man has.\n\nThe young lady later finds out that the man she is supposed to marry was an armed robber. She was unhappy of the whole incident. When her dad ask what had happened, she replied that the man she was supposed to marry is an armed robber; her father ended by saying \"I told you so\".\n\nCast\nBobe Cole\nMargret Quainoo (Araba Stamp)\nKweku Crankson (Osuo Abrobor)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n I TOLD YOU SO GHANAIAN MOVIE\n\n1970 films\nGhanaian films",
"Marianus III (died 1321) was the sole Giudice of Arborea from 1308 to his death. He co-ruled with his elder brother Andrew from the death of their father, John of Arborea, in 1304. Their mother was Vera Cappai. They were illegitimate.\n\nIn 1312, he was constrained by the Republic of Pisa to buy his own right of succession from the Emperor Henry VII and to marry Constance of Montalcino by proxy. In 1314, he requested aid from the Crown of Aragon against the Pisans.\n\nHe restored roads and bridges, complete the walls of Oristano and her defensive towers, and constructed a new archiepiscopal palace.\n\nHe never did marry Constance, but he did cohabitate with Padulesa de Serra, who gave him six children, among whom was his successor, Hugh II.\n\n1321 deaths\nJudges (judikes) of Arborea\nYear of birth unknown"
] |
[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life",
"Who did he marry",
"Hillary married Louise Mary Rose"
] |
C_fbbb2e9b40cf4db49c95bd62d63ff913_0
|
What day did they marry on
| 2 |
What day did Edmund Hillary marry on?
|
Edmund Hillary
|
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
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3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest;
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Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
| true |
[
"How to Marry a Billionaire: A Christmas Tale is a 2000 American Christmas romantic comedy television film directed by Rod Daniel, starring John Stamos, Joshua Malina, and Shemar Moore. It is a remake of the 1953 film How to Marry a Millionaire and premiered on Fox on December 20, 2000.\n\nPremise\nThree friends disillusioned with their romantics lives, decided to plot a plan to marry a millionaire before the Christmas day. In the course, however, they find love each one on his own way.\n\nCast\n John Stamos as Tom Nathan\n Joshua Malina as Mark Sickler\n Shemar Moore as Jason Hunt\n Gabrielle Anwar as Jenny Seeger\n Dorie Barton as Tiffany Kennedy\n Carole Raphaelle Davis as Catherine\n Rhea Perlman as Jacqueline Kennedy\n Dabney Coleman as John F. Kennedy\n\nReception\nSteven Oxman from Variety magazine wrote: \"Despite attractive trappings and some distinctly delightful cameos, Fox's How to Marry a Billionaire ultimately comes off as a wooden effort Fox's take on the original 1953 pic replaces the three women out to marry into money with three men out to accomplish the same—and adds extra zeroes to the titular target. But while the argument presented in the pic—what's good for the goose should be good for the gander (if women can marry for money, why not men?)—makes perfect sense, this story remains an idea that never quite works, resulting in a joyless, if intermittently amusing, made-for.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n2000 television films\n2000 films\n2000 romantic comedy films\n2000s Christmas comedy films\nAmerican Christmas comedy films\nRemakes of American films\nAmerican films\nAmerican romantic comedy films\nChristmas television films\nComedy film remakes\nAmerican comedy television films\nFilms directed by Rod Daniel\nFilms scored by Teddy Castellucci\nFilms shot in California\nFox network original films\nRomance film remakes\nRomance television films\nTelevision remakes of films",
"Pavunu Pavunuthan is a 1991 Indian Tamil-language drama film written and directed by K. Bhagyaraj. He also stars and composed the music. The film was released on 14 April 1991. It was dubbed into Telugu as Chilipi Sipayi and released on 24 January 1992.\n\nPlot \n\nThe story start with flashback of chinnu(bagyaraj) in train to his co passenger about his life.Chinnu is a commando captain who visits a village for vacation. He tries to love a girl, pavunu.She rejects his offer as she is waiting for her uncle to marry,who left the village around 20 years ago, at the age of 7,as his father beated for his childish mischief activities. Pavunu' maternal uncle(Arumuga Gounder) is also eagerly waiting for his eloped son to return home.One day a letter for arumuga gounder was sent by his son, which reveals that he will come back in 10 days and he was married. On hearing the news about marriage,Pavunu tried to suicide.Meanwhile chinnu reveals her that he was his uncle and told that he pranked for fun as a stranger these days.chinnu planned for his sister,on that day chinnu's sister insisted pavunu to marry chinnu now itself as military person may leave for duty on a sudden call anytime.chinnu resisted for the sudden plan,but the villagers compelled him to marry.Few minutes before marriage an information from an army personnel told arumuga gounder that his son was died.Chinnu appeared as fraud among all.Later it was understood by family and village persons that he tried to do goodness by not disappointing the family members,as arumuga gounder family is in poor economy and eagerly waiting for his son's return and pavunu is also sensitive about her uncle to marry.Actualy chinnu told his sister that he is not his real brother and only to safeguard pavunu'suicide he lied.chinnu asked her to reveal this issue in a proper way to pavunu.but she rejected it and convinced chinnu to keep secret between us as pavunu's life will be in vain if revealed.After some time things get normal and chinnu tries to convince pavunu.President of the village arranged a maariage invitation for pavunu and chinnu secretly to make a bad image for chinu,to induce a view that chinnu is compelling pavunu to marry.president and chinnu already had issues on minor matter.on hearing this, chinnu also taken it as good becoz he knows that even pavunu had idea to marry eventhough she is showing negative attitude.On day before marriage pavunu reveal that she cannot marry him ,even though she had an affair,because she tattooed her uncle name in her breast.on understanding this chinnu left the village on day before marriage.after nearly 10 years chinnu returns village,what happened is the climax.\n\nCast \n K. Bhagyaraj as Chinnu\n Rohini as Pavunu\n Kuladeivam Rajagopal as Arumuga Gounder\n\nSoundtrack \nSoundtrack was composed by K. Bhagyaraj.\n\nReception \nN. Krishnaswamy of The Indian Express wrote, \"The story line keeps you guessing about what is going to come at every turn, and the mix of comedy, sentiment, characterisation and plot development meshes well to create a film of such impact\".\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n1990s Tamil-language films\n1991 films\nFilms directed by K. Bhagyaraj\nIndian drama films\nIndian films"
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[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life",
"Who did he marry",
"Hillary married Louise Mary Rose",
"What day did they marry on",
"3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest;"
] |
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What did he say about it
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What did Edmund Hillary say about marrying Louise Mary Rose?
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Edmund Hillary
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Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
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he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf.
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Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
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"\"What They'll Say About Us\" is a song by American singer-songwriter Finneas. It was released by OYOY as a single on September 2, 2020. The song was written and produced by Finneas. A lullaby-influenced ballad, the lyrics were inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests and Nick Cordero's death due to COVID-19. \"What They'll Say About Us\" was noted by music critics for its lyrical content. A music video for the song was released alongside the song and was directed by Sam Bennett in one take. It is the first single from his debut studio album Optimist.\n\nBackground and development\nFinneas wrote and produced \"What They'll Say About Us\". It was inspired by the spark of Black Lives Matter protests after racial inequality in the United States and the death of Canadian actor Nick Cordero, who died at the age of 41 from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Finneas wrote the track in June 2020 while in quarantine. In an interview over Zoom with The Wall Street Journal, he said: \"I wrote this song in June after spending the day at a protest in Downtown LA, filled with hope with the prospect that millions of people were coming together from all over the world to fight against institutionalized racism and inequality\". He further stated: \"The other component of the song was [that] I was very closely following Nick Cordero's story on Instagram, via his wife [Amanda Kloots], and Nick and his wife were not people I'd ever met. I don't know them at all. I saw the headlines about his health, just like everybody else did. I just became incredibly attached to this family that I’d never met before. I kind of wrote this song as if you were singing to your loved one who was in a hospital bed while the world was protesting outside. I did make a point to keep the song fairly ambiguous because I know everybody's sort of going through different circumstances of the same things right now\".\n\nComposition and lyrics\n\"What They'll Say About Us\" begins \"calmly and reassuringly\": \"You're tired now, lie down/I'll be waiting to give you the good news/It might take patience/And when you wake up, it won't be over/So don't you give up\". However, as the beat and other instruments begin to arrive, the soundstage changes to be hazy. John Pareles, writing for The New York Times, says it \"mortality begins to haunt the song, all the way to a devastating last line\", noting the lyrics, \"It might take patience/And if you don't wake up/I'll know you tried to/I wish you could see him/He looks just like you\".\n\nReception\nIn a review for DIY magazine, the staff labeled \"What They'll Say About Us\" as \"poignant\" and an \"ode to human strength\". Writing for Billboard magazine, Jason Lipshutz said while the production on the track is \"effectively restrained\", people should credit Finneas for going \"full-on showstopper when he draws out the line, 'We've got the time to take the world / And make it better than it ever was\". Emily Tan of Spin magazine described the track as a song that \"aims to offer comfort to those who have lost someone due to Covid-19\".\n\nMusic video\nA music video for \"What They'll Say About Us\" was released to Finneas' YouTube channel on September 2, 2020. The video was directed by Sam Bennett and shot in one take. In the visual, lights and rain swirl around Finneas as he sings and offers comfort to people who have lost someone they love from COVID-19. Spins Emily Yan described the visual as \"simple\" and \"intimate\".\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2020s ballads\n2020 singles\n2020 songs\nSong recordings produced by Finneas O'Connell\nSongs written by Finneas O'Connell\nSongs in memory of deceased persons\nFinneas O'Connell songs",
"\n\nTrack listing\n Opening Overture\n \"I Get a Kick Out of You\" (Cole Porter)\n \"You Are the Sunshine of My Life\" (Stevie Wonder)\n \"You Will Be My Music\" (Joe Raposo)\n \"Don't Worry 'bout Me\" (Ted Koehler, Rube Bloom)\n \"If\" (David Gates)\n \"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown\" (Jim Croce)\n \"Ol' Man River\" (Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II)\n Famous Monologue\n Saloon Trilogy: \"Last Night When We Were Young\"/\"Violets for Your Furs\"/\"Here's That Rainy Day\" (Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg)/(Matt Dennis, Tom Adair)/(Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Burke)\n \"I've Got You Under My Skin\" (Porter)\n \"My Kind of Town\" (Sammy Cahn, Van Heusen)\n \"Let Me Try Again\" (Paul Anka, Cahn, Michel Jourdan)\n \"The Lady Is a Tramp\" (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart)\n \"My Way\" (Anka, Claude Francois, Jacques Revaux, Gilles Thibaut)\n\nFrank Sinatra's Monologue About the Australian Press\nI do believe this is my interval, as we say... We've been having a marvelous time being chased around the country for three days. You know, I think it's worth mentioning because it's so idiotic, it's so ridiculous what's been happening. We came all the way to Australia because I chose to come here. I haven't been here for a long time and I wanted to come back for a few days. Wait now, wait. I'm not buttering anybody at all. I don't have to. I really don't have to. I like coming here. I like the people. I love your attitude. I like the booze and the beer and everything else that comes into the scene. I also like the way the country's growing and it's a swinging place.\n\nSo we come here and what happens? We gotta run all day long because of the parasites who chase us with automobiles. That's dangerous, too, on the road, you know. Might cause an accident. They won't quit. They wonder why I won't talk to them. I wouldn't drink their water, let alone talk to them. And if any of you folks in the press are in the audience, please quote me properly. Don't mix it up, do it exactly as I'm saying it, please. Write it down very clearly. One idiot called me up and he wanted to know what I had for breakfast. What the hell does he care what I had for breakfast? I was about to tell him what I did after breakfast. Oh, boy, they're murder! We have a name in the States for their counterparts: They're called parasites. Because they take and take and take and never give, absolutely, never give. I don't care what you think about any press in the world, I say they're bums and they'll always be bums, everyone of them. There are just a few exceptions to the rule. Some good editorial writers who don't go out in the street and chase people around. Critics don't bother me, because if I do badly, I know I'm bad before they even write it, and if I'm good, I know I'm good before they write it. It's true. I know best about myself. So, a critic is a critic. He doesn't anger me. It's the scandal man who bugs you, drives you crazy. It's the two-bit-type work that they do. They're pimps. They're just crazy, you know. And the broads who work in the press are the hookers of the press. Need I explain that to you? I might offer them a buck and a half... I'm not sure. I once gave a chick in Washington $2 and I overpaid her, I found out. She didn't even bathe. Imagine what that was like, ha, ha.\n\nNow, it's a good thing I'm not angry. Really. It's a good thing I'm not angry. I couldn't care less. The press of the world never made a person a star who was untalented, nor did they ever hurt any artist who was talented. So we, who have God-given talent, say, \"To hell with them.\" It doesn't make any difference, you know. And I want to say one more thing. From what I see what's happened since I was last here... what, 16 years ago? Twelve years ago. From what I've seen to happen with the type of news that they print in this town shocked me. And do you know what is devastating? It's old-fashioned. It was done in America and England twenty years ago. And they're catching up with it now, with the scandal sheet. They're rags, that's what they are. You use them to train your dog and your parrot. What else do I have to say? Oh, I guess that's it. That'll keep them talking to themselves for a while. I think most of them are a bunch of fags anyway. Never did a hard day's work in their life. I love when they say, \"What do you mean, you won't stand still when I take your picture?\" All of a sudden, they're God. We gotta do what they want us to do. It's incredible. A pox on them... Now, let's get down to some serious business here...\n\nSee also\nConcerts of Frank Sinatra\n\nFrank Sinatra"
] |
[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life",
"Who did he marry",
"Hillary married Louise Mary Rose",
"What day did they marry on",
"3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest;",
"What did he say about it",
"he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf."
] |
C_fbbb2e9b40cf4db49c95bd62d63ff913_0
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What are his childrens names
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What are Edmund Hillary's children's names?
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Edmund Hillary
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Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
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They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975
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Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
| false |
[
"Elizabeth Dawson Baker is an American children's novelist who made her international debut in 2002 with The Frog Princess which was a Texas Lone Star Reading List Book, A Book Sense Children's Pick, a Florida's Sunshine State Readers List pick and a 2006 Sasquatch Book Award nominee. The Frog Princess has also inspired a series of eight additional books based on it. The Frog Princess inspired the 2009 Disney film The Princess and the Frog.\n\nBibliography\n\nTales of the Frog Princess series\nThe Frog Princess (2002) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; New edition (August 26, 2014)\nDragon's Breath (2004) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; New edition (August 26, 2014)\nOnce Upon A Curse (2004) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; New edition (August 26, 2014)\nNo Place For Magic (2006) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (August 26, 2014)\nThe Salamander Spell (2007) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; New edition (February 24, 2015)\nThe Dragon Princess (2008) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; New edition (February 24, 2015)\nDragon Kiss (2009) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; New edition (February 24, 2015)\nA Prince Among Frogs (2009) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; New edition (February 24, 2015)\nThe Frog Princess Returns (2017) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens (June 6, 2017)\n\nThe Wide-Awake Princess series \n The Wide-Awake Princess (2010) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (January 3, 2012)\n Unlocking the Spell [aka The Princess's Promise] (2012) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (April 1, 2014)\n The Bravest Princess (2014) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (February 24, 2015)\n Princess in Disguise (2015) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (April 5, 2016)\n Princess Between Worlds (2016) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (March 21, 2017)\n The Princess and the Pearl (2017) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (March 20, 2018)\n Princess Before Dawn (2018) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens (March 20, 2018)\n\nThe Fairy-Tale Matchmaker series \n The Fairy-Tale Matchmaker (2014) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (October 6, 2015)\n The Perfect Match (2015) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (October 11, 2016)\n The True Heart (2016) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (October 10, 2017)\n The Magical Match (2017) ~ Bloomsbury Children's Books; Reprint edition (October 16, 2018)\n\nFairy Wings series \n Fairy Wings [originally titled Wings: A Fairy Tale] (2008) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; 1 edition (February 14, 2012)\n Fairy Lies (2012) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (August 6, 2013)\n\nMagical Animal Rescue series \n Maggie and the Flying Horse (2017) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens (April 11, 2017)\n Maggie and the Wish Fish (2017) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens (April 11, 2017)\n Maggie and the Unicorn (2017) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens (October 3, 2017)\n Maggie and the Flying Pigs (2017) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens (October 3, 2017)\n\nOther books\nA Question of Magic (2013) ~ Bloomsbury USA Childrens; Reprint edition (August 4, 2015)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Author's official site\n Summaries of the Tales of the Frog Princess series\n\nLiving people\n21st-century American novelists\nAmerican children's writers\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nAmerican women novelists\nWomen science fiction and fantasy writers\n21st-century American women writers",
"This is a list of children's animated television series (including internet television series); that is, animated programs originally targeted towards audiences aged 12 and under in mind.\n\nThis list does not include Japanese, Chinese, or Korean series, as children's animation is much more common in these regions.\n\n1970s\n\nUnited States\n\nCo-productions\n\nReferences\n\nChildrens\nChildrens 1970s\nChildrens animated series\nChildrens 1970s\nChildrens animated series\n 1970s"
] |
[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life",
"Who did he marry",
"Hillary married Louise Mary Rose",
"What day did they marry on",
"3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest;",
"What did he say about it",
"he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf.",
"What are his childrens names",
"They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975"
] |
C_fbbb2e9b40cf4db49c95bd62d63ff913_0
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What was so special about them
| 5 |
What was so special about Edmund Hillary's children?
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Edmund Hillary
|
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
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Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off.
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Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
| true |
[
"12 Again is a show that premiered on CBBC on 13 February 2012. It is presented by Iain Stirling, and each episode is 30 minutes long. The show sees various celebrities talking about what their life was like at the age of 12, usually covering news stories, what they would gossip about, favourite television programmes, favourite music, their favourite celebrities and what they would have done differently if they were 12 again.\n\nEpisodes\n\nSeries 1: 2012\n\n\"End of Summer\" special\nOn Monday 3 September 2012 at 5:45pm, a brand new 12 Again special premiered, where many special celebrity guests revisit their favourite summer memories of when they were 12.\n\nSeries 2: 2012\nA second series of 12 Again began on Friday, 21 September 2012, at 5pm, to run for 13 episodes.\n\nSeries 3: 2013\n\nFuture\nA fourth series was confirmed for last 2014. It will air on Thursdays at 5pm.\n\nPremiere\nThe show premiered in February 2012, during the half-term break, with new episodes every day. Re-runs of the show air as of April 2012. New episodes premiere at different times; there is usually at least one episode in 2 months.\nNew episodes will premiere every day at 10am and repeated at 3pm from 2 to 11 June so there will be 7 episodes premiering.\n\nSeries 2 began on Friday 21 September 2012 at 5pm, with brand new episodes premiering every Friday until Friday 14 December 2012.\n\nTopics covered\nIntroduction\nWhat life was like for them in General when they were 12\nThe music they liked when they were 12\nTheir big moments/big news stories when they were 12\nWhat they watched on TV when they were 12\nWhat they would change if they were 12 again\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nCBBC shows",
"\"Boy Blue\" is a pop song written by Cyndi Lauper, Stephen Broughton Lunt, and Jeff Bova for Lauper's second album, True Colors (1986). It was released as the album's fourth single in 1987 (see 1987 in music). The single version is a remix. Charting at #71 on the Hot 100, it was Lauper's first solo single that failed to make a real impact on the charts. Proceeds from the sale of the single were donated to AIDS organizations.\n\nThe official video was a live clip of the song in Paris, France and it was pulled from the concert video Cyndi Lauper in Paris. The video received heavy airplay on MTV when the single was released (during June and July 1987) and was rarely played after. A live version of \"Boy Blue\" was later released as the B-side of her single \"Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China)\".\n\nBackground\nThematically like \"True Colors\" on the album, Lauper wrote this song for a friend who died of AIDS, and the title comes from a poem by Eugene Field called \"Little Boy Blue\". This poem is based on a kid's story:\n\n\"Little Boy Blue\"\n The little toy dog is covered with dust,\n But sturdy and staunch he stands;\n And the little toy soldier is red with rust,\n And his musket moulds in his hands;\n Time was when the little toy dog was new,\n And the soldier was passing fair;\n And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue\n Kissed them and put them there.\nHere is what Cyndi says about this song:\n\n\"I tried to write about my friend. I knew he really loved 'That's What Friends Are For.' I know that maybe he would have liked me to do a song like that. Instead I wrote about him personally. I don't know that my lyrics were good enough, I don't know that anything was good enough. Maybe it was too personal. I don't know. But I wrote it for him. It was because of him that I keep trying to do stuff. And other friends. So many talented people, so many of our friends and so many gifted people have passed on. Or struggle everyday. Just to live. And it was because of my friends and others that I do this. Maybe that song wasn't good enough, I don't know.\"\n\nWhen Lauper was asked about her intense live performance that was released as the video for the song, she responded:\n\n\"I used to cry every night when I sang that song. I was so mad. You know, you go through so much and I was so mad. I was mad that my friend was gone, I was mad at the way people treated me...We didn't know what the hell it was. We didn't know anything. Then all of a sudden it was out in the open and everyone was talking about it, but when he first told me about it I didn't understand. I didn't know. And then all of a sudden my friend was ill and ill and ill and then...It was so hard. I was so angry and every night I would sing my guts out, but you'd open your eyes after and it was the same. But sometimes, in a lot of ways, it was healing.\"\n\nMusic video\n\nThe official music video for the song was a live video clip pulled from the \"Cyndi Lauper in Paris\" home video cassette and HBO special. It was directed by Andy Morahan.\n\nTrack listing\n7\"\n \"Boy Blue\" (Remix) – 3:58\n \"The Faraway Nearby\" – 2:57\n\n12\"\n \"Boy Blue\" (LP Version)\n \"Time After Time\"\n \"The Faraway Nearby\"\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n1987 songs\n1987 singles\nCyndi Lauper songs\nEpic Records singles\nMusic videos directed by Andy Morahan\nSong recordings produced by Cyndi Lauper\nSongs written by Cyndi Lauper\nSongs written by Jeff Bova\nSongs about HIV/AIDS"
] |
[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life",
"Who did he marry",
"Hillary married Louise Mary Rose",
"What day did they marry on",
"3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest;",
"What did he say about it",
"he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf.",
"What are his childrens names",
"They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975",
"What was so special about them",
"Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off."
] |
C_fbbb2e9b40cf4db49c95bd62d63ff913_0
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Who did he marry next
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Who did Edmund Hillary marry next after Louise Mary Rose?
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Edmund Hillary
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Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
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In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
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Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
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[
"Lembing Awang Pulang Ke Dayang is a 2009 Malaysian film, directed by Majed Salleh. The film was produced by Dayang Digital, and also stars Farid Kamil, Siti Elizad, Zul Huzaimy, Lynette Ludi and Uji Rashid.\n\nPlot\nThis movie is related to an incident that occurred in Johor. It occurred in 1776 when a man called Awang returned to Parit Raja after more than 3 years abroad to marry his fiancée Dayang. Upon his return, he found out that another man called Bachok had told Dayang of Awang's death and planning to marry her the next day. Awang turned up at the wedding ceremony and using a spear given by Raja Bugis, he speared Bachok in the stomach. Bachok, fatally injured grabbed the spear in his stomach and speared his best man. The man then speared the next man he saw and this was repeated until the 99th person was speared. It was Dayang's father who was protecting Dayang. He did not continue the repeated spearing and died. Awang ran away to Endau and Dayang did not marry another till she died.\n\nCast\n Farid Kamil- Awang (Main Actor/Actress) \n Ejad - Dayang (Main Actor/Actress) \n Zul Huzaimy - Bachuk (Main Actor/Actress) \n Lynette Ludi - Claudia (Main Actor/Actress) \n Hattan - Panglima Merah (Supporting Actor) \n Aziz M.Osman - Dekar Agas & Raja Muda Bugis (Supporting Actor) \n Mustapha Maarof - Pak Ngah (Supporting Actor) \n Kuswadinata - Pak Long (Supporting Actor) \n Khir Rahman - Nakhoda Galigor (Supporting Actor) \n Datin Hajah Rosnani Jamil : Mak Ngah (Supporting Actor) \n Uji Rashid - Mak Long (Supporting Actor) \n M.Rajoli - Orang Kaya Aris (Supporting Actor) \n Zainurdin Ismail - Tok Beta (Supporting Actor) \n Tamrin Ibrahim Pendek - Pndek (Supporting Actor)\n\nReferences\n\nMalaysian films\n2009 films",
"I Told You So is a 1970 Ghanaian movie. The movie portrays Ghanaians and their way of life in a satirical style. It also gives insight into the life of a young lady who did not take the advice of her father when about to marry a man, she did not know anything about the man she was going to marry, but rather took her mother's and uncle's advice because of the wealth and power the man has.\n\nThe young lady later finds out that the man she is supposed to marry was an armed robber. She was unhappy of the whole incident. When her dad ask what had happened, she replied that the man she was supposed to marry is an armed robber; her father ended by saying \"I told you so\".\n\nCast\nBobe Cole\nMargret Quainoo (Araba Stamp)\nKweku Crankson (Osuo Abrobor)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n I TOLD YOU SO GHANAIAN MOVIE\n\n1970 films\nGhanaian films"
] |
[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life",
"Who did he marry",
"Hillary married Louise Mary Rose",
"What day did they marry on",
"3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest;",
"What did he say about it",
"he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf.",
"What are his childrens names",
"They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975",
"What was so special about them",
"Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off.",
"Who did he marry next",
"In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979."
] |
C_fbbb2e9b40cf4db49c95bd62d63ff913_0
|
What happened next
| 7 |
What happened next after Edmund Hillary marrying June Mulgrew?
|
Edmund Hillary
|
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
|
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration;
|
Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
| true |
[
"What Happens Next may refer to:\n\n What Happens Next? (film), 2012 documentary film about Dan Mangan\nWhat Happens Next? (band), American thrashcore band\n What Happens Next (Gang of Four album), 2015\nWhat Happens Next (Joe Satriani album), 2018\nWhat Happens Next (What Happened Then?), a 1984 album by American hardcore punk band Ill Repute\n\nOther uses\n What Happens Next?: A History of Hollywood Screenwriting, a book by Marc Norman\n\nSee also\n What Comes Next (disambiguation)",
"What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy"
] |
[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life",
"Who did he marry",
"Hillary married Louise Mary Rose",
"What day did they marry on",
"3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest;",
"What did he say about it",
"he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf.",
"What are his childrens names",
"They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975",
"What was so special about them",
"Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off.",
"Who did he marry next",
"In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.",
"What happened next",
"His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration;"
] |
C_fbbb2e9b40cf4db49c95bd62d63ff913_0
|
Who else was part of the travel
| 8 |
Who else was part of the travel besides Peter Hillary?
|
Edmund Hillary
|
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
|
Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
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Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
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[
"Fredrick Else (31 March 193320 July 2015) was an English footballer, who played as a goalkeeper. Else gained over 600 professional appearances in his career playing for three clubs, Preston North End, Blackburn Rovers and Barrow.\n\nClub career\nElse was born in Golborne near Wigan on 31 March 1933. Whilst on national service in the north-east he played for amateur club Axwell Park Colliery Welfare in the Derwent Valley League. He attracted the attention of Football League teams and signed as a junior for Preston North End in 1951, and as a professional in 1953. He made his debut for Preston against Manchester City in 1954, but was restricted to 14 appearances over his first three seasons. He eventually became first choice, displacing George Thompson, and played 238 times for North End. During this time Preston's most successful season came in 1957–58, when the club finished as runners up in Division One.\n\nThe 1960–61 season ended in relegation for Preston and Else was sold to neighbours Blackburn Rovers for £20,000. Else became a first choice for Blackburn straight away and played 221 times for the club. A collarbone injury in 1964–65 resulted in a period out of the game, though Else returned to regain the goalkeeper's jersey at Blackburn. Nonetheless the team were relegated the following season and Else was released. During the summer of 1966 Else signed with Barrow of the Fourth Division. Else became part of Barrow's most successful team, with the side winning promotion to the Third Division in his first season there. Else was Barrow's first choice keeper for the entire period that they were in the third division, and played 148 league matches for the club. He retired from football after Barrow's relegation in 1970 following a leg infection. His final season included a brief stint as caretaker manager at Barrow.\n\nHonours\n Football League Division One Runner-up 1957–1958\n Football League Division Four Promotion 1966–1967\n\nInternational career\nElse has been described by fans of the clubs that he played for as one of the best English goalkeepers never to win a full international cap. He did, however, make one appearance for the England B team in 1957 against Scotland B, as well as participating in a Football Association touring side of 1961.\n\nPersonal life and death\nElse met his wife Marjorie in 1949 in Douglas on the Isle of Man. They married when Else was 22 and Marjorie 20, on 29 October 1955, a Saturday morning. The wedding was held in Marjorie's home town of Blackpool and the date was chosen so that the couple could marry in the morning and Else could then travel either to Deepdale, to play for Preston North End's reserve team, or to Bloomfield Road where Preston's first team was due to be playing Blackpool F.C. In the event Else was selected for the reserves and the couple had to travel by bus to Preston.\n\nAfter retiring from football, Else remained in Barrow-in-Furness, becoming a geography and maths teacher at a local secondary school. He retired from teaching in 1999 and moved to Cyprus, though still attended some Barrow matches. Else died in Barrow-in-Furness on 20 July 2015, aged 82.\n\nReferences\n\n2015 deaths\n1933 births\nBarrow A.F.C. managers\nBarrow A.F.C. players\nBlackburn Rovers F.C. players\nPreston North End F.C. players\nPeople from Golborne\nEnglish footballers\nAssociation football goalkeepers\nSchoolteachers from Cumbria\nEnglish Football League players\nEngland B international footballers\nEnglish football managers",
"Else Pappenheim (born May 22, 1911 in Salzburg, Austria-Hungary; died January 11, 2009 in New York) was an American neurologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of Austrian origin.\n\n\nLife \nElse Pappenheim came from a traditional Jewish family of doctors. Her mother Edith Goldschmidt (1883–1942) - a granddaughter of the founder of the first female high school in Leipzig, Henriette Goldschmidt - could not escape the persecution of Jews and committed suicide with her sister in 1942. Her father Martin Pappenheim (1881-1943) was head of the neurological department at Lainz Hospital, who emigrated to Palestine in 1934 as an opponent of Austrofascism. Her aunt was Marie (Mitzi) Pappenheim, who was one of the first women to receive her doctorate from the medical school in Vienna; under her married name Marie Frischauf, she ran sex advice centers for the poor in Vienna together with Wilhelm Reich, before emigrating in 1934.\n\nElse Pappenheim grew up in Vienna, where she attended Eugenie Schwarzwald's reform school before beginning her studies in medicine. In 1937, Pappenheim was one of the last analysts to be trained at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. Until March 1938, Pappenheim worked at the University Hospital Vienna as a secondary doctor for neurology and psychiatry. After the connection, the Psychoanalytical Institute was closed and its members were forced to flee. Pappenheim emigrated to the United States via Palestine, where she met American psychoanalysis at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with one of the leading US psychiatrists, Adolf Meyer, whose analytical level, however, she found \"primitive\".In the United States, Else Pappenheim married Stephen Frischauf in 1946, who had also emigrated from Austria. The family later lived in New York, where the now Else Frishauf worked as a freelance psychoanalyst and held professorships at various universities.\n\nIn 1956 Pappenheim visited Austria again for the first time since her flight. However, it was not until 1987, as part of the \"Expelled Reason\" symposium, in which she took part along with many other emigrants, that there was a certain rapprochement with Austria in the form of an exchange with young Austrian psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.\n\nElse Pappenheim died in New York at the age of 97. She was the last living member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association from before 1938 and one of the last witnesses who could provide information about the end and re-establishment of psychoanalysis.\n\nWritings \n\n Else Pappenheim: \"Contemporary Witness\", in: Friedrich Stadler [Ed.]: International Symposium, October 19 to 23, 1987 in Vienna: Emigration and Exile of Austrian Science , Vienna: Youth and People, 1987 , p 221–229 (autobiographical)\n\nReferences \n\n1911 births\n2009 deaths\nAustrian neurologists\nWomen neurologists\nAustrian psychoanalysts\nPhysicians from Salzburg\nAustrian psychiatrists\nJewish psychiatrists\nAustrian women psychiatrists\nJewish women scientists\nJewish emigrants from Austria to the United States after the Anschluss"
] |
[
"Edmund Hillary",
"Personal life",
"Who did he marry",
"Hillary married Louise Mary Rose",
"What day did they marry on",
"3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest;",
"What did he say about it",
"he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf.",
"What are his childrens names",
"They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975",
"What was so special about them",
"Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off.",
"Who did he marry next",
"In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.",
"What happened next",
"His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration;",
"Who else was part of the travel",
"Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition."
] |
C_fbbb2e9b40cf4db49c95bd62d63ff913_0
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Where did he retire too
| 9 |
Where did Peter Hillary retire too?
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Edmund Hillary
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Hillary married Louise Mary Rose on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959-1975). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979. His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition. Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement. He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention. The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund. Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me - it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days." CANNOTANSWER
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Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City,
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Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
Hillary became interested in mountaineering while in secondary school. He made his first major climb in 1939, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II and was wounded in an accident. Prior to the Everest expedition, Hillary had been part of the British reconnaissance expedition to the mountain in 1951 as well as an unsuccessful attempt to climb Cho Oyu in 1952. As part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition he reached the South Pole overland in 1958. He subsequently reached the North Pole, making him the first person to reach both poles and summit Everest. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Following his ascent of Everest, Hillary devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in Nepal. Hillary had numerous honours conferred upon him, including the Order of the Garter in 1995. Upon his death in 2008, he was given a state funeral in New Zealand.
Early life
Hillary was born to Percival Augustus (1885–1965) and Gertrude (née Clark) (1892–1965) Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919. His father Percy had served at Gallipoli with the 15th (North Auckland) Regiment, and was discharged "medically unfit" from the Army in 1916; he had married Gertrude after his return to New Zealand. His grandfather Edmund Raymond Hillary (b. 1836) from Lancashire, England was a watchmaker, who immigrated to northern Wairoa in the mid-19th century. He married Annie "Ida" Fleming from Ireland having four children. His maternal great-grandparents, the Clarks, were both from Yorkshire.
His family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, in 1920, after Percy was allocated eight acres (3.2 ha) of land there as a returned soldier. Percy had been a journalist prewar, and soon became founding editor of the weekly Tuakau District News as well as an apiarist. Ed had a sister June (born 1917) and a brother Rex (born 1920).
Hillary was educated at Tuakau Primary School and then Auckland Grammar School. He finished primary school aged 11 or two years early, and at "Grammar" achieved average marks. His mother wanted him to go to a "good school" and he commuted by train, cycling to Tuakau station before 7 am and returning after 6 pm for years (a one-hour and 40 minutes journey each way) until the family moved to Remuera, Auckland in 1935, his last of four years at "Grammar".
He was initially smaller than his peers and shy, and did not enjoy "Grammar", where commuting barred him from after-school activities. He grew to be and gained confidence after taking up boxing.
He became interested in climbing when he was 16 following a 1935 school trip to Mount Ruapehu, after which he showed more interest in tramping than in studying and said he "wanted to see the world". He then attended Auckland University College, and joined the Tramping Club there. But in 1938, "after two notably unsuccessful years studying mathematics and science" he gave up on formal education.
He then became an apiarist (beekeeper) with his father and brother Rex; with 1600 hives to attend, thousands of 90 lb (41 kg) boxes of honey comb to handle, and 12 to 100 bee-stings daily. He kept bees in summer, and concentrated on climbing in winter. His father also edited the journal "The N.Z. Honeybee" and his mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees.
In 1938, he went to hear Herbert Sutcliffe, the proponent of a life philosophy called "Radiant Living", with his family. The family all became foundation members, and his mother became its secretary in 1939. He went to Gisborne as Sutcliff's assistant, and in 1941 sat examinations to become a teacher of Radiant Living, getting a 100% pass mark. His test lecture was on "Inferiority – cause and cure". He said of his five-year association with the movement that "I learned to speak confidently from the platform; to think more freely on important topics; to mix more readily with a wide variety of people". Tenets included healthy eating (the salads that June took to university for lunch) and pacificism. He joined the Radiant Living Tramping Club, and further developed his love of the outdoors in the Waitākere Ranges.
In 1939, he completed his first major climb, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier, near Aoraki / Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing brought new friends; Harry Ayres and George Lowe became "the first real friends I'd ever had".
World War II
At the outbreak of World War II, Hillary applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) but quickly withdrew the application, later writing that he was "harassed by [his] religious conscience". In 1943, with the Japanese threat in the Pacific and the arrival of conscription, he joined the RNZAF as a navigator in No. 6 Squadron RNZAF and later No. 5 Squadron RNZAF on Catalina flying boats. In 1945, he was sent to Fiji and to the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burnt in an accident.
Expeditions
In January 1948, Hillary and others ascended the south ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. He took part in an arduous rescue on La Perouse in 1948, befriending fellow climber Norman Hardie.
In 1951 he was part of a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest led by Eric Shipton, before joining the successful British attempt of 1953. In 1952, Hillary and George Lowe were part of the British team led by Shipton, that attempted Cho Oyu. After that attempt failed due to the lack of a route from the Nepal side, Hillary and Lowe crossed the Nup La pass into Tibet and reached the old Camp II, on the northern side, where all the previous expeditions had camped.
1953 Everest expedition
In 1949, the long-standing climbing route to the summit of Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet. For the next several years, Nepal allowed only one or two expeditions per year. A Swiss expedition (in which Tenzing took part) attempted to reach the summit in 1952, but was forced back by bad weather and problems with oxygen sets below the summit.
In 1952, Hillary learned that he and Lowe had been invited by the Joint Himalayan Committee for the 1953 British attempt and immediately accepted. Shipton had been named as leader but was replaced by Hunt. Hillary objected but was immediately impressed by Hunt's energy and determination. Hunt asked Charles Evans and Hillary to form with him a small three-man planning group on the expedition. Hunt wrote that:
Hillary had hoped to climb with Lowe, but Hunt named two teams for the ascent: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans; and Hillary and Tenzing. Hillary, therefore, made a concerted effort to forge a working friendship with Tenzing. Hillary wrote, "Tenzing had substantially greater personal ambition than any Sherpa I had met."
The Hunt expedition totalled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and of baggage. Lowe supervised the preparation of the Lhotse Face, a huge and steep ice face, for climbing. Hillary forged a route through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.
Cameraman Tom Stobart was Hillary's room-mate in Kathmandu. He described Hillary as:
The expedition set up base camp in March 1953 and, working slowly, set up its final camp at the South Col at . On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans attempted the climb but turned back when Evans's oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 300 vertical feet (91 m) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to attempt the summit.
Snow and wind delayed them at the South Col for two days. They set out on 28 May with the support of Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima. The two pitched a tent at on 28 May, while their support group returned down the mountain. On the following morning Hillary discovered that his boots had frozen solid outside the tent. He spent two hours warming them over a stove before he and Tenzing, wearing packs, attempted the final ascent. The final obstacle was the 40-foot (12 m) rock face now called "Hillary Step"; Hillary later wrote:
Tenzing in his 1955 autobiography wrote that Hillary took the first step onto the summit and he followed. They reached Everest's 29,028 ft (8,848 m) summitthe highest point on earthat 11:30 am.
They spent about 15 minutes at the summit. Hillary took a photo of Tenzing posing with his ice-axe, but there is no photo of Hillary; Tenzing's autobiography says that Hillary simply declined to have his picture taken. They also took photos looking down the mountain.
Tenzing left chocolates at the summit as an offering, and Hillary left a cross given to him by John Hunt. Their descent was complicated by drifting snow which had covered their tracks. The first person they met was Lowe; Hillary said, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
They returned to Kathmandu a few days later and learned that Hillary had already been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Hunt a Knight Bachelor. News reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.
The 37 members of the party later received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal with engraved along the rim.
In addition to the knighting of Hillary and Hunt, Tenzingineligible for knighthood as a Nepalese citizenreceived the George Medal. Tenzing also received the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan.
After Everest
Hillary climbed ten other peaks in the Himalayas on further visits in 1956, 1960–1961, and 1963–1965. He also reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, on 4 January 1958. His party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so using motor vehicles.
In 1960, Hillary organised the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition, with Griffith Pugh; and Pugh showed that Mount Everest could be climbed without oxygen, with a long period of acclimatisation by living at for six months.
An assault on Makalu, the world's fifth-highest mountain, was unsuccessful. Hillary was with the expedition for five months, although it lasted for ten.
The expedition also searched for the fabled abominable snowman. No evidence of Yetis was found, instead footprints and tracks were proven to be from other causes. During the expedition, Hillary travelled to remote temples which contained "Yeti scalps"; however after bringing back three relics, two were shown to be from bears and one from a goat antelope. Hillary said after the expedition: "The yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most yeti phenomena".
In 1962, he was a guest on the television game show What's My Line?; he stumped the panel, comprising Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf, and Merv Griffin.
In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition, titled "Ocean to Sky", from the mouth of the Ganges River to its source. From 1977 to 1979 he commentated aboard Antarctic sightseeing flights operated by Air New Zealand, and was scheduled to act as the guide for the fatal Flight 901, but had to cancel owing to other commitments.
In 1985, he accompanied Neil Armstrong in a small twin-engined ski plane over the Arctic Ocean and landed at the North Pole. Hillary thus became the first man to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest. This accomplishment inspired generations of explorers to compete over what later was defined as Three Poles Challenge.
In January 2007, Hillary travelled to Antarctica as part of a delegation commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Scott Base.
Public recognition
On 6 June 1953, Hillary was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and he received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal the same year. On 6 February 1987, he was the fourth appointee to the Order of New Zealand. He was also awarded the Polar Medal in 1958 for his part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the class of commander of the Order of Sports Merit of France in about 1960, the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, 1st Class of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1953 and the Coronation Medal in 1975. On 22 April 1995, Hillary was appointed Knight Companion of The Most Noble Order of the Garter. On 17 June 2004, Hillary was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. The Government of India conferred on him its second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, posthumously, in 2008.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful ascent of Everest, the Nepalese government conferred honorary citizenship upon Hillary at a special Golden Jubilee celebration in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was the first foreign national to receive that honour.
Since 1992, New Zealand's $5 note has featured Hillary's portrait, making him the only living person not a current head of state ever to appear on a New Zealand banknote. In giving his permission, Hillary insisted that Aoraki / Mount Cook rather than Mount Everest be used as the backdrop.
Annual Reader's Digest polls from 2005 to 2007 named Hillary as "New Zealand's most trusted individual".
Hillary's favoured New Zealand charity was the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, of which he was patron for 35 years. He was particularly keen on how this organisation introduced young New Zealanders to the outdoors in a very similar way to his first experience of a school trip to Mt Ruapehu at the age of 16. A bronze statue of Hillary was erected outside The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village; it was unveiled by Hillary himself in 2003. Various streets, institutions and organisations around New Zealand and abroad are named after him – for example, the Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate in Otara, which was established by Hillary in 2001.
Two Antarctic features are named after Hillary. The Hillary Coast is a section of coastline south of Ross Island and north of the Shackleton Coast. The Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, appears on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, published by the International Hydrographic Organization.
Personal life
Hillary married Louise Mary Rose (19301975) on 3 September 1953, soon after the ascent of Everest; he admitted he was terrified of proposing to her and relied on her mother to propose on his behalf. They had three children: Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1956) and Belinda (19591975). On 31 March 1975, while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after take-off. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died on Air New Zealand Flight 901 in 1979.
His son Peter Hillary also became a climber, summiting Everest in 1990. In May 2002 Peter climbed Everest as part of a 50th anniversary celebration; Jamling Tenzing Norgay (son of Tenzing who had died in 1986) was also part of the expedition.
Hillary's home for most of his life was a property on Remuera Road in Auckland City, where he enjoyed reading adventure and science fiction novels in his retirement.
He also built a bach at Whites Beach, one of Auckland's west coast beaches in the former Waitakere City, between Anawhata and North Piha; a friend called it Hillary's place of solace, where he could escape media attention.
The Hillary family has had a connection with the west coast of Auckland since 1925, when Louise's father built a bach at Anawhata. The family donated land at Whites Beach that is now crossed by trampers on the Hillary Trail, named for Edmund.
Hillary said of the area: "That is the thing that international travel brings home to me – it's always good to be going home. This is the only place I want to live in; this is the place I want to see out my days."
Philanthropy
Following his ascent of Everest he devoted himself to assisting the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he established in 1960 and led until his death in 2008. His efforts are credited with the construction of many schools and hospitals in this remote region of the Himalayas. He was the Honorary President of the American Himalayan Foundation, a United States non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas. He was also the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the worldwide protection of mountains.
Political involvement
Hillary supported the Labour Party in the 1975 New Zealand general election, as a member of the "Citizens for Rowling" campaign. His involvement in this campaign was seen as precluding his nomination as Governor-General; the position was offered to Keith Holyoake in 1977. In 1985, Hillary was appointed New Zealand High Commissioner to India (concurrently High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal) and spent four and a half years based in New Delhi.
In 1975, Hillary served as a vice president for the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand, a national pro-choice advocacy group. He was also a patron of REPEAL, an organization seeking repeal of the restrictive Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Death
On 22 April 2007, while on a trip to Kathmandu, Hillary suffered a fall, and was hospitalised after returning to New Zealand.
On 11 January 2008, he died of heart failure at Auckland City Hospital.
Flags were lowered to half-mast on New Zealand public buildings and at Scott Base in Antarctica, and Prime Minister Helen Clark called Hillary's death a "profound loss to New Zealand".
On 21 January, Hillary's casket was taken into Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, to lie in state.
A state funeral was held on 22 January 2008, after which his body was cremated. On 29 February 2008, most of his ashes were scattered in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf per his desire. The remainder went to a Nepalese monastery near Everest; a plan to scatter them on the summit was cancelled in 2010.
Posthumous tributes
In January 2008, Lukla Airport, in Lukla, Nepal, was renamed to Tenzing–Hillary Airport in recognition of their promotion of its construction.
On 2 April 2008, a service of thanksgiving in Hillary's honour at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle was attended by Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand dignitaries including Prime Minister Helen Clark, and members of Hillary's and Norgay's families; Gurkha soldiers from Nepal stood guard outside the ceremony.
In October 2008, it was announced that future rugby test matches between England and New Zealand would be played for the Hillary Shield. In 2009 the Duke of Edinburgh's Award in New Zealandformerly the Young New Zealanders' Challengewas renamed "The Duke of Edinburgh's Hillary Award".
On 5 November 2008, a commemorative set of five stamps was issued by New Zealand Post.
There have been many calls for lasting tributes to Hillary. The first major public tribute has been by way of the "Summits for Ed" tribute tour organised by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation. This tribute tour went from Bluff at the bottom of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island, visiting 39 towns and cities along the way. In each venue, school children and members of the public were invited to join to climb a significant hill or site in their area to show their respect for Hillary. The public were also invited to bring small rocks or pebbles that had special significance to them, that would be included in a memorial to Hillary at the base of Mt Ruapehu, in the grounds of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. Funds donated during the tour are used by the foundation to sponsor young New Zealanders on outdoor courses. Over 8,000 persons attended these "Summit" climbs between March and May 2008.
The tribute song "Hillary 88", by the New Zealand duo The Kiwis, is the official world memorial song for Hillary, with the endorsement of Lady Hillary.
A four-day track in the Waitākere Ranges, along Auckland's west coast, is named the Hillary Trail, in honour of Hillary. Hillary's father-in-law, Jim Rose, who had built a bach at Anawhata in 1925, wrote in his 1982 history of Anawhata Beach, "My family look forward to the time when we will be able to walk from Huia to Muriwai on public walking tracks like the old-time Maori could do". Hillary loved the area, and had his own bach near Anawhata. The track was opened on 11 January 2010, the second anniversary of Hillary's death. Rose Track, descending from Anawhata Road to Whites Beach, is named after the Rose family.
The South Ridge of Aoraki / Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain, was renamed Hillary Ridge on 18 August 2011. Hillary and three other climbers were the first party to successfully climb the ridge in 1948. In September 2013 the Government of Nepal proposed naming a mountain in Nepal Hillary Peak in his honour. After the New Horizons mission discovered a mountain range on Pluto on 14 July 2015, it was informally named Hillary Montes (Hillary Mountains) by NASA.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Mountain Legacy Medal, awarded by the Nepalese NGO Mountain Legacy "for remarkable service in the conservation of culture and nature in mountainous regions" was inaugurated in 2003, with the approval of Sir Edmund Hillary.
A bronze bust of Hillary (circa 1953) by Ophelia Gordon Bell is in the Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Sir Edmund Hillary Archive was added to the UNESCO Memory of the world archive in 2013, it is currently held by Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Arms
Publications
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
(The Summit (Chapter 16, pp 197–209) is by Hillary)
External links
from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
On top of the world: Ed Hillary at nzhistory.net.nz
Videos (10) at the New Zealand National Film Unit
Obituary of Edmund Hillary at tributes.com
"Interview with Sir Edmund Hillary: Mountain Climbing" at Smithsonian Folkways
Edmund Hillary on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, 17 April 1979
Edmund Hillary's collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
Edmund Hillary addressing The New York Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon, February 10, 1954 broadcast by WNYC
1919 births
2008 deaths
Ambassadors of New Zealand to Nepal
New Zealand autobiographers
Explorers of Antarctica
High Commissioners of New Zealand to Bangladesh
High Commissioners of New Zealand to India
People in sports awarded knighthoods
Members of the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, First Class
New Zealand and the Antarctic
New Zealand explorers
New Zealand humanitarians
New Zealand military personnel of World War II
New Zealand mountain climbers
New Zealand memoirists
New Zealand male writers
New Zealand people of English descent
Non-fiction outdoors writers
People educated at Auckland Grammar School
People from Auckland
Recipients of the Padma Vibhushan in sports
Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Royal New Zealand Air Force personnel
New Zealand summiters of Mount Everest
University of Auckland alumni
New Zealand beekeepers
New Zealand recipients of the Polar Medal
New Zealand Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Members of the Order of New Zealand
New Zealand Knights of the Garter
Honorary Citizens of Nepal
People associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum
20th-century memoirists
North Pole
South Pole
History of the Ross Dependency
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"Zvi Zylbertal (; born 1952) is an Israeli jurist who served on the Supreme Court of Israel between 2012 and 2017. Prior to his Supreme Court tenure, he served on the Jerusalem District Court.\n\nCareer \nZylbertal was born in Jerusalem in 1952. He was admitted to the Israeli Bar Association in 1983. He was appointed to the Jerusalem District Court in 2000, where he served as a judge until being appointed to the Supreme Court in 2012. In March 2016, he made a surprise announcement that he planned to retire in April 2017, which he did. He was replaced by David Mintz.\n\nReferences \n\n1952 births\nLiving people\nJudges of the Supreme Court of Israel",
"James Marks (1835 – 12 January 1907) was an Australian politician.\n\nHe was born in Sydney to publican James Marks and Elizabeth Charles. He attended school privately in Sydney and then worked on his father's farm. In 1862 he married Sarah Jane Moffitt, with whom he had six children. The family farm was such a success that Marks was able to retire at the age of forty, moving to Woollahra where he became a local alderman. In 1891 he was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly as the Free Trade member for Paddington, but he did not re-contest in 1894. Marks died at Woollahra in 1907.\n\nReferences\n\n \n\n1835 births\n1907 deaths\nMembers of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly\nFree Trade Party politicians\n19th-century Australian politicians"
] |
[
"Ai Otsuka",
"Love Jam"
] |
C_df18be75571544dcbd0c61230abee7b2_1
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When was Love Jam released?
| 1 |
When was Ai Otsuka's Love Jam released?
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Ai Otsuka
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In November 2004, the follow-up to Love Punch, Love Jam, was released, which met even greater popular success. Along with three single released before her second studio album was released. First, "Happy Days" sold 163,433 units and reached third on the Oricon weekly chart. Love Jam Tour 2005, her first tour, began on April 24, 2005. It was completed in June 2005 and a live DVD with footage was released on July 27, 2005. Love Cook, her third album was released on December 14, 2005. "Kingyo Hanabi" was the second single to be released after her first album. "Kingyo Hanabi" also landed in third on the Oricon weekly chart but was able to sell 148,121 units, about 20,000 copies less than her "Happy Days" single. Two months later, Otsuka released another single, "Daisuki da Yo". Like the previous two singles, it reached number 3 on the Oricon weekly chart and sold 156,844 units. Otsuka released her second studio album a month later in November 2004. Love Jam debuted at the number one position and sold 224,381 units in its first week. In total, 656,700 units were sold. Love Jam became her first album to top the chart, but at the same time it was her lowest selling studio album. Love Jam was released in two different versions including a CD and a CD+DVD version. Following the release of Love Jam, Ai Otsuka released the recut single "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" in February 2005. It was a different version of the "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 735 Yen" track on Love Jam. "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" is arranged differently in terms of music and vocals. This single sold 149,134 units and debuted third on the Oricon weekly chart and was the sixty-eighth single of 2005. It was the first ending theme song for the anime Black Jack. CANNOTANSWER
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In November 2004,
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is a Japanese singer-songwriter from Suminoe-ku, Osaka, Japan. She is a popular artist on the Avex Trax label and is best known for her 2003 hit "Sakuranbo", which stayed in the Top 200 Oricon Weekly Singles Chart for 103 weeks.
A piano player since age four, Otsuka composes and co-produces her own songs, as well as writes her own lyrics. Her music ranges from upbeat pop/rock music to ballads.
Every year, Otsuka also has her own Love is Born tour to mark the anniversary of being in the music industry and her birthday in September. All of the Love is Born concerts take place in Japan, ending in her hometown of Osaka. On Love is Born 5th Anniversary in 2008, Otsuka held a leg of the concert in Taiwan, where she performed a Chinese version of her song "Planetarium". In 2009, Otsuka held 3 Love is Born 6th Anniversary concerts in Japan, as well as two concerts in Taiwan.
In 2012, Otsuka debuted as the vocalist of the band Rabbit. She sold 7 million copies in Japan.
Biography
Early life and career beginnings
Otsuka started to play piano at the age of four. She composed her first track at 15, as a homework given by her piano teacher. After graduating from high school she entered to the Osaka University of Arts Nursery College, where she got her degree as a nursery teacher. For a short period of time -around late 2001- she was part of a duo called HimawaRi, along with classmate Mami Nishida. They released only the song "Sakuranbo" on the Internet, and were active for a little time. She sent demo tapes to record labels with no positive results, until she got a call back from Avex just before her graduation from university.
2003: Debut and Love Punch
Her debut single, entitled "Momo no Hanabira", was released on September 10, 2003. The single was a minor hit, peaking at number 24 on the Oricon weekly singles top 100, but stayed on the charts for 21 weeks. Her second single, "Sakuranbo", was released on December 17, 2003. The song debuted at number 20 on the Oricon charts, but managed to get into the Top 10 in February 2004 and went to peak at number five. Eventually, the single stayed on the chart for 101 weeks (almost two years), and a special "encore press" version was commissioned, which peaked at number 4, and it became the twelfth best selling single of 2004. Gradually climbing the charts to top 5, the single. In early March 2004, Otsuka released her third single, "Amaenbo". The song peaked at the sixth position on the Japanese charts, while at the same time "Sakuranbo" was fifth. This was the first time in Japanese music history a female artist was able to have two singles in the top ten in the same week. By end of March 2004, her first album, Love Punch, was released, and peaked third on the Oricon charts selling 190,265 copies in its first week.
Love Jam
In November 2004, the follow-up to Love Punch, Love Jam, was released, which met even greater popular success. Along with three single released before her second studio album was released. First, "Happy Days" sold 163,433 units and reached third on the Oricon weekly chart. Love Jam Tour 2005, her first tour, began on April 24, 2005. It was completed in June 2005 and a live DVD with footage was released on July 27, 2005. Love Cook, her third album was released on December 14, 2005.
"Kingyo Hanabi" was the second single to be released after her first album. "Kingyo Hanabi" also landed in third on the Oricon weekly chart but was able to sell 148,121 units, about 20,000 copies less than her "Happy Days" single. Two months later, Otsuka released another single, "Daisuki da Yo". Like the previous two singles, it reached number 3 on the Oricon weekly chart and sold 156,844 units.
Otsuka released her second studio album a month later in November 2004. Love Jam debuted at the number one position and sold 224,381 units in its first week. In total, 656,700 units were sold. Love Jam became her first album to top the chart, but at the same time it was her lowest selling studio album. Love Jam was released in two different versions including a CD and a CD+DVD version. Following the release of Love Jam, Ai Otsuka released the recut single "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" in February 2005. It was a different version of the "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 735 Yen" track on Love Jam. "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" is arranged differently in terms of music and vocals. This single sold 149,134 units and debuted third on the Oricon weekly chart and was the sixty-eighth single of 2005. It was the first ending theme song for the anime Black Jack.
Love Cook
"Smily/Biidama" was her first single to be released after Love Jam. Both songs from the single were used for commercials. "Smily/Biidama" sold 110,512 copies during its debut week and charted at first place. "Smily/Biidama" sold a total of 308,338 copies in 2005, placing it as the twenty-sixth single of that year.
It was during this time, in June 2005, that Otsuka made her acting debut with the drama Tokyo Friends. Unlike most dramas, the series was directly released on DVD and never aired on TV. The drama used three songs as its theme song, Boo Bee Benz's "To Me" and "Kimi to Iu Hana," as well the coupling song to her sixth single, "Friends: Sabakan Ver." All three tracks would eventually be included in the soundtrack for the drama's movie sequel.
Otsuka released her tenth single in 2005, "Neko ni Fūsen" in middle of the year in July. "Neko ni Fūsen" was her lowest single that year, only reaching third on the chart and selling 111,324 copies. It placed ninety-second on the 2005 yearly charts.
Otsuka's single "Planetarium", was released on September 20, 2005. This was her last single of that year. "Planetarium" sales of 315,669 was her second highest single second only to "Sakuranbo," before her third studio album was released. "Planetarium" was used as the insert song for the live action version of the drama Hana Yori Dango.
Love Cook, her third studio album, came out on December 14, 2005. In its first week, it sold 335,000 copies. The promotional videos for this album were filmed as mini-dramas. She also hosts a radio show on JOQR Recomen!! AM1134hHz called Otsuka Ai no ai-r jack.
Love Piece
In April 2006, Otsuka released "Frienger" (a portmanteau of the words Friend and Ranger). The promotional video was shot in Taiwan and was used as the commercial song for the Toshiba W41T 4 GB MP3 mobile phone. Soon after the release of "Frienger," Otsuka reprised her role as an actress for Tokyo Friends: The Movie, which hit theaters in Japan on August 12, 2006. The movie is a direct sequel to the DVD drama released the previous year. Otsuka also sang the opening theme for Tokyo Friends, "Yumekui", which was released as a new single on August 2, 2006. It debuted fifth on the weekly chart, selling 63,428 copies in the first week and a total of 145,281 copies.
Two months after "Yumekui", Otsuka released another single titled "Renai Shashin" on October 25, 2006, which was used as the opening theme song for the movie Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru. The song was based on events from the film and its original novel, also called Renai Shashin. "Renai Shashin" debuted at number 2 and sold 129,855 copies, making it the 75th best-selling single of the year. At the end of 2006, Otsuka had released a total of three singles and charted on Oricon's 2006 yearly chart with "Frienger" at number 60, "Yumekui" at number 66, and "Renai Shashin" at number 75.
Otsuka released her fourteenth single, "Chu-Lip," on February 21, 2007. The single was used as the theme song for the TBS drama Kirakira Kenshui, starring Manami Konishi and Wentz Eiji of WaT and managed to claim the third position on the Oricon charts.
Ai Am Best
Otsuka released her first best hits compilation album, titled Ai am Best, on March 28, 2007, which features 13 pre-2006 songs and their respective promotional videos. There are 11 songs that span her singles in chronological order, one song from Love Cook and one song from a Nana sound track: "Love for Nana: Only 1 Tribute".
Ai am Best sold 64,396 copies on the first day and topped the Oricon charts, making it Otsuka's best selling album. It sold over 350,000 copies in its first week. "Ai am Best" also features two bonus tracks—one for the DVD, "Best of Babashi", and one for the CD, "Babashi". First Press "Ai am Best" includes an Ai stamp and Ai wallet calendar. Some also include an Ai pin in yellow or white.
Otsuka went on a tour titled Ai am Best Tour that featured songs from Ai am Best and more. The tour started on May 18 and ended on July 7, 2007.
2007–2008: Love debut and Love Piece
On April 11, 2007 Otsuka released a new single, "Love no Theme," as the self-created bunny rabbit character "Love-chan". "Love no Theme" was sung on her Jam Punch Tour 2005. Before its release, it was titled I canChu before it was changed to "Love no Theme". The "Love no Theme" single included a preview of a new single featuring Love, titled "White Choco." This song could only be found previously on the promotional CD released before "Momo no Hanabira". "Love no Theme" unfortunately did not sell as well as Otsuka's normal singles.
Otsuka released her first single after Ai am Best, "Peach/Heart" on July 25, 2007. The first A-side "Peach" is an up-beat summer song and was used as the end theme for the summer drama Hanazakari no Kimitachi E (starring Maki Horikita and Shun Oguri), while the second "Heart" is a mid-tempo track. The single also includes a rearranged version of "Renai Shashin", titled .
On September 26, 2007, Otsuka released two CDs and a DVD. The first CD was Otsuka's fourth original album, titled Love Piece. This included all of her singles from "Frienger" to "Peach/Heart", with five new songs on an 11-track album. The album was released in CD+DVD and CD-only formats, with the DVD including a music video of "Heart" and , a song from the album. The first-press of the DVD also includes the PV of "U-Boat," while the first-press of the CD-only version comes with a 40-page color photobook. The second CD was a limited pressing re-release of the best album "Ai am Best" in CD-only format.
Also on September 26, Otsuka released a DVD of her Ai am Best Tour 2007, recorded at the Tokyo International Forum Hall A on July 9, 2007. The DVD is available in a single-disc edition, as well as a special two-disc edition with outtakes of the tour. The first-press of the special edition comes with a 40-page photobook.
Otsuka performed at Makuhari Messe on July 7, 2007, for one of Japan's two Live Earth concerts, alongside contemporaries Kumi Koda and Ayaka.
2009–2010: Love Letter and Love is Best
Otsuka released her 16th single "Pocket" on November 7, 2007. And two weeks later, Love-chan's second single, "White Choco", was released on November 21, 2007. During 2008, Otsuka embarked on her Love Piece Tour 2008, her fourth solo tour, from February to May. Her 17th single, "Rocket Sneaker/One x Time", was released on May 21. Otsuka's 18th single, "Kurage, Nagareboshi", was released on September 10, 2008. The single was released in four different formats, as a commemoration of her fifth anniversary in the music industry since the release of her debut single "Momo no Hanabira". On December 17, 2008, she released her fifth studio album, Love Letter, which peaked third on the weekly Oricon charts. It contains all of her singles since Love Piece including "Pocket", the third track on the album. Love Letter was her lowest-selling album. On February 25, 2009, "Bye Bye" was released as her second re-cut single. "Bye Bye" was used in a commercial for the Asahi Breweries beverage, Asahi Slat. Otsuka's second compilation album, Love Is Best, was released on November 11, 2009. The album features a collection of "love songs," ranging from singles to album tracks and b-sides, and will feature re-recorded versions of some tracks including a duet with Su from hip-hop band Rip Slyme on the song "Aisu x Time." On its first day of release the album charted at number one with a sales total of 22,895. As her character Love, she also released her first mini album entitled Love It (pronounced Rabitto, as rabbit), on November 18, 2009 (a week after Love Is Best). The album's track "Magic" was used in TV commercials for Music.jp.
In January 2010, Otsuka performed a song for Fuji Television titled "Lucky Star" which the network used as the theme song for its coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics. In February it was announced that "Lucky Star" would be released as a cellphone-only digital single, but later was announced to have a physical release as a double A-side single, "Zokkondition/Lucky Star", which released on April 7, 2010. "Zokkondition" was used in advertisements for Asahi Beer, similar to her previous single "Bye Bye". On September 8, 2010, she released another single "'I Love..." (I ♥ xxx), which was her 21st and last single before taking a hiatus from music.
2011–present: Hiatus, Rabbit and Love Fantastic
During Otsuka's hiatus from music due to her pregnancy, a new song titled "Hikari" was made available for download on October 9, 2011, through her official mobile website Love 9 Cube. On March 30, 2012, she released Neko ga Suki ni natta Kirai na Neko, a series of two picture books about cats. Purchasers of the books had the chance to download another new song, called "Gomen ne". On September 9, 2012, she celebrated her 30th birthday and ninth anniversary in the music industry with Love Is Born: 9th Anniversary 2012, her first series of concerts in two years, in which she held performances in Tokyo, Hyogo and Aichi.
In October 2012, Otsuka announced that she would be debuting as the vocalist of a new band called Rabbit. The band released their debut album Rabito on December 12, 2012 through the Cutting Edge label. The album peaked at number 61 on the Oricon charts. Rabbit went on their first domestic tour in Japan starting in February 2013. This month it was also announced that Otsuka, as a solo, would begin a tour in September to celebrate her tenth anniversary in the music industry,. In July 2013, it was announced that Otsuka would be releasing her first solo single in three years, entitled "Re:Name", to celebrate her tenth anniversary. The single was released on October 9, 2013, and debuted at number eight on the Japanese charts. On December 13, 2013, a song entitled "Sakuranbo (Cocktail)", which was a self-cover version of her second single, was released digitally through the iTunes Music Store. On March 26, 2014, Otsuka released an EP entitled AIO Punch, which included other self-covers from previously released songs. And she also recorded a cover of Dreams Come True's "Romance" for their tribute album Watashi to Dori Kamu: Dreams Come True 25th Anniversary Best Covers, which was released on the same day. Her 23rd single, "More More" was released on May 21, 2014. Otsuka's sixth studio album, entitled Love Fantastic, was released on July 16, 2014. She released her seventh album, Love Tricky, on April 22, 2015. Otsuka's eighth studio album, Love Honey, came out on April 12, 2017.
Personal life
In February 2010, it was reported by Josei Seven magazine that Otsuka was dating rapper Kazuto Otsuki (publicly known as Su, member of hip hop group Rip Slyme), with whom she collaborated in October 2009 for her song "Aisu x Time". Neither of the artists' agencies would comment on the matter. On June 26, 2010, Otsuka announced via a message on her official Web site that she and Su had gotten married on the previous day. Su also posted an announcement on Rip Slyme's website, confirming what Otsuka wrote on her website.
During her Love is Born concert held on September 11, 2010, Otsuka revealed to the audience that she was expecting her first child, and on March 24, 2011, she gave birth to a daughter.
On November 22, 2018, Otsuka announced that she had filed for divorce.
Discography
Studio albums
2004: Love Punch
2004: Love Jam
2005: Love Cook
2007: Love Piece
2008: Love Letter
2014: Love Fantastic
2015: Love Tricky
2017: Love Honey
Compilation albums
2007: Ai Am Best
2009: Love Is Best
2019: Ai Am Best, too
Radio shows
Otsuka Ai ai-r Jack (Nippon Cultural Broadcasting)
Corolla presents Life-Love Circle (Tokyo FM)
Books
(February 25, 2005)
Love World (September 25, 2007)
(January 31, 2008)
(March 31, 2010)
(March 30, 2012)
Awards
Japan Cable Radio Awards
2004: Best New Artist
Best Hits Kayōsai
2004: Best New Artist
2005: Gold Artist Prize – "Planetarium"
2006: Gold Artist Prize – "Ren'ai Shashin"
2007: Gold Artist Prize – "Pocket"
Japan Gold Disc Award
2005: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Punch
2005: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Jam
2006: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Cook
2007: The Best 10 Albums - Ai Am Best
MTV Video Music Awards Japan
2007: Best Pop Video - "Ren'ai Shashin"
2007: Best Video from a Film - "Ren'ai Shashin" (from Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru)
References
External links
Love website
1982 births
Living people
Japanese women pop singers
Japanese actresses
Japanese women singer-songwriters
Japanese singer-songwriters
Musicians from Osaka
Osaka University of Arts alumni
Avex Trax artists
21st-century Japanese women singers
21st-century Japanese singers
| true |
[
"\"One Shot at Love\" is the fourth single released from LL Cool J's third album, Walking with a Panther. It was released in 1989 for Def Jam Recordings and was produced by Dwayne Simon and LL Cool J. \"One Shot at Love\" was a commercial disappointment as it only peaked at #68 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop songs chart.\n\nTrack listing\n\nA-side\n\"One Shot at Love\" (J.T. Smith, D.Simon, S. Ett) - 4:09\n\nB-side\n\"Clap Your Hands\" (J.T. Smith) - 3:37\n\nReferences\n\n1989 singles\nLL Cool J songs\nSongs written by LL Cool J\n1989 songs\nDef Jam Recordings singles\nSongs written by Dwayne Simon",
"When the Lights Go Out was a 1988 album that was recorded by American singer/actress Pia Zadora. The album was reissued in July 2014 as a 2-CD set.\n\nBackground\nThe set was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis in 1987 and was intended to be released in the United States on Epic Records, but those plans were scrapped and was instead released in Europe through CBS Records, where it failed to chart in that region. Its only release from that album, \"Dance Out Of My Head,\" peaked at number 65 in the United Kingdom.\n\nOn July 28, 2014, US label Funky Town Grooves reissued the album in a 2-CD set, with the entire tracks remastered on one CD while the second CD contained 6 unreleased remixed versions of \"Dance Out of My Head\" and 5 unreleased remixes of \"Heartbeat of Love\" from the Pia Z album. This marked the first time that the album was released in the United States since Epic's decision to shelve the release stateside.\n\nTrack listing\nAll tracks composed by James Harris III and Terry Lewis\n\n1988 and 2014 reissue\n \"I Don't Wanna Love\" (4:26)\t\n \"Still Remembered\" (4:37)\t\n \"Dance Out of My Head\" (4:39)\t\n \"Laughin' at You\" (3:54)\t\n \"When the Lights Go Out\" (4:14)\t\n \"Pia's Interlude\" (0:25)\t\n \"I Really Like You (Not Him)\" (5:04)\t\n \"Silence\" (3:40)\t\n \"Since I've Been Lovin' You\" (4:40)\t\n \"Pia's Theme\" (1:49)\t\n \"It's Always the Same\" (5:23)\n\n2014 reissue (CD2 remixes)\n \"Dance Out of My Head\" (The Dressed Down Mix)\n \"Dance Out of My Head\" (House Groove Mix)\n \"Dance Out of My Head\" (Jam & Lewis Remix)\n \"Dance Out of My Head\" (Ben Liebrand Mix)\n \"Dance Out of My Head\" (Dub version)\n \"Dance Out of My Head\" (7\" version)\n \"Heartbeat of Love\" (7\" version)\n \"Heartbeat of Love\" (C&C Club Mix)\n \"Heartbeat of Love\" (C&C Dub Mix)\n \"Heartbeat of Love\" (Freestyle Club Mix)\n \"Heartbeat of Love\" (The DJ's Bonus Beats)\n\nPersonnel\nPia Zadora – lead vocals\nJimmy Jam – drum and keyboard programming, digital and analog keyboards, acoustic piano, percussion\nTerry Lewis – drum programming, acoustic and electric basses, guitars, percussion\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nVideo for \"Dance Out Of My Head\" from YouTube\n\n1988 albums\nPia Zadora albums\nAlbums produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis\nEpic Records albums\nDance-pop albums by American artists"
] |
[
"Ai Otsuka",
"Love Jam",
"When was Love Jam released?",
"In November 2004,"
] |
C_df18be75571544dcbd0c61230abee7b2_1
|
What was a popular single off the album?
| 2 |
What was a popular single off of Ai Otsuka's Love Jam album?
|
Ai Otsuka
|
In November 2004, the follow-up to Love Punch, Love Jam, was released, which met even greater popular success. Along with three single released before her second studio album was released. First, "Happy Days" sold 163,433 units and reached third on the Oricon weekly chart. Love Jam Tour 2005, her first tour, began on April 24, 2005. It was completed in June 2005 and a live DVD with footage was released on July 27, 2005. Love Cook, her third album was released on December 14, 2005. "Kingyo Hanabi" was the second single to be released after her first album. "Kingyo Hanabi" also landed in third on the Oricon weekly chart but was able to sell 148,121 units, about 20,000 copies less than her "Happy Days" single. Two months later, Otsuka released another single, "Daisuki da Yo". Like the previous two singles, it reached number 3 on the Oricon weekly chart and sold 156,844 units. Otsuka released her second studio album a month later in November 2004. Love Jam debuted at the number one position and sold 224,381 units in its first week. In total, 656,700 units were sold. Love Jam became her first album to top the chart, but at the same time it was her lowest selling studio album. Love Jam was released in two different versions including a CD and a CD+DVD version. Following the release of Love Jam, Ai Otsuka released the recut single "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" in February 2005. It was a different version of the "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 735 Yen" track on Love Jam. "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" is arranged differently in terms of music and vocals. This single sold 149,134 units and debuted third on the Oricon weekly chart and was the sixty-eighth single of 2005. It was the first ending theme song for the anime Black Jack. CANNOTANSWER
|
Happy Days
|
is a Japanese singer-songwriter from Suminoe-ku, Osaka, Japan. She is a popular artist on the Avex Trax label and is best known for her 2003 hit "Sakuranbo", which stayed in the Top 200 Oricon Weekly Singles Chart for 103 weeks.
A piano player since age four, Otsuka composes and co-produces her own songs, as well as writes her own lyrics. Her music ranges from upbeat pop/rock music to ballads.
Every year, Otsuka also has her own Love is Born tour to mark the anniversary of being in the music industry and her birthday in September. All of the Love is Born concerts take place in Japan, ending in her hometown of Osaka. On Love is Born 5th Anniversary in 2008, Otsuka held a leg of the concert in Taiwan, where she performed a Chinese version of her song "Planetarium". In 2009, Otsuka held 3 Love is Born 6th Anniversary concerts in Japan, as well as two concerts in Taiwan.
In 2012, Otsuka debuted as the vocalist of the band Rabbit. She sold 7 million copies in Japan.
Biography
Early life and career beginnings
Otsuka started to play piano at the age of four. She composed her first track at 15, as a homework given by her piano teacher. After graduating from high school she entered to the Osaka University of Arts Nursery College, where she got her degree as a nursery teacher. For a short period of time -around late 2001- she was part of a duo called HimawaRi, along with classmate Mami Nishida. They released only the song "Sakuranbo" on the Internet, and were active for a little time. She sent demo tapes to record labels with no positive results, until she got a call back from Avex just before her graduation from university.
2003: Debut and Love Punch
Her debut single, entitled "Momo no Hanabira", was released on September 10, 2003. The single was a minor hit, peaking at number 24 on the Oricon weekly singles top 100, but stayed on the charts for 21 weeks. Her second single, "Sakuranbo", was released on December 17, 2003. The song debuted at number 20 on the Oricon charts, but managed to get into the Top 10 in February 2004 and went to peak at number five. Eventually, the single stayed on the chart for 101 weeks (almost two years), and a special "encore press" version was commissioned, which peaked at number 4, and it became the twelfth best selling single of 2004. Gradually climbing the charts to top 5, the single. In early March 2004, Otsuka released her third single, "Amaenbo". The song peaked at the sixth position on the Japanese charts, while at the same time "Sakuranbo" was fifth. This was the first time in Japanese music history a female artist was able to have two singles in the top ten in the same week. By end of March 2004, her first album, Love Punch, was released, and peaked third on the Oricon charts selling 190,265 copies in its first week.
Love Jam
In November 2004, the follow-up to Love Punch, Love Jam, was released, which met even greater popular success. Along with three single released before her second studio album was released. First, "Happy Days" sold 163,433 units and reached third on the Oricon weekly chart. Love Jam Tour 2005, her first tour, began on April 24, 2005. It was completed in June 2005 and a live DVD with footage was released on July 27, 2005. Love Cook, her third album was released on December 14, 2005.
"Kingyo Hanabi" was the second single to be released after her first album. "Kingyo Hanabi" also landed in third on the Oricon weekly chart but was able to sell 148,121 units, about 20,000 copies less than her "Happy Days" single. Two months later, Otsuka released another single, "Daisuki da Yo". Like the previous two singles, it reached number 3 on the Oricon weekly chart and sold 156,844 units.
Otsuka released her second studio album a month later in November 2004. Love Jam debuted at the number one position and sold 224,381 units in its first week. In total, 656,700 units were sold. Love Jam became her first album to top the chart, but at the same time it was her lowest selling studio album. Love Jam was released in two different versions including a CD and a CD+DVD version. Following the release of Love Jam, Ai Otsuka released the recut single "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" in February 2005. It was a different version of the "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 735 Yen" track on Love Jam. "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" is arranged differently in terms of music and vocals. This single sold 149,134 units and debuted third on the Oricon weekly chart and was the sixty-eighth single of 2005. It was the first ending theme song for the anime Black Jack.
Love Cook
"Smily/Biidama" was her first single to be released after Love Jam. Both songs from the single were used for commercials. "Smily/Biidama" sold 110,512 copies during its debut week and charted at first place. "Smily/Biidama" sold a total of 308,338 copies in 2005, placing it as the twenty-sixth single of that year.
It was during this time, in June 2005, that Otsuka made her acting debut with the drama Tokyo Friends. Unlike most dramas, the series was directly released on DVD and never aired on TV. The drama used three songs as its theme song, Boo Bee Benz's "To Me" and "Kimi to Iu Hana," as well the coupling song to her sixth single, "Friends: Sabakan Ver." All three tracks would eventually be included in the soundtrack for the drama's movie sequel.
Otsuka released her tenth single in 2005, "Neko ni Fūsen" in middle of the year in July. "Neko ni Fūsen" was her lowest single that year, only reaching third on the chart and selling 111,324 copies. It placed ninety-second on the 2005 yearly charts.
Otsuka's single "Planetarium", was released on September 20, 2005. This was her last single of that year. "Planetarium" sales of 315,669 was her second highest single second only to "Sakuranbo," before her third studio album was released. "Planetarium" was used as the insert song for the live action version of the drama Hana Yori Dango.
Love Cook, her third studio album, came out on December 14, 2005. In its first week, it sold 335,000 copies. The promotional videos for this album were filmed as mini-dramas. She also hosts a radio show on JOQR Recomen!! AM1134hHz called Otsuka Ai no ai-r jack.
Love Piece
In April 2006, Otsuka released "Frienger" (a portmanteau of the words Friend and Ranger). The promotional video was shot in Taiwan and was used as the commercial song for the Toshiba W41T 4 GB MP3 mobile phone. Soon after the release of "Frienger," Otsuka reprised her role as an actress for Tokyo Friends: The Movie, which hit theaters in Japan on August 12, 2006. The movie is a direct sequel to the DVD drama released the previous year. Otsuka also sang the opening theme for Tokyo Friends, "Yumekui", which was released as a new single on August 2, 2006. It debuted fifth on the weekly chart, selling 63,428 copies in the first week and a total of 145,281 copies.
Two months after "Yumekui", Otsuka released another single titled "Renai Shashin" on October 25, 2006, which was used as the opening theme song for the movie Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru. The song was based on events from the film and its original novel, also called Renai Shashin. "Renai Shashin" debuted at number 2 and sold 129,855 copies, making it the 75th best-selling single of the year. At the end of 2006, Otsuka had released a total of three singles and charted on Oricon's 2006 yearly chart with "Frienger" at number 60, "Yumekui" at number 66, and "Renai Shashin" at number 75.
Otsuka released her fourteenth single, "Chu-Lip," on February 21, 2007. The single was used as the theme song for the TBS drama Kirakira Kenshui, starring Manami Konishi and Wentz Eiji of WaT and managed to claim the third position on the Oricon charts.
Ai Am Best
Otsuka released her first best hits compilation album, titled Ai am Best, on March 28, 2007, which features 13 pre-2006 songs and their respective promotional videos. There are 11 songs that span her singles in chronological order, one song from Love Cook and one song from a Nana sound track: "Love for Nana: Only 1 Tribute".
Ai am Best sold 64,396 copies on the first day and topped the Oricon charts, making it Otsuka's best selling album. It sold over 350,000 copies in its first week. "Ai am Best" also features two bonus tracks—one for the DVD, "Best of Babashi", and one for the CD, "Babashi". First Press "Ai am Best" includes an Ai stamp and Ai wallet calendar. Some also include an Ai pin in yellow or white.
Otsuka went on a tour titled Ai am Best Tour that featured songs from Ai am Best and more. The tour started on May 18 and ended on July 7, 2007.
2007–2008: Love debut and Love Piece
On April 11, 2007 Otsuka released a new single, "Love no Theme," as the self-created bunny rabbit character "Love-chan". "Love no Theme" was sung on her Jam Punch Tour 2005. Before its release, it was titled I canChu before it was changed to "Love no Theme". The "Love no Theme" single included a preview of a new single featuring Love, titled "White Choco." This song could only be found previously on the promotional CD released before "Momo no Hanabira". "Love no Theme" unfortunately did not sell as well as Otsuka's normal singles.
Otsuka released her first single after Ai am Best, "Peach/Heart" on July 25, 2007. The first A-side "Peach" is an up-beat summer song and was used as the end theme for the summer drama Hanazakari no Kimitachi E (starring Maki Horikita and Shun Oguri), while the second "Heart" is a mid-tempo track. The single also includes a rearranged version of "Renai Shashin", titled .
On September 26, 2007, Otsuka released two CDs and a DVD. The first CD was Otsuka's fourth original album, titled Love Piece. This included all of her singles from "Frienger" to "Peach/Heart", with five new songs on an 11-track album. The album was released in CD+DVD and CD-only formats, with the DVD including a music video of "Heart" and , a song from the album. The first-press of the DVD also includes the PV of "U-Boat," while the first-press of the CD-only version comes with a 40-page color photobook. The second CD was a limited pressing re-release of the best album "Ai am Best" in CD-only format.
Also on September 26, Otsuka released a DVD of her Ai am Best Tour 2007, recorded at the Tokyo International Forum Hall A on July 9, 2007. The DVD is available in a single-disc edition, as well as a special two-disc edition with outtakes of the tour. The first-press of the special edition comes with a 40-page photobook.
Otsuka performed at Makuhari Messe on July 7, 2007, for one of Japan's two Live Earth concerts, alongside contemporaries Kumi Koda and Ayaka.
2009–2010: Love Letter and Love is Best
Otsuka released her 16th single "Pocket" on November 7, 2007. And two weeks later, Love-chan's second single, "White Choco", was released on November 21, 2007. During 2008, Otsuka embarked on her Love Piece Tour 2008, her fourth solo tour, from February to May. Her 17th single, "Rocket Sneaker/One x Time", was released on May 21. Otsuka's 18th single, "Kurage, Nagareboshi", was released on September 10, 2008. The single was released in four different formats, as a commemoration of her fifth anniversary in the music industry since the release of her debut single "Momo no Hanabira". On December 17, 2008, she released her fifth studio album, Love Letter, which peaked third on the weekly Oricon charts. It contains all of her singles since Love Piece including "Pocket", the third track on the album. Love Letter was her lowest-selling album. On February 25, 2009, "Bye Bye" was released as her second re-cut single. "Bye Bye" was used in a commercial for the Asahi Breweries beverage, Asahi Slat. Otsuka's second compilation album, Love Is Best, was released on November 11, 2009. The album features a collection of "love songs," ranging from singles to album tracks and b-sides, and will feature re-recorded versions of some tracks including a duet with Su from hip-hop band Rip Slyme on the song "Aisu x Time." On its first day of release the album charted at number one with a sales total of 22,895. As her character Love, she also released her first mini album entitled Love It (pronounced Rabitto, as rabbit), on November 18, 2009 (a week after Love Is Best). The album's track "Magic" was used in TV commercials for Music.jp.
In January 2010, Otsuka performed a song for Fuji Television titled "Lucky Star" which the network used as the theme song for its coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics. In February it was announced that "Lucky Star" would be released as a cellphone-only digital single, but later was announced to have a physical release as a double A-side single, "Zokkondition/Lucky Star", which released on April 7, 2010. "Zokkondition" was used in advertisements for Asahi Beer, similar to her previous single "Bye Bye". On September 8, 2010, she released another single "'I Love..." (I ♥ xxx), which was her 21st and last single before taking a hiatus from music.
2011–present: Hiatus, Rabbit and Love Fantastic
During Otsuka's hiatus from music due to her pregnancy, a new song titled "Hikari" was made available for download on October 9, 2011, through her official mobile website Love 9 Cube. On March 30, 2012, she released Neko ga Suki ni natta Kirai na Neko, a series of two picture books about cats. Purchasers of the books had the chance to download another new song, called "Gomen ne". On September 9, 2012, she celebrated her 30th birthday and ninth anniversary in the music industry with Love Is Born: 9th Anniversary 2012, her first series of concerts in two years, in which she held performances in Tokyo, Hyogo and Aichi.
In October 2012, Otsuka announced that she would be debuting as the vocalist of a new band called Rabbit. The band released their debut album Rabito on December 12, 2012 through the Cutting Edge label. The album peaked at number 61 on the Oricon charts. Rabbit went on their first domestic tour in Japan starting in February 2013. This month it was also announced that Otsuka, as a solo, would begin a tour in September to celebrate her tenth anniversary in the music industry,. In July 2013, it was announced that Otsuka would be releasing her first solo single in three years, entitled "Re:Name", to celebrate her tenth anniversary. The single was released on October 9, 2013, and debuted at number eight on the Japanese charts. On December 13, 2013, a song entitled "Sakuranbo (Cocktail)", which was a self-cover version of her second single, was released digitally through the iTunes Music Store. On March 26, 2014, Otsuka released an EP entitled AIO Punch, which included other self-covers from previously released songs. And she also recorded a cover of Dreams Come True's "Romance" for their tribute album Watashi to Dori Kamu: Dreams Come True 25th Anniversary Best Covers, which was released on the same day. Her 23rd single, "More More" was released on May 21, 2014. Otsuka's sixth studio album, entitled Love Fantastic, was released on July 16, 2014. She released her seventh album, Love Tricky, on April 22, 2015. Otsuka's eighth studio album, Love Honey, came out on April 12, 2017.
Personal life
In February 2010, it was reported by Josei Seven magazine that Otsuka was dating rapper Kazuto Otsuki (publicly known as Su, member of hip hop group Rip Slyme), with whom she collaborated in October 2009 for her song "Aisu x Time". Neither of the artists' agencies would comment on the matter. On June 26, 2010, Otsuka announced via a message on her official Web site that she and Su had gotten married on the previous day. Su also posted an announcement on Rip Slyme's website, confirming what Otsuka wrote on her website.
During her Love is Born concert held on September 11, 2010, Otsuka revealed to the audience that she was expecting her first child, and on March 24, 2011, she gave birth to a daughter.
On November 22, 2018, Otsuka announced that she had filed for divorce.
Discography
Studio albums
2004: Love Punch
2004: Love Jam
2005: Love Cook
2007: Love Piece
2008: Love Letter
2014: Love Fantastic
2015: Love Tricky
2017: Love Honey
Compilation albums
2007: Ai Am Best
2009: Love Is Best
2019: Ai Am Best, too
Radio shows
Otsuka Ai ai-r Jack (Nippon Cultural Broadcasting)
Corolla presents Life-Love Circle (Tokyo FM)
Books
(February 25, 2005)
Love World (September 25, 2007)
(January 31, 2008)
(March 31, 2010)
(March 30, 2012)
Awards
Japan Cable Radio Awards
2004: Best New Artist
Best Hits Kayōsai
2004: Best New Artist
2005: Gold Artist Prize – "Planetarium"
2006: Gold Artist Prize – "Ren'ai Shashin"
2007: Gold Artist Prize – "Pocket"
Japan Gold Disc Award
2005: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Punch
2005: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Jam
2006: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Cook
2007: The Best 10 Albums - Ai Am Best
MTV Video Music Awards Japan
2007: Best Pop Video - "Ren'ai Shashin"
2007: Best Video from a Film - "Ren'ai Shashin" (from Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru)
References
External links
Love website
1982 births
Living people
Japanese women pop singers
Japanese actresses
Japanese women singer-songwriters
Japanese singer-songwriters
Musicians from Osaka
Osaka University of Arts alumni
Avex Trax artists
21st-century Japanese women singers
21st-century Japanese singers
| true |
[
"Kardia Mou Min Anisiheis (Greek: Καρδιά Μου Μην Ανησυχείς, English: Do not worry my heart) is an album by Antonis Remos. It was released in May 2002 and was the best selling album of the year selling more than 150,000 copies and was certified 3x Platinum. In Cyprus the album sold more than 12,000 copies and was certified 2x Platinum.\n\nPromotion\nin December 2001, a double-a side cd-single was released with the singles Ela Na Me Telioseis and Den Eho Pou Na Pao. \nIn winter 2002-2003 Remos appeared with Alkistis Protopsalti performing most of the songs of his album.\nThe album was re-released in May 2003, featuring remixes and the duet with Alkistis Protopsalti S' Agapo which was the second single from her own album Pes Mou Thalassa which was released in December 2002.\n\nTrack listing\n Kardia mou min anisiheis (Do Not Worry My Heart)\n Pes mou ti zitas (Tell Me What Are You Asking For)\n Ekripsa To Prosopo Mou (I Hid My Face)\n Den Eho Pou Na Pao (I Have Nowhere To Go)\n Tremo (I'm Trembling)\n Ela na me teleiosis (Come To Finish Me Off)\n Ti Sou 'Ho Kani; (What Have I Done To You?)\n Paradehome (I Admit) \n Den teliosame (We're Not Done)\n S' Agapo...Ine Aplo (I Love You, It's Simple)\n Savvatovrada (Saturday Nights)\n Mi Me Rotae Kanis (Don't Anyone Ask Me)\n Arrostimeno Mou Mialo (My Sick Mind)\n Meta Ap' Ola Auta (After All This)\n S' Ekdikithika (I Took My Revenge)\nRe-released Edition bonus tracks\n Den teleiosame (Remixes by Remee)\n Kardia mou min anisiheis (Galleon Radio mix)\n S' Agapo (Alkistis Protopsalti featuring Antonis Remos)\n\nSingles\nEla Na Me Telioseis\n-The first single and first video of the album. Was released in December 2001 in a double-a cd single with \"Olos O Kosmos Ise Esi\". The cd-single was certified double Platinum.\nDen Eho Pou Na Pao\n-Second single off the album. Was released in December 2001 in a double-a cd single with \"Ela Na Me Telioseis\". The cd-single was certified double Platinum.\nKardia Mou Min Anisihis \n-Third single off the album, released just prior to the release of the album in Spring 2002. A cd-single was also released featuring various remixes.\nTremo\n-Fourth single and second video clip off the album. Released in summer 2002.\nEkripsa To Prosopo Mou\n-Fifth single and third video clip off the album. Released in Autumn 2002.\nSavvatovrada\n-Sixth single and forth (and final) video clip off the album. Released in February 2003.\nDen Teliosame\n-Seventh and final single off the album released in May 2003. A cd-single featuring remixes was also released at the same time.\n\nalso included on the re-release edition of the album:\nS' Agapo - Alikistis Protopsalti featuring Antonis Remos\n-The second single off Alkistis Protopsalti album Pes Mou Thalassa released in December 2002. It was included in the re-release of Kardia Mou Min Anisiheis in May 2003.\n\nReferences\n\n2002 albums\nAntonis Remos albums",
"\"What It Is to Burn\" is the debut single and title track off the album What It Is to Burn by the U.S. post-hardcore band Finch. It was released as a single in 2003 and was featured in the pilot episode of One Tree Hill. A demo version of the song was released on the Drive-Thru Records compilation CD Welcome to the Family in 2001.\n\nBackground \nIn an interview with AOL, lead singer Nate Barcalow said he wrote this song from the viewpoint of a man in hell sending a letter to his loved one.\n\n\"What It Is to Burn\" was first released in 2001 as a demo for a compilation by Drive-Thru Records entitled Welcome to the Family. This version is described as being longer and orchestral, as well as more popular within Finch's fanbase. The song was re-recorded and added as the title track for Finch's debut album in 2002. The shorter album version was released as a single in 2003, peaking at No. 15 on Billboard's Alternative Songs chart; to this date, it is Finch's only charting song in the United States.\n\nLoudwire listed \"What It Is to Burn\" at No. 47 in their list of the Top 21st Century Hard Rock Songs.\n\nChart history\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n AOL interview \n\n2003 singles\nSongs written by Nate Barcalow\nFinch (American band) songs\nRock ballads\n2001 songs"
] |
[
"Ai Otsuka",
"Love Jam",
"When was Love Jam released?",
"In November 2004,",
"What was a popular single off the album?",
"Happy Days"
] |
C_df18be75571544dcbd0c61230abee7b2_1
|
Did she win any awards for Happy Days?
| 3 |
Did Ai Otsuka win any awards for Happy Days?
|
Ai Otsuka
|
In November 2004, the follow-up to Love Punch, Love Jam, was released, which met even greater popular success. Along with three single released before her second studio album was released. First, "Happy Days" sold 163,433 units and reached third on the Oricon weekly chart. Love Jam Tour 2005, her first tour, began on April 24, 2005. It was completed in June 2005 and a live DVD with footage was released on July 27, 2005. Love Cook, her third album was released on December 14, 2005. "Kingyo Hanabi" was the second single to be released after her first album. "Kingyo Hanabi" also landed in third on the Oricon weekly chart but was able to sell 148,121 units, about 20,000 copies less than her "Happy Days" single. Two months later, Otsuka released another single, "Daisuki da Yo". Like the previous two singles, it reached number 3 on the Oricon weekly chart and sold 156,844 units. Otsuka released her second studio album a month later in November 2004. Love Jam debuted at the number one position and sold 224,381 units in its first week. In total, 656,700 units were sold. Love Jam became her first album to top the chart, but at the same time it was her lowest selling studio album. Love Jam was released in two different versions including a CD and a CD+DVD version. Following the release of Love Jam, Ai Otsuka released the recut single "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" in February 2005. It was a different version of the "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 735 Yen" track on Love Jam. "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" is arranged differently in terms of music and vocals. This single sold 149,134 units and debuted third on the Oricon weekly chart and was the sixty-eighth single of 2005. It was the first ending theme song for the anime Black Jack. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
is a Japanese singer-songwriter from Suminoe-ku, Osaka, Japan. She is a popular artist on the Avex Trax label and is best known for her 2003 hit "Sakuranbo", which stayed in the Top 200 Oricon Weekly Singles Chart for 103 weeks.
A piano player since age four, Otsuka composes and co-produces her own songs, as well as writes her own lyrics. Her music ranges from upbeat pop/rock music to ballads.
Every year, Otsuka also has her own Love is Born tour to mark the anniversary of being in the music industry and her birthday in September. All of the Love is Born concerts take place in Japan, ending in her hometown of Osaka. On Love is Born 5th Anniversary in 2008, Otsuka held a leg of the concert in Taiwan, where she performed a Chinese version of her song "Planetarium". In 2009, Otsuka held 3 Love is Born 6th Anniversary concerts in Japan, as well as two concerts in Taiwan.
In 2012, Otsuka debuted as the vocalist of the band Rabbit. She sold 7 million copies in Japan.
Biography
Early life and career beginnings
Otsuka started to play piano at the age of four. She composed her first track at 15, as a homework given by her piano teacher. After graduating from high school she entered to the Osaka University of Arts Nursery College, where she got her degree as a nursery teacher. For a short period of time -around late 2001- she was part of a duo called HimawaRi, along with classmate Mami Nishida. They released only the song "Sakuranbo" on the Internet, and were active for a little time. She sent demo tapes to record labels with no positive results, until she got a call back from Avex just before her graduation from university.
2003: Debut and Love Punch
Her debut single, entitled "Momo no Hanabira", was released on September 10, 2003. The single was a minor hit, peaking at number 24 on the Oricon weekly singles top 100, but stayed on the charts for 21 weeks. Her second single, "Sakuranbo", was released on December 17, 2003. The song debuted at number 20 on the Oricon charts, but managed to get into the Top 10 in February 2004 and went to peak at number five. Eventually, the single stayed on the chart for 101 weeks (almost two years), and a special "encore press" version was commissioned, which peaked at number 4, and it became the twelfth best selling single of 2004. Gradually climbing the charts to top 5, the single. In early March 2004, Otsuka released her third single, "Amaenbo". The song peaked at the sixth position on the Japanese charts, while at the same time "Sakuranbo" was fifth. This was the first time in Japanese music history a female artist was able to have two singles in the top ten in the same week. By end of March 2004, her first album, Love Punch, was released, and peaked third on the Oricon charts selling 190,265 copies in its first week.
Love Jam
In November 2004, the follow-up to Love Punch, Love Jam, was released, which met even greater popular success. Along with three single released before her second studio album was released. First, "Happy Days" sold 163,433 units and reached third on the Oricon weekly chart. Love Jam Tour 2005, her first tour, began on April 24, 2005. It was completed in June 2005 and a live DVD with footage was released on July 27, 2005. Love Cook, her third album was released on December 14, 2005.
"Kingyo Hanabi" was the second single to be released after her first album. "Kingyo Hanabi" also landed in third on the Oricon weekly chart but was able to sell 148,121 units, about 20,000 copies less than her "Happy Days" single. Two months later, Otsuka released another single, "Daisuki da Yo". Like the previous two singles, it reached number 3 on the Oricon weekly chart and sold 156,844 units.
Otsuka released her second studio album a month later in November 2004. Love Jam debuted at the number one position and sold 224,381 units in its first week. In total, 656,700 units were sold. Love Jam became her first album to top the chart, but at the same time it was her lowest selling studio album. Love Jam was released in two different versions including a CD and a CD+DVD version. Following the release of Love Jam, Ai Otsuka released the recut single "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" in February 2005. It was a different version of the "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 735 Yen" track on Love Jam. "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" is arranged differently in terms of music and vocals. This single sold 149,134 units and debuted third on the Oricon weekly chart and was the sixty-eighth single of 2005. It was the first ending theme song for the anime Black Jack.
Love Cook
"Smily/Biidama" was her first single to be released after Love Jam. Both songs from the single were used for commercials. "Smily/Biidama" sold 110,512 copies during its debut week and charted at first place. "Smily/Biidama" sold a total of 308,338 copies in 2005, placing it as the twenty-sixth single of that year.
It was during this time, in June 2005, that Otsuka made her acting debut with the drama Tokyo Friends. Unlike most dramas, the series was directly released on DVD and never aired on TV. The drama used three songs as its theme song, Boo Bee Benz's "To Me" and "Kimi to Iu Hana," as well the coupling song to her sixth single, "Friends: Sabakan Ver." All three tracks would eventually be included in the soundtrack for the drama's movie sequel.
Otsuka released her tenth single in 2005, "Neko ni Fūsen" in middle of the year in July. "Neko ni Fūsen" was her lowest single that year, only reaching third on the chart and selling 111,324 copies. It placed ninety-second on the 2005 yearly charts.
Otsuka's single "Planetarium", was released on September 20, 2005. This was her last single of that year. "Planetarium" sales of 315,669 was her second highest single second only to "Sakuranbo," before her third studio album was released. "Planetarium" was used as the insert song for the live action version of the drama Hana Yori Dango.
Love Cook, her third studio album, came out on December 14, 2005. In its first week, it sold 335,000 copies. The promotional videos for this album were filmed as mini-dramas. She also hosts a radio show on JOQR Recomen!! AM1134hHz called Otsuka Ai no ai-r jack.
Love Piece
In April 2006, Otsuka released "Frienger" (a portmanteau of the words Friend and Ranger). The promotional video was shot in Taiwan and was used as the commercial song for the Toshiba W41T 4 GB MP3 mobile phone. Soon after the release of "Frienger," Otsuka reprised her role as an actress for Tokyo Friends: The Movie, which hit theaters in Japan on August 12, 2006. The movie is a direct sequel to the DVD drama released the previous year. Otsuka also sang the opening theme for Tokyo Friends, "Yumekui", which was released as a new single on August 2, 2006. It debuted fifth on the weekly chart, selling 63,428 copies in the first week and a total of 145,281 copies.
Two months after "Yumekui", Otsuka released another single titled "Renai Shashin" on October 25, 2006, which was used as the opening theme song for the movie Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru. The song was based on events from the film and its original novel, also called Renai Shashin. "Renai Shashin" debuted at number 2 and sold 129,855 copies, making it the 75th best-selling single of the year. At the end of 2006, Otsuka had released a total of three singles and charted on Oricon's 2006 yearly chart with "Frienger" at number 60, "Yumekui" at number 66, and "Renai Shashin" at number 75.
Otsuka released her fourteenth single, "Chu-Lip," on February 21, 2007. The single was used as the theme song for the TBS drama Kirakira Kenshui, starring Manami Konishi and Wentz Eiji of WaT and managed to claim the third position on the Oricon charts.
Ai Am Best
Otsuka released her first best hits compilation album, titled Ai am Best, on March 28, 2007, which features 13 pre-2006 songs and their respective promotional videos. There are 11 songs that span her singles in chronological order, one song from Love Cook and one song from a Nana sound track: "Love for Nana: Only 1 Tribute".
Ai am Best sold 64,396 copies on the first day and topped the Oricon charts, making it Otsuka's best selling album. It sold over 350,000 copies in its first week. "Ai am Best" also features two bonus tracks—one for the DVD, "Best of Babashi", and one for the CD, "Babashi". First Press "Ai am Best" includes an Ai stamp and Ai wallet calendar. Some also include an Ai pin in yellow or white.
Otsuka went on a tour titled Ai am Best Tour that featured songs from Ai am Best and more. The tour started on May 18 and ended on July 7, 2007.
2007–2008: Love debut and Love Piece
On April 11, 2007 Otsuka released a new single, "Love no Theme," as the self-created bunny rabbit character "Love-chan". "Love no Theme" was sung on her Jam Punch Tour 2005. Before its release, it was titled I canChu before it was changed to "Love no Theme". The "Love no Theme" single included a preview of a new single featuring Love, titled "White Choco." This song could only be found previously on the promotional CD released before "Momo no Hanabira". "Love no Theme" unfortunately did not sell as well as Otsuka's normal singles.
Otsuka released her first single after Ai am Best, "Peach/Heart" on July 25, 2007. The first A-side "Peach" is an up-beat summer song and was used as the end theme for the summer drama Hanazakari no Kimitachi E (starring Maki Horikita and Shun Oguri), while the second "Heart" is a mid-tempo track. The single also includes a rearranged version of "Renai Shashin", titled .
On September 26, 2007, Otsuka released two CDs and a DVD. The first CD was Otsuka's fourth original album, titled Love Piece. This included all of her singles from "Frienger" to "Peach/Heart", with five new songs on an 11-track album. The album was released in CD+DVD and CD-only formats, with the DVD including a music video of "Heart" and , a song from the album. The first-press of the DVD also includes the PV of "U-Boat," while the first-press of the CD-only version comes with a 40-page color photobook. The second CD was a limited pressing re-release of the best album "Ai am Best" in CD-only format.
Also on September 26, Otsuka released a DVD of her Ai am Best Tour 2007, recorded at the Tokyo International Forum Hall A on July 9, 2007. The DVD is available in a single-disc edition, as well as a special two-disc edition with outtakes of the tour. The first-press of the special edition comes with a 40-page photobook.
Otsuka performed at Makuhari Messe on July 7, 2007, for one of Japan's two Live Earth concerts, alongside contemporaries Kumi Koda and Ayaka.
2009–2010: Love Letter and Love is Best
Otsuka released her 16th single "Pocket" on November 7, 2007. And two weeks later, Love-chan's second single, "White Choco", was released on November 21, 2007. During 2008, Otsuka embarked on her Love Piece Tour 2008, her fourth solo tour, from February to May. Her 17th single, "Rocket Sneaker/One x Time", was released on May 21. Otsuka's 18th single, "Kurage, Nagareboshi", was released on September 10, 2008. The single was released in four different formats, as a commemoration of her fifth anniversary in the music industry since the release of her debut single "Momo no Hanabira". On December 17, 2008, she released her fifth studio album, Love Letter, which peaked third on the weekly Oricon charts. It contains all of her singles since Love Piece including "Pocket", the third track on the album. Love Letter was her lowest-selling album. On February 25, 2009, "Bye Bye" was released as her second re-cut single. "Bye Bye" was used in a commercial for the Asahi Breweries beverage, Asahi Slat. Otsuka's second compilation album, Love Is Best, was released on November 11, 2009. The album features a collection of "love songs," ranging from singles to album tracks and b-sides, and will feature re-recorded versions of some tracks including a duet with Su from hip-hop band Rip Slyme on the song "Aisu x Time." On its first day of release the album charted at number one with a sales total of 22,895. As her character Love, she also released her first mini album entitled Love It (pronounced Rabitto, as rabbit), on November 18, 2009 (a week after Love Is Best). The album's track "Magic" was used in TV commercials for Music.jp.
In January 2010, Otsuka performed a song for Fuji Television titled "Lucky Star" which the network used as the theme song for its coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics. In February it was announced that "Lucky Star" would be released as a cellphone-only digital single, but later was announced to have a physical release as a double A-side single, "Zokkondition/Lucky Star", which released on April 7, 2010. "Zokkondition" was used in advertisements for Asahi Beer, similar to her previous single "Bye Bye". On September 8, 2010, she released another single "'I Love..." (I ♥ xxx), which was her 21st and last single before taking a hiatus from music.
2011–present: Hiatus, Rabbit and Love Fantastic
During Otsuka's hiatus from music due to her pregnancy, a new song titled "Hikari" was made available for download on October 9, 2011, through her official mobile website Love 9 Cube. On March 30, 2012, she released Neko ga Suki ni natta Kirai na Neko, a series of two picture books about cats. Purchasers of the books had the chance to download another new song, called "Gomen ne". On September 9, 2012, she celebrated her 30th birthday and ninth anniversary in the music industry with Love Is Born: 9th Anniversary 2012, her first series of concerts in two years, in which she held performances in Tokyo, Hyogo and Aichi.
In October 2012, Otsuka announced that she would be debuting as the vocalist of a new band called Rabbit. The band released their debut album Rabito on December 12, 2012 through the Cutting Edge label. The album peaked at number 61 on the Oricon charts. Rabbit went on their first domestic tour in Japan starting in February 2013. This month it was also announced that Otsuka, as a solo, would begin a tour in September to celebrate her tenth anniversary in the music industry,. In July 2013, it was announced that Otsuka would be releasing her first solo single in three years, entitled "Re:Name", to celebrate her tenth anniversary. The single was released on October 9, 2013, and debuted at number eight on the Japanese charts. On December 13, 2013, a song entitled "Sakuranbo (Cocktail)", which was a self-cover version of her second single, was released digitally through the iTunes Music Store. On March 26, 2014, Otsuka released an EP entitled AIO Punch, which included other self-covers from previously released songs. And she also recorded a cover of Dreams Come True's "Romance" for their tribute album Watashi to Dori Kamu: Dreams Come True 25th Anniversary Best Covers, which was released on the same day. Her 23rd single, "More More" was released on May 21, 2014. Otsuka's sixth studio album, entitled Love Fantastic, was released on July 16, 2014. She released her seventh album, Love Tricky, on April 22, 2015. Otsuka's eighth studio album, Love Honey, came out on April 12, 2017.
Personal life
In February 2010, it was reported by Josei Seven magazine that Otsuka was dating rapper Kazuto Otsuki (publicly known as Su, member of hip hop group Rip Slyme), with whom she collaborated in October 2009 for her song "Aisu x Time". Neither of the artists' agencies would comment on the matter. On June 26, 2010, Otsuka announced via a message on her official Web site that she and Su had gotten married on the previous day. Su also posted an announcement on Rip Slyme's website, confirming what Otsuka wrote on her website.
During her Love is Born concert held on September 11, 2010, Otsuka revealed to the audience that she was expecting her first child, and on March 24, 2011, she gave birth to a daughter.
On November 22, 2018, Otsuka announced that she had filed for divorce.
Discography
Studio albums
2004: Love Punch
2004: Love Jam
2005: Love Cook
2007: Love Piece
2008: Love Letter
2014: Love Fantastic
2015: Love Tricky
2017: Love Honey
Compilation albums
2007: Ai Am Best
2009: Love Is Best
2019: Ai Am Best, too
Radio shows
Otsuka Ai ai-r Jack (Nippon Cultural Broadcasting)
Corolla presents Life-Love Circle (Tokyo FM)
Books
(February 25, 2005)
Love World (September 25, 2007)
(January 31, 2008)
(March 31, 2010)
(March 30, 2012)
Awards
Japan Cable Radio Awards
2004: Best New Artist
Best Hits Kayōsai
2004: Best New Artist
2005: Gold Artist Prize – "Planetarium"
2006: Gold Artist Prize – "Ren'ai Shashin"
2007: Gold Artist Prize – "Pocket"
Japan Gold Disc Award
2005: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Punch
2005: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Jam
2006: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Cook
2007: The Best 10 Albums - Ai Am Best
MTV Video Music Awards Japan
2007: Best Pop Video - "Ren'ai Shashin"
2007: Best Video from a Film - "Ren'ai Shashin" (from Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru)
References
External links
Love website
1982 births
Living people
Japanese women pop singers
Japanese actresses
Japanese women singer-songwriters
Japanese singer-songwriters
Musicians from Osaka
Osaka University of Arts alumni
Avex Trax artists
21st-century Japanese women singers
21st-century Japanese singers
| false |
[
"Happy Issue (1940–1964) was an American Thoroughbred racehorse who broke the track record for a mile and a quarter on dirt to become the first female horse to win the prestigious Hollywood Gold Cup at Hollywood Park Racetrack in Inglewood, California. Through 2010. only two other females have won the race. Two Lea did it in 1952 and then Princessnesian was the last to accomplish the feat in 1968.\n\nHappy Issue was owned and trained by Charles H. \"Frenchy\" Pinon who raced her under the nom de course, Happy Stable. On November 18, 1944 the four-year-old won the most important race to that point in her career with a victory in the Vanity Handicap, a mile and one-eighth race for fillies and mares at Hollywood Park Racetrack. On December 17 she set a new Hollywood Park track record of 2:01 4/5 for a mile and a quarter on dirt in becoming the first female to ever win the Hollywood Gold Cup.\n\nFrenchy Pinon raced Happy Issue for nine years after which she was retired to broodmare duty. Her offspring did not meet with success in racing.\n\nReferences\n\n Happy Issue's pedigree and partial racing stats\n\n1940 racehorse births\n1964 racehorse deaths\nThoroughbred family 9-c\nRacehorses bred in Kentucky\nRacehorses trained in the United States",
"Sonia Deepti (born 29 July 1984) is an Indian actress who has primarily appeared in Telugu films. Her debut performance as Shravs in the 2007 Sekhar Kammula film Happy Days won her the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress – Telugu.\n\nCareer\nSonia Deepti was born and brought up in Hyderabad, Telangana. After finishing her studies with a degree in computer applications, she worked as a software engineer in an IT company for three years, before stepping into acting. At an event, she was spotted by Sekhar Kammula, who gave her an acting offer, after seeing her performance in an audition. Accepting the offer, she made her acting debut in the 2007 Telugu film Happy Days, enacting the role of Shravs. The film, upon release, became a blockbuster and won six awards at the 2008 Filmfare Awards South, one of which was the Award for Best Supporting Actress for Sonia for her performance that won her critical acclaim.\n\nIn late 2008, her second film Vinayakudu opposite Krishnudu, one of her co-actors in Happy Days, was released, which went on to become a successful venture as well. She soon got offers from the Tamil film industry as well and made her debut in Tamil with the N. Lingusamy-directed romantic-action film Paiyaa in 2010. That year she had another Tamil film releasing, Inidhu Inidhu, a remake of Happy Days, in which she reprised her role from the original. Sonia played the role of Samantha's character's friend in the 2011 Telugu film Dookudu.\n\nShe made her debut in Kannada with the film Ninnindale starring Puneeth Rajkumar and Erica Fernandes, which was released in January 2014.\n\nJust a day before a day before International Women's Day in 2015, she released a short film on her YouTube channel. Scripted by Megha Wali, this film was about questioning moral policing. It was well received on social media and appreciated by many stars including Ram Gopal Varma and Amitabh Bachchan. It was shot at Country Club in Hyderabad.\n\nFilmography\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n \n\nIndian film actresses\nActresses in Telugu cinema\nActresses in Tamil cinema\nLiving people\nFilmfare Awards South winners\nActresses from Hyderabad, India\nActresses in Kannada cinema\n21st-century Indian actresses\nFemale models from Hyderabad, India\n1984 births"
] |
[
"Ai Otsuka",
"Love Jam",
"When was Love Jam released?",
"In November 2004,",
"What was a popular single off the album?",
"Happy Days",
"Did she win any awards for Happy Days?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_df18be75571544dcbd0c61230abee7b2_1
|
How many copies of Love Jam did she sell?
| 4 |
How many copies of Love Jam did Ai Otsuka sell?
|
Ai Otsuka
|
In November 2004, the follow-up to Love Punch, Love Jam, was released, which met even greater popular success. Along with three single released before her second studio album was released. First, "Happy Days" sold 163,433 units and reached third on the Oricon weekly chart. Love Jam Tour 2005, her first tour, began on April 24, 2005. It was completed in June 2005 and a live DVD with footage was released on July 27, 2005. Love Cook, her third album was released on December 14, 2005. "Kingyo Hanabi" was the second single to be released after her first album. "Kingyo Hanabi" also landed in third on the Oricon weekly chart but was able to sell 148,121 units, about 20,000 copies less than her "Happy Days" single. Two months later, Otsuka released another single, "Daisuki da Yo". Like the previous two singles, it reached number 3 on the Oricon weekly chart and sold 156,844 units. Otsuka released her second studio album a month later in November 2004. Love Jam debuted at the number one position and sold 224,381 units in its first week. In total, 656,700 units were sold. Love Jam became her first album to top the chart, but at the same time it was her lowest selling studio album. Love Jam was released in two different versions including a CD and a CD+DVD version. Following the release of Love Jam, Ai Otsuka released the recut single "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" in February 2005. It was a different version of the "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 735 Yen" track on Love Jam. "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" is arranged differently in terms of music and vocals. This single sold 149,134 units and debuted third on the Oricon weekly chart and was the sixty-eighth single of 2005. It was the first ending theme song for the anime Black Jack. CANNOTANSWER
|
In total, 656,700 units were sold.
|
is a Japanese singer-songwriter from Suminoe-ku, Osaka, Japan. She is a popular artist on the Avex Trax label and is best known for her 2003 hit "Sakuranbo", which stayed in the Top 200 Oricon Weekly Singles Chart for 103 weeks.
A piano player since age four, Otsuka composes and co-produces her own songs, as well as writes her own lyrics. Her music ranges from upbeat pop/rock music to ballads.
Every year, Otsuka also has her own Love is Born tour to mark the anniversary of being in the music industry and her birthday in September. All of the Love is Born concerts take place in Japan, ending in her hometown of Osaka. On Love is Born 5th Anniversary in 2008, Otsuka held a leg of the concert in Taiwan, where she performed a Chinese version of her song "Planetarium". In 2009, Otsuka held 3 Love is Born 6th Anniversary concerts in Japan, as well as two concerts in Taiwan.
In 2012, Otsuka debuted as the vocalist of the band Rabbit. She sold 7 million copies in Japan.
Biography
Early life and career beginnings
Otsuka started to play piano at the age of four. She composed her first track at 15, as a homework given by her piano teacher. After graduating from high school she entered to the Osaka University of Arts Nursery College, where she got her degree as a nursery teacher. For a short period of time -around late 2001- she was part of a duo called HimawaRi, along with classmate Mami Nishida. They released only the song "Sakuranbo" on the Internet, and were active for a little time. She sent demo tapes to record labels with no positive results, until she got a call back from Avex just before her graduation from university.
2003: Debut and Love Punch
Her debut single, entitled "Momo no Hanabira", was released on September 10, 2003. The single was a minor hit, peaking at number 24 on the Oricon weekly singles top 100, but stayed on the charts for 21 weeks. Her second single, "Sakuranbo", was released on December 17, 2003. The song debuted at number 20 on the Oricon charts, but managed to get into the Top 10 in February 2004 and went to peak at number five. Eventually, the single stayed on the chart for 101 weeks (almost two years), and a special "encore press" version was commissioned, which peaked at number 4, and it became the twelfth best selling single of 2004. Gradually climbing the charts to top 5, the single. In early March 2004, Otsuka released her third single, "Amaenbo". The song peaked at the sixth position on the Japanese charts, while at the same time "Sakuranbo" was fifth. This was the first time in Japanese music history a female artist was able to have two singles in the top ten in the same week. By end of March 2004, her first album, Love Punch, was released, and peaked third on the Oricon charts selling 190,265 copies in its first week.
Love Jam
In November 2004, the follow-up to Love Punch, Love Jam, was released, which met even greater popular success. Along with three single released before her second studio album was released. First, "Happy Days" sold 163,433 units and reached third on the Oricon weekly chart. Love Jam Tour 2005, her first tour, began on April 24, 2005. It was completed in June 2005 and a live DVD with footage was released on July 27, 2005. Love Cook, her third album was released on December 14, 2005.
"Kingyo Hanabi" was the second single to be released after her first album. "Kingyo Hanabi" also landed in third on the Oricon weekly chart but was able to sell 148,121 units, about 20,000 copies less than her "Happy Days" single. Two months later, Otsuka released another single, "Daisuki da Yo". Like the previous two singles, it reached number 3 on the Oricon weekly chart and sold 156,844 units.
Otsuka released her second studio album a month later in November 2004. Love Jam debuted at the number one position and sold 224,381 units in its first week. In total, 656,700 units were sold. Love Jam became her first album to top the chart, but at the same time it was her lowest selling studio album. Love Jam was released in two different versions including a CD and a CD+DVD version. Following the release of Love Jam, Ai Otsuka released the recut single "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" in February 2005. It was a different version of the "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 735 Yen" track on Love Jam. "Kuroge Wagyu Joshio Tan Yaki 680 Yen" is arranged differently in terms of music and vocals. This single sold 149,134 units and debuted third on the Oricon weekly chart and was the sixty-eighth single of 2005. It was the first ending theme song for the anime Black Jack.
Love Cook
"Smily/Biidama" was her first single to be released after Love Jam. Both songs from the single were used for commercials. "Smily/Biidama" sold 110,512 copies during its debut week and charted at first place. "Smily/Biidama" sold a total of 308,338 copies in 2005, placing it as the twenty-sixth single of that year.
It was during this time, in June 2005, that Otsuka made her acting debut with the drama Tokyo Friends. Unlike most dramas, the series was directly released on DVD and never aired on TV. The drama used three songs as its theme song, Boo Bee Benz's "To Me" and "Kimi to Iu Hana," as well the coupling song to her sixth single, "Friends: Sabakan Ver." All three tracks would eventually be included in the soundtrack for the drama's movie sequel.
Otsuka released her tenth single in 2005, "Neko ni Fūsen" in middle of the year in July. "Neko ni Fūsen" was her lowest single that year, only reaching third on the chart and selling 111,324 copies. It placed ninety-second on the 2005 yearly charts.
Otsuka's single "Planetarium", was released on September 20, 2005. This was her last single of that year. "Planetarium" sales of 315,669 was her second highest single second only to "Sakuranbo," before her third studio album was released. "Planetarium" was used as the insert song for the live action version of the drama Hana Yori Dango.
Love Cook, her third studio album, came out on December 14, 2005. In its first week, it sold 335,000 copies. The promotional videos for this album were filmed as mini-dramas. She also hosts a radio show on JOQR Recomen!! AM1134hHz called Otsuka Ai no ai-r jack.
Love Piece
In April 2006, Otsuka released "Frienger" (a portmanteau of the words Friend and Ranger). The promotional video was shot in Taiwan and was used as the commercial song for the Toshiba W41T 4 GB MP3 mobile phone. Soon after the release of "Frienger," Otsuka reprised her role as an actress for Tokyo Friends: The Movie, which hit theaters in Japan on August 12, 2006. The movie is a direct sequel to the DVD drama released the previous year. Otsuka also sang the opening theme for Tokyo Friends, "Yumekui", which was released as a new single on August 2, 2006. It debuted fifth on the weekly chart, selling 63,428 copies in the first week and a total of 145,281 copies.
Two months after "Yumekui", Otsuka released another single titled "Renai Shashin" on October 25, 2006, which was used as the opening theme song for the movie Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru. The song was based on events from the film and its original novel, also called Renai Shashin. "Renai Shashin" debuted at number 2 and sold 129,855 copies, making it the 75th best-selling single of the year. At the end of 2006, Otsuka had released a total of three singles and charted on Oricon's 2006 yearly chart with "Frienger" at number 60, "Yumekui" at number 66, and "Renai Shashin" at number 75.
Otsuka released her fourteenth single, "Chu-Lip," on February 21, 2007. The single was used as the theme song for the TBS drama Kirakira Kenshui, starring Manami Konishi and Wentz Eiji of WaT and managed to claim the third position on the Oricon charts.
Ai Am Best
Otsuka released her first best hits compilation album, titled Ai am Best, on March 28, 2007, which features 13 pre-2006 songs and their respective promotional videos. There are 11 songs that span her singles in chronological order, one song from Love Cook and one song from a Nana sound track: "Love for Nana: Only 1 Tribute".
Ai am Best sold 64,396 copies on the first day and topped the Oricon charts, making it Otsuka's best selling album. It sold over 350,000 copies in its first week. "Ai am Best" also features two bonus tracks—one for the DVD, "Best of Babashi", and one for the CD, "Babashi". First Press "Ai am Best" includes an Ai stamp and Ai wallet calendar. Some also include an Ai pin in yellow or white.
Otsuka went on a tour titled Ai am Best Tour that featured songs from Ai am Best and more. The tour started on May 18 and ended on July 7, 2007.
2007–2008: Love debut and Love Piece
On April 11, 2007 Otsuka released a new single, "Love no Theme," as the self-created bunny rabbit character "Love-chan". "Love no Theme" was sung on her Jam Punch Tour 2005. Before its release, it was titled I canChu before it was changed to "Love no Theme". The "Love no Theme" single included a preview of a new single featuring Love, titled "White Choco." This song could only be found previously on the promotional CD released before "Momo no Hanabira". "Love no Theme" unfortunately did not sell as well as Otsuka's normal singles.
Otsuka released her first single after Ai am Best, "Peach/Heart" on July 25, 2007. The first A-side "Peach" is an up-beat summer song and was used as the end theme for the summer drama Hanazakari no Kimitachi E (starring Maki Horikita and Shun Oguri), while the second "Heart" is a mid-tempo track. The single also includes a rearranged version of "Renai Shashin", titled .
On September 26, 2007, Otsuka released two CDs and a DVD. The first CD was Otsuka's fourth original album, titled Love Piece. This included all of her singles from "Frienger" to "Peach/Heart", with five new songs on an 11-track album. The album was released in CD+DVD and CD-only formats, with the DVD including a music video of "Heart" and , a song from the album. The first-press of the DVD also includes the PV of "U-Boat," while the first-press of the CD-only version comes with a 40-page color photobook. The second CD was a limited pressing re-release of the best album "Ai am Best" in CD-only format.
Also on September 26, Otsuka released a DVD of her Ai am Best Tour 2007, recorded at the Tokyo International Forum Hall A on July 9, 2007. The DVD is available in a single-disc edition, as well as a special two-disc edition with outtakes of the tour. The first-press of the special edition comes with a 40-page photobook.
Otsuka performed at Makuhari Messe on July 7, 2007, for one of Japan's two Live Earth concerts, alongside contemporaries Kumi Koda and Ayaka.
2009–2010: Love Letter and Love is Best
Otsuka released her 16th single "Pocket" on November 7, 2007. And two weeks later, Love-chan's second single, "White Choco", was released on November 21, 2007. During 2008, Otsuka embarked on her Love Piece Tour 2008, her fourth solo tour, from February to May. Her 17th single, "Rocket Sneaker/One x Time", was released on May 21. Otsuka's 18th single, "Kurage, Nagareboshi", was released on September 10, 2008. The single was released in four different formats, as a commemoration of her fifth anniversary in the music industry since the release of her debut single "Momo no Hanabira". On December 17, 2008, she released her fifth studio album, Love Letter, which peaked third on the weekly Oricon charts. It contains all of her singles since Love Piece including "Pocket", the third track on the album. Love Letter was her lowest-selling album. On February 25, 2009, "Bye Bye" was released as her second re-cut single. "Bye Bye" was used in a commercial for the Asahi Breweries beverage, Asahi Slat. Otsuka's second compilation album, Love Is Best, was released on November 11, 2009. The album features a collection of "love songs," ranging from singles to album tracks and b-sides, and will feature re-recorded versions of some tracks including a duet with Su from hip-hop band Rip Slyme on the song "Aisu x Time." On its first day of release the album charted at number one with a sales total of 22,895. As her character Love, she also released her first mini album entitled Love It (pronounced Rabitto, as rabbit), on November 18, 2009 (a week after Love Is Best). The album's track "Magic" was used in TV commercials for Music.jp.
In January 2010, Otsuka performed a song for Fuji Television titled "Lucky Star" which the network used as the theme song for its coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics. In February it was announced that "Lucky Star" would be released as a cellphone-only digital single, but later was announced to have a physical release as a double A-side single, "Zokkondition/Lucky Star", which released on April 7, 2010. "Zokkondition" was used in advertisements for Asahi Beer, similar to her previous single "Bye Bye". On September 8, 2010, she released another single "'I Love..." (I ♥ xxx), which was her 21st and last single before taking a hiatus from music.
2011–present: Hiatus, Rabbit and Love Fantastic
During Otsuka's hiatus from music due to her pregnancy, a new song titled "Hikari" was made available for download on October 9, 2011, through her official mobile website Love 9 Cube. On March 30, 2012, she released Neko ga Suki ni natta Kirai na Neko, a series of two picture books about cats. Purchasers of the books had the chance to download another new song, called "Gomen ne". On September 9, 2012, she celebrated her 30th birthday and ninth anniversary in the music industry with Love Is Born: 9th Anniversary 2012, her first series of concerts in two years, in which she held performances in Tokyo, Hyogo and Aichi.
In October 2012, Otsuka announced that she would be debuting as the vocalist of a new band called Rabbit. The band released their debut album Rabito on December 12, 2012 through the Cutting Edge label. The album peaked at number 61 on the Oricon charts. Rabbit went on their first domestic tour in Japan starting in February 2013. This month it was also announced that Otsuka, as a solo, would begin a tour in September to celebrate her tenth anniversary in the music industry,. In July 2013, it was announced that Otsuka would be releasing her first solo single in three years, entitled "Re:Name", to celebrate her tenth anniversary. The single was released on October 9, 2013, and debuted at number eight on the Japanese charts. On December 13, 2013, a song entitled "Sakuranbo (Cocktail)", which was a self-cover version of her second single, was released digitally through the iTunes Music Store. On March 26, 2014, Otsuka released an EP entitled AIO Punch, which included other self-covers from previously released songs. And she also recorded a cover of Dreams Come True's "Romance" for their tribute album Watashi to Dori Kamu: Dreams Come True 25th Anniversary Best Covers, which was released on the same day. Her 23rd single, "More More" was released on May 21, 2014. Otsuka's sixth studio album, entitled Love Fantastic, was released on July 16, 2014. She released her seventh album, Love Tricky, on April 22, 2015. Otsuka's eighth studio album, Love Honey, came out on April 12, 2017.
Personal life
In February 2010, it was reported by Josei Seven magazine that Otsuka was dating rapper Kazuto Otsuki (publicly known as Su, member of hip hop group Rip Slyme), with whom she collaborated in October 2009 for her song "Aisu x Time". Neither of the artists' agencies would comment on the matter. On June 26, 2010, Otsuka announced via a message on her official Web site that she and Su had gotten married on the previous day. Su also posted an announcement on Rip Slyme's website, confirming what Otsuka wrote on her website.
During her Love is Born concert held on September 11, 2010, Otsuka revealed to the audience that she was expecting her first child, and on March 24, 2011, she gave birth to a daughter.
On November 22, 2018, Otsuka announced that she had filed for divorce.
Discography
Studio albums
2004: Love Punch
2004: Love Jam
2005: Love Cook
2007: Love Piece
2008: Love Letter
2014: Love Fantastic
2015: Love Tricky
2017: Love Honey
Compilation albums
2007: Ai Am Best
2009: Love Is Best
2019: Ai Am Best, too
Radio shows
Otsuka Ai ai-r Jack (Nippon Cultural Broadcasting)
Corolla presents Life-Love Circle (Tokyo FM)
Books
(February 25, 2005)
Love World (September 25, 2007)
(January 31, 2008)
(March 31, 2010)
(March 30, 2012)
Awards
Japan Cable Radio Awards
2004: Best New Artist
Best Hits Kayōsai
2004: Best New Artist
2005: Gold Artist Prize – "Planetarium"
2006: Gold Artist Prize – "Ren'ai Shashin"
2007: Gold Artist Prize – "Pocket"
Japan Gold Disc Award
2005: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Punch
2005: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Jam
2006: Rock & Pop Album of the Year – Love Cook
2007: The Best 10 Albums - Ai Am Best
MTV Video Music Awards Japan
2007: Best Pop Video - "Ren'ai Shashin"
2007: Best Video from a Film - "Ren'ai Shashin" (from Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru)
References
External links
Love website
1982 births
Living people
Japanese women pop singers
Japanese actresses
Japanese women singer-songwriters
Japanese singer-songwriters
Musicians from Osaka
Osaka University of Arts alumni
Avex Trax artists
21st-century Japanese women singers
21st-century Japanese singers
| true |
[
"\"Still Love You\" is a song by Japanese pop group AAA. It is their 32nd single and is included in the group's seventh studio album 777: Triple Seven. The song was written by Mitsuhiro Hidaka and Kaji Katsura. The single was released in Japan on May 16, 2012, under Avex Trax in four editions: a CD-only edition, a CD and DVD A edition, a CD and DVD B edition, and a Mu-Mo edition. \"Still Love You\" debuted at number three on the weekly Oricon singles chart. The single charted for seven weeks and went on to sell over 55,000 copies in Japan.\n\nComposition\n\"Still Love You\" was written by Mitsuhiro Hidaka and Kaji Katsura, composed by Shirose from White Jam, Heroism, and DJ First from White Jam Beatz, and arranged by ats. \"I$M\" was written by Goro Matsui, Kenn Kato, Bounceback, Kenko-p, Leonn, Kyasu Morizuki, and Hidaka, composed by Kazuyuki Akita, and arranged by Kazuki Kumagai.\n\nRelease and promotion\n\"Still Love You\" was released on May 16, 2012, in four editions: a CD-only edition, which includes \"Still Love You (Remo-con Remix)\"; a CD and DVD A edition, which includes the music video for the song, the first part of the music video making, and the third part of the AAA 6th Anniversary Tour; a CD and DVD B edition, which includes the second part of the music video making and the fourth part of the AAA 6th Anniversary Tour; a Mu-Mo edition, which includes the Think About AAA 6th Anniversary clips from seasons 18, 19, and 20 in editions A, B, and C, respectively. The song was used in television advertisements for the hypermarket Ito-Yokado.\n\nChart performance\n\"Still Love You\" debuted at number three on the weekly Oricon singles charts, selling 48,284 copies in its first week. It went on to chart for seven weeks and sold over 55,000 copies in Japan. On the issue dated May 28, 2012, the song debuted at number eight on the Billboard Japan Hot 100. On the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) Digital Track Chart, the song debuted at number 10.\n\nTrack listing\n\nChart history\n\nNotes\n The sales figure of 55,000 copies is taken from accumulating the sales of the single during its first six charting weeks on the Oricon weekly chart (48,284, 4,946, 2,129).\n\nReferences\n\n2012 singles\nAAA (band) songs\nAvex Trax singles\nJapanese-language songs\n2012 songs",
"Back for the First Time is the debut studio album by American hip hop recording artist Ludacris. The album, his major label debut, was released on October 17, 2000, under Disturbing tha Peace and Def Jam South.\n\nBackground\nMost of the tracks are taken from his first album, the independently released Incognegro (1999), except for \"Stick 'Em Up\", \"Southern Hospitality\", a remix of \"What's Your Fantasy\", and \"Phat Rabbit\".\n\nCommercial performance\nThe album debuted at number four on the US Billboard 200 chart, and sold 133,000 copies in its first-week of sales. As of November 2009, the album has sold 3.1 million copies in the United States to date. The album was eventually certified triple Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for shipments of more than 3 million copies.\n\nTrack listing\n\nSample credits\n\nPhat Rabbit\n\"Are You That Somebody?\" by Aaliyah\n1st & 10 \n\"How High\" by Method Man and Redman\n\"Where Did We Go Wrong\" by Incognito\nWhat's Your Fantasy\n\"Face Down, A** Up\" by Luke\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\n2000 albums\nAlbums produced by Bangladesh (record producer)\nAlbums produced by the Neptunes\nAlbums produced by Organized Noize\nAlbums produced by Jermaine Dupri\nAlbums produced by Timbaland\nDef Jam Recordings albums\nLudacris albums\nDisturbing tha Peace albums"
] |
[
"Hedy Lamarr",
"First marriage"
] |
C_5f1567837dc546c292ffa9eac0fe195f_0
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What year did he marry the first time?
| 1 |
What year did Hedy Lamarr marry the first time?
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Hedy Lamarr
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On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own. CANNOTANSWER
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1933,
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Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.
After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (born Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935).
Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.
As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.
European film career
Early work
Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin.
However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous.
Ecstasy
In early 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.
Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.
Withdrawal
Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. It won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her.
Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karlische. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.
Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
Hollywood career
Louis B. Mayer and MGM
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr (to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman".
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation", says Shearer. She was billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away."
In future Hollywood films, she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke. The resulting film was a flop.
Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; it made $5 million. MGM promptly reteamed Lamarr and Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film in the vein of Ninotchka (1939), which was another hit.
Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls - a big success.
Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young. She made a third film with Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942). It was successful at the box office, as was Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.
Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon. It was a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
She was reunited with Powell in a comedy The Heavenly Body (1944), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators (1944). This was an attempt to repeat the success of Casablanca (1943), and RKO borrowed her for a melodrama Experiment Perilous (1944).
Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. It was very popular, but would be the last film she made under her MGM contract.
Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it. Writer Howard Sharpe interviewed her and gave his impression:
Author Richard Rhodes describes her assimilation into American culture:
Lamarr also had a penchant for speaking about herself in the third person.
Wartime fundraiser
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds.
She participated in a war bond-selling campaign with a sailor named Eddie Rhodes. Rhodes was in the crowd at each Lamarr appearance, and she would call him up on stage. She would briefly flirt with him before asking the audience if she should give him a kiss. The crowd would say yes, to which Hedy would reply that she would if enough people bought war bonds. After enough bonds were purchased, she would kiss Rhodes and he would head back into the audience. Then they would head off to the next war bond rally.
Producer
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946). It went over budget and only made minor profits.
She and Chertok then made Dishonored Lady (1947), another thriller starring Lamarr, which also went over budget - but was not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).
Later films
Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success playing Delilah against Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949. The film also won two Oscars.
Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).
Her career went into decline. She went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.
She was Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre ("Proud Woman") and Shower of Stars ("Cloak and Dagger"). Her last film was a thriller The Female Animal (1958).
Lamarr was signed to act in the 1966 film Picture Mommy Dead, but was let go when she collapsed during filming from nervous exhaustion. She was replaced in the role of Jessica Flagmore Shelley by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Inventor
Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.
Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled:
Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later years
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine.
In the late 1950s Lamarr designed and, with then-husband W. Howard Lee, developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.
Lamarr became estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
Seclusion
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. A documentary, Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca.
Death
Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014 a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.
Awards
Hedy Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1939, Lamarr was selected the "most promising new actress" of 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by Philadelphia Record film critic. British moviegoers voted Hedy Lamarr the year's 10th best actress, for her performance in Samson and Delilah in 1951.
In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing". The following year, Lamarr's native Austria awarded her the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors.
In 2006, the Hedy-Lamarr-Weg was founded in Vienna Meidling (12th District), named after the actress.
In 2013, the IQOQI installed a quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which they named after her in 2014.
In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The same year, Anthony Loder's request that the remaining ashes of his mother should be buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna was realized. On November 7, her urn was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery in Group 33 G, Tomb No. 80, not far from the centrally located presidential tomb.
On November 9, 2015, Google honored her on her 101st Birthday with a doodle.
On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr
Marriages and children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:
Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–1937), chairman of the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik
Gene Markey (married 1939–1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939) during her marriage with Markey. (He was later adopted by Loder and was thereafter known as James Lamarr Loder.) Lamarr and Markey lived at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California during their marriage.
John Loder (married 1943–1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), married Larry Colton, a writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), married Roxanne who worked for illustrator James McMullan. Anthony Loder was featured in the 2004 documentary film Calling Hedy Lamarr.
Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader
W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), a Texas oilman (who later married film actress Gene Tierney)
Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer
Following her sixth and final divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the last 35 years of her life.
Throughout, she claimed that James Lamarr Markey/Loder was biologically unrelated and adopted during her marriage to Gene Markey. However, years later James found documentation that he was the out-of-wedlock son of Lamarr and actor John Loder, whom she later married as her third husband. She had two more children with him: Denise (born 1945) and Anthony (born 1947) during their marriage.
Filmography
Source:
Radio appearances
In popular culture
The Mel Brooks 1974 western parody Blazing Saddles features a villain named "Hedley Lamarr". As a running gag, various characters mistakenly refer to him as "Hedy Lamarr" prompting him to testily reply "That's Hedley."
In the 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and subsequent film adaptation (1986) Audrey II says to Seymour in the song 'Feed Me' that he can get Seymour anything he wants including "A date with Hedy Lamarr."
In 2008, an off-Broadway play, Frequency Hopping, features the lives of Lamarr and Antheil. The play was written and staged by Elyse Singer, and the script won a prize for best new play about science and technology from STAGE.
In 2010, Lamarr was selected out of 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society on May 20.
Also during 2010, the New York Public Library exhibit Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library included a photo of a topless Lamarr () by Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann.
In 2011, the story of Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores the darker side of scientific discovery and experimentation, which premiered on September 7. Her work in improving wireless security was part of the premiere episode of the Discovery Channel show How We Invented the World.
Also during 2011, Anne Hathaway revealed that she had learned that the original Catwoman was based on Lamarr, so she studied all of Lamarr's films and incorporated some of her breathing techniques into her portrayal of Catwoman in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2015, on November 9, the 101st anniversary of Lamarr's birth, Google paid tribute to Hedy Lamarr's work in film and her contributions to scientific advancement with an animated Google Doodle.
In 2016, Lamarr was depicted in an off-Broadway play, HEDY! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, a one-woman show written and performed by Heather Massie.
In 2016, the off-Broadway, one-actor show "Stand Still and Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr." starring Emily Ebertz and written by Mike Broemmel went into production.
Also during 2016, Whitney Frost, a character in the TV show Agent Carter was inspired by Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall.
In 2017, actress Celia Massingham portrayed Lamarr on The CW television series Legends of Tomorrow in the sixth episode of the third season, titled Helen Hunt. The episode is set in 1937 Hollywoodland. The episode aired on November 14, 2017.
Also during 2017, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon, a documentary about Lamarr's career as an actress and later as an inventor, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in theaters on November 24, 2017, and aired on PBS American Masters in May 2018.
In 2018, actress Alyssa Sutherland portrayed Lamarr on the NBC television series Timeless in the third episode of the second season, titled Hollywoodland. The episode aired March 25, 2018.
In 2021, Lamarr was mentioned in the first episode of the Marvel's What If...? The episode aired on August 11, 2021.
See also
Inventors' Day
List of Austrians
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Hedy Lamarr Foundation website
Hedy Lamarr profile at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
US Patent 2292387, owned by Hedy Kiesler Markey AKA Hedy Lamarr on Google Patents
US Patent 2292387 on WIPO Pantentscope
Profile, women-inventors.com
Hedy Lamarr at Reel Classics
Happy 100th Birthday Hedy Lamarr, Movie Star who Paved the Way for Wifi at CNet
"Most Beautiful Woman" by Day, Inventor by Night at NPR
Hedy Lamarr at Inventions
Hedy Lamarr: Q&A with Author Patrick Agan, Andre Soares, Alt Film Guide,
Hedy at a Hundred the centenary of Lamarr's birth, in the Ames Tribune, November 2014
"The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr" (article and audio excerpts), Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 14, 2014
Episode 6: Hedy Lamarr from Babes of Science podcasts
Hedy Lamarr before she came to Hollywood and Hedy Lamarr – brains, beauty and bad judgment at aenigma
1914 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Austrian actresses
20th-century Austrian people
Actresses from Vienna
American anti-fascists
American film actresses
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austro-Hungarian Jews
Austrian film actresses
Austrian inventors
Illeists
Jewish American actresses
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
People with acquired American citizenship
Radio pioneers
Women inventors
20th-century American inventors
| true |
[
"Madschun is a Turkish fairy tale from Andrew Lang's The Olive Fairy Book. The tale was first published by folklorist Ignác Kúnos in a collection of Turkish folktales.\n\nTranslations\nThe tale was also translated into English as \"Madjun\".\n\nSummary\nOnce, there was a young man who, even from childhood, had never grown any hair. One day, he saw the Sultan's daughter and became determined to marry her.\n\nHe first sent his mother to tell the Sultan that her son wanted to marry his daughter. The Sultan was intrigued by the request, and told the woman to send her son. However, by the time the son arrived, the Sultan's interest had waned, and he only wanted to be rid of the boy. So he told the boy that he must first gather all the birds of the world and bring them to the Sultan's garden, which had no birds.\nAfter wandering for a time, the boy met a dervish, and asked his help. The dervish told him to go to a huge cypress tree down the road, and hide in its shadow until he heard a huge rush of wings. This would be all the birds in the world coming for a rest. He was to wait until they were sitting, then say the word \"madschun\", which would cause them to freeze and become motionless. He could then gather the birds and take them to the palace. And that is what the boy did.\nThe sultan was a little dismayed. He told the boy that he could marry the princess - after he grew a full head of hair.\nUpset, the boy went home and brooded until he heard that the princess was to marry the son of the wazir. At this, he sneaked into the palace, found where the princess, the wazir's son, and some others were waiting, and said \"Madschun\". This froze all of them to the spot. The Sultan sent for a magician to explain what had happened, and the magician told him that it was because the Sultan had mistreated the boy. The Sultan sent for the boy at once, and the boy, hiding nearby, raced home.\nThe boy told his mother that she was to tell the sultan's messengers that the boy had left awhile ago, and that if they asked her to go look for the boy, she was to say that she was too poor to travel. She did this, and the messengers gave her a bag of gold for expenses and asked her help.\nAfter they left, the boy went to the palace, freed everyone, and married the princess.\n\nReferences\n\nTurkish_folklore\nTurkish fairy tales",
"I Told You So is a 1970 Ghanaian movie. The movie portrays Ghanaians and their way of life in a satirical style. It also gives insight into the life of a young lady who did not take the advice of her father when about to marry a man, she did not know anything about the man she was going to marry, but rather took her mother's and uncle's advice because of the wealth and power the man has.\n\nThe young lady later finds out that the man she is supposed to marry was an armed robber. She was unhappy of the whole incident. When her dad ask what had happened, she replied that the man she was supposed to marry is an armed robber; her father ended by saying \"I told you so\".\n\nCast\nBobe Cole\nMargret Quainoo (Araba Stamp)\nKweku Crankson (Osuo Abrobor)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n I TOLD YOU SO GHANAIAN MOVIE\n\n1970 films\nGhanaian films"
] |
[
"Hedy Lamarr",
"First marriage",
"What year did he marry the first time?",
"1933,"
] |
C_5f1567837dc546c292ffa9eac0fe195f_0
|
Who did he marry?
| 2 |
Who did Hedy Lamarr marry?
|
Hedy Lamarr
|
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own. CANNOTANSWER
|
Mandl,
|
Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.
After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (born Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935).
Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.
As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.
European film career
Early work
Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin.
However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous.
Ecstasy
In early 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.
Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.
Withdrawal
Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. It won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her.
Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karlische. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.
Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
Hollywood career
Louis B. Mayer and MGM
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr (to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman".
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation", says Shearer. She was billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away."
In future Hollywood films, she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke. The resulting film was a flop.
Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; it made $5 million. MGM promptly reteamed Lamarr and Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film in the vein of Ninotchka (1939), which was another hit.
Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls - a big success.
Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young. She made a third film with Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942). It was successful at the box office, as was Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.
Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon. It was a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
She was reunited with Powell in a comedy The Heavenly Body (1944), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators (1944). This was an attempt to repeat the success of Casablanca (1943), and RKO borrowed her for a melodrama Experiment Perilous (1944).
Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. It was very popular, but would be the last film she made under her MGM contract.
Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it. Writer Howard Sharpe interviewed her and gave his impression:
Author Richard Rhodes describes her assimilation into American culture:
Lamarr also had a penchant for speaking about herself in the third person.
Wartime fundraiser
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds.
She participated in a war bond-selling campaign with a sailor named Eddie Rhodes. Rhodes was in the crowd at each Lamarr appearance, and she would call him up on stage. She would briefly flirt with him before asking the audience if she should give him a kiss. The crowd would say yes, to which Hedy would reply that she would if enough people bought war bonds. After enough bonds were purchased, she would kiss Rhodes and he would head back into the audience. Then they would head off to the next war bond rally.
Producer
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946). It went over budget and only made minor profits.
She and Chertok then made Dishonored Lady (1947), another thriller starring Lamarr, which also went over budget - but was not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).
Later films
Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success playing Delilah against Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949. The film also won two Oscars.
Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).
Her career went into decline. She went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.
She was Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre ("Proud Woman") and Shower of Stars ("Cloak and Dagger"). Her last film was a thriller The Female Animal (1958).
Lamarr was signed to act in the 1966 film Picture Mommy Dead, but was let go when she collapsed during filming from nervous exhaustion. She was replaced in the role of Jessica Flagmore Shelley by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Inventor
Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.
Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled:
Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later years
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine.
In the late 1950s Lamarr designed and, with then-husband W. Howard Lee, developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.
Lamarr became estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
Seclusion
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. A documentary, Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca.
Death
Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014 a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.
Awards
Hedy Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1939, Lamarr was selected the "most promising new actress" of 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by Philadelphia Record film critic. British moviegoers voted Hedy Lamarr the year's 10th best actress, for her performance in Samson and Delilah in 1951.
In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing". The following year, Lamarr's native Austria awarded her the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors.
In 2006, the Hedy-Lamarr-Weg was founded in Vienna Meidling (12th District), named after the actress.
In 2013, the IQOQI installed a quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which they named after her in 2014.
In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The same year, Anthony Loder's request that the remaining ashes of his mother should be buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna was realized. On November 7, her urn was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery in Group 33 G, Tomb No. 80, not far from the centrally located presidential tomb.
On November 9, 2015, Google honored her on her 101st Birthday with a doodle.
On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr
Marriages and children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:
Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–1937), chairman of the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik
Gene Markey (married 1939–1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939) during her marriage with Markey. (He was later adopted by Loder and was thereafter known as James Lamarr Loder.) Lamarr and Markey lived at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California during their marriage.
John Loder (married 1943–1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), married Larry Colton, a writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), married Roxanne who worked for illustrator James McMullan. Anthony Loder was featured in the 2004 documentary film Calling Hedy Lamarr.
Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader
W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), a Texas oilman (who later married film actress Gene Tierney)
Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer
Following her sixth and final divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the last 35 years of her life.
Throughout, she claimed that James Lamarr Markey/Loder was biologically unrelated and adopted during her marriage to Gene Markey. However, years later James found documentation that he was the out-of-wedlock son of Lamarr and actor John Loder, whom she later married as her third husband. She had two more children with him: Denise (born 1945) and Anthony (born 1947) during their marriage.
Filmography
Source:
Radio appearances
In popular culture
The Mel Brooks 1974 western parody Blazing Saddles features a villain named "Hedley Lamarr". As a running gag, various characters mistakenly refer to him as "Hedy Lamarr" prompting him to testily reply "That's Hedley."
In the 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and subsequent film adaptation (1986) Audrey II says to Seymour in the song 'Feed Me' that he can get Seymour anything he wants including "A date with Hedy Lamarr."
In 2008, an off-Broadway play, Frequency Hopping, features the lives of Lamarr and Antheil. The play was written and staged by Elyse Singer, and the script won a prize for best new play about science and technology from STAGE.
In 2010, Lamarr was selected out of 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society on May 20.
Also during 2010, the New York Public Library exhibit Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library included a photo of a topless Lamarr () by Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann.
In 2011, the story of Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores the darker side of scientific discovery and experimentation, which premiered on September 7. Her work in improving wireless security was part of the premiere episode of the Discovery Channel show How We Invented the World.
Also during 2011, Anne Hathaway revealed that she had learned that the original Catwoman was based on Lamarr, so she studied all of Lamarr's films and incorporated some of her breathing techniques into her portrayal of Catwoman in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2015, on November 9, the 101st anniversary of Lamarr's birth, Google paid tribute to Hedy Lamarr's work in film and her contributions to scientific advancement with an animated Google Doodle.
In 2016, Lamarr was depicted in an off-Broadway play, HEDY! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, a one-woman show written and performed by Heather Massie.
In 2016, the off-Broadway, one-actor show "Stand Still and Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr." starring Emily Ebertz and written by Mike Broemmel went into production.
Also during 2016, Whitney Frost, a character in the TV show Agent Carter was inspired by Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall.
In 2017, actress Celia Massingham portrayed Lamarr on The CW television series Legends of Tomorrow in the sixth episode of the third season, titled Helen Hunt. The episode is set in 1937 Hollywoodland. The episode aired on November 14, 2017.
Also during 2017, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon, a documentary about Lamarr's career as an actress and later as an inventor, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in theaters on November 24, 2017, and aired on PBS American Masters in May 2018.
In 2018, actress Alyssa Sutherland portrayed Lamarr on the NBC television series Timeless in the third episode of the second season, titled Hollywoodland. The episode aired March 25, 2018.
In 2021, Lamarr was mentioned in the first episode of the Marvel's What If...? The episode aired on August 11, 2021.
See also
Inventors' Day
List of Austrians
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Hedy Lamarr Foundation website
Hedy Lamarr profile at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
US Patent 2292387, owned by Hedy Kiesler Markey AKA Hedy Lamarr on Google Patents
US Patent 2292387 on WIPO Pantentscope
Profile, women-inventors.com
Hedy Lamarr at Reel Classics
Happy 100th Birthday Hedy Lamarr, Movie Star who Paved the Way for Wifi at CNet
"Most Beautiful Woman" by Day, Inventor by Night at NPR
Hedy Lamarr at Inventions
Hedy Lamarr: Q&A with Author Patrick Agan, Andre Soares, Alt Film Guide,
Hedy at a Hundred the centenary of Lamarr's birth, in the Ames Tribune, November 2014
"The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr" (article and audio excerpts), Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 14, 2014
Episode 6: Hedy Lamarr from Babes of Science podcasts
Hedy Lamarr before she came to Hollywood and Hedy Lamarr – brains, beauty and bad judgment at aenigma
1914 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Austrian actresses
20th-century Austrian people
Actresses from Vienna
American anti-fascists
American film actresses
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austro-Hungarian Jews
Austrian film actresses
Austrian inventors
Illeists
Jewish American actresses
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
People with acquired American citizenship
Radio pioneers
Women inventors
20th-century American inventors
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"1933,",
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"Mandl,"
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Where did Hedy Lamarr and Mandl meet?
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Hedy Lamarr
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On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.
After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (born Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935).
Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.
As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.
European film career
Early work
Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin.
However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous.
Ecstasy
In early 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.
Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.
Withdrawal
Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. It won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her.
Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karlische. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.
Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
Hollywood career
Louis B. Mayer and MGM
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr (to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman".
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation", says Shearer. She was billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away."
In future Hollywood films, she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke. The resulting film was a flop.
Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; it made $5 million. MGM promptly reteamed Lamarr and Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film in the vein of Ninotchka (1939), which was another hit.
Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls - a big success.
Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young. She made a third film with Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942). It was successful at the box office, as was Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.
Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon. It was a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
She was reunited with Powell in a comedy The Heavenly Body (1944), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators (1944). This was an attempt to repeat the success of Casablanca (1943), and RKO borrowed her for a melodrama Experiment Perilous (1944).
Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. It was very popular, but would be the last film she made under her MGM contract.
Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it. Writer Howard Sharpe interviewed her and gave his impression:
Author Richard Rhodes describes her assimilation into American culture:
Lamarr also had a penchant for speaking about herself in the third person.
Wartime fundraiser
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds.
She participated in a war bond-selling campaign with a sailor named Eddie Rhodes. Rhodes was in the crowd at each Lamarr appearance, and she would call him up on stage. She would briefly flirt with him before asking the audience if she should give him a kiss. The crowd would say yes, to which Hedy would reply that she would if enough people bought war bonds. After enough bonds were purchased, she would kiss Rhodes and he would head back into the audience. Then they would head off to the next war bond rally.
Producer
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946). It went over budget and only made minor profits.
She and Chertok then made Dishonored Lady (1947), another thriller starring Lamarr, which also went over budget - but was not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).
Later films
Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success playing Delilah against Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949. The film also won two Oscars.
Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).
Her career went into decline. She went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.
She was Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre ("Proud Woman") and Shower of Stars ("Cloak and Dagger"). Her last film was a thriller The Female Animal (1958).
Lamarr was signed to act in the 1966 film Picture Mommy Dead, but was let go when she collapsed during filming from nervous exhaustion. She was replaced in the role of Jessica Flagmore Shelley by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Inventor
Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.
Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled:
Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later years
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine.
In the late 1950s Lamarr designed and, with then-husband W. Howard Lee, developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.
Lamarr became estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
Seclusion
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. A documentary, Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca.
Death
Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014 a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.
Awards
Hedy Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1939, Lamarr was selected the "most promising new actress" of 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by Philadelphia Record film critic. British moviegoers voted Hedy Lamarr the year's 10th best actress, for her performance in Samson and Delilah in 1951.
In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing". The following year, Lamarr's native Austria awarded her the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors.
In 2006, the Hedy-Lamarr-Weg was founded in Vienna Meidling (12th District), named after the actress.
In 2013, the IQOQI installed a quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which they named after her in 2014.
In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The same year, Anthony Loder's request that the remaining ashes of his mother should be buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna was realized. On November 7, her urn was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery in Group 33 G, Tomb No. 80, not far from the centrally located presidential tomb.
On November 9, 2015, Google honored her on her 101st Birthday with a doodle.
On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr
Marriages and children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:
Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–1937), chairman of the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik
Gene Markey (married 1939–1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939) during her marriage with Markey. (He was later adopted by Loder and was thereafter known as James Lamarr Loder.) Lamarr and Markey lived at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California during their marriage.
John Loder (married 1943–1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), married Larry Colton, a writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), married Roxanne who worked for illustrator James McMullan. Anthony Loder was featured in the 2004 documentary film Calling Hedy Lamarr.
Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader
W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), a Texas oilman (who later married film actress Gene Tierney)
Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer
Following her sixth and final divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the last 35 years of her life.
Throughout, she claimed that James Lamarr Markey/Loder was biologically unrelated and adopted during her marriage to Gene Markey. However, years later James found documentation that he was the out-of-wedlock son of Lamarr and actor John Loder, whom she later married as her third husband. She had two more children with him: Denise (born 1945) and Anthony (born 1947) during their marriage.
Filmography
Source:
Radio appearances
In popular culture
The Mel Brooks 1974 western parody Blazing Saddles features a villain named "Hedley Lamarr". As a running gag, various characters mistakenly refer to him as "Hedy Lamarr" prompting him to testily reply "That's Hedley."
In the 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and subsequent film adaptation (1986) Audrey II says to Seymour in the song 'Feed Me' that he can get Seymour anything he wants including "A date with Hedy Lamarr."
In 2008, an off-Broadway play, Frequency Hopping, features the lives of Lamarr and Antheil. The play was written and staged by Elyse Singer, and the script won a prize for best new play about science and technology from STAGE.
In 2010, Lamarr was selected out of 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society on May 20.
Also during 2010, the New York Public Library exhibit Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library included a photo of a topless Lamarr () by Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann.
In 2011, the story of Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores the darker side of scientific discovery and experimentation, which premiered on September 7. Her work in improving wireless security was part of the premiere episode of the Discovery Channel show How We Invented the World.
Also during 2011, Anne Hathaway revealed that she had learned that the original Catwoman was based on Lamarr, so she studied all of Lamarr's films and incorporated some of her breathing techniques into her portrayal of Catwoman in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2015, on November 9, the 101st anniversary of Lamarr's birth, Google paid tribute to Hedy Lamarr's work in film and her contributions to scientific advancement with an animated Google Doodle.
In 2016, Lamarr was depicted in an off-Broadway play, HEDY! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, a one-woman show written and performed by Heather Massie.
In 2016, the off-Broadway, one-actor show "Stand Still and Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr." starring Emily Ebertz and written by Mike Broemmel went into production.
Also during 2016, Whitney Frost, a character in the TV show Agent Carter was inspired by Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall.
In 2017, actress Celia Massingham portrayed Lamarr on The CW television series Legends of Tomorrow in the sixth episode of the third season, titled Helen Hunt. The episode is set in 1937 Hollywoodland. The episode aired on November 14, 2017.
Also during 2017, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon, a documentary about Lamarr's career as an actress and later as an inventor, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in theaters on November 24, 2017, and aired on PBS American Masters in May 2018.
In 2018, actress Alyssa Sutherland portrayed Lamarr on the NBC television series Timeless in the third episode of the second season, titled Hollywoodland. The episode aired March 25, 2018.
In 2021, Lamarr was mentioned in the first episode of the Marvel's What If...? The episode aired on August 11, 2021.
See also
Inventors' Day
List of Austrians
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Hedy Lamarr Foundation website
Hedy Lamarr profile at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
US Patent 2292387, owned by Hedy Kiesler Markey AKA Hedy Lamarr on Google Patents
US Patent 2292387 on WIPO Pantentscope
Profile, women-inventors.com
Hedy Lamarr at Reel Classics
Happy 100th Birthday Hedy Lamarr, Movie Star who Paved the Way for Wifi at CNet
"Most Beautiful Woman" by Day, Inventor by Night at NPR
Hedy Lamarr at Inventions
Hedy Lamarr: Q&A with Author Patrick Agan, Andre Soares, Alt Film Guide,
Hedy at a Hundred the centenary of Lamarr's birth, in the Ames Tribune, November 2014
"The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr" (article and audio excerpts), Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 14, 2014
Episode 6: Hedy Lamarr from Babes of Science podcasts
Hedy Lamarr before she came to Hollywood and Hedy Lamarr – brains, beauty and bad judgment at aenigma
1914 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Austrian actresses
20th-century Austrian people
Actresses from Vienna
American anti-fascists
American film actresses
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austro-Hungarian Jews
Austrian film actresses
Austrian inventors
Illeists
Jewish American actresses
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
People with acquired American citizenship
Radio pioneers
Women inventors
20th-century American inventors
| false |
[
"This article details the 2010–11 UEFA Europa League qualifying phase and play-off round.\n\nEach tie was played over two legs, with each team playing one leg at home. The team that had the higher aggregate score over the two legs progressed to the next round. In the event that aggregate scores finished level, the away goals rule was applied; i.e., the team that scored more goals away from home over the two legs progressed. If away goals were also equal, then 30 minutes of extra time was played, divided into two 15-minute halves. The away goals rule was again applied after extra time; i.e., if there were goals scored during extra time and the aggregate score was still level, the visiting team qualified by virtue of more away goals scored. If no goals were scored during extra time, the tie was decided by a penalty shootout.\n\nAll times are CEST (UTC+2)\n\nRound and draw dates\nAll draws were held at UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland.\n\nMatches may also be played on Tuesdays or Wednesdays instead of the regular Thursdays due to scheduling conflicts.\n\nTeams\nBelow are the 160 teams involved in the qualifying phase and play-off round, grouped by their starting rounds. The 37 winners of the play-off round qualified for the group stage to join the 10 losing teams from the Champions League play-off round, and the title holders, Atlético Madrid.\n\nIn each round, teams were seeded based on their 2010 UEFA club coefficients. Prior to the draw, UEFA may form \"groups\" in accordance with the principles set by the Club Competitions Committee, but they are purely for convenience of the draw and do not resemble any real groupings in the sense of the competition, while ensuring that teams from the same association not drawn against each other.\n\nCL-c Losing teams from the Champions League third qualifying round (Champions Path)\n\nCL-n Losing teams from the Champions League third qualifying round (Non-Champions Path)\n\nFirst qualifying round\n\nSeeding\n\nMatches\n\n|}\nNote 1: Order of legs reversed after original draw.\n\nFirst leg\n\nNotes\nNote 2: Played in Durrës at the Stadiumi Niko Dovana as Laçi's Stadiumi Laçi did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 3: Played in Tallinn at the Lilleküla Stadium as Narva Trans's Narva Kreenholmi Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 4: Played in Tirana at the Qemal Stafa Stadium as KF Tirana's Selman Stërmasi Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 5: Played in Nikšić at the Stadion Gradski as Zeta's Trešnjica Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 6: Played in Chișinău at the Zimbru Stadium as Olimpia's Olimpia Bălți Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 7: Played in Baku at the Tofiq Bahramov Stadium as Qarabağ's Guzanli Olympic Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 8: Played in Dugopolje at Stadion Hrvatski vitezovi as Šibenik's Stadion Šubićevac did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 9: Played in Andorra la Vella at the Camp d'Esports del M.I. Consell General as the grass in Estadi Comunal d'Andorra la Vella was being replaced. This grass replacement led to the 3–0 loss awarded to FC Santa Coloma on the first leg of the UEFA Champions League first qualifying round against Birkirkara.\nNote 10: Played in Luxembourg City at the Stade Josy Barthel as Grevenmacher's Op Flohr Stadion did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 11: Played in Tórshavn at the Gundadalur as NSÍ Runavík's Runavík Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 12: Played in Domžale at the Sports Park as Olimpija Ljubljana's ŽŠD Ljubljana Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\n\nSecond leg\n\nAnorthosis won 4–0 on aggregate.\n\nTauras Tauragė won 5–4 on aggregate.\n\nQarabağ won 5–2 on aggregate.\n\nMogren won 5–0 on aggregate.\n\nŠibenik won 3–0 on aggregate.\n\nDinamo Tbilisi won 2–1 on aggregate.\n\n1–1 on aggregate. Olimpia won on away goals.\n\nBnei Yehuda won 1–0 on aggregate.\n\nPortadown won 2–1 on aggregate.\n\nMYPA won 7–0 on aggregate.\n\nDnepr Mogilev won 8–2 on aggregate.\n\nRanders won 7–3 on aggregate.\n\n1–1 on aggregate. Dacia won on away goals.\n\nGyőri ETO won 5–3 on aggregate.\n\nKF Tirana won 1–0 on aggregate.\n\nGefle won 4–1 on aggregate.\n\nRabotnički won 11–0 on aggregate.\n\nTPS won 7–1 on aggregate.\n\nZrinjski won 4–2 on aggregate.\n\nDundalk won 5–4 on aggregate.\n\nKalmar FF won 4–0 on aggregate.\n\nŠiroki Brijeg won 5–0 on aggregate.\n\nZestafoni won 5–0 on aggregate.\n\nKR Reykjavík won 5–2 on aggregate.\n\nRuch Chorzów won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nTorpedo Zhodino won 6–1 on aggregate.\n\nNotes\nNote 13: Played in Kaunas at S. Darius and S. Girėnas Stadium as Tauras Tauragė's Vytautas Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 14: Played in Skopje at Philip II Arena as Metalurg Skopje's Železarnica Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 15: Played in Nikšić at Stadion Gradski as Mogren's Stadion Mogren did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 16: Played in Chişinău at Zimbru Stadium as Dacia's Dinamo Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 17: Played in Solna at Råsunda Stadium as Gefle's Strömvallen did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 18: Played in Toftir at Svangaskarð as EB/Streymur's Við Margáir did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 19: Played in Reykjavík at Laugardalsvöllur as Fylkir's Fylkisvöllur did not meet UEFA criteria.\n\nSecond qualifying round\n\nSeeding\n\n*Unseeded teams from the first qualifying round that qualified for the second qualifying round, effectively taking the coefficient and seeding of their first qualifying round opponents in this draw.\n\nMatches\n\n|}\n\nNotes\nNote 20: Order of legs reversed after original draw.\nNote 21: Original match abandoned in the 80th minute due to adverse weather conditions, with MYPA leading 1–0. The match was replayed on 23 July 2010 at 18:30 CEST from the beginning.\nNote 22: UEFA awarded Győri ETO a 3–0 win due to Atyrau fielding a suspended player in the first leg. The original match had ended in a 2–0 win for Győri ETO.\nNote 23: UEFA awarded Budućnost Podgorica a 3–0 win due to Baku fielding a suspended player in the first leg. The original match had ended in a 2–1 win for Baku.\n\nFirst leg\n\nNotes\nNote 24: Played in Tbilisi at Boris Paichadze Stadium as WIT Georgia's Shevardeni Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 25: Played in Kaunas at S. Darius and S. Girėnas Stadium as Tauras Tauragė's Vytautas stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 26: Played in Chișinău at Zimbru Stadium as Olimpia's Olimpia Bălți Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 27: Played in Vantaa at ISS Stadion as Honka's Tapiolan Urheilupuisto did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 28: Played in Solna at Råsunda Stadium as Gefle's Strömvallen did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 29: Played in Luxembourg City at Stade Josy Barthel as Differdange's Stade du Thillenberg did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 30: Played in Ghent at Jules Ottenstadion as Cercle Brugge's Jan Breydel Stadium is undergoing renovative work.\nNote 31: Played in Győr at ETO Park as Videoton's Stadion Sóstói did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 32: Played in Tirana at Qemal Stafa Stadium as Besa Kavajë's Stadiumi Besa did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 33: Played in Funchal at Estádio da Madeira as Marítimo's Estádio dos Barreiros is undergoing extensive renovative work.\nNote 34: Played in Belfast at Windsor Park as Cliftonville's Solitude did not meet UEFA criteria.\n\nSecond leg\n\nRabotnički won 1–0 on aggregate.\n\nTeteks won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nOFK Beograd won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\nZestafoni won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nMaccabi Tel Aviv won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\nSpartak Zlatibor Voda won 5–3 on aggregate.\n\nQarabağ won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\n2–2 on aggregate. Cercle Brugge won on away goals.\n\n3–3 on aggregate. Dnepr Mogilev won on away goals.\n\nAustria Wien won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\n2–2 on aggregate. Molde won on away goals.\n\nBaník Ostrava won 6–0 on aggregate.\n\nDinamo Minsk won 10–1 on aggregate.\n\nKarpaty Lviv won 6–2 on aggregate.\n\nKalmar FF won 2–0 on aggregate.\n\nReplay:\n\nMYPA won 8–0 on aggregate.\n\nDinamo Tbilisi won 4–2 on aggregate.\n\nRanders won 4–1 on aggregate.\n\nElfsborg won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nAPOEL won 6–1 on aggregate.\n\nUtrecht won 5–1 on aggregate.\n\nShamrock Rovers won 2–1 on aggregate.\n\nDinamo București won 7–1 on aggregate.\n\nAnorthosis won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\nWisła won 7–0 on aggregate.\n\nBrøndby won 3–0 on aggregate.\n\nLevski Sofia won 8–0 on aggregate.\n\nBeşiktaş won 7–0 on aggregate.\n\n1–1 on aggregate. Ruch won on away goals.\n\nRapid Wien won 6–2 on aggregate.\n\nMaribor won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nBangor City won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\nGyőri ETO won 5–0 on aggregate.\n\nZrinjski won 13–3 on aggregate.\n\nOlympiacos won 11–1 on aggregate.\n\nLausanne-Sport won 2–1 on aggregate.\n\nMarítimo won 6–4 on aggregate.\n\nCliftonville won 1–0 on aggregate.\n\nBudućnost Podgorica won 4–2 on aggregate.\n\nMotherwell won 2–0 on aggregate.\n\nNotes\nNote 35: Played in Skopje at Philip II Arena as Teteks's City Stadium Tetovo did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 36: Played in Barysaw at Haradski Stadium as Torpedo Zhodino's Torpedo Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 37: Played in Nikšić at Stadion Gradski as Mogren's Stadion Mogren did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 38: Played in Novi Sad at Karađorđe Stadium as Spartak Zlatibor Voda's Subotica City Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 39: Played in Baku at Tofiq Bahramov Stadium as Qarabağ's Guzanli Olympic Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 40: Played in Jūrmala at Slokas Stadium as Jelgava's Ozolnieku Stadions did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 41: Played in Tallinn at Lilleküla Stadium as Sillamäe Kalev's Sillamäe Kalevi Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 42: Played in Chişinău at Zimbru Stadium as Dacia's Dinamo Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 43: Played in Tiraspol at Sheriff Stadium as Iskra-Stal's Orăşenesc Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 44: Played in Tirana at Qemal Stafa Stadium as KF Tirana's Selman Stërmasi stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 45: Played in Split at Stadion Poljud as Šibenik's Stadion Šubićevac did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 46: Played in Toftir at Svangaskarð as Víkingur Gøta's Serpugerði Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 47: Played in Wrexham at Racecourse Ground as Bangor City's Farrar Road Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 48: Played in Dublin at Dalymount Park as Sporting Fingal's Morton Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\n\nThird qualifying round\n\nSeeding\n\n*Unseeded teams from the second qualifying round that qualified for the third qualifying round, effectively taking the coefficient and seeding of their second qualifying round opponents in this draw.\n\nMatches\n\n|}\n\nNotes\n* Note 49: Order of legs reversed after original draw\n\nFirst leg\n\nNotes\nNote 50: Played in Sofia at Vasil Levski National Stadium as CSKA Sofia's Balgarska Armiya Stadium was closed at the end of the previous season because it didn't meet the BFU and UEFA criteria.\nNote 51: Played in Novi Sad at Karađorđe Stadium as Spartak Zlatibor Voda's Subotica City Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 52: Played in Sofia at Georgi Asparuhov Stadium as Beroe Stara Zagora's Beroe Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 53: Played in Prague at Generali Arena as Viktoria Plzeň's Stadion města Plzně did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 54: Played in Funchal at Estádio da Madeira as Marítimo's Estádio dos Barreiros is undergoing extensive renovative work.\n\nSecond leg\n\nRapid Wien won 4–1 on aggregate.\n\nElfsborg won 7–1 on aggregate.\n\nGalatasaray won 7–3 on aggregate.\n\nDnepr Mogilev won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nKarpaty Lviv won 2–0 on aggregate.\n\nQarabağ won 4–2 on aggregate.\n\nDinamo Minsk won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\nSturm Graz won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nAnorthosis won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\n2–2 on aggregate. Sibir Novosibirsk won on away goals.\n\nAZ won 2–1 on aggregate.\n\nDnipro Dnipropetrovsk won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\nTimișoara won 5–4 on aggregate.\n\nBrøndby won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nLausanne-Sport won 4–3 on aggregate.\n\nUtrecht won 4–1 on aggregate.\n\nLevski Sofia won 6–3 on aggregate.\n\nAris won 4–3 on aggregate.\n\nGenk won 8–3 on aggregate.\n\nBeşiktaş won 4–1 on aggregate.\n\n2–2 on aggregate. Maccabi Tel Aviv won on away goals.\n\nAPOEL won 4–1 on aggregate.\n\nMarítimo won 10–3 on aggregate.\n\nSlovan Bratislava won 3–2 on aggregate.\n\nAustria Wien won 6–1 on aggregate.\n\nStuttgart won 5–4 on aggregate.\n\nHajduk Split won 4–3 on aggregate.\n\nLiverpool won 4–0 on aggregate.\n\nCSKA Sofia won 5–1 on aggregate.\n\nJuventus won 3–0 on aggregate.\n\nMaribor won 6–2 on aggregate.\n\n1–1 on aggregate. Győri ETO won 4–3 on penalties.\n\nMotherwell won 4–1 on aggregate.\n\nOdense won 5–3 on aggregate.\n\nSporting won 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nNotes\nNote 55: Played in Skopje at Philip II Arena as Teteks's City Stadium Tetovo did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 56: Played in Baku at Tofiq Bahramov Stadium as Qarabağ's Guzanli Olympic Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 57: Played in Zürich at Letzigrund as Luzern's Stadion Allmend did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 58: Played in Wrexham at Racecourse Ground as Bangor City's Farrar Road Stadium did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 59: Played in Bratislava at Štadión Pasienky as Slovan Bratislava's Tehelné pole is undergoing extensive renovative work.\nNote 60: Played in Belfast at Windsor Park as Cliftonville's Solitude did not meet UEFA criteria.\nNote 61: Played in Modena at Stadio Alberto Braglia as Juventus's Stadio Olimpico di Torino was to host a U2 360° Tour concert.\nNote 62: Match was suspended in the 33rd minute for 20 minutes because of a floodlight failure.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n2010–11 UEFA Europa League, UEFA.com\n\nQualifying rounds\nUEFA Europa League qualifying rounds",
"Where Fear and Weapons Meet was a hardcore punk band from South Florida. The group's first EP appeared in 1998; they followed it with a full-length in 1999, both on Revelation Records, and won nationwide exposure. They then released a split with Comin' Correct before returning with another full-length, Unstoppable, on Triple Crown Records. Their final release was Control, in 2003.\n\nIn June 2012, it was announced that the band will reunite the following October at the Bringin' It Back For The Kids Fest 2 in Pompano Beach, Florida.\n\nDiscography\n Where Fear and Weapons Meet EP (Revelation Records, 1998)\n The Weapon (Revelation Records, 1999)\n Split (Temperance Records, 2000)\n Unstoppable (Triple Crown Records, 2001)\n Control (Eulogy Recordings, 2003)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Where Fear and Weapons Meet on Eulogy Records\n Where Fear and Weapons Meet on Revelation Records\n\nMusical groups from Fort Lauderdale, Florida\nAmerican metalcore musical groups\nMusical groups established in 1998\nMusical groups disestablished in 2004\nMusical groups reestablished in 2012\nTriple Crown Records artists\n1998 establishments in Florida"
] |
[
"Hedy Lamarr",
"First marriage",
"What year did he marry the first time?",
"1933,",
"Who did he marry?",
"Mandl,",
"Where did they meet?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_5f1567837dc546c292ffa9eac0fe195f_0
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Where were they married?
| 4 |
Where were Hedy Lamarr and Mandl married?
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Hedy Lamarr
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On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.
After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (born Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935).
Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.
As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.
European film career
Early work
Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin.
However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous.
Ecstasy
In early 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.
Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.
Withdrawal
Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. It won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her.
Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karlische. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.
Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
Hollywood career
Louis B. Mayer and MGM
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr (to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman".
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation", says Shearer. She was billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away."
In future Hollywood films, she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke. The resulting film was a flop.
Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; it made $5 million. MGM promptly reteamed Lamarr and Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film in the vein of Ninotchka (1939), which was another hit.
Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls - a big success.
Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young. She made a third film with Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942). It was successful at the box office, as was Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.
Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon. It was a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
She was reunited with Powell in a comedy The Heavenly Body (1944), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators (1944). This was an attempt to repeat the success of Casablanca (1943), and RKO borrowed her for a melodrama Experiment Perilous (1944).
Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. It was very popular, but would be the last film she made under her MGM contract.
Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it. Writer Howard Sharpe interviewed her and gave his impression:
Author Richard Rhodes describes her assimilation into American culture:
Lamarr also had a penchant for speaking about herself in the third person.
Wartime fundraiser
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds.
She participated in a war bond-selling campaign with a sailor named Eddie Rhodes. Rhodes was in the crowd at each Lamarr appearance, and she would call him up on stage. She would briefly flirt with him before asking the audience if she should give him a kiss. The crowd would say yes, to which Hedy would reply that she would if enough people bought war bonds. After enough bonds were purchased, she would kiss Rhodes and he would head back into the audience. Then they would head off to the next war bond rally.
Producer
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946). It went over budget and only made minor profits.
She and Chertok then made Dishonored Lady (1947), another thriller starring Lamarr, which also went over budget - but was not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).
Later films
Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success playing Delilah against Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949. The film also won two Oscars.
Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).
Her career went into decline. She went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.
She was Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre ("Proud Woman") and Shower of Stars ("Cloak and Dagger"). Her last film was a thriller The Female Animal (1958).
Lamarr was signed to act in the 1966 film Picture Mommy Dead, but was let go when she collapsed during filming from nervous exhaustion. She was replaced in the role of Jessica Flagmore Shelley by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Inventor
Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.
Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled:
Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later years
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine.
In the late 1950s Lamarr designed and, with then-husband W. Howard Lee, developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.
Lamarr became estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
Seclusion
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. A documentary, Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca.
Death
Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014 a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.
Awards
Hedy Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1939, Lamarr was selected the "most promising new actress" of 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by Philadelphia Record film critic. British moviegoers voted Hedy Lamarr the year's 10th best actress, for her performance in Samson and Delilah in 1951.
In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing". The following year, Lamarr's native Austria awarded her the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors.
In 2006, the Hedy-Lamarr-Weg was founded in Vienna Meidling (12th District), named after the actress.
In 2013, the IQOQI installed a quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which they named after her in 2014.
In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The same year, Anthony Loder's request that the remaining ashes of his mother should be buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna was realized. On November 7, her urn was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery in Group 33 G, Tomb No. 80, not far from the centrally located presidential tomb.
On November 9, 2015, Google honored her on her 101st Birthday with a doodle.
On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr
Marriages and children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:
Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–1937), chairman of the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik
Gene Markey (married 1939–1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939) during her marriage with Markey. (He was later adopted by Loder and was thereafter known as James Lamarr Loder.) Lamarr and Markey lived at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California during their marriage.
John Loder (married 1943–1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), married Larry Colton, a writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), married Roxanne who worked for illustrator James McMullan. Anthony Loder was featured in the 2004 documentary film Calling Hedy Lamarr.
Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader
W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), a Texas oilman (who later married film actress Gene Tierney)
Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer
Following her sixth and final divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the last 35 years of her life.
Throughout, she claimed that James Lamarr Markey/Loder was biologically unrelated and adopted during her marriage to Gene Markey. However, years later James found documentation that he was the out-of-wedlock son of Lamarr and actor John Loder, whom she later married as her third husband. She had two more children with him: Denise (born 1945) and Anthony (born 1947) during their marriage.
Filmography
Source:
Radio appearances
In popular culture
The Mel Brooks 1974 western parody Blazing Saddles features a villain named "Hedley Lamarr". As a running gag, various characters mistakenly refer to him as "Hedy Lamarr" prompting him to testily reply "That's Hedley."
In the 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and subsequent film adaptation (1986) Audrey II says to Seymour in the song 'Feed Me' that he can get Seymour anything he wants including "A date with Hedy Lamarr."
In 2008, an off-Broadway play, Frequency Hopping, features the lives of Lamarr and Antheil. The play was written and staged by Elyse Singer, and the script won a prize for best new play about science and technology from STAGE.
In 2010, Lamarr was selected out of 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society on May 20.
Also during 2010, the New York Public Library exhibit Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library included a photo of a topless Lamarr () by Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann.
In 2011, the story of Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores the darker side of scientific discovery and experimentation, which premiered on September 7. Her work in improving wireless security was part of the premiere episode of the Discovery Channel show How We Invented the World.
Also during 2011, Anne Hathaway revealed that she had learned that the original Catwoman was based on Lamarr, so she studied all of Lamarr's films and incorporated some of her breathing techniques into her portrayal of Catwoman in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2015, on November 9, the 101st anniversary of Lamarr's birth, Google paid tribute to Hedy Lamarr's work in film and her contributions to scientific advancement with an animated Google Doodle.
In 2016, Lamarr was depicted in an off-Broadway play, HEDY! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, a one-woman show written and performed by Heather Massie.
In 2016, the off-Broadway, one-actor show "Stand Still and Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr." starring Emily Ebertz and written by Mike Broemmel went into production.
Also during 2016, Whitney Frost, a character in the TV show Agent Carter was inspired by Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall.
In 2017, actress Celia Massingham portrayed Lamarr on The CW television series Legends of Tomorrow in the sixth episode of the third season, titled Helen Hunt. The episode is set in 1937 Hollywoodland. The episode aired on November 14, 2017.
Also during 2017, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon, a documentary about Lamarr's career as an actress and later as an inventor, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in theaters on November 24, 2017, and aired on PBS American Masters in May 2018.
In 2018, actress Alyssa Sutherland portrayed Lamarr on the NBC television series Timeless in the third episode of the second season, titled Hollywoodland. The episode aired March 25, 2018.
In 2021, Lamarr was mentioned in the first episode of the Marvel's What If...? The episode aired on August 11, 2021.
See also
Inventors' Day
List of Austrians
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Hedy Lamarr Foundation website
Hedy Lamarr profile at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
US Patent 2292387, owned by Hedy Kiesler Markey AKA Hedy Lamarr on Google Patents
US Patent 2292387 on WIPO Pantentscope
Profile, women-inventors.com
Hedy Lamarr at Reel Classics
Happy 100th Birthday Hedy Lamarr, Movie Star who Paved the Way for Wifi at CNet
"Most Beautiful Woman" by Day, Inventor by Night at NPR
Hedy Lamarr at Inventions
Hedy Lamarr: Q&A with Author Patrick Agan, Andre Soares, Alt Film Guide,
Hedy at a Hundred the centenary of Lamarr's birth, in the Ames Tribune, November 2014
"The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr" (article and audio excerpts), Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 14, 2014
Episode 6: Hedy Lamarr from Babes of Science podcasts
Hedy Lamarr before she came to Hollywood and Hedy Lamarr – brains, beauty and bad judgment at aenigma
1914 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Austrian actresses
20th-century Austrian people
Actresses from Vienna
American anti-fascists
American film actresses
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austro-Hungarian Jews
Austrian film actresses
Austrian inventors
Illeists
Jewish American actresses
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
People with acquired American citizenship
Radio pioneers
Women inventors
20th-century American inventors
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"Panthea Grant Boone Boggs (September 20, 1801 – September 23, 1880) was the First Lady of Missouri from 1836 until 1840. She was also a granddaughter of American pioneer Daniel Boone. She was married to Lilburn Boggs who served as the sixth Governor of Missouri from 1836 to 1840. They spent the first 23 years of their marriage living in Jackson County, Missouri. After Boggs served as governor, they moved to California in 1846 where they planned to retire, but where the former governor served as alcalde, local postmaster, and in the California state assembly.\n\nGovernor Boggs was previously married to Julia Bent, a daughter of Judge Silas Bent. They were married from 1817 until her death in 1820.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1801 births\n1880 deaths\nFirst Ladies and Gentlemen of Missouri\nPeople from Greenup, Kentucky\nPeople from Jackson County, Missouri\nPeople from Napa County, California\nDaniel Boone"
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[
"Hedy Lamarr",
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"What year did he marry the first time?",
"1933,",
"Who did he marry?",
"Mandl,",
"Where did they meet?",
"I don't know.",
"Where were they married?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_5f1567837dc546c292ffa9eac0fe195f_0
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What happened during their marriage?
| 5 |
What happened during Hedy Lamarr's marriage?
|
Hedy Lamarr
|
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own. CANNOTANSWER
|
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable,
|
Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.
After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (born Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935).
Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.
As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.
European film career
Early work
Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin.
However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous.
Ecstasy
In early 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.
Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.
Withdrawal
Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. It won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her.
Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karlische. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.
Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
Hollywood career
Louis B. Mayer and MGM
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr (to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman".
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation", says Shearer. She was billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away."
In future Hollywood films, she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke. The resulting film was a flop.
Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; it made $5 million. MGM promptly reteamed Lamarr and Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film in the vein of Ninotchka (1939), which was another hit.
Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls - a big success.
Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young. She made a third film with Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942). It was successful at the box office, as was Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.
Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon. It was a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
She was reunited with Powell in a comedy The Heavenly Body (1944), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators (1944). This was an attempt to repeat the success of Casablanca (1943), and RKO borrowed her for a melodrama Experiment Perilous (1944).
Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. It was very popular, but would be the last film she made under her MGM contract.
Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it. Writer Howard Sharpe interviewed her and gave his impression:
Author Richard Rhodes describes her assimilation into American culture:
Lamarr also had a penchant for speaking about herself in the third person.
Wartime fundraiser
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds.
She participated in a war bond-selling campaign with a sailor named Eddie Rhodes. Rhodes was in the crowd at each Lamarr appearance, and she would call him up on stage. She would briefly flirt with him before asking the audience if she should give him a kiss. The crowd would say yes, to which Hedy would reply that she would if enough people bought war bonds. After enough bonds were purchased, she would kiss Rhodes and he would head back into the audience. Then they would head off to the next war bond rally.
Producer
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946). It went over budget and only made minor profits.
She and Chertok then made Dishonored Lady (1947), another thriller starring Lamarr, which also went over budget - but was not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).
Later films
Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success playing Delilah against Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949. The film also won two Oscars.
Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).
Her career went into decline. She went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.
She was Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre ("Proud Woman") and Shower of Stars ("Cloak and Dagger"). Her last film was a thriller The Female Animal (1958).
Lamarr was signed to act in the 1966 film Picture Mommy Dead, but was let go when she collapsed during filming from nervous exhaustion. She was replaced in the role of Jessica Flagmore Shelley by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Inventor
Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.
Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled:
Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later years
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine.
In the late 1950s Lamarr designed and, with then-husband W. Howard Lee, developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.
Lamarr became estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
Seclusion
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. A documentary, Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca.
Death
Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014 a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.
Awards
Hedy Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1939, Lamarr was selected the "most promising new actress" of 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by Philadelphia Record film critic. British moviegoers voted Hedy Lamarr the year's 10th best actress, for her performance in Samson and Delilah in 1951.
In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing". The following year, Lamarr's native Austria awarded her the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors.
In 2006, the Hedy-Lamarr-Weg was founded in Vienna Meidling (12th District), named after the actress.
In 2013, the IQOQI installed a quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which they named after her in 2014.
In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The same year, Anthony Loder's request that the remaining ashes of his mother should be buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna was realized. On November 7, her urn was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery in Group 33 G, Tomb No. 80, not far from the centrally located presidential tomb.
On November 9, 2015, Google honored her on her 101st Birthday with a doodle.
On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr
Marriages and children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:
Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–1937), chairman of the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik
Gene Markey (married 1939–1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939) during her marriage with Markey. (He was later adopted by Loder and was thereafter known as James Lamarr Loder.) Lamarr and Markey lived at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California during their marriage.
John Loder (married 1943–1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), married Larry Colton, a writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), married Roxanne who worked for illustrator James McMullan. Anthony Loder was featured in the 2004 documentary film Calling Hedy Lamarr.
Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader
W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), a Texas oilman (who later married film actress Gene Tierney)
Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer
Following her sixth and final divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the last 35 years of her life.
Throughout, she claimed that James Lamarr Markey/Loder was biologically unrelated and adopted during her marriage to Gene Markey. However, years later James found documentation that he was the out-of-wedlock son of Lamarr and actor John Loder, whom she later married as her third husband. She had two more children with him: Denise (born 1945) and Anthony (born 1947) during their marriage.
Filmography
Source:
Radio appearances
In popular culture
The Mel Brooks 1974 western parody Blazing Saddles features a villain named "Hedley Lamarr". As a running gag, various characters mistakenly refer to him as "Hedy Lamarr" prompting him to testily reply "That's Hedley."
In the 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and subsequent film adaptation (1986) Audrey II says to Seymour in the song 'Feed Me' that he can get Seymour anything he wants including "A date with Hedy Lamarr."
In 2008, an off-Broadway play, Frequency Hopping, features the lives of Lamarr and Antheil. The play was written and staged by Elyse Singer, and the script won a prize for best new play about science and technology from STAGE.
In 2010, Lamarr was selected out of 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society on May 20.
Also during 2010, the New York Public Library exhibit Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library included a photo of a topless Lamarr () by Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann.
In 2011, the story of Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores the darker side of scientific discovery and experimentation, which premiered on September 7. Her work in improving wireless security was part of the premiere episode of the Discovery Channel show How We Invented the World.
Also during 2011, Anne Hathaway revealed that she had learned that the original Catwoman was based on Lamarr, so she studied all of Lamarr's films and incorporated some of her breathing techniques into her portrayal of Catwoman in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2015, on November 9, the 101st anniversary of Lamarr's birth, Google paid tribute to Hedy Lamarr's work in film and her contributions to scientific advancement with an animated Google Doodle.
In 2016, Lamarr was depicted in an off-Broadway play, HEDY! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, a one-woman show written and performed by Heather Massie.
In 2016, the off-Broadway, one-actor show "Stand Still and Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr." starring Emily Ebertz and written by Mike Broemmel went into production.
Also during 2016, Whitney Frost, a character in the TV show Agent Carter was inspired by Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall.
In 2017, actress Celia Massingham portrayed Lamarr on The CW television series Legends of Tomorrow in the sixth episode of the third season, titled Helen Hunt. The episode is set in 1937 Hollywoodland. The episode aired on November 14, 2017.
Also during 2017, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon, a documentary about Lamarr's career as an actress and later as an inventor, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in theaters on November 24, 2017, and aired on PBS American Masters in May 2018.
In 2018, actress Alyssa Sutherland portrayed Lamarr on the NBC television series Timeless in the third episode of the second season, titled Hollywoodland. The episode aired March 25, 2018.
In 2021, Lamarr was mentioned in the first episode of the Marvel's What If...? The episode aired on August 11, 2021.
See also
Inventors' Day
List of Austrians
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Hedy Lamarr Foundation website
Hedy Lamarr profile at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
US Patent 2292387, owned by Hedy Kiesler Markey AKA Hedy Lamarr on Google Patents
US Patent 2292387 on WIPO Pantentscope
Profile, women-inventors.com
Hedy Lamarr at Reel Classics
Happy 100th Birthday Hedy Lamarr, Movie Star who Paved the Way for Wifi at CNet
"Most Beautiful Woman" by Day, Inventor by Night at NPR
Hedy Lamarr at Inventions
Hedy Lamarr: Q&A with Author Patrick Agan, Andre Soares, Alt Film Guide,
Hedy at a Hundred the centenary of Lamarr's birth, in the Ames Tribune, November 2014
"The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr" (article and audio excerpts), Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 14, 2014
Episode 6: Hedy Lamarr from Babes of Science podcasts
Hedy Lamarr before she came to Hollywood and Hedy Lamarr – brains, beauty and bad judgment at aenigma
1914 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Austrian actresses
20th-century Austrian people
Actresses from Vienna
American anti-fascists
American film actresses
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austro-Hungarian Jews
Austrian film actresses
Austrian inventors
Illeists
Jewish American actresses
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
People with acquired American citizenship
Radio pioneers
Women inventors
20th-century American inventors
| true |
[
"Cemetery Girl is a novel written by David Bell, which was released by New\nAmerican Library, a member of Penguin Group USA in 2011.\n\nNovel\nThe novel tells the story of Tom and Abby Stuart, a couple who had everything:\na perfect marriage, successful careers, and a beautiful twelve-year-old daughter,\nCaitlin. Then one day Caitlin vanished without a trace. For a while they grasped\nat every false hope and followed every empty lead, but the tragedy ended up\nchanging their lives, overwhelming them with guilt and dread, and shattering their\nmarriage.\n\nFour years later, Caitlin is found alive—dirty and disheveled yet preternaturally\ncalm. She won’t discuss where she was or what happened. Then the police\narrest a suspect connected to the disappearance, but Caitlin refuses to testify,\nleaving the Stuarts with a choice: Let the man who may be responsible for\ndestroying their lives walk away, or take matters into their own hands. And when\nTom decides to try to uncover the truth for himself, he finds that nothing that has\nhappened yet can prepare him for what he is about to discover.\n\nReception\nPublishers Weekly called Cemetery Girl “disquieting and suspenseful” and Suspense Magazine called it “brilliantly engaging, and a must-read for thriller fans.” The Washington Post criticized Bell's novel because \"his characters keep behaving in maddeningly irrational ways.\"\n\nCemetery Girl won the prestigious Prix Polar International de Cognac in 2013 and was a finalist for the 2012 Kentucky Literary Award.\n\nThe novel also received the most write-in votes when The New York Times asked readers what book should have won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.\n\nCemetery Girl book trailer\nNashville filmmaker James Weems shot a short film called “Caitlin’s Story” that serves as\nthe book trailer for Bell’s Cemetery Girl.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Cemetery Girl on YouTube\n Cemetery Girl at Penguin USA\n\n2011 American novels\nAmerican thriller novels",
"What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy"
] |
[
"Hedy Lamarr",
"First marriage",
"What year did he marry the first time?",
"1933,",
"Who did he marry?",
"Mandl,",
"Where did they meet?",
"I don't know.",
"Where were they married?",
"I don't know.",
"What happened during their marriage?",
"Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable,"
] |
C_5f1567837dc546c292ffa9eac0fe195f_0
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Why?
| 6 |
Why Hedy Lamarr?
|
Hedy Lamarr
|
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own. CANNOTANSWER
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extremely controlling husband
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Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.
After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (born Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935).
Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.
As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.
European film career
Early work
Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin.
However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous.
Ecstasy
In early 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.
Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.
Withdrawal
Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. It won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her.
Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karlische. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.
Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
Hollywood career
Louis B. Mayer and MGM
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr (to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman".
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation", says Shearer. She was billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away."
In future Hollywood films, she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke. The resulting film was a flop.
Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; it made $5 million. MGM promptly reteamed Lamarr and Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film in the vein of Ninotchka (1939), which was another hit.
Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls - a big success.
Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young. She made a third film with Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942). It was successful at the box office, as was Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.
Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon. It was a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
She was reunited with Powell in a comedy The Heavenly Body (1944), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators (1944). This was an attempt to repeat the success of Casablanca (1943), and RKO borrowed her for a melodrama Experiment Perilous (1944).
Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. It was very popular, but would be the last film she made under her MGM contract.
Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it. Writer Howard Sharpe interviewed her and gave his impression:
Author Richard Rhodes describes her assimilation into American culture:
Lamarr also had a penchant for speaking about herself in the third person.
Wartime fundraiser
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds.
She participated in a war bond-selling campaign with a sailor named Eddie Rhodes. Rhodes was in the crowd at each Lamarr appearance, and she would call him up on stage. She would briefly flirt with him before asking the audience if she should give him a kiss. The crowd would say yes, to which Hedy would reply that she would if enough people bought war bonds. After enough bonds were purchased, she would kiss Rhodes and he would head back into the audience. Then they would head off to the next war bond rally.
Producer
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946). It went over budget and only made minor profits.
She and Chertok then made Dishonored Lady (1947), another thriller starring Lamarr, which also went over budget - but was not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).
Later films
Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success playing Delilah against Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949. The film also won two Oscars.
Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).
Her career went into decline. She went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.
She was Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre ("Proud Woman") and Shower of Stars ("Cloak and Dagger"). Her last film was a thriller The Female Animal (1958).
Lamarr was signed to act in the 1966 film Picture Mommy Dead, but was let go when she collapsed during filming from nervous exhaustion. She was replaced in the role of Jessica Flagmore Shelley by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Inventor
Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.
Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled:
Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later years
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine.
In the late 1950s Lamarr designed and, with then-husband W. Howard Lee, developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.
Lamarr became estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
Seclusion
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. A documentary, Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca.
Death
Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014 a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.
Awards
Hedy Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1939, Lamarr was selected the "most promising new actress" of 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by Philadelphia Record film critic. British moviegoers voted Hedy Lamarr the year's 10th best actress, for her performance in Samson and Delilah in 1951.
In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing". The following year, Lamarr's native Austria awarded her the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors.
In 2006, the Hedy-Lamarr-Weg was founded in Vienna Meidling (12th District), named after the actress.
In 2013, the IQOQI installed a quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which they named after her in 2014.
In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The same year, Anthony Loder's request that the remaining ashes of his mother should be buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna was realized. On November 7, her urn was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery in Group 33 G, Tomb No. 80, not far from the centrally located presidential tomb.
On November 9, 2015, Google honored her on her 101st Birthday with a doodle.
On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr
Marriages and children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:
Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–1937), chairman of the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik
Gene Markey (married 1939–1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939) during her marriage with Markey. (He was later adopted by Loder and was thereafter known as James Lamarr Loder.) Lamarr and Markey lived at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California during their marriage.
John Loder (married 1943–1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), married Larry Colton, a writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), married Roxanne who worked for illustrator James McMullan. Anthony Loder was featured in the 2004 documentary film Calling Hedy Lamarr.
Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader
W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), a Texas oilman (who later married film actress Gene Tierney)
Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer
Following her sixth and final divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the last 35 years of her life.
Throughout, she claimed that James Lamarr Markey/Loder was biologically unrelated and adopted during her marriage to Gene Markey. However, years later James found documentation that he was the out-of-wedlock son of Lamarr and actor John Loder, whom she later married as her third husband. She had two more children with him: Denise (born 1945) and Anthony (born 1947) during their marriage.
Filmography
Source:
Radio appearances
In popular culture
The Mel Brooks 1974 western parody Blazing Saddles features a villain named "Hedley Lamarr". As a running gag, various characters mistakenly refer to him as "Hedy Lamarr" prompting him to testily reply "That's Hedley."
In the 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and subsequent film adaptation (1986) Audrey II says to Seymour in the song 'Feed Me' that he can get Seymour anything he wants including "A date with Hedy Lamarr."
In 2008, an off-Broadway play, Frequency Hopping, features the lives of Lamarr and Antheil. The play was written and staged by Elyse Singer, and the script won a prize for best new play about science and technology from STAGE.
In 2010, Lamarr was selected out of 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society on May 20.
Also during 2010, the New York Public Library exhibit Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library included a photo of a topless Lamarr () by Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann.
In 2011, the story of Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores the darker side of scientific discovery and experimentation, which premiered on September 7. Her work in improving wireless security was part of the premiere episode of the Discovery Channel show How We Invented the World.
Also during 2011, Anne Hathaway revealed that she had learned that the original Catwoman was based on Lamarr, so she studied all of Lamarr's films and incorporated some of her breathing techniques into her portrayal of Catwoman in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2015, on November 9, the 101st anniversary of Lamarr's birth, Google paid tribute to Hedy Lamarr's work in film and her contributions to scientific advancement with an animated Google Doodle.
In 2016, Lamarr was depicted in an off-Broadway play, HEDY! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, a one-woman show written and performed by Heather Massie.
In 2016, the off-Broadway, one-actor show "Stand Still and Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr." starring Emily Ebertz and written by Mike Broemmel went into production.
Also during 2016, Whitney Frost, a character in the TV show Agent Carter was inspired by Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall.
In 2017, actress Celia Massingham portrayed Lamarr on The CW television series Legends of Tomorrow in the sixth episode of the third season, titled Helen Hunt. The episode is set in 1937 Hollywoodland. The episode aired on November 14, 2017.
Also during 2017, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon, a documentary about Lamarr's career as an actress and later as an inventor, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in theaters on November 24, 2017, and aired on PBS American Masters in May 2018.
In 2018, actress Alyssa Sutherland portrayed Lamarr on the NBC television series Timeless in the third episode of the second season, titled Hollywoodland. The episode aired March 25, 2018.
In 2021, Lamarr was mentioned in the first episode of the Marvel's What If...? The episode aired on August 11, 2021.
See also
Inventors' Day
List of Austrians
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Hedy Lamarr Foundation website
Hedy Lamarr profile at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
US Patent 2292387, owned by Hedy Kiesler Markey AKA Hedy Lamarr on Google Patents
US Patent 2292387 on WIPO Pantentscope
Profile, women-inventors.com
Hedy Lamarr at Reel Classics
Happy 100th Birthday Hedy Lamarr, Movie Star who Paved the Way for Wifi at CNet
"Most Beautiful Woman" by Day, Inventor by Night at NPR
Hedy Lamarr at Inventions
Hedy Lamarr: Q&A with Author Patrick Agan, Andre Soares, Alt Film Guide,
Hedy at a Hundred the centenary of Lamarr's birth, in the Ames Tribune, November 2014
"The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr" (article and audio excerpts), Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 14, 2014
Episode 6: Hedy Lamarr from Babes of Science podcasts
Hedy Lamarr before she came to Hollywood and Hedy Lamarr – brains, beauty and bad judgment at aenigma
1914 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Austrian actresses
20th-century Austrian people
Actresses from Vienna
American anti-fascists
American film actresses
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austro-Hungarian Jews
Austrian film actresses
Austrian inventors
Illeists
Jewish American actresses
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
People with acquired American citizenship
Radio pioneers
Women inventors
20th-century American inventors
| true |
[
"Why may refer to:\n\n Causality, a consequential relationship between two events\n Reason (argument), a premise in support of an argument, for what reason or purpose\n Grounding (metaphysics), a topic in metaphysics regarding how things exist in virtue of more fundamental things.\n Why?, one of the Five Ws used in journalism\n\nMusic\n\nArtists\n Why? (American band), a hip hop/indie rock band formed in Oakland, California, in 2004\n Yoni Wolf, formerly known by the stage name Why?\n Why?, a 1990s UK folk band, two members of which later formed Quench in 2001\n Why (Canadian band), a rock band formed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1993\n\nAlbums\n Why? (Discharge album)\n Why? (Ginger Baker album)\n Why? (Jacob Whitesides album)\n Why (Prudence Liew album)\n Why? (They Might Be Giants album)\n Why (Taeyeon EP)\n Why (Baby V.O.X)\n Why, by Moahni Moahna\n\nSongs\n \"Why\" (3T song), featuring Michael Jackson\n \"Why\" (Andy Gibb song)\n \"Why\" (Annie Lennox song), covered by DJ Sammy, Kelly Clarkson, Lara Fabian, Allison Crowe, and others\n \"Why?\" (Bronski Beat song)\n \"Why\" (The Byrds song), B-side to the single \"Eight Miles High\"\n \"Why\" (Carly Simon song)\n \"Why\" (Cathy Dennis song)\n \"Why\" (Frankie Avalon song), covered by Anthony Newley and by Donny Osmond\n \"Why\" (Gabrielle song)\n \"Why?\" (Geir Rönning song)\n \"Why\" (Glamma Kid song)\n \"Why\" (Jadakiss song)\n \"Why\" (Jason Aldean song)\n \"Why\" (Jieqiong song)\n \"Why\" (Lionel Richie song)\n \"Why?\" (Marika Gombitová song)\n \"Why\" (Mary J. Blige song), featuring Rick Ross\n \"Why\" (Miliyah Kato song)\n \"Why?\" (Mis-Teeq song)\n \"Why\" (Rascal Flatts song)\n \"Why\" (Sabrina Carpenter song)\n \"Why\" (Sonique song)\n \"Why\" (Taeyeon song)\n \"Why\" (Tony Sheridan song), with The Beatles\n \"Why (Must We Fall in Love)\", a song by Diana Ross & The Supremes\n \"Why, Why, Why\", a song by Billy Currington\n \"Why\", by 4Minute from Best of 4Minute\n \"Why\", by Air Supply from Mumbo Jumbo\n \"Why?\", by Aminé from OnePointFive\n \"Why\", by Antique from Die for You\n \"Why\", by Average White Band from Cut the Cake\n \"Why\" by Avril Lavigne, B-side to the single \"Complicated\"\n \"Why\", by Ayaka from the single \"Clap & Love\"/\"Why\" and the theme song of the PSP game Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII\n \"Why\", by Bazzi from Cosmic\n \"Why\", by Basshunter from Bass Generation\n \"Why\", by Busted from A Present for Everyone\n \"Why, Pt. 2\", by Collective Soul from Blender\n \"Why\", by Crossfade from Falling Away\n \"Why?\", by Des'ree from Dream Soldier\n \"Why! ...\", by Enigma from Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!\n \"Why\", by Fleetwood Mac from Mystery to Me\n \"Why\", by Frankie Valli from Closeup\n \"Why\", by Godsmack from Awake\n \"Why\", by Helloween from Master of the Rings\n \"Why\", by Irene Cara from Anyone Can See\n \"Why\", by Jamie Walters from Jamie Walters\n \"Why\", by Jason Aldean, also covered by Shannon Brown from Corn Fed\n \"Why\", by Jocelyn Enriquez from All My Life\n \"Why\", by Joe Satriani from The Extremist\n \"Why\", by Limp Bizkit from Greatest Hitz\n \"Why?\", by Lonnie Mack from The Wham of that Memphis Man\n \"Why\", by Mario from Go!\n \"Why\", by Melanie Chisholm from Northern Star\n \"Why\", by Natalie Imbruglia from Left of the Middle\n \"Why\", by Ne-Yo from Non-Fiction\n \"Why\", by NF from The Search\n \"Why\", by Rooney\n \"Why?\", by Secondhand Serenade from A Twist In My Story\n \"Why\", by Shawn Mendes from Shawn Mendes\n \"Why\", by Stabbing Westward from Wither Blister Burn & Peel\n \"Why\", by Swift from Thoughts Are Thought\n \"Why?\", by Tracy Chapman from Tracy Chapman\n \"Why\", by Uriah Heep from Demons and Wizards\n \"Why?\", by Vanilla Ninja from Vanilla Ninja\n \"Why\", by Wide Mouth Mason from Where I Started\n \"Why\", by Yoko Ono from Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band\n \"Why?\", by Z-Ro from The Life of Joseph W. McVey\n \"Why\", written by Buddy Feyne, notably performed by Nat King Cole\n \"Why\", from the musical Tick, tick... BOOM!\n \"Why\", from the television series Fraggle Rock\n \"Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)\", by Nina Simone from 'Nuff Said!\n \"Why (What's Goin' On?)\", a song by The Roots from The Tipping Point \"Why, Why, Why\", a song by Eddie Rabbitt from Songs from Rabbittland \"Why? Why? Why? (Is It So Hard)\", a song by Paul Revere & The Raiders from The Spirit of '67Other media\n Why (board game), a game based on the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents Why? (film), a 1987 Czech film\n Why? (1971 film), a 1971 short starring O. J. Simpson and Tim Buckley\n Why? (book), a children's book by Tomie dePaola\n \"Why?\", an episode of the TV series As Time Goes By Why? with Hannibal Buress'', a Comedy Central television series\n\nPlaces\n Why, Arizona, an unincorporated community in the United States\n Why, Lakes, South Sudan\n\nSurname\n Alby Why (1899–1969), Australian rugby league footballer\n Jack Why (1903–1944), Australian rugby league footballer\n\nTransport\n Whyteleafe railway station, Surrey, National Rail station code\n\nOther uses\n Why the lucky stiff, or simply why or _why, a computer programmer and artist\n World Hunger Year (WHY), a charity organization\n Why?, a satirical wiki and subproject of Uncyclopedia\n\nSee also\n Wai (disambiguation)\n Wye (disambiguation)\n Y (disambiguation)",
"Tell Me Why may refer to:\n\nBooks \n Tell Me Why (magazine), a British children's magazine relaunched as World of Wonder\n Tell Me Why, a 2009 book by Eric Walters\n\nMusic\n\nAlbums\n Tell Me Why (Archie Roach album), 2019\n Tell Me Why (Bobby Vinton album), 1964, or the title song\n Tell Me Why (Jann Browne album), 1990, or the title song\n Tell Me Why (Wynonna Judd album) 1993, or the title song\n Tell Me Why, a 2002 EP and its title song by Pocket Venus\n\nSongs\n \"Tell Me Why\" (1951 song), song written by Al Alberts and Marty Gold, popularized by The Four Aces and by Eddie Fisher\n \"Tell Me Why\" (1956 song), song written by Titus Turner, popularized by Marie Knight, and later by Elvis Presley\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Beatles song), 1964\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Declan Galbraith song), 2002\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Earl Thomas Conley song), 1981\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Echobelly song)\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Exposé song), 1989\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Genesis song), 1991\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Jann Browne song), 1990\n \"Tell Me Why\" (M.I.A. song), 2010\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Monica Anghel and Marcel Pavel song), 2002\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Neil Young song), 1970\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Spice Girls song), 2000\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Supermode song), 2006\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Wah Wah Collective song), 2013\n \"Tell Me Why\" (Wynonna Judd song), 1993\n \"Tell Me Why (The Riddle)\", a 2000 song by Paul van Dyk and Saint Etienne\n \"Tell Me Why\", by the Bee Gees from 2 Years On\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Berlin from Pleasure Victim\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Eddie Cochran from Singin' to My Baby, adapted from\n \"Tell Me Why\", written by Mitchell Parish, Michael Edwards, and Sigmund Spaeth, adapted from\n \"Tell Me Why\", composed by Roy L. Burtch, lyrics by Fred Mower, c. 1899\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Gorky Park from Moscow Calling\n \"Tell Me Why\", by John Cale from Walking on Locusts\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Jonas Brothers from JONAS\n \"Tell Me Why\", by The Kid Laroi from F*ck Love\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Musical Youth\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Norman Fox & The Rob-Roys, and covered in 1961 by Dion and the Belmonts\n \"Tell Me Why\", by the Penpals from Berserk\n \"Tell Me Why\", by P.O.D. from When Angels & Serpents Dance\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Prezioso & Marvin\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Taylor Swift from Fearless\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Three Days Grace from Human\n \"Tell Me Why\", by Will Smith featuring Mary J. Blige from Smith's album Lost and Found\n \"Tell Me Why\", from the musical A Man of No Importance\n\nOthers\n Tell Me Why (video game), a video game by Dontnod Entertainment\n\nSee also\n Tell Me (disambiguation)"
] |
[
"Hedy Lamarr",
"First marriage",
"What year did he marry the first time?",
"1933,",
"Who did he marry?",
"Mandl,",
"Where did they meet?",
"I don't know.",
"Where were they married?",
"I don't know.",
"What happened during their marriage?",
"Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable,",
"Why?",
"extremely controlling husband"
] |
C_5f1567837dc546c292ffa9eac0fe195f_0
|
What did he do to control her?
| 7 |
What did Hedy Lamarr do to control Mandl?
|
Hedy Lamarr
|
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own. CANNOTANSWER
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She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home,
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Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.
After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (born Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935).
Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.
As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.
European film career
Early work
Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin.
However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous.
Ecstasy
In early 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.
Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.
Withdrawal
Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. It won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her.
Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karlische. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.
Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
Hollywood career
Louis B. Mayer and MGM
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr (to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman".
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation", says Shearer. She was billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away."
In future Hollywood films, she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke. The resulting film was a flop.
Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; it made $5 million. MGM promptly reteamed Lamarr and Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film in the vein of Ninotchka (1939), which was another hit.
Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls - a big success.
Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young. She made a third film with Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942). It was successful at the box office, as was Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.
Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon. It was a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
She was reunited with Powell in a comedy The Heavenly Body (1944), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators (1944). This was an attempt to repeat the success of Casablanca (1943), and RKO borrowed her for a melodrama Experiment Perilous (1944).
Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. It was very popular, but would be the last film she made under her MGM contract.
Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it. Writer Howard Sharpe interviewed her and gave his impression:
Author Richard Rhodes describes her assimilation into American culture:
Lamarr also had a penchant for speaking about herself in the third person.
Wartime fundraiser
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds.
She participated in a war bond-selling campaign with a sailor named Eddie Rhodes. Rhodes was in the crowd at each Lamarr appearance, and she would call him up on stage. She would briefly flirt with him before asking the audience if she should give him a kiss. The crowd would say yes, to which Hedy would reply that she would if enough people bought war bonds. After enough bonds were purchased, she would kiss Rhodes and he would head back into the audience. Then they would head off to the next war bond rally.
Producer
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946). It went over budget and only made minor profits.
She and Chertok then made Dishonored Lady (1947), another thriller starring Lamarr, which also went over budget - but was not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).
Later films
Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success playing Delilah against Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949. The film also won two Oscars.
Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).
Her career went into decline. She went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.
She was Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre ("Proud Woman") and Shower of Stars ("Cloak and Dagger"). Her last film was a thriller The Female Animal (1958).
Lamarr was signed to act in the 1966 film Picture Mommy Dead, but was let go when she collapsed during filming from nervous exhaustion. She was replaced in the role of Jessica Flagmore Shelley by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Inventor
Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.
Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled:
Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later years
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine.
In the late 1950s Lamarr designed and, with then-husband W. Howard Lee, developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.
Lamarr became estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
Seclusion
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. A documentary, Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca.
Death
Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014 a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.
Awards
Hedy Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1939, Lamarr was selected the "most promising new actress" of 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by Philadelphia Record film critic. British moviegoers voted Hedy Lamarr the year's 10th best actress, for her performance in Samson and Delilah in 1951.
In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing". The following year, Lamarr's native Austria awarded her the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors.
In 2006, the Hedy-Lamarr-Weg was founded in Vienna Meidling (12th District), named after the actress.
In 2013, the IQOQI installed a quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which they named after her in 2014.
In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The same year, Anthony Loder's request that the remaining ashes of his mother should be buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna was realized. On November 7, her urn was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery in Group 33 G, Tomb No. 80, not far from the centrally located presidential tomb.
On November 9, 2015, Google honored her on her 101st Birthday with a doodle.
On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr
Marriages and children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:
Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–1937), chairman of the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik
Gene Markey (married 1939–1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939) during her marriage with Markey. (He was later adopted by Loder and was thereafter known as James Lamarr Loder.) Lamarr and Markey lived at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California during their marriage.
John Loder (married 1943–1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), married Larry Colton, a writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), married Roxanne who worked for illustrator James McMullan. Anthony Loder was featured in the 2004 documentary film Calling Hedy Lamarr.
Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader
W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), a Texas oilman (who later married film actress Gene Tierney)
Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer
Following her sixth and final divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the last 35 years of her life.
Throughout, she claimed that James Lamarr Markey/Loder was biologically unrelated and adopted during her marriage to Gene Markey. However, years later James found documentation that he was the out-of-wedlock son of Lamarr and actor John Loder, whom she later married as her third husband. She had two more children with him: Denise (born 1945) and Anthony (born 1947) during their marriage.
Filmography
Source:
Radio appearances
In popular culture
The Mel Brooks 1974 western parody Blazing Saddles features a villain named "Hedley Lamarr". As a running gag, various characters mistakenly refer to him as "Hedy Lamarr" prompting him to testily reply "That's Hedley."
In the 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and subsequent film adaptation (1986) Audrey II says to Seymour in the song 'Feed Me' that he can get Seymour anything he wants including "A date with Hedy Lamarr."
In 2008, an off-Broadway play, Frequency Hopping, features the lives of Lamarr and Antheil. The play was written and staged by Elyse Singer, and the script won a prize for best new play about science and technology from STAGE.
In 2010, Lamarr was selected out of 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society on May 20.
Also during 2010, the New York Public Library exhibit Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library included a photo of a topless Lamarr () by Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann.
In 2011, the story of Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores the darker side of scientific discovery and experimentation, which premiered on September 7. Her work in improving wireless security was part of the premiere episode of the Discovery Channel show How We Invented the World.
Also during 2011, Anne Hathaway revealed that she had learned that the original Catwoman was based on Lamarr, so she studied all of Lamarr's films and incorporated some of her breathing techniques into her portrayal of Catwoman in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2015, on November 9, the 101st anniversary of Lamarr's birth, Google paid tribute to Hedy Lamarr's work in film and her contributions to scientific advancement with an animated Google Doodle.
In 2016, Lamarr was depicted in an off-Broadway play, HEDY! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, a one-woman show written and performed by Heather Massie.
In 2016, the off-Broadway, one-actor show "Stand Still and Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr." starring Emily Ebertz and written by Mike Broemmel went into production.
Also during 2016, Whitney Frost, a character in the TV show Agent Carter was inspired by Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall.
In 2017, actress Celia Massingham portrayed Lamarr on The CW television series Legends of Tomorrow in the sixth episode of the third season, titled Helen Hunt. The episode is set in 1937 Hollywoodland. The episode aired on November 14, 2017.
Also during 2017, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon, a documentary about Lamarr's career as an actress and later as an inventor, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in theaters on November 24, 2017, and aired on PBS American Masters in May 2018.
In 2018, actress Alyssa Sutherland portrayed Lamarr on the NBC television series Timeless in the third episode of the second season, titled Hollywoodland. The episode aired March 25, 2018.
In 2021, Lamarr was mentioned in the first episode of the Marvel's What If...? The episode aired on August 11, 2021.
See also
Inventors' Day
List of Austrians
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Hedy Lamarr Foundation website
Hedy Lamarr profile at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
US Patent 2292387, owned by Hedy Kiesler Markey AKA Hedy Lamarr on Google Patents
US Patent 2292387 on WIPO Pantentscope
Profile, women-inventors.com
Hedy Lamarr at Reel Classics
Happy 100th Birthday Hedy Lamarr, Movie Star who Paved the Way for Wifi at CNet
"Most Beautiful Woman" by Day, Inventor by Night at NPR
Hedy Lamarr at Inventions
Hedy Lamarr: Q&A with Author Patrick Agan, Andre Soares, Alt Film Guide,
Hedy at a Hundred the centenary of Lamarr's birth, in the Ames Tribune, November 2014
"The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr" (article and audio excerpts), Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 14, 2014
Episode 6: Hedy Lamarr from Babes of Science podcasts
Hedy Lamarr before she came to Hollywood and Hedy Lamarr – brains, beauty and bad judgment at aenigma
1914 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Austrian actresses
20th-century Austrian people
Actresses from Vienna
American anti-fascists
American film actresses
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austro-Hungarian Jews
Austrian film actresses
Austrian inventors
Illeists
Jewish American actresses
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
People with acquired American citizenship
Radio pioneers
Women inventors
20th-century American inventors
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"\"What Did I Do to You?\" is a song recorded by British singer Lisa Stansfield for her 1989 album, Affection. It was written by Stansfield, Ian Devaney and Andy Morris, and produced by Devaney and Morris. The song was released as the fourth European single on 30 April 1990. It included three previously unreleased songs written by Stansfield, Devaney and Morris: \"My Apple Heart,\" \"Lay Me Down\" and \"Something's Happenin'.\" \"What Did I Do to You?\" was remixed by Mark Saunders and by the Grammy Award-winning American house music DJ and producer, David Morales. The single became a top forty hit in the European countries reaching number eighteen in Finland, number twenty in Ireland and number twenty-five in the United Kingdom. \"What Did I Do to You?\" was also released in Japan.\n\nIn 2014, the remixes of \"What Did I Do to You?\" were included on the deluxe 2CD + DVD re-release of Affection and on People Hold On ... The Remix Anthology. They were also featured on The Collection 1989–2003 box set (2014), including previously unreleased Red Zone Mix by David Morales.\n\nCritical reception\nThe song received positive reviews from music critics. Matthew Hocter from Albumism viewed it as a \"upbeat offering\". David Giles from Music Week said it is \"beautifully performed\" by Stansfield. A reviewer from Reading Eagle wrote that \"What Did I Do to You?\" \"would be right at home on the \"Saturday Night Fever\" soundtrack.\"\n\nMusic video\nA music video was produced to promote the single, directed by Philip Richardson, who had previously directed the videos for \"All Around the World\" and \"Live Together\". It features Stansfield with her kiss curls, dressed in a white outfit and performing with her band on a stage in front of a jumping audience. The video was later published on Stansfield's official YouTube channel in November 2009. It has amassed more than 1,6 million views as of October 2021.\n\nTrack listings\n\n European/UK 7\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix Edit) – 4:20\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n European/UK/Japanese CD single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix Edit) – 4:20\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 5:19\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 4:17\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n UK 10\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix) – 5:52\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 5:19\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 4:17\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n European/UK 12\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Morales Mix) – 7:59\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 4:22\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 3:19\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:15\n\n UK 12\" promotional single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Morales Mix) – 7:59\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Anti Poll Tax Dub) – 6:31\n\n Other remixes\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Red Zone Mix) – 7:45\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nLisa Stansfield songs\n1990 singles\nSongs written by Lisa Stansfield\n1989 songs\nArista Records singles\nSongs written by Ian Devaney\nSongs written by Andy Morris (musician)",
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Quentin Harrison from Albumism noted it as \"luxuriant electro-pop\", adding that Ian Curnow and Phil Harding \"rework it into an appetizing, but accessible house ditty that emphasizes unity between the single's beat and Minogue's supple vocal.\" While reviewing Rhythm of Love, Chris True from AllMusic highlighted the song as an album standout. NME voted it as the thirtieth best track of 1991. Eleanor Levy from Record Mirror described it as \"more mature, in a Hi-NRG, Bronski Beatish way.\" She added, \"More straightforward rhythm than formula pop song, it fizzes predictably rather than sparkles but, like Kylie's ever-elongating fringe, will no doubt grow and grow.\" Caroline Sullivan from Smash Hits called it \"supreme\", and said the song \"sees a return to the reassuring old Kylie-sound\". While reviewing Ultimate Kylie, Mark Edwards from Stylus Magazine gave it a positive remark, saying that along with \"Shocked\" and \"Give Me Just a Little More Time\", they \"were great songs and suddenly Kylie was a little bit cool.\"\n\nChart performance\n\"What Do I Have to Do\" debuted at number twenty-seven on the Australian Singles Chart, until rising and peaking at number eleven, staying there for two consecutive weeks. The song then debuted at number ninety-nine on the Dutch Top 40, until peaking at number eighty-one for one week. The song then debuted and peaked at number fifty on the French Singles Chart.\n\nImpact and legacy\nEnglish DJ and record producer Nicky Holloway chose \"What Do I Have to Do\" as one of his top 10 vinyl thrills in 1996, saying, \"I've had so much fun with this over the years. You don't realise what you're dancing to until it's too late to stop! It's got a long intro so people are dancing away and don't realise that it's Kylie Minogue until they're sucked into it.\"\n\nMusic video\n\nThe music video for the song was directed by Dave Hogan. In relation to this video, Minogue is quoted as saying \"how many Hollywood stars can you look like in three and a half minutes...\". Her younger sister Dannii Minogue also appears in the video. The music video begins with clips of the dance scene intercut with Minogue emerging from a swimming pool and her love interest seeing her with another man. The love interest is played by Zane O'Donnell, the same model who would appear in the video for Minogue's subsequent single \"Shocked\". \nMinogue then goes out to the balcony overlooking a fairground and the man follows. The video then shifts to the man watching Minogue dancing with a female friend in a club. The next scene is Minogue waking up in her lover's bed as he prepares to leave the bedroom. After this, Minogue singing on the bed is intercut with scenes of her singing and dancing in front of a white backdrop. The video goes back to her and her friend having fun in the club as the man stares at her again. Later, she sits on the bench overlooking the scene and takes a glance at a lookalike of her lover next to her. Following this, she gets up to dance as the man watches. Finally, she gets a tattoo of a black panther on her back and shows it to her lover. The video concludes with all of Minogue's performance scenes intercut with her doing the ironing in a Gingham Apron and on a date with her lover. The final shot is of Minogue and her lover walking across a bridge.\n\nWhile reviewing the DVD version of Greatest Hits for Amazon.co.uk, John Galilee said \"Her most outrageous but greatest video moment is where she parodies certain movie stars in the chic video for \"What Do I Have to Do?\", and because of her heavy eye make-up almost earns herself the title drag-queen Kylie (watch out for sister Dannii who briefly stars in the video, wearing a blonde wig).\"\n\nFormats and track listings\nThese are the formats and track listings of major single releases of \"What Do I Have to Do\".\n\n 7\" vinyl single\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (7\" Mix) – 3:32\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Instrumental) – 3:48\n\n 12\" vinyl single\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Pumpin' Mix) – 7:48\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Extended Instrumental) – 5:08\n\n CD single\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (7\" Mix) – 3:32\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Pumpin' Mix) – 7:48\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Extended Instrumental) – 5:08\n\n iTunes Digital EP – Remixes\n(Not available at time of original release. Released for the first time as part of iTunes PWL archive release in 2009)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (12\" Instrumental)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (7\" Mix)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (7\" Backing Track)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (7\" Instrumental)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Album Backing Track)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Album Instrumental)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Between the Sheets Mix)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Extended Album Mix)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Movers & Shakers 12\" Backing Track)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Movers & Shakers 12\" Instrumental)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Movers & Shakers 7\" Backing Track)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Movers & Shakers 7\" Instrumental)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Movers & Shakers 7\" Mix)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Movers & Shakers 12\" Mix)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Movers & Shakers Do the Dub)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Pumpin' Mix)\n\n iTunes Digital EP – The Original Synth Mixes (released 8 November 2010)\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Billy The Fish Mix: Part I) 3:44\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Billy The Fish Mix: Part II) 7:30\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Original 12\" Mix) 7:09\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Extended Album Mix II) 8:42\n\n iTunes Digital EP – What Do I Have to Do?\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (7\" Mix) — 3:33\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Pumpin' Mix) — 7:47\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Extended Album Mix) — 8:07\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (7\" Instrumental) — 3:33\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Extended Instrumental) — 5:07\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (7\" Backing Track) — 3:33\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Album Instrumental) — 3:43\n \"What Do I Have to Do\" (Album Backing Track) — 3:43\n \"Things Can Only Get Better\" (Album Instrumental) — 3:55\n \"Things Can Only Get Better\" (Album Backing Track) — 3:55\n\nLive performances\nMinogue performed the song on the following concert tours:\n Rhythm of Love Tour\n Let's Get to It Tour\n Intimate and Live Tour\n On a Night Like This Tour\n Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour (as part of the \"Smiley Kylie Medley\")\n Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour (as part of the \"Everything Taboo Medley\")\n For You, for Me (as part of the \"Everything Taboo Medley\")\n Aphrodite World Tour\nSummer 2019\n\nThe song was also performed on:\n An Audience with Kylie Minogue 2001 TV special, performed as part of the hits medley.\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n1991 singles\nKylie Minogue songs\nSong recordings produced by Stock Aitken Waterman\nSongs written by Mike Stock (musician)\nSongs written by Matt Aitken\nSongs written by Pete Waterman\n1990 songs\nMushroom Records singles\nPete Waterman Entertainment singles\nTorch songs\nEurodance songs"
] |
[
"Hedy Lamarr",
"First marriage",
"What year did he marry the first time?",
"1933,",
"Who did he marry?",
"Mandl,",
"Where did they meet?",
"I don't know.",
"Where were they married?",
"I don't know.",
"What happened during their marriage?",
"Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable,",
"Why?",
"extremely controlling husband",
"What did he do to control her?",
"She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home,"
] |
C_5f1567837dc546c292ffa9eac0fe195f_0
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What else did she endure?
| 8 |
Besides Hedy Lamarr, what else did Mandl endure?
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Hedy Lamarr
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On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage: I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own. CANNOTANSWER
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I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own.
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Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor.
After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers (1938). Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics (1939), Boom Town (1940), H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), and White Cargo (1942). Her greatest success was as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film, The Female Animal (1958). She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Early life
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud "Trude" Kiesler (born Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935).
Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "practicing Christian" who raised her daughter as a Christian, although Hedy was not formally baptized at the time.
As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also began to associate invention with her father, who would take her out on walks, explaining how various technologies in society functioned.
European film career
Early work
Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theater in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin.
However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous.
Ecstasy
In early 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machatý's film Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech). She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man.
The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being "duped" by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses.
Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and in Germany.
Withdrawal
Lamarr played a number of stage roles, including a starring one in Sissy, a play about Empress Elisabeth of Austria produced in Vienna. It won accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. She sent most of them away, including a man who was more insistent, Friedrich Mandl. He became obsessed with getting to know her.
Mandl was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and later, German Führer Adolf Hitler, but they could not stop the headstrong Lamarr.
On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karlische. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.
Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi regime of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both countries attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.
Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country in 1937. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:
Hollywood career
Louis B. Mayer and MGM
After arriving in London in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her (of $125 a week), but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr (to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it), choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman".
Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger, who was making Algiers (1938), an American version of the French film, Pépé le Moko (1937). Lamarr was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer. The film created a "national sensation", says Shearer. She was billed as an unknown but well-publicized Austrian actress, which created anticipation in audiences. Mayer hoped she would become another Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. According to one viewer, when her face first appeared on the screen, "everyone gasped ... Lamarr's beauty literally took one's breath away."
In future Hollywood films, she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. Her second American film was to be I Take This Woman, co-starring with Spencer Tracy under the direction of regular Dietrich collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was fired during the shoot, replaced by Frank Borzage. The film was put on hold, and Lamarr was put into Lady of the Tropics (1939), where she played a mixed-race seductress in Saigon opposite Robert Taylor. She returned to I Take This Woman, re-shot by W. S. Van Dyke. The resulting film was a flop.
Far more popular was Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert and Spencer Tracy; it made $5 million. MGM promptly reteamed Lamarr and Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film in the vein of Ninotchka (1939), which was another hit.
Lamarr was teamed with James Stewart in Come Live with Me (1941), playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), where Lamarr, Judy Garland and Lana Turner played aspiring showgirls - a big success.
Lamarr was top-billed in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), although the film's protagonist was the title role played by Robert Young. She made a third film with Tracy, Tortilla Flat (1942). It was successful at the box office, as was Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.
Lamarr played the seductive native girl Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942), top billed over Walter Pidgeon. It was a huge hit. White Cargo contains arguably her most memorable film quote, delivered with provocative invitation: "I am Tondelayo. I make tiffin for you?" This line typifies many of Lamarr's roles, which emphasized her beauty and sensuality while giving her relatively few lines. The lack of acting challenges bored Lamarr. She reportedly took up inventing to relieve her boredom.
She was reunited with Powell in a comedy The Heavenly Body (1944), then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators (1944). This was an attempt to repeat the success of Casablanca (1943), and RKO borrowed her for a melodrama Experiment Perilous (1944).
Back at MGM Lamarr was teamed with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945), playing a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. It was very popular, but would be the last film she made under her MGM contract.
Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. She might swim at her agent's pool, but shunned the beaches and staring crowds. When asked for an autograph, she wondered why anyone would want it. Writer Howard Sharpe interviewed her and gave his impression:
Author Richard Rhodes describes her assimilation into American culture:
Lamarr also had a penchant for speaking about herself in the third person.
Wartime fundraiser
Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but was reportedly told by NIC member Charles F. Kettering and others that she could better help the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds.
She participated in a war bond-selling campaign with a sailor named Eddie Rhodes. Rhodes was in the crowd at each Lamarr appearance, and she would call him up on stage. She would briefly flirt with him before asking the audience if she should give him a kiss. The crowd would say yes, to which Hedy would reply that she would if enough people bought war bonds. After enough bonds were purchased, she would kiss Rhodes and he would head back into the audience. Then they would head off to the next war bond rally.
Producer
After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the thriller The Strange Woman (1946). It went over budget and only made minor profits.
She and Chertok then made Dishonored Lady (1947), another thriller starring Lamarr, which also went over budget - but was not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).
Later films
Lamarr enjoyed her biggest success playing Delilah against Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949. The film also won two Oscars.
Lamarr returned to MGM for a film noir with John Hodiak, A Lady Without Passport (1950), which flopped. More popular were two pictures she made at Paramount, a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950), and a Bob Hope spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).
Her career went into decline. She went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she also produced. However she lacked the experience necessary to make a success of such an epic production, and lost millions of dollars when she was unable to secure distribution of the picture.
She was Joan of Arc in Irwin Allen's critically panned epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre ("Proud Woman") and Shower of Stars ("Cloak and Dagger"). Her last film was a thriller The Female Animal (1958).
Lamarr was signed to act in the 1966 film Picture Mommy Dead, but was let go when she collapsed during filming from nervous exhaustion. She was replaced in the role of Jessica Flagmore Shelley by Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Inventor
Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.
Among the few who knew of Lamarr's inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her "tinkering" hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for.
During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course. She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented. Antheil recalled:
Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships.
In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Later years
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine.
In the late 1950s Lamarr designed and, with then-husband W. Howard Lee, developed the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.
In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.
The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke". With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981.
A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr won CorelDRAW's yearly software suite cover design contest in 1996. For several years, beginning in 1997, it was featured on boxes of the software suite. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. Corel countered that she did not own rights to the image. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd adjacent to Vine Street where the walk is centered.
Lamarr became estranged from her older son, James Lamarr Loder, when he was 12 years old. Their relationship ended abruptly, and he moved in with another family. They did not speak again for almost 50 years. Lamarr left James Loder out of her will, and he sued for control of the US$3.3 million estate left by Lamarr in 2000. He eventually settled for US$50,000.
Seclusion
In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. A documentary, Calling Hedy Lamarr, was released in 2004 and featured her children, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder-DeLuca.
Death
Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, on January 19, 2000, of heart disease, aged 85. Her son Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes.
In 2014 a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.
Awards
Hedy Lamarr was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
In 1939, Lamarr was selected the "most promising new actress" of 1938 in a poll of area voters conducted by Philadelphia Record film critic. British moviegoers voted Hedy Lamarr the year's 10th best actress, for her performance in Samson and Delilah in 1951.
In 1997, Lamarr and George Antheil were jointly honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and Lamarr also was the first woman to receive the Invention Convention's BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, known as the "Oscars of inventing". The following year, Lamarr's native Austria awarded her the Viktor Kaplan Medal of the Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors.
In 2006, the Hedy-Lamarr-Weg was founded in Vienna Meidling (12th District), named after the actress.
In 2013, the IQOQI installed a quantum telescope on the roof of the University of Vienna, which they named after her in 2014.
In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The same year, Anthony Loder's request that the remaining ashes of his mother should be buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna was realized. On November 7, her urn was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery in Group 33 G, Tomb No. 80, not far from the centrally located presidential tomb.
On November 9, 2015, Google honored her on her 101st Birthday with a doodle.
On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr
Marriages and children
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:
Friedrich Mandl (married 1933–1937), chairman of the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik
Gene Markey (married 1939–1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey (born January 9, 1939) during her marriage with Markey. (He was later adopted by Loder and was thereafter known as James Lamarr Loder.) Lamarr and Markey lived at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, California during their marriage.
John Loder (married 1943–1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (born January 19, 1945), married Larry Colton, a writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (born February 1, 1947), married Roxanne who worked for illustrator James McMullan. Anthony Loder was featured in the 2004 documentary film Calling Hedy Lamarr.
Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (married 1951–1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader
W. Howard Lee (married 1953–1960), a Texas oilman (who later married film actress Gene Tierney)
Lewis J. Boies (married 1963–1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer
Following her sixth and final divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the last 35 years of her life.
Throughout, she claimed that James Lamarr Markey/Loder was biologically unrelated and adopted during her marriage to Gene Markey. However, years later James found documentation that he was the out-of-wedlock son of Lamarr and actor John Loder, whom she later married as her third husband. She had two more children with him: Denise (born 1945) and Anthony (born 1947) during their marriage.
Filmography
Source:
Radio appearances
In popular culture
The Mel Brooks 1974 western parody Blazing Saddles features a villain named "Hedley Lamarr". As a running gag, various characters mistakenly refer to him as "Hedy Lamarr" prompting him to testily reply "That's Hedley."
In the 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors and subsequent film adaptation (1986) Audrey II says to Seymour in the song 'Feed Me' that he can get Seymour anything he wants including "A date with Hedy Lamarr."
In 2008, an off-Broadway play, Frequency Hopping, features the lives of Lamarr and Antheil. The play was written and staged by Elyse Singer, and the script won a prize for best new play about science and technology from STAGE.
In 2010, Lamarr was selected out of 150 IT people to be featured in a short film launched by the British Computer Society on May 20.
Also during 2010, the New York Public Library exhibit Thirty Years of Photography at the New York Public Library included a photo of a topless Lamarr () by Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann.
In 2011, the story of Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread spectrum invention was explored in an episode of the Science Channel show Dark Matters: Twisted But True, a series that explores the darker side of scientific discovery and experimentation, which premiered on September 7. Her work in improving wireless security was part of the premiere episode of the Discovery Channel show How We Invented the World.
Also during 2011, Anne Hathaway revealed that she had learned that the original Catwoman was based on Lamarr, so she studied all of Lamarr's films and incorporated some of her breathing techniques into her portrayal of Catwoman in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises.
In 2015, on November 9, the 101st anniversary of Lamarr's birth, Google paid tribute to Hedy Lamarr's work in film and her contributions to scientific advancement with an animated Google Doodle.
In 2016, Lamarr was depicted in an off-Broadway play, HEDY! The Life and Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, a one-woman show written and performed by Heather Massie.
In 2016, the off-Broadway, one-actor show "Stand Still and Look Stupid: The Life Story of Hedy Lamarr." starring Emily Ebertz and written by Mike Broemmel went into production.
Also during 2016, Whitney Frost, a character in the TV show Agent Carter was inspired by Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall.
In 2017, actress Celia Massingham portrayed Lamarr on The CW television series Legends of Tomorrow in the sixth episode of the third season, titled Helen Hunt. The episode is set in 1937 Hollywoodland. The episode aired on November 14, 2017.
Also during 2017, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, written and directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon, a documentary about Lamarr's career as an actress and later as an inventor, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in theaters on November 24, 2017, and aired on PBS American Masters in May 2018.
In 2018, actress Alyssa Sutherland portrayed Lamarr on the NBC television series Timeless in the third episode of the second season, titled Hollywoodland. The episode aired March 25, 2018.
In 2021, Lamarr was mentioned in the first episode of the Marvel's What If...? The episode aired on August 11, 2021.
See also
Inventors' Day
List of Austrians
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Hedy Lamarr Foundation website
Hedy Lamarr profile at the National Inventors Hall of Fame
US Patent 2292387, owned by Hedy Kiesler Markey AKA Hedy Lamarr on Google Patents
US Patent 2292387 on WIPO Pantentscope
Profile, women-inventors.com
Hedy Lamarr at Reel Classics
Happy 100th Birthday Hedy Lamarr, Movie Star who Paved the Way for Wifi at CNet
"Most Beautiful Woman" by Day, Inventor by Night at NPR
Hedy Lamarr at Inventions
Hedy Lamarr: Q&A with Author Patrick Agan, Andre Soares, Alt Film Guide,
Hedy at a Hundred the centenary of Lamarr's birth, in the Ames Tribune, November 2014
"The unlikely life of inventor and Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr" (article and audio excerpts), Alex McClintock and Sharon Carleton, Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 14, 2014
Episode 6: Hedy Lamarr from Babes of Science podcasts
Hedy Lamarr before she came to Hollywood and Hedy Lamarr – brains, beauty and bad judgment at aenigma
1914 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century Austrian actresses
20th-century Austrian people
Actresses from Vienna
American anti-fascists
American film actresses
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
American people of Austrian-Jewish descent
Austrian emigrants to the United States
Austro-Hungarian Jews
Austrian film actresses
Austrian inventors
Illeists
Jewish American actresses
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
People with acquired American citizenship
Radio pioneers
Women inventors
20th-century American inventors
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"\"No te Mentía\" is the first single of Ednita Nazario's album Real (2007). This song deals with a warning from one woman to her beloved, whom she did not will endure \"no more\".\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was recorded in Argentina in November 2007. The Worldwide Premiere of this video was in \"No te Duermas\" TV Show of Telemundo.\n\n No Te Mentia - Official Music Video\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2007 singles\n2007 songs\nEdnita Nazario songs\nSongs written by Claudia Brant\nSongs written by Jorge Luis Piloto\nSony BMG Norte singles\n2000s ballads\nPop ballads",
"\"What Else Is There?\" is the third single from the Norwegian duo Röyksopp's second album The Understanding. It features the vocals of Karin Dreijer from the Swedish electronica duo The Knife. The album was released in the UK with the help of Astralwerks.\n\nThe single was used in an O2 television advertisement in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia during 2008. It was also used in the 2006 film Cashback and the 2007 film, Meet Bill. Trentemøller's remix of \"What Else is There?\" was featured in an episode of the HBO show Entourage.\n\nThe song was covered by extreme metal band Enslaved as a bonus track for their album E.\n\nThe song was listed as the 375th best song of the 2000s by Pitchfork Media.\n\nOfficial versions\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Album Version) – 5:17\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Radio Edit) – 3:38\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Jacques Lu Cont Radio Mix) – 3:46\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Vocal Version) – 8:03\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Dub Version) – 7:51\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Mix) – 8:25\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Edit) – 4:50\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Remix) (Radio Edit) – 3:06\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Trentemøller Remix) – 7:42\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Vitalic Remix) – 5:14\n\nResponse\nThe single was officially released on 5 December 2005 in the UK. The single had a limited release on 21 November 2005 to promote the upcoming album. On the UK Singles Chart, it peaked at number 32, while on the UK Dance Chart, it reached number one.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was directed by Martin de Thurah. It features Norwegian model Marianne Schröder who is shown lip-syncing Dreijer's voice. Schröder is depicted as a floating woman traveling across stormy landscapes and within empty houses. Dreijer makes a cameo appearance as a woman wearing an Elizabethan ruff while dining alone at a festive table.\n\nMovie spots\n\nThe song is also featured in the movie Meet Bill as characters played by Jessica Alba and Aaron Eckhart smoke marijuana while listening to it. It is also part of the end credits music of the film Cashback.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2005 singles\nRöyksopp songs\nAstralwerks singles\nSongs written by Svein Berge\nSongs written by Torbjørn Brundtland\n2004 songs\nSongs written by Roger Greenaway\nSongs written by Olof Dreijer\nSongs written by Karin Dreijer"
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"Carl Nielsen",
"Early years"
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C_c74626fda5f14827b9b513a88349da83_1
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Did he have a hard time in his early years?
| 1 |
Did Carl Nielsen have a hard time in his early years?
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Carl Nielsen
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Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jorgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography Min Fynske Barndom (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837-1881), was a talented musician. Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin". He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka which the composer mentioned in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper from a nearby village when he was fourteen; the shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense. Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 ore and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances. CANNOTANSWER
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Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen.
|
Carl August Nielsen (; 9 June 1865 – 3 October 1931) was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer.
Brought up by poor yet musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. He initially played in a military band before attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen from 1884 until December 1886. He premiered his Op. 1, Suite for Strings, in 1888, at the age of 23. The following year, Nielsen began a 16-year stint as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra under the conductor Johan Svendsen, during which he played in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy and continued to work there until his death.
Although his symphonies, concertos and choral music are now internationally acclaimed, Nielsen's career and personal life were marked by many difficulties, often reflected in his music. The works he composed between 1897 and 1904 are sometimes ascribed to his "psychological" period, resulting mainly from a turbulent marriage with the sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen. Nielsen is especially noted for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera Maskarade and many of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. His early music was inspired by composers such as Brahms and Grieg, but he soon developed his own style, first experimenting with progressive tonality and later diverging even more radically from the standards of composition still common at the time. Nielsen's sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. He died from a heart attack six years later, and is buried in Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen.
Nielsen maintained the reputation of a musical outsider during his lifetime, both in his own country and internationally. It was only later that his works firmly entered the international repertoire, accelerating in popularity from the 1960s through Leonard Bernstein and others. In Denmark, Nielsen's reputation was sealed in 2006 when four of his works were listed by the Danish Ministry of Culture amongst the greatest pieces of Danish classical music. For many years, he appeared on the Danish hundred-kroner banknote. The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense documents his life and that of his wife. Between 1994 and 2009 the Royal Danish Library, sponsored by the Danish government, completed the Carl Nielsen Edition, freely available online, containing background information and sheet music for all of Nielsen's works, many of which had not been previously published.
Life
Early years
Nielsen was born on 9 June 1865, the seventh of twelve children in a poor peasant family, at Sortelung near Nørre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jørgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains, while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837–1881), was a talented musician.
Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin." He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He studied violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka that he mentions in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper in a nearby village when he was fourteen. The shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion in Odense.
Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 øre and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances.
Studies and early career
In 1881, Nielsen began to take his violin playing more seriously, studying privately under Carl Larsen, the sexton at Odense Cathedral. It is not known how much Nielsen composed during this period, but from his autobiography, it can be deduced that he wrote some trios and quartets for brass instruments, and that he had difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that brass instruments were tuned in different keys. Following an introduction to Niels W. Gade, the director of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, by whom he was well received, Nielsen obtained his release from the military band at short notice, and studied at the Academy from the beginning of 1884.
Though not an outstanding student and composing little, Nielsen progressed well in violin under Valdemar Tofte (1832–1907), and received a solid grounding in music theory from Orla Rosenhoff (1844–1905), who would remain a valued adviser during his early years as a professional composer. He also studied composition under Gade, whom he liked as a friend but not for his music. Contacts with fellow students and cultured families in Copenhagen, some of whom would become lifelong friends, became equally important. The patchy education resulting from his country background left Nielsen insatiably curious about the arts, philosophy and aesthetics. But, in the opinion of the musicologist David Fanning, it also left him "with a highly personal, common man's point of view on those subjects". He left the Academy at the end of 1886, after graduating with good but not outstanding marks in all subjects. He then went to stay with the retired Odense merchant Jens Georg Nielsen (1820–1901) and his wife at their apartment on Slagelsegade as he was not yet in a position to pay his own way. While there, he fell in love with their 14-year-old daughter Emilie Demant. The affair was to last for the next three years.
On 17 September 1887, Nielsen played the violin in the Tivoli Concert Hall when his Andante tranquillo e Scherzo for strings was premiered. Shortly afterwards, on 25 January 1888, his String Quartet in F major was played at one of the private performances of the (Private Chamber Music Society). While Nielsen considered the Quartet in F to be his official debut as a professional composer, a far greater impression was made by his Suite for Strings. Performed at Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen on 8 September 1888, it was designated by Nielsen as his Op. 1.
By September 1889 Nielsen had progressed well enough on the violin to gain a position with the second violins in the prestigious Royal Danish Orchestra which played at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, then conducted by Johan Svendsen. In this position he experienced Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. Although this employment sometimes caused Nielsen considerable frustration, he continued to play there until 1905. After Svendsen's retirement in 1906, Nielsen increasingly served as conductor (being officially appointed assistant conductor in 1910). Between graduation and attaining this position, he made a modest income from private violin lessons while enjoying the continuing support of his patrons, not only Jens Georg Nielsen but also Albert Sachs (born 1846) and Hans Demant (1827–1897) who both ran factories in Odense. After less than a year at the Royal Theatre, Nielsen won a scholarship of 1,800 kroner, giving him the means to spend several months travelling in Europe.
Marriage and children
While travelling, Nielsen discovered and then turned against Richard Wagner's music dramas, heard many of Europe's leading orchestras and soloists and sharpened his opinions on both music and the visual arts. Although he revered the music of Bach and Mozart, he remained ambivalent about much 19th-century music. In 1891 he met the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Leipzig; they were to maintain a correspondence for over thirty years. Shortly after arriving in Paris in early March 1891 Nielsen met the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen, who was also travelling on a scholarship. They toured Italy together and married in St Mark's English Church, Florence, on 10 May 1891 before returning to Denmark. According to Fanning, their relationship was not only a "love match", but also a "meeting of minds"; Anne Marie was a gifted artist and a "strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career". This determination would strain the Nielsens' marriage, as Anne Marie would spend months away from home during the 1890s and 1900s, leaving Carl, who was susceptible to opportunities with other ladies, to raise their three young children in addition to composing and fulfilling his duties at the Royal Theatre.
Nielsen sublimated his anger and frustration over his marriage in a number of musical works, most notably between 1897 and 1904, a period which he sometimes called his "psychological" period. Fanning writes, "At this time his interest in the driving forces behind human personality crystallized in the opera Saul and David and the Second Symphony (The Four Temperaments) and the cantatas and ". Carl suggested divorce in March 1905 and had considered moving to Germany for a fresh start, but despite several extended periods of separation the Nielsens remained married for the remainder of the composer's life.
Nielsen had five children, two of them illegitimate. He had already fathered a son, Carl August Nielsen, in January 1888, before he met Anne Marie. In 1912, an illegitimate daughter was born – Rachel Siegmann, about whom Anne Marie never learned. With his wife Nielsen had two daughters and a son. Irmelin, the elder daughter, studied music theory with her father and in December 1919 married Eggert Møller (1893–1978), a medical doctor who became a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the polyclinic at the National Hospital. The younger daughter Anne Marie, who graduated from the Copenhagen Academy of Arts, married the Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi (1892–1988) in 1918; he contributed to the promotion of Nielsen's music, both as a violinist and a conductor. Nielsen's son, Hans Børge, was handicapped as a result of meningitis and spent most of his life away from the family. He died near Kolding in 1956.
Mature composer
At first, Nielsen's works did not gain sufficient recognition for him to be able to support himself. During the concert which saw the premiere of his First Symphony on 14 March 1894 conducted by Svendsen, Nielsen played in the second violin section. The symphony was a great success when played in Berlin in 1896, contributing significantly to his reputation. He was increasingly in demand to write incidental music for the theatre as well as cantatas for special occasions, both of which provided a welcome source of additional income. Fanning comments on the relationship which developed between his programmatic and symphonic works: "Sometimes he would find stageworthy ideas in his supposedly pure orchestral music; sometimes a text or scenario forced him to invent vivid musical imagery which he could later turn to more abstract use."
Nielsen's cantata Hymnus amoris for soloists, chorus and orchestra was first performed at Copenhagen's Musikforeningen (The Music Society) on 27 April 1897. It was inspired by Titian's painting Miracle of the Jealous Husband which Nielsen had seen on his honeymoon in Italy in 1891. On one of the copies, he wrote: "To my own Marie! These tones in praise of love are nothing compared to the real thing."
Beginning in 1901, Nielsen received a modest state pension – initially 800 kroner per annum, growing to 7,500 kroner by 1927 – to augment his violinist's salary. This allowed him to stop taking private pupils and left him more time to compose. From 1903, he also had an annual retainer from his principal publisher, . Between 1905 and 1914 he served as second conductor at the Royal Theatre. For his son-in-law, Emil Telmányi, Nielsen wrote his Violin Concerto, Op. 33 (1911). From 1914 to 1926, he conducted the Musikforeningen orchestra. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and continued to work there until his death.
The strain of dual careers and constant separation from his wife led to an extended breach in his marriage. The couple began separation proceedings in 1916, and separation by mutual consent was granted in 1919. In the period 1916–22, Nielsen often lived on Funen retreating to the Damgaard and Fuglsang estates, or worked as a conductor in Gothenburg. The period was one of creative crisis for Nielsen which, coinciding with World War I, would strongly influence his Fourth (1914–16) and Fifth symphonies (1921–22), arguably his greatest works according to Fanning. The composer was particularly upset in the 1920s when his long-standing Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen was unable to undertake publication of many of his major works, including Aladdin and Pan and Syrinx.
The sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. After suffering a serious heart attack in 1925, Nielsen was forced to curtail much of his activity, although he continued to compose until his death. His sixtieth birthday in 1925 brought many congratulations, a decoration from the Swedish government, and a gala concert and reception in Copenhagen. The composer, however, was in a dour mood; in an article in Politiken on 9 November 1925 he wrote: If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end ... What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
Final years and death
Nielsen's final large-scale orchestral works were his Flute Concerto (1926) and the Clarinet Concerto (1928), of which Robert Layton writes: "If ever there was music from another planet, this is surely it. Its sonorities are sparse and monochrome, its air rarefied and bracing." Nielsen's last musical composition, the organ work Commotio, was premiered posthumously in 1931 in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck.
During his final years, Nielsen produced a short book of essays entitled Living Music (1925), followed in 1927 by his memoir Min Fynske Barndom. In 1926 he wrote in his diary "My home soil pulls me more and more like a long sucking kiss. Does it mean that I shall finally return and rest in the earth of Funen? Then it must be in the place where I was born: Sortelung, Frydenlands parish".
This was not to be. Nielsen was admitted to Copenhagen's National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) on 1 October 1931 following a series of heart attacks. He died there at ten minutes past midnight on 3 October, surrounded by his family. His last words to them were "You are standing here as if you were waiting for something".
He was buried in Copenhagen's Vestre Cemetery; all the music at his funeral, including the hymns, was the work of the composer. After his death, his wife was commissioned to sculpt a monument to him, to be erected in central Copenhagen. She wrote: "I wanted to take the winged horse, eternal symbol of poetry, and place a musician on its back. He was to sit there between the rushing wings blowing a reed pipe out over Copenhagen." Dispute about her design and a shortfall in funding meant that erection of the monument was delayed and that Anne Marie herself ended up subsidising it. The Carl Nielsen Monument was finally unveiled in 1939.
Music
Nielsen's works are sometimes referred to by CNW numbers, based on the Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works (CNW) published online by the Danish Royal Library in 2015. The CNW catalogue is intended to replace the 1965 catalogue compiled by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe (FS numbers).
Musical style
In his Lives of the Great Composers, the music critic Harold Schonberg emphasizes the breadth of Nielsen's compositions, his energetic rhythms, generous orchestration and his individuality. In comparing him with Jean Sibelius, he considers he had "just as much sweep, even more power, and a more universal message". The Oxford University music professor Daniel M. Grimley qualifies Nielsen as "one of the most playful, life-affirming, and awkward voices in twentieth-century music" thanks to the "melodic richness and harmonic vitality" of his work. Anne-Marie Reynolds, author of Carl Nielsen's Voice: His Songs in Context, cites Robert Simpson's view that "all of his music is vocal in origin", maintaining that song-writing strongly influenced Nielsen's development as a composer.
The Danish sociologist Benedikte Brincker observes that the perception of Nielsen and his music in his home country is rather different from his international appreciation. His interest and background in folk music had special resonance for Danes, and this was intensified during the nationalistic movements of the 1930s and during World War II, when singing was an important basis for the Danes to distinguish themselves from their German enemies. Nielsen's songs retain an important place in Danish culture and education. The musicologist Niels Krabbe describes the popular image of Nielsen in Denmark as being like "the ugly duckling syndrome" – a reference to the tale of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen – whereby "a poor boy ... passing through adversity and frugality ... marches into Copenhagen and ... comes to conquer the position as the uncrowned King".
While outside Denmark Nielsen is largely thought of as the composer of orchestral music and the opera Maskarade, in his own country he is more of a national symbol. These two sides were officially brought together in Denmark in 2006 when the Ministry of Culture issued a list of the twelve greatest Danish musical works that included Nielsen’s opera Maskarade, his Fourth Symphony, and a pair of his Danish folk songs. Krabbe asks the rhetorical question: "Can 'the national' in Nielsen be demonstrated in the music in the form of particular themes, harmonies, sounds, forms, etc., or is it a pure construct of reception history?"
Nielsen himself was ambiguous about his attitudes to late Romantic German music and to nationalism in music. He wrote to the Dutch composer Julius Röntgen in 1909 "I am surprised by the technical skills of the Germans nowadays, and I cannot help thinking that all this delight in complication must exhaust itself. I foresee a completely new art of pure archaic virtue. What do you think about songs sung in unison? We must go back ... to the pure and the clear." On the other hand, he wrote in 1925 "Nothing destroys music more than nationalism does ... and it is impossible to deliver national music on request."
Nielsen studied Renaissance polyphony closely, which accounts for some of the melodic and harmonic content of his music. This interest is exemplified in his Tre Motetter (Three Motets, Op. 55). To non-Danish critics, Nielsen's music initially had a neo-classical sound but became increasingly modern as he developed his own approach to what the writer and composer Robert Simpson called progressive tonality, moving from one key to another. Typically, Nielsen's music might end in a different key from that of its commencement, sometimes as the outcome of a struggle as in his symphonies. There is debate as to how much such elements owe to his folk music activities. Some critics have referred to his rhythms, his use of acciaccaturas or appoggiaturas, or his frequent use of a flattened seventh and minor third in his works, as being typically Danish. The composer himself wrote "The intervals, as I see it, are the elements which first arouse a deeper interest in music ... [I]t is intervals which surprise and delight us anew every time we hear the cuckoo in spring. Its appeal would be less if its call were all on one note."
Nielsen's philosophy of music style is perhaps summed up in his advice in a 1907 letter to the Norwegian composer Knut Harder: "You have ... fluency, so far, so good; but I advise you again and again, my dear Mr. Harder; Tonality, Clarity, Strength."
Symphonies
Nielsen is perhaps most closely associated outside Denmark with his six symphonies, written between 1892 and 1925. The works have much in common: they are all just over 30 minutes long, brass instruments are a key component of the orchestration, and they all exhibit unusual changes in tonality, which heighten the dramatic tension. From its opening bars, Symphony No. 1 (Op. 7, 1890–92), while reflecting the influence of Grieg and Brahms, shows Nielsen's individuality. In Symphony No. 2 (Op. 16, 1901–02), Nielsen embarks on the development of human character. Inspiration came from a painting in an inn depicting the four temperaments (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine).
The title of Symphony No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva (Op. 27, 1910–11), is understood by the English composer Robert Simpson to refer to the "outward growth of the mind's scope". It fully exploits Nielsen's technique of confronting two keys at the same time and includes a peaceful section with soprano and baritone voices, singing a tune without words. Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable (Op. 29, 1914–16), written during World War I, is among the most frequently performed of the symphonies. In the last movement two sets of timpani are placed on opposite sides of the stage undertaking a kind of musical duel. Nielsen described the symphony as "the life force, the unquenchable will to live".
Also frequently performed is the Symphony No. 5 (Op. 50, 1921–22), presenting another battle between the forces of order and chaos. A snare drummer is given the task of interrupting the orchestra, playing and out of time, as if to destroy the music. Performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erik Tuxen at the 1950 Edinburgh International Festival, it caused a sensation, sparking interest in Nielsen's music outside Scandinavia. In Symphony No. 6 (without opus number), written 1924–25, and subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (Simple Symphony), the tonal language seems similar to that in Nielsen's other symphonies, but the symphony develops into a sequence of cameos, some sad, some grotesque, some humorous.
Operas and cantatas
Nielsen's two operas are very different in style. The four-act (Saul and David), written in 1902 to a libretto by Einar Christiansen, tells the Biblical story of Saul's jealousy of the young David while (Masquerade) is a comic opera in three acts written in 1906 to a Danish libretto by Vilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. Saul and David received a negative press when it was premiered in November 1902 and did no better when it was revived in 1904. By contrast, in November 1906 Masquerade was a resounding success with an exceptional run of 25 performances over its first four months. Generally considered to be Denmark's national opera, in its home country it has enjoyed lasting success and popularity, attributable to its many strophic songs, its dances and its underlying "old Copenhagen" atmosphere.
Nielsen wrote a considerable number of choral works but most of them were composed for special occasions and were seldom reprised. Three fully-fledged cantatas for soloists, orchestra and choir have, however, entered the repertoire. Nielsen composed (Hymn of Love), Op. 12 (1897) after studying early polyphonic choral style. Writing in the newspaper Dannebrog, Nanna Liebmann referred to the work as "a decisive victory" for Nielsen, and Angul Hammerich of Nationaltidende welcomed its improved clarity and purity. But the reviewer H.W. Schytte thought Nielsen had been pretentious presenting the lyrics in Latin rather than Danish. (The Sleep), Op. 18, Nielsen's second major choral work, sets to music the various phases of sleep including the terror of a nightmare in its central movement which, with its unusual discords, came as a shock to the reviewers at its premiere in March 1905. (Springtime on Funen), Op. 42, completed in 1922, has been cited as the most Danish of all Nielsen's compositions as it extols the beauty of Funen's countryside.
Concertos
Nielsen wrote three concertos: the Violin Concerto, Op. 33 is a middle-period work, from 1911, which lies within the tradition of European classicism, whereas the Flute Concerto (without opus number) of 1926 and the Clarinet Concerto, Op. 57 which followed in 1928 are late works, influenced by the modernism of the 1920s and, according to the Danish musicologist Herbert Rosenberg, the product of "an extremely experienced composer who knows how to avoid inessentials." Unlike Nielsen's later works, the Violin Concerto has a distinct, melody-oriented neo-classical structure. The Flute Concerto, in two movements, was written for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet which had premiered Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). In contrast to the rather traditional style of the Violin Concerto, it reflects the modernistic trends of the period. The first movement, for example, switches between D minor, E-flat minor and F major before the flute comes to the fore with a cantabile theme in E major. The Clarinet Concerto was also written for a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, Aage Oxenvad. Nielsen stretches the capacities of instrument and player to the utmost; the concerto has just one continuous movement and contains a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra and between the two principal competing keys, F major and E major.
The wind concertos present many examples of what Nielsen called ("objectification"). By this term he meant giving instrumentalists freedom of interpretation and performance within the bounds set out by the score.
Orchestral music
Nielsen's earliest work composed specifically for orchestra was the immediately successful Suite for Strings (1888), which evoked Scandinavian Romanticism as expressed by Grieg and Svendsen. The work marked an important milestone in Nielsen's career as it was not only his first real success but it was also the first of his pieces he conducted himself when it was played in Odense a month later.
The Helios Overture, Op. 17 (1903) stems from Nielsen's stay in Athens which inspired him to compose a work depicting the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea. The score is a showpiece for orchestra, and has been amongst Nielsen's most popular works. (Saga Dream), Op. 39 (1907–08) is a tone poem for orchestra based on the Icelandic Njal's Saga. In Nielsen's words:
There are among other things four cadenzas for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and flute which run quite freely alongside one another, with no harmonic connection, and without my marking time. They are just like four streams of thought, each going its own way – differently and randomly for each performance – until they meet in a point of rest, as if flowing into a lock where they are united.
At the Bier of a Young Artist () for string orchestra was written for the funeral of the Danish painter Oluf Hartmann in January 1910 and was also played at Nielsen's own funeral. Pan and Syrinx (), a vigorous nine-minute symphonic poem inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, was premiered in 1911. The Rhapsodic Overture, An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands (), draws on Faroese folk tunes but also contains freely composed sections.
Among Nielsen's orchestral works for the stage are Aladdin (1919) and (The Mother), Op. 41 (1920). Aladdin was written to accompany a production of Adam Oehlenschläger's fairy tale at The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. The complete score, lasting over 80 minutes, is Nielsen's longest work apart from his operas, but a shorter orchestral suite consisting of the Oriental March, Hindu Dance and Negro Dance is often performed. , written to celebrate the reunification of Southern Jutland with Denmark, was first performed in 1921; it is a setting of patriotic verses written for the occasion.
Chamber music
Nielsen composed several chamber music works, some of them still high on the international repertoire. The Wind Quintet, one of his most popular pieces, was composed in 1922 specifically for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Simpson, explaining that Nielsen's fondness of wind instruments was closely related to his love of nature, writes: "He was also intensely interested in human character, and in the Wind Quintet composed deliberately for five friends; each part is cunningly made to suit the individuality of each player."
Nielsen wrote four string quartets. The First String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13 (1889, revised 1900) contains a "Résumé" section in the finale, bringing together themes from the first, third and fourth movements. The Second String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 5 appeared in 1890 and the Third String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 14 in 1898. The music historian Jan Smaczny suggests that in this work "the handling of texture is confident and far less derivative than in earlier works ... [the quartet] prompts the most regret that Nielsen did not pursue the genre further ... to parallel his later symphonic development". The Fourth String Quartet in F major (1904) initially received a mixed reception, with critics uncertain about its reserved style. Nielsen revised it several times, the final version in 1919 being listed as his Op. 44.
The violin was Nielsen's own instrument and he composed four large-scale chamber works for it. The departures from standard procedures in the First Sonata, Op. 9 (1895), including its often sudden modulations and its terse thematic material, disconcerted Danish critics at its first performance. The Second Sonata, Op. 35 of 1912 was written for the violinist Peder Møller who earlier that year had premiered the composer's Violin Concerto. The work is an example of the composer's progressive tonality since, although it is stated to be in the key of G minor, the first and final movements end in different keys. The critic Emilius Bangert wrote of the premiere (which was given by Axel Gade), "The overall impression was of a beautiful, unbroken line – a flow of notes – where in particular a wonderful second subject in the first part and the pure, high sphere of the last part were captivating". Two other works are for violin solo. The Prelude, Theme and Variations, Op. 48 (1923) was written for Telmányi, and, like Nielsen's Chaconne for piano, Op. 32, was inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Preludio e Presto, Op. 52 (1928) was written as a tribute for the sixtieth birthday of the composer Fini Henriques.
Keyboard works
Although Nielsen came to compose mainly at the piano, he only composed directly for it occasionally over a period of 40 years, creating works often with a distinctive style which slowed their international acceptance. Nielsen's own piano technique, an echo of which is probably preserved in three wax cylinders marked "Carl Nielsen" at the State Archives in Aarhus, seems to have been mediocre. Reviewing the 1969 recording of works by the pianist John Ogdon, John Horton commented on the early pieces: "Nielsen's technical resources hardly measure up to the grandeur of his designs", whilst characterising the later pieces as "major works which can stand comparison with his symphonic music". The anti-romantic tone of the Symphonic Suite, Op. 8 (1894) was described by a later critic as "nothing less than a clenched fist straight in the face of all established musical convention". In Nielsen's words, the Chaconne, Op. 32 (1917) was "a really big piece, and I think effective". It is not only inspired by the work of Bach, especially the chaconne for solo violin, but also by the virtuoso piano arrangements of Bach's music by composers such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Ferruccio Busoni. Also on a large scale, and from the same year, is the Theme and Variations, Op. 41, in which critics have discerned the influences of Brahms and also of Max Reger, of whom Nielsen had earlier written to a friend "I think that the public will be utterly unable to grasp Reger's work and yet I am a lot more sympathetic towards his efforts than towards ... Richard Strauss".
All Nielsen's organ works were late compositions. The Danish organist Finn Viderø suggests that his interest was prompted by the (Organ reform movement), and the renewal of the front pipes of the Schnitger organ in the St. Jacobi Church, Hamburg, from 1928 to 1930. Nielsen's last major work – , Op. 58, a 22-minute piece for organ – was composed between June 1930 and February 1931, only a few months before his death.
Songs and hymns
Over the years, Nielsen wrote the music for over 290 songs and hymns, most of them for verses and poems by well-known Danish authors such as N. F. S. Grundtvig, Ingemann, Poul Martin Møller, Adam Oehlenschläger and Jeppe Aakjær. In Denmark, many of them are still popular today both with adults and children. They are regarded as "the most representative part of the country's most representative composer's output". In 1906, Nielsen had explained the significance of such songs to his countrymen:With certain melodic inflections we Danes unavoidably think of the poems of, for example, Ingemann, Christian Winther or Drachmann, and we often seem to perceive the smell of Danish landscapes and rural images in our songs and music. But it is also clear that a foreigner, who knows neither our countryside, nor our painters, our poets, or our history in the same intimate way as we do ourselves, will be completely unable to grasp what it is that brings us to hear and tremble with sympathetic understanding.
Of great significance was Nielsen's contribution to the 1922 publication, Folkehøjskolens Melodibog (The Folk High School Songbook), of which he was one of the editors together with Thomas Laub, Oluf Ring and Thorvald Aagaard. The book contained about 600 melodies, of which about 200 were composed by the editors, and was intended to provide a repertoire for communal singing, an integral part of Danish folk culture. The collection was extremely popular and became embedded in the Danish educational system. During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, mass song gatherings, using these melodies, were part of Denmark's "spiritual re-armament", and after the war in 1945 Nielsen's contributions were characterised by one writer as "shining jewels in our treasure-chest of patriotic songs". This remains a significant factor in Danish assessment of the composer.
Editions
Between 1994 and 2009 a complete new edition of Nielsen's works, the Carl Nielsen Edition, was commissioned by the Danish Government (at a cost of over 40 million kroner). For many of the works, including the operas Maskarade and Saul and David, and the complete Aladdin music, this was their first printed publication, copies of manuscripts having previously been used in performances. The scores are now all available for download free of charge at the website of the Danish Royal Library (which also owns most of Nielsen's music manuscripts).
Reception
Unlike that of his contemporary, the Finn Jean Sibelius, Nielsen's reputation abroad did not start to evolve until after World War II. For some time, international interest was largely directed towards his symphonies while his other works, many of them highly popular in Denmark, have only recently started to become part of the world repertoire. Even in Denmark, many of his compositions failed to impress. It was only in 1897 after the first performance of Hymnus amoris that he received support from the critics, to be substantially reinforced in 1906 by their enthusiastic reception of Masquerade.
Within two months of its successful premiere at the Odd Fellows Concert Hall in Copenhagen on 28 February 1912, the Third Symphony (Espansiva) was in the repertoire of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and by 1913 it had seen performances in Stuttgart, Stockholm and Helsinki. The symphony was the most popular of all Nielsen's works during his lifetime and was also played in Berlin, Hamburg, London and Gothenburg. Other works caused some uncertainty, even in Denmark. After the premiere of the Fifth Symphony (1922) one critic wrote: "The treasure of Danish symphonies and Carl Nielsen's own output have been enriched by a strange and highly original work." Another, however, described it as a "bloody, clenched fist in the face of an unsuspecting snob audience", also qualifying it as "filthy music from trenches".
At the end of the 1940s two major biographies of Nielsen appeared in Danish, dominating opinion of the composer's life and work for several decades. Robert Simpson's book Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (first edition 1952) was the earliest large-scale study in English.
An international breakthrough came in 1962 when Leonard Bernstein recorded the Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic for CBS. The recording helped Nielsen's music to achieve appreciation beyond his home country and is considered one of the finest recorded accounts of the symphony. Nielsen's centenary in 1965 was widely celebrated, both in terms of performances and publications, and Bernstein was awarded the Sonning Prize for his recording of the Third Symphony. In 1988 Nielsen's diaries and his letters to Anne Marie were published, and these, together with a 1991 biography by Jørgen Jensen using this new material, led to a revised objective assessment of the composer's personality. Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of Nielsen's 125th anniversary in 1990, the music critic Andrew Pincus recalled that 25 years earlier Bernstein had believed the world was ready to accept the Dane as the equal of Jean Sibelius, speaking of "his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability" (which Pincus believed was still a challenge for audiences). Biographies and studies in English in the 1990s helped to establish Nielsen's status worldwide, to the point at which his music has become a regular feature of concert programming in Western countries.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2008, the American music critic Alex Ross compares the "brute strength" of Nielsen's symphonies to Beethoven's Eroica and Fifth Symphony but explains that only now were the Americans slowly beginning to appreciate the Danish composer.
Nielsen did not record any of his works. However, three younger contemporary conductors who had worked with him, Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen, did record his symphonies and other orchestral works with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1946 and 1952. Jensen also made the first LP recording of the Fifth Symphony in 1954. Work carried out by the recently published complete Carl Nielsen Edition has revealed that the scores used in these recordings often differ from the composer's original intentions and thus the supposed authenticity of these recordings is now debatable.
There are now numerous recordings of all Nielsen's major works, including complete cycles of the symphonies conducted by, amongst others, Sir Colin Davis, Herbert Blomstedt and Sakari Oramo. Over 50 recordings have been made of Nielsen's Wind Quintet.
Legacy
From 1916, Nielsen taught at the Royal Academy where he became director in 1931, shortly before his death. He also had private students in his earlier days in order to supplement his income. As a result of his teaching, Nielsen has exerted considerable influence on classical music in Denmark. Among his most successful pupils were the composers Thorvald Aagaard, remembered in particular for his songs, Harald Agersnap, both a conductor and orchestral composer, and Jørgen Bentzon who composed choral and chamber music mainly for his folk music school (Københavns Folkemusikskole). Among his other students were the musicologist Knud Jeppesen, the pianist Herman Koppel, the academy professor and symphony composer Poul Schierbeck, the organist Emilius Bangert who played at Roskilde Cathedral, and Nancy Dalberg, one of Nielsen's private students who helped with the orchestration of Aladdin. Nielsen also instructed the conductor and choirmaster Mogens Wöldike, remembered for his interpretations of Baroque music, and Rudolph Simonsen, the pianist and composer who became director of the Academy after Nielsen's death.
The Carl Nielsen Society maintains a listing of performances of Nielsen's works, classified by region (Denmark, Scandinavia, Europe apart from Scandinavia and outside Europe) which demonstrates that his music is regularly performed throughout the world. The concerti and symphonies feature frequently in these listings.
The Carl Nielsen International Competition commenced in the 1970s under the auspices of the Odense Symphony Orchestra. A four-yearly violin competition has been held there since 1980. Flute and clarinet competitions were later added, but these have now been discontinued. An international Organ Competition, founded by the city of Odense, became associated with the Nielsen competition in 2009, but from 2015 will be organized separately, based in Odense Cathedral.
In his home country, the Carl Nielsen Museum, in Odense, is dedicated to Nielsen and his wife, Anne Marie. The composer is featured on the 100 kroner note issued by the Danish National Bank from 1997 to 2010. His image was selected in recognition of his contribution to Danish music compositions such as his opera Maskarade, his Espansiva symphony and his many songs including "Danmark, nu blunder den lyse nat".
Several special events were scheduled on or around 9 June 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nielsen's birth. In addition to many performances in Denmark, concerts were programmed in cities across Europe, including London, Leipzig, Kraków, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Vienna, and even further afield in Japan, Egypt and New York. For 9 June, Nielsen's birthday, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra presented a programme in Copenhagen's DR Concert Hall featuring Hymnus amoris, the Clarinet Concerto and Symphony No. 4 for a broadcast extending across Europe and the United States. The Danish Royal Opera has programmed Maskarade and a new production (directed by David Pountney) of Saul og David. During 2015, the Danish Quartet scheduled performances of Nielsen's string quartets in Denmark, Israel, Germany, Norway and the UK (at the Cheltenham Music Festival). In the UK, the BBC Philharmonic prepared a concert series on Nielsen beginning on 9 June in Manchester. Nielsen's Maskarade overture was also the first item for the opening night of the 2015 BBC Promenade Concerts in London, while his compositions featured in five other concerts of the Prom season. The city of Odense, which has strong connections with Nielsen, developed an extensive programme of concerts and cultural events for the anniversary year.
Minor planet 6058 Carlnielsen is named in his honor.
References
Citations
Sources
Table of contents, including introductions and music scores.
In .
In .
In .
Obituaries
External links
The Carl Nielsen Edition – index page to introductory information on many of Nielsen's works from the Royal Danish Library
Carl Nielsen bibliography 1985–2008 at the Royal Danish Library
The Danish Carl Nielsen Society – provides much detailed information on the composer and his works, including an overview of upcoming concerts
The Carl Nielsen Museum, Odense – "is a museum dedicated to the composer Carl Nielsen and to his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen".
Nielsen's Late Music, article by Svend Ravnkilde
Carl Nielsen International Music Competition & Festival – an annual music event in Odense, celebrating the composer. Organized by the Odense Symphony Orchestra
List of works from the Carl Nielsen Society
Carl Nielsen som symfoniker (1951–1954), Knud Jeppesen's 44 lectures, International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
"Förunderligt och märkligt" recording with
1865 births
1931 deaths
19th-century classical composers
19th-century classical violinists
19th-century Danish composers
19th-century male conductors (music)
19th-century conductors (music)
20th-century classical composers
20th-century classical violinists
20th-century conductors (music)
20th-century Danish composers
20th-century Danish male musicians
Royal Danish Academy of Music faculty
Burials at Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
Danish classical composers
Danish classical violinists
Danish conductors (music)
Danish music educators
Danish male classical composers
Danish opera composers
Danish Romantic composers
Directors of the Royal Danish Academy of Music
Male classical violinists
Male conductors (music)
Male opera composers
People from Faaborg-Midtfyn Municipality
Pupils of Niels Gade
Royal Danish Academy of Music alumni
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"Phillip Zhuwao (born 1971 - died 1997) was a Zimbabwean poet.\n\nEarly life \nZhuwao grew up in an itinerant family, moving from farm to farm, as his parents were labourers. His grandfather was a Lozi from Barotseland, while his mother's people came from Mozambique. This contributed to his family's disorientation: \"I have three international identities, an abnormality hard to describe.\" As he did not go far in his education, he was a self taught writer who read obsessively.\n\nWriting career \nThough he lived a brief life, Zhuwao was a literary prodigy. He was widely published in South African literary magazines such as Bliksem, Contrast, New Coin, Staffrider, and struck up a friendship with publisher, Robert Berold, who has contributed immensely to his posthumous legacy. His only published book, Sunrise Poison, completed in 1996, was only released 21 years after his death. It is the first of a planned four volume collected works, which include fiction, essays, letters as well as poetry.\n\nZhuwao's work is also featured in Gary Cummiskey's Dye Hard Press. He wrote a series of chain poems with South African poet, Alan Finlay.\n\nPublications \nSunrise Poison (Deep South, 2018)\n\nThe Red Laughter of Guns in Green Summer Rain: Chainpoems with Alan Finlay (Dye Hard Press, 2002)\n\nReferences \n\nZimbabwean poets\n1971 births\n1997 deaths\nZimbabwean people of Mozambican descent",
"William Bowring (14 November 1874 at St John's, Newfoundland, Canada – 12 August 1945 at Bay, St Michael, Barbados) was a West Indian cricketer who toured with the first West Indian touring side to England in 1900. He was educated at Sherborne and Marlborough and was the only one of the tourists to have learnt his cricket in England.\n\nHe first went to the West Indies in late 1898 and his first big matches were for A.B. St Hill's team in 1898-99 and for Barbados in the 1899-1900 Inter-Colonial Tournament but in none of these matches did he have any success.\n\nDespite this he was originally selected as captain of the 1900 tourists. He was eventually replaced in this role by Aucher Warner but agreed to join the side as an ordinary member. He was described before the tour as \"Good bat, hard hitter, makes his runs mostly in front of the wicket by hard drives. Has a good forcing stroke off his legs, and plays very hard, especially on the off. A good field, and safe catch. Member of the Wanderers' Club\". He was disappointing on the tour and \"except for three innings, did nothing\". His top score was 63 against Hampshire and he scored 33 and 28 against Warwickshire.\n\nHe played for Barbados in the 1901-02 Inter-Colonial Tournament and then over three years later was chosen for the combined West Indies team against Lord Brackley's team in 1904-05 when he scored 5 and was absent hurt in the second innings.\n\nHis first class career therefore consisted of 5 matches with a batting average of under 5.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nCricketArchive stats\nCricinfo player profile\n\nCanadian cricketers\nBarbados cricketers\n1874 births\n1945 deaths\nCricketers from Newfoundland and Labrador\nSportspeople from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador"
] |
[
"Carl Nielsen",
"Early years",
"Did he have a hard time in his early years?",
"Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen."
] |
C_c74626fda5f14827b9b513a88349da83_1
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When did his his interest begin in playing violin?
| 2 |
When did Carl Nielsen's interest begin in playing violin?
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Carl Nielsen
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Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jorgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography Min Fynske Barndom (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837-1881), was a talented musician. Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin". He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka which the composer mentioned in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper from a nearby village when he was fourteen; the shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense. Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 ore and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances. CANNOTANSWER
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when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin
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Carl August Nielsen (; 9 June 1865 – 3 October 1931) was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer.
Brought up by poor yet musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. He initially played in a military band before attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen from 1884 until December 1886. He premiered his Op. 1, Suite for Strings, in 1888, at the age of 23. The following year, Nielsen began a 16-year stint as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra under the conductor Johan Svendsen, during which he played in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy and continued to work there until his death.
Although his symphonies, concertos and choral music are now internationally acclaimed, Nielsen's career and personal life were marked by many difficulties, often reflected in his music. The works he composed between 1897 and 1904 are sometimes ascribed to his "psychological" period, resulting mainly from a turbulent marriage with the sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen. Nielsen is especially noted for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera Maskarade and many of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. His early music was inspired by composers such as Brahms and Grieg, but he soon developed his own style, first experimenting with progressive tonality and later diverging even more radically from the standards of composition still common at the time. Nielsen's sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. He died from a heart attack six years later, and is buried in Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen.
Nielsen maintained the reputation of a musical outsider during his lifetime, both in his own country and internationally. It was only later that his works firmly entered the international repertoire, accelerating in popularity from the 1960s through Leonard Bernstein and others. In Denmark, Nielsen's reputation was sealed in 2006 when four of his works were listed by the Danish Ministry of Culture amongst the greatest pieces of Danish classical music. For many years, he appeared on the Danish hundred-kroner banknote. The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense documents his life and that of his wife. Between 1994 and 2009 the Royal Danish Library, sponsored by the Danish government, completed the Carl Nielsen Edition, freely available online, containing background information and sheet music for all of Nielsen's works, many of which had not been previously published.
Life
Early years
Nielsen was born on 9 June 1865, the seventh of twelve children in a poor peasant family, at Sortelung near Nørre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jørgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains, while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837–1881), was a talented musician.
Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin." He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He studied violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka that he mentions in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper in a nearby village when he was fourteen. The shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion in Odense.
Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 øre and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances.
Studies and early career
In 1881, Nielsen began to take his violin playing more seriously, studying privately under Carl Larsen, the sexton at Odense Cathedral. It is not known how much Nielsen composed during this period, but from his autobiography, it can be deduced that he wrote some trios and quartets for brass instruments, and that he had difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that brass instruments were tuned in different keys. Following an introduction to Niels W. Gade, the director of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, by whom he was well received, Nielsen obtained his release from the military band at short notice, and studied at the Academy from the beginning of 1884.
Though not an outstanding student and composing little, Nielsen progressed well in violin under Valdemar Tofte (1832–1907), and received a solid grounding in music theory from Orla Rosenhoff (1844–1905), who would remain a valued adviser during his early years as a professional composer. He also studied composition under Gade, whom he liked as a friend but not for his music. Contacts with fellow students and cultured families in Copenhagen, some of whom would become lifelong friends, became equally important. The patchy education resulting from his country background left Nielsen insatiably curious about the arts, philosophy and aesthetics. But, in the opinion of the musicologist David Fanning, it also left him "with a highly personal, common man's point of view on those subjects". He left the Academy at the end of 1886, after graduating with good but not outstanding marks in all subjects. He then went to stay with the retired Odense merchant Jens Georg Nielsen (1820–1901) and his wife at their apartment on Slagelsegade as he was not yet in a position to pay his own way. While there, he fell in love with their 14-year-old daughter Emilie Demant. The affair was to last for the next three years.
On 17 September 1887, Nielsen played the violin in the Tivoli Concert Hall when his Andante tranquillo e Scherzo for strings was premiered. Shortly afterwards, on 25 January 1888, his String Quartet in F major was played at one of the private performances of the (Private Chamber Music Society). While Nielsen considered the Quartet in F to be his official debut as a professional composer, a far greater impression was made by his Suite for Strings. Performed at Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen on 8 September 1888, it was designated by Nielsen as his Op. 1.
By September 1889 Nielsen had progressed well enough on the violin to gain a position with the second violins in the prestigious Royal Danish Orchestra which played at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, then conducted by Johan Svendsen. In this position he experienced Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. Although this employment sometimes caused Nielsen considerable frustration, he continued to play there until 1905. After Svendsen's retirement in 1906, Nielsen increasingly served as conductor (being officially appointed assistant conductor in 1910). Between graduation and attaining this position, he made a modest income from private violin lessons while enjoying the continuing support of his patrons, not only Jens Georg Nielsen but also Albert Sachs (born 1846) and Hans Demant (1827–1897) who both ran factories in Odense. After less than a year at the Royal Theatre, Nielsen won a scholarship of 1,800 kroner, giving him the means to spend several months travelling in Europe.
Marriage and children
While travelling, Nielsen discovered and then turned against Richard Wagner's music dramas, heard many of Europe's leading orchestras and soloists and sharpened his opinions on both music and the visual arts. Although he revered the music of Bach and Mozart, he remained ambivalent about much 19th-century music. In 1891 he met the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Leipzig; they were to maintain a correspondence for over thirty years. Shortly after arriving in Paris in early March 1891 Nielsen met the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen, who was also travelling on a scholarship. They toured Italy together and married in St Mark's English Church, Florence, on 10 May 1891 before returning to Denmark. According to Fanning, their relationship was not only a "love match", but also a "meeting of minds"; Anne Marie was a gifted artist and a "strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career". This determination would strain the Nielsens' marriage, as Anne Marie would spend months away from home during the 1890s and 1900s, leaving Carl, who was susceptible to opportunities with other ladies, to raise their three young children in addition to composing and fulfilling his duties at the Royal Theatre.
Nielsen sublimated his anger and frustration over his marriage in a number of musical works, most notably between 1897 and 1904, a period which he sometimes called his "psychological" period. Fanning writes, "At this time his interest in the driving forces behind human personality crystallized in the opera Saul and David and the Second Symphony (The Four Temperaments) and the cantatas and ". Carl suggested divorce in March 1905 and had considered moving to Germany for a fresh start, but despite several extended periods of separation the Nielsens remained married for the remainder of the composer's life.
Nielsen had five children, two of them illegitimate. He had already fathered a son, Carl August Nielsen, in January 1888, before he met Anne Marie. In 1912, an illegitimate daughter was born – Rachel Siegmann, about whom Anne Marie never learned. With his wife Nielsen had two daughters and a son. Irmelin, the elder daughter, studied music theory with her father and in December 1919 married Eggert Møller (1893–1978), a medical doctor who became a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the polyclinic at the National Hospital. The younger daughter Anne Marie, who graduated from the Copenhagen Academy of Arts, married the Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi (1892–1988) in 1918; he contributed to the promotion of Nielsen's music, both as a violinist and a conductor. Nielsen's son, Hans Børge, was handicapped as a result of meningitis and spent most of his life away from the family. He died near Kolding in 1956.
Mature composer
At first, Nielsen's works did not gain sufficient recognition for him to be able to support himself. During the concert which saw the premiere of his First Symphony on 14 March 1894 conducted by Svendsen, Nielsen played in the second violin section. The symphony was a great success when played in Berlin in 1896, contributing significantly to his reputation. He was increasingly in demand to write incidental music for the theatre as well as cantatas for special occasions, both of which provided a welcome source of additional income. Fanning comments on the relationship which developed between his programmatic and symphonic works: "Sometimes he would find stageworthy ideas in his supposedly pure orchestral music; sometimes a text or scenario forced him to invent vivid musical imagery which he could later turn to more abstract use."
Nielsen's cantata Hymnus amoris for soloists, chorus and orchestra was first performed at Copenhagen's Musikforeningen (The Music Society) on 27 April 1897. It was inspired by Titian's painting Miracle of the Jealous Husband which Nielsen had seen on his honeymoon in Italy in 1891. On one of the copies, he wrote: "To my own Marie! These tones in praise of love are nothing compared to the real thing."
Beginning in 1901, Nielsen received a modest state pension – initially 800 kroner per annum, growing to 7,500 kroner by 1927 – to augment his violinist's salary. This allowed him to stop taking private pupils and left him more time to compose. From 1903, he also had an annual retainer from his principal publisher, . Between 1905 and 1914 he served as second conductor at the Royal Theatre. For his son-in-law, Emil Telmányi, Nielsen wrote his Violin Concerto, Op. 33 (1911). From 1914 to 1926, he conducted the Musikforeningen orchestra. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and continued to work there until his death.
The strain of dual careers and constant separation from his wife led to an extended breach in his marriage. The couple began separation proceedings in 1916, and separation by mutual consent was granted in 1919. In the period 1916–22, Nielsen often lived on Funen retreating to the Damgaard and Fuglsang estates, or worked as a conductor in Gothenburg. The period was one of creative crisis for Nielsen which, coinciding with World War I, would strongly influence his Fourth (1914–16) and Fifth symphonies (1921–22), arguably his greatest works according to Fanning. The composer was particularly upset in the 1920s when his long-standing Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen was unable to undertake publication of many of his major works, including Aladdin and Pan and Syrinx.
The sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. After suffering a serious heart attack in 1925, Nielsen was forced to curtail much of his activity, although he continued to compose until his death. His sixtieth birthday in 1925 brought many congratulations, a decoration from the Swedish government, and a gala concert and reception in Copenhagen. The composer, however, was in a dour mood; in an article in Politiken on 9 November 1925 he wrote: If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end ... What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
Final years and death
Nielsen's final large-scale orchestral works were his Flute Concerto (1926) and the Clarinet Concerto (1928), of which Robert Layton writes: "If ever there was music from another planet, this is surely it. Its sonorities are sparse and monochrome, its air rarefied and bracing." Nielsen's last musical composition, the organ work Commotio, was premiered posthumously in 1931 in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck.
During his final years, Nielsen produced a short book of essays entitled Living Music (1925), followed in 1927 by his memoir Min Fynske Barndom. In 1926 he wrote in his diary "My home soil pulls me more and more like a long sucking kiss. Does it mean that I shall finally return and rest in the earth of Funen? Then it must be in the place where I was born: Sortelung, Frydenlands parish".
This was not to be. Nielsen was admitted to Copenhagen's National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) on 1 October 1931 following a series of heart attacks. He died there at ten minutes past midnight on 3 October, surrounded by his family. His last words to them were "You are standing here as if you were waiting for something".
He was buried in Copenhagen's Vestre Cemetery; all the music at his funeral, including the hymns, was the work of the composer. After his death, his wife was commissioned to sculpt a monument to him, to be erected in central Copenhagen. She wrote: "I wanted to take the winged horse, eternal symbol of poetry, and place a musician on its back. He was to sit there between the rushing wings blowing a reed pipe out over Copenhagen." Dispute about her design and a shortfall in funding meant that erection of the monument was delayed and that Anne Marie herself ended up subsidising it. The Carl Nielsen Monument was finally unveiled in 1939.
Music
Nielsen's works are sometimes referred to by CNW numbers, based on the Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works (CNW) published online by the Danish Royal Library in 2015. The CNW catalogue is intended to replace the 1965 catalogue compiled by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe (FS numbers).
Musical style
In his Lives of the Great Composers, the music critic Harold Schonberg emphasizes the breadth of Nielsen's compositions, his energetic rhythms, generous orchestration and his individuality. In comparing him with Jean Sibelius, he considers he had "just as much sweep, even more power, and a more universal message". The Oxford University music professor Daniel M. Grimley qualifies Nielsen as "one of the most playful, life-affirming, and awkward voices in twentieth-century music" thanks to the "melodic richness and harmonic vitality" of his work. Anne-Marie Reynolds, author of Carl Nielsen's Voice: His Songs in Context, cites Robert Simpson's view that "all of his music is vocal in origin", maintaining that song-writing strongly influenced Nielsen's development as a composer.
The Danish sociologist Benedikte Brincker observes that the perception of Nielsen and his music in his home country is rather different from his international appreciation. His interest and background in folk music had special resonance for Danes, and this was intensified during the nationalistic movements of the 1930s and during World War II, when singing was an important basis for the Danes to distinguish themselves from their German enemies. Nielsen's songs retain an important place in Danish culture and education. The musicologist Niels Krabbe describes the popular image of Nielsen in Denmark as being like "the ugly duckling syndrome" – a reference to the tale of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen – whereby "a poor boy ... passing through adversity and frugality ... marches into Copenhagen and ... comes to conquer the position as the uncrowned King".
While outside Denmark Nielsen is largely thought of as the composer of orchestral music and the opera Maskarade, in his own country he is more of a national symbol. These two sides were officially brought together in Denmark in 2006 when the Ministry of Culture issued a list of the twelve greatest Danish musical works that included Nielsen’s opera Maskarade, his Fourth Symphony, and a pair of his Danish folk songs. Krabbe asks the rhetorical question: "Can 'the national' in Nielsen be demonstrated in the music in the form of particular themes, harmonies, sounds, forms, etc., or is it a pure construct of reception history?"
Nielsen himself was ambiguous about his attitudes to late Romantic German music and to nationalism in music. He wrote to the Dutch composer Julius Röntgen in 1909 "I am surprised by the technical skills of the Germans nowadays, and I cannot help thinking that all this delight in complication must exhaust itself. I foresee a completely new art of pure archaic virtue. What do you think about songs sung in unison? We must go back ... to the pure and the clear." On the other hand, he wrote in 1925 "Nothing destroys music more than nationalism does ... and it is impossible to deliver national music on request."
Nielsen studied Renaissance polyphony closely, which accounts for some of the melodic and harmonic content of his music. This interest is exemplified in his Tre Motetter (Three Motets, Op. 55). To non-Danish critics, Nielsen's music initially had a neo-classical sound but became increasingly modern as he developed his own approach to what the writer and composer Robert Simpson called progressive tonality, moving from one key to another. Typically, Nielsen's music might end in a different key from that of its commencement, sometimes as the outcome of a struggle as in his symphonies. There is debate as to how much such elements owe to his folk music activities. Some critics have referred to his rhythms, his use of acciaccaturas or appoggiaturas, or his frequent use of a flattened seventh and minor third in his works, as being typically Danish. The composer himself wrote "The intervals, as I see it, are the elements which first arouse a deeper interest in music ... [I]t is intervals which surprise and delight us anew every time we hear the cuckoo in spring. Its appeal would be less if its call were all on one note."
Nielsen's philosophy of music style is perhaps summed up in his advice in a 1907 letter to the Norwegian composer Knut Harder: "You have ... fluency, so far, so good; but I advise you again and again, my dear Mr. Harder; Tonality, Clarity, Strength."
Symphonies
Nielsen is perhaps most closely associated outside Denmark with his six symphonies, written between 1892 and 1925. The works have much in common: they are all just over 30 minutes long, brass instruments are a key component of the orchestration, and they all exhibit unusual changes in tonality, which heighten the dramatic tension. From its opening bars, Symphony No. 1 (Op. 7, 1890–92), while reflecting the influence of Grieg and Brahms, shows Nielsen's individuality. In Symphony No. 2 (Op. 16, 1901–02), Nielsen embarks on the development of human character. Inspiration came from a painting in an inn depicting the four temperaments (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine).
The title of Symphony No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva (Op. 27, 1910–11), is understood by the English composer Robert Simpson to refer to the "outward growth of the mind's scope". It fully exploits Nielsen's technique of confronting two keys at the same time and includes a peaceful section with soprano and baritone voices, singing a tune without words. Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable (Op. 29, 1914–16), written during World War I, is among the most frequently performed of the symphonies. In the last movement two sets of timpani are placed on opposite sides of the stage undertaking a kind of musical duel. Nielsen described the symphony as "the life force, the unquenchable will to live".
Also frequently performed is the Symphony No. 5 (Op. 50, 1921–22), presenting another battle between the forces of order and chaos. A snare drummer is given the task of interrupting the orchestra, playing and out of time, as if to destroy the music. Performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erik Tuxen at the 1950 Edinburgh International Festival, it caused a sensation, sparking interest in Nielsen's music outside Scandinavia. In Symphony No. 6 (without opus number), written 1924–25, and subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (Simple Symphony), the tonal language seems similar to that in Nielsen's other symphonies, but the symphony develops into a sequence of cameos, some sad, some grotesque, some humorous.
Operas and cantatas
Nielsen's two operas are very different in style. The four-act (Saul and David), written in 1902 to a libretto by Einar Christiansen, tells the Biblical story of Saul's jealousy of the young David while (Masquerade) is a comic opera in three acts written in 1906 to a Danish libretto by Vilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. Saul and David received a negative press when it was premiered in November 1902 and did no better when it was revived in 1904. By contrast, in November 1906 Masquerade was a resounding success with an exceptional run of 25 performances over its first four months. Generally considered to be Denmark's national opera, in its home country it has enjoyed lasting success and popularity, attributable to its many strophic songs, its dances and its underlying "old Copenhagen" atmosphere.
Nielsen wrote a considerable number of choral works but most of them were composed for special occasions and were seldom reprised. Three fully-fledged cantatas for soloists, orchestra and choir have, however, entered the repertoire. Nielsen composed (Hymn of Love), Op. 12 (1897) after studying early polyphonic choral style. Writing in the newspaper Dannebrog, Nanna Liebmann referred to the work as "a decisive victory" for Nielsen, and Angul Hammerich of Nationaltidende welcomed its improved clarity and purity. But the reviewer H.W. Schytte thought Nielsen had been pretentious presenting the lyrics in Latin rather than Danish. (The Sleep), Op. 18, Nielsen's second major choral work, sets to music the various phases of sleep including the terror of a nightmare in its central movement which, with its unusual discords, came as a shock to the reviewers at its premiere in March 1905. (Springtime on Funen), Op. 42, completed in 1922, has been cited as the most Danish of all Nielsen's compositions as it extols the beauty of Funen's countryside.
Concertos
Nielsen wrote three concertos: the Violin Concerto, Op. 33 is a middle-period work, from 1911, which lies within the tradition of European classicism, whereas the Flute Concerto (without opus number) of 1926 and the Clarinet Concerto, Op. 57 which followed in 1928 are late works, influenced by the modernism of the 1920s and, according to the Danish musicologist Herbert Rosenberg, the product of "an extremely experienced composer who knows how to avoid inessentials." Unlike Nielsen's later works, the Violin Concerto has a distinct, melody-oriented neo-classical structure. The Flute Concerto, in two movements, was written for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet which had premiered Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). In contrast to the rather traditional style of the Violin Concerto, it reflects the modernistic trends of the period. The first movement, for example, switches between D minor, E-flat minor and F major before the flute comes to the fore with a cantabile theme in E major. The Clarinet Concerto was also written for a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, Aage Oxenvad. Nielsen stretches the capacities of instrument and player to the utmost; the concerto has just one continuous movement and contains a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra and between the two principal competing keys, F major and E major.
The wind concertos present many examples of what Nielsen called ("objectification"). By this term he meant giving instrumentalists freedom of interpretation and performance within the bounds set out by the score.
Orchestral music
Nielsen's earliest work composed specifically for orchestra was the immediately successful Suite for Strings (1888), which evoked Scandinavian Romanticism as expressed by Grieg and Svendsen. The work marked an important milestone in Nielsen's career as it was not only his first real success but it was also the first of his pieces he conducted himself when it was played in Odense a month later.
The Helios Overture, Op. 17 (1903) stems from Nielsen's stay in Athens which inspired him to compose a work depicting the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea. The score is a showpiece for orchestra, and has been amongst Nielsen's most popular works. (Saga Dream), Op. 39 (1907–08) is a tone poem for orchestra based on the Icelandic Njal's Saga. In Nielsen's words:
There are among other things four cadenzas for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and flute which run quite freely alongside one another, with no harmonic connection, and without my marking time. They are just like four streams of thought, each going its own way – differently and randomly for each performance – until they meet in a point of rest, as if flowing into a lock where they are united.
At the Bier of a Young Artist () for string orchestra was written for the funeral of the Danish painter Oluf Hartmann in January 1910 and was also played at Nielsen's own funeral. Pan and Syrinx (), a vigorous nine-minute symphonic poem inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, was premiered in 1911. The Rhapsodic Overture, An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands (), draws on Faroese folk tunes but also contains freely composed sections.
Among Nielsen's orchestral works for the stage are Aladdin (1919) and (The Mother), Op. 41 (1920). Aladdin was written to accompany a production of Adam Oehlenschläger's fairy tale at The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. The complete score, lasting over 80 minutes, is Nielsen's longest work apart from his operas, but a shorter orchestral suite consisting of the Oriental March, Hindu Dance and Negro Dance is often performed. , written to celebrate the reunification of Southern Jutland with Denmark, was first performed in 1921; it is a setting of patriotic verses written for the occasion.
Chamber music
Nielsen composed several chamber music works, some of them still high on the international repertoire. The Wind Quintet, one of his most popular pieces, was composed in 1922 specifically for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Simpson, explaining that Nielsen's fondness of wind instruments was closely related to his love of nature, writes: "He was also intensely interested in human character, and in the Wind Quintet composed deliberately for five friends; each part is cunningly made to suit the individuality of each player."
Nielsen wrote four string quartets. The First String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13 (1889, revised 1900) contains a "Résumé" section in the finale, bringing together themes from the first, third and fourth movements. The Second String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 5 appeared in 1890 and the Third String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 14 in 1898. The music historian Jan Smaczny suggests that in this work "the handling of texture is confident and far less derivative than in earlier works ... [the quartet] prompts the most regret that Nielsen did not pursue the genre further ... to parallel his later symphonic development". The Fourth String Quartet in F major (1904) initially received a mixed reception, with critics uncertain about its reserved style. Nielsen revised it several times, the final version in 1919 being listed as his Op. 44.
The violin was Nielsen's own instrument and he composed four large-scale chamber works for it. The departures from standard procedures in the First Sonata, Op. 9 (1895), including its often sudden modulations and its terse thematic material, disconcerted Danish critics at its first performance. The Second Sonata, Op. 35 of 1912 was written for the violinist Peder Møller who earlier that year had premiered the composer's Violin Concerto. The work is an example of the composer's progressive tonality since, although it is stated to be in the key of G minor, the first and final movements end in different keys. The critic Emilius Bangert wrote of the premiere (which was given by Axel Gade), "The overall impression was of a beautiful, unbroken line – a flow of notes – where in particular a wonderful second subject in the first part and the pure, high sphere of the last part were captivating". Two other works are for violin solo. The Prelude, Theme and Variations, Op. 48 (1923) was written for Telmányi, and, like Nielsen's Chaconne for piano, Op. 32, was inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Preludio e Presto, Op. 52 (1928) was written as a tribute for the sixtieth birthday of the composer Fini Henriques.
Keyboard works
Although Nielsen came to compose mainly at the piano, he only composed directly for it occasionally over a period of 40 years, creating works often with a distinctive style which slowed their international acceptance. Nielsen's own piano technique, an echo of which is probably preserved in three wax cylinders marked "Carl Nielsen" at the State Archives in Aarhus, seems to have been mediocre. Reviewing the 1969 recording of works by the pianist John Ogdon, John Horton commented on the early pieces: "Nielsen's technical resources hardly measure up to the grandeur of his designs", whilst characterising the later pieces as "major works which can stand comparison with his symphonic music". The anti-romantic tone of the Symphonic Suite, Op. 8 (1894) was described by a later critic as "nothing less than a clenched fist straight in the face of all established musical convention". In Nielsen's words, the Chaconne, Op. 32 (1917) was "a really big piece, and I think effective". It is not only inspired by the work of Bach, especially the chaconne for solo violin, but also by the virtuoso piano arrangements of Bach's music by composers such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Ferruccio Busoni. Also on a large scale, and from the same year, is the Theme and Variations, Op. 41, in which critics have discerned the influences of Brahms and also of Max Reger, of whom Nielsen had earlier written to a friend "I think that the public will be utterly unable to grasp Reger's work and yet I am a lot more sympathetic towards his efforts than towards ... Richard Strauss".
All Nielsen's organ works were late compositions. The Danish organist Finn Viderø suggests that his interest was prompted by the (Organ reform movement), and the renewal of the front pipes of the Schnitger organ in the St. Jacobi Church, Hamburg, from 1928 to 1930. Nielsen's last major work – , Op. 58, a 22-minute piece for organ – was composed between June 1930 and February 1931, only a few months before his death.
Songs and hymns
Over the years, Nielsen wrote the music for over 290 songs and hymns, most of them for verses and poems by well-known Danish authors such as N. F. S. Grundtvig, Ingemann, Poul Martin Møller, Adam Oehlenschläger and Jeppe Aakjær. In Denmark, many of them are still popular today both with adults and children. They are regarded as "the most representative part of the country's most representative composer's output". In 1906, Nielsen had explained the significance of such songs to his countrymen:With certain melodic inflections we Danes unavoidably think of the poems of, for example, Ingemann, Christian Winther or Drachmann, and we often seem to perceive the smell of Danish landscapes and rural images in our songs and music. But it is also clear that a foreigner, who knows neither our countryside, nor our painters, our poets, or our history in the same intimate way as we do ourselves, will be completely unable to grasp what it is that brings us to hear and tremble with sympathetic understanding.
Of great significance was Nielsen's contribution to the 1922 publication, Folkehøjskolens Melodibog (The Folk High School Songbook), of which he was one of the editors together with Thomas Laub, Oluf Ring and Thorvald Aagaard. The book contained about 600 melodies, of which about 200 were composed by the editors, and was intended to provide a repertoire for communal singing, an integral part of Danish folk culture. The collection was extremely popular and became embedded in the Danish educational system. During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, mass song gatherings, using these melodies, were part of Denmark's "spiritual re-armament", and after the war in 1945 Nielsen's contributions were characterised by one writer as "shining jewels in our treasure-chest of patriotic songs". This remains a significant factor in Danish assessment of the composer.
Editions
Between 1994 and 2009 a complete new edition of Nielsen's works, the Carl Nielsen Edition, was commissioned by the Danish Government (at a cost of over 40 million kroner). For many of the works, including the operas Maskarade and Saul and David, and the complete Aladdin music, this was their first printed publication, copies of manuscripts having previously been used in performances. The scores are now all available for download free of charge at the website of the Danish Royal Library (which also owns most of Nielsen's music manuscripts).
Reception
Unlike that of his contemporary, the Finn Jean Sibelius, Nielsen's reputation abroad did not start to evolve until after World War II. For some time, international interest was largely directed towards his symphonies while his other works, many of them highly popular in Denmark, have only recently started to become part of the world repertoire. Even in Denmark, many of his compositions failed to impress. It was only in 1897 after the first performance of Hymnus amoris that he received support from the critics, to be substantially reinforced in 1906 by their enthusiastic reception of Masquerade.
Within two months of its successful premiere at the Odd Fellows Concert Hall in Copenhagen on 28 February 1912, the Third Symphony (Espansiva) was in the repertoire of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and by 1913 it had seen performances in Stuttgart, Stockholm and Helsinki. The symphony was the most popular of all Nielsen's works during his lifetime and was also played in Berlin, Hamburg, London and Gothenburg. Other works caused some uncertainty, even in Denmark. After the premiere of the Fifth Symphony (1922) one critic wrote: "The treasure of Danish symphonies and Carl Nielsen's own output have been enriched by a strange and highly original work." Another, however, described it as a "bloody, clenched fist in the face of an unsuspecting snob audience", also qualifying it as "filthy music from trenches".
At the end of the 1940s two major biographies of Nielsen appeared in Danish, dominating opinion of the composer's life and work for several decades. Robert Simpson's book Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (first edition 1952) was the earliest large-scale study in English.
An international breakthrough came in 1962 when Leonard Bernstein recorded the Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic for CBS. The recording helped Nielsen's music to achieve appreciation beyond his home country and is considered one of the finest recorded accounts of the symphony. Nielsen's centenary in 1965 was widely celebrated, both in terms of performances and publications, and Bernstein was awarded the Sonning Prize for his recording of the Third Symphony. In 1988 Nielsen's diaries and his letters to Anne Marie were published, and these, together with a 1991 biography by Jørgen Jensen using this new material, led to a revised objective assessment of the composer's personality. Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of Nielsen's 125th anniversary in 1990, the music critic Andrew Pincus recalled that 25 years earlier Bernstein had believed the world was ready to accept the Dane as the equal of Jean Sibelius, speaking of "his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability" (which Pincus believed was still a challenge for audiences). Biographies and studies in English in the 1990s helped to establish Nielsen's status worldwide, to the point at which his music has become a regular feature of concert programming in Western countries.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2008, the American music critic Alex Ross compares the "brute strength" of Nielsen's symphonies to Beethoven's Eroica and Fifth Symphony but explains that only now were the Americans slowly beginning to appreciate the Danish composer.
Nielsen did not record any of his works. However, three younger contemporary conductors who had worked with him, Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen, did record his symphonies and other orchestral works with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1946 and 1952. Jensen also made the first LP recording of the Fifth Symphony in 1954. Work carried out by the recently published complete Carl Nielsen Edition has revealed that the scores used in these recordings often differ from the composer's original intentions and thus the supposed authenticity of these recordings is now debatable.
There are now numerous recordings of all Nielsen's major works, including complete cycles of the symphonies conducted by, amongst others, Sir Colin Davis, Herbert Blomstedt and Sakari Oramo. Over 50 recordings have been made of Nielsen's Wind Quintet.
Legacy
From 1916, Nielsen taught at the Royal Academy where he became director in 1931, shortly before his death. He also had private students in his earlier days in order to supplement his income. As a result of his teaching, Nielsen has exerted considerable influence on classical music in Denmark. Among his most successful pupils were the composers Thorvald Aagaard, remembered in particular for his songs, Harald Agersnap, both a conductor and orchestral composer, and Jørgen Bentzon who composed choral and chamber music mainly for his folk music school (Københavns Folkemusikskole). Among his other students were the musicologist Knud Jeppesen, the pianist Herman Koppel, the academy professor and symphony composer Poul Schierbeck, the organist Emilius Bangert who played at Roskilde Cathedral, and Nancy Dalberg, one of Nielsen's private students who helped with the orchestration of Aladdin. Nielsen also instructed the conductor and choirmaster Mogens Wöldike, remembered for his interpretations of Baroque music, and Rudolph Simonsen, the pianist and composer who became director of the Academy after Nielsen's death.
The Carl Nielsen Society maintains a listing of performances of Nielsen's works, classified by region (Denmark, Scandinavia, Europe apart from Scandinavia and outside Europe) which demonstrates that his music is regularly performed throughout the world. The concerti and symphonies feature frequently in these listings.
The Carl Nielsen International Competition commenced in the 1970s under the auspices of the Odense Symphony Orchestra. A four-yearly violin competition has been held there since 1980. Flute and clarinet competitions were later added, but these have now been discontinued. An international Organ Competition, founded by the city of Odense, became associated with the Nielsen competition in 2009, but from 2015 will be organized separately, based in Odense Cathedral.
In his home country, the Carl Nielsen Museum, in Odense, is dedicated to Nielsen and his wife, Anne Marie. The composer is featured on the 100 kroner note issued by the Danish National Bank from 1997 to 2010. His image was selected in recognition of his contribution to Danish music compositions such as his opera Maskarade, his Espansiva symphony and his many songs including "Danmark, nu blunder den lyse nat".
Several special events were scheduled on or around 9 June 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nielsen's birth. In addition to many performances in Denmark, concerts were programmed in cities across Europe, including London, Leipzig, Kraków, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Vienna, and even further afield in Japan, Egypt and New York. For 9 June, Nielsen's birthday, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra presented a programme in Copenhagen's DR Concert Hall featuring Hymnus amoris, the Clarinet Concerto and Symphony No. 4 for a broadcast extending across Europe and the United States. The Danish Royal Opera has programmed Maskarade and a new production (directed by David Pountney) of Saul og David. During 2015, the Danish Quartet scheduled performances of Nielsen's string quartets in Denmark, Israel, Germany, Norway and the UK (at the Cheltenham Music Festival). In the UK, the BBC Philharmonic prepared a concert series on Nielsen beginning on 9 June in Manchester. Nielsen's Maskarade overture was also the first item for the opening night of the 2015 BBC Promenade Concerts in London, while his compositions featured in five other concerts of the Prom season. The city of Odense, which has strong connections with Nielsen, developed an extensive programme of concerts and cultural events for the anniversary year.
Minor planet 6058 Carlnielsen is named in his honor.
References
Citations
Sources
Table of contents, including introductions and music scores.
In .
In .
In .
Obituaries
External links
The Carl Nielsen Edition – index page to introductory information on many of Nielsen's works from the Royal Danish Library
Carl Nielsen bibliography 1985–2008 at the Royal Danish Library
The Danish Carl Nielsen Society – provides much detailed information on the composer and his works, including an overview of upcoming concerts
The Carl Nielsen Museum, Odense – "is a museum dedicated to the composer Carl Nielsen and to his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen".
Nielsen's Late Music, article by Svend Ravnkilde
Carl Nielsen International Music Competition & Festival – an annual music event in Odense, celebrating the composer. Organized by the Odense Symphony Orchestra
List of works from the Carl Nielsen Society
Carl Nielsen som symfoniker (1951–1954), Knud Jeppesen's 44 lectures, International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
"Förunderligt och märkligt" recording with
1865 births
1931 deaths
19th-century classical composers
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19th-century Danish composers
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People from Faaborg-Midtfyn Municipality
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Royal Danish Academy of Music alumni
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"\"Xmas Steps\" or \"Christmas Steps\" is a song by Scottish post-rock group Mogwai. The original version of the song (\"Xmas Steps\") is the lead track from the 1998 EP No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew), and a slightly different version (\"Christmas Steps\") appears on the 1999 album Come On Die Young.\n\nOverview\n\"Xmas Steps\" is an eleven-minute-long instrumental, in the key of C♯ minor. \"Christmas Steps\" is a rerecorded version which retains the basic structure and composition, but is shorter in length, performed significantly slower and features clearer dynamic contrast and better production value. The song is named after Christmas Steps, a road in Bristol, South West England. The song was featured on the 1999 compilation album, Everything Is Nice: The Matador Records 10th Anniversary Anthology, incorrectly labelled as \"Xmas Steps\".\n\nMusical composition (\"Xmas Steps\")\n\"Xmas Steps\" begins with the same guitar melody as \"Christmas Steps\". This is repeated until (0:30), when a second guitar begins doubling the melody, with slight variations. At (0:45), the Hi-hat begins quietly keeping time, and the melody is repeated until (1:31), where it is joined quietly by a bass guitar, playing a counter-melody.\nAt (1:46), both the guitars begin playing a counter-melody, until (2:01), where one guitar plays an independent counter-melody, which is repeated until (2:44), where both guitars begin to steadily strum chords. At (3:20), the Hi-hat stops keeping time, leading the guitars into a gradual crescendo, joined at (3:27) by the bass, which plays the same chords as the guitars, with a different rhythm. The guitars increase steadily in volume and tempo, until (4:20), where the drums enter and the guitars begin playing a chord structure based around the chords of C♯ minor, C♯ suspended 2nd, and A major. At (4:52), the guitars suddenly turn distorted, repeating the chord structure, until (5:21), when a distorted guitar solo is played. At (5:46), the guitars repeat a C♯ minor chord, until (5:55), when the guitars turn clean and begin repeating the chord structure. At (6:11), a violin solo begins to play and the guitars begin playing a counter-melody. This is repeated until (7:54), when the drums cease playing, the guitars repeat the counter-melody and the violin solo continues improvising. At (10:06), the sound of the tape being wound back by hand is heard. The violin ceases playing at (10:42), followed soon by the guitars, which end on a C♯, which fades out.\n\nMusical composition (\"Christmas Steps\")\n\"Christmas Steps\" begins with a guitar melody based around the chords of C♯ minor and A major:\n\nThis is repeated until (0:36) when a second guitar begins to double the melody, with slight variations. At (1:12), one of the guitars begins to play a counter-melody, and at (1:28), the bass guitar also begins a counter-melody. At (1:47), both guitars begin playing the first counter-melody. At (2:04), one of the guitars begins playing another counter-melody, until (2:57), when the guitars begin doubling themselves again. At (3:14), the bass guitar ceases playing and the guitar strumming becomes more predominant, until (3:47), when the bass guitar suddenly begins playing a loud, slightly distorted counter-melody. The instruments build up in a gradual crescendo, increasing in volume and tempo, until (4:39), when the drums enter and the guitars strum a chord structure based around the chords of C♯ minor, C♯ suspended 2nd, and A major. At (5:14), the guitars suddenly turn distorted, repeating the chord structure until (5:43), where one of the guitars plays a solo. At (6:10), the guitars strum a C♯ minor chord until (6:18), where the guitars turn clean and the chord structure is reintroduced. At (6:29), a violin solo begins playing quietly in the background; the reason for the quietness being the song using the same solo as recorded by Luke Sutherland for \"Xmas Steps\", which was played significantly faster. At (6:34), the guitars begin the last counter-melody of the song, doubling each other with noticeable variations. The drums cease playing at (7:10), leaving the guitars playing their melodies, and gradually slowing down in a diminuendo with the violin solo playing faintly in the background, until (10:28), when the guitars cease playing, ending on a C♯, which fades out.\n\nMusic video\nA video for the song was filmed by English filmmaker Brian Griffin and released in 1998. The video is set in the Age of Steam, and was shot on location in the Chiltern Hills and at the Great Western Preservation Society in Didcot.\n\nMedia usage\n In 2007, \"Christmas Steps\" was featured in the documentary film White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.\n\nPersonnel\n Stuart Braithwaite – guitar\n Dominic Aitchison – bass guitar\n John Cummings – guitar\n Martin Bulloch – drums\n Luke Sutherland – violin\n Dave Fridmann – producer, mixer, engineer\n\nNotes\n\nExternal links\n\"Christmas Steps\" on Last.fm\n\"Christmas Steps\" Guitar Tablature\n\nMogwai songs\nPost-rock songs\nRock instrumentals\n1998 songs\nSongs written by Stuart Braithwaite\nSongs written by Dominic Aitchison",
"The Violin Maker is a 1915 American short silent drama film directed by Lon Chaney, written by Milton M. Moore and starring Lon Chaney and Gretchen Lederer. The film is now considered to be lost. A still exists showing Chaney as \"Pedro\" smashing the violin (see Plot).\n\nPlot\nPedro (Lon Chaney) is a violin maker who is deeply in love with his talented ward, Marguerita. One day, while she is playing the violin, director Maurice Puello hears the girl play and persuades her to give a recital at his theater. Her first appearance is a great success, and Pedro applauds her from the audience, not realizing she is falling in love with Maurice. Pedro decides to make a special violin for the girl. He finishes the violin, the finest instrument he has ever made, and brings it over to the theater. Waiting by the stage door, he sees Marguerita and Maurice walking out arm in arm. Blinded with jealousy, Pedro disguises himself as a blind beggar in order to spy on Marguerita.\n\nOne night as Pedro is playing the violin on the street corner disguised as the beggar, Maurice and Marguerita are attracted by the beautiful music. Marguerita offers to buy the violin, but Pedro tells her that he cannot sell it because he made it especially for an old sweetheart. She sees an inscription on the back of the violin that says \"To my Marguerita\" and Pedro suddenly reveals his identity in anger and spitefully smashes the violin over his knee.\n\nOne night, Pedro wanders into a cafe where Marguerita is playing a violin. He has a waiter bring her a coin with a request for another tune. When the waiter points Pedro out to her as the man who made the request, Marguerita is touched and plays a beautiful melody for Pedro. She goes over to his table and asks for his forgiveness. He is about to ignore her when he notices that she has repaired the violin that he smashed. He is moved by the girl's devotion to him and the two are happily reunited.\n\nCast\n Lon Chaney as Pedro\n Gretchen Lederer as Marguerita\n William Quinn as Maurice Puello\n\nReception\n\"A strong character portrayal is here rendered by Lon Chaney in the role of an Italian violin maker. The story is original in many ways, and pleases all the time by its strong heart interest action.\" --- Motion Picture News\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1915 films\n1915 drama films\n1915 short films\nAmerican films\nAmerican silent short films\nAmerican black-and-white films\nLost American films\nFilms directed by Lon Chaney\nUniversal Pictures short films\nAmerican drama films"
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[
"Carl Nielsen",
"Early years",
"Did he have a hard time in his early years?",
"Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen.",
"When did his his interest begin in playing violin?",
"when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin"
] |
C_c74626fda5f14827b9b513a88349da83_1
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What happened after he tried the violin?
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What happened after Carl Nielsen tried the violin?
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Carl Nielsen
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Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jorgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography Min Fynske Barndom (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837-1881), was a talented musician. Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin". He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka which the composer mentioned in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper from a nearby village when he was fourteen; the shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense. Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 ore and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances. CANNOTANSWER
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He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine:
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Carl August Nielsen (; 9 June 1865 – 3 October 1931) was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer.
Brought up by poor yet musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. He initially played in a military band before attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen from 1884 until December 1886. He premiered his Op. 1, Suite for Strings, in 1888, at the age of 23. The following year, Nielsen began a 16-year stint as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra under the conductor Johan Svendsen, during which he played in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy and continued to work there until his death.
Although his symphonies, concertos and choral music are now internationally acclaimed, Nielsen's career and personal life were marked by many difficulties, often reflected in his music. The works he composed between 1897 and 1904 are sometimes ascribed to his "psychological" period, resulting mainly from a turbulent marriage with the sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen. Nielsen is especially noted for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera Maskarade and many of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. His early music was inspired by composers such as Brahms and Grieg, but he soon developed his own style, first experimenting with progressive tonality and later diverging even more radically from the standards of composition still common at the time. Nielsen's sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. He died from a heart attack six years later, and is buried in Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen.
Nielsen maintained the reputation of a musical outsider during his lifetime, both in his own country and internationally. It was only later that his works firmly entered the international repertoire, accelerating in popularity from the 1960s through Leonard Bernstein and others. In Denmark, Nielsen's reputation was sealed in 2006 when four of his works were listed by the Danish Ministry of Culture amongst the greatest pieces of Danish classical music. For many years, he appeared on the Danish hundred-kroner banknote. The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense documents his life and that of his wife. Between 1994 and 2009 the Royal Danish Library, sponsored by the Danish government, completed the Carl Nielsen Edition, freely available online, containing background information and sheet music for all of Nielsen's works, many of which had not been previously published.
Life
Early years
Nielsen was born on 9 June 1865, the seventh of twelve children in a poor peasant family, at Sortelung near Nørre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jørgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains, while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837–1881), was a talented musician.
Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin." He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He studied violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka that he mentions in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper in a nearby village when he was fourteen. The shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion in Odense.
Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 øre and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances.
Studies and early career
In 1881, Nielsen began to take his violin playing more seriously, studying privately under Carl Larsen, the sexton at Odense Cathedral. It is not known how much Nielsen composed during this period, but from his autobiography, it can be deduced that he wrote some trios and quartets for brass instruments, and that he had difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that brass instruments were tuned in different keys. Following an introduction to Niels W. Gade, the director of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, by whom he was well received, Nielsen obtained his release from the military band at short notice, and studied at the Academy from the beginning of 1884.
Though not an outstanding student and composing little, Nielsen progressed well in violin under Valdemar Tofte (1832–1907), and received a solid grounding in music theory from Orla Rosenhoff (1844–1905), who would remain a valued adviser during his early years as a professional composer. He also studied composition under Gade, whom he liked as a friend but not for his music. Contacts with fellow students and cultured families in Copenhagen, some of whom would become lifelong friends, became equally important. The patchy education resulting from his country background left Nielsen insatiably curious about the arts, philosophy and aesthetics. But, in the opinion of the musicologist David Fanning, it also left him "with a highly personal, common man's point of view on those subjects". He left the Academy at the end of 1886, after graduating with good but not outstanding marks in all subjects. He then went to stay with the retired Odense merchant Jens Georg Nielsen (1820–1901) and his wife at their apartment on Slagelsegade as he was not yet in a position to pay his own way. While there, he fell in love with their 14-year-old daughter Emilie Demant. The affair was to last for the next three years.
On 17 September 1887, Nielsen played the violin in the Tivoli Concert Hall when his Andante tranquillo e Scherzo for strings was premiered. Shortly afterwards, on 25 January 1888, his String Quartet in F major was played at one of the private performances of the (Private Chamber Music Society). While Nielsen considered the Quartet in F to be his official debut as a professional composer, a far greater impression was made by his Suite for Strings. Performed at Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen on 8 September 1888, it was designated by Nielsen as his Op. 1.
By September 1889 Nielsen had progressed well enough on the violin to gain a position with the second violins in the prestigious Royal Danish Orchestra which played at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, then conducted by Johan Svendsen. In this position he experienced Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. Although this employment sometimes caused Nielsen considerable frustration, he continued to play there until 1905. After Svendsen's retirement in 1906, Nielsen increasingly served as conductor (being officially appointed assistant conductor in 1910). Between graduation and attaining this position, he made a modest income from private violin lessons while enjoying the continuing support of his patrons, not only Jens Georg Nielsen but also Albert Sachs (born 1846) and Hans Demant (1827–1897) who both ran factories in Odense. After less than a year at the Royal Theatre, Nielsen won a scholarship of 1,800 kroner, giving him the means to spend several months travelling in Europe.
Marriage and children
While travelling, Nielsen discovered and then turned against Richard Wagner's music dramas, heard many of Europe's leading orchestras and soloists and sharpened his opinions on both music and the visual arts. Although he revered the music of Bach and Mozart, he remained ambivalent about much 19th-century music. In 1891 he met the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Leipzig; they were to maintain a correspondence for over thirty years. Shortly after arriving in Paris in early March 1891 Nielsen met the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen, who was also travelling on a scholarship. They toured Italy together and married in St Mark's English Church, Florence, on 10 May 1891 before returning to Denmark. According to Fanning, their relationship was not only a "love match", but also a "meeting of minds"; Anne Marie was a gifted artist and a "strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career". This determination would strain the Nielsens' marriage, as Anne Marie would spend months away from home during the 1890s and 1900s, leaving Carl, who was susceptible to opportunities with other ladies, to raise their three young children in addition to composing and fulfilling his duties at the Royal Theatre.
Nielsen sublimated his anger and frustration over his marriage in a number of musical works, most notably between 1897 and 1904, a period which he sometimes called his "psychological" period. Fanning writes, "At this time his interest in the driving forces behind human personality crystallized in the opera Saul and David and the Second Symphony (The Four Temperaments) and the cantatas and ". Carl suggested divorce in March 1905 and had considered moving to Germany for a fresh start, but despite several extended periods of separation the Nielsens remained married for the remainder of the composer's life.
Nielsen had five children, two of them illegitimate. He had already fathered a son, Carl August Nielsen, in January 1888, before he met Anne Marie. In 1912, an illegitimate daughter was born – Rachel Siegmann, about whom Anne Marie never learned. With his wife Nielsen had two daughters and a son. Irmelin, the elder daughter, studied music theory with her father and in December 1919 married Eggert Møller (1893–1978), a medical doctor who became a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the polyclinic at the National Hospital. The younger daughter Anne Marie, who graduated from the Copenhagen Academy of Arts, married the Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi (1892–1988) in 1918; he contributed to the promotion of Nielsen's music, both as a violinist and a conductor. Nielsen's son, Hans Børge, was handicapped as a result of meningitis and spent most of his life away from the family. He died near Kolding in 1956.
Mature composer
At first, Nielsen's works did not gain sufficient recognition for him to be able to support himself. During the concert which saw the premiere of his First Symphony on 14 March 1894 conducted by Svendsen, Nielsen played in the second violin section. The symphony was a great success when played in Berlin in 1896, contributing significantly to his reputation. He was increasingly in demand to write incidental music for the theatre as well as cantatas for special occasions, both of which provided a welcome source of additional income. Fanning comments on the relationship which developed between his programmatic and symphonic works: "Sometimes he would find stageworthy ideas in his supposedly pure orchestral music; sometimes a text or scenario forced him to invent vivid musical imagery which he could later turn to more abstract use."
Nielsen's cantata Hymnus amoris for soloists, chorus and orchestra was first performed at Copenhagen's Musikforeningen (The Music Society) on 27 April 1897. It was inspired by Titian's painting Miracle of the Jealous Husband which Nielsen had seen on his honeymoon in Italy in 1891. On one of the copies, he wrote: "To my own Marie! These tones in praise of love are nothing compared to the real thing."
Beginning in 1901, Nielsen received a modest state pension – initially 800 kroner per annum, growing to 7,500 kroner by 1927 – to augment his violinist's salary. This allowed him to stop taking private pupils and left him more time to compose. From 1903, he also had an annual retainer from his principal publisher, . Between 1905 and 1914 he served as second conductor at the Royal Theatre. For his son-in-law, Emil Telmányi, Nielsen wrote his Violin Concerto, Op. 33 (1911). From 1914 to 1926, he conducted the Musikforeningen orchestra. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and continued to work there until his death.
The strain of dual careers and constant separation from his wife led to an extended breach in his marriage. The couple began separation proceedings in 1916, and separation by mutual consent was granted in 1919. In the period 1916–22, Nielsen often lived on Funen retreating to the Damgaard and Fuglsang estates, or worked as a conductor in Gothenburg. The period was one of creative crisis for Nielsen which, coinciding with World War I, would strongly influence his Fourth (1914–16) and Fifth symphonies (1921–22), arguably his greatest works according to Fanning. The composer was particularly upset in the 1920s when his long-standing Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen was unable to undertake publication of many of his major works, including Aladdin and Pan and Syrinx.
The sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. After suffering a serious heart attack in 1925, Nielsen was forced to curtail much of his activity, although he continued to compose until his death. His sixtieth birthday in 1925 brought many congratulations, a decoration from the Swedish government, and a gala concert and reception in Copenhagen. The composer, however, was in a dour mood; in an article in Politiken on 9 November 1925 he wrote: If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end ... What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
Final years and death
Nielsen's final large-scale orchestral works were his Flute Concerto (1926) and the Clarinet Concerto (1928), of which Robert Layton writes: "If ever there was music from another planet, this is surely it. Its sonorities are sparse and monochrome, its air rarefied and bracing." Nielsen's last musical composition, the organ work Commotio, was premiered posthumously in 1931 in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck.
During his final years, Nielsen produced a short book of essays entitled Living Music (1925), followed in 1927 by his memoir Min Fynske Barndom. In 1926 he wrote in his diary "My home soil pulls me more and more like a long sucking kiss. Does it mean that I shall finally return and rest in the earth of Funen? Then it must be in the place where I was born: Sortelung, Frydenlands parish".
This was not to be. Nielsen was admitted to Copenhagen's National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) on 1 October 1931 following a series of heart attacks. He died there at ten minutes past midnight on 3 October, surrounded by his family. His last words to them were "You are standing here as if you were waiting for something".
He was buried in Copenhagen's Vestre Cemetery; all the music at his funeral, including the hymns, was the work of the composer. After his death, his wife was commissioned to sculpt a monument to him, to be erected in central Copenhagen. She wrote: "I wanted to take the winged horse, eternal symbol of poetry, and place a musician on its back. He was to sit there between the rushing wings blowing a reed pipe out over Copenhagen." Dispute about her design and a shortfall in funding meant that erection of the monument was delayed and that Anne Marie herself ended up subsidising it. The Carl Nielsen Monument was finally unveiled in 1939.
Music
Nielsen's works are sometimes referred to by CNW numbers, based on the Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works (CNW) published online by the Danish Royal Library in 2015. The CNW catalogue is intended to replace the 1965 catalogue compiled by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe (FS numbers).
Musical style
In his Lives of the Great Composers, the music critic Harold Schonberg emphasizes the breadth of Nielsen's compositions, his energetic rhythms, generous orchestration and his individuality. In comparing him with Jean Sibelius, he considers he had "just as much sweep, even more power, and a more universal message". The Oxford University music professor Daniel M. Grimley qualifies Nielsen as "one of the most playful, life-affirming, and awkward voices in twentieth-century music" thanks to the "melodic richness and harmonic vitality" of his work. Anne-Marie Reynolds, author of Carl Nielsen's Voice: His Songs in Context, cites Robert Simpson's view that "all of his music is vocal in origin", maintaining that song-writing strongly influenced Nielsen's development as a composer.
The Danish sociologist Benedikte Brincker observes that the perception of Nielsen and his music in his home country is rather different from his international appreciation. His interest and background in folk music had special resonance for Danes, and this was intensified during the nationalistic movements of the 1930s and during World War II, when singing was an important basis for the Danes to distinguish themselves from their German enemies. Nielsen's songs retain an important place in Danish culture and education. The musicologist Niels Krabbe describes the popular image of Nielsen in Denmark as being like "the ugly duckling syndrome" – a reference to the tale of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen – whereby "a poor boy ... passing through adversity and frugality ... marches into Copenhagen and ... comes to conquer the position as the uncrowned King".
While outside Denmark Nielsen is largely thought of as the composer of orchestral music and the opera Maskarade, in his own country he is more of a national symbol. These two sides were officially brought together in Denmark in 2006 when the Ministry of Culture issued a list of the twelve greatest Danish musical works that included Nielsen’s opera Maskarade, his Fourth Symphony, and a pair of his Danish folk songs. Krabbe asks the rhetorical question: "Can 'the national' in Nielsen be demonstrated in the music in the form of particular themes, harmonies, sounds, forms, etc., or is it a pure construct of reception history?"
Nielsen himself was ambiguous about his attitudes to late Romantic German music and to nationalism in music. He wrote to the Dutch composer Julius Röntgen in 1909 "I am surprised by the technical skills of the Germans nowadays, and I cannot help thinking that all this delight in complication must exhaust itself. I foresee a completely new art of pure archaic virtue. What do you think about songs sung in unison? We must go back ... to the pure and the clear." On the other hand, he wrote in 1925 "Nothing destroys music more than nationalism does ... and it is impossible to deliver national music on request."
Nielsen studied Renaissance polyphony closely, which accounts for some of the melodic and harmonic content of his music. This interest is exemplified in his Tre Motetter (Three Motets, Op. 55). To non-Danish critics, Nielsen's music initially had a neo-classical sound but became increasingly modern as he developed his own approach to what the writer and composer Robert Simpson called progressive tonality, moving from one key to another. Typically, Nielsen's music might end in a different key from that of its commencement, sometimes as the outcome of a struggle as in his symphonies. There is debate as to how much such elements owe to his folk music activities. Some critics have referred to his rhythms, his use of acciaccaturas or appoggiaturas, or his frequent use of a flattened seventh and minor third in his works, as being typically Danish. The composer himself wrote "The intervals, as I see it, are the elements which first arouse a deeper interest in music ... [I]t is intervals which surprise and delight us anew every time we hear the cuckoo in spring. Its appeal would be less if its call were all on one note."
Nielsen's philosophy of music style is perhaps summed up in his advice in a 1907 letter to the Norwegian composer Knut Harder: "You have ... fluency, so far, so good; but I advise you again and again, my dear Mr. Harder; Tonality, Clarity, Strength."
Symphonies
Nielsen is perhaps most closely associated outside Denmark with his six symphonies, written between 1892 and 1925. The works have much in common: they are all just over 30 minutes long, brass instruments are a key component of the orchestration, and they all exhibit unusual changes in tonality, which heighten the dramatic tension. From its opening bars, Symphony No. 1 (Op. 7, 1890–92), while reflecting the influence of Grieg and Brahms, shows Nielsen's individuality. In Symphony No. 2 (Op. 16, 1901–02), Nielsen embarks on the development of human character. Inspiration came from a painting in an inn depicting the four temperaments (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine).
The title of Symphony No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva (Op. 27, 1910–11), is understood by the English composer Robert Simpson to refer to the "outward growth of the mind's scope". It fully exploits Nielsen's technique of confronting two keys at the same time and includes a peaceful section with soprano and baritone voices, singing a tune without words. Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable (Op. 29, 1914–16), written during World War I, is among the most frequently performed of the symphonies. In the last movement two sets of timpani are placed on opposite sides of the stage undertaking a kind of musical duel. Nielsen described the symphony as "the life force, the unquenchable will to live".
Also frequently performed is the Symphony No. 5 (Op. 50, 1921–22), presenting another battle between the forces of order and chaos. A snare drummer is given the task of interrupting the orchestra, playing and out of time, as if to destroy the music. Performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erik Tuxen at the 1950 Edinburgh International Festival, it caused a sensation, sparking interest in Nielsen's music outside Scandinavia. In Symphony No. 6 (without opus number), written 1924–25, and subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (Simple Symphony), the tonal language seems similar to that in Nielsen's other symphonies, but the symphony develops into a sequence of cameos, some sad, some grotesque, some humorous.
Operas and cantatas
Nielsen's two operas are very different in style. The four-act (Saul and David), written in 1902 to a libretto by Einar Christiansen, tells the Biblical story of Saul's jealousy of the young David while (Masquerade) is a comic opera in three acts written in 1906 to a Danish libretto by Vilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. Saul and David received a negative press when it was premiered in November 1902 and did no better when it was revived in 1904. By contrast, in November 1906 Masquerade was a resounding success with an exceptional run of 25 performances over its first four months. Generally considered to be Denmark's national opera, in its home country it has enjoyed lasting success and popularity, attributable to its many strophic songs, its dances and its underlying "old Copenhagen" atmosphere.
Nielsen wrote a considerable number of choral works but most of them were composed for special occasions and were seldom reprised. Three fully-fledged cantatas for soloists, orchestra and choir have, however, entered the repertoire. Nielsen composed (Hymn of Love), Op. 12 (1897) after studying early polyphonic choral style. Writing in the newspaper Dannebrog, Nanna Liebmann referred to the work as "a decisive victory" for Nielsen, and Angul Hammerich of Nationaltidende welcomed its improved clarity and purity. But the reviewer H.W. Schytte thought Nielsen had been pretentious presenting the lyrics in Latin rather than Danish. (The Sleep), Op. 18, Nielsen's second major choral work, sets to music the various phases of sleep including the terror of a nightmare in its central movement which, with its unusual discords, came as a shock to the reviewers at its premiere in March 1905. (Springtime on Funen), Op. 42, completed in 1922, has been cited as the most Danish of all Nielsen's compositions as it extols the beauty of Funen's countryside.
Concertos
Nielsen wrote three concertos: the Violin Concerto, Op. 33 is a middle-period work, from 1911, which lies within the tradition of European classicism, whereas the Flute Concerto (without opus number) of 1926 and the Clarinet Concerto, Op. 57 which followed in 1928 are late works, influenced by the modernism of the 1920s and, according to the Danish musicologist Herbert Rosenberg, the product of "an extremely experienced composer who knows how to avoid inessentials." Unlike Nielsen's later works, the Violin Concerto has a distinct, melody-oriented neo-classical structure. The Flute Concerto, in two movements, was written for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet which had premiered Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). In contrast to the rather traditional style of the Violin Concerto, it reflects the modernistic trends of the period. The first movement, for example, switches between D minor, E-flat minor and F major before the flute comes to the fore with a cantabile theme in E major. The Clarinet Concerto was also written for a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, Aage Oxenvad. Nielsen stretches the capacities of instrument and player to the utmost; the concerto has just one continuous movement and contains a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra and between the two principal competing keys, F major and E major.
The wind concertos present many examples of what Nielsen called ("objectification"). By this term he meant giving instrumentalists freedom of interpretation and performance within the bounds set out by the score.
Orchestral music
Nielsen's earliest work composed specifically for orchestra was the immediately successful Suite for Strings (1888), which evoked Scandinavian Romanticism as expressed by Grieg and Svendsen. The work marked an important milestone in Nielsen's career as it was not only his first real success but it was also the first of his pieces he conducted himself when it was played in Odense a month later.
The Helios Overture, Op. 17 (1903) stems from Nielsen's stay in Athens which inspired him to compose a work depicting the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea. The score is a showpiece for orchestra, and has been amongst Nielsen's most popular works. (Saga Dream), Op. 39 (1907–08) is a tone poem for orchestra based on the Icelandic Njal's Saga. In Nielsen's words:
There are among other things four cadenzas for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and flute which run quite freely alongside one another, with no harmonic connection, and without my marking time. They are just like four streams of thought, each going its own way – differently and randomly for each performance – until they meet in a point of rest, as if flowing into a lock where they are united.
At the Bier of a Young Artist () for string orchestra was written for the funeral of the Danish painter Oluf Hartmann in January 1910 and was also played at Nielsen's own funeral. Pan and Syrinx (), a vigorous nine-minute symphonic poem inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, was premiered in 1911. The Rhapsodic Overture, An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands (), draws on Faroese folk tunes but also contains freely composed sections.
Among Nielsen's orchestral works for the stage are Aladdin (1919) and (The Mother), Op. 41 (1920). Aladdin was written to accompany a production of Adam Oehlenschläger's fairy tale at The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. The complete score, lasting over 80 minutes, is Nielsen's longest work apart from his operas, but a shorter orchestral suite consisting of the Oriental March, Hindu Dance and Negro Dance is often performed. , written to celebrate the reunification of Southern Jutland with Denmark, was first performed in 1921; it is a setting of patriotic verses written for the occasion.
Chamber music
Nielsen composed several chamber music works, some of them still high on the international repertoire. The Wind Quintet, one of his most popular pieces, was composed in 1922 specifically for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Simpson, explaining that Nielsen's fondness of wind instruments was closely related to his love of nature, writes: "He was also intensely interested in human character, and in the Wind Quintet composed deliberately for five friends; each part is cunningly made to suit the individuality of each player."
Nielsen wrote four string quartets. The First String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13 (1889, revised 1900) contains a "Résumé" section in the finale, bringing together themes from the first, third and fourth movements. The Second String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 5 appeared in 1890 and the Third String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 14 in 1898. The music historian Jan Smaczny suggests that in this work "the handling of texture is confident and far less derivative than in earlier works ... [the quartet] prompts the most regret that Nielsen did not pursue the genre further ... to parallel his later symphonic development". The Fourth String Quartet in F major (1904) initially received a mixed reception, with critics uncertain about its reserved style. Nielsen revised it several times, the final version in 1919 being listed as his Op. 44.
The violin was Nielsen's own instrument and he composed four large-scale chamber works for it. The departures from standard procedures in the First Sonata, Op. 9 (1895), including its often sudden modulations and its terse thematic material, disconcerted Danish critics at its first performance. The Second Sonata, Op. 35 of 1912 was written for the violinist Peder Møller who earlier that year had premiered the composer's Violin Concerto. The work is an example of the composer's progressive tonality since, although it is stated to be in the key of G minor, the first and final movements end in different keys. The critic Emilius Bangert wrote of the premiere (which was given by Axel Gade), "The overall impression was of a beautiful, unbroken line – a flow of notes – where in particular a wonderful second subject in the first part and the pure, high sphere of the last part were captivating". Two other works are for violin solo. The Prelude, Theme and Variations, Op. 48 (1923) was written for Telmányi, and, like Nielsen's Chaconne for piano, Op. 32, was inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Preludio e Presto, Op. 52 (1928) was written as a tribute for the sixtieth birthday of the composer Fini Henriques.
Keyboard works
Although Nielsen came to compose mainly at the piano, he only composed directly for it occasionally over a period of 40 years, creating works often with a distinctive style which slowed their international acceptance. Nielsen's own piano technique, an echo of which is probably preserved in three wax cylinders marked "Carl Nielsen" at the State Archives in Aarhus, seems to have been mediocre. Reviewing the 1969 recording of works by the pianist John Ogdon, John Horton commented on the early pieces: "Nielsen's technical resources hardly measure up to the grandeur of his designs", whilst characterising the later pieces as "major works which can stand comparison with his symphonic music". The anti-romantic tone of the Symphonic Suite, Op. 8 (1894) was described by a later critic as "nothing less than a clenched fist straight in the face of all established musical convention". In Nielsen's words, the Chaconne, Op. 32 (1917) was "a really big piece, and I think effective". It is not only inspired by the work of Bach, especially the chaconne for solo violin, but also by the virtuoso piano arrangements of Bach's music by composers such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Ferruccio Busoni. Also on a large scale, and from the same year, is the Theme and Variations, Op. 41, in which critics have discerned the influences of Brahms and also of Max Reger, of whom Nielsen had earlier written to a friend "I think that the public will be utterly unable to grasp Reger's work and yet I am a lot more sympathetic towards his efforts than towards ... Richard Strauss".
All Nielsen's organ works were late compositions. The Danish organist Finn Viderø suggests that his interest was prompted by the (Organ reform movement), and the renewal of the front pipes of the Schnitger organ in the St. Jacobi Church, Hamburg, from 1928 to 1930. Nielsen's last major work – , Op. 58, a 22-minute piece for organ – was composed between June 1930 and February 1931, only a few months before his death.
Songs and hymns
Over the years, Nielsen wrote the music for over 290 songs and hymns, most of them for verses and poems by well-known Danish authors such as N. F. S. Grundtvig, Ingemann, Poul Martin Møller, Adam Oehlenschläger and Jeppe Aakjær. In Denmark, many of them are still popular today both with adults and children. They are regarded as "the most representative part of the country's most representative composer's output". In 1906, Nielsen had explained the significance of such songs to his countrymen:With certain melodic inflections we Danes unavoidably think of the poems of, for example, Ingemann, Christian Winther or Drachmann, and we often seem to perceive the smell of Danish landscapes and rural images in our songs and music. But it is also clear that a foreigner, who knows neither our countryside, nor our painters, our poets, or our history in the same intimate way as we do ourselves, will be completely unable to grasp what it is that brings us to hear and tremble with sympathetic understanding.
Of great significance was Nielsen's contribution to the 1922 publication, Folkehøjskolens Melodibog (The Folk High School Songbook), of which he was one of the editors together with Thomas Laub, Oluf Ring and Thorvald Aagaard. The book contained about 600 melodies, of which about 200 were composed by the editors, and was intended to provide a repertoire for communal singing, an integral part of Danish folk culture. The collection was extremely popular and became embedded in the Danish educational system. During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, mass song gatherings, using these melodies, were part of Denmark's "spiritual re-armament", and after the war in 1945 Nielsen's contributions were characterised by one writer as "shining jewels in our treasure-chest of patriotic songs". This remains a significant factor in Danish assessment of the composer.
Editions
Between 1994 and 2009 a complete new edition of Nielsen's works, the Carl Nielsen Edition, was commissioned by the Danish Government (at a cost of over 40 million kroner). For many of the works, including the operas Maskarade and Saul and David, and the complete Aladdin music, this was their first printed publication, copies of manuscripts having previously been used in performances. The scores are now all available for download free of charge at the website of the Danish Royal Library (which also owns most of Nielsen's music manuscripts).
Reception
Unlike that of his contemporary, the Finn Jean Sibelius, Nielsen's reputation abroad did not start to evolve until after World War II. For some time, international interest was largely directed towards his symphonies while his other works, many of them highly popular in Denmark, have only recently started to become part of the world repertoire. Even in Denmark, many of his compositions failed to impress. It was only in 1897 after the first performance of Hymnus amoris that he received support from the critics, to be substantially reinforced in 1906 by their enthusiastic reception of Masquerade.
Within two months of its successful premiere at the Odd Fellows Concert Hall in Copenhagen on 28 February 1912, the Third Symphony (Espansiva) was in the repertoire of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and by 1913 it had seen performances in Stuttgart, Stockholm and Helsinki. The symphony was the most popular of all Nielsen's works during his lifetime and was also played in Berlin, Hamburg, London and Gothenburg. Other works caused some uncertainty, even in Denmark. After the premiere of the Fifth Symphony (1922) one critic wrote: "The treasure of Danish symphonies and Carl Nielsen's own output have been enriched by a strange and highly original work." Another, however, described it as a "bloody, clenched fist in the face of an unsuspecting snob audience", also qualifying it as "filthy music from trenches".
At the end of the 1940s two major biographies of Nielsen appeared in Danish, dominating opinion of the composer's life and work for several decades. Robert Simpson's book Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (first edition 1952) was the earliest large-scale study in English.
An international breakthrough came in 1962 when Leonard Bernstein recorded the Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic for CBS. The recording helped Nielsen's music to achieve appreciation beyond his home country and is considered one of the finest recorded accounts of the symphony. Nielsen's centenary in 1965 was widely celebrated, both in terms of performances and publications, and Bernstein was awarded the Sonning Prize for his recording of the Third Symphony. In 1988 Nielsen's diaries and his letters to Anne Marie were published, and these, together with a 1991 biography by Jørgen Jensen using this new material, led to a revised objective assessment of the composer's personality. Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of Nielsen's 125th anniversary in 1990, the music critic Andrew Pincus recalled that 25 years earlier Bernstein had believed the world was ready to accept the Dane as the equal of Jean Sibelius, speaking of "his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability" (which Pincus believed was still a challenge for audiences). Biographies and studies in English in the 1990s helped to establish Nielsen's status worldwide, to the point at which his music has become a regular feature of concert programming in Western countries.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2008, the American music critic Alex Ross compares the "brute strength" of Nielsen's symphonies to Beethoven's Eroica and Fifth Symphony but explains that only now were the Americans slowly beginning to appreciate the Danish composer.
Nielsen did not record any of his works. However, three younger contemporary conductors who had worked with him, Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen, did record his symphonies and other orchestral works with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1946 and 1952. Jensen also made the first LP recording of the Fifth Symphony in 1954. Work carried out by the recently published complete Carl Nielsen Edition has revealed that the scores used in these recordings often differ from the composer's original intentions and thus the supposed authenticity of these recordings is now debatable.
There are now numerous recordings of all Nielsen's major works, including complete cycles of the symphonies conducted by, amongst others, Sir Colin Davis, Herbert Blomstedt and Sakari Oramo. Over 50 recordings have been made of Nielsen's Wind Quintet.
Legacy
From 1916, Nielsen taught at the Royal Academy where he became director in 1931, shortly before his death. He also had private students in his earlier days in order to supplement his income. As a result of his teaching, Nielsen has exerted considerable influence on classical music in Denmark. Among his most successful pupils were the composers Thorvald Aagaard, remembered in particular for his songs, Harald Agersnap, both a conductor and orchestral composer, and Jørgen Bentzon who composed choral and chamber music mainly for his folk music school (Københavns Folkemusikskole). Among his other students were the musicologist Knud Jeppesen, the pianist Herman Koppel, the academy professor and symphony composer Poul Schierbeck, the organist Emilius Bangert who played at Roskilde Cathedral, and Nancy Dalberg, one of Nielsen's private students who helped with the orchestration of Aladdin. Nielsen also instructed the conductor and choirmaster Mogens Wöldike, remembered for his interpretations of Baroque music, and Rudolph Simonsen, the pianist and composer who became director of the Academy after Nielsen's death.
The Carl Nielsen Society maintains a listing of performances of Nielsen's works, classified by region (Denmark, Scandinavia, Europe apart from Scandinavia and outside Europe) which demonstrates that his music is regularly performed throughout the world. The concerti and symphonies feature frequently in these listings.
The Carl Nielsen International Competition commenced in the 1970s under the auspices of the Odense Symphony Orchestra. A four-yearly violin competition has been held there since 1980. Flute and clarinet competitions were later added, but these have now been discontinued. An international Organ Competition, founded by the city of Odense, became associated with the Nielsen competition in 2009, but from 2015 will be organized separately, based in Odense Cathedral.
In his home country, the Carl Nielsen Museum, in Odense, is dedicated to Nielsen and his wife, Anne Marie. The composer is featured on the 100 kroner note issued by the Danish National Bank from 1997 to 2010. His image was selected in recognition of his contribution to Danish music compositions such as his opera Maskarade, his Espansiva symphony and his many songs including "Danmark, nu blunder den lyse nat".
Several special events were scheduled on or around 9 June 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nielsen's birth. In addition to many performances in Denmark, concerts were programmed in cities across Europe, including London, Leipzig, Kraków, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Vienna, and even further afield in Japan, Egypt and New York. For 9 June, Nielsen's birthday, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra presented a programme in Copenhagen's DR Concert Hall featuring Hymnus amoris, the Clarinet Concerto and Symphony No. 4 for a broadcast extending across Europe and the United States. The Danish Royal Opera has programmed Maskarade and a new production (directed by David Pountney) of Saul og David. During 2015, the Danish Quartet scheduled performances of Nielsen's string quartets in Denmark, Israel, Germany, Norway and the UK (at the Cheltenham Music Festival). In the UK, the BBC Philharmonic prepared a concert series on Nielsen beginning on 9 June in Manchester. Nielsen's Maskarade overture was also the first item for the opening night of the 2015 BBC Promenade Concerts in London, while his compositions featured in five other concerts of the Prom season. The city of Odense, which has strong connections with Nielsen, developed an extensive programme of concerts and cultural events for the anniversary year.
Minor planet 6058 Carlnielsen is named in his honor.
References
Citations
Sources
Table of contents, including introductions and music scores.
In .
In .
In .
Obituaries
External links
The Carl Nielsen Edition – index page to introductory information on many of Nielsen's works from the Royal Danish Library
Carl Nielsen bibliography 1985–2008 at the Royal Danish Library
The Danish Carl Nielsen Society – provides much detailed information on the composer and his works, including an overview of upcoming concerts
The Carl Nielsen Museum, Odense – "is a museum dedicated to the composer Carl Nielsen and to his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen".
Nielsen's Late Music, article by Svend Ravnkilde
Carl Nielsen International Music Competition & Festival – an annual music event in Odense, celebrating the composer. Organized by the Odense Symphony Orchestra
List of works from the Carl Nielsen Society
Carl Nielsen som symfoniker (1951–1954), Knud Jeppesen's 44 lectures, International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
"Förunderligt och märkligt" recording with
1865 births
1931 deaths
19th-century classical composers
19th-century classical violinists
19th-century Danish composers
19th-century male conductors (music)
19th-century conductors (music)
20th-century classical composers
20th-century classical violinists
20th-century conductors (music)
20th-century Danish composers
20th-century Danish male musicians
Royal Danish Academy of Music faculty
Burials at Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
Danish classical composers
Danish classical violinists
Danish conductors (music)
Danish music educators
Danish male classical composers
Danish opera composers
Danish Romantic composers
Directors of the Royal Danish Academy of Music
Male classical violinists
Male conductors (music)
Male opera composers
People from Faaborg-Midtfyn Municipality
Pupils of Niels Gade
Royal Danish Academy of Music alumni
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[
"Tweet and Sour is a 1956 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon short directed by Friz Freleng. The short was released on March 24, 1956, and stars Tweety, Sylvester, Granny, and Sam Cat. The voices are performed by Mel Blanc and June Foray.\n\nThe cartoon's title is a play on the phrase \"sweet and sour\".\n\nPlot\nGranny leaves the house for an afternoon outing, but as she drives by the house and waves goodbye to Tweety, she sees Sylvester has gotten into the house and is about to have Tweety for his supper. Granny furiously stops Sylvester in time and, fed up with his constant chasing after Tweety, gives him a harsh warning: \"If there's so much as one little feather harmed on Tweety, it's off to the violin string factory!\" (punctuating the warning by mimicking Frédéric Chopin's \"The Funeral March\").\n\nAs Sylvester cowers in fear and sulks in the corner after Granny leaves, he tries to eat Tweety again, until he reminds him of Granny's threat (also imitating The Funeral March). As Sylvester goes back to sulking, in the corner of the room, Tweety is about to face a new threat — Sam Cat (first seen in Putty Tat Trouble, but here seen wearing an eyepatch). Sam is after a meal of his own and is uncaring that Sylvester will be deemed responsible if Tweety is noticed missing. As such, the chase now casts Sylvester not as the predator but as the (not-so-altrustic) protagonist who plans to save Tweety from the predatory Sam before Granny returns — more so to save his own skin. After several exchanges, with both Sylvester and Sam clobbering each other, Sylvester finally gets rid of his rival by blowing him up in Granny's chimney (by way of a lighted TNT candle tied to a balloon).\n\nHowever, when Granny returns, Sylvester's efforts are in vain. As he is putting Tweety back in the cage, Granny enters and, assuming he was after Tweety, promises to make good on her earlier threat. Sylvester tried to explain what really happened before declaring: \"Aw, what's the use! She'll never believe me!\", then he plays Chopin on his violin and falls into the violin case as a coffin to his demise.\n\nVoice cast\nMel Blanc as Sylvester, Tweety\nJune Foray as Granny (uncredited)\n\nSee also\nList of American films of 1956\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1956 animated films\nLooney Tunes shorts\nAmerican films\nShort films directed by Friz Freleng\n1950s American animated films\n1956 films\nAnimated films about cats\nAnimated films about birds\nFilms scored by Milt Franklyn\nFilms featuring Tweety\nFilms featuring Sylvester the Cat\nFilms produced by Edward Selzer",
"John Dunn (16 February 1866, Kingston upon Hull – 18 December 1940, Harrogate) was the most prominent English violinist at the turn of the 20th century and composer. He was considered especially successful in interpreting works by Niccolò Paganini.\n\nLife \nHis first public performance happened when he was only 9. Soon he went to the Leipzig Conservatory. Studied with Henry Schradieck. After completing the course and returning to Britain he performed as soloist at Covent Garden (in 1882), The Proms, Crystal Palace, Glasgow Choral Union concerts, Royal Amateur Orchestral Society, bur also in Berlin and Leipzig.\n\nIn approximately 1900 he took a concert tour in America, during which he used an exotic 'Russian' pseudonym Ivan Donoiewski. In 1902 he made the first performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in England.\n\nHis compositions include a Violin Concerto, a Sonatina for piano and minor pieces, among others a Soliloquy and a Berceuse. He also wrote a number of cadences to Ludwig van Beethoven's Violin Concerto.\n\nThe 1843 'John Dunn' violin by Giuseppe Rocca is named after him.\n\nCompositions \nBook\n John Dunn. Violin Playing. 3rd ed.: 1915 (1st ed. 1898; 4th ed. 1923)\nMusical compositions\n Petite valse de concert, Op. 4, for violin and piano (©1924)\n Fairy Oraces, Op. 5, for violin and piano (©1924)\n Caprice Chinois, Op. 6, for violin and piano (©1924)\nArrangements of works by other composers\n Caprice No.9 by Niccolò Paganini, for violin and piano (©1924)\n Nocturne by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in F major, for violin and piano (©1924)\n\nSources\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n John Dunn playing Niccolò Paganini's Caprice No.13\n\n1866 births\n1940 deaths"
] |
[
"Carl Nielsen",
"Early years",
"Did he have a hard time in his early years?",
"Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen.",
"When did his his interest begin in playing violin?",
"when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin",
"What happened after he tried the violin?",
"He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine:"
] |
C_c74626fda5f14827b9b513a88349da83_1
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When did he begin to get recognition for his talent?
| 4 |
When did Carl Nielsen begin to get recognition for his talent?
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Carl Nielsen
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Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jorgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography Min Fynske Barndom (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837-1881), was a talented musician. Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin". He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka which the composer mentioned in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper from a nearby village when he was fourteen; the shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense. Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 ore and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances. CANNOTANSWER
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As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper
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Carl August Nielsen (; 9 June 1865 – 3 October 1931) was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer.
Brought up by poor yet musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. He initially played in a military band before attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen from 1884 until December 1886. He premiered his Op. 1, Suite for Strings, in 1888, at the age of 23. The following year, Nielsen began a 16-year stint as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra under the conductor Johan Svendsen, during which he played in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy and continued to work there until his death.
Although his symphonies, concertos and choral music are now internationally acclaimed, Nielsen's career and personal life were marked by many difficulties, often reflected in his music. The works he composed between 1897 and 1904 are sometimes ascribed to his "psychological" period, resulting mainly from a turbulent marriage with the sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen. Nielsen is especially noted for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera Maskarade and many of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. His early music was inspired by composers such as Brahms and Grieg, but he soon developed his own style, first experimenting with progressive tonality and later diverging even more radically from the standards of composition still common at the time. Nielsen's sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. He died from a heart attack six years later, and is buried in Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen.
Nielsen maintained the reputation of a musical outsider during his lifetime, both in his own country and internationally. It was only later that his works firmly entered the international repertoire, accelerating in popularity from the 1960s through Leonard Bernstein and others. In Denmark, Nielsen's reputation was sealed in 2006 when four of his works were listed by the Danish Ministry of Culture amongst the greatest pieces of Danish classical music. For many years, he appeared on the Danish hundred-kroner banknote. The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense documents his life and that of his wife. Between 1994 and 2009 the Royal Danish Library, sponsored by the Danish government, completed the Carl Nielsen Edition, freely available online, containing background information and sheet music for all of Nielsen's works, many of which had not been previously published.
Life
Early years
Nielsen was born on 9 June 1865, the seventh of twelve children in a poor peasant family, at Sortelung near Nørre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jørgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains, while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837–1881), was a talented musician.
Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin." He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He studied violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka that he mentions in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper in a nearby village when he was fourteen. The shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion in Odense.
Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 øre and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances.
Studies and early career
In 1881, Nielsen began to take his violin playing more seriously, studying privately under Carl Larsen, the sexton at Odense Cathedral. It is not known how much Nielsen composed during this period, but from his autobiography, it can be deduced that he wrote some trios and quartets for brass instruments, and that he had difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that brass instruments were tuned in different keys. Following an introduction to Niels W. Gade, the director of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, by whom he was well received, Nielsen obtained his release from the military band at short notice, and studied at the Academy from the beginning of 1884.
Though not an outstanding student and composing little, Nielsen progressed well in violin under Valdemar Tofte (1832–1907), and received a solid grounding in music theory from Orla Rosenhoff (1844–1905), who would remain a valued adviser during his early years as a professional composer. He also studied composition under Gade, whom he liked as a friend but not for his music. Contacts with fellow students and cultured families in Copenhagen, some of whom would become lifelong friends, became equally important. The patchy education resulting from his country background left Nielsen insatiably curious about the arts, philosophy and aesthetics. But, in the opinion of the musicologist David Fanning, it also left him "with a highly personal, common man's point of view on those subjects". He left the Academy at the end of 1886, after graduating with good but not outstanding marks in all subjects. He then went to stay with the retired Odense merchant Jens Georg Nielsen (1820–1901) and his wife at their apartment on Slagelsegade as he was not yet in a position to pay his own way. While there, he fell in love with their 14-year-old daughter Emilie Demant. The affair was to last for the next three years.
On 17 September 1887, Nielsen played the violin in the Tivoli Concert Hall when his Andante tranquillo e Scherzo for strings was premiered. Shortly afterwards, on 25 January 1888, his String Quartet in F major was played at one of the private performances of the (Private Chamber Music Society). While Nielsen considered the Quartet in F to be his official debut as a professional composer, a far greater impression was made by his Suite for Strings. Performed at Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen on 8 September 1888, it was designated by Nielsen as his Op. 1.
By September 1889 Nielsen had progressed well enough on the violin to gain a position with the second violins in the prestigious Royal Danish Orchestra which played at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, then conducted by Johan Svendsen. In this position he experienced Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. Although this employment sometimes caused Nielsen considerable frustration, he continued to play there until 1905. After Svendsen's retirement in 1906, Nielsen increasingly served as conductor (being officially appointed assistant conductor in 1910). Between graduation and attaining this position, he made a modest income from private violin lessons while enjoying the continuing support of his patrons, not only Jens Georg Nielsen but also Albert Sachs (born 1846) and Hans Demant (1827–1897) who both ran factories in Odense. After less than a year at the Royal Theatre, Nielsen won a scholarship of 1,800 kroner, giving him the means to spend several months travelling in Europe.
Marriage and children
While travelling, Nielsen discovered and then turned against Richard Wagner's music dramas, heard many of Europe's leading orchestras and soloists and sharpened his opinions on both music and the visual arts. Although he revered the music of Bach and Mozart, he remained ambivalent about much 19th-century music. In 1891 he met the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Leipzig; they were to maintain a correspondence for over thirty years. Shortly after arriving in Paris in early March 1891 Nielsen met the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen, who was also travelling on a scholarship. They toured Italy together and married in St Mark's English Church, Florence, on 10 May 1891 before returning to Denmark. According to Fanning, their relationship was not only a "love match", but also a "meeting of minds"; Anne Marie was a gifted artist and a "strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career". This determination would strain the Nielsens' marriage, as Anne Marie would spend months away from home during the 1890s and 1900s, leaving Carl, who was susceptible to opportunities with other ladies, to raise their three young children in addition to composing and fulfilling his duties at the Royal Theatre.
Nielsen sublimated his anger and frustration over his marriage in a number of musical works, most notably between 1897 and 1904, a period which he sometimes called his "psychological" period. Fanning writes, "At this time his interest in the driving forces behind human personality crystallized in the opera Saul and David and the Second Symphony (The Four Temperaments) and the cantatas and ". Carl suggested divorce in March 1905 and had considered moving to Germany for a fresh start, but despite several extended periods of separation the Nielsens remained married for the remainder of the composer's life.
Nielsen had five children, two of them illegitimate. He had already fathered a son, Carl August Nielsen, in January 1888, before he met Anne Marie. In 1912, an illegitimate daughter was born – Rachel Siegmann, about whom Anne Marie never learned. With his wife Nielsen had two daughters and a son. Irmelin, the elder daughter, studied music theory with her father and in December 1919 married Eggert Møller (1893–1978), a medical doctor who became a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the polyclinic at the National Hospital. The younger daughter Anne Marie, who graduated from the Copenhagen Academy of Arts, married the Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi (1892–1988) in 1918; he contributed to the promotion of Nielsen's music, both as a violinist and a conductor. Nielsen's son, Hans Børge, was handicapped as a result of meningitis and spent most of his life away from the family. He died near Kolding in 1956.
Mature composer
At first, Nielsen's works did not gain sufficient recognition for him to be able to support himself. During the concert which saw the premiere of his First Symphony on 14 March 1894 conducted by Svendsen, Nielsen played in the second violin section. The symphony was a great success when played in Berlin in 1896, contributing significantly to his reputation. He was increasingly in demand to write incidental music for the theatre as well as cantatas for special occasions, both of which provided a welcome source of additional income. Fanning comments on the relationship which developed between his programmatic and symphonic works: "Sometimes he would find stageworthy ideas in his supposedly pure orchestral music; sometimes a text or scenario forced him to invent vivid musical imagery which he could later turn to more abstract use."
Nielsen's cantata Hymnus amoris for soloists, chorus and orchestra was first performed at Copenhagen's Musikforeningen (The Music Society) on 27 April 1897. It was inspired by Titian's painting Miracle of the Jealous Husband which Nielsen had seen on his honeymoon in Italy in 1891. On one of the copies, he wrote: "To my own Marie! These tones in praise of love are nothing compared to the real thing."
Beginning in 1901, Nielsen received a modest state pension – initially 800 kroner per annum, growing to 7,500 kroner by 1927 – to augment his violinist's salary. This allowed him to stop taking private pupils and left him more time to compose. From 1903, he also had an annual retainer from his principal publisher, . Between 1905 and 1914 he served as second conductor at the Royal Theatre. For his son-in-law, Emil Telmányi, Nielsen wrote his Violin Concerto, Op. 33 (1911). From 1914 to 1926, he conducted the Musikforeningen orchestra. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and continued to work there until his death.
The strain of dual careers and constant separation from his wife led to an extended breach in his marriage. The couple began separation proceedings in 1916, and separation by mutual consent was granted in 1919. In the period 1916–22, Nielsen often lived on Funen retreating to the Damgaard and Fuglsang estates, or worked as a conductor in Gothenburg. The period was one of creative crisis for Nielsen which, coinciding with World War I, would strongly influence his Fourth (1914–16) and Fifth symphonies (1921–22), arguably his greatest works according to Fanning. The composer was particularly upset in the 1920s when his long-standing Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen was unable to undertake publication of many of his major works, including Aladdin and Pan and Syrinx.
The sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. After suffering a serious heart attack in 1925, Nielsen was forced to curtail much of his activity, although he continued to compose until his death. His sixtieth birthday in 1925 brought many congratulations, a decoration from the Swedish government, and a gala concert and reception in Copenhagen. The composer, however, was in a dour mood; in an article in Politiken on 9 November 1925 he wrote: If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end ... What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
Final years and death
Nielsen's final large-scale orchestral works were his Flute Concerto (1926) and the Clarinet Concerto (1928), of which Robert Layton writes: "If ever there was music from another planet, this is surely it. Its sonorities are sparse and monochrome, its air rarefied and bracing." Nielsen's last musical composition, the organ work Commotio, was premiered posthumously in 1931 in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck.
During his final years, Nielsen produced a short book of essays entitled Living Music (1925), followed in 1927 by his memoir Min Fynske Barndom. In 1926 he wrote in his diary "My home soil pulls me more and more like a long sucking kiss. Does it mean that I shall finally return and rest in the earth of Funen? Then it must be in the place where I was born: Sortelung, Frydenlands parish".
This was not to be. Nielsen was admitted to Copenhagen's National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) on 1 October 1931 following a series of heart attacks. He died there at ten minutes past midnight on 3 October, surrounded by his family. His last words to them were "You are standing here as if you were waiting for something".
He was buried in Copenhagen's Vestre Cemetery; all the music at his funeral, including the hymns, was the work of the composer. After his death, his wife was commissioned to sculpt a monument to him, to be erected in central Copenhagen. She wrote: "I wanted to take the winged horse, eternal symbol of poetry, and place a musician on its back. He was to sit there between the rushing wings blowing a reed pipe out over Copenhagen." Dispute about her design and a shortfall in funding meant that erection of the monument was delayed and that Anne Marie herself ended up subsidising it. The Carl Nielsen Monument was finally unveiled in 1939.
Music
Nielsen's works are sometimes referred to by CNW numbers, based on the Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works (CNW) published online by the Danish Royal Library in 2015. The CNW catalogue is intended to replace the 1965 catalogue compiled by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe (FS numbers).
Musical style
In his Lives of the Great Composers, the music critic Harold Schonberg emphasizes the breadth of Nielsen's compositions, his energetic rhythms, generous orchestration and his individuality. In comparing him with Jean Sibelius, he considers he had "just as much sweep, even more power, and a more universal message". The Oxford University music professor Daniel M. Grimley qualifies Nielsen as "one of the most playful, life-affirming, and awkward voices in twentieth-century music" thanks to the "melodic richness and harmonic vitality" of his work. Anne-Marie Reynolds, author of Carl Nielsen's Voice: His Songs in Context, cites Robert Simpson's view that "all of his music is vocal in origin", maintaining that song-writing strongly influenced Nielsen's development as a composer.
The Danish sociologist Benedikte Brincker observes that the perception of Nielsen and his music in his home country is rather different from his international appreciation. His interest and background in folk music had special resonance for Danes, and this was intensified during the nationalistic movements of the 1930s and during World War II, when singing was an important basis for the Danes to distinguish themselves from their German enemies. Nielsen's songs retain an important place in Danish culture and education. The musicologist Niels Krabbe describes the popular image of Nielsen in Denmark as being like "the ugly duckling syndrome" – a reference to the tale of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen – whereby "a poor boy ... passing through adversity and frugality ... marches into Copenhagen and ... comes to conquer the position as the uncrowned King".
While outside Denmark Nielsen is largely thought of as the composer of orchestral music and the opera Maskarade, in his own country he is more of a national symbol. These two sides were officially brought together in Denmark in 2006 when the Ministry of Culture issued a list of the twelve greatest Danish musical works that included Nielsen’s opera Maskarade, his Fourth Symphony, and a pair of his Danish folk songs. Krabbe asks the rhetorical question: "Can 'the national' in Nielsen be demonstrated in the music in the form of particular themes, harmonies, sounds, forms, etc., or is it a pure construct of reception history?"
Nielsen himself was ambiguous about his attitudes to late Romantic German music and to nationalism in music. He wrote to the Dutch composer Julius Röntgen in 1909 "I am surprised by the technical skills of the Germans nowadays, and I cannot help thinking that all this delight in complication must exhaust itself. I foresee a completely new art of pure archaic virtue. What do you think about songs sung in unison? We must go back ... to the pure and the clear." On the other hand, he wrote in 1925 "Nothing destroys music more than nationalism does ... and it is impossible to deliver national music on request."
Nielsen studied Renaissance polyphony closely, which accounts for some of the melodic and harmonic content of his music. This interest is exemplified in his Tre Motetter (Three Motets, Op. 55). To non-Danish critics, Nielsen's music initially had a neo-classical sound but became increasingly modern as he developed his own approach to what the writer and composer Robert Simpson called progressive tonality, moving from one key to another. Typically, Nielsen's music might end in a different key from that of its commencement, sometimes as the outcome of a struggle as in his symphonies. There is debate as to how much such elements owe to his folk music activities. Some critics have referred to his rhythms, his use of acciaccaturas or appoggiaturas, or his frequent use of a flattened seventh and minor third in his works, as being typically Danish. The composer himself wrote "The intervals, as I see it, are the elements which first arouse a deeper interest in music ... [I]t is intervals which surprise and delight us anew every time we hear the cuckoo in spring. Its appeal would be less if its call were all on one note."
Nielsen's philosophy of music style is perhaps summed up in his advice in a 1907 letter to the Norwegian composer Knut Harder: "You have ... fluency, so far, so good; but I advise you again and again, my dear Mr. Harder; Tonality, Clarity, Strength."
Symphonies
Nielsen is perhaps most closely associated outside Denmark with his six symphonies, written between 1892 and 1925. The works have much in common: they are all just over 30 minutes long, brass instruments are a key component of the orchestration, and they all exhibit unusual changes in tonality, which heighten the dramatic tension. From its opening bars, Symphony No. 1 (Op. 7, 1890–92), while reflecting the influence of Grieg and Brahms, shows Nielsen's individuality. In Symphony No. 2 (Op. 16, 1901–02), Nielsen embarks on the development of human character. Inspiration came from a painting in an inn depicting the four temperaments (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine).
The title of Symphony No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva (Op. 27, 1910–11), is understood by the English composer Robert Simpson to refer to the "outward growth of the mind's scope". It fully exploits Nielsen's technique of confronting two keys at the same time and includes a peaceful section with soprano and baritone voices, singing a tune without words. Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable (Op. 29, 1914–16), written during World War I, is among the most frequently performed of the symphonies. In the last movement two sets of timpani are placed on opposite sides of the stage undertaking a kind of musical duel. Nielsen described the symphony as "the life force, the unquenchable will to live".
Also frequently performed is the Symphony No. 5 (Op. 50, 1921–22), presenting another battle between the forces of order and chaos. A snare drummer is given the task of interrupting the orchestra, playing and out of time, as if to destroy the music. Performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erik Tuxen at the 1950 Edinburgh International Festival, it caused a sensation, sparking interest in Nielsen's music outside Scandinavia. In Symphony No. 6 (without opus number), written 1924–25, and subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (Simple Symphony), the tonal language seems similar to that in Nielsen's other symphonies, but the symphony develops into a sequence of cameos, some sad, some grotesque, some humorous.
Operas and cantatas
Nielsen's two operas are very different in style. The four-act (Saul and David), written in 1902 to a libretto by Einar Christiansen, tells the Biblical story of Saul's jealousy of the young David while (Masquerade) is a comic opera in three acts written in 1906 to a Danish libretto by Vilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. Saul and David received a negative press when it was premiered in November 1902 and did no better when it was revived in 1904. By contrast, in November 1906 Masquerade was a resounding success with an exceptional run of 25 performances over its first four months. Generally considered to be Denmark's national opera, in its home country it has enjoyed lasting success and popularity, attributable to its many strophic songs, its dances and its underlying "old Copenhagen" atmosphere.
Nielsen wrote a considerable number of choral works but most of them were composed for special occasions and were seldom reprised. Three fully-fledged cantatas for soloists, orchestra and choir have, however, entered the repertoire. Nielsen composed (Hymn of Love), Op. 12 (1897) after studying early polyphonic choral style. Writing in the newspaper Dannebrog, Nanna Liebmann referred to the work as "a decisive victory" for Nielsen, and Angul Hammerich of Nationaltidende welcomed its improved clarity and purity. But the reviewer H.W. Schytte thought Nielsen had been pretentious presenting the lyrics in Latin rather than Danish. (The Sleep), Op. 18, Nielsen's second major choral work, sets to music the various phases of sleep including the terror of a nightmare in its central movement which, with its unusual discords, came as a shock to the reviewers at its premiere in March 1905. (Springtime on Funen), Op. 42, completed in 1922, has been cited as the most Danish of all Nielsen's compositions as it extols the beauty of Funen's countryside.
Concertos
Nielsen wrote three concertos: the Violin Concerto, Op. 33 is a middle-period work, from 1911, which lies within the tradition of European classicism, whereas the Flute Concerto (without opus number) of 1926 and the Clarinet Concerto, Op. 57 which followed in 1928 are late works, influenced by the modernism of the 1920s and, according to the Danish musicologist Herbert Rosenberg, the product of "an extremely experienced composer who knows how to avoid inessentials." Unlike Nielsen's later works, the Violin Concerto has a distinct, melody-oriented neo-classical structure. The Flute Concerto, in two movements, was written for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet which had premiered Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). In contrast to the rather traditional style of the Violin Concerto, it reflects the modernistic trends of the period. The first movement, for example, switches between D minor, E-flat minor and F major before the flute comes to the fore with a cantabile theme in E major. The Clarinet Concerto was also written for a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, Aage Oxenvad. Nielsen stretches the capacities of instrument and player to the utmost; the concerto has just one continuous movement and contains a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra and between the two principal competing keys, F major and E major.
The wind concertos present many examples of what Nielsen called ("objectification"). By this term he meant giving instrumentalists freedom of interpretation and performance within the bounds set out by the score.
Orchestral music
Nielsen's earliest work composed specifically for orchestra was the immediately successful Suite for Strings (1888), which evoked Scandinavian Romanticism as expressed by Grieg and Svendsen. The work marked an important milestone in Nielsen's career as it was not only his first real success but it was also the first of his pieces he conducted himself when it was played in Odense a month later.
The Helios Overture, Op. 17 (1903) stems from Nielsen's stay in Athens which inspired him to compose a work depicting the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea. The score is a showpiece for orchestra, and has been amongst Nielsen's most popular works. (Saga Dream), Op. 39 (1907–08) is a tone poem for orchestra based on the Icelandic Njal's Saga. In Nielsen's words:
There are among other things four cadenzas for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and flute which run quite freely alongside one another, with no harmonic connection, and without my marking time. They are just like four streams of thought, each going its own way – differently and randomly for each performance – until they meet in a point of rest, as if flowing into a lock where they are united.
At the Bier of a Young Artist () for string orchestra was written for the funeral of the Danish painter Oluf Hartmann in January 1910 and was also played at Nielsen's own funeral. Pan and Syrinx (), a vigorous nine-minute symphonic poem inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, was premiered in 1911. The Rhapsodic Overture, An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands (), draws on Faroese folk tunes but also contains freely composed sections.
Among Nielsen's orchestral works for the stage are Aladdin (1919) and (The Mother), Op. 41 (1920). Aladdin was written to accompany a production of Adam Oehlenschläger's fairy tale at The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. The complete score, lasting over 80 minutes, is Nielsen's longest work apart from his operas, but a shorter orchestral suite consisting of the Oriental March, Hindu Dance and Negro Dance is often performed. , written to celebrate the reunification of Southern Jutland with Denmark, was first performed in 1921; it is a setting of patriotic verses written for the occasion.
Chamber music
Nielsen composed several chamber music works, some of them still high on the international repertoire. The Wind Quintet, one of his most popular pieces, was composed in 1922 specifically for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Simpson, explaining that Nielsen's fondness of wind instruments was closely related to his love of nature, writes: "He was also intensely interested in human character, and in the Wind Quintet composed deliberately for five friends; each part is cunningly made to suit the individuality of each player."
Nielsen wrote four string quartets. The First String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13 (1889, revised 1900) contains a "Résumé" section in the finale, bringing together themes from the first, third and fourth movements. The Second String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 5 appeared in 1890 and the Third String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 14 in 1898. The music historian Jan Smaczny suggests that in this work "the handling of texture is confident and far less derivative than in earlier works ... [the quartet] prompts the most regret that Nielsen did not pursue the genre further ... to parallel his later symphonic development". The Fourth String Quartet in F major (1904) initially received a mixed reception, with critics uncertain about its reserved style. Nielsen revised it several times, the final version in 1919 being listed as his Op. 44.
The violin was Nielsen's own instrument and he composed four large-scale chamber works for it. The departures from standard procedures in the First Sonata, Op. 9 (1895), including its often sudden modulations and its terse thematic material, disconcerted Danish critics at its first performance. The Second Sonata, Op. 35 of 1912 was written for the violinist Peder Møller who earlier that year had premiered the composer's Violin Concerto. The work is an example of the composer's progressive tonality since, although it is stated to be in the key of G minor, the first and final movements end in different keys. The critic Emilius Bangert wrote of the premiere (which was given by Axel Gade), "The overall impression was of a beautiful, unbroken line – a flow of notes – where in particular a wonderful second subject in the first part and the pure, high sphere of the last part were captivating". Two other works are for violin solo. The Prelude, Theme and Variations, Op. 48 (1923) was written for Telmányi, and, like Nielsen's Chaconne for piano, Op. 32, was inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Preludio e Presto, Op. 52 (1928) was written as a tribute for the sixtieth birthday of the composer Fini Henriques.
Keyboard works
Although Nielsen came to compose mainly at the piano, he only composed directly for it occasionally over a period of 40 years, creating works often with a distinctive style which slowed their international acceptance. Nielsen's own piano technique, an echo of which is probably preserved in three wax cylinders marked "Carl Nielsen" at the State Archives in Aarhus, seems to have been mediocre. Reviewing the 1969 recording of works by the pianist John Ogdon, John Horton commented on the early pieces: "Nielsen's technical resources hardly measure up to the grandeur of his designs", whilst characterising the later pieces as "major works which can stand comparison with his symphonic music". The anti-romantic tone of the Symphonic Suite, Op. 8 (1894) was described by a later critic as "nothing less than a clenched fist straight in the face of all established musical convention". In Nielsen's words, the Chaconne, Op. 32 (1917) was "a really big piece, and I think effective". It is not only inspired by the work of Bach, especially the chaconne for solo violin, but also by the virtuoso piano arrangements of Bach's music by composers such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Ferruccio Busoni. Also on a large scale, and from the same year, is the Theme and Variations, Op. 41, in which critics have discerned the influences of Brahms and also of Max Reger, of whom Nielsen had earlier written to a friend "I think that the public will be utterly unable to grasp Reger's work and yet I am a lot more sympathetic towards his efforts than towards ... Richard Strauss".
All Nielsen's organ works were late compositions. The Danish organist Finn Viderø suggests that his interest was prompted by the (Organ reform movement), and the renewal of the front pipes of the Schnitger organ in the St. Jacobi Church, Hamburg, from 1928 to 1930. Nielsen's last major work – , Op. 58, a 22-minute piece for organ – was composed between June 1930 and February 1931, only a few months before his death.
Songs and hymns
Over the years, Nielsen wrote the music for over 290 songs and hymns, most of them for verses and poems by well-known Danish authors such as N. F. S. Grundtvig, Ingemann, Poul Martin Møller, Adam Oehlenschläger and Jeppe Aakjær. In Denmark, many of them are still popular today both with adults and children. They are regarded as "the most representative part of the country's most representative composer's output". In 1906, Nielsen had explained the significance of such songs to his countrymen:With certain melodic inflections we Danes unavoidably think of the poems of, for example, Ingemann, Christian Winther or Drachmann, and we often seem to perceive the smell of Danish landscapes and rural images in our songs and music. But it is also clear that a foreigner, who knows neither our countryside, nor our painters, our poets, or our history in the same intimate way as we do ourselves, will be completely unable to grasp what it is that brings us to hear and tremble with sympathetic understanding.
Of great significance was Nielsen's contribution to the 1922 publication, Folkehøjskolens Melodibog (The Folk High School Songbook), of which he was one of the editors together with Thomas Laub, Oluf Ring and Thorvald Aagaard. The book contained about 600 melodies, of which about 200 were composed by the editors, and was intended to provide a repertoire for communal singing, an integral part of Danish folk culture. The collection was extremely popular and became embedded in the Danish educational system. During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, mass song gatherings, using these melodies, were part of Denmark's "spiritual re-armament", and after the war in 1945 Nielsen's contributions were characterised by one writer as "shining jewels in our treasure-chest of patriotic songs". This remains a significant factor in Danish assessment of the composer.
Editions
Between 1994 and 2009 a complete new edition of Nielsen's works, the Carl Nielsen Edition, was commissioned by the Danish Government (at a cost of over 40 million kroner). For many of the works, including the operas Maskarade and Saul and David, and the complete Aladdin music, this was their first printed publication, copies of manuscripts having previously been used in performances. The scores are now all available for download free of charge at the website of the Danish Royal Library (which also owns most of Nielsen's music manuscripts).
Reception
Unlike that of his contemporary, the Finn Jean Sibelius, Nielsen's reputation abroad did not start to evolve until after World War II. For some time, international interest was largely directed towards his symphonies while his other works, many of them highly popular in Denmark, have only recently started to become part of the world repertoire. Even in Denmark, many of his compositions failed to impress. It was only in 1897 after the first performance of Hymnus amoris that he received support from the critics, to be substantially reinforced in 1906 by their enthusiastic reception of Masquerade.
Within two months of its successful premiere at the Odd Fellows Concert Hall in Copenhagen on 28 February 1912, the Third Symphony (Espansiva) was in the repertoire of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and by 1913 it had seen performances in Stuttgart, Stockholm and Helsinki. The symphony was the most popular of all Nielsen's works during his lifetime and was also played in Berlin, Hamburg, London and Gothenburg. Other works caused some uncertainty, even in Denmark. After the premiere of the Fifth Symphony (1922) one critic wrote: "The treasure of Danish symphonies and Carl Nielsen's own output have been enriched by a strange and highly original work." Another, however, described it as a "bloody, clenched fist in the face of an unsuspecting snob audience", also qualifying it as "filthy music from trenches".
At the end of the 1940s two major biographies of Nielsen appeared in Danish, dominating opinion of the composer's life and work for several decades. Robert Simpson's book Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (first edition 1952) was the earliest large-scale study in English.
An international breakthrough came in 1962 when Leonard Bernstein recorded the Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic for CBS. The recording helped Nielsen's music to achieve appreciation beyond his home country and is considered one of the finest recorded accounts of the symphony. Nielsen's centenary in 1965 was widely celebrated, both in terms of performances and publications, and Bernstein was awarded the Sonning Prize for his recording of the Third Symphony. In 1988 Nielsen's diaries and his letters to Anne Marie were published, and these, together with a 1991 biography by Jørgen Jensen using this new material, led to a revised objective assessment of the composer's personality. Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of Nielsen's 125th anniversary in 1990, the music critic Andrew Pincus recalled that 25 years earlier Bernstein had believed the world was ready to accept the Dane as the equal of Jean Sibelius, speaking of "his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability" (which Pincus believed was still a challenge for audiences). Biographies and studies in English in the 1990s helped to establish Nielsen's status worldwide, to the point at which his music has become a regular feature of concert programming in Western countries.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2008, the American music critic Alex Ross compares the "brute strength" of Nielsen's symphonies to Beethoven's Eroica and Fifth Symphony but explains that only now were the Americans slowly beginning to appreciate the Danish composer.
Nielsen did not record any of his works. However, three younger contemporary conductors who had worked with him, Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen, did record his symphonies and other orchestral works with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1946 and 1952. Jensen also made the first LP recording of the Fifth Symphony in 1954. Work carried out by the recently published complete Carl Nielsen Edition has revealed that the scores used in these recordings often differ from the composer's original intentions and thus the supposed authenticity of these recordings is now debatable.
There are now numerous recordings of all Nielsen's major works, including complete cycles of the symphonies conducted by, amongst others, Sir Colin Davis, Herbert Blomstedt and Sakari Oramo. Over 50 recordings have been made of Nielsen's Wind Quintet.
Legacy
From 1916, Nielsen taught at the Royal Academy where he became director in 1931, shortly before his death. He also had private students in his earlier days in order to supplement his income. As a result of his teaching, Nielsen has exerted considerable influence on classical music in Denmark. Among his most successful pupils were the composers Thorvald Aagaard, remembered in particular for his songs, Harald Agersnap, both a conductor and orchestral composer, and Jørgen Bentzon who composed choral and chamber music mainly for his folk music school (Københavns Folkemusikskole). Among his other students were the musicologist Knud Jeppesen, the pianist Herman Koppel, the academy professor and symphony composer Poul Schierbeck, the organist Emilius Bangert who played at Roskilde Cathedral, and Nancy Dalberg, one of Nielsen's private students who helped with the orchestration of Aladdin. Nielsen also instructed the conductor and choirmaster Mogens Wöldike, remembered for his interpretations of Baroque music, and Rudolph Simonsen, the pianist and composer who became director of the Academy after Nielsen's death.
The Carl Nielsen Society maintains a listing of performances of Nielsen's works, classified by region (Denmark, Scandinavia, Europe apart from Scandinavia and outside Europe) which demonstrates that his music is regularly performed throughout the world. The concerti and symphonies feature frequently in these listings.
The Carl Nielsen International Competition commenced in the 1970s under the auspices of the Odense Symphony Orchestra. A four-yearly violin competition has been held there since 1980. Flute and clarinet competitions were later added, but these have now been discontinued. An international Organ Competition, founded by the city of Odense, became associated with the Nielsen competition in 2009, but from 2015 will be organized separately, based in Odense Cathedral.
In his home country, the Carl Nielsen Museum, in Odense, is dedicated to Nielsen and his wife, Anne Marie. The composer is featured on the 100 kroner note issued by the Danish National Bank from 1997 to 2010. His image was selected in recognition of his contribution to Danish music compositions such as his opera Maskarade, his Espansiva symphony and his many songs including "Danmark, nu blunder den lyse nat".
Several special events were scheduled on or around 9 June 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nielsen's birth. In addition to many performances in Denmark, concerts were programmed in cities across Europe, including London, Leipzig, Kraków, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Vienna, and even further afield in Japan, Egypt and New York. For 9 June, Nielsen's birthday, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra presented a programme in Copenhagen's DR Concert Hall featuring Hymnus amoris, the Clarinet Concerto and Symphony No. 4 for a broadcast extending across Europe and the United States. The Danish Royal Opera has programmed Maskarade and a new production (directed by David Pountney) of Saul og David. During 2015, the Danish Quartet scheduled performances of Nielsen's string quartets in Denmark, Israel, Germany, Norway and the UK (at the Cheltenham Music Festival). In the UK, the BBC Philharmonic prepared a concert series on Nielsen beginning on 9 June in Manchester. Nielsen's Maskarade overture was also the first item for the opening night of the 2015 BBC Promenade Concerts in London, while his compositions featured in five other concerts of the Prom season. The city of Odense, which has strong connections with Nielsen, developed an extensive programme of concerts and cultural events for the anniversary year.
Minor planet 6058 Carlnielsen is named in his honor.
References
Citations
Sources
Table of contents, including introductions and music scores.
In .
In .
In .
Obituaries
External links
The Carl Nielsen Edition – index page to introductory information on many of Nielsen's works from the Royal Danish Library
Carl Nielsen bibliography 1985–2008 at the Royal Danish Library
The Danish Carl Nielsen Society – provides much detailed information on the composer and his works, including an overview of upcoming concerts
The Carl Nielsen Museum, Odense – "is a museum dedicated to the composer Carl Nielsen and to his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen".
Nielsen's Late Music, article by Svend Ravnkilde
Carl Nielsen International Music Competition & Festival – an annual music event in Odense, celebrating the composer. Organized by the Odense Symphony Orchestra
List of works from the Carl Nielsen Society
Carl Nielsen som symfoniker (1951–1954), Knud Jeppesen's 44 lectures, International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
"Förunderligt och märkligt" recording with
1865 births
1931 deaths
19th-century classical composers
19th-century classical violinists
19th-century Danish composers
19th-century male conductors (music)
19th-century conductors (music)
20th-century classical composers
20th-century classical violinists
20th-century conductors (music)
20th-century Danish composers
20th-century Danish male musicians
Royal Danish Academy of Music faculty
Burials at Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
Danish classical composers
Danish classical violinists
Danish conductors (music)
Danish music educators
Danish male classical composers
Danish opera composers
Danish Romantic composers
Directors of the Royal Danish Academy of Music
Male classical violinists
Male conductors (music)
Male opera composers
People from Faaborg-Midtfyn Municipality
Pupils of Niels Gade
Royal Danish Academy of Music alumni
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"The Bombardier Talent 3 is a family of railcars manufactured by Bombardier Transportation. The first generation Talent (Talbot leichter Nahverkehrs-Triebwagen) was built in 1996 by Waggonfabrik Talbot in Aachen, Germany. In contrast to the Bombardier Talent 2, the multiple unit is not a new development, but a further development of Talent 2, to which Talent 3 is visually similar. In contrast to the second generation, the Talent 3 complies not only with German but also with European standards.\n\nThe first unit was planned to enter service in 2019, but the first runs with passengers did not start until November 2020.\n\nService history\nBombardier introduced the Talent 3 at the InnoTrans trade show in September 2016. That month, ÖBB announced a preliminary agreement to purchase up to 300 sets. The agreement was formally signed, along with a firm order for the first 21 sets to be operated from a base in Vorarlberg, in December. In May 2017, ÖBB announced an order for an additional 25 sets for service in Tyrol and cross-border operation to Italy. Construction of the first Talent 3s for ÖBB began in September 17, with deliveries scheduled to begin in April 2019. In ÖBB service, they are designated Class 4758.\n\nIn March 2017, German operator Vlexx ordered 21 Talent 3 sets for operation in the states of Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate, supposed to begin operation in December 2019.\n\nIn November 2021, Alstom sold the design rights to the Talent 3 to CAF to comply with a European Commission directive when it took over Bombardier.\n\nDesign\nThe Talent 3 is based on the earlier Talent and Talent 2 designs, with a wider carbody, larger doors, and a lower floor to increase capacity and improve passenger flow at station stops. Depending on the intended service pattern, the Talent 3 can be specified with either a or top speed. Talent 3 sets can vary in length based on customer requirements—ÖBB ordered six-car sets with a passenger capacity of 300, while Vlexx ordered three-car sets that carry up to 160 passengers.\n\nIn September 2018 a prototype Talent 3 capable of lithium battery operation was unveiled.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nArticulated passenger trains\nBombardier Transportation multiple units\nCAF multiple units\nElectric multiple units of Austria\nElectric multiple units of Germany\nTrain-related introductions in 2020",
"The first series of British talent competition programme Britain's Got Talent was broadcast on ITV, from 9 to 17 June 2007; it was commissioned following the success of the first season of America's Got Talent, helping to revive production of the British edition after initial development was suspended in 2005. Simon Cowell, the programme's creator, formed the judging panel with both Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden, with Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly (colloquially known as Ant & Dec) operating as the programme's hosts. Alongside the main programme, the first series was accompanied by a spin-off sister programme on ITV2, titled Britain's Got More Talent, hosted by Stephen Mulhern.\n\nThe first series was won by opera singer Paul Potts; as of 2019, result information on other finalists has yet to be disclosed. During its broadcast, the series averaged around 8.4 million viewers. The first series faced controversy relating to the involvement of two participants who failed to disclose information that would make them ineligible for participation, alongside receiving criticism from viewers for airing footage that was considered unsuitable during one of the semi-finals.\n\nSeries overview\n\nAfter Simon Cowell pitched to ITV his plans for a televised talent competition, production was green-lighted for a full series after a pilot episode was created in mid-2005. However, a dispute broke out between Paul O'Grady, the original choice as host for the programme, and the broadcaster, that resulted in O'Grady signing up to another broadcaster. His decision resulted in production being suspended, and did not resume until in the wake of the success of the first series of America's Got Talent. When it did resume, production staff focused on a schedule of ten episodes to begin with for the first series of Britain's Got Talent, with major auditions for potential acts held within the cities of Manchester, Birmingham, London and Cardiff. The initial choices for judges changed to begin with following O'Grady's decision to switch broadcasters, with it eventually finalised on Cowell, Piers Morgan, and Amanda Holden.\n\nOf the participants who auditioned to be in the contest for this series, only 24 made it into the three live semi-finals, with eight appearing in each one, and six of these acts moving on into the live final. The following below lists the results of each participant's overall performance in this series:\n\n | |\n\nSemi-final summary\n Buzzed out | Judges' vote | \n | |\n\nSemi-final 1 (14 June)\n\nSemi-final 2 (15 June)\n\nSemi-final 3 (16 June)\n\nFinal (17 June)\n\nRatings\n\nCriticism & controversies\nThe first series of Britain's Got Talent found itself marred with controversy over two participants - Richard Bates, and Kit Kat Dolls - that auditioned for the competition, after they were found to have breached rules that required personal details and information that was not \"untruthful, inaccurate or misleading\". Bates was removed at the request of Lancashire Police, after they revealed that he had not disclosed being on the UK's Violent and Sex Offender Register at the time of filming for an offence he had committed in 2005, while the Kit Kat Dolls were disqualified after three of their members were discovered to be secretly working as prostitutes during an undercover investigation by the News of the World.\n\nWhen the live rounds took place, viewers criticised the programme for the involvement of magician Doctor Gore. Their complaints focused on the nature of his performance and their presentation, which they deemed as unsuitable for a family-orientated programme that would be watched by young children. Production staff claimed in their defence that the performance was thoroughly reviewed before it was broadcast, but the investigation of regulator Ofcom ruled against Britain's Got Talent for breaching its broadcasting code with regards to protecting young children from unsuitable material.\n\nReferences\n\n2007 British television seasons\nSeries 01"
] |
[
"Carl Nielsen",
"Early years",
"Did he have a hard time in his early years?",
"Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen.",
"When did his his interest begin in playing violin?",
"when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin",
"What happened after he tried the violin?",
"He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine:",
"When did he begin to get recognition for his talent?",
"As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper"
] |
C_c74626fda5f14827b9b513a88349da83_1
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DId he continue with the violin and composing after becoming a shopkeeper?
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DId Carl Nielsen continue with the violin and composing after becoming a shopkeeper?
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Carl Nielsen
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Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jorgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography Min Fynske Barndom (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837-1881), was a talented musician. Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin". He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka which the composer mentioned in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper from a nearby village when he was fourteen; the shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense. Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 ore and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances. CANNOTANSWER
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Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion,
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Carl August Nielsen (; 9 June 1865 – 3 October 1931) was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer.
Brought up by poor yet musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. He initially played in a military band before attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen from 1884 until December 1886. He premiered his Op. 1, Suite for Strings, in 1888, at the age of 23. The following year, Nielsen began a 16-year stint as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra under the conductor Johan Svendsen, during which he played in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy and continued to work there until his death.
Although his symphonies, concertos and choral music are now internationally acclaimed, Nielsen's career and personal life were marked by many difficulties, often reflected in his music. The works he composed between 1897 and 1904 are sometimes ascribed to his "psychological" period, resulting mainly from a turbulent marriage with the sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen. Nielsen is especially noted for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera Maskarade and many of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. His early music was inspired by composers such as Brahms and Grieg, but he soon developed his own style, first experimenting with progressive tonality and later diverging even more radically from the standards of composition still common at the time. Nielsen's sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. He died from a heart attack six years later, and is buried in Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen.
Nielsen maintained the reputation of a musical outsider during his lifetime, both in his own country and internationally. It was only later that his works firmly entered the international repertoire, accelerating in popularity from the 1960s through Leonard Bernstein and others. In Denmark, Nielsen's reputation was sealed in 2006 when four of his works were listed by the Danish Ministry of Culture amongst the greatest pieces of Danish classical music. For many years, he appeared on the Danish hundred-kroner banknote. The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense documents his life and that of his wife. Between 1994 and 2009 the Royal Danish Library, sponsored by the Danish government, completed the Carl Nielsen Edition, freely available online, containing background information and sheet music for all of Nielsen's works, many of which had not been previously published.
Life
Early years
Nielsen was born on 9 June 1865, the seventh of twelve children in a poor peasant family, at Sortelung near Nørre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jørgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains, while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837–1881), was a talented musician.
Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin." He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He studied violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka that he mentions in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper in a nearby village when he was fourteen. The shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion in Odense.
Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 øre and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances.
Studies and early career
In 1881, Nielsen began to take his violin playing more seriously, studying privately under Carl Larsen, the sexton at Odense Cathedral. It is not known how much Nielsen composed during this period, but from his autobiography, it can be deduced that he wrote some trios and quartets for brass instruments, and that he had difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that brass instruments were tuned in different keys. Following an introduction to Niels W. Gade, the director of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, by whom he was well received, Nielsen obtained his release from the military band at short notice, and studied at the Academy from the beginning of 1884.
Though not an outstanding student and composing little, Nielsen progressed well in violin under Valdemar Tofte (1832–1907), and received a solid grounding in music theory from Orla Rosenhoff (1844–1905), who would remain a valued adviser during his early years as a professional composer. He also studied composition under Gade, whom he liked as a friend but not for his music. Contacts with fellow students and cultured families in Copenhagen, some of whom would become lifelong friends, became equally important. The patchy education resulting from his country background left Nielsen insatiably curious about the arts, philosophy and aesthetics. But, in the opinion of the musicologist David Fanning, it also left him "with a highly personal, common man's point of view on those subjects". He left the Academy at the end of 1886, after graduating with good but not outstanding marks in all subjects. He then went to stay with the retired Odense merchant Jens Georg Nielsen (1820–1901) and his wife at their apartment on Slagelsegade as he was not yet in a position to pay his own way. While there, he fell in love with their 14-year-old daughter Emilie Demant. The affair was to last for the next three years.
On 17 September 1887, Nielsen played the violin in the Tivoli Concert Hall when his Andante tranquillo e Scherzo for strings was premiered. Shortly afterwards, on 25 January 1888, his String Quartet in F major was played at one of the private performances of the (Private Chamber Music Society). While Nielsen considered the Quartet in F to be his official debut as a professional composer, a far greater impression was made by his Suite for Strings. Performed at Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen on 8 September 1888, it was designated by Nielsen as his Op. 1.
By September 1889 Nielsen had progressed well enough on the violin to gain a position with the second violins in the prestigious Royal Danish Orchestra which played at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, then conducted by Johan Svendsen. In this position he experienced Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. Although this employment sometimes caused Nielsen considerable frustration, he continued to play there until 1905. After Svendsen's retirement in 1906, Nielsen increasingly served as conductor (being officially appointed assistant conductor in 1910). Between graduation and attaining this position, he made a modest income from private violin lessons while enjoying the continuing support of his patrons, not only Jens Georg Nielsen but also Albert Sachs (born 1846) and Hans Demant (1827–1897) who both ran factories in Odense. After less than a year at the Royal Theatre, Nielsen won a scholarship of 1,800 kroner, giving him the means to spend several months travelling in Europe.
Marriage and children
While travelling, Nielsen discovered and then turned against Richard Wagner's music dramas, heard many of Europe's leading orchestras and soloists and sharpened his opinions on both music and the visual arts. Although he revered the music of Bach and Mozart, he remained ambivalent about much 19th-century music. In 1891 he met the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Leipzig; they were to maintain a correspondence for over thirty years. Shortly after arriving in Paris in early March 1891 Nielsen met the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen, who was also travelling on a scholarship. They toured Italy together and married in St Mark's English Church, Florence, on 10 May 1891 before returning to Denmark. According to Fanning, their relationship was not only a "love match", but also a "meeting of minds"; Anne Marie was a gifted artist and a "strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career". This determination would strain the Nielsens' marriage, as Anne Marie would spend months away from home during the 1890s and 1900s, leaving Carl, who was susceptible to opportunities with other ladies, to raise their three young children in addition to composing and fulfilling his duties at the Royal Theatre.
Nielsen sublimated his anger and frustration over his marriage in a number of musical works, most notably between 1897 and 1904, a period which he sometimes called his "psychological" period. Fanning writes, "At this time his interest in the driving forces behind human personality crystallized in the opera Saul and David and the Second Symphony (The Four Temperaments) and the cantatas and ". Carl suggested divorce in March 1905 and had considered moving to Germany for a fresh start, but despite several extended periods of separation the Nielsens remained married for the remainder of the composer's life.
Nielsen had five children, two of them illegitimate. He had already fathered a son, Carl August Nielsen, in January 1888, before he met Anne Marie. In 1912, an illegitimate daughter was born – Rachel Siegmann, about whom Anne Marie never learned. With his wife Nielsen had two daughters and a son. Irmelin, the elder daughter, studied music theory with her father and in December 1919 married Eggert Møller (1893–1978), a medical doctor who became a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the polyclinic at the National Hospital. The younger daughter Anne Marie, who graduated from the Copenhagen Academy of Arts, married the Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi (1892–1988) in 1918; he contributed to the promotion of Nielsen's music, both as a violinist and a conductor. Nielsen's son, Hans Børge, was handicapped as a result of meningitis and spent most of his life away from the family. He died near Kolding in 1956.
Mature composer
At first, Nielsen's works did not gain sufficient recognition for him to be able to support himself. During the concert which saw the premiere of his First Symphony on 14 March 1894 conducted by Svendsen, Nielsen played in the second violin section. The symphony was a great success when played in Berlin in 1896, contributing significantly to his reputation. He was increasingly in demand to write incidental music for the theatre as well as cantatas for special occasions, both of which provided a welcome source of additional income. Fanning comments on the relationship which developed between his programmatic and symphonic works: "Sometimes he would find stageworthy ideas in his supposedly pure orchestral music; sometimes a text or scenario forced him to invent vivid musical imagery which he could later turn to more abstract use."
Nielsen's cantata Hymnus amoris for soloists, chorus and orchestra was first performed at Copenhagen's Musikforeningen (The Music Society) on 27 April 1897. It was inspired by Titian's painting Miracle of the Jealous Husband which Nielsen had seen on his honeymoon in Italy in 1891. On one of the copies, he wrote: "To my own Marie! These tones in praise of love are nothing compared to the real thing."
Beginning in 1901, Nielsen received a modest state pension – initially 800 kroner per annum, growing to 7,500 kroner by 1927 – to augment his violinist's salary. This allowed him to stop taking private pupils and left him more time to compose. From 1903, he also had an annual retainer from his principal publisher, . Between 1905 and 1914 he served as second conductor at the Royal Theatre. For his son-in-law, Emil Telmányi, Nielsen wrote his Violin Concerto, Op. 33 (1911). From 1914 to 1926, he conducted the Musikforeningen orchestra. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and continued to work there until his death.
The strain of dual careers and constant separation from his wife led to an extended breach in his marriage. The couple began separation proceedings in 1916, and separation by mutual consent was granted in 1919. In the period 1916–22, Nielsen often lived on Funen retreating to the Damgaard and Fuglsang estates, or worked as a conductor in Gothenburg. The period was one of creative crisis for Nielsen which, coinciding with World War I, would strongly influence his Fourth (1914–16) and Fifth symphonies (1921–22), arguably his greatest works according to Fanning. The composer was particularly upset in the 1920s when his long-standing Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen was unable to undertake publication of many of his major works, including Aladdin and Pan and Syrinx.
The sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. After suffering a serious heart attack in 1925, Nielsen was forced to curtail much of his activity, although he continued to compose until his death. His sixtieth birthday in 1925 brought many congratulations, a decoration from the Swedish government, and a gala concert and reception in Copenhagen. The composer, however, was in a dour mood; in an article in Politiken on 9 November 1925 he wrote: If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end ... What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
Final years and death
Nielsen's final large-scale orchestral works were his Flute Concerto (1926) and the Clarinet Concerto (1928), of which Robert Layton writes: "If ever there was music from another planet, this is surely it. Its sonorities are sparse and monochrome, its air rarefied and bracing." Nielsen's last musical composition, the organ work Commotio, was premiered posthumously in 1931 in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck.
During his final years, Nielsen produced a short book of essays entitled Living Music (1925), followed in 1927 by his memoir Min Fynske Barndom. In 1926 he wrote in his diary "My home soil pulls me more and more like a long sucking kiss. Does it mean that I shall finally return and rest in the earth of Funen? Then it must be in the place where I was born: Sortelung, Frydenlands parish".
This was not to be. Nielsen was admitted to Copenhagen's National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) on 1 October 1931 following a series of heart attacks. He died there at ten minutes past midnight on 3 October, surrounded by his family. His last words to them were "You are standing here as if you were waiting for something".
He was buried in Copenhagen's Vestre Cemetery; all the music at his funeral, including the hymns, was the work of the composer. After his death, his wife was commissioned to sculpt a monument to him, to be erected in central Copenhagen. She wrote: "I wanted to take the winged horse, eternal symbol of poetry, and place a musician on its back. He was to sit there between the rushing wings blowing a reed pipe out over Copenhagen." Dispute about her design and a shortfall in funding meant that erection of the monument was delayed and that Anne Marie herself ended up subsidising it. The Carl Nielsen Monument was finally unveiled in 1939.
Music
Nielsen's works are sometimes referred to by CNW numbers, based on the Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works (CNW) published online by the Danish Royal Library in 2015. The CNW catalogue is intended to replace the 1965 catalogue compiled by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe (FS numbers).
Musical style
In his Lives of the Great Composers, the music critic Harold Schonberg emphasizes the breadth of Nielsen's compositions, his energetic rhythms, generous orchestration and his individuality. In comparing him with Jean Sibelius, he considers he had "just as much sweep, even more power, and a more universal message". The Oxford University music professor Daniel M. Grimley qualifies Nielsen as "one of the most playful, life-affirming, and awkward voices in twentieth-century music" thanks to the "melodic richness and harmonic vitality" of his work. Anne-Marie Reynolds, author of Carl Nielsen's Voice: His Songs in Context, cites Robert Simpson's view that "all of his music is vocal in origin", maintaining that song-writing strongly influenced Nielsen's development as a composer.
The Danish sociologist Benedikte Brincker observes that the perception of Nielsen and his music in his home country is rather different from his international appreciation. His interest and background in folk music had special resonance for Danes, and this was intensified during the nationalistic movements of the 1930s and during World War II, when singing was an important basis for the Danes to distinguish themselves from their German enemies. Nielsen's songs retain an important place in Danish culture and education. The musicologist Niels Krabbe describes the popular image of Nielsen in Denmark as being like "the ugly duckling syndrome" – a reference to the tale of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen – whereby "a poor boy ... passing through adversity and frugality ... marches into Copenhagen and ... comes to conquer the position as the uncrowned King".
While outside Denmark Nielsen is largely thought of as the composer of orchestral music and the opera Maskarade, in his own country he is more of a national symbol. These two sides were officially brought together in Denmark in 2006 when the Ministry of Culture issued a list of the twelve greatest Danish musical works that included Nielsen’s opera Maskarade, his Fourth Symphony, and a pair of his Danish folk songs. Krabbe asks the rhetorical question: "Can 'the national' in Nielsen be demonstrated in the music in the form of particular themes, harmonies, sounds, forms, etc., or is it a pure construct of reception history?"
Nielsen himself was ambiguous about his attitudes to late Romantic German music and to nationalism in music. He wrote to the Dutch composer Julius Röntgen in 1909 "I am surprised by the technical skills of the Germans nowadays, and I cannot help thinking that all this delight in complication must exhaust itself. I foresee a completely new art of pure archaic virtue. What do you think about songs sung in unison? We must go back ... to the pure and the clear." On the other hand, he wrote in 1925 "Nothing destroys music more than nationalism does ... and it is impossible to deliver national music on request."
Nielsen studied Renaissance polyphony closely, which accounts for some of the melodic and harmonic content of his music. This interest is exemplified in his Tre Motetter (Three Motets, Op. 55). To non-Danish critics, Nielsen's music initially had a neo-classical sound but became increasingly modern as he developed his own approach to what the writer and composer Robert Simpson called progressive tonality, moving from one key to another. Typically, Nielsen's music might end in a different key from that of its commencement, sometimes as the outcome of a struggle as in his symphonies. There is debate as to how much such elements owe to his folk music activities. Some critics have referred to his rhythms, his use of acciaccaturas or appoggiaturas, or his frequent use of a flattened seventh and minor third in his works, as being typically Danish. The composer himself wrote "The intervals, as I see it, are the elements which first arouse a deeper interest in music ... [I]t is intervals which surprise and delight us anew every time we hear the cuckoo in spring. Its appeal would be less if its call were all on one note."
Nielsen's philosophy of music style is perhaps summed up in his advice in a 1907 letter to the Norwegian composer Knut Harder: "You have ... fluency, so far, so good; but I advise you again and again, my dear Mr. Harder; Tonality, Clarity, Strength."
Symphonies
Nielsen is perhaps most closely associated outside Denmark with his six symphonies, written between 1892 and 1925. The works have much in common: they are all just over 30 minutes long, brass instruments are a key component of the orchestration, and they all exhibit unusual changes in tonality, which heighten the dramatic tension. From its opening bars, Symphony No. 1 (Op. 7, 1890–92), while reflecting the influence of Grieg and Brahms, shows Nielsen's individuality. In Symphony No. 2 (Op. 16, 1901–02), Nielsen embarks on the development of human character. Inspiration came from a painting in an inn depicting the four temperaments (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine).
The title of Symphony No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva (Op. 27, 1910–11), is understood by the English composer Robert Simpson to refer to the "outward growth of the mind's scope". It fully exploits Nielsen's technique of confronting two keys at the same time and includes a peaceful section with soprano and baritone voices, singing a tune without words. Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable (Op. 29, 1914–16), written during World War I, is among the most frequently performed of the symphonies. In the last movement two sets of timpani are placed on opposite sides of the stage undertaking a kind of musical duel. Nielsen described the symphony as "the life force, the unquenchable will to live".
Also frequently performed is the Symphony No. 5 (Op. 50, 1921–22), presenting another battle between the forces of order and chaos. A snare drummer is given the task of interrupting the orchestra, playing and out of time, as if to destroy the music. Performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erik Tuxen at the 1950 Edinburgh International Festival, it caused a sensation, sparking interest in Nielsen's music outside Scandinavia. In Symphony No. 6 (without opus number), written 1924–25, and subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (Simple Symphony), the tonal language seems similar to that in Nielsen's other symphonies, but the symphony develops into a sequence of cameos, some sad, some grotesque, some humorous.
Operas and cantatas
Nielsen's two operas are very different in style. The four-act (Saul and David), written in 1902 to a libretto by Einar Christiansen, tells the Biblical story of Saul's jealousy of the young David while (Masquerade) is a comic opera in three acts written in 1906 to a Danish libretto by Vilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. Saul and David received a negative press when it was premiered in November 1902 and did no better when it was revived in 1904. By contrast, in November 1906 Masquerade was a resounding success with an exceptional run of 25 performances over its first four months. Generally considered to be Denmark's national opera, in its home country it has enjoyed lasting success and popularity, attributable to its many strophic songs, its dances and its underlying "old Copenhagen" atmosphere.
Nielsen wrote a considerable number of choral works but most of them were composed for special occasions and were seldom reprised. Three fully-fledged cantatas for soloists, orchestra and choir have, however, entered the repertoire. Nielsen composed (Hymn of Love), Op. 12 (1897) after studying early polyphonic choral style. Writing in the newspaper Dannebrog, Nanna Liebmann referred to the work as "a decisive victory" for Nielsen, and Angul Hammerich of Nationaltidende welcomed its improved clarity and purity. But the reviewer H.W. Schytte thought Nielsen had been pretentious presenting the lyrics in Latin rather than Danish. (The Sleep), Op. 18, Nielsen's second major choral work, sets to music the various phases of sleep including the terror of a nightmare in its central movement which, with its unusual discords, came as a shock to the reviewers at its premiere in March 1905. (Springtime on Funen), Op. 42, completed in 1922, has been cited as the most Danish of all Nielsen's compositions as it extols the beauty of Funen's countryside.
Concertos
Nielsen wrote three concertos: the Violin Concerto, Op. 33 is a middle-period work, from 1911, which lies within the tradition of European classicism, whereas the Flute Concerto (without opus number) of 1926 and the Clarinet Concerto, Op. 57 which followed in 1928 are late works, influenced by the modernism of the 1920s and, according to the Danish musicologist Herbert Rosenberg, the product of "an extremely experienced composer who knows how to avoid inessentials." Unlike Nielsen's later works, the Violin Concerto has a distinct, melody-oriented neo-classical structure. The Flute Concerto, in two movements, was written for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet which had premiered Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). In contrast to the rather traditional style of the Violin Concerto, it reflects the modernistic trends of the period. The first movement, for example, switches between D minor, E-flat minor and F major before the flute comes to the fore with a cantabile theme in E major. The Clarinet Concerto was also written for a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, Aage Oxenvad. Nielsen stretches the capacities of instrument and player to the utmost; the concerto has just one continuous movement and contains a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra and between the two principal competing keys, F major and E major.
The wind concertos present many examples of what Nielsen called ("objectification"). By this term he meant giving instrumentalists freedom of interpretation and performance within the bounds set out by the score.
Orchestral music
Nielsen's earliest work composed specifically for orchestra was the immediately successful Suite for Strings (1888), which evoked Scandinavian Romanticism as expressed by Grieg and Svendsen. The work marked an important milestone in Nielsen's career as it was not only his first real success but it was also the first of his pieces he conducted himself when it was played in Odense a month later.
The Helios Overture, Op. 17 (1903) stems from Nielsen's stay in Athens which inspired him to compose a work depicting the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea. The score is a showpiece for orchestra, and has been amongst Nielsen's most popular works. (Saga Dream), Op. 39 (1907–08) is a tone poem for orchestra based on the Icelandic Njal's Saga. In Nielsen's words:
There are among other things four cadenzas for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and flute which run quite freely alongside one another, with no harmonic connection, and without my marking time. They are just like four streams of thought, each going its own way – differently and randomly for each performance – until they meet in a point of rest, as if flowing into a lock where they are united.
At the Bier of a Young Artist () for string orchestra was written for the funeral of the Danish painter Oluf Hartmann in January 1910 and was also played at Nielsen's own funeral. Pan and Syrinx (), a vigorous nine-minute symphonic poem inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, was premiered in 1911. The Rhapsodic Overture, An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands (), draws on Faroese folk tunes but also contains freely composed sections.
Among Nielsen's orchestral works for the stage are Aladdin (1919) and (The Mother), Op. 41 (1920). Aladdin was written to accompany a production of Adam Oehlenschläger's fairy tale at The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. The complete score, lasting over 80 minutes, is Nielsen's longest work apart from his operas, but a shorter orchestral suite consisting of the Oriental March, Hindu Dance and Negro Dance is often performed. , written to celebrate the reunification of Southern Jutland with Denmark, was first performed in 1921; it is a setting of patriotic verses written for the occasion.
Chamber music
Nielsen composed several chamber music works, some of them still high on the international repertoire. The Wind Quintet, one of his most popular pieces, was composed in 1922 specifically for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Simpson, explaining that Nielsen's fondness of wind instruments was closely related to his love of nature, writes: "He was also intensely interested in human character, and in the Wind Quintet composed deliberately for five friends; each part is cunningly made to suit the individuality of each player."
Nielsen wrote four string quartets. The First String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13 (1889, revised 1900) contains a "Résumé" section in the finale, bringing together themes from the first, third and fourth movements. The Second String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 5 appeared in 1890 and the Third String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 14 in 1898. The music historian Jan Smaczny suggests that in this work "the handling of texture is confident and far less derivative than in earlier works ... [the quartet] prompts the most regret that Nielsen did not pursue the genre further ... to parallel his later symphonic development". The Fourth String Quartet in F major (1904) initially received a mixed reception, with critics uncertain about its reserved style. Nielsen revised it several times, the final version in 1919 being listed as his Op. 44.
The violin was Nielsen's own instrument and he composed four large-scale chamber works for it. The departures from standard procedures in the First Sonata, Op. 9 (1895), including its often sudden modulations and its terse thematic material, disconcerted Danish critics at its first performance. The Second Sonata, Op. 35 of 1912 was written for the violinist Peder Møller who earlier that year had premiered the composer's Violin Concerto. The work is an example of the composer's progressive tonality since, although it is stated to be in the key of G minor, the first and final movements end in different keys. The critic Emilius Bangert wrote of the premiere (which was given by Axel Gade), "The overall impression was of a beautiful, unbroken line – a flow of notes – where in particular a wonderful second subject in the first part and the pure, high sphere of the last part were captivating". Two other works are for violin solo. The Prelude, Theme and Variations, Op. 48 (1923) was written for Telmányi, and, like Nielsen's Chaconne for piano, Op. 32, was inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Preludio e Presto, Op. 52 (1928) was written as a tribute for the sixtieth birthday of the composer Fini Henriques.
Keyboard works
Although Nielsen came to compose mainly at the piano, he only composed directly for it occasionally over a period of 40 years, creating works often with a distinctive style which slowed their international acceptance. Nielsen's own piano technique, an echo of which is probably preserved in three wax cylinders marked "Carl Nielsen" at the State Archives in Aarhus, seems to have been mediocre. Reviewing the 1969 recording of works by the pianist John Ogdon, John Horton commented on the early pieces: "Nielsen's technical resources hardly measure up to the grandeur of his designs", whilst characterising the later pieces as "major works which can stand comparison with his symphonic music". The anti-romantic tone of the Symphonic Suite, Op. 8 (1894) was described by a later critic as "nothing less than a clenched fist straight in the face of all established musical convention". In Nielsen's words, the Chaconne, Op. 32 (1917) was "a really big piece, and I think effective". It is not only inspired by the work of Bach, especially the chaconne for solo violin, but also by the virtuoso piano arrangements of Bach's music by composers such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Ferruccio Busoni. Also on a large scale, and from the same year, is the Theme and Variations, Op. 41, in which critics have discerned the influences of Brahms and also of Max Reger, of whom Nielsen had earlier written to a friend "I think that the public will be utterly unable to grasp Reger's work and yet I am a lot more sympathetic towards his efforts than towards ... Richard Strauss".
All Nielsen's organ works were late compositions. The Danish organist Finn Viderø suggests that his interest was prompted by the (Organ reform movement), and the renewal of the front pipes of the Schnitger organ in the St. Jacobi Church, Hamburg, from 1928 to 1930. Nielsen's last major work – , Op. 58, a 22-minute piece for organ – was composed between June 1930 and February 1931, only a few months before his death.
Songs and hymns
Over the years, Nielsen wrote the music for over 290 songs and hymns, most of them for verses and poems by well-known Danish authors such as N. F. S. Grundtvig, Ingemann, Poul Martin Møller, Adam Oehlenschläger and Jeppe Aakjær. In Denmark, many of them are still popular today both with adults and children. They are regarded as "the most representative part of the country's most representative composer's output". In 1906, Nielsen had explained the significance of such songs to his countrymen:With certain melodic inflections we Danes unavoidably think of the poems of, for example, Ingemann, Christian Winther or Drachmann, and we often seem to perceive the smell of Danish landscapes and rural images in our songs and music. But it is also clear that a foreigner, who knows neither our countryside, nor our painters, our poets, or our history in the same intimate way as we do ourselves, will be completely unable to grasp what it is that brings us to hear and tremble with sympathetic understanding.
Of great significance was Nielsen's contribution to the 1922 publication, Folkehøjskolens Melodibog (The Folk High School Songbook), of which he was one of the editors together with Thomas Laub, Oluf Ring and Thorvald Aagaard. The book contained about 600 melodies, of which about 200 were composed by the editors, and was intended to provide a repertoire for communal singing, an integral part of Danish folk culture. The collection was extremely popular and became embedded in the Danish educational system. During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, mass song gatherings, using these melodies, were part of Denmark's "spiritual re-armament", and after the war in 1945 Nielsen's contributions were characterised by one writer as "shining jewels in our treasure-chest of patriotic songs". This remains a significant factor in Danish assessment of the composer.
Editions
Between 1994 and 2009 a complete new edition of Nielsen's works, the Carl Nielsen Edition, was commissioned by the Danish Government (at a cost of over 40 million kroner). For many of the works, including the operas Maskarade and Saul and David, and the complete Aladdin music, this was their first printed publication, copies of manuscripts having previously been used in performances. The scores are now all available for download free of charge at the website of the Danish Royal Library (which also owns most of Nielsen's music manuscripts).
Reception
Unlike that of his contemporary, the Finn Jean Sibelius, Nielsen's reputation abroad did not start to evolve until after World War II. For some time, international interest was largely directed towards his symphonies while his other works, many of them highly popular in Denmark, have only recently started to become part of the world repertoire. Even in Denmark, many of his compositions failed to impress. It was only in 1897 after the first performance of Hymnus amoris that he received support from the critics, to be substantially reinforced in 1906 by their enthusiastic reception of Masquerade.
Within two months of its successful premiere at the Odd Fellows Concert Hall in Copenhagen on 28 February 1912, the Third Symphony (Espansiva) was in the repertoire of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and by 1913 it had seen performances in Stuttgart, Stockholm and Helsinki. The symphony was the most popular of all Nielsen's works during his lifetime and was also played in Berlin, Hamburg, London and Gothenburg. Other works caused some uncertainty, even in Denmark. After the premiere of the Fifth Symphony (1922) one critic wrote: "The treasure of Danish symphonies and Carl Nielsen's own output have been enriched by a strange and highly original work." Another, however, described it as a "bloody, clenched fist in the face of an unsuspecting snob audience", also qualifying it as "filthy music from trenches".
At the end of the 1940s two major biographies of Nielsen appeared in Danish, dominating opinion of the composer's life and work for several decades. Robert Simpson's book Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (first edition 1952) was the earliest large-scale study in English.
An international breakthrough came in 1962 when Leonard Bernstein recorded the Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic for CBS. The recording helped Nielsen's music to achieve appreciation beyond his home country and is considered one of the finest recorded accounts of the symphony. Nielsen's centenary in 1965 was widely celebrated, both in terms of performances and publications, and Bernstein was awarded the Sonning Prize for his recording of the Third Symphony. In 1988 Nielsen's diaries and his letters to Anne Marie were published, and these, together with a 1991 biography by Jørgen Jensen using this new material, led to a revised objective assessment of the composer's personality. Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of Nielsen's 125th anniversary in 1990, the music critic Andrew Pincus recalled that 25 years earlier Bernstein had believed the world was ready to accept the Dane as the equal of Jean Sibelius, speaking of "his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability" (which Pincus believed was still a challenge for audiences). Biographies and studies in English in the 1990s helped to establish Nielsen's status worldwide, to the point at which his music has become a regular feature of concert programming in Western countries.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2008, the American music critic Alex Ross compares the "brute strength" of Nielsen's symphonies to Beethoven's Eroica and Fifth Symphony but explains that only now were the Americans slowly beginning to appreciate the Danish composer.
Nielsen did not record any of his works. However, three younger contemporary conductors who had worked with him, Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen, did record his symphonies and other orchestral works with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1946 and 1952. Jensen also made the first LP recording of the Fifth Symphony in 1954. Work carried out by the recently published complete Carl Nielsen Edition has revealed that the scores used in these recordings often differ from the composer's original intentions and thus the supposed authenticity of these recordings is now debatable.
There are now numerous recordings of all Nielsen's major works, including complete cycles of the symphonies conducted by, amongst others, Sir Colin Davis, Herbert Blomstedt and Sakari Oramo. Over 50 recordings have been made of Nielsen's Wind Quintet.
Legacy
From 1916, Nielsen taught at the Royal Academy where he became director in 1931, shortly before his death. He also had private students in his earlier days in order to supplement his income. As a result of his teaching, Nielsen has exerted considerable influence on classical music in Denmark. Among his most successful pupils were the composers Thorvald Aagaard, remembered in particular for his songs, Harald Agersnap, both a conductor and orchestral composer, and Jørgen Bentzon who composed choral and chamber music mainly for his folk music school (Københavns Folkemusikskole). Among his other students were the musicologist Knud Jeppesen, the pianist Herman Koppel, the academy professor and symphony composer Poul Schierbeck, the organist Emilius Bangert who played at Roskilde Cathedral, and Nancy Dalberg, one of Nielsen's private students who helped with the orchestration of Aladdin. Nielsen also instructed the conductor and choirmaster Mogens Wöldike, remembered for his interpretations of Baroque music, and Rudolph Simonsen, the pianist and composer who became director of the Academy after Nielsen's death.
The Carl Nielsen Society maintains a listing of performances of Nielsen's works, classified by region (Denmark, Scandinavia, Europe apart from Scandinavia and outside Europe) which demonstrates that his music is regularly performed throughout the world. The concerti and symphonies feature frequently in these listings.
The Carl Nielsen International Competition commenced in the 1970s under the auspices of the Odense Symphony Orchestra. A four-yearly violin competition has been held there since 1980. Flute and clarinet competitions were later added, but these have now been discontinued. An international Organ Competition, founded by the city of Odense, became associated with the Nielsen competition in 2009, but from 2015 will be organized separately, based in Odense Cathedral.
In his home country, the Carl Nielsen Museum, in Odense, is dedicated to Nielsen and his wife, Anne Marie. The composer is featured on the 100 kroner note issued by the Danish National Bank from 1997 to 2010. His image was selected in recognition of his contribution to Danish music compositions such as his opera Maskarade, his Espansiva symphony and his many songs including "Danmark, nu blunder den lyse nat".
Several special events were scheduled on or around 9 June 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nielsen's birth. In addition to many performances in Denmark, concerts were programmed in cities across Europe, including London, Leipzig, Kraków, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Vienna, and even further afield in Japan, Egypt and New York. For 9 June, Nielsen's birthday, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra presented a programme in Copenhagen's DR Concert Hall featuring Hymnus amoris, the Clarinet Concerto and Symphony No. 4 for a broadcast extending across Europe and the United States. The Danish Royal Opera has programmed Maskarade and a new production (directed by David Pountney) of Saul og David. During 2015, the Danish Quartet scheduled performances of Nielsen's string quartets in Denmark, Israel, Germany, Norway and the UK (at the Cheltenham Music Festival). In the UK, the BBC Philharmonic prepared a concert series on Nielsen beginning on 9 June in Manchester. Nielsen's Maskarade overture was also the first item for the opening night of the 2015 BBC Promenade Concerts in London, while his compositions featured in five other concerts of the Prom season. The city of Odense, which has strong connections with Nielsen, developed an extensive programme of concerts and cultural events for the anniversary year.
Minor planet 6058 Carlnielsen is named in his honor.
References
Citations
Sources
Table of contents, including introductions and music scores.
In .
In .
In .
Obituaries
External links
The Carl Nielsen Edition – index page to introductory information on many of Nielsen's works from the Royal Danish Library
Carl Nielsen bibliography 1985–2008 at the Royal Danish Library
The Danish Carl Nielsen Society – provides much detailed information on the composer and his works, including an overview of upcoming concerts
The Carl Nielsen Museum, Odense – "is a museum dedicated to the composer Carl Nielsen and to his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen".
Nielsen's Late Music, article by Svend Ravnkilde
Carl Nielsen International Music Competition & Festival – an annual music event in Odense, celebrating the composer. Organized by the Odense Symphony Orchestra
List of works from the Carl Nielsen Society
Carl Nielsen som symfoniker (1951–1954), Knud Jeppesen's 44 lectures, International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
"Förunderligt och märkligt" recording with
1865 births
1931 deaths
19th-century classical composers
19th-century classical violinists
19th-century Danish composers
19th-century male conductors (music)
19th-century conductors (music)
20th-century classical composers
20th-century classical violinists
20th-century conductors (music)
20th-century Danish composers
20th-century Danish male musicians
Royal Danish Academy of Music faculty
Burials at Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
Danish classical composers
Danish classical violinists
Danish conductors (music)
Danish music educators
Danish male classical composers
Danish opera composers
Danish Romantic composers
Directors of the Royal Danish Academy of Music
Male classical violinists
Male conductors (music)
Male opera composers
People from Faaborg-Midtfyn Municipality
Pupils of Niels Gade
Royal Danish Academy of Music alumni
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"Ludwig Wilhelm Maurer (February 8, 1789 – October 13–25, 1878) was a German composer, conductor, and violinist born in Potsdam. In 1802, he debuted in Berlin with his first major violin performance. After a brief period of studying French violin style in Mitau (Latvia), Maurer went to Russia at age 17 in 1806, where he would stay for most of his life. For this reason, Maurer is considered both a German and a Russian composer.\n\nUpon his arrival in St. Petersburg, Maurer performed extensively until the French violinist and composer Pierre Baillot aided Maurer in becoming the conductor of the Count Vsevolozhsky's orchestra in Moscow. Maurer conducted the orchestra until 1817 when he toured as a performer in Germany and Paris. In 1819 Maurer began using Hanover as a base for directing and conducting, while touring and composing. During this period Maurer also maintained a composing partnership with Aleksey Nikolayevich Verstovsky in the opera-vaudeville form. Toward the end of this period in Maurer's life, he toured Germany with his sons Vsevolod and Alexis, who played violin and cello respectively.\n\nBy 1833, however, Maurer was back in St. Petersburg, where he would remain for the rest of his life. The following year Maurer appeared as the soloist in the first performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto in Russia. In 1835 Maurer became the conductor and director of the French Opera in St. Petersburg. He attained other positions in the St. Petersburg music scene and continued to compose until his death in October 1878.\n\nImportant Works\n\nOpera:\nDer Neue Paris, 1826\nDer entdeckte Diebstahl, 1826\nAloise, 1828\nDie Runenschrift, 1830\nSymphony in F minor, op. 67\nSinfonia concertante, op. 55\nViolin concertos 1-10\nString quartets 1-6\nvarious opera-vaudevilles\nTwelve Little Pieces for Brass\n\nNotes\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1789 births\n1878 deaths\nGerman Romantic composers\nGerman conductors (music)\nGerman male conductors (music)\nGerman classical violinists\nMale classical violinists\nGerman violinists\nGerman male violinists\n19th-century classical composers\nGerman male classical composers\n19th-century German composers\n19th-century German male musicians",
"A violin sonata is a musical composition for violin, often accompanied by a keyboard instrument and in earlier periods with a bass instrument doubling the keyboard bass line. The violin sonata developed from a simple baroque form with no fixed format to a standardised and complex classical form. Since the romantic age some composers have pushed the boundaries of both the classical format as well as the use of the instruments.\n\nThe early violin sonata\nIn the earliest violin sonatas a bass instrument and the harpsichord played a simple bass line (continuo) with the harpsichord doubling the bass line and fixed chords while the violin played independently. The music was contrapuntal with no fixed format. Georg Philipp Telemann wrote many such sonatas as did Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach also wrote sonatas with harpsichord obbligato, which freed the keyboard instrument from playing only a bass line accompaniment and allowed in to enhance the part of the soloist. He also wrote sonatas for solo violin without any kind of accompaniment.\n\nThe classical sonata form\n\nMozart was instrumental in the development of the classical violin sonata of which at least 36 are known. Mozart wrote mostly two movement sonatas, generally a fast movement in sonata form and a second, slower movement in various formats. In his later sonatas he added a third fast movement in various formats. Several of his violin sonatas feature a movement in theme and variation format.\n\nBeethoven wrote ten violin sonatas throughout his composing career. His sonatas matured in both style and complexity; the Kreutzer Sonata is a work of extreme contrast. A rendition typically lasts forty minutes and is very demanding on both players.\n\nBrahms, Franck, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Shostakovich amongst other later composers added to the repertoire pushing the form to its limits, or writing rules of their own.\n\nThe modern violin sonata\n\nSchnittke (with his polystylistic technique), and Henze are noted modern composers of the violin sonata who have all brought about radical reformation of the classical sonata form as well as new technical demands on the performers.\n\nSee also\nList of violin sonatas\nSonata form\nViolin\n Violin concerto\nSonata\n\nReferences"
] |
[
"Carl Nielsen",
"Early years",
"Did he have a hard time in his early years?",
"Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen.",
"When did his his interest begin in playing violin?",
"when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin",
"What happened after he tried the violin?",
"He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine:",
"When did he begin to get recognition for his talent?",
"As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper",
"DId he continue with the violin and composing after becoming a shopkeeper?",
"Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion,"
] |
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Are there any other interesting aspects about this article aside from Nielsen not giving up violin during his time with the battalion?
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Carl Nielsen
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Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jorgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography Min Fynske Barndom (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837-1881), was a talented musician. Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin". He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka which the composer mentioned in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper from a nearby village when he was fourteen; the shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense. Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 ore and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances. CANNOTANSWER
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After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense.
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Carl August Nielsen (; 9 June 1865 – 3 October 1931) was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer.
Brought up by poor yet musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. He initially played in a military band before attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen from 1884 until December 1886. He premiered his Op. 1, Suite for Strings, in 1888, at the age of 23. The following year, Nielsen began a 16-year stint as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra under the conductor Johan Svendsen, during which he played in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy and continued to work there until his death.
Although his symphonies, concertos and choral music are now internationally acclaimed, Nielsen's career and personal life were marked by many difficulties, often reflected in his music. The works he composed between 1897 and 1904 are sometimes ascribed to his "psychological" period, resulting mainly from a turbulent marriage with the sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen. Nielsen is especially noted for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera Maskarade and many of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. His early music was inspired by composers such as Brahms and Grieg, but he soon developed his own style, first experimenting with progressive tonality and later diverging even more radically from the standards of composition still common at the time. Nielsen's sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. He died from a heart attack six years later, and is buried in Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen.
Nielsen maintained the reputation of a musical outsider during his lifetime, both in his own country and internationally. It was only later that his works firmly entered the international repertoire, accelerating in popularity from the 1960s through Leonard Bernstein and others. In Denmark, Nielsen's reputation was sealed in 2006 when four of his works were listed by the Danish Ministry of Culture amongst the greatest pieces of Danish classical music. For many years, he appeared on the Danish hundred-kroner banknote. The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense documents his life and that of his wife. Between 1994 and 2009 the Royal Danish Library, sponsored by the Danish government, completed the Carl Nielsen Edition, freely available online, containing background information and sheet music for all of Nielsen's works, many of which had not been previously published.
Life
Early years
Nielsen was born on 9 June 1865, the seventh of twelve children in a poor peasant family, at Sortelung near Nørre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jørgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains, while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837–1881), was a talented musician.
Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin." He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He studied violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka that he mentions in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper in a nearby village when he was fourteen. The shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion in Odense.
Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 øre and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances.
Studies and early career
In 1881, Nielsen began to take his violin playing more seriously, studying privately under Carl Larsen, the sexton at Odense Cathedral. It is not known how much Nielsen composed during this period, but from his autobiography, it can be deduced that he wrote some trios and quartets for brass instruments, and that he had difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that brass instruments were tuned in different keys. Following an introduction to Niels W. Gade, the director of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, by whom he was well received, Nielsen obtained his release from the military band at short notice, and studied at the Academy from the beginning of 1884.
Though not an outstanding student and composing little, Nielsen progressed well in violin under Valdemar Tofte (1832–1907), and received a solid grounding in music theory from Orla Rosenhoff (1844–1905), who would remain a valued adviser during his early years as a professional composer. He also studied composition under Gade, whom he liked as a friend but not for his music. Contacts with fellow students and cultured families in Copenhagen, some of whom would become lifelong friends, became equally important. The patchy education resulting from his country background left Nielsen insatiably curious about the arts, philosophy and aesthetics. But, in the opinion of the musicologist David Fanning, it also left him "with a highly personal, common man's point of view on those subjects". He left the Academy at the end of 1886, after graduating with good but not outstanding marks in all subjects. He then went to stay with the retired Odense merchant Jens Georg Nielsen (1820–1901) and his wife at their apartment on Slagelsegade as he was not yet in a position to pay his own way. While there, he fell in love with their 14-year-old daughter Emilie Demant. The affair was to last for the next three years.
On 17 September 1887, Nielsen played the violin in the Tivoli Concert Hall when his Andante tranquillo e Scherzo for strings was premiered. Shortly afterwards, on 25 January 1888, his String Quartet in F major was played at one of the private performances of the (Private Chamber Music Society). While Nielsen considered the Quartet in F to be his official debut as a professional composer, a far greater impression was made by his Suite for Strings. Performed at Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen on 8 September 1888, it was designated by Nielsen as his Op. 1.
By September 1889 Nielsen had progressed well enough on the violin to gain a position with the second violins in the prestigious Royal Danish Orchestra which played at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, then conducted by Johan Svendsen. In this position he experienced Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. Although this employment sometimes caused Nielsen considerable frustration, he continued to play there until 1905. After Svendsen's retirement in 1906, Nielsen increasingly served as conductor (being officially appointed assistant conductor in 1910). Between graduation and attaining this position, he made a modest income from private violin lessons while enjoying the continuing support of his patrons, not only Jens Georg Nielsen but also Albert Sachs (born 1846) and Hans Demant (1827–1897) who both ran factories in Odense. After less than a year at the Royal Theatre, Nielsen won a scholarship of 1,800 kroner, giving him the means to spend several months travelling in Europe.
Marriage and children
While travelling, Nielsen discovered and then turned against Richard Wagner's music dramas, heard many of Europe's leading orchestras and soloists and sharpened his opinions on both music and the visual arts. Although he revered the music of Bach and Mozart, he remained ambivalent about much 19th-century music. In 1891 he met the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Leipzig; they were to maintain a correspondence for over thirty years. Shortly after arriving in Paris in early March 1891 Nielsen met the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen, who was also travelling on a scholarship. They toured Italy together and married in St Mark's English Church, Florence, on 10 May 1891 before returning to Denmark. According to Fanning, their relationship was not only a "love match", but also a "meeting of minds"; Anne Marie was a gifted artist and a "strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career". This determination would strain the Nielsens' marriage, as Anne Marie would spend months away from home during the 1890s and 1900s, leaving Carl, who was susceptible to opportunities with other ladies, to raise their three young children in addition to composing and fulfilling his duties at the Royal Theatre.
Nielsen sublimated his anger and frustration over his marriage in a number of musical works, most notably between 1897 and 1904, a period which he sometimes called his "psychological" period. Fanning writes, "At this time his interest in the driving forces behind human personality crystallized in the opera Saul and David and the Second Symphony (The Four Temperaments) and the cantatas and ". Carl suggested divorce in March 1905 and had considered moving to Germany for a fresh start, but despite several extended periods of separation the Nielsens remained married for the remainder of the composer's life.
Nielsen had five children, two of them illegitimate. He had already fathered a son, Carl August Nielsen, in January 1888, before he met Anne Marie. In 1912, an illegitimate daughter was born – Rachel Siegmann, about whom Anne Marie never learned. With his wife Nielsen had two daughters and a son. Irmelin, the elder daughter, studied music theory with her father and in December 1919 married Eggert Møller (1893–1978), a medical doctor who became a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the polyclinic at the National Hospital. The younger daughter Anne Marie, who graduated from the Copenhagen Academy of Arts, married the Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi (1892–1988) in 1918; he contributed to the promotion of Nielsen's music, both as a violinist and a conductor. Nielsen's son, Hans Børge, was handicapped as a result of meningitis and spent most of his life away from the family. He died near Kolding in 1956.
Mature composer
At first, Nielsen's works did not gain sufficient recognition for him to be able to support himself. During the concert which saw the premiere of his First Symphony on 14 March 1894 conducted by Svendsen, Nielsen played in the second violin section. The symphony was a great success when played in Berlin in 1896, contributing significantly to his reputation. He was increasingly in demand to write incidental music for the theatre as well as cantatas for special occasions, both of which provided a welcome source of additional income. Fanning comments on the relationship which developed between his programmatic and symphonic works: "Sometimes he would find stageworthy ideas in his supposedly pure orchestral music; sometimes a text or scenario forced him to invent vivid musical imagery which he could later turn to more abstract use."
Nielsen's cantata Hymnus amoris for soloists, chorus and orchestra was first performed at Copenhagen's Musikforeningen (The Music Society) on 27 April 1897. It was inspired by Titian's painting Miracle of the Jealous Husband which Nielsen had seen on his honeymoon in Italy in 1891. On one of the copies, he wrote: "To my own Marie! These tones in praise of love are nothing compared to the real thing."
Beginning in 1901, Nielsen received a modest state pension – initially 800 kroner per annum, growing to 7,500 kroner by 1927 – to augment his violinist's salary. This allowed him to stop taking private pupils and left him more time to compose. From 1903, he also had an annual retainer from his principal publisher, . Between 1905 and 1914 he served as second conductor at the Royal Theatre. For his son-in-law, Emil Telmányi, Nielsen wrote his Violin Concerto, Op. 33 (1911). From 1914 to 1926, he conducted the Musikforeningen orchestra. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and continued to work there until his death.
The strain of dual careers and constant separation from his wife led to an extended breach in his marriage. The couple began separation proceedings in 1916, and separation by mutual consent was granted in 1919. In the period 1916–22, Nielsen often lived on Funen retreating to the Damgaard and Fuglsang estates, or worked as a conductor in Gothenburg. The period was one of creative crisis for Nielsen which, coinciding with World War I, would strongly influence his Fourth (1914–16) and Fifth symphonies (1921–22), arguably his greatest works according to Fanning. The composer was particularly upset in the 1920s when his long-standing Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen was unable to undertake publication of many of his major works, including Aladdin and Pan and Syrinx.
The sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. After suffering a serious heart attack in 1925, Nielsen was forced to curtail much of his activity, although he continued to compose until his death. His sixtieth birthday in 1925 brought many congratulations, a decoration from the Swedish government, and a gala concert and reception in Copenhagen. The composer, however, was in a dour mood; in an article in Politiken on 9 November 1925 he wrote: If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end ... What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
Final years and death
Nielsen's final large-scale orchestral works were his Flute Concerto (1926) and the Clarinet Concerto (1928), of which Robert Layton writes: "If ever there was music from another planet, this is surely it. Its sonorities are sparse and monochrome, its air rarefied and bracing." Nielsen's last musical composition, the organ work Commotio, was premiered posthumously in 1931 in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck.
During his final years, Nielsen produced a short book of essays entitled Living Music (1925), followed in 1927 by his memoir Min Fynske Barndom. In 1926 he wrote in his diary "My home soil pulls me more and more like a long sucking kiss. Does it mean that I shall finally return and rest in the earth of Funen? Then it must be in the place where I was born: Sortelung, Frydenlands parish".
This was not to be. Nielsen was admitted to Copenhagen's National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) on 1 October 1931 following a series of heart attacks. He died there at ten minutes past midnight on 3 October, surrounded by his family. His last words to them were "You are standing here as if you were waiting for something".
He was buried in Copenhagen's Vestre Cemetery; all the music at his funeral, including the hymns, was the work of the composer. After his death, his wife was commissioned to sculpt a monument to him, to be erected in central Copenhagen. She wrote: "I wanted to take the winged horse, eternal symbol of poetry, and place a musician on its back. He was to sit there between the rushing wings blowing a reed pipe out over Copenhagen." Dispute about her design and a shortfall in funding meant that erection of the monument was delayed and that Anne Marie herself ended up subsidising it. The Carl Nielsen Monument was finally unveiled in 1939.
Music
Nielsen's works are sometimes referred to by CNW numbers, based on the Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works (CNW) published online by the Danish Royal Library in 2015. The CNW catalogue is intended to replace the 1965 catalogue compiled by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe (FS numbers).
Musical style
In his Lives of the Great Composers, the music critic Harold Schonberg emphasizes the breadth of Nielsen's compositions, his energetic rhythms, generous orchestration and his individuality. In comparing him with Jean Sibelius, he considers he had "just as much sweep, even more power, and a more universal message". The Oxford University music professor Daniel M. Grimley qualifies Nielsen as "one of the most playful, life-affirming, and awkward voices in twentieth-century music" thanks to the "melodic richness and harmonic vitality" of his work. Anne-Marie Reynolds, author of Carl Nielsen's Voice: His Songs in Context, cites Robert Simpson's view that "all of his music is vocal in origin", maintaining that song-writing strongly influenced Nielsen's development as a composer.
The Danish sociologist Benedikte Brincker observes that the perception of Nielsen and his music in his home country is rather different from his international appreciation. His interest and background in folk music had special resonance for Danes, and this was intensified during the nationalistic movements of the 1930s and during World War II, when singing was an important basis for the Danes to distinguish themselves from their German enemies. Nielsen's songs retain an important place in Danish culture and education. The musicologist Niels Krabbe describes the popular image of Nielsen in Denmark as being like "the ugly duckling syndrome" – a reference to the tale of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen – whereby "a poor boy ... passing through adversity and frugality ... marches into Copenhagen and ... comes to conquer the position as the uncrowned King".
While outside Denmark Nielsen is largely thought of as the composer of orchestral music and the opera Maskarade, in his own country he is more of a national symbol. These two sides were officially brought together in Denmark in 2006 when the Ministry of Culture issued a list of the twelve greatest Danish musical works that included Nielsen’s opera Maskarade, his Fourth Symphony, and a pair of his Danish folk songs. Krabbe asks the rhetorical question: "Can 'the national' in Nielsen be demonstrated in the music in the form of particular themes, harmonies, sounds, forms, etc., or is it a pure construct of reception history?"
Nielsen himself was ambiguous about his attitudes to late Romantic German music and to nationalism in music. He wrote to the Dutch composer Julius Röntgen in 1909 "I am surprised by the technical skills of the Germans nowadays, and I cannot help thinking that all this delight in complication must exhaust itself. I foresee a completely new art of pure archaic virtue. What do you think about songs sung in unison? We must go back ... to the pure and the clear." On the other hand, he wrote in 1925 "Nothing destroys music more than nationalism does ... and it is impossible to deliver national music on request."
Nielsen studied Renaissance polyphony closely, which accounts for some of the melodic and harmonic content of his music. This interest is exemplified in his Tre Motetter (Three Motets, Op. 55). To non-Danish critics, Nielsen's music initially had a neo-classical sound but became increasingly modern as he developed his own approach to what the writer and composer Robert Simpson called progressive tonality, moving from one key to another. Typically, Nielsen's music might end in a different key from that of its commencement, sometimes as the outcome of a struggle as in his symphonies. There is debate as to how much such elements owe to his folk music activities. Some critics have referred to his rhythms, his use of acciaccaturas or appoggiaturas, or his frequent use of a flattened seventh and minor third in his works, as being typically Danish. The composer himself wrote "The intervals, as I see it, are the elements which first arouse a deeper interest in music ... [I]t is intervals which surprise and delight us anew every time we hear the cuckoo in spring. Its appeal would be less if its call were all on one note."
Nielsen's philosophy of music style is perhaps summed up in his advice in a 1907 letter to the Norwegian composer Knut Harder: "You have ... fluency, so far, so good; but I advise you again and again, my dear Mr. Harder; Tonality, Clarity, Strength."
Symphonies
Nielsen is perhaps most closely associated outside Denmark with his six symphonies, written between 1892 and 1925. The works have much in common: they are all just over 30 minutes long, brass instruments are a key component of the orchestration, and they all exhibit unusual changes in tonality, which heighten the dramatic tension. From its opening bars, Symphony No. 1 (Op. 7, 1890–92), while reflecting the influence of Grieg and Brahms, shows Nielsen's individuality. In Symphony No. 2 (Op. 16, 1901–02), Nielsen embarks on the development of human character. Inspiration came from a painting in an inn depicting the four temperaments (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine).
The title of Symphony No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva (Op. 27, 1910–11), is understood by the English composer Robert Simpson to refer to the "outward growth of the mind's scope". It fully exploits Nielsen's technique of confronting two keys at the same time and includes a peaceful section with soprano and baritone voices, singing a tune without words. Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable (Op. 29, 1914–16), written during World War I, is among the most frequently performed of the symphonies. In the last movement two sets of timpani are placed on opposite sides of the stage undertaking a kind of musical duel. Nielsen described the symphony as "the life force, the unquenchable will to live".
Also frequently performed is the Symphony No. 5 (Op. 50, 1921–22), presenting another battle between the forces of order and chaos. A snare drummer is given the task of interrupting the orchestra, playing and out of time, as if to destroy the music. Performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erik Tuxen at the 1950 Edinburgh International Festival, it caused a sensation, sparking interest in Nielsen's music outside Scandinavia. In Symphony No. 6 (without opus number), written 1924–25, and subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (Simple Symphony), the tonal language seems similar to that in Nielsen's other symphonies, but the symphony develops into a sequence of cameos, some sad, some grotesque, some humorous.
Operas and cantatas
Nielsen's two operas are very different in style. The four-act (Saul and David), written in 1902 to a libretto by Einar Christiansen, tells the Biblical story of Saul's jealousy of the young David while (Masquerade) is a comic opera in three acts written in 1906 to a Danish libretto by Vilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. Saul and David received a negative press when it was premiered in November 1902 and did no better when it was revived in 1904. By contrast, in November 1906 Masquerade was a resounding success with an exceptional run of 25 performances over its first four months. Generally considered to be Denmark's national opera, in its home country it has enjoyed lasting success and popularity, attributable to its many strophic songs, its dances and its underlying "old Copenhagen" atmosphere.
Nielsen wrote a considerable number of choral works but most of them were composed for special occasions and were seldom reprised. Three fully-fledged cantatas for soloists, orchestra and choir have, however, entered the repertoire. Nielsen composed (Hymn of Love), Op. 12 (1897) after studying early polyphonic choral style. Writing in the newspaper Dannebrog, Nanna Liebmann referred to the work as "a decisive victory" for Nielsen, and Angul Hammerich of Nationaltidende welcomed its improved clarity and purity. But the reviewer H.W. Schytte thought Nielsen had been pretentious presenting the lyrics in Latin rather than Danish. (The Sleep), Op. 18, Nielsen's second major choral work, sets to music the various phases of sleep including the terror of a nightmare in its central movement which, with its unusual discords, came as a shock to the reviewers at its premiere in March 1905. (Springtime on Funen), Op. 42, completed in 1922, has been cited as the most Danish of all Nielsen's compositions as it extols the beauty of Funen's countryside.
Concertos
Nielsen wrote three concertos: the Violin Concerto, Op. 33 is a middle-period work, from 1911, which lies within the tradition of European classicism, whereas the Flute Concerto (without opus number) of 1926 and the Clarinet Concerto, Op. 57 which followed in 1928 are late works, influenced by the modernism of the 1920s and, according to the Danish musicologist Herbert Rosenberg, the product of "an extremely experienced composer who knows how to avoid inessentials." Unlike Nielsen's later works, the Violin Concerto has a distinct, melody-oriented neo-classical structure. The Flute Concerto, in two movements, was written for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet which had premiered Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). In contrast to the rather traditional style of the Violin Concerto, it reflects the modernistic trends of the period. The first movement, for example, switches between D minor, E-flat minor and F major before the flute comes to the fore with a cantabile theme in E major. The Clarinet Concerto was also written for a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, Aage Oxenvad. Nielsen stretches the capacities of instrument and player to the utmost; the concerto has just one continuous movement and contains a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra and between the two principal competing keys, F major and E major.
The wind concertos present many examples of what Nielsen called ("objectification"). By this term he meant giving instrumentalists freedom of interpretation and performance within the bounds set out by the score.
Orchestral music
Nielsen's earliest work composed specifically for orchestra was the immediately successful Suite for Strings (1888), which evoked Scandinavian Romanticism as expressed by Grieg and Svendsen. The work marked an important milestone in Nielsen's career as it was not only his first real success but it was also the first of his pieces he conducted himself when it was played in Odense a month later.
The Helios Overture, Op. 17 (1903) stems from Nielsen's stay in Athens which inspired him to compose a work depicting the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea. The score is a showpiece for orchestra, and has been amongst Nielsen's most popular works. (Saga Dream), Op. 39 (1907–08) is a tone poem for orchestra based on the Icelandic Njal's Saga. In Nielsen's words:
There are among other things four cadenzas for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and flute which run quite freely alongside one another, with no harmonic connection, and without my marking time. They are just like four streams of thought, each going its own way – differently and randomly for each performance – until they meet in a point of rest, as if flowing into a lock where they are united.
At the Bier of a Young Artist () for string orchestra was written for the funeral of the Danish painter Oluf Hartmann in January 1910 and was also played at Nielsen's own funeral. Pan and Syrinx (), a vigorous nine-minute symphonic poem inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, was premiered in 1911. The Rhapsodic Overture, An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands (), draws on Faroese folk tunes but also contains freely composed sections.
Among Nielsen's orchestral works for the stage are Aladdin (1919) and (The Mother), Op. 41 (1920). Aladdin was written to accompany a production of Adam Oehlenschläger's fairy tale at The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. The complete score, lasting over 80 minutes, is Nielsen's longest work apart from his operas, but a shorter orchestral suite consisting of the Oriental March, Hindu Dance and Negro Dance is often performed. , written to celebrate the reunification of Southern Jutland with Denmark, was first performed in 1921; it is a setting of patriotic verses written for the occasion.
Chamber music
Nielsen composed several chamber music works, some of them still high on the international repertoire. The Wind Quintet, one of his most popular pieces, was composed in 1922 specifically for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Simpson, explaining that Nielsen's fondness of wind instruments was closely related to his love of nature, writes: "He was also intensely interested in human character, and in the Wind Quintet composed deliberately for five friends; each part is cunningly made to suit the individuality of each player."
Nielsen wrote four string quartets. The First String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13 (1889, revised 1900) contains a "Résumé" section in the finale, bringing together themes from the first, third and fourth movements. The Second String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 5 appeared in 1890 and the Third String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 14 in 1898. The music historian Jan Smaczny suggests that in this work "the handling of texture is confident and far less derivative than in earlier works ... [the quartet] prompts the most regret that Nielsen did not pursue the genre further ... to parallel his later symphonic development". The Fourth String Quartet in F major (1904) initially received a mixed reception, with critics uncertain about its reserved style. Nielsen revised it several times, the final version in 1919 being listed as his Op. 44.
The violin was Nielsen's own instrument and he composed four large-scale chamber works for it. The departures from standard procedures in the First Sonata, Op. 9 (1895), including its often sudden modulations and its terse thematic material, disconcerted Danish critics at its first performance. The Second Sonata, Op. 35 of 1912 was written for the violinist Peder Møller who earlier that year had premiered the composer's Violin Concerto. The work is an example of the composer's progressive tonality since, although it is stated to be in the key of G minor, the first and final movements end in different keys. The critic Emilius Bangert wrote of the premiere (which was given by Axel Gade), "The overall impression was of a beautiful, unbroken line – a flow of notes – where in particular a wonderful second subject in the first part and the pure, high sphere of the last part were captivating". Two other works are for violin solo. The Prelude, Theme and Variations, Op. 48 (1923) was written for Telmányi, and, like Nielsen's Chaconne for piano, Op. 32, was inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Preludio e Presto, Op. 52 (1928) was written as a tribute for the sixtieth birthday of the composer Fini Henriques.
Keyboard works
Although Nielsen came to compose mainly at the piano, he only composed directly for it occasionally over a period of 40 years, creating works often with a distinctive style which slowed their international acceptance. Nielsen's own piano technique, an echo of which is probably preserved in three wax cylinders marked "Carl Nielsen" at the State Archives in Aarhus, seems to have been mediocre. Reviewing the 1969 recording of works by the pianist John Ogdon, John Horton commented on the early pieces: "Nielsen's technical resources hardly measure up to the grandeur of his designs", whilst characterising the later pieces as "major works which can stand comparison with his symphonic music". The anti-romantic tone of the Symphonic Suite, Op. 8 (1894) was described by a later critic as "nothing less than a clenched fist straight in the face of all established musical convention". In Nielsen's words, the Chaconne, Op. 32 (1917) was "a really big piece, and I think effective". It is not only inspired by the work of Bach, especially the chaconne for solo violin, but also by the virtuoso piano arrangements of Bach's music by composers such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Ferruccio Busoni. Also on a large scale, and from the same year, is the Theme and Variations, Op. 41, in which critics have discerned the influences of Brahms and also of Max Reger, of whom Nielsen had earlier written to a friend "I think that the public will be utterly unable to grasp Reger's work and yet I am a lot more sympathetic towards his efforts than towards ... Richard Strauss".
All Nielsen's organ works were late compositions. The Danish organist Finn Viderø suggests that his interest was prompted by the (Organ reform movement), and the renewal of the front pipes of the Schnitger organ in the St. Jacobi Church, Hamburg, from 1928 to 1930. Nielsen's last major work – , Op. 58, a 22-minute piece for organ – was composed between June 1930 and February 1931, only a few months before his death.
Songs and hymns
Over the years, Nielsen wrote the music for over 290 songs and hymns, most of them for verses and poems by well-known Danish authors such as N. F. S. Grundtvig, Ingemann, Poul Martin Møller, Adam Oehlenschläger and Jeppe Aakjær. In Denmark, many of them are still popular today both with adults and children. They are regarded as "the most representative part of the country's most representative composer's output". In 1906, Nielsen had explained the significance of such songs to his countrymen:With certain melodic inflections we Danes unavoidably think of the poems of, for example, Ingemann, Christian Winther or Drachmann, and we often seem to perceive the smell of Danish landscapes and rural images in our songs and music. But it is also clear that a foreigner, who knows neither our countryside, nor our painters, our poets, or our history in the same intimate way as we do ourselves, will be completely unable to grasp what it is that brings us to hear and tremble with sympathetic understanding.
Of great significance was Nielsen's contribution to the 1922 publication, Folkehøjskolens Melodibog (The Folk High School Songbook), of which he was one of the editors together with Thomas Laub, Oluf Ring and Thorvald Aagaard. The book contained about 600 melodies, of which about 200 were composed by the editors, and was intended to provide a repertoire for communal singing, an integral part of Danish folk culture. The collection was extremely popular and became embedded in the Danish educational system. During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, mass song gatherings, using these melodies, were part of Denmark's "spiritual re-armament", and after the war in 1945 Nielsen's contributions were characterised by one writer as "shining jewels in our treasure-chest of patriotic songs". This remains a significant factor in Danish assessment of the composer.
Editions
Between 1994 and 2009 a complete new edition of Nielsen's works, the Carl Nielsen Edition, was commissioned by the Danish Government (at a cost of over 40 million kroner). For many of the works, including the operas Maskarade and Saul and David, and the complete Aladdin music, this was their first printed publication, copies of manuscripts having previously been used in performances. The scores are now all available for download free of charge at the website of the Danish Royal Library (which also owns most of Nielsen's music manuscripts).
Reception
Unlike that of his contemporary, the Finn Jean Sibelius, Nielsen's reputation abroad did not start to evolve until after World War II. For some time, international interest was largely directed towards his symphonies while his other works, many of them highly popular in Denmark, have only recently started to become part of the world repertoire. Even in Denmark, many of his compositions failed to impress. It was only in 1897 after the first performance of Hymnus amoris that he received support from the critics, to be substantially reinforced in 1906 by their enthusiastic reception of Masquerade.
Within two months of its successful premiere at the Odd Fellows Concert Hall in Copenhagen on 28 February 1912, the Third Symphony (Espansiva) was in the repertoire of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and by 1913 it had seen performances in Stuttgart, Stockholm and Helsinki. The symphony was the most popular of all Nielsen's works during his lifetime and was also played in Berlin, Hamburg, London and Gothenburg. Other works caused some uncertainty, even in Denmark. After the premiere of the Fifth Symphony (1922) one critic wrote: "The treasure of Danish symphonies and Carl Nielsen's own output have been enriched by a strange and highly original work." Another, however, described it as a "bloody, clenched fist in the face of an unsuspecting snob audience", also qualifying it as "filthy music from trenches".
At the end of the 1940s two major biographies of Nielsen appeared in Danish, dominating opinion of the composer's life and work for several decades. Robert Simpson's book Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (first edition 1952) was the earliest large-scale study in English.
An international breakthrough came in 1962 when Leonard Bernstein recorded the Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic for CBS. The recording helped Nielsen's music to achieve appreciation beyond his home country and is considered one of the finest recorded accounts of the symphony. Nielsen's centenary in 1965 was widely celebrated, both in terms of performances and publications, and Bernstein was awarded the Sonning Prize for his recording of the Third Symphony. In 1988 Nielsen's diaries and his letters to Anne Marie were published, and these, together with a 1991 biography by Jørgen Jensen using this new material, led to a revised objective assessment of the composer's personality. Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of Nielsen's 125th anniversary in 1990, the music critic Andrew Pincus recalled that 25 years earlier Bernstein had believed the world was ready to accept the Dane as the equal of Jean Sibelius, speaking of "his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability" (which Pincus believed was still a challenge for audiences). Biographies and studies in English in the 1990s helped to establish Nielsen's status worldwide, to the point at which his music has become a regular feature of concert programming in Western countries.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2008, the American music critic Alex Ross compares the "brute strength" of Nielsen's symphonies to Beethoven's Eroica and Fifth Symphony but explains that only now were the Americans slowly beginning to appreciate the Danish composer.
Nielsen did not record any of his works. However, three younger contemporary conductors who had worked with him, Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen, did record his symphonies and other orchestral works with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1946 and 1952. Jensen also made the first LP recording of the Fifth Symphony in 1954. Work carried out by the recently published complete Carl Nielsen Edition has revealed that the scores used in these recordings often differ from the composer's original intentions and thus the supposed authenticity of these recordings is now debatable.
There are now numerous recordings of all Nielsen's major works, including complete cycles of the symphonies conducted by, amongst others, Sir Colin Davis, Herbert Blomstedt and Sakari Oramo. Over 50 recordings have been made of Nielsen's Wind Quintet.
Legacy
From 1916, Nielsen taught at the Royal Academy where he became director in 1931, shortly before his death. He also had private students in his earlier days in order to supplement his income. As a result of his teaching, Nielsen has exerted considerable influence on classical music in Denmark. Among his most successful pupils were the composers Thorvald Aagaard, remembered in particular for his songs, Harald Agersnap, both a conductor and orchestral composer, and Jørgen Bentzon who composed choral and chamber music mainly for his folk music school (Københavns Folkemusikskole). Among his other students were the musicologist Knud Jeppesen, the pianist Herman Koppel, the academy professor and symphony composer Poul Schierbeck, the organist Emilius Bangert who played at Roskilde Cathedral, and Nancy Dalberg, one of Nielsen's private students who helped with the orchestration of Aladdin. Nielsen also instructed the conductor and choirmaster Mogens Wöldike, remembered for his interpretations of Baroque music, and Rudolph Simonsen, the pianist and composer who became director of the Academy after Nielsen's death.
The Carl Nielsen Society maintains a listing of performances of Nielsen's works, classified by region (Denmark, Scandinavia, Europe apart from Scandinavia and outside Europe) which demonstrates that his music is regularly performed throughout the world. The concerti and symphonies feature frequently in these listings.
The Carl Nielsen International Competition commenced in the 1970s under the auspices of the Odense Symphony Orchestra. A four-yearly violin competition has been held there since 1980. Flute and clarinet competitions were later added, but these have now been discontinued. An international Organ Competition, founded by the city of Odense, became associated with the Nielsen competition in 2009, but from 2015 will be organized separately, based in Odense Cathedral.
In his home country, the Carl Nielsen Museum, in Odense, is dedicated to Nielsen and his wife, Anne Marie. The composer is featured on the 100 kroner note issued by the Danish National Bank from 1997 to 2010. His image was selected in recognition of his contribution to Danish music compositions such as his opera Maskarade, his Espansiva symphony and his many songs including "Danmark, nu blunder den lyse nat".
Several special events were scheduled on or around 9 June 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nielsen's birth. In addition to many performances in Denmark, concerts were programmed in cities across Europe, including London, Leipzig, Kraków, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Vienna, and even further afield in Japan, Egypt and New York. For 9 June, Nielsen's birthday, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra presented a programme in Copenhagen's DR Concert Hall featuring Hymnus amoris, the Clarinet Concerto and Symphony No. 4 for a broadcast extending across Europe and the United States. The Danish Royal Opera has programmed Maskarade and a new production (directed by David Pountney) of Saul og David. During 2015, the Danish Quartet scheduled performances of Nielsen's string quartets in Denmark, Israel, Germany, Norway and the UK (at the Cheltenham Music Festival). In the UK, the BBC Philharmonic prepared a concert series on Nielsen beginning on 9 June in Manchester. Nielsen's Maskarade overture was also the first item for the opening night of the 2015 BBC Promenade Concerts in London, while his compositions featured in five other concerts of the Prom season. The city of Odense, which has strong connections with Nielsen, developed an extensive programme of concerts and cultural events for the anniversary year.
Minor planet 6058 Carlnielsen is named in his honor.
References
Citations
Sources
Table of contents, including introductions and music scores.
In .
In .
In .
Obituaries
External links
The Carl Nielsen Edition – index page to introductory information on many of Nielsen's works from the Royal Danish Library
Carl Nielsen bibliography 1985–2008 at the Royal Danish Library
The Danish Carl Nielsen Society – provides much detailed information on the composer and his works, including an overview of upcoming concerts
The Carl Nielsen Museum, Odense – "is a museum dedicated to the composer Carl Nielsen and to his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen".
Nielsen's Late Music, article by Svend Ravnkilde
Carl Nielsen International Music Competition & Festival – an annual music event in Odense, celebrating the composer. Organized by the Odense Symphony Orchestra
List of works from the Carl Nielsen Society
Carl Nielsen som symfoniker (1951–1954), Knud Jeppesen's 44 lectures, International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
"Förunderligt och märkligt" recording with
1865 births
1931 deaths
19th-century classical composers
19th-century classical violinists
19th-century Danish composers
19th-century male conductors (music)
19th-century conductors (music)
20th-century classical composers
20th-century classical violinists
20th-century conductors (music)
20th-century Danish composers
20th-century Danish male musicians
Royal Danish Academy of Music faculty
Burials at Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
Danish classical composers
Danish classical violinists
Danish conductors (music)
Danish music educators
Danish male classical composers
Danish opera composers
Danish Romantic composers
Directors of the Royal Danish Academy of Music
Male classical violinists
Male conductors (music)
Male opera composers
People from Faaborg-Midtfyn Municipality
Pupils of Niels Gade
Royal Danish Academy of Music alumni
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"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"Carl Nielsen",
"Early years",
"Did he have a hard time in his early years?",
"Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen.",
"When did his his interest begin in playing violin?",
"when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin",
"What happened after he tried the violin?",
"He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine:",
"When did he begin to get recognition for his talent?",
"As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper",
"DId he continue with the violin and composing after becoming a shopkeeper?",
"Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense."
] |
C_c74626fda5f14827b9b513a88349da83_1
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How did he end up in the army?
| 7 |
How did Carl Nielsen end up in the army?
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Carl Nielsen
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Nielsen was born the seventh of twelve children to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Sortelung near Norre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jorgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography Min Fynske Barndom (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837-1881), was a talented musician. Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin". He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He learned the violin and piano as a child and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka which the composer mentioned in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper from a nearby village when he was fourteen; the shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion at nearby Odense. Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 ore and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances. CANNOTANSWER
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on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion
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Carl August Nielsen (; 9 June 1865 – 3 October 1931) was a Danish composer, conductor and violinist, widely recognized as his country's most prominent composer.
Brought up by poor yet musically talented parents on the island of Funen, he demonstrated his musical abilities at an early age. He initially played in a military band before attending the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen from 1884 until December 1886. He premiered his Op. 1, Suite for Strings, in 1888, at the age of 23. The following year, Nielsen began a 16-year stint as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra under the conductor Johan Svendsen, during which he played in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy and continued to work there until his death.
Although his symphonies, concertos and choral music are now internationally acclaimed, Nielsen's career and personal life were marked by many difficulties, often reflected in his music. The works he composed between 1897 and 1904 are sometimes ascribed to his "psychological" period, resulting mainly from a turbulent marriage with the sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen. Nielsen is especially noted for his six symphonies, his Wind Quintet and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. In Denmark, his opera Maskarade and many of his songs have become an integral part of the national heritage. His early music was inspired by composers such as Brahms and Grieg, but he soon developed his own style, first experimenting with progressive tonality and later diverging even more radically from the standards of composition still common at the time. Nielsen's sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. He died from a heart attack six years later, and is buried in Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen.
Nielsen maintained the reputation of a musical outsider during his lifetime, both in his own country and internationally. It was only later that his works firmly entered the international repertoire, accelerating in popularity from the 1960s through Leonard Bernstein and others. In Denmark, Nielsen's reputation was sealed in 2006 when four of his works were listed by the Danish Ministry of Culture amongst the greatest pieces of Danish classical music. For many years, he appeared on the Danish hundred-kroner banknote. The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense documents his life and that of his wife. Between 1994 and 2009 the Royal Danish Library, sponsored by the Danish government, completed the Carl Nielsen Edition, freely available online, containing background information and sheet music for all of Nielsen's works, many of which had not been previously published.
Life
Early years
Nielsen was born on 9 June 1865, the seventh of twelve children in a poor peasant family, at Sortelung near Nørre Lyndelse, south of Odense on the island of Funen. His father, Niels Jørgensen, was a house painter and traditional musician who, with his abilities as a fiddler and cornet player, was in strong demand for local celebrations. Nielsen described his childhood in his autobiography (My Childhood on Funen). His mother, whom he recalls singing folk songs during his childhood, came from a well-to-do family of sea captains, while one of his half-uncles, Hans Andersen (1837–1881), was a talented musician.
Nielsen gave an account of his introduction to music: "I had heard music before, heard father play the violin and cornet, heard mother singing, and, when in bed with the measles, I had tried myself out on the little violin." He had received the instrument from his mother when he was six. He studied violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka that he mentions in his autobiography. As his parents did not believe he had any future as a musician, they apprenticed him to a shopkeeper in a nearby village when he was fourteen. The shopkeeper went bankrupt by midsummer and Nielsen had to return home. After learning to play brass instruments, on 1 November 1879 he became a bugler and alto trombonist in the band of the army's 16th Battalion in Odense.
Nielsen did not give up the violin during his time with the battalion, continuing to play it when he went home to perform at dances with his father. The army paid him three kroner and 45 øre and a loaf of bread every five days for two and a half years, after which his salary was raised slightly, enabling him to buy the civilian clothes he needed to perform at barn dances.
Studies and early career
In 1881, Nielsen began to take his violin playing more seriously, studying privately under Carl Larsen, the sexton at Odense Cathedral. It is not known how much Nielsen composed during this period, but from his autobiography, it can be deduced that he wrote some trios and quartets for brass instruments, and that he had difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that brass instruments were tuned in different keys. Following an introduction to Niels W. Gade, the director of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, by whom he was well received, Nielsen obtained his release from the military band at short notice, and studied at the Academy from the beginning of 1884.
Though not an outstanding student and composing little, Nielsen progressed well in violin under Valdemar Tofte (1832–1907), and received a solid grounding in music theory from Orla Rosenhoff (1844–1905), who would remain a valued adviser during his early years as a professional composer. He also studied composition under Gade, whom he liked as a friend but not for his music. Contacts with fellow students and cultured families in Copenhagen, some of whom would become lifelong friends, became equally important. The patchy education resulting from his country background left Nielsen insatiably curious about the arts, philosophy and aesthetics. But, in the opinion of the musicologist David Fanning, it also left him "with a highly personal, common man's point of view on those subjects". He left the Academy at the end of 1886, after graduating with good but not outstanding marks in all subjects. He then went to stay with the retired Odense merchant Jens Georg Nielsen (1820–1901) and his wife at their apartment on Slagelsegade as he was not yet in a position to pay his own way. While there, he fell in love with their 14-year-old daughter Emilie Demant. The affair was to last for the next three years.
On 17 September 1887, Nielsen played the violin in the Tivoli Concert Hall when his Andante tranquillo e Scherzo for strings was premiered. Shortly afterwards, on 25 January 1888, his String Quartet in F major was played at one of the private performances of the (Private Chamber Music Society). While Nielsen considered the Quartet in F to be his official debut as a professional composer, a far greater impression was made by his Suite for Strings. Performed at Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen on 8 September 1888, it was designated by Nielsen as his Op. 1.
By September 1889 Nielsen had progressed well enough on the violin to gain a position with the second violins in the prestigious Royal Danish Orchestra which played at Copenhagen's Royal Theatre, then conducted by Johan Svendsen. In this position he experienced Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff and Otello at their Danish premieres. Although this employment sometimes caused Nielsen considerable frustration, he continued to play there until 1905. After Svendsen's retirement in 1906, Nielsen increasingly served as conductor (being officially appointed assistant conductor in 1910). Between graduation and attaining this position, he made a modest income from private violin lessons while enjoying the continuing support of his patrons, not only Jens Georg Nielsen but also Albert Sachs (born 1846) and Hans Demant (1827–1897) who both ran factories in Odense. After less than a year at the Royal Theatre, Nielsen won a scholarship of 1,800 kroner, giving him the means to spend several months travelling in Europe.
Marriage and children
While travelling, Nielsen discovered and then turned against Richard Wagner's music dramas, heard many of Europe's leading orchestras and soloists and sharpened his opinions on both music and the visual arts. Although he revered the music of Bach and Mozart, he remained ambivalent about much 19th-century music. In 1891 he met the composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni in Leipzig; they were to maintain a correspondence for over thirty years. Shortly after arriving in Paris in early March 1891 Nielsen met the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen, who was also travelling on a scholarship. They toured Italy together and married in St Mark's English Church, Florence, on 10 May 1891 before returning to Denmark. According to Fanning, their relationship was not only a "love match", but also a "meeting of minds"; Anne Marie was a gifted artist and a "strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career". This determination would strain the Nielsens' marriage, as Anne Marie would spend months away from home during the 1890s and 1900s, leaving Carl, who was susceptible to opportunities with other ladies, to raise their three young children in addition to composing and fulfilling his duties at the Royal Theatre.
Nielsen sublimated his anger and frustration over his marriage in a number of musical works, most notably between 1897 and 1904, a period which he sometimes called his "psychological" period. Fanning writes, "At this time his interest in the driving forces behind human personality crystallized in the opera Saul and David and the Second Symphony (The Four Temperaments) and the cantatas and ". Carl suggested divorce in March 1905 and had considered moving to Germany for a fresh start, but despite several extended periods of separation the Nielsens remained married for the remainder of the composer's life.
Nielsen had five children, two of them illegitimate. He had already fathered a son, Carl August Nielsen, in January 1888, before he met Anne Marie. In 1912, an illegitimate daughter was born – Rachel Siegmann, about whom Anne Marie never learned. With his wife Nielsen had two daughters and a son. Irmelin, the elder daughter, studied music theory with her father and in December 1919 married Eggert Møller (1893–1978), a medical doctor who became a professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the polyclinic at the National Hospital. The younger daughter Anne Marie, who graduated from the Copenhagen Academy of Arts, married the Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi (1892–1988) in 1918; he contributed to the promotion of Nielsen's music, both as a violinist and a conductor. Nielsen's son, Hans Børge, was handicapped as a result of meningitis and spent most of his life away from the family. He died near Kolding in 1956.
Mature composer
At first, Nielsen's works did not gain sufficient recognition for him to be able to support himself. During the concert which saw the premiere of his First Symphony on 14 March 1894 conducted by Svendsen, Nielsen played in the second violin section. The symphony was a great success when played in Berlin in 1896, contributing significantly to his reputation. He was increasingly in demand to write incidental music for the theatre as well as cantatas for special occasions, both of which provided a welcome source of additional income. Fanning comments on the relationship which developed between his programmatic and symphonic works: "Sometimes he would find stageworthy ideas in his supposedly pure orchestral music; sometimes a text or scenario forced him to invent vivid musical imagery which he could later turn to more abstract use."
Nielsen's cantata Hymnus amoris for soloists, chorus and orchestra was first performed at Copenhagen's Musikforeningen (The Music Society) on 27 April 1897. It was inspired by Titian's painting Miracle of the Jealous Husband which Nielsen had seen on his honeymoon in Italy in 1891. On one of the copies, he wrote: "To my own Marie! These tones in praise of love are nothing compared to the real thing."
Beginning in 1901, Nielsen received a modest state pension – initially 800 kroner per annum, growing to 7,500 kroner by 1927 – to augment his violinist's salary. This allowed him to stop taking private pupils and left him more time to compose. From 1903, he also had an annual retainer from his principal publisher, . Between 1905 and 1914 he served as second conductor at the Royal Theatre. For his son-in-law, Emil Telmányi, Nielsen wrote his Violin Concerto, Op. 33 (1911). From 1914 to 1926, he conducted the Musikforeningen orchestra. In 1916, he took a post teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and continued to work there until his death.
The strain of dual careers and constant separation from his wife led to an extended breach in his marriage. The couple began separation proceedings in 1916, and separation by mutual consent was granted in 1919. In the period 1916–22, Nielsen often lived on Funen retreating to the Damgaard and Fuglsang estates, or worked as a conductor in Gothenburg. The period was one of creative crisis for Nielsen which, coinciding with World War I, would strongly influence his Fourth (1914–16) and Fifth symphonies (1921–22), arguably his greatest works according to Fanning. The composer was particularly upset in the 1920s when his long-standing Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen was unable to undertake publication of many of his major works, including Aladdin and Pan and Syrinx.
The sixth and final symphony, Sinfonia semplice, was written in 1924–25. After suffering a serious heart attack in 1925, Nielsen was forced to curtail much of his activity, although he continued to compose until his death. His sixtieth birthday in 1925 brought many congratulations, a decoration from the Swedish government, and a gala concert and reception in Copenhagen. The composer, however, was in a dour mood; in an article in Politiken on 9 November 1925 he wrote: If I could live my life again, I would chase any thoughts of Art out of my head and be apprenticed to a merchant or pursue some other useful trade the results of which could be visible in the end ... What use is it to me that the whole world acknowledges me, but hurries away and leaves me alone with my wares until everything breaks down and I discover to my disgrace that I have lived as a foolish dreamer and believed that the more I worked and exerted myself in my art, the better position I would achieve. No, it is no enviable fate to be an artist.
Final years and death
Nielsen's final large-scale orchestral works were his Flute Concerto (1926) and the Clarinet Concerto (1928), of which Robert Layton writes: "If ever there was music from another planet, this is surely it. Its sonorities are sparse and monochrome, its air rarefied and bracing." Nielsen's last musical composition, the organ work Commotio, was premiered posthumously in 1931 in St. Mary's Church, Lübeck.
During his final years, Nielsen produced a short book of essays entitled Living Music (1925), followed in 1927 by his memoir Min Fynske Barndom. In 1926 he wrote in his diary "My home soil pulls me more and more like a long sucking kiss. Does it mean that I shall finally return and rest in the earth of Funen? Then it must be in the place where I was born: Sortelung, Frydenlands parish".
This was not to be. Nielsen was admitted to Copenhagen's National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) on 1 October 1931 following a series of heart attacks. He died there at ten minutes past midnight on 3 October, surrounded by his family. His last words to them were "You are standing here as if you were waiting for something".
He was buried in Copenhagen's Vestre Cemetery; all the music at his funeral, including the hymns, was the work of the composer. After his death, his wife was commissioned to sculpt a monument to him, to be erected in central Copenhagen. She wrote: "I wanted to take the winged horse, eternal symbol of poetry, and place a musician on its back. He was to sit there between the rushing wings blowing a reed pipe out over Copenhagen." Dispute about her design and a shortfall in funding meant that erection of the monument was delayed and that Anne Marie herself ended up subsidising it. The Carl Nielsen Monument was finally unveiled in 1939.
Music
Nielsen's works are sometimes referred to by CNW numbers, based on the Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works (CNW) published online by the Danish Royal Library in 2015. The CNW catalogue is intended to replace the 1965 catalogue compiled by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe (FS numbers).
Musical style
In his Lives of the Great Composers, the music critic Harold Schonberg emphasizes the breadth of Nielsen's compositions, his energetic rhythms, generous orchestration and his individuality. In comparing him with Jean Sibelius, he considers he had "just as much sweep, even more power, and a more universal message". The Oxford University music professor Daniel M. Grimley qualifies Nielsen as "one of the most playful, life-affirming, and awkward voices in twentieth-century music" thanks to the "melodic richness and harmonic vitality" of his work. Anne-Marie Reynolds, author of Carl Nielsen's Voice: His Songs in Context, cites Robert Simpson's view that "all of his music is vocal in origin", maintaining that song-writing strongly influenced Nielsen's development as a composer.
The Danish sociologist Benedikte Brincker observes that the perception of Nielsen and his music in his home country is rather different from his international appreciation. His interest and background in folk music had special resonance for Danes, and this was intensified during the nationalistic movements of the 1930s and during World War II, when singing was an important basis for the Danes to distinguish themselves from their German enemies. Nielsen's songs retain an important place in Danish culture and education. The musicologist Niels Krabbe describes the popular image of Nielsen in Denmark as being like "the ugly duckling syndrome" – a reference to the tale of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen – whereby "a poor boy ... passing through adversity and frugality ... marches into Copenhagen and ... comes to conquer the position as the uncrowned King".
While outside Denmark Nielsen is largely thought of as the composer of orchestral music and the opera Maskarade, in his own country he is more of a national symbol. These two sides were officially brought together in Denmark in 2006 when the Ministry of Culture issued a list of the twelve greatest Danish musical works that included Nielsen’s opera Maskarade, his Fourth Symphony, and a pair of his Danish folk songs. Krabbe asks the rhetorical question: "Can 'the national' in Nielsen be demonstrated in the music in the form of particular themes, harmonies, sounds, forms, etc., or is it a pure construct of reception history?"
Nielsen himself was ambiguous about his attitudes to late Romantic German music and to nationalism in music. He wrote to the Dutch composer Julius Röntgen in 1909 "I am surprised by the technical skills of the Germans nowadays, and I cannot help thinking that all this delight in complication must exhaust itself. I foresee a completely new art of pure archaic virtue. What do you think about songs sung in unison? We must go back ... to the pure and the clear." On the other hand, he wrote in 1925 "Nothing destroys music more than nationalism does ... and it is impossible to deliver national music on request."
Nielsen studied Renaissance polyphony closely, which accounts for some of the melodic and harmonic content of his music. This interest is exemplified in his Tre Motetter (Three Motets, Op. 55). To non-Danish critics, Nielsen's music initially had a neo-classical sound but became increasingly modern as he developed his own approach to what the writer and composer Robert Simpson called progressive tonality, moving from one key to another. Typically, Nielsen's music might end in a different key from that of its commencement, sometimes as the outcome of a struggle as in his symphonies. There is debate as to how much such elements owe to his folk music activities. Some critics have referred to his rhythms, his use of acciaccaturas or appoggiaturas, or his frequent use of a flattened seventh and minor third in his works, as being typically Danish. The composer himself wrote "The intervals, as I see it, are the elements which first arouse a deeper interest in music ... [I]t is intervals which surprise and delight us anew every time we hear the cuckoo in spring. Its appeal would be less if its call were all on one note."
Nielsen's philosophy of music style is perhaps summed up in his advice in a 1907 letter to the Norwegian composer Knut Harder: "You have ... fluency, so far, so good; but I advise you again and again, my dear Mr. Harder; Tonality, Clarity, Strength."
Symphonies
Nielsen is perhaps most closely associated outside Denmark with his six symphonies, written between 1892 and 1925. The works have much in common: they are all just over 30 minutes long, brass instruments are a key component of the orchestration, and they all exhibit unusual changes in tonality, which heighten the dramatic tension. From its opening bars, Symphony No. 1 (Op. 7, 1890–92), while reflecting the influence of Grieg and Brahms, shows Nielsen's individuality. In Symphony No. 2 (Op. 16, 1901–02), Nielsen embarks on the development of human character. Inspiration came from a painting in an inn depicting the four temperaments (choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine).
The title of Symphony No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva (Op. 27, 1910–11), is understood by the English composer Robert Simpson to refer to the "outward growth of the mind's scope". It fully exploits Nielsen's technique of confronting two keys at the same time and includes a peaceful section with soprano and baritone voices, singing a tune without words. Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable (Op. 29, 1914–16), written during World War I, is among the most frequently performed of the symphonies. In the last movement two sets of timpani are placed on opposite sides of the stage undertaking a kind of musical duel. Nielsen described the symphony as "the life force, the unquenchable will to live".
Also frequently performed is the Symphony No. 5 (Op. 50, 1921–22), presenting another battle between the forces of order and chaos. A snare drummer is given the task of interrupting the orchestra, playing and out of time, as if to destroy the music. Performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erik Tuxen at the 1950 Edinburgh International Festival, it caused a sensation, sparking interest in Nielsen's music outside Scandinavia. In Symphony No. 6 (without opus number), written 1924–25, and subtitled Sinfonia Semplice (Simple Symphony), the tonal language seems similar to that in Nielsen's other symphonies, but the symphony develops into a sequence of cameos, some sad, some grotesque, some humorous.
Operas and cantatas
Nielsen's two operas are very different in style. The four-act (Saul and David), written in 1902 to a libretto by Einar Christiansen, tells the Biblical story of Saul's jealousy of the young David while (Masquerade) is a comic opera in three acts written in 1906 to a Danish libretto by Vilhelm Andersen, based on the comedy by Ludvig Holberg. Saul and David received a negative press when it was premiered in November 1902 and did no better when it was revived in 1904. By contrast, in November 1906 Masquerade was a resounding success with an exceptional run of 25 performances over its first four months. Generally considered to be Denmark's national opera, in its home country it has enjoyed lasting success and popularity, attributable to its many strophic songs, its dances and its underlying "old Copenhagen" atmosphere.
Nielsen wrote a considerable number of choral works but most of them were composed for special occasions and were seldom reprised. Three fully-fledged cantatas for soloists, orchestra and choir have, however, entered the repertoire. Nielsen composed (Hymn of Love), Op. 12 (1897) after studying early polyphonic choral style. Writing in the newspaper Dannebrog, Nanna Liebmann referred to the work as "a decisive victory" for Nielsen, and Angul Hammerich of Nationaltidende welcomed its improved clarity and purity. But the reviewer H.W. Schytte thought Nielsen had been pretentious presenting the lyrics in Latin rather than Danish. (The Sleep), Op. 18, Nielsen's second major choral work, sets to music the various phases of sleep including the terror of a nightmare in its central movement which, with its unusual discords, came as a shock to the reviewers at its premiere in March 1905. (Springtime on Funen), Op. 42, completed in 1922, has been cited as the most Danish of all Nielsen's compositions as it extols the beauty of Funen's countryside.
Concertos
Nielsen wrote three concertos: the Violin Concerto, Op. 33 is a middle-period work, from 1911, which lies within the tradition of European classicism, whereas the Flute Concerto (without opus number) of 1926 and the Clarinet Concerto, Op. 57 which followed in 1928 are late works, influenced by the modernism of the 1920s and, according to the Danish musicologist Herbert Rosenberg, the product of "an extremely experienced composer who knows how to avoid inessentials." Unlike Nielsen's later works, the Violin Concerto has a distinct, melody-oriented neo-classical structure. The Flute Concerto, in two movements, was written for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet which had premiered Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). In contrast to the rather traditional style of the Violin Concerto, it reflects the modernistic trends of the period. The first movement, for example, switches between D minor, E-flat minor and F major before the flute comes to the fore with a cantabile theme in E major. The Clarinet Concerto was also written for a member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet, Aage Oxenvad. Nielsen stretches the capacities of instrument and player to the utmost; the concerto has just one continuous movement and contains a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra and between the two principal competing keys, F major and E major.
The wind concertos present many examples of what Nielsen called ("objectification"). By this term he meant giving instrumentalists freedom of interpretation and performance within the bounds set out by the score.
Orchestral music
Nielsen's earliest work composed specifically for orchestra was the immediately successful Suite for Strings (1888), which evoked Scandinavian Romanticism as expressed by Grieg and Svendsen. The work marked an important milestone in Nielsen's career as it was not only his first real success but it was also the first of his pieces he conducted himself when it was played in Odense a month later.
The Helios Overture, Op. 17 (1903) stems from Nielsen's stay in Athens which inspired him to compose a work depicting the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea. The score is a showpiece for orchestra, and has been amongst Nielsen's most popular works. (Saga Dream), Op. 39 (1907–08) is a tone poem for orchestra based on the Icelandic Njal's Saga. In Nielsen's words:
There are among other things four cadenzas for oboe, clarinet, bassoon and flute which run quite freely alongside one another, with no harmonic connection, and without my marking time. They are just like four streams of thought, each going its own way – differently and randomly for each performance – until they meet in a point of rest, as if flowing into a lock where they are united.
At the Bier of a Young Artist () for string orchestra was written for the funeral of the Danish painter Oluf Hartmann in January 1910 and was also played at Nielsen's own funeral. Pan and Syrinx (), a vigorous nine-minute symphonic poem inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, was premiered in 1911. The Rhapsodic Overture, An Imaginary Trip to the Faroe Islands (), draws on Faroese folk tunes but also contains freely composed sections.
Among Nielsen's orchestral works for the stage are Aladdin (1919) and (The Mother), Op. 41 (1920). Aladdin was written to accompany a production of Adam Oehlenschläger's fairy tale at The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. The complete score, lasting over 80 minutes, is Nielsen's longest work apart from his operas, but a shorter orchestral suite consisting of the Oriental March, Hindu Dance and Negro Dance is often performed. , written to celebrate the reunification of Southern Jutland with Denmark, was first performed in 1921; it is a setting of patriotic verses written for the occasion.
Chamber music
Nielsen composed several chamber music works, some of them still high on the international repertoire. The Wind Quintet, one of his most popular pieces, was composed in 1922 specifically for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Simpson, explaining that Nielsen's fondness of wind instruments was closely related to his love of nature, writes: "He was also intensely interested in human character, and in the Wind Quintet composed deliberately for five friends; each part is cunningly made to suit the individuality of each player."
Nielsen wrote four string quartets. The First String Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13 (1889, revised 1900) contains a "Résumé" section in the finale, bringing together themes from the first, third and fourth movements. The Second String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 5 appeared in 1890 and the Third String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 14 in 1898. The music historian Jan Smaczny suggests that in this work "the handling of texture is confident and far less derivative than in earlier works ... [the quartet] prompts the most regret that Nielsen did not pursue the genre further ... to parallel his later symphonic development". The Fourth String Quartet in F major (1904) initially received a mixed reception, with critics uncertain about its reserved style. Nielsen revised it several times, the final version in 1919 being listed as his Op. 44.
The violin was Nielsen's own instrument and he composed four large-scale chamber works for it. The departures from standard procedures in the First Sonata, Op. 9 (1895), including its often sudden modulations and its terse thematic material, disconcerted Danish critics at its first performance. The Second Sonata, Op. 35 of 1912 was written for the violinist Peder Møller who earlier that year had premiered the composer's Violin Concerto. The work is an example of the composer's progressive tonality since, although it is stated to be in the key of G minor, the first and final movements end in different keys. The critic Emilius Bangert wrote of the premiere (which was given by Axel Gade), "The overall impression was of a beautiful, unbroken line – a flow of notes – where in particular a wonderful second subject in the first part and the pure, high sphere of the last part were captivating". Two other works are for violin solo. The Prelude, Theme and Variations, Op. 48 (1923) was written for Telmányi, and, like Nielsen's Chaconne for piano, Op. 32, was inspired by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Preludio e Presto, Op. 52 (1928) was written as a tribute for the sixtieth birthday of the composer Fini Henriques.
Keyboard works
Although Nielsen came to compose mainly at the piano, he only composed directly for it occasionally over a period of 40 years, creating works often with a distinctive style which slowed their international acceptance. Nielsen's own piano technique, an echo of which is probably preserved in three wax cylinders marked "Carl Nielsen" at the State Archives in Aarhus, seems to have been mediocre. Reviewing the 1969 recording of works by the pianist John Ogdon, John Horton commented on the early pieces: "Nielsen's technical resources hardly measure up to the grandeur of his designs", whilst characterising the later pieces as "major works which can stand comparison with his symphonic music". The anti-romantic tone of the Symphonic Suite, Op. 8 (1894) was described by a later critic as "nothing less than a clenched fist straight in the face of all established musical convention". In Nielsen's words, the Chaconne, Op. 32 (1917) was "a really big piece, and I think effective". It is not only inspired by the work of Bach, especially the chaconne for solo violin, but also by the virtuoso piano arrangements of Bach's music by composers such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Ferruccio Busoni. Also on a large scale, and from the same year, is the Theme and Variations, Op. 41, in which critics have discerned the influences of Brahms and also of Max Reger, of whom Nielsen had earlier written to a friend "I think that the public will be utterly unable to grasp Reger's work and yet I am a lot more sympathetic towards his efforts than towards ... Richard Strauss".
All Nielsen's organ works were late compositions. The Danish organist Finn Viderø suggests that his interest was prompted by the (Organ reform movement), and the renewal of the front pipes of the Schnitger organ in the St. Jacobi Church, Hamburg, from 1928 to 1930. Nielsen's last major work – , Op. 58, a 22-minute piece for organ – was composed between June 1930 and February 1931, only a few months before his death.
Songs and hymns
Over the years, Nielsen wrote the music for over 290 songs and hymns, most of them for verses and poems by well-known Danish authors such as N. F. S. Grundtvig, Ingemann, Poul Martin Møller, Adam Oehlenschläger and Jeppe Aakjær. In Denmark, many of them are still popular today both with adults and children. They are regarded as "the most representative part of the country's most representative composer's output". In 1906, Nielsen had explained the significance of such songs to his countrymen:With certain melodic inflections we Danes unavoidably think of the poems of, for example, Ingemann, Christian Winther or Drachmann, and we often seem to perceive the smell of Danish landscapes and rural images in our songs and music. But it is also clear that a foreigner, who knows neither our countryside, nor our painters, our poets, or our history in the same intimate way as we do ourselves, will be completely unable to grasp what it is that brings us to hear and tremble with sympathetic understanding.
Of great significance was Nielsen's contribution to the 1922 publication, Folkehøjskolens Melodibog (The Folk High School Songbook), of which he was one of the editors together with Thomas Laub, Oluf Ring and Thorvald Aagaard. The book contained about 600 melodies, of which about 200 were composed by the editors, and was intended to provide a repertoire for communal singing, an integral part of Danish folk culture. The collection was extremely popular and became embedded in the Danish educational system. During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, mass song gatherings, using these melodies, were part of Denmark's "spiritual re-armament", and after the war in 1945 Nielsen's contributions were characterised by one writer as "shining jewels in our treasure-chest of patriotic songs". This remains a significant factor in Danish assessment of the composer.
Editions
Between 1994 and 2009 a complete new edition of Nielsen's works, the Carl Nielsen Edition, was commissioned by the Danish Government (at a cost of over 40 million kroner). For many of the works, including the operas Maskarade and Saul and David, and the complete Aladdin music, this was their first printed publication, copies of manuscripts having previously been used in performances. The scores are now all available for download free of charge at the website of the Danish Royal Library (which also owns most of Nielsen's music manuscripts).
Reception
Unlike that of his contemporary, the Finn Jean Sibelius, Nielsen's reputation abroad did not start to evolve until after World War II. For some time, international interest was largely directed towards his symphonies while his other works, many of them highly popular in Denmark, have only recently started to become part of the world repertoire. Even in Denmark, many of his compositions failed to impress. It was only in 1897 after the first performance of Hymnus amoris that he received support from the critics, to be substantially reinforced in 1906 by their enthusiastic reception of Masquerade.
Within two months of its successful premiere at the Odd Fellows Concert Hall in Copenhagen on 28 February 1912, the Third Symphony (Espansiva) was in the repertoire of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and by 1913 it had seen performances in Stuttgart, Stockholm and Helsinki. The symphony was the most popular of all Nielsen's works during his lifetime and was also played in Berlin, Hamburg, London and Gothenburg. Other works caused some uncertainty, even in Denmark. After the premiere of the Fifth Symphony (1922) one critic wrote: "The treasure of Danish symphonies and Carl Nielsen's own output have been enriched by a strange and highly original work." Another, however, described it as a "bloody, clenched fist in the face of an unsuspecting snob audience", also qualifying it as "filthy music from trenches".
At the end of the 1940s two major biographies of Nielsen appeared in Danish, dominating opinion of the composer's life and work for several decades. Robert Simpson's book Carl Nielsen, Symphonist (first edition 1952) was the earliest large-scale study in English.
An international breakthrough came in 1962 when Leonard Bernstein recorded the Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic for CBS. The recording helped Nielsen's music to achieve appreciation beyond his home country and is considered one of the finest recorded accounts of the symphony. Nielsen's centenary in 1965 was widely celebrated, both in terms of performances and publications, and Bernstein was awarded the Sonning Prize for his recording of the Third Symphony. In 1988 Nielsen's diaries and his letters to Anne Marie were published, and these, together with a 1991 biography by Jørgen Jensen using this new material, led to a revised objective assessment of the composer's personality. Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of Nielsen's 125th anniversary in 1990, the music critic Andrew Pincus recalled that 25 years earlier Bernstein had believed the world was ready to accept the Dane as the equal of Jean Sibelius, speaking of "his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability" (which Pincus believed was still a challenge for audiences). Biographies and studies in English in the 1990s helped to establish Nielsen's status worldwide, to the point at which his music has become a regular feature of concert programming in Western countries.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2008, the American music critic Alex Ross compares the "brute strength" of Nielsen's symphonies to Beethoven's Eroica and Fifth Symphony but explains that only now were the Americans slowly beginning to appreciate the Danish composer.
Nielsen did not record any of his works. However, three younger contemporary conductors who had worked with him, Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen, did record his symphonies and other orchestral works with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1946 and 1952. Jensen also made the first LP recording of the Fifth Symphony in 1954. Work carried out by the recently published complete Carl Nielsen Edition has revealed that the scores used in these recordings often differ from the composer's original intentions and thus the supposed authenticity of these recordings is now debatable.
There are now numerous recordings of all Nielsen's major works, including complete cycles of the symphonies conducted by, amongst others, Sir Colin Davis, Herbert Blomstedt and Sakari Oramo. Over 50 recordings have been made of Nielsen's Wind Quintet.
Legacy
From 1916, Nielsen taught at the Royal Academy where he became director in 1931, shortly before his death. He also had private students in his earlier days in order to supplement his income. As a result of his teaching, Nielsen has exerted considerable influence on classical music in Denmark. Among his most successful pupils were the composers Thorvald Aagaard, remembered in particular for his songs, Harald Agersnap, both a conductor and orchestral composer, and Jørgen Bentzon who composed choral and chamber music mainly for his folk music school (Københavns Folkemusikskole). Among his other students were the musicologist Knud Jeppesen, the pianist Herman Koppel, the academy professor and symphony composer Poul Schierbeck, the organist Emilius Bangert who played at Roskilde Cathedral, and Nancy Dalberg, one of Nielsen's private students who helped with the orchestration of Aladdin. Nielsen also instructed the conductor and choirmaster Mogens Wöldike, remembered for his interpretations of Baroque music, and Rudolph Simonsen, the pianist and composer who became director of the Academy after Nielsen's death.
The Carl Nielsen Society maintains a listing of performances of Nielsen's works, classified by region (Denmark, Scandinavia, Europe apart from Scandinavia and outside Europe) which demonstrates that his music is regularly performed throughout the world. The concerti and symphonies feature frequently in these listings.
The Carl Nielsen International Competition commenced in the 1970s under the auspices of the Odense Symphony Orchestra. A four-yearly violin competition has been held there since 1980. Flute and clarinet competitions were later added, but these have now been discontinued. An international Organ Competition, founded by the city of Odense, became associated with the Nielsen competition in 2009, but from 2015 will be organized separately, based in Odense Cathedral.
In his home country, the Carl Nielsen Museum, in Odense, is dedicated to Nielsen and his wife, Anne Marie. The composer is featured on the 100 kroner note issued by the Danish National Bank from 1997 to 2010. His image was selected in recognition of his contribution to Danish music compositions such as his opera Maskarade, his Espansiva symphony and his many songs including "Danmark, nu blunder den lyse nat".
Several special events were scheduled on or around 9 June 2015 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nielsen's birth. In addition to many performances in Denmark, concerts were programmed in cities across Europe, including London, Leipzig, Kraków, Gothenburg, Helsinki and Vienna, and even further afield in Japan, Egypt and New York. For 9 June, Nielsen's birthday, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra presented a programme in Copenhagen's DR Concert Hall featuring Hymnus amoris, the Clarinet Concerto and Symphony No. 4 for a broadcast extending across Europe and the United States. The Danish Royal Opera has programmed Maskarade and a new production (directed by David Pountney) of Saul og David. During 2015, the Danish Quartet scheduled performances of Nielsen's string quartets in Denmark, Israel, Germany, Norway and the UK (at the Cheltenham Music Festival). In the UK, the BBC Philharmonic prepared a concert series on Nielsen beginning on 9 June in Manchester. Nielsen's Maskarade overture was also the first item for the opening night of the 2015 BBC Promenade Concerts in London, while his compositions featured in five other concerts of the Prom season. The city of Odense, which has strong connections with Nielsen, developed an extensive programme of concerts and cultural events for the anniversary year.
Minor planet 6058 Carlnielsen is named in his honor.
References
Citations
Sources
Table of contents, including introductions and music scores.
In .
In .
In .
Obituaries
External links
The Carl Nielsen Edition – index page to introductory information on many of Nielsen's works from the Royal Danish Library
Carl Nielsen bibliography 1985–2008 at the Royal Danish Library
The Danish Carl Nielsen Society – provides much detailed information on the composer and his works, including an overview of upcoming concerts
The Carl Nielsen Museum, Odense – "is a museum dedicated to the composer Carl Nielsen and to his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen".
Nielsen's Late Music, article by Svend Ravnkilde
Carl Nielsen International Music Competition & Festival – an annual music event in Odense, celebrating the composer. Organized by the Odense Symphony Orchestra
List of works from the Carl Nielsen Society
Carl Nielsen som symfoniker (1951–1954), Knud Jeppesen's 44 lectures, International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
"Förunderligt och märkligt" recording with
1865 births
1931 deaths
19th-century classical composers
19th-century classical violinists
19th-century Danish composers
19th-century male conductors (music)
19th-century conductors (music)
20th-century classical composers
20th-century classical violinists
20th-century conductors (music)
20th-century Danish composers
20th-century Danish male musicians
Royal Danish Academy of Music faculty
Burials at Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
Danish classical composers
Danish classical violinists
Danish conductors (music)
Danish music educators
Danish male classical composers
Danish opera composers
Danish Romantic composers
Directors of the Royal Danish Academy of Music
Male classical violinists
Male conductors (music)
Male opera composers
People from Faaborg-Midtfyn Municipality
Pupils of Niels Gade
Royal Danish Academy of Music alumni
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"Yip Yip Yaphank is the name of musical revue composed and produced by Irving Berlin in 1918 while he was a recruit during World War I in the United States Army's 152nd Depot Brigade at Camp Upton in Upton, New York.\n\nFrom idea to the stage\nThe commanding officer at Camp Upton had wanted to build a community building on the grounds of the army base, and thought that Sgt. Berlin could help raise the $35,000 needed for its construction. Berlin's song, \"Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,\" an everyman song for soldiers, would be the basis of a revue full of army recruits—a veritable source of manpower available for him to use. He called for his friend and co-worker Harry Ruby to join him in writing down the flurry of songs that Berlin would create, including \"God Bless America,\" which Berlin would eventually toss out of the play for being too sticky.\n\nIn July 1918, Yip, Yip Yaphank had a tryout run at Camp Upton's little Liberty Theatre, before moving on to Central Park West's Century Theatre in August. The show was typical of revues and follies, featuring acrobatics, dancers, jugglers, and also featured a demonstration by Lightweight Boxing Champion Benny Leonard. Included with the performances were military drills choreographed to music by Berlin.\n\nThe show had its comedy too, including males dressed as Ziegfeld girls, and Sgt. Berlin himself as the reluctant soldier not wanting to join in reveille during the \"Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning\" skit.\n\nThe finale, \"We're On Our Way to France,\" was the replacement for \"God Bless America.\" During this act, the whole company wore their full gear, and marched out of the theater, down the aisles and out to the street. During the Century Theatre run, the \"performers\" stayed at an armory downtown, and would usually march right back to the armory after the evening show.\n\nBy September 1918, the production had to move to the Lexington Theatre, where it would eventually end its run. On that night, the audience saw the usual ending, with the battle-ready men marching off to \"war,\" but with a slight diversion. After the main performers were seen marching through the aisles, Sgt. Irving Berlin and the rest of the crew were similarly dressed and marching out of the theater. This time, the men were going off to war, heading to France for real.\n\nAfter the curtain\n\nThe play earned the U.S. Army ($ million in dollars) for Camp Upton's Community Building, though the army never had it built. Irving Berlin did not go to France, but would be listed among other great songwriters and playwrights of the time, well up to the next great war.\n\nSongs\n\"You Can't Stay Up on Bevo\"\n\"Oh, How I Hate To Get Up in the Morning\"\n\"I Can Always Find a Little Sunshine in the Y.M.C.A.\"\n\"Kitchen Police\"\n\"Dream On, Little Soldier Boy\"\n\"Mandy\" (a major song in a blackface minstrel number; later featured in the 1919 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies)\n\"We're On Our Way to France\"\n\"The Girl I left Behind\"\n\"Ragtime Razor Brigade\"\n\"Ever Since I Put on a Uniform\"\n\"Page Boy\"\n\"Floradora Sextette\"\n\"Love Interest\"\n\"Dreams of a Soldier\"\n\"Some Boy'\n\"Darktown Strutters' Ball\"\n\"Waters of Venice\"\n\"Baby\"\n\"White's Pet\"\n\"Don't Know the Half\"\n\"Fancy Free\"\n\"On Our Way to France\"\n\"God Bless America\" - originally written for the play but not included in this play. It was included in the sequel to \"Yip Yip Yaphank\" entitled \"This is the Army\" in 1943\n\nNotes\n\nExternal links\n \n\nMusicals by Irving Berlin\n1918 musicals\nBroadway musicals",
"György Kmety (Felsőpokorágy, – London, ) was a general in the Hungarian Army, and in the Ottoman Army under the name Ismail Pasha.\n\nCareer \nKmety's father was a noble but poor evangelist vicar who died in 1818, so his brother (Paul) brought him up. Kmety completed his studies in Kežmarok and in 1833 he joined the 19th Army. At the end of 1847 he was a non-commissioned officer in Joseph Radetzky von Radetz's army as a first lieutenant. On 1 October 1848 in Győr he joined the 23rd Army Corps as a captain.\n\nHungarian Revolution of 1848 \nKmety played an important role in setting up the corps, because another captain ended up not enlisting because of illness. Kmety was leading four companies when he went with Lajos Kossuth to János Móga's camp, and with them fought the Battle of Schwechat. For this Kossuth awarded him a captaincy in the 1st Army Corps. Later he was promoted to colonel for defeating a cavalry attack. From 15 February 1849 Kmety was leading a division.\n\nKmety didn't fight in the Battle of Kápolna because of Henryk Dembiński's poor leadership, although he covered the retreating Hungarian army. On 28 February 1849 Kmety won the battle against Franz Deym at Mezőkövesd. On 14 April 1849 he was promoted to colonel.\n\nKmety led the Hungarians to recover Buda, but he was injured. After that he was commanded to occupy the banks of the River Rába. On 13 June Kmety defeated the Austrian troops led by Franz Wyss in the Battle of Csorna, and because of this he received the general title. On 27 June Edler von Warensberg defeated Kmety and he had to move towards Vojvodina. Even though Kmety tried to rush his troops he missed the Battle of Hegyes against Josip Jelačić.\n\nOn 9 August Kmety joined to the Hungarian army corps at Temesvár (now Timișoara, Romania). On the left flank Kmety advanced successfully, but in other sections of the corps he also had to retreat. On 15 August Kmety defeated the Austrian Army at Lugos (now Lugoj, Romania).\n\nAfter the Revolution \n\nAfter the Surrender at Világos Kmety fled to the Ottoman Empire and he joined to the Ottoman army under the name of Isma'il, but he did not convert to Islam. The Ottoman people liked him and asked him to modernise the Ottoman army, which he did. Kmety was transferred to Aleppo with Józef Bem, where they helped to suppress a serious riot.\n\nAfter Bem's death Kmety moved to London, where his first work was published. At the beginning of the Crimean War Kmety returned to the Ottoman Empire where he was defeated by the Russians at the Siege of Kars on 29 September 1855. When General William Fenwick Williams wanted to give up the castle, Kmety decided to engage combat with the enemy's troops. Because of that Kmety received an award from the Ottoman government.\n\nIn 1861 Kmety retired and returned to London where he died in 1865.\n\nLegacy \nIn recognition of his help, after Kmety's death the Turks erected a statue that still stands in Istanbul. Kmety never married and had no children.\n\nWorks\n\nNotes\n\nSources \n \n \n \n \n \n\n1813 births\n1865 deaths\nHungarian Revolution of 1848\nOttoman Army generals\nOttoman military personnel of the Crimean War\nBurials at Kensal Green Cemetery\nHungarian emigrants to England"
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[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005"
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
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When was Reise, reise released?
| 1 |
When was Reise, Reise by Rammstein released?
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Rammstein
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Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;
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Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"Leo Charles Reise Jr. (June 7, 1922 – July 26, 2015) was a professional ice hockey player in the NHL and son of former pro Leo Reise. Reise was born in Stoney Creek, Ontario.\n\nPlaying career\nFollowing junior hockey in Brantford and Guelph, Reise enlisted in the navy where he played for the naval teams of Victoria, Halifax and HMCS CHIPPAWA in Winnipeg where he played on the 1945 Basil Baker trophy winning team. Leo Reise began his NHL career following the end of World War II playing six games with the Chicago Black Hawks in the 1945–46 NHL season. After playing 17 games with Chicago the next season, he was traded to the Detroit Red Wings where he remained until the end of the 1951–52 NHL season. He finished his last two seasons, 1952–53 and 1953–54, with the New York Rangers. In 494 NHL games, he recorded 28 goals and 109 points. He won two Stanley Cups with the Detroit Red Wings in 1950 and 1952.\n\nPost hockey\nAfter his hockey career Reise went on to running a plumbing business in the Hamilton area.\n\nReise died of cancer on July 26, 2015 at the age of 93.\n\nTrivia\n When Leo Reise Jr. entered the NHL in 1945, it was the first time in league history that a father and son had both made it to the NHL level. His father, Leo Reise played 8 seasons in the NHL.\n The Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup in 1947, 1948, & 1949, but in an overtime game during the 1950 Stanley Cup Semi-Finals, Reise scored the winning goal which prevented the Leafs from winning four straight championships. This goal also propelled the Detroit Red Wings to an eventual Stanley Cup Championship.\n The last NHL team Reise played for was the New York Rangers, the same team his father retired from the NHL with.\n\nAwards and achievements\nUSHL First All-Star Team (1946)\nNHL Second All-Star Team (1950, 1951)\nPlayed in NHL All-Star Game (1950, 1951, 1952, 1953)\n\nCareer statistics\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nReise Jr. at Legends of Hockey\n Reise Jr. at Detroit Red Wings Legends\n\n1922 births\n2015 deaths\nCanadian military personnel of World War II\nChicago Blackhawks players\nDetroit Red Wings players\nIce hockey people from Ontario\nNew York Rangers players\nSportspeople from Hamilton, Ontario\nStanley Cup champions\nCanadian ice hockey defencemen\nCanadian expatriates in the United States",
"Sürpriz were a six-member German-Turkish musical group, consisting of Cihan Özden, Deniz Filizmen, Yasemin Akkar, Filiz Zeyno, Savaş Uçar and Bülent Ural, known for their participation in the Eurovision Song Contest 1999. The word \"Sürpriz\", means \"Surprise\" in Turkish.\n\nBiography\nThe group was formed by Özden in 1999 specifically in order to enter that year's German Eurovision selection with the song \"Reise nach Jerusalem - Kudüs'e seyahat\" (\"Journey to Jerusalem\"), which had been written by regular Eurovision composers Ralph Siegel and Bernd Meinunger. At the original selection held in Bremen on 12 March, \"Reise nach Jerusalem - Kudüs'e seyahat\" finished in second place behind Corinna May's \"Hör den Kindern einfach zu\". However, some days later it emerged that May's song had previously been released by another singer in 1997, which contravened Eurovision rules and led to its disqualification. As runners-up, Sürpriz were therefore offered the Eurovision spot, but this too caused controversy when allegations of self-plagiarism were made, claiming that the song was remarkably similar to another Siegel composition which had appeared on a B-side in 1984, \"Wo geht die Reise hin?\" (\"Where Does the Journey Go?\") by Harmony Four. The matter was taken to the European Broadcasting Union, where a panel of experts concluded that the similarity was not sufficient to disqualify the song on the grounds alleged.\n\nSürpriz therefore were given the go-ahead to perform in the 44th Eurovision Song Contest, which took place in Jerusalem on 29 May. On the night, the song was performed in a combination of English, German, Turkish and Hebrew, and in what turned out to be a closely fought contest with some notably topsy-turvy voting, \"Reise nach Jerusalem - Kudüs'e seyahat\" claimed an unexpected third place of the 23 entries.\n\nThe good showing at Eurovision failed to translate into substantial sales, and \"Reise nach Jerusalem - Kudüs'e seyahat\" failed to chart in Germany. The group recorded a self-titled CD, which was released in Turkey only in 2000, and continued through several personnel changes before disbanding in 2002.\n\nReferences \n\nGerman musical groups\nTurkish musical groups\nEurovision Song Contest entrants for Germany\nEurovision Song Contest entrants of 1999"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;"
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
What is the name of the band that made this album?
| 2 |
What is the name of the band that made the album Reise, Reise?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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Rammstein
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Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
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!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
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!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
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Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
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[
"Cluain Tarbh is also the name of an Irish town from which the album takes its name.\n\nCluain Tarbh (Irish for Meadow of Bulls) is the Irish Celtic metal band Mael Mórdha's debut studio album. It was released in September 2005. The album name, along with the band name, can be written as the cover suggests, using Traditional Irish typography. The name would then be, \"Cluain Tarḃ.\"\n\nThe album contains eight tracks, the shortest being An Tús at 0:56 long, and the longest being I Am the Wench's Bane at 10:15 long. The album is a collection of popular and newly written material spanning several years in the band's history.\n\nThe cover art depicts the Battle of Clontarf or Cath Chluain Tarbh and this is the primary theme of the album's art and title track. The man on the left is a native Irish Gael, presumably fighting on the side of Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig, High King of Ireland. The man on the right appears to be a Viking, fighting on the side of the King of Leinster, Mael Mórdha. Both men are engaged in one-on-one combat against one another.\n\nThe album contains lyrics in both English and Irish.\n\nTrack listing\n\"An Tús\" (The Beginning) – 0:56\n\"Winds of One Thousand Winters\" – 5:51\n\"The Serpent and the Black Lake\" – 6:55\n\"Cluain Tarbh\" (Meadow of Bulls) – 6:45\n\"I Am the Wench's Bane\" – 10:15\n\"The Man All Hate to Love\" – 4:21\n\"Pauper of Souls\" – 5:02\n\"Realms of Insanity\" – 6:41\n\nSong information\n\nAn Tús\n\"An Tús\" is the introduction to the album. It fades in (and out) and is what sounds like a war tune with pipes. This is possibly mimicking what could be the lead-up the Battle of Clontarf, used as a metaphor for the entire album.\n\nWinds of One Thousand Winters\nThis song is the beginning of Mael Mórdha's signature Ceol Breatha Gaelach on the album. This is one of the sample tracks which can be heard on their website. As explained by the band:\n\n A complex mix of orchestration, layered guitars and drums, this tune expresses the misery felt by the ignorance expressed towards our past and the hope of a time when a king will rise to unite the clanns and revive our dying culture. The music is more textured than Cluain Tarbh as the theme deals with more subtle, deeper feelings.\n\nComposed: 2003\n\nThe Serpent and the Black Lake\nThis song is stated by the band to be about the \"Lure of Love\".\n\nComposed: 1997\n\nCluain Tarbh\nThe title track. This song tells the story of the Battle of Clontarf and can be considered the centrepiece of the album.\n\nFrom the band's website:\n This is about the lead up and aftermath of that most famous of battles fought in the Meadow of Bulls (Cluain Tarbh - Clontarf) on Good Friday 1014 between the then high king of Éire, Brian Boru and the king of Leinster, Mael Mórdha. The pace is fast and furious (for Mael Mórdha I mean) with pounding guitars and drums, whistle and bellowing vocals.\n\nComposed: 2003\n\nI Am the Wench's Bane\nThis is the longest song on the album. It is said to be \"on the relationship between the Wench and Her Bane\".\n\nComposed: 2001\n\nThe Man All Hate to Love\nFrom the band's website:\n If Cluain Tarbh is fast then this song is misery incarnate. Slow with lots of backing vocals, orchestration and miserable guitars. The title pretty much explains the theme of this little ditty. If you ever feel down listening to this song will make you realise that nothing could be as terrible as what is expressed here.\n\nComposed: 2003\n\nPauper of Souls\nThis song is stated to be about \"the merits of belief over non-belief\".\n\nComposed: 2001\n\nRealms of Insanity\nThis song is apparently \"open to interpretation\". No further information is given.\n\nComposed: 1996\n\nExternal links\nOfficial Mael Mórdha Website\n\n2005 debut albums\nMael Mórdha albums",
"Kraken III is the name of the third studio album Colombian group Kraken It was released on January 3, 1990 by Sonolux. The first single from the album was \"Rostros Ocultos\". The second single was \"Lágrimas de Fuego\".\n\nInformation \nThis album confirmed the progressive trend of the band. A trend that featured a group identity and a concept of what is Kraken. This album started to show the other bands of the country's ideology which is the National Rock and how it can be strengthened.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences \n\nKraken (band) albums\n1993 albums"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein"
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
Did the album make the charts?
| 3 |
Did the album Reise, Reise by Rammstein make the charts?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
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"The Proud One is the seventh studio album released by The Osmonds in 1975. Two singles, \"The Proud One\" and \"I'm Still Gonna Need You\" were released from the album. The album peaked at No. 160 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, a precipitous drop from their previous albums.\n\nThe title track gave the quintet its last top 40 hit in the US to date as well as its first and only number-one on the easy listening charts. \"I'm Still Gonna Need You\" did not make the Billboard Hot 100 but did make the top 40 in the UK and appeared on the easy listening charts.\n\nThe UK version of the album, released with the same tracks but under the title I'm Still Gonna Need You, reached No. 19 on the UK Albums Chart, their last studio album to make an appearance on the chart.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nhttp://osmondmania.com/Discography2/Album_Pages/ProudOne.html\n\nThe Osmonds albums\n1975 albums\nAlbums produced by Mike Curb\nMGM Records albums",
"\"The Way We Make a Broken Heart\" is a song written by John Hiatt. It was recorded by Ry Cooder in 1980 on his album Borderline. \"The Way We Make a Broken Heart\" was covered by both John Hiatt and Rosanne Cash in 1983 as a duet. The single was produced by Scott Mathews and Ron Nagle, however, Geffen Records did not release the single. Willy DeVille performed this song twice in Berlin 2002; once in an unplugged version and once with his electric band. This is documented on his 2002 album Live in Berlin. Asleep At The Wheel also recorded the song on their 1985 album Pasture Prime under the title \"This Is the Way We Make a Broken Heart\".\n\n1987 recording\nRosanne Cash re-recorded the song in 1987 and it went all the way to number one on the US country charts where it was her sixth single to go to number one.\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n1987 singles\n1980 songs\nAsleep at the Wheel songs\nRosanne Cash songs\nSongs written by John Hiatt\nColumbia Records singles\nSong recordings produced by Rodney Crowell"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein",
"Did the album make the charts?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
Did the band go on tour for the album?
| 4 |
Did the band Rammstein go on tour for the album Reise, Reise?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
|
Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004,
|
Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"Travel III EP is the sixth album by the Christian rock band Future of Forestry, and the third in the \"Travel Series.\" The recording of the album “officially” started on February 11. It was released on June 29, 2010. Frontman Eric Owyoung wrote all of the songs for this EP and his wife, Tamara Owyoung, painted the cover art for the album. The band subsequently departed on what was called \"The 3 Tour\" to go along with the release. The tour was self-booked and took place in the West and Midwest regions of the United States starting on June 27, 2010 and ending on July 13, 2010.\n\nTrack listing\nThe names (and respective order) of the songs were released on the band's Myspace page leading up to the release of the CD, as they did for the rest of the Travel Series EPs. However, on Travel III, for the first time, Future of Forestry released the tracks out-of-order.\n\n \"Bold and Underlined\" - 4:04\n \"Working to Be Loved\" - 3:48\n \"Did You Lose Yourself\" - 4:47\n \"Protection\" - 4:14\n \"Horizon Rainfall\" - 2:53\n \"Your Day's Not Over\" - 5:00\n\nAwards\nThe album was nominated for a Dove Award for Rock Album of the Year at the 42nd GMA Dove Awards.\n\nReferences \n\n2010 EPs\nFuture of Forestry albums",
"We All Need a Reason to Believe is the second studio album by American pop punk band Valencia. It was produced by Ariel Rechtshaid, who has done projects for We Are Scientists and Plain White T's. An early review from AbsolutePunk writer Drew Beringer stated the release proved Valencia is \"a band that can breathe new life into pop-punk\".\n\nThe album title comes from lyrics in the second track, \"Holiday\".\n\nRelease\nIn early April 2008, the band appeared at the Bamboozle Left festival. On April 8, the band posted a rough mix of \"Holiday\" online. It was mentioned that the track would feature on the band's next album, which was planned for release in late summer/early fall. In July, the band supported All Time Low on their headlining US tour. We All Need a Reason to Believe was made available for streaming on August 19 through the band's Myspace profile, before being released on August 26 through major label Columbia Records. In October and November, the band supported Bayside on their headlining US tour. On November 21, the band released a music video for \"Where Did You Go?\". In January and February 2009, the band went on a headlining tour of the US with support from Houston Calls. In February and March, the band toured Australia as part of the Soundwave festival. On April 30, a music video was released for \"The Good Life\". The band appeared at The Bamboozle festival in early May. Between late June and late August, the band performed on the Warped Tour.\n\nTrack listing\n \"Better Be Prepared\" — 3:09\n \"Holiday\" — 2:58\n \"Where Did You Go?\" (featuring Rachel Minton of Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer) — 3:21\n \"Head in Hands\" — 2:56\n \"Carry On\" — 3:41\n \"All at Once\" — 3:27\n \"Safe to Say\" — 3:21\n \"Listen Up\" (featuring Kenny Vasoli of The Starting Line) — 3:39 \n \"I Can't See Myself\" — 3:39\n \"The Good Life\" — 4:02\n \"Free\" — 4:18\n\nBonus track\n \"Running Away\" – 3:30\n\nWe All Need a Reason to B-Side\n \"When Words Fail, This Music Speaks\" — 2:41\n \"Working\" — 2:32\n \"Running Away\" — 3:33\n \"A Better Place to Land\" — 3:26\n\nPersonnel\n Shane Henderson — vocals\n JD Perry — guitar\n Maxim Soria — drums\n George Ciukurescu — bass\n Brendan Walter — guitar\n Kenny Vasoli (The Starting Line) — guest vocals on \"Listen Up\"\n Rachel Minton (Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer) — guest vocals on \"Where Did You Go?\"\n Dana Nielsen — engineer\n\nReferences\n\n2008 albums\nValencia (band) albums\nColumbia Records albums"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein",
"Did the album make the charts?",
"I don't know.",
"Did the band go on tour for the album?",
"Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004,"
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
Did the album have any singles?
| 5 |
Did the album Reise, Reise by Rammstein have any singles?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
|
"Ohne dich" on 22 November.
|
Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"\"Under Any Moon\" is a single by Glenn Medeiros and The Jets, released in 1989. \n\nWritten by Diane Warren, the song was released as a single only in the United Kingdom. It was included on the soundtrack for The Karate Kid Part III (1989), on the Mercury label, and was also included on The Jets' album, Believe (1989), on the MCA label. \n\nThe song failed to have any chart impact in the UK, while it did have minor airplay in the United States, it did not chart either. It was never performed live by The Jets.\n\nReferences\n\n1989 singles\n1989 songs\nThe Jets (band) songs\nGlenn Medeiros songs\nMercury Records singles\nSongs written by Diane Warren",
"24-7-365 is the second album by rap group, N2Deep. The album was released in 1994 for Bust It Records and was produced by N2Deep and Johnny Z. Despite the success of their previous album, Back to the Hotel, 24-7-365 did not make it on any album charts or feature any charting singles. Four singles were released \"Deep N2 the Game\", \"Small Town\", \"California Hot Tubs\" and \"Somethin' Freaky\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nSamples\nDeep N2 the Game\n\"Miss You\" by The Rolling Stones\nWhoo Ride\n\"Rigor Mortis\" by Cameo\n\nExternal links\n 24-7-365 at Discogs\n\nReferences\n\nN2Deep albums\nJay Tee albums\n1994 albums"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein",
"Did the album make the charts?",
"I don't know.",
"Did the band go on tour for the album?",
"Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004,",
"Did the album have any singles?",
"\"Ohne dich\" on 22 November."
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
What location was the album recorded?
| 6 |
What location was the album Reise, Reise by Rammstein recorded?
|
Rammstein
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Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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Germany
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Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"Get the Party Started is a 2007 album by Welsh singer Dame Shirley Bassey.\n\nBackground \nReleased in June 2007, the album features newly remixed tracks by contemporary producers. The remixes feature recorded vocal tracks previously issued in the 1980s and '90s. \"I Will Survive\" was recorded in 1996 for the album The Show Must Go On but was not issued at that time. In addition, the album features new recordings including a cover version of Pink's \"Get the Party Started\", which fronted the 2006 Marks & Spencer Christmas advertising campaign. This track was used again in 2010 for the opening credits of the spy-spoof movie Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.\n\nThe album project was spearheaded by Bassey and saw her working with songwriting partners Catherine Feeney and Nikki Lamborn, who co-wrote the song \"The Living Tree\". The album was released in the UK and Europe on 25 June 2007. It entered the UK Albums Chart at No. 6, her highest chart position for a studio album since 1970 and since 1978 overall. On 22 July 2013 it was awarded a silver disc by British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Due to the success of the digital download of the single \"Get the Party Started\" remixed by Chris Cox, Get the Party Started was released officially in the US on 18 March 2008 on the Decca label, making it the first album to be released there by Bassey after a long time absent.\n\nTrack listing\n \"Get the Party Started\" \n \"Big Spender\" (North by Northwest remix) (Vocal recorded in 1984 for I Am What I Am)\n \"I (Who Have Nothing)\" (North by Northwest remix) (Vocal recorded in 1984 for I Am What I Am)\n \"This is My Life\" (Cagedbaby remix) (Vocal recorded in 1984 for I Am What I Am)\n \"Slave to the Rhythm\" (The Glimmers remix)\n \"Can I Touch You There?\" (Knut Saevik and Paul 'Strangefruit' Nyhus)\n \"What Now My Love\" (Bugz in the Attic remix) (Vocal recorded in 1984 for I Am What I Am)\n \"Kiss Me Honey, Honey\" (Restless Soul remix) (Vocal recorded in 1984 for I Am What I Am)\n \"Hello\" (Dobie Remix)\n \"You Only Live Twice\" (Mark de Clive-Lowe remix) (Vocal recorded in 1987 for The Bond Collection)\n \"The Living Tree\" (Catherine Feeney, Nikki Lamborn) *\n \"Where Is the Love\" (Bruno E. remix)\n \"I Will Survive\" (North by Northwest remix) (Previously unreleased vocal performance from 1996)\n* New recordings exclusive to this release.\n\nGet the Party Started (Deluxe version)\n\nThe album was re-issued in November 2009 as a digital download only with several bonus tracks and a digital booklet.\n\n \"Get the Party Started\" (Soundscape Radio Edit Mix) (New remix exclusive to this release)\n \"Big Spender\" (Pink Pound Remix) (Vocal recorded in 1984 for I Am What I Am)\n \"The Living Tree\" (Shaken and Stirred Mix)\n \"The Living Tree\" (Promotional Video)\n \"Get the Party Started\" (Promotional Video)\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences \n\nShirley Bassey albums\n2007 remix albums",
"301 is the last album recorded by Esbjörn Svensson Trio, released on 30 March 2012. The album is their second released posthumously, after Leucocyte (album), as the pianist Esbjörn Svensson died in June 2008.\n\nIt was recorded during the same sessions of the recording of Leucocyte, whilst the Swedish trio were touring around Asia and Australia. The disc is named after Studios 301 in Sydney where the album was recorded.\n\nBefore his death, Svensson was actually involved in the editing down of the sessions into what might have been a double album. In the end, surviving members Magnus Öström and Dan Berglund elected to delay the release of 301. Regular sound engineer Åke Linton was also a key presence in the recording, editing and mixing process.\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\n2012 albums\nEsbjörn Svensson Trio albums"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein",
"Did the album make the charts?",
"I don't know.",
"Did the band go on tour for the album?",
"Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004,",
"Did the album have any singles?",
"\"Ohne dich\" on 22 November.",
"What location was the album recorded?",
"Germany"
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
Where is the band from?
| 7 |
Where is the band Rammstein from?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"Magneuptychia nebulosa is a species of butterfly of the family Nymphalidae. It is found in northern Venezuela, where it has been recorded only from the slope of the Serranía del Litoral in the Venezuelan Coastal Range. Records from Colombia and Panama are probably based on misidentifications.\n\nThe length of the forewings is 19.6–21.5 mm for males and 19.6–21 mm for females. The forewing ground color is brown with the submarginal band dark brown, undulating and extending from the apex towards the tornus, delimiting a slightly darker area. The marginal band is dark brown and extends from the apex towards the tornus. The fringe is grayish brown. The hindwing color is brown with the submarginal band dark brown, undulating and extending from the apex the towards tornus. It is convex in each cell. The marginal band is dark brown and extends from the apex towards the tornus. The postmarginal and tornal areas are pale ocher and the fringe is grayish brown.\n\nReferences\n\nButterflies described in 1867\nEuptychiina\nNymphalidae of South America\nTaxa named by Arthur Gardiner Butler",
"Live Celtic Folk Music is a live album by Battlefield Band, released in 1998 on the Munich Records label. It was recorded in 1980 at the Winterfolkfestival, held in Dordrecht, The Netherlands.\n\nTrack listing\n \"Lord Huntly's Cave/The Lady in the Bottle/Stewart Chisholm's Walkabout\" – 5:26 (from Stand Easy/Preview 1980) \n \"The Gallant Grahams\" – 3:08 (from Alan Reid & Brian McNeill's Sidetracks 1981) \n \"I Hae Laid a Herrin' in Salt/My Wife's a Wanton Wee Thing/The Banks of the Allan\" – 3:34 (from Stand Easy/Preview 1980) \n \"Blackhall Rocks\" – 2:54 (from Home Is Where the Van Is 1980) \n \"Athole Highlanders\" – 2:46 \n \"Miss Drummond of Perth/Fiddler's Joy/Traditional Reel/The Shetland Fiddler\" – 3:10 (from Stand Easy 1979) \n \"The Lads O' the Fair\" – 3:55 (from Home Is Where the Van Is 1980) \n \"74th Highlanders' Farewell to Edinburg/The Cup of Tea\" – 4:08 (from Stand Easy/Preview 1980) \n \"Joe McGann's Fiddle/Center's Bonnet\" – 5:46 (from Stand Easy/Preview 1980)\n\nPersonnel\n\nBattlefield Band\n Alan Reid\n Brian McNeill\n Duncan MacGillivray \n Ged Foley\n\nSources and links\n \n\nBattlefield Band albums\n1998 live albums"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein",
"Did the album make the charts?",
"I don't know.",
"Did the band go on tour for the album?",
"Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004,",
"Did the album have any singles?",
"\"Ohne dich\" on 22 November.",
"What location was the album recorded?",
"Germany",
"Where is the band from?",
"Germany"
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
Did they release a video for the album?
| 8 |
Did Rammstein release a video for the album Reise, Reise?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne",
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Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"\"Fuck It Up\" is a song recorded by Australian rapper Iggy Azalea for her second studio album In My Defense (2019). It was released as the third and final single on July 19, the day of the album's release. The song features vocals from American rapper Kash Doll and was produced by J. White Did It, who served as an executive producer on In My Defense and produced the album's previous two singles, \"Sally Walker\" and \"Started\". It was released by Bad Dreams Records (Azalea's own record label) and Empire Distribution\n\nCommercially the song peaked within the top 40 on the New Zealand Hot singles chart.\n\nThe music video begins with Azalea working as a hotel receptionist and meeting an old friend from high school, discovering that their reunion is about to take place but she and Kash Doll were not invited. The rest of the video sees the two rappers spending time in a bedroom and restaurant before finally attending the reunion itself, where they win an award together. YouTube personality Nikita Dragun makes a cameo appearance in the video.\n\nBackground and release\nAfter her 2018 departure from Island Records following the release of her extended play Survive the Summer, Azalea began working on her second album. She specifically specified that she wanted the album to be for her fans to enjoy as, in her words, \"critics have literally never given any album I've made a good review\". Azalea teased the song in early 2019 while working on her album; the song later had snippets uploaded to YouTube and a music video for the song was shot from June to July 2019. When the album was released, \"Fuck It Up\" was quickly announced as In My Defense's third single and, after disappointing sales compared to the album's previous singles and Azalea's announcement of a follow-up extended play in Wicked Lips, it became the final release from the album.\n\nMusic video\nA music video for the song was shot on July 11, 2019, it was later uploaded to Azalea's YouTube channel on July 19, 2019. As of July 2020, the music video has 35 million views. The video begins with Azalea working as a hotel receptionist and meeting an old friend from high school, discovering that their reunion is about to take place but she and Kash Doll were not invited. The rest of the video sees the two rappers spending time in a bedroom and restaurant before finally attending the reunion itself, where they win an award together. YouTube personality Nikita Dragun makes a cameo appearance in the video.\n\nCharts\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2019 singles\nIggy Azalea songs\nKash Doll songs\n2019 songs\nSongs written by Iggy Azalea\nSong recordings produced by J. White Did It",
"\"Reminisce\" / \"Where The Story Ends\" are two songs by ten piece hip-hop group Blazin' Squad, released as a double A-side single from their debut studio album, In the Beginning.\n\nBackground\nAlthough a double A-side released was not originally intended, after the band expressed interest in both songs as singles, the record label decide to pair them together as a double A-side, as they did not wish to release four singles from one album. Although \"Reminisce\" received more radio and video airplay, \"Where the Story Ends\" also became a significant part of the single release, and was regularly performed on TV in promotion of the single. \"Reminisce\" contains a sample from Zapp's 1985 hit-single \"Computer Love\". The sample is mainly featured in the intro of the song. The single was released on 10 February 2003. Although it was the least successful single from the album, it did manage to reach a peak position of #8 on the UK Singles Chart, meaning all three singles from the album peaked within the UK Top 10.\n\nMusic videos\nMusic videos were made and released for both songs, although \"Reminisce\" generally received more airplay. Despite the radio version being the prominent mix, the music video for \"Reminisce\" contains the longer album version. The video lasts for a total length of four minutes and ten seconds. The video features the group performing the song atop the wreckage in a dis-used scrapyard. The video features individual shots of each band member, as well scenes featuring the whole band. The video was filmed in East London. The music video for \"Where the Story Ends\" was a much simpler production. The video lasts for a total length of four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. The video features footage of the band recording the song in the studio, as well as other clips from their TV appearances, meet and greets and other personal appearances.\n\nTrack listing\n Digital single\n \"Reminisce\" (Radio Edit) - 3:10\n \"Where The Story Ends\" (Album Version) - 4:40\n\n UK CD #1\n \"Reminisce\" (Radio Edit) - 3:10\n \"Where The Story Ends\" (Album Version) - 4:40\n \"How Blazin' Rolls\" - 3:41\n \"Reminisce\" (CD-Rom Video) - 3:10\n\n UK CD #2\n \"Reminisce\" (TNT Xplosive Platinum Mix) - 3:27\n \"Reminisce\" (Album Version) - 4:03\n \"Where The Story Ends\" (Video) - 4:27\n \"Band Video Interview\" - 3:58\n\n Cassette\n \"Reminisce\" (Radio Edit) - 3:10\n \"Where The Story Ends\" (Album Version) - 4:40\n \"Reminisce\" (TNT Xplosive Platinum Mix) - 3:27\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2003 singles\nBlazin' Squad songs"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein",
"Did the album make the charts?",
"I don't know.",
"Did the band go on tour for the album?",
"Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004,",
"Did the album have any singles?",
"\"Ohne dich\" on 22 November.",
"What location was the album recorded?",
"Germany",
"Where is the band from?",
"Germany",
"Did they release a video for the album?",
"January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, \"Sonne\","
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
What was the video called?
| 9 |
What was the video for Reise, Reise by Rammstein called?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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Sonne
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Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"\"What What (In the Butt)\" is a viral video created by Andrew Swant and Bobby Ciraldo for the song of the same name by Samwell. It is known for its numerous blatant and camp references to homosexuality and anal sex. The lyrics of the song, a production of Mike Stasny, mostly revolve around the title. The video was made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and uploaded on Valentine's Day 2007 to YouTube. As of October 2021, the video has over 72 million views.\n\nThemes and imagery\nOn 5 March 2007, with regard to the Christian imagery in the video, Samwell said, in an interview with KROQ-FM, that the opening image is \"not a cross, but a flaming symbol that [he] just happened to use\". According to Stasny, however: \"[Samwell] wanted it because he's a Christian but he doesn't do Christian morality. For him, having a burning cross is a way to pay respect to his beliefs.\"\n\nThe video also parodies the flower petal scene from the movie American Beauty (1999).\n\nOn April 8, 2007, Brownmark Films released an interview with Samwell, in which he discussed the public reception of the song at length.\n\nPerformances and appearances\nIn April 2008, Samwell appeared on the BBC television show Lily Allen and Friends for an interview and performed a live version of \"What What (In the Butt)\" with choreographed dancers. The video was also featured in episode #53 of ADD-TV in Manhattan. \"What What (In the Butt)\" was an official selection at the Milwaukee International Film Festival and the Mix Brasil Film Festival.\n\nIn June 2010 Samwell appeared on an episode of Comedy Central's Tosh.0, television show about viral videos. The segment told the story of how the \"What What\" video was created, followed by an acoustic duet version of the song by Samwell and Josh Homme, lead singer for Queens Of The Stone Age and guitar player for Kyuss.\n\nIn 2009, the creators of the video, and Samwell himself, claimed that a feature film called What What (In the Butt): The Movie was in the works.\n\nOn November 12, 2010, Brownmark Films filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against MTV Networks, South Park Studios, and Viacom for their use of \"What What in the Butt\" in a 2008 South Park episode. In July 2011, a federal judge decided that South Park's use of the video fell under the fair use exception to copyright law, and thus the defendants did not owe damages. The decision was unusual in a copyright lawsuit because it was made on a motion to dismiss, before summary judgment. The appeal was dismissed by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on June 7, 2012. Additionally, the district court awarded attorneys' fees to the defendants because the lawsuit was \"objectively unreasonable\".\n\nIn January 2013, a behind-the-scenes video was released which showed footage from the original 2006 green screen shoot.\n\nIn popular culture\nIn the April 2, 2008 episode of South Park, \"Canada on Strike\", the boys post a viral video on \"YouToob\" (a fictional version of YouTube) of Butters performing \"What What (In the Butt)\".\nIn October 2011 a porn parody of Comedy Central's Tosh.0 was released called Tosh Porn Oh. The film (porn star Dane Cross' directorial debut) contained a segment based on the \"What What (In the Butt)\" video with Samwell replaced by the pornographic actress Skin Diamond. The segment features a recreation of the original video which, according to the end credits, was fully licensed by Brownmark Films.\nThe \"What What\" song surfaced on an episode of Sweden’s Got Talent in which four naked young men danced to the song.\nThe creators of the \"What What\" video projected images of Samwell's iconic pink zeppelin onto buildings in Los Angeles for the five-year anniversary of the project.\n\nSee also\nLGBT hip hop\n\"In the Bush\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n Official website\n \"What What\" re-created segment on South Park\n Blogcritics Magazine interview with the creators of the video\n \n\nViral videos\nSongs about buttocks\nSongs about sexuality\nLGBT-related songs\n2007 YouTube videos\n2007 songs\nInternet memes introduced in 2007\nMusic memes",
"\"What a Night\" is a song performed by British band, Loveable Rogues. It was their debut single and was intended to feature on a debut album. The single was released in Ireland and the United Kingdom on 19 April 2013. The band were dropped from Syco in October 2013, but the single was featured on their debut album This and That, released in 2014 on Super Duper Records.\n\nBackground\nLoveable Rogues first announced that they're signed to Syco on June, 2012. In late 2012, the band released a free mixtape through their Soundcloud channel. The collection of songs was released as a free download and was called 'First Things First'. \"What A Night\" was previewed along with new songs such as \"Maybe Baby\", \"Talking Monkeys\" and \"Honest\".\n\nMusic video\n\nTwo teaser videos were released before the music video. The first teaser video was uploaded to their Vevo channel on 11 February 2013. The second teaser released two days after or a week before the music video released; on 19 February 2013, the music video was uploaded to their Vevo channel.\nThe video features the band having a night party with their friends.\n\nChart performance\n\"What a Night\" debuted on the UK Singles Chart at number 9 on 27 April 2013 after debuting at number 5 on the UK Singles Chart Update.\n\nTrack listing\nDigital download\n What a Night - 2:50\n Nuthouse - 3:58\n What a Night (feat. Lucky Mason) Sonny J Mason Remix] - 3:41\n What a Night (Supasound Radio Remix) - 2:42\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2013 debut singles\n2013 songs\nSyco Music singles\nSong recordings produced by Red Triangle (production team)\nSongs written by Rick Parkhouse\nSongs written by George Tizzard"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein",
"Did the album make the charts?",
"I don't know.",
"Did the band go on tour for the album?",
"Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004,",
"Did the album have any singles?",
"\"Ohne dich\" on 22 November.",
"What location was the album recorded?",
"Germany",
"Where is the band from?",
"Germany",
"Did they release a video for the album?",
"January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, \"Sonne\",",
"What was the video called?",
"Sonne"
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
When did it get released?
| 10 |
When did the video Sonne by Rammstein get released?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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The video was released on 29 January 2001.
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Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"How Did This Get Made? is a comedy podcast on the Earwolf network hosted by Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas.\n\nGenerally, How Did This Get Made? is released every two weeks. During the show's off-week, a \".5\" episode is uploaded featuring Scheer announcing the next week's movie, as well as challenges for the fans. In addition to the shows and mini-shows, the How Did This Get Made? stream hosted the first three episodes of Bitch Sesh, the podcast of previous guests Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider, in December 2015. It has also hosted episodes of its own spin-off podcast, the How Did This Get Made? Origin Stories, in which Blake Harris interviews people involved with the films covered by the main show. In December 2017, an episode was recorded for the Pee Cast Blast event, and released exclusively on Stitcher Premium.\n\nEvery episode has featured Paul Scheer as the host of the podcast. The only episode to date in which Scheer hosted remotely was The Smurfs, in which he Skyped in. Raphael has taken extended breaks from the podcast for both filming commitments and maternity leave. Mantzoukas has also missed episodes due to work, but has also Skyped in for various episodes. On the occasions that neither Raphael nor Mantzoukas are available for live appearances, Scheer calls in previous fan-favorite guests for what is known as a How Did This Get Made? All-Stars episode.\n\nList of episodes\n\nMini episodes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n List of How Did This Get Made? episodes\n\nHow Did This Get Made\nHow Did This Get Made",
"Let You Know may refer to:\n\n \"Let You Know\" (Flume song), released in 2019\n \"Let You Know\" (Hoobastank song), released in 2006\n \"Let You Know\" (Sketchy Bongo and Shekhinah song), released in 2016\n\nSee also\n \"Did I Let You Know\", a 2011 song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers\n \"I'll Let You Know When I Get There\", a 2011 episode of the American TV series The Killing\n Just to Let You Know..., 1993 debut album by Bitty McLean\n Things I Should Let You Know, 2013 album by Seth Glier"
] |
[
"Rammstein",
"Reise, Reise, 2003-2005",
"When was Reise, reise released?",
"meaning \"journey, journey\", or as a command \"travel, travel\", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003;",
"What is the name of the band that made this album?",
"Rammstein",
"Did the album make the charts?",
"I don't know.",
"Did the band go on tour for the album?",
"Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004,",
"Did the album have any singles?",
"\"Ohne dich\" on 22 November.",
"What location was the album recorded?",
"Germany",
"Where is the band from?",
"Germany",
"Did they release a video for the album?",
"January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, \"Sonne\",",
"What was the video called?",
"Sonne",
"When did it get released?",
"The video was released on 29 January 2001."
] |
C_75b0bc10897c4042bbd162ceb9ce997a_1
|
What is an interesting fact about this album?
| 11 |
What is an interesting fact about the album Reise, Reise by Rammstein?
|
Rammstein
|
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel - Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerrader" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at number 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached number 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In August 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria. On 22-23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on November 2. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year. Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to number one in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999 the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued with the inclusion of "Du hast" in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture. Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album. Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr". From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Buck dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself. Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rudersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jorn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September. Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Volkerball, released in November 2006. CANNOTANSWER
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From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX.
|
Rammstein (, "ramming stone") is a German Neue Deutsche Härte band formed in Berlin in 1994. The band's lineup—consisting of lead vocalist Till Lindemann, lead guitarist Richard Kruspe, rhythm guitarist Paul Landers, bassist Oliver Riedel, drummer Christoph Schneider, and keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz—has remained unchanged throughout their history, along with their approach to songwriting, which consists of Lindemann writing and singing the lyrics over instrumental pieces the rest of the band have completed beforehand. Prior to their formation, some members were associated with the punk rock acts Feeling B and First Arsch.
After winning a local contest, Rammstein were able to record demos and send them to different record labels, eventually signing with Motor Music. Working with producer Jacob Hellner, they released their debut album Herzeleid in 1995. Though the album initially sold poorly, the band gained popularity through their live performances and the album eventually reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second album, Sehnsucht, was released in 1997 and debuted at No. 1 in Germany, resulting in a worldwide tour lasting nearly four years and spawning the successful singles "Engel" and "Du hast" and the live album Live aus Berlin (1999). Following the tour, Rammstein signed with major label Universal Music and released Mutter in 2001. Six singles were released from the album, all charting in countries throughout Europe. The lead single, "Sonne", reached No. 2 in Germany. Rammstein released Reise, Reise in 2004 and had two more singles reach No. 2 in Germany: "Mein Teil" and "Amerika"; the former song reached No. 1 in Spain, becoming their first No. 1 single.
Their fifth album, Rosenrot, was released in 2005, and the lead single, "Benzin", reached No. 6 in Germany. Their second live album, Völkerball, was released in 2006. The band released their sixth album, Liebe ist für alle da, in 2009, with its lead single, "Pussy", becoming their first No. 1 hit in Germany despite having a controversial music video that featured hardcore pornography. The band then entered a recording hiatus and toured for several years, releasing the Made in Germany greatest hits album as well as the Rammstein in Amerika and Paris live albums. After a decade without new music, Rammstein returned in 2019 with the song "Deutschland", which became their second No. 1 hit in Germany. Their untitled seventh studio album was released in May 2019 and reached No. 1 in 14 countries.
Rammstein were one of the first bands to emerge within the Neue Deutsche Härte genre, with their debut album leading the music press to coin the term, and their style of music has generally had a positive reception from music critics. Commercially, the band have been very successful, earning many No. 1 albums as well as gold and platinum certifications in countries around the world. Their grand live performances, which often feature pyrotechnics, have contributed to their popularity growth. Despite success, the band have been subject to some controversies, with their overall image having been criticized; for instance, the song "Ich tu dir weh" forced its parent album Liebe ist für alle da to be re-released in Germany with the song removed due to its sexually explicit lyrics.
History
Founding and Herzeleid (1989–1996)
In 1989, East German guitarist Richard Kruspe escaped to West Berlin and started the band Orgasm Death Gimmick. At that time, he was heavily influenced by US music, especially that of rock group Kiss. After the Berlin Wall came down, he moved back home to Schwerin, where Till Lindemann worked as a basket-weaver and played drums in the band First Arsch (loosely translated as "First Arse" or "First Ass"). At this time, Kruspe lived with Oliver Riedel of the Inchtabokatables and Christoph Schneider of Die Firma.
In 1992, Kruspe made his first trip to the United States with Till Lindemann and Oliver "Ollie" Riedel. He realized that he did not want to make US music and concentrated on creating a unique German sound. Kruspe, Riedel and Schneider started working together on a new project in 1993. Finding it difficult to write both music and lyrics, Kruspe persuaded Lindemann, whom he had overheard singing while he was working, to join the fledgling group. The band called themselves Rammstein-Flugschau (Rammstein Airshow) after the 1988 Ramstein air show disaster. Guitarist Paul Landers said the spelling of Ramstein with the extra "m" was a mistake. After the band became popular, the band members denied the connection to the air show disaster and said that their name was inspired by the giant doorstop-type devices found on old gates, called Rammsteine. The extra "m" in the band's name makes it translate literally as "ramming stone". In a 2019 feature, Metal Hammer explained that the band was named after one of their earliest songs, "Ramstein", written after the city. According to the band, people started to refer to them as "the band with the 'Ramstein song'" and later as the "Ramstein band".
Rammstein co-existed with the members' previous projects for about a year and a half. Members would invest the money raised with Feeling B shows in Rammstein. They recorded their first songs in a building that had been squatted by Feeling B frontman Aljoscha Rompe. A contest was held in Berlin for amateur bands in 1994, the winner of which would receive access to a professional recording studio for a whole week. Kruspe, Riedel, Schneider, and Lindemann entered and won the contest with a 4-track demo tape with demo versions of songs from Herzeleid, written in English. This sparked Landers' attention, who wanted in on the project upon hearing their demo. To complete their sound, Rammstein attempted to recruit Christian "Flake" Lorenz, who had played with Landers in Feeling B. Though initially hesitant, Lorenz eventually agreed to join the band. Later, Rammstein were signed by Motor Music.
Rammstein began to record their first studio album, Herzeleid, in March 1995 with producer Jacob Hellner. They released their first single "Du riechst so gut" that August and released the album in September. Later that year, they toured with Clawfinger in Warsaw and Prague. Rammstein headlined a 17-show tour of Germany in December, which helped boost the band's popularity and establish them as a credible live act. They went on several tours throughout early 1996, releasing their second single titled "Seemann" on 8 January. On 27 March 1996, Rammstein performed on MTV's Hanging Out in London, their first performance in the UK. Their first major boost in popularity outside Germany came when Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate mich" and "Rammstein", during his work as music director for the David Lynch 1997 film Lost Highway. The soundtrack for the film was released in the U.S. in late 1996 and later throughout Europe in April 1997. In the middle of 1996, they headlined one tour of their own in small, sold-out venues. Rammstein went on to tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from September to October 1996, performing an anniversary concert on 27 September called "100 years of Rammstein". Guests to the concert included Moby, Bobo, and the Berlin Session Orchestra, while Berlin director Gert Hof was responsible for the light show.
Sehnsucht and Live aus Berlin (1996–2000)
Rammstein started recording Sehnsucht in November 1996 at the Temple Studios in Malta. The album was again produced by Jacob Hellner. "Engel", the first single from the album, was released on 1 April 1997 and reached gold status in Germany on 23 May. This prompted the release of a fan edition of the single, named Engel – Fan Edition. This contained two previously unreleased songs, "Feuerräder" and "Wilder Wein". Release of the second single from the album Sehnsucht was "Du hast", which hit the German single charts August 1997 at No. 5. Rammstein then continued touring in the summer while Sehnsucht was released on 22 August 1997. The album reached No. 1 in Germany after two weeks in the charts. Simultaneously, Herzeleid and both Sehnsucht singles ("Du hast" and "Engel") were in the Top 20 of the German charts. Rammstein continued to headline sold-out shows throughout Europe in September and October. On 5 December 1997, they embarked on their first tour of the United States as the opening act for KMFDM. In July 1998, the band released a cover of the song Stripped, originally released by Depeche Mode in early 1986; it was included on the tribute album For the Masses, the Rammstein version obtained moderate success in Germany and Austria.
On 22–23 August 1998, Rammstein played to over 17,000 fans at the Wuhlheide in Berlin; the biggest show the band had played there up to that date. Supporting acts were Danzig, Nina Hagen, Joachim Witt and Alaska. The show was professionally filmed, intended to be released on their upcoming live DVD, Live aus Berlin. Rammstein embarked on a live tour with Korn, Ice Cube, Orgy and Limp Bizkit called the Family Values Tour in September through to late October 1998. Continuing their success in the US, Sehnsucht received Gold record status there on 2 November. The band was nominated at the MTV European Music Awards for Best Rock Act and performed "Du hast" live on 12 November that year.
Rammstein had further success in 1999, starting off the year in February with a nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 41st-annual Grammy Awards. A year after it was filmed, the Live aus Berlin concert was released on CD on 30 August 1999, with a limited edition double CD also available. Two weeks after it was released, Live aus Berlin went to No. 2 in the German Album Charts. On 13 September and 26 November 1999, the video and DVD versions of the concert were released respectively. Further popularity ensued when "Du hast" was included in The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture.
Mutter (2000–2002)
Rammstein's album Mutter was recorded in the south of France in May and June 2000, and mixed in Stockholm in October of that year. During December 2000, Rammstein released an MP3 version of "Links 2-3-4" as a teaser for their new album. 2001 was a busy year for Rammstein, as the band needed to finish off the Sehnsucht Tour ending in January and February with the band playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia and New Zealand and playing some concerts in Japan. January also heralded the shooting of the video for their upcoming single, "Sonne", recorded in Potsdam at Babelsberger Filmstudios from 13 to 15 January 2001. The video was released on 29 January 2001. The single for "Sonne" was released on 12 February 2001 in Europe, featuring an instrumental version of the song, two remixes by Clawfinger and the song "Adios" from the upcoming album.
Mutter was released on 2 April 2001, sparking another Rammstein tour through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On 14 May, the second single from the album, "Links 2 3 4", was released, along with a video of the single on 18 May. After a tour throughout Europe in June, the band then toured the U.S., Canada and Mexico from June to August 2001. "Ich will", the third single from the album, was released on 10 September 2001 and a Tour edition of the Mutter album (the cover of which is red) was released, featuring alternative artwork and live versions of "Ich will", "Links 2 3 4", "Sonne" and "Spieluhr".
From 8 to 12 January 2002, Rammstein traveled to Prague to participate in a minor scene for the film XXX. The band is seen in the opening scene, performing their song "Feuer frei!" in a concert. "Feuer frei!" was released across Europe as the first single from the XXX soundtrack on 14 October 2002. Rammstein released two remixes of the song. Furthermore, the single's track listing included "Du hast" and "Bück dich" cover versions by Battery. The video for the single was edited by Rob Cohen and contains part Rammstein performance at the beginning of the film and part snippets from the film itself.
Reise, Reise, Rosenrot, and Völkerball (2003–2006)
Rammstein recorded Reise, Reise (meaning "journey, journey", or as a command "travel, travel", but also an archaic Reveille) at the El Cortijo studio in southern Spain in November and December 2003; it was mixed at Toytown studio in Stockholm, Sweden in April and May 2004. The first single from the album was "Mein Teil", released on 26 July. The video was shot in the Arena, in the Treptow district of Berlin. Outdoor shooting took place at the Deutsche Oper (Opera House) U-Bahn station on Bismarckstrasse. The director was Zoran Bihac, who also filmed the "Links 2 3 4" video. The video for the second single, "Amerika", was filmed on 6 and 7 August 2004 in the ruins of the former cement works in Rüdersdorf, near Berlin, under the direction of Jörn Heitmann (who also directed the "Ich Will" music video, among others). The space suits for the moon scenes were borrowed from Hollywood and 240 tons of ash were needed to create the moon landscape. The video premiered on 20 August, while the single was released on 13 September.
Reise, Reise was released on 27 September 2004 and went straight into top 10 charts throughout Europe. According to the Billboard charts, Rammstein were at that stage the most successful German-language band of all time. Rammstein toured Germany through November and some of December 2004, releasing the single "Ohne dich" on 22 November. In February 2005, Rammstein toured Europe again. By 28 February, Rammstein had played 21 concerts in front of more than 200,000 spectators in ten countries. It was on this tour that the band was faced with several lawsuits resulting from severe fire breathing accidents involving audience members. "Keine Lust" the fourth single from Reise, Reise, was released on 28 February 2005. From 27 May to 30 July 2005, Rammstein played music festivals across Europe. Footage from these concerts can be seen on Rammstein's live DVD Völkerball, released in November 2006.
In August 2005, Rammstein revealed that the follow-up album to Reise, Reise would be called Rosenrot. Their first single from the album, "Benzin", was released on 5 October, with its video premiere on 16 September. Rosenrot was released worldwide on 28 October. Directly following the release, the album continued the success of its predecessor, Reise, Reise, placing on top 10 charts in 20 countries. 16 December 2005 marked the release of the title track on Rosenrot. The video for "Mann gegen Mann" was released on 6 February 2006, with the single being released on 3 March. On 19 February 2006, Rammstein had an asteroid named after them, 110393 Rammstein.
On 17 November, the first Rammstein Live DVD since Live aus Berlin from 1998 was released. Völkerball shows concert performances by the band in England, France, Japan and Russia. The Special Edition is extended by a second DVD, which contains the documentaries "Anaconda in the net" by Mathilde Bonnefoy and the "Making of the album Reise, Reise" by the band's guitarist Paul Landers. The limited edition was released as a large black-and-white photo-book with photos by Frederic Batier, who had accompanied the band through their recent tours. The photo-book edition contains two DVDs and two live albums.
Liebe ist für alle da (2007–2011)
The band took a hiatus in 2006 and began work again in 2007. The recording process reportedly took two years. In July 2009, the title track "Liebe ist für alle da" leaked onto the internet, along with promotional materials. This led Universal Music to take action against certain fan sites. It was confirmed in August 2009 that the new album would have 11 tracks, and mixing of the album – which was taking place in Stockholm – had been completed. On 1 September 2009, it was confirmed on the band's website that "Pussy" would be the first single from the album. On the same day, The Gauntlet posted a promotional video for it. The video also confirmed the album title, Liebe ist für alle da. Later, the title was confirmed again in an interview with Paul Landers for RockOne magazine. 46,7 The music video for "Pussy" was released on 16 September 2009, at 20:30 GMT, released especially for the adult website Visit-x. The video contains graphic scenes of male and female nudity as well as women engaging in sexual acts with the band members, although the actual sex scenes were performed by body doubles. The women featured in the video are German pornographic stars. Metal Hammer released an edited version of the video onto their website.
"Ich tu dir weh" was confirmed as the second single from the album by Landers and Lorenz in an interview for Radio Eins. Although censorship of the song in Germany prohibits any advertisement, broadcast or public display, the video to "Ich tu dir weh" was released on 21 December 2009 on the adult website Visit-x, just like the video to "Pussy", after advertisement on the band's official German website; it depicts the band on stage in a similar configuration as on their 2009/10 tour. Any references to the video on the official website have since been deleted. In Europe, the single was released on 15 January 2010, and in the U.S. on 19 January 2010. Like the video "Pussy," this video was also directed by Jonas Åkerlund. On 23 April 2010, Rammstein released their video "Haifisch". Unlike the video for "Ich tu dir weh", it contains more of a narrative rather than a performance. The single was released during May and June 2010.
On 8 November 2009, Rammstein began the first leg of the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in Lisbon, Portugal. As part of their European summer tour, Rammstein performed at the 2010 Rock AM Ring Festival on 4–6 June 2010. They also headlined several shows across Europe on the Sonisphere Festival, including their first ever outdoor UK performance at Knebworth Park, performing the day before Iron Maiden. On Sunday 18 July 2010, Rammstein played in front of more than 130,000 people in Quebec City on the Plains of Abraham as the closing show for the Festival d'été de Québec. It was their first North American appearance in nine years. The band announced that their last tour dates of 2010 were to be in the Americas. After several South American dates, the band returned to the United States for a single show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City – their first US show in over ten years. The tickets sold out in a very short time (under 20 minutes).
They also performed at Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada on 9 December. This concert sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale, indicating a high demand to see Rammstein in North America. The band then played at Big Day Out 2011 from 21 January to 6 February in New Zealand and Australia. The band also visited South Africa for the first time in early 2011 and played two sold-out concerts in Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively, indicating another territory eager for the opportunity to enjoy the band live. On 16 February 2011, Rammstein announced that, after the massive success of their sold out Madison Square Garden show on 11 December 2010, they would be touring North America after ten years.
Rammstein played in New Jersey (East Rutherford) Izod Center, Montreal Bell Centre, Toronto Air Canada Centre, Chicago Allstate Arena, Edmonton Rexall Place, Seattle Tacoma Dome, San Francisco (Oakland) Oracle Arena, Los Angeles The Forum, and Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center, Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes, Guadalajara's Arena VFG, and Monterrey's Auditorio Banamex to a total of six US dates, three Canadian dates, and four Mexican dates. Tickets went on sale 25 and 26 February to great response, with many shows completely selling out, making this tour a complete success. On 20 April 2011, the band also won the Revolver Golden God Award for Best Live Band, their first US award.
Made in Germany, video releases, and side projects (2011–2017)
Rammstein released a greatest hits album titled Made in Germany 1995–2011 on 2 December 2011. It contains one previously unreleased track, "Mein Land" which was released as a single on 11 November 2011 with another track, "Vergiss uns nicht", that was released at a later date. The compilation is available in three different editions: The standard edition; this includes a CD with normal songs from their back catalog. Special edition; has the same CD from the standard edition and an extra CD with Rammstein songs that have been remixed by different artists such as Scooter. Finally, the super deluxe edition; has the two previously mentioned CDs and three DVDs with interviews and the making of videos from different music videos. The video for the song "Mein Land" was filmed on 23 May 2011 at Sycamore Beach in Malibu, California. It premiered on the band's official website on 11 November 2011. A full European tour in support of Made in Germany began in November 2011 and spanned all the way to May 2012. It included a North American tour that began on 20 April 2012 in Sunrise, Florida and ended on 25 May 2012 in Houston, Texas that visited 21 cities throughout the US and Canada. The Swedish industrial band Deathstars supported the band during the first two legs of the European tour. DJ Joe Letz from Combichrist and Emigrate was the opening act for the North American Tour.
Rammstein, minus Till Lindemann, performed "The Beautiful People" with Marilyn Manson at the Echo Awards on 22 March 2012. On 21 September 2012, it was announced that Rammstein would be headlining Download Festival 2013, along with Iron Maiden and Slipknot. Twelve additional festival performances for summer 2013 were announced the same day, including Wacken Open Air festival and Rock Werchter. Rammstein announced new tour dates starting for spring 2013 in Europe, including a 2-day return to Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide, the location of their first (official) live DVD, Live Aus Berlin. On 22 November 2012, Rammstein announced via Facebook that they will be releasing a video collection featuring all music videos entitled Videos 1995–2012, plus two unreleased music videos for "Mein Herz Brennt", originally featured on the album Mutter. The first video premiered on the band's Vimeo, while the second premiered on a promotional website. Both videos were directed by Zoran Bihac. The first was released on 7 December 2012, and featured the newly recorded piano version of "Mein Herz Brennt". A single of the song was released on the same day, which included an edited version of the original and a new song titled 'Gib Mir Deine Augen' as a b-side. The explicit version's video leaked onto the internet on 11 December 2012 but was officially released on 14 December, in conjunction with the video collection DVD.
In July 2013, guitarist Paul Landers revealed in an interview the possibility of a Rammstein documentary and a live DVD. He indicated that the band may "start thinking" about a new album in 2014. In September 2014, band co-founder Richard Kruspe (then working with his side band, Emigrate) said the band was preparing some more live DVDs and that they were taking some time off from the studio. The band would meet again in 2015 to decide if the time was right to return to the studio. In May 2015, Lindemann confirmed in an interview with MusikUniverse that Rammstein would start pre-production on a possible new album in September of that year, and that production would most likely go on until 2017. According to Peter Tägtgren – who works with frontman Till Lindemann on their side-project Lindemann – Till would be regrouping with his Rammstein bandmates later in 2015 to start pre-production on a new full-length album, which normally takes two years to be released.
In early August 2015, Rammstein released a trailer for an upcoming project, titled "In Amerika". On 15 August, the band announced Rammstein in Amerika, a video release that includes a 2010 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a documentary made from archived footage recorded during the band's career. Rammstein played several festivals in Europe and North America during 2016, and in November announced plans to perform at a similar string of European festivals in 2017. On 18 January 2017 Rammstein announced a new live video release titled Paris, a recording of a March 2012 concert that took place at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris. It premiered on 23 March in selected cinemas, and was released worldwide on DVD/Blu-ray and CD on 19 May 2017.
Untitled seventh album and upcoming eighth album (2017–present)
In an interview in March 2017, Richard Kruspe said that Rammstein had about 35 new songs that were close to completion, though the release date of the band's seventh studio album was still an open question. In May, Rammstein started touring once again. Also in May, it was revealed that Sky van Hoff would be working with the band on their next album. On 18 June 2018, it was announced via StubHub's ticketing website that Rammstein would play songs at their Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, show from their forthcoming album, then set for release late in 2018. On 17 September 2018, the band announced through Facebook that they were "almost done" recording the album, as they were recording orchestra and choirs in Minsk. On 2 January 2019, guitarist Richard Kruspe announced that recording of the album wrapped in November 2018 and that the record would be released in April 2019, along with five music videos.
Rammstein released the first single from their seventh album, "Deutschland", on 28 March 2019 and announced the release date of their untitled seventh studio album, 17 May 2019. Rammstein also revealed the album cover which consisted of a single, unlit match which fans say represents their love of fire and simplicity. On 26 April 2019, Rammstein released the second single from the new album, "Radio". Shortly after its release, the album reached No. 1 in fourteen different countries. On 28 May 2019, Rammstein released their third single and music video from the album, this time for "Ausländer". The band embarked on their Stadium Tour to support the album, beginning in May 2019. They were due to play shows in Europe and North America in 2020, but were forced to postpone them due to the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the two continents. The dates first were rescheduled for 2021 and, in March 2021, again rescheduled to 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the band to remain sheltered during a lockdown in Germany, the band returned to writing music, which Christoph Schneider confirmed in a German podcast. It was reported in September 2020 that they had returned to La Fabrique Studios in France, where they recorded their untitled seventh album, to record new music, potentially for a new album. On 25 September, the 25th anniversary of their debut album Herzeleid, they announced a remastered anniversary edition for the album, for release on 4 December. The release was made available both digitally and physically, as a CD housed in a digipak as well as a double heavyweight, colored vinyl.
In February 2021, Flake Lorenz confirmed to Motor Music that the band had finished recording an eighth studio album. Lorenz stated that the recording sessions were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic allowed for "less distraction" and "more time to think of new things". In October 2021, a song from the album was premiered on the International Space Station to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The following month, Richard Kruspe stated in an interview that Rammstein's eighth studio album would be released in the first half of 2022, prior to the slated resumption of their Stadium Tour that had been postponed to 2022. Despite this, composer Sven Helbig, who worked on the album, stated that the release could be delayed due to the 2021–2022 global supply chain crisis, which impacts the album's physical releases. Heraldo de Aragón reported in January 2022 that Rammstein had recorded a cover version of "Entre dos tierras" ("Between Two Lands") by Spanish rock band Héroes del Silencio for the album.
Musical style and lyrics
Rammstein's sound has primarily been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, hard rock, and gothic metal, while also being described as nu metal, alternative metal, symphonic metal, progressive metal, and "techno-metal". Rammstein's style has received positive feedback from critics. New Zealand's Southland Times (17 December 1999) suggested that Till Lindemann's "booming, sub-sonic voice" would send "the peasants fleeing into their barns and bolting their doors", while The New York Times (9 January 2005) commented that on the stage, "Mr. Lindemann gave off an air of such brute masculinity and barely contained violence that it seemed that he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head". Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic commented that "their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful". "We just push boundaries", said Till Lindemann in an interview with rock magazine Kerrang!, "We cannot help it if people don't like those boundaries being pushed".
Nearly all of Rammstein's songs are in German. Educated in East Germany schools, the members were all taught Russian as a second language rather than English. In 2019, Flake commented: "I saw a lot of East German bands that sung in very bad English to people who didn't understand English – it was absolutely stupid. But if you really want to tell your emotions, you have to speak in your mother tongue." Songs they have recorded entirely or partly in English include: a cover of Depeche Mode's 1986 song "Stripped" and English renditions of "Engel", "Du hast", and "Amerika". The original version of "Amerika" as well as "Stirb nicht vor mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" and "Pussy" also contain some lyrics in English. The song "Moskau" ("Moscow") contains a chorus in Russian, and Till Lindemann has an unofficial song called "Schtiel" (cover of song "Штиль"("Shtil") by Russian popular heavy metal band "Aria") entirely in Russian. "Te quiero puta!" is entirely in Spanish, "Frühling in Paris" has a chorus in French, "Zeig dich" contains lyrics in Latin performed by a choir and "Ausländer" has lyrics in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Oliver Riedel commented that "[the] German language suits heavy metal music. French might be the language of love, but German is the language of anger". In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, when asked whether Rammstein would ever create an original song entirely in English, Till Lindemann stated that 'Rammstein will never write a song in English, it's like asking Buddha to kill a pig'.
The band's lyrics, as sung by Till Lindemann, are an essential element of their music, and shape the perception by fans and a wider public. Among other things that are seen as controversial, Rammstein also refers to classical German literature, e.g. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous poems Der Erlkönig (1778) and Das Heidenröslein (1771) for the songs "Dalai Lama" and "Rosenrot", respectively. Several of their songs are related to controversial and taboo subjects such as sadomasochism, homosexuality, intersexuality, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, pyromania, religion and sexual violence. Also several of their songs are allegedly inspired by real-life events. These songs include "Rammstein" (Ramstein airshow disaster), "Mein Teil" (The Meiwes Case), "Wiener Blut" (Fritzl case) and "Donaukinder" (2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill). Their fourth album, Reise, Reise, is loosely inspired by the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. The band have also occasionally delved into politics with their lyrics. "Amerika" is a critic of the cultural and political imperialism of the United States all over the world. The lyrics of the song "Deutschland" contain the lines "Deutschland! / Meine Liebe / kann ich dir nicht geben" (Germany! / My love / [is what] I cannot give you), which conveys the band's inability to have unquestioned patriotic feelings.
Live performances
Since their early years, Rammstein are particularly known for their over-the-top live performances, making such extensive use of pyrotechnics that fans eventually coined the motto, "Other bands play, Rammstein burns!" (a play on Manowar's song "Kings of Metal", which states that "other bands play, Manowar kill"). Following an accident in Berlin on 27 September 1996, in which some burning decorative parts of the stage collapsed, the band started using professionals to handle the pyrotechnics. Lindemann subsequently qualified as a licensed pyrotechnician, and often spends entire songs engulfed in flames. He has suffered multiple burns on his ears, head, and arms.
The band's stage costumes are also known for being outlandish. During the Reise, Reise Tour, they wore lederhosen, corsets, and military-inspired uniforms with German steel helmets; during the Mutter Tour, the group kept to the themes of the album artwork and descended onto the stage from a giant uterus while wearing diapers. During the Völkerball concert, among others, Lindemann changed costumes between songs and dressed accordingly for each. For example, for the song "Mein Teil", he was dressed as a blood-soaked chef; in "Reise, Reise", he dressed as a sailor. The rest of the band each wore their own preferred costume, but none quite as bizarre as Till's. The band's flair for costumes is evident in their music videos as well as their live shows. In the "Keine Lust" video, all members except Lorenz are dressed in fat suits. In the "Amerika" video, all members of the band wear astronaut costumes.
Since the Mutter Tour in 2001, Rammstein have worked with stage designer Roy Bennett, who helped the band in developing the look of the stages. With the Ahoi Tour in 2004/2005, the band began using a two-level stage, with half the band playing the lower level and the other half on the upper level. At this tour, the upper level rose over 2 meters above the stage floor and had an oval entrance just beneath the drums. At both sides of the upper level, a special lift made it possible for the band members to access both stage levels.
On the Liebe ist für alle da Tour in 2009, the new stage still had a two-level design. This time, however, the upper level only had about half the height as on the previous tour. Stage entrance was possible by a hydraulic ramp in the middle of the stage floor. At each end of the upper level, stairs were placed in order to gain access to both levels. This tour included not only the extensive use of pyrotechnics, but also a massive lighting show, such as the band's logo lit up as big lamps on four enormous collapsible towers, forming the industrial backdrop of the set and being capable of different lighting effects.
During the arena shows of the Made in Germany 1995-2011 Tour, the stage was slightly altered with new set pieces such as a large industrial fan as well as new backdrops. The most noticeable addition was a long catwalk, connecting the main stage to a smaller stage in the middle of the audience. During the 2013 festival leg of the tour, the bridge and smaller stage were omitted. For the 2016 Festival Tour, the band kept the stage itself mostly unchanged, though had the entire lighting rig changed completely. According to Kruspe, the onstage antics are meant to get people's attention and have fun at the same time; Rammstein's motto, according to Schneider, is "do your own thing and overdo it".
Kruspe said of the stage show in July 1999, "You have to understand that 99 per cent of the people don't understand the lyrics, so you have to come up with something to keep the drama in the show. We have to do something. We like to have a show; we like to play with fire. We do have a sense of humour. We do laugh about it; we have fun [...] but we're not Spinal Tap. We take the music and the lyrics seriously. It's a combination of humour, theatre, and our East German culture, you know?"
Their antics have also garnered controversy. During the American Family Values Tour 1998, alongside acts such as rapper Ice Cube, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, the band was arrested for public indecency. In one of their more infamous moments, Lindemann engaged in simulated sodomy with Lorenz during their performance of "Bück dich" in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were subsequently arrested, fined $25 and spent one night in jail.
Controversies
Imagery
The New York Times described Rammstein's music as a "powerful strain of brutally intense rock... bringing gale-force music and spectacular theatrics together". The members have not been shy about courting controversy and have periodically attracted condemnation from morality campaigners. Till and Flake's stage act earned them a night in jail in June 1999 after a liquid-ejecting dildo was used in a concert in Worcester, Massachusetts. Back home in Germany, the band faced repeated accusations of fascist sympathies because of the dark and sometimes militaristic imagery of their videos and concerts, including the use of excerpts from the film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl in the video for their cover of Depeche Mode's song "Stripped". MTV Germany studied the lyrics, talked to the band and came away satisfied that Rammstein are apolitical; Peter Ruppert, then head of Music Programming at MTV Germany, stated that the band "aren't in any way connected with any right-wing activities".
Their cover of their debut album Herzeleid, released in Germany in 1995, showed the band members bare-chested in a style that resembled Strength Through Joy in the eyes of some critics, who accused the band of trying to sell themselves as "poster boys for the Master Race". Rammstein have vehemently denied this and said they want nothing to do with politics or supremacy of any kind. Lorenz, annoyed by the claim, has remarked it is just a photo, and should be understood as such. Herzeleid has since been given a different cover in North America, depicting the band members' faces.
The video of "Deutschland", released in 2019, sparked further controversy, as it portrays black German actress Ruby Commey appearing as Germania, which has been described as "a calculated affront to German nationalists". The video also portrays the band members both as Nazi concentration camp executioners and as Jewish prisoners, sparking the complaints of Holocaust survivors groups; however, others defended the video and the song lyrics, which have been interpreted as "express[ing] a love/hate relationship with Germany"
Relation to violent events
Rammstein were cited in relation to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when a photo of Eric Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt in the 11th grade was revealed. There was no evidence to correlate the band and the massacre. In response to the shooting, the band issued a statement:
Coincidentally, on 10 September 2001, the single and video clip of Ich will ("I Want") was released which portrays the band as bank robbers who want to get a message across and receiving a Goldene Kamera (Golden Camera) award, a German version of the Emmy award, for their "actions". In the United States, the video clip was broadcast only late at night after the attacks of 11 September 2001, although many media officials and politicians requested the video to be pulled from broadcast completely.
Following the conclusion of the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia in September 2004, the Russian authorities claimed that the terrorists had "listened to German hard rock group Rammstein on personal stereos during the siege to keep themselves edgy and fired up". The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Band members said this about the issue:
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, also included Rammstein in one of his favorite bands. However, he noted that the music among other things was not to blame for his decisions.
Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings in May 2014, was also a fan of Rammstein according to his YouTube records. On a lyric video of Mein Herz brennt, Rodger wrote: "[G]reat song to listen to while daydreaming about being a powerful ruler". Even though Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he wished to become a dictator and punish all the people who rejected him, there was no direct link found between the band's music and the killing spree. Santa Barbara police later confirmed that Rodger's main motivations were sexual and social rejection.
The Trollhättan school attack perpetrator, Anton Lundin Pettersson, used a manipulated version of the band's logo that added Nazi Germany's eagle on his Facebook page.
Videos
In October 2004, the video for "Mein Teil" ("My part") caused considerable controversy in Germany when it was released. It takes a darkly comic view of the Armin Meiwes cannibalism case, showing a cross-dressed Schneider holding the other five band members on a leash and rolling around in mud. The controversy did nothing to stop the single rising to No. 2 in the German charts. Meiwes (who was convicted of manslaughter in 2004, then retried in 2006 and found guilty of murder) brought a lawsuit in January 2006 against the band for infringement of rights to the story.
The band's own views of its image are sanguine; Landers has said: "We like being on the fringes of bad taste". Christian "Flake" Lorenz comments: "The controversy is fun, like stealing forbidden fruit. But it serves a purpose. We like audiences to grapple with our music, and people have become more receptive".
The video for "Pussy" was released September 2009. It features hardcore pornographic scenes of nudity along with women engaging in sexual activity with body doubles of the band members. It is the third Rammstein video to include nudity.
Placement on the Index
On 5 November 2009, their sixth studio album Liebe ist für alle da was placed on the Index of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien or BPjM (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), making it illegal in Germany to make the album accessible to minors or display it where it can be seen by people underage, effectively banning it from stores. According to the official statement of the BPjM, the depiction of lead guitarist Richard Kruspe holding a woman wearing only a mask over his knee and lifting his hand to strike her behind has given cause for offense, as well as the lyrics to "Ich tu dir weh" (meaning "I hurt you") which supposedly promoted dangerous BDSM techniques. Furthermore, the advisory board took into consideration the alleged promotion of unprotected sexual intercourse in the lyrics to "Pussy".
The band, as well as several members of the German press, reacted with astonishment to the decision. Keyboardist Christian Lorenz expressed surprise at the advisory board's "parochial sense of art" and regretted their apparent inability to detect irony. On 16 November 2009, a stripped-down version of Liebe ist für alle da was released. As of 31 May 2010, the administrative court in Cologne had decided to suspend the inclusion into the Index (case 22 L 1899/09). The German department deleted the record from the Index on 1 June (Decision No. A 117/10). On 9 June, the band announced that the original version of the album was available in their shop and that the single "Ich tu dir weh" would soon be released in Germany. In October 2011, the album was judged not harmful to minors and deleted from the Index.
In 2016, Rammstein filed a lawsuit against the German state claiming €66,000 in compensation for damages that had allegedly resulted from the indexing, chiefly the destruction or withholding of 85,000 copies of the album that the band says would have otherwise sold.
Legal action
In 2010, Rammstein settled out of court against Apocalyptica's former record label Sony Music Entertainment GmbH as the successor of the by now defunct affiliated label Gun Records for using Rammstein's label in marketing Apocalyptica's 2007 album Worlds Collide, which featured a track with singer Lindemann.
Apocalyptica were seen on stage with Rammstein during the song "Mein Herz brennt" in February 2012 at Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland.
Political views
The band wrote the song "Links 2-3-4" (Links being German for "left") as a riposte to early claims that the band were neo-Nazis, and to affirm that they reside on the left side of the political spectrum. In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Nazi accusations, Lindemann stated "We come from the East and we have grown up as socialists. We used to be either punks or Goths – we hate Nazis! And then, such a far-fetched accusation. We are doing exactly the same thing today, but no one in America or in Mexico would even get the idea to come up with something like that. This only happens in Germany. Our reply to this animosity was, "Links 2-3-4", and with that, we had made it clear where we stand politically." Regarding the song, Kruspe said: My heart beats on the left, two, three, four'. It's simple. If you want to put us in a political category, we're on the left side, and that's the reason we made the song". The song's title refers to the refrain of the German Communist Party song Einheitsfrontlied, written by Bertholt Brecht: "Drum links, zwei, drei! Drum links, zwei, drei! / Wo dein Platz, Genosse ist! / Reih dich ein, in die Arbeitereinheitsfront / Weil du auch ein Arbeiter bist". (Then left, two, three! Then left, two, three! / Here's the place, Comrade, for you! / So fall in with the Workers' united front / For you are a worker too.) Another key lyric expressing the band's allegiance to the left paraphrases the titles of newspaper columns published side by side for several years in the German newspaper Bild: "Mein Herz schlägt links" ("My heart beats on the left") by The Left Party co-chair and former Social Democratic Party of Germany chair Oskar Lafontaine, and "Mein Herz schlägt auf dem rechten Fleck" ("My heart beats in the right place") by Peter Gauweiler of the conservative Christian Social Union. Lorenz stated that the song was created to show the band could write a harsh, evil, military-sounding song without being Nazis.
The band also wrote the song "Amerika" as a critique of the worldwide cultural and political imperialism of the United States. In their book Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture, Jill E. Twark and Axel Hildebrandt found that the song's text and most of its video's images point toward a critique of America's cultural imperialism, political propaganda, and self-assumed role as global police force. The song responds critically to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. They also found that another song of theirs that is critical of the United States is "Mein Land", believing that it critiques American racism and nationalism.
During the Eastern European leg of their Europe Stadium Tour, the band showed support for the LGBT community on several occasions. At a concert in Chorzów, Poland on 24 July 2019, drummer Christoph Schneider surfed the crowd in a rubber boat, holding a rainbow flag. At their concert in Moscow five days later, guitarists Kruspe and Landers kissed onstage, while they embraced each other during a concert in Saint Petersburg on 2 August. The band's support for gay rights was met with criticism from some Russian politicians. Vitaly Milonov, a member of the State Duma called the band "idiots" and said: "If they think it possible to behave in such a way, they should also consider it possible to keep this garbage away from us."
Members
Since forming in 1994, Rammstein have retained a constant line-up. Richard Kruspe had said in a Revolver Magazine interview that it is because of the band respecting each other's wishes to take a break, either for personal reasons or to focus on a side project. Members of the band have had side projects that they take part in during Rammstein's inactivity. Kruspe currently fronts the group Emigrate while Till Lindemann began his project Lindemann in 2015.
Till Lindemann – lead vocals, harmonica
Richard Kruspe – lead guitar, backing vocals
Paul Landers – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Oliver Riedel – bass guitar
Christoph Schneider – drums, percussion
Christian "Flake" Lorenz – keyboards, samples, synthesizers, trumpet, programming
Discography
Studio albums
Herzeleid (1995)
Sehnsucht (1997)
Mutter (2001)
Reise, Reise (2004)
Rosenrot (2005)
Liebe ist für alle da (2009)
Untitled album (2019)
Tours
Club Tour (1994–1995)
Herzeleid Tour (1995–1997)
Sehnsucht Tour (1997–2001)
Family Values Tour 1998 (22 September 1998 – 31 October 1998)
Mutter Tour (2001–2002)
Pledge of Allegiance Tour (2001; in between the August–November dates of the Mutter Tour)
Ahoi Tour (Reise, Reise Tour) (2004–2005)
Liebe Ist Für Alle Da Tour (2009–2011)
Made in Germany 1995–2011 Tour (2011–2013)
Rammstein Tour 2016 (2016)
Rammstein Festival Tour 2017 (2017)
Rammstein Stadium Tour (2019 and 2022)
Awards and honors
Grammy Awards
|-
!scope="row"| 1999
| "Du hast"
| rowspan="2"| Best Metal Performance
|
|-
!scope="row"| 2006
| "Mein Teil"
|
|}
Notes and references
Notes
References
Further reading
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 1. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Barry Graves, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Bernward Halbscheffel: Das neue Rock-Lexikon. Bd 2. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Rammstein: Rammstein – Liederbuch. Hal Leonard Corporation, London 1999.
Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Letzte Ausfahrt – Germania. Ein Phänomen namens neue deutsche Härte. I.P. Verlag, Berlin 1999,
Gert Hof: Rammstein. Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2001,
Matthias Matthies: Rammstein – Deutschlandtour 2001. Berlin 2002.
Andreas Speit: Ästhetische Mobilmachung – Dark Wave, Neofolk und Industrial im Spannungsfeld rechter Ideologien., Unrast 2001.
Michele Bettendorf: Ursprung Punkszene. Oder Rammstein hätte es im Westen nie gegeben. Books on Demand GmbH, 2002.
Till Lindemann und Gert Hof: Messer. Eichborn, Frankfurt M 2002.
Michael Fuchs-Gamböck und Thorsten Schatz: Spiel mit dem Feuer – Das inoffizielle Rammstein-Buch. Heel, Königswinter 2006.
Frédéric Batier: Rammstein – Völkerball. 2006.
External links
1994 establishments in Germany
Echo (music award) winners
German gothic metal musical groups
German heavy metal musical groups
German industrial metal musical groups
German industrial music groups
German Neue Deutsche Härte music groups
Industrial metal musical groups
Kerrang! Awards winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups established in 1994
Musical groups from Berlin
Obscenity controversies in music
Republic Records artists
Slash Records artists
World Music Awards winners
| true |
[
"The Revival of the Fittest EP is the second and final extended play by the American Christian screamo band Aftereight. It was independently released on September 18, 2007. The EP is no longer available digitally, and is also out of print.\n\nThe EP served as a bridging release of the band's genre transition from screamo to their newly found pop rock sound. Ultimately, this would lead the band to change their name to Capital Lights the next year, as a sign of their new direction.\n\nIt is also the release to spark the attention of Tooth & Nail Records, and what eventually led to the band signing with the label.\n\nBackground\nBryson Phillips later told Tulsa World, after the release, that he considered this the band's first professional release, stating that they previously \"just burned discs to give away and sell at shows. There was nothing professional about it whatsoever.\"\n\nCritical reception\nThough reception was small, the release garnered high praise from the few music sites that did review it.\n\nJJ Francesco of New Release Tuesday praised the EP immensely saying: \"This album is a nice treat if you can somehow find it. The rock is good and it's interesting to hear what the poppy rock Capital Lights sounds up with the energy amped up a bit.\" Preston Tucker of Jesus Freak Hideout plainly stated: \"Overall, this album is very solid. In fact, it would be a grave mistake for any power pop / rock fan to turn this one down.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nAftereight\nBryson Phillips - lead vocals, bass\nBrett Admire - guitar\nJonathan Williams - guitar\nMichael Phillips - drums\n\nNotes\nThe tracks \"Worth as Much as a Counterfeit Dollar\", \"The Night of Your Life is When You Die\", and \"Can I Get an Amen!\" are all re-recorded for the band's next album This Is an Outrage!.\n\nReferences\n\n2007 EPs\nCapital Lights albums\nChristian rock EPs",
"\"Panic Prone\" is the third and final single from Chevelle's third album This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In), and the album's sixth track.\n\nBackground \nDrummer Sam Loeffler said in an interview, \"Panic Prone is an interesting song because I've just recently learned what it's about. Pete was watching television and one of those commercials came on, 'Save the Children' commercials. That song is about making a decision whether you're going to sit on your couch and watch this happen or you're going to stand up and do something about it. That song isn't about if you should or shouldn't do it, it's just about – Are you going to do it? Is this my problem? I was really surprised that it was about that. I think one of the lines is actually about one of our friend's falling off the wagon, too. I think the first line might be about that.\"\n\nThe single did not achieve commercial success and peaked at number 26 on the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks, that being the only category in which it charted.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nNotes \n\nChevelle (band) songs\n2004 songs\nSongs written by Pete Loeffler\nSongs written by Sam Loeffler\nSong recordings produced by Michael Baskette"
] |
[
"Taking Back Sunday",
"Major label debut (2005-2007)"
] |
C_5fb9ec4b7f9f450cb99be3f90436ec02_0
|
What happened in 2005?
| 1 |
What happened in 2005 for Taking Back Sunday?
|
Taking Back Sunday
|
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well. On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across. Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?". In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands. On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film. CANNOTANSWER
|
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros.
|
Taking Back Sunday is an American rock band from Long Island, New York. The band was formed by guitarist Eddie Reyes and bassist Jesse Lacey in 1999. The band's members currently are Adam Lazzara (lead vocals), John Nolan (lead guitar, keyboards, vocals), Shaun Cooper (bass guitar) and Mark O'Connell (drums), accompanied by Nathan Cogan (guitar) for their live performances. Among the band's former members include Lacey, Reyes and guitarist and vocalist Fred Mascherino.
Lazzara replaced original vocalist Antonio Longo prior to the release of the band's 2002 debut album Tell All Your Friends. Nolan and Cooper left the band in 2003 to form Straylight Run before returning in 2010. The band's breakthrough album, 2006's Louder Now, featured the popular lead single "MakeDamnSure", sold over 900,000 copies and peaked at No. 2 on the United States Billboard 200, surpassing the band's previous Billboard 200 peak in 2004 at No. 3 with Where You Want to Be.
The band most recently released their seventh album Tidal Wave in 2016. Lacey quit Taking Back Sunday in 1999 and formed the critically acclaimed rock band Brand New in 2000, with whom Taking Back Sunday would become embroiled in a highly publicized feud with. Reyes left the band in 2018, leaving Taking Back Sunday without both its founding members.
History
Early years (1999–2002)
Guitarist Eddie Reyes, who had played in The Movielife, Mind Over Matter and Inside, and guitarist Jesse Lacey of the Rookie Lot founded Taking Back Sunday in Amityville, New York in November 1999. Lacey moved to bass with the addition of guitarist John Nolan. The group also included vocalist Antonio Longo of One True Thing and drummer Steven DeJoseph. At a party, Nolan reportedly romanced Lacey's girlfriend, after which Lacey left the band. Lacey formed Brand New a year later. Nolan contacted Adam Lazzara to fill in on bass, which resulted in Lazzara moving from North Carolina to New York. Lazzara had met the band when they played a show near his hometown in North Carolina.
DeJoseph was unable to tour extensively because of personal issues and was waiting until the band had another drummer before leaving the group. Mark O'Connell, a friend of Reyes, heard about the opening and joined the group. After recording Taking Back Sunday's self-titled EP, Longo left the band and eventually played with The Prizefighter and the Mirror. In December 2000, Lazzara switched from bass to lead vocals. He never thought he would become the group's singer: "I remember getting into [Reyes'] Windstar with that [EP] and just driving around singing those songs, just to make myself actually do it." O'Connell suggested that the group needed a bassist, and brought in Shaun Cooper. Lazzara spoke of his initial thoughts on Cooper's talent in an interview with AP magazine, saying with Cooper it was "the best bass playing I’d ever seen in my life. I was like, "Oh my God, people can do that?'" In February 2001, Taking Back Sunday released a five-track demo before touring for a year.
While performing as an unsigned band, which they received contract offers from labels that ultimately amounted to nothing. These included Triple Crown Records, who was apprehensive as they had just signed Brand New, and Drive-Thru Records' offer resulted from co-owner Richard Reines having mistaken Nolan for Lacey. Eventually, a friend of the band shared a demo with Victory Records sales and A&R representative Angel Juarbe. Jurabe then sent a copy to Victory founder Tony Brummel, who asked to see a live performance. Within two weeks of seeing them live, a contract was written up, and the band signed to Victory in December 2001.
Victory Records era: Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want to Be (2002–2005)
Although other labels expressed interest in Taking Back Sunday, Victory Records encouraged them to make an album. The band's debut effort was recorded over a period of two weeks in December 2001 at Big Blue Meenie Recording Studio in New Jersey with producer Sal Villanueva. Lazzara fell ill around Christmas, and the sessions were delayed one to two weeks; recording concluded in early January 2002, and ended up costing $10,000. The debut album's name was revealed in February to be Tell All Your Friends; prior to the release of their debut, a music video for "Great Romances of the 20th Century" was released on March 4, 2002. It was directed by Christian Winters, a friend of the band. Winters made the video before the group signed with Victory, and the record company enjoyed it. The song was distributed to radio stations on March 12, and the full album was released on March 25. A video for "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" followed on December 10, 2002, and "You're so Last Summer" on November 24, 2003, following a radio release the previous September. Both videos were also directed by Winters.
Lazzara was suffering from a drinking problem around this time and cheated on Nolan's sister, Michelle, who he had been dating for a while. After playing Skate & Surf Festival in late April 2003, Lazzara apologized to Nolan later that evening. However, Nolan later learned the apology had been insincere, and both Nolan and Cooper officially told the other three band members they were leaving the band two days later. Nolan publicly reasoned that his departure resulted from exhaustion from touring; Lazzara reiterated this reason, and revealed Cooper had left because he did not want to be in the band without Nolan. In truth, Nolan later revealed there was constant fighting within the group, with each member feeling they were not receiving enough credit for the group's success.
John and Michelle Nolan formed Straylight Run with Cooper and Breaking Pangaea drummer Will Noon in the wake of the split from Taking Back Sunday. Taking Back Sunday underwent a short period where they were unsure what to do next, and even briefly considered breaking up. The band was due to tour the United Kingdom with Brand New in May and June 2003; however, all the shows were cancelled because of rumors of the band breaking up. Eventually, it was decided the band would continue; The two departed Taking Back Sunday members were replaced by Breaking Pangaea frontman Fred Mascherino on guitar and vocals as well as O'Connell's longtime friend Matt Rubano on bass.
After their co-headlining tour with Saves the Day concluded in November 2003, Taking Back Sunday immediately commenced work on a second album. Recording for the second album began on March 1, with Lou Giordano at the helm as producer. Taking Back Sunday self-financed the recording sessions, two weeks of which took place at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, New York. The remainder of the album was completed at Water Music in Hoboken, New Jersey, and recording was officially finished by April. At the suggestion of Giordano, the band experimented with instruments aside from the group's usual instrumentation.
The record, titled Where You Want To Be, was released on July 27, 2004, on Victory Records. Despite sounding slightly different from Tell All Your Friends as a result of Giordano's guidance, the new album managed to do well commercially; preceded by the single "A Decade Under the Influence" on June 22, Where You Want To Be was propelled to the No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart at its debut, with around 163,000 copies sold. It became one of the best-selling independent rock albums within a year, selling 634,000 copies by June 2005. Rolling Stone listed Where You Want To Be as one of the top fifty records of 2004. Instead of spending marketing money towards trying to get radio play, Victory Records deployed a street team handing out sampler CDs and fliers to promote the album.
Tom Delonge of Blink-182 directed the music video for "This Photograph is Proof (I Know You Know)"; Blink-182 had invited the band to open for them during their North American tour in 2004. Taking Back Sunday toured frequently for eight months in support of Where You Want to Be.
Major label debut: Louder Now (2005–2007)
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.
On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across.
Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?".
In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands.
On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film.
Departure of Fred Mascherino and New Again (2007–2010)
In October 2007 the band announced that Taking Back Sunday and guitarist Fred Mascherino would be parting ways, which came after he decided to focus on his then upcoming solo album with The Color Fred. He was later replaced by Matthew Fazzi, who would provide guitar and backing vocals. Mascherino went on to reveal in later interviews: "There were just problems between the five of us about writing, who was going to do it and how we were going to do it, we weren't being very productive because we were fighting too much about that stuff. The band was more about cooking food than making music." This statement inspired the band to write the track "Capital M-E", which features lyrical references to Mascherino's departure and the comments he made afterward. In 2010, Fred Mascherino posted a picture of himself and Adam Lazzara with the caption, "Today was a good day" indicating that he and Lazzara have since made up and are on good terms again.
On November 6, 2008, Taking Back Sunday revealed in Rolling Stone that their fourth studio album was to be titled New Again and would feature the tracks "Winter Passing", "Lonely Lonely", "Catholic Knees", and "Carpathia". They stated that "Winter Passing" was "...a slow dance like the last song at your 8th grade dance [that] moves more like an R&B tune than a rock and roll song", and that "Carpathia" will include the first bass solos in any Taking Back Sunday song. They also commented that "Catholic Knees" is "one of the heavier songs we've ever written", and that "Lonely Lonely" is "relentless – two and a half minutes of punching you in the face". In the build-up to the release of New Again, the band released a number of tracks—the first of which was "Carpathia"—on December 21, 2008 as free digital downloads to those who purchased the band's Christmas holiday set, with a physical limited vinyl release of the track as well as a live version of "Catholic Knees" released on April 18, 2009, secondly title track "New Again" as a free single download from the band's website on April 16, 2009, followed by the first full single "Sink into Me", released on April 20, 2009, premiering on BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe show, and being made available digitally short after. On May 16, 2009, "Everything Must Go" was released to stream on the band's MySpace. Every Monday, the band released a new song on their MySpace from New Again labeling it "New Music Monday".
During their tour supporting New Again, the band played in Dublin, Ireland where guitarist Matt Fazzi fractured his foot. Despite this, the show in Belfast, Northern Ireland went on and the rest of the tour was completed, which included stops in the UK at Sonisphere Festival and the Kerrang! awards show. On August 18, 2009, the band released a digital live album entitled Live from Bamboozle '09. The album consists of 13 live tracks recorded at The Bamboozle, where they played in May of the same year. In September 2009, the band announced they will be co-headlining with The All-American Rejects and Anberlin for a full US tour. They are also set to release a live acoustic DVD around spring 2010 following the tour.
On February 12, 2010, the band released a previously unreleased b-side from New Again, entitled "Winter Passing", on their official website.
Throughout February and March the band played the Australian Soundwave tour, playing songs from various albums to crowds of almost 30,000.
Taking Back Sunday and lineup change (2010–2012)
On March 29, 2010, Matt Rubano and Matthew Fazzi announced that they were no longer members of Taking Back Sunday. The band's official website also posted a picture of the original line-up with the members' eyes crossed out, indicating a possible reunion of the Tell All Your Friends era lineup. On March 31, 2010, tbsnewagain tweeted a link to a video announcing the new lineup of the band. The video ended with a quick stream of words which ended with, "Sometimes it takes some time to remember where you were headed in the first place and the people you intended to go there with. There's no hard feelings, just the future."
On April 12, the band made an official announcement confirming that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had re-joined the band. It was announced that they would soon begin the recording process of their fifth studio album with Louder Now producer Eric Valentine. On the same day, Adam Lazzara did an interview with Alternative Press, in which he discussed how the original line-up got back together and how both Matt Rubano and Matt Fazzi were not fired, but rather "let go". The band finished writing in El Paso with around 15 songs completed, according to Mark O'Connell. Pre-production on the new album began on August 17, 2010, the same day their live acoustic album Live from Orensanz was released. On December 20, 2010, the band put out a new Christmas song entitled "Merry Christmas I Missed You So Much". On April 6, 2011, the band played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, to record footage for an upcoming video for the song "El Paso". Adam Lazzara requested that the audience put away their phones and cameras during the recording. They played the song three times during the set. During this performance, the band also debuted a new song entitled "Faith (When I Let You Down)", live for the first time. "Faith (When I Let You Down)" was released as the official first single from the album on May 3, 2011, with an acoustic version of "Great Romances of the 20th Century" as the b-side. On June 7, 2011, the second official single "This Is All Now" was released on iTunes, with the b-side being an acoustic version of "Ghost Man on Third". On June 26, 2011 in an interview with Robert Herrera of Punkvideosrock.com, Mark and Shaun stated that the reason they returned to their original lineup was because they no longer felt it was Taking Back Sunday without the original members. Mark stated they were miserable as a band, weren't having fun, and didn't like the direction the band was going so they decided to reach out to the original members and after meeting with the band in Texas found that "the chemistry was still there."
On July 8, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "Faith (When I Let You Down)". On November 3, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "You Got Me". This is the second single from their self-titled album. The video was created with the help of Steve Pedulla and Ward McDonald and it features guitarist Eddie Reyes dancing solo on a theater stage. Taking Back Sunday played Warped Tour 2012 at all locations. In honor of Record Store Day 2012, the band released a limited press vinyl LP entitled "We Play Songs", featuring four live acoustic tracks.
TAYF10 anniversary tour (2012–13)
Taking Back Sunday embarked on a "Tell All Your Friends" 10th anniversary tour for 2012, during which the band performed their debut album in its entirety. The full US tour featured Bayside as main support, with Transit, Man Overboard and Gabriel the Marine as special guests. An audio and video recording of the acoustic version of the tour was released for digital download through the band's website on June 18, 2013.
On June 7, 2013 2:33PM, Taking Back Sunday took to Twitter to confirm that the recording of their 6th studio album had begun; they tweeted: "Phase one of recording the new record starts now... Happy Friday!" The band, who are working alongside producers Marc Jacob Hudson and Ray Jeffrey, have confirmed that pre-production of the 6th studio record has been completed, and that drum and bass tracking has begun. On July 1, 2013, the band announced that guitar and vocal tracking had begun as well. They announced on Facebook that the album will be released in early 2014.
On August 29, 2013, Adam Lazzara and John Nolan performed an acoustic set at the Leaky Lifeboat Inn, in Seaford, New York, where they debuted a new song with a working title, "The Bird You Cannot Change". On September 11 and 12 the band played a new song at Starland Ballroom called "Flicker Fade". Song title was later confirmed during a televised concert on September 12 on AXSTV. On October 13, the band performed a new song, with the working title, "Anywhere That You Want to Go / Beat Up Car".
From October 25 through November 2, Underoath vocalist Spencer Chamberlain began filling in on lead vocals following the premature birth of Adam Lazzara's son. On November 8, Lazzara and Nolan performed at the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University as an acoustic act. This featured the appearance of a Stony Brook violinist named Dylan Ebrahimian who also will appear on Taking Back Sunday's next album due in 2014.
Happiness Is, Tidal Wave and departure of Eddie Reyes (2014–present)
On January 11, 2014, Taking Back Sunday revealed that a new album, Happiness Is, was available for pre-order on iTunes, as was a new track: "Flicker, Fade". Happiness Is was released on March 18, 2014 through Hopeless Records.
The band embarked on a North American headline tour in 2015 with The Menzingers and letlive.
On June 27, 2016, the band's next album, Tidal Wave, was announced for release on September 16. Material for the album was written in between tours for Happiness Is.
On April 13, 2018, it was announced that founding guitarist Eddie Reyes has parted ways with the band. This was later confirmed by Reyes stating the reason for his departure was due to his battle with alcoholism and hope to join the band again in the future. In the meantime, he has also stated to have started a new band.
On the subject of ever touring with previous members of Taking Back Sunday, John Nolan said in an interview: "I don’t think that’s something that really interests us. This lineup has been together for three albums now and we’re really focused on continuing to develop and evolve together. Revisiting old songs with past band members just seem like an exercise in nostalgia."
On October 12, 2018, the band began announcing a compilation album to celebrate their 20th anniversary, along with a worldwide tour. The album, entitled Twenty, was released on January 11, 2019. Twenty consists of songs from Taking Back Sunday's Victory Records and Warner Bros. Records albums, which are now owned by Concord Music.
For their 20th Anniversary tour, the band have employed the use of a specially made coin to flip at shows in locations where they are playing two nights in a row. The coin toss will decide the second album to be played the first night of the pair of shows, either Louder Now or Where You Want to Be. (Tell All Your Friends will be played each night.)
In an interview with The Aquarian, John Nolan said that the band was not currently on a label, indicating that they left Hopeless Records.
Musical style and influences
Taking Back Sunday has been described as alternative rock, emo, post-hardcore, pop punk, pop rock, and emo pop. Charles Spano of AllMusic described the band as a "New York-based emo band that blend Southern California post-punk, nu metal and old school hardcore." Taking Back Sunday's influences include the Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dag Nasty, The Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring, Bad Brains, Quicksand, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Celtic Frost, Sunny Day Real Estate, Kreator, Nirvana, and Radiohead.
Band members
Current members
John Nolan – lead guitar, keyboards, vocals (1999–2003; 2010–present)
Adam Lazzara – lead vocals (2001–present); bass guitar, vocals (2000–2001)
Mark O'Connell – drums, percussion (2001–present)
Shaun Cooper – bass guitar (2001–2003; 2010–present)
Discography
Studio albums
Tell All Your Friends (2002)
Where You Want to Be (2004)
Louder Now (2006)
New Again (2009)
Taking Back Sunday (2011)
Happiness Is (2014)
Tidal Wave (2016)
References
Additional notes
Citations
External links
[ Complete discography of Taking Back Sunday], billboard
TBS Hub
Musical groups from Long Island
Alternative rock groups from New York (state)
American emo musical groups
American post-hardcore musical groups
Musical groups established in 1999
Pop punk groups from New York (state)
Warner Records artists
Berklee College of Music alumni
1999 establishments in New York (state)
Victory Records artists
Hopeless Records artists
| true |
[
"Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books",
"\"What Happened to Us\" is a song by Australian recording artist Jessica Mauboy, featuring English recording artist Jay Sean. It was written by Sean, Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim and Israel Cruz. \"What Happened to Us\" was leaked online in October 2010, and was released on 10 March 2011, as the third single from Mauboy's second studio album, Get 'Em Girls (2010). The song received positive reviews from critics.\n\nA remix of \"What Happened to Us\" made by production team OFM, was released on 11 April 2011. A different version of the song which features Stan Walker, was released on 29 May 2011. \"What Happened to Us\" charted on the ARIA Singles Chart at number 14 and was certified platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA). An accompanying music video was directed by Mark Alston, and reminisces on a former relationship between Mauboy and Sean.\n\nProduction and release\n\n\"What Happened to Us\" was written by Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim, Israel Cruz and Jay Sean. It was produced by Skaller, Cruz, Rohaim and Bobby Bass. The song uses C, D, and B minor chords in the chorus. \"What Happened to Us\" was sent to contemporary hit radio in Australia on 14 February 2011. The cover art for the song was revealed on 22 February on Mauboy's official Facebook page. A CD release was available for purchase via her official website on 10 March, for one week only. It was released digitally the following day.\n\nReception\nMajhid Heath from ABC Online Indigenous called the song a \"Jordin Sparks-esque duet\", and wrote that it \"has a nice innocence to it that rings true to the experience of losing a first love.\" Chris Urankar from Nine to Five wrote that it as a \"mid-tempo duet ballad\" which signifies Mauboy's strength as a global player. On 21 March 2011, \"What Happened to Us\" debuted at number 30 on the ARIA Singles Chart, and peaked at number 14 the following week. The song was certified platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), for selling 70,000 copies. \"What Happened to Us\" spent a total of ten weeks in the ARIA top fifty.\n\nMusic video\n\nBackground\nThe music video for the song was shot in the Elizabeth Bay House in Sydney on 26 November 2010. The video was shot during Sean's visit to Australia for the Summerbeatz tour. During an interview with The Daily Telegraph while on the set of the video, Sean said \"the song is sick! ... Jessica's voice is amazing and we're shooting [the video] in this ridiculously beautiful mansion overlooking the harbour.\" The video was directed by Mark Alston, who had previously directed the video for Mauboy's single \"Let Me Be Me\" (2009). It premiered on YouTube on 10 February 2011.\n\nSynopsis and reception\nThe video begins showing Mauboy who appears to be sitting on a yellow antique couch in a mansion, wearing a purple dress. As the video progresses, scenes of memories are displayed of Mauboy and her love interest, played by Sean, spending time there previously. It then cuts to the scenes where Sean appears in the main entrance room of the mansion. The final scene shows Mauboy outdoors in a gold dress, surrounded by green grass and trees. She is later joined by Sean who appears in a black suit and a white shirt, and together they sing the chorus of the song to each other. David Lim of Feed Limmy wrote that the video is \"easily the best thing our R&B princess has committed to film – ever\" and praised the \"mansion and wondrous interior décor\". He also commended Mauboy for choosing Australian talent to direct the video instead of American directors, which she had used for her previous two music videos. Since its release, the video has received over two million views on Vevo.\n\nLive performances\nMauboy performed \"What Happened to Us\" live for the first time during her YouTube Live Sessions program on 4 December 2010. She also appeared on Adam Hills in Gordon Street Tonight on 23 February 2011 for an interview and later performed the song. On 15 March 2011, Mauboy performed \"What Happened to Us\" on Sunrise. She also performed the song with Stan Walker during the Australian leg of Chris Brown's F.A.M.E. Tour in April 2011. Mauboy and Walker later performed \"What Happened to Us\" on Dancing with the Stars Australia on 29 May 2011. From November 2013 to February 2014, \"What Happened to Us\" was part of the set list of the To the End of the Earth Tour, Mauboy's second headlining tour of Australia, with Nathaniel Willemse singing Sean's part.\n\nTrack listing\n\nDigital download\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean – 3:19\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Sgt Slick Remix) – 6:33\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Just Witness Remix) – 3:45\n\nCD single\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Album Version) – 3:19\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (Sgt Slick Remix) – 6:33\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (OFM Remix) – 3:39\n\nDigital download – Remix\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Jay Sean (OFM Remix) – 3:38\n\nDigital download\n \"What Happened to Us\" featuring Stan Walker – 3:20\n\nPersonnel\nSongwriting – Josh Alexander, Billy Steinberg, Jeremy Skaller, Rob Larow, Khaled Rohaim, Israel Cruz, Jay Sean\nProduction – Jeremy Skaller, Bobby Bass\nAdditional production – Israel Cruz, Khaled Rohaim\nLead vocals – Jessica Mauboy, Jay Sean\nMixing – Phil Tan\nAdditional mixing – Damien Lewis\nMastering – Tom Coyne \nSource:\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly chart\n\nYear-end chart\n\nCertification\n\nRadio dates and release history\n\nReferences\n\n2010 songs\n2011 singles\nJessica Mauboy songs\nJay Sean songs\nSongs written by Billy Steinberg\nSongs written by Jay Sean\nSongs written by Josh Alexander\nSongs written by Israel Cruz\nVocal duets\nSony Music Australia singles\nSongs written by Khaled Rohaim"
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"Taking Back Sunday",
"Major label debut (2005-2007)",
"What happened in 2005?",
"On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros."
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What happened after this?
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What happened to Taking Back Sunday after signing with Warner Bros.?
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Taking Back Sunday
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On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well. On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across. Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?". In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands. On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film. CANNOTANSWER
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Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005.
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Taking Back Sunday is an American rock band from Long Island, New York. The band was formed by guitarist Eddie Reyes and bassist Jesse Lacey in 1999. The band's members currently are Adam Lazzara (lead vocals), John Nolan (lead guitar, keyboards, vocals), Shaun Cooper (bass guitar) and Mark O'Connell (drums), accompanied by Nathan Cogan (guitar) for their live performances. Among the band's former members include Lacey, Reyes and guitarist and vocalist Fred Mascherino.
Lazzara replaced original vocalist Antonio Longo prior to the release of the band's 2002 debut album Tell All Your Friends. Nolan and Cooper left the band in 2003 to form Straylight Run before returning in 2010. The band's breakthrough album, 2006's Louder Now, featured the popular lead single "MakeDamnSure", sold over 900,000 copies and peaked at No. 2 on the United States Billboard 200, surpassing the band's previous Billboard 200 peak in 2004 at No. 3 with Where You Want to Be.
The band most recently released their seventh album Tidal Wave in 2016. Lacey quit Taking Back Sunday in 1999 and formed the critically acclaimed rock band Brand New in 2000, with whom Taking Back Sunday would become embroiled in a highly publicized feud with. Reyes left the band in 2018, leaving Taking Back Sunday without both its founding members.
History
Early years (1999–2002)
Guitarist Eddie Reyes, who had played in The Movielife, Mind Over Matter and Inside, and guitarist Jesse Lacey of the Rookie Lot founded Taking Back Sunday in Amityville, New York in November 1999. Lacey moved to bass with the addition of guitarist John Nolan. The group also included vocalist Antonio Longo of One True Thing and drummer Steven DeJoseph. At a party, Nolan reportedly romanced Lacey's girlfriend, after which Lacey left the band. Lacey formed Brand New a year later. Nolan contacted Adam Lazzara to fill in on bass, which resulted in Lazzara moving from North Carolina to New York. Lazzara had met the band when they played a show near his hometown in North Carolina.
DeJoseph was unable to tour extensively because of personal issues and was waiting until the band had another drummer before leaving the group. Mark O'Connell, a friend of Reyes, heard about the opening and joined the group. After recording Taking Back Sunday's self-titled EP, Longo left the band and eventually played with The Prizefighter and the Mirror. In December 2000, Lazzara switched from bass to lead vocals. He never thought he would become the group's singer: "I remember getting into [Reyes'] Windstar with that [EP] and just driving around singing those songs, just to make myself actually do it." O'Connell suggested that the group needed a bassist, and brought in Shaun Cooper. Lazzara spoke of his initial thoughts on Cooper's talent in an interview with AP magazine, saying with Cooper it was "the best bass playing I’d ever seen in my life. I was like, "Oh my God, people can do that?'" In February 2001, Taking Back Sunday released a five-track demo before touring for a year.
While performing as an unsigned band, which they received contract offers from labels that ultimately amounted to nothing. These included Triple Crown Records, who was apprehensive as they had just signed Brand New, and Drive-Thru Records' offer resulted from co-owner Richard Reines having mistaken Nolan for Lacey. Eventually, a friend of the band shared a demo with Victory Records sales and A&R representative Angel Juarbe. Jurabe then sent a copy to Victory founder Tony Brummel, who asked to see a live performance. Within two weeks of seeing them live, a contract was written up, and the band signed to Victory in December 2001.
Victory Records era: Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want to Be (2002–2005)
Although other labels expressed interest in Taking Back Sunday, Victory Records encouraged them to make an album. The band's debut effort was recorded over a period of two weeks in December 2001 at Big Blue Meenie Recording Studio in New Jersey with producer Sal Villanueva. Lazzara fell ill around Christmas, and the sessions were delayed one to two weeks; recording concluded in early January 2002, and ended up costing $10,000. The debut album's name was revealed in February to be Tell All Your Friends; prior to the release of their debut, a music video for "Great Romances of the 20th Century" was released on March 4, 2002. It was directed by Christian Winters, a friend of the band. Winters made the video before the group signed with Victory, and the record company enjoyed it. The song was distributed to radio stations on March 12, and the full album was released on March 25. A video for "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" followed on December 10, 2002, and "You're so Last Summer" on November 24, 2003, following a radio release the previous September. Both videos were also directed by Winters.
Lazzara was suffering from a drinking problem around this time and cheated on Nolan's sister, Michelle, who he had been dating for a while. After playing Skate & Surf Festival in late April 2003, Lazzara apologized to Nolan later that evening. However, Nolan later learned the apology had been insincere, and both Nolan and Cooper officially told the other three band members they were leaving the band two days later. Nolan publicly reasoned that his departure resulted from exhaustion from touring; Lazzara reiterated this reason, and revealed Cooper had left because he did not want to be in the band without Nolan. In truth, Nolan later revealed there was constant fighting within the group, with each member feeling they were not receiving enough credit for the group's success.
John and Michelle Nolan formed Straylight Run with Cooper and Breaking Pangaea drummer Will Noon in the wake of the split from Taking Back Sunday. Taking Back Sunday underwent a short period where they were unsure what to do next, and even briefly considered breaking up. The band was due to tour the United Kingdom with Brand New in May and June 2003; however, all the shows were cancelled because of rumors of the band breaking up. Eventually, it was decided the band would continue; The two departed Taking Back Sunday members were replaced by Breaking Pangaea frontman Fred Mascherino on guitar and vocals as well as O'Connell's longtime friend Matt Rubano on bass.
After their co-headlining tour with Saves the Day concluded in November 2003, Taking Back Sunday immediately commenced work on a second album. Recording for the second album began on March 1, with Lou Giordano at the helm as producer. Taking Back Sunday self-financed the recording sessions, two weeks of which took place at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, New York. The remainder of the album was completed at Water Music in Hoboken, New Jersey, and recording was officially finished by April. At the suggestion of Giordano, the band experimented with instruments aside from the group's usual instrumentation.
The record, titled Where You Want To Be, was released on July 27, 2004, on Victory Records. Despite sounding slightly different from Tell All Your Friends as a result of Giordano's guidance, the new album managed to do well commercially; preceded by the single "A Decade Under the Influence" on June 22, Where You Want To Be was propelled to the No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart at its debut, with around 163,000 copies sold. It became one of the best-selling independent rock albums within a year, selling 634,000 copies by June 2005. Rolling Stone listed Where You Want To Be as one of the top fifty records of 2004. Instead of spending marketing money towards trying to get radio play, Victory Records deployed a street team handing out sampler CDs and fliers to promote the album.
Tom Delonge of Blink-182 directed the music video for "This Photograph is Proof (I Know You Know)"; Blink-182 had invited the band to open for them during their North American tour in 2004. Taking Back Sunday toured frequently for eight months in support of Where You Want to Be.
Major label debut: Louder Now (2005–2007)
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.
On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across.
Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?".
In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands.
On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film.
Departure of Fred Mascherino and New Again (2007–2010)
In October 2007 the band announced that Taking Back Sunday and guitarist Fred Mascherino would be parting ways, which came after he decided to focus on his then upcoming solo album with The Color Fred. He was later replaced by Matthew Fazzi, who would provide guitar and backing vocals. Mascherino went on to reveal in later interviews: "There were just problems between the five of us about writing, who was going to do it and how we were going to do it, we weren't being very productive because we were fighting too much about that stuff. The band was more about cooking food than making music." This statement inspired the band to write the track "Capital M-E", which features lyrical references to Mascherino's departure and the comments he made afterward. In 2010, Fred Mascherino posted a picture of himself and Adam Lazzara with the caption, "Today was a good day" indicating that he and Lazzara have since made up and are on good terms again.
On November 6, 2008, Taking Back Sunday revealed in Rolling Stone that their fourth studio album was to be titled New Again and would feature the tracks "Winter Passing", "Lonely Lonely", "Catholic Knees", and "Carpathia". They stated that "Winter Passing" was "...a slow dance like the last song at your 8th grade dance [that] moves more like an R&B tune than a rock and roll song", and that "Carpathia" will include the first bass solos in any Taking Back Sunday song. They also commented that "Catholic Knees" is "one of the heavier songs we've ever written", and that "Lonely Lonely" is "relentless – two and a half minutes of punching you in the face". In the build-up to the release of New Again, the band released a number of tracks—the first of which was "Carpathia"—on December 21, 2008 as free digital downloads to those who purchased the band's Christmas holiday set, with a physical limited vinyl release of the track as well as a live version of "Catholic Knees" released on April 18, 2009, secondly title track "New Again" as a free single download from the band's website on April 16, 2009, followed by the first full single "Sink into Me", released on April 20, 2009, premiering on BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe show, and being made available digitally short after. On May 16, 2009, "Everything Must Go" was released to stream on the band's MySpace. Every Monday, the band released a new song on their MySpace from New Again labeling it "New Music Monday".
During their tour supporting New Again, the band played in Dublin, Ireland where guitarist Matt Fazzi fractured his foot. Despite this, the show in Belfast, Northern Ireland went on and the rest of the tour was completed, which included stops in the UK at Sonisphere Festival and the Kerrang! awards show. On August 18, 2009, the band released a digital live album entitled Live from Bamboozle '09. The album consists of 13 live tracks recorded at The Bamboozle, where they played in May of the same year. In September 2009, the band announced they will be co-headlining with The All-American Rejects and Anberlin for a full US tour. They are also set to release a live acoustic DVD around spring 2010 following the tour.
On February 12, 2010, the band released a previously unreleased b-side from New Again, entitled "Winter Passing", on their official website.
Throughout February and March the band played the Australian Soundwave tour, playing songs from various albums to crowds of almost 30,000.
Taking Back Sunday and lineup change (2010–2012)
On March 29, 2010, Matt Rubano and Matthew Fazzi announced that they were no longer members of Taking Back Sunday. The band's official website also posted a picture of the original line-up with the members' eyes crossed out, indicating a possible reunion of the Tell All Your Friends era lineup. On March 31, 2010, tbsnewagain tweeted a link to a video announcing the new lineup of the band. The video ended with a quick stream of words which ended with, "Sometimes it takes some time to remember where you were headed in the first place and the people you intended to go there with. There's no hard feelings, just the future."
On April 12, the band made an official announcement confirming that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had re-joined the band. It was announced that they would soon begin the recording process of their fifth studio album with Louder Now producer Eric Valentine. On the same day, Adam Lazzara did an interview with Alternative Press, in which he discussed how the original line-up got back together and how both Matt Rubano and Matt Fazzi were not fired, but rather "let go". The band finished writing in El Paso with around 15 songs completed, according to Mark O'Connell. Pre-production on the new album began on August 17, 2010, the same day their live acoustic album Live from Orensanz was released. On December 20, 2010, the band put out a new Christmas song entitled "Merry Christmas I Missed You So Much". On April 6, 2011, the band played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, to record footage for an upcoming video for the song "El Paso". Adam Lazzara requested that the audience put away their phones and cameras during the recording. They played the song three times during the set. During this performance, the band also debuted a new song entitled "Faith (When I Let You Down)", live for the first time. "Faith (When I Let You Down)" was released as the official first single from the album on May 3, 2011, with an acoustic version of "Great Romances of the 20th Century" as the b-side. On June 7, 2011, the second official single "This Is All Now" was released on iTunes, with the b-side being an acoustic version of "Ghost Man on Third". On June 26, 2011 in an interview with Robert Herrera of Punkvideosrock.com, Mark and Shaun stated that the reason they returned to their original lineup was because they no longer felt it was Taking Back Sunday without the original members. Mark stated they were miserable as a band, weren't having fun, and didn't like the direction the band was going so they decided to reach out to the original members and after meeting with the band in Texas found that "the chemistry was still there."
On July 8, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "Faith (When I Let You Down)". On November 3, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "You Got Me". This is the second single from their self-titled album. The video was created with the help of Steve Pedulla and Ward McDonald and it features guitarist Eddie Reyes dancing solo on a theater stage. Taking Back Sunday played Warped Tour 2012 at all locations. In honor of Record Store Day 2012, the band released a limited press vinyl LP entitled "We Play Songs", featuring four live acoustic tracks.
TAYF10 anniversary tour (2012–13)
Taking Back Sunday embarked on a "Tell All Your Friends" 10th anniversary tour for 2012, during which the band performed their debut album in its entirety. The full US tour featured Bayside as main support, with Transit, Man Overboard and Gabriel the Marine as special guests. An audio and video recording of the acoustic version of the tour was released for digital download through the band's website on June 18, 2013.
On June 7, 2013 2:33PM, Taking Back Sunday took to Twitter to confirm that the recording of their 6th studio album had begun; they tweeted: "Phase one of recording the new record starts now... Happy Friday!" The band, who are working alongside producers Marc Jacob Hudson and Ray Jeffrey, have confirmed that pre-production of the 6th studio record has been completed, and that drum and bass tracking has begun. On July 1, 2013, the band announced that guitar and vocal tracking had begun as well. They announced on Facebook that the album will be released in early 2014.
On August 29, 2013, Adam Lazzara and John Nolan performed an acoustic set at the Leaky Lifeboat Inn, in Seaford, New York, where they debuted a new song with a working title, "The Bird You Cannot Change". On September 11 and 12 the band played a new song at Starland Ballroom called "Flicker Fade". Song title was later confirmed during a televised concert on September 12 on AXSTV. On October 13, the band performed a new song, with the working title, "Anywhere That You Want to Go / Beat Up Car".
From October 25 through November 2, Underoath vocalist Spencer Chamberlain began filling in on lead vocals following the premature birth of Adam Lazzara's son. On November 8, Lazzara and Nolan performed at the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University as an acoustic act. This featured the appearance of a Stony Brook violinist named Dylan Ebrahimian who also will appear on Taking Back Sunday's next album due in 2014.
Happiness Is, Tidal Wave and departure of Eddie Reyes (2014–present)
On January 11, 2014, Taking Back Sunday revealed that a new album, Happiness Is, was available for pre-order on iTunes, as was a new track: "Flicker, Fade". Happiness Is was released on March 18, 2014 through Hopeless Records.
The band embarked on a North American headline tour in 2015 with The Menzingers and letlive.
On June 27, 2016, the band's next album, Tidal Wave, was announced for release on September 16. Material for the album was written in between tours for Happiness Is.
On April 13, 2018, it was announced that founding guitarist Eddie Reyes has parted ways with the band. This was later confirmed by Reyes stating the reason for his departure was due to his battle with alcoholism and hope to join the band again in the future. In the meantime, he has also stated to have started a new band.
On the subject of ever touring with previous members of Taking Back Sunday, John Nolan said in an interview: "I don’t think that’s something that really interests us. This lineup has been together for three albums now and we’re really focused on continuing to develop and evolve together. Revisiting old songs with past band members just seem like an exercise in nostalgia."
On October 12, 2018, the band began announcing a compilation album to celebrate their 20th anniversary, along with a worldwide tour. The album, entitled Twenty, was released on January 11, 2019. Twenty consists of songs from Taking Back Sunday's Victory Records and Warner Bros. Records albums, which are now owned by Concord Music.
For their 20th Anniversary tour, the band have employed the use of a specially made coin to flip at shows in locations where they are playing two nights in a row. The coin toss will decide the second album to be played the first night of the pair of shows, either Louder Now or Where You Want to Be. (Tell All Your Friends will be played each night.)
In an interview with The Aquarian, John Nolan said that the band was not currently on a label, indicating that they left Hopeless Records.
Musical style and influences
Taking Back Sunday has been described as alternative rock, emo, post-hardcore, pop punk, pop rock, and emo pop. Charles Spano of AllMusic described the band as a "New York-based emo band that blend Southern California post-punk, nu metal and old school hardcore." Taking Back Sunday's influences include the Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dag Nasty, The Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring, Bad Brains, Quicksand, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Celtic Frost, Sunny Day Real Estate, Kreator, Nirvana, and Radiohead.
Band members
Current members
John Nolan – lead guitar, keyboards, vocals (1999–2003; 2010–present)
Adam Lazzara – lead vocals (2001–present); bass guitar, vocals (2000–2001)
Mark O'Connell – drums, percussion (2001–present)
Shaun Cooper – bass guitar (2001–2003; 2010–present)
Discography
Studio albums
Tell All Your Friends (2002)
Where You Want to Be (2004)
Louder Now (2006)
New Again (2009)
Taking Back Sunday (2011)
Happiness Is (2014)
Tidal Wave (2016)
References
Additional notes
Citations
External links
[ Complete discography of Taking Back Sunday], billboard
TBS Hub
Musical groups from Long Island
Alternative rock groups from New York (state)
American emo musical groups
American post-hardcore musical groups
Musical groups established in 1999
Pop punk groups from New York (state)
Warner Records artists
Berklee College of Music alumni
1999 establishments in New York (state)
Victory Records artists
Hopeless Records artists
| true |
[
"Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, in Spanish Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Book of the Examples of Count Lucanor and of Patronio), also commonly known as El Conde Lucanor, Libro de Patronio, or Libro de los ejemplos (original Old Castilian: Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio), is one of the earliest works of prose in Castilian Spanish. It was first written in 1335.\n\nThe book is divided into four parts. The first and most well-known part is a series of 51 short stories (some no more than a page or two) drawn from various sources, such as Aesop and other classical writers, and Arabic folktales.\n\nTales of Count Lucanor was first printed in 1575 when it was published at Seville under the auspices of Argote de Molina. It was again printed at Madrid in 1642, after which it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.\n\nPurpose and structure\n\nA didactic, moralistic purpose, which would color so much of the Spanish literature to follow (see Novela picaresca), is the mark of this book. Count Lucanor engages in conversation with his advisor Patronio, putting to him a problem (\"Some man has made me a proposition...\" or \"I fear that such and such person intends to...\") and asking for advice. Patronio responds always with the greatest humility, claiming not to wish to offer advice to so illustrious a person as the Count, but offering to tell him a story of which the Count's problem reminds him. (Thus, the stories are \"examples\" [ejemplos] of wise action.) At the end he advises the Count to do as the protagonist of his story did.\n\nEach chapter ends in more or less the same way, with slight variations on: \"And this pleased the Count greatly and he did just so, and found it well. And Don Johán (Juan) saw that this example was very good, and had it written in this book, and composed the following verses.\" A rhymed couplet closes, giving the moral of the story.\n\nOrigin of stories and influence on later literature\nMany of the stories written in the book are the first examples written in a modern European language of various stories, which many other writers would use in the proceeding centuries. Many of the stories he included were themselves derived from other stories, coming from western and Arab sources.\n\nShakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the basic elements of Tale 35, \"What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\".\n\nTale 32, \"What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth\" tells the story that Hans Christian Andersen made popular as The Emperor's New Clothes.\n\nStory 7, \"What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana\", a version of Aesop's The Milkmaid and Her Pail, was claimed by Max Müller to originate in the Hindu cycle Panchatantra.\n\nTale 2, \"What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market,\" is the familiar fable The miller, his son and the donkey.\n\nIn 2016, Baroque Decay released a game under the name \"The Count Lucanor\". As well as some protagonists' names, certain events from the books inspired past events in the game.\n\nThe stories\n\nThe book opens with a prologue which introduces the characters of the Count and Patronio. The titles in the following list are those given in Keller and Keating's 1977 translation into English. James York's 1868 translation into English gives a significantly different ordering of the stories and omits the fifty-first.\n\n What Happened to a King and His Favorite \n What Happened to a Good Man and His Son \n How King Richard of England Leapt into the Sea against the Moors\n What a Genoese Said to His Soul When He Was about to Die \n What Happened to a Fox and a Crow Who Had a Piece of Cheese in His Beak\n How the Swallow Warned the Other Birds When She Saw Flax Being Sown \n What Happened to a Woman Named Truhana \n What Happened to a Man Whose Liver Had to Be Washed \n What Happened to Two Horses Which Were Thrown to the Lion \n What Happened to a Man Who on Account of Poverty and Lack of Other Food Was Eating Bitter Lentils \n What Happened to a Dean of Santiago de Compostela and Don Yllán, the Grand Master of Toledo\n What Happened to the Fox and the Rooster \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Hunting Partridges \n The Miracle of Saint Dominick When He Preached against the Usurer \n What Happened to Lorenzo Suárez at the Siege of Seville \n The Reply that count Fernán González Gave to His Relative Núño Laynes \n What Happened to a Very Hungry Man Who Was Half-heartedly Invited to Dinner \n What Happened to Pero Meléndez de Valdés When He Broke His Leg \n What Happened to the Crows and the Owls \n What Happened to a King for Whom a Man Promised to Perform Alchemy \n What Happened to a Young King and a Philosopher to Whom his Father Commended Him \n What Happened to the Lion and the Bull \n How the Ants Provide for Themselves \n What Happened to the King Who Wanted to Test His Three Sons \n What Happened to the Count of Provence and How He Was Freed from Prison by the Advice of Saladin\n What Happened to the Tree of Lies \n What Happened to an Emperor and to Don Alvarfáñez Minaya and Their Wives \n What Happened in Granada to Don Lorenzo Suárez Gallinato When He Beheaded the Renegade Chaplain \n What Happened to a Fox Who Lay down in the Street to Play Dead \n What Happened to King Abenabet of Seville and Ramayquía His Wife \n How a Cardinal Judged between the Canons of Paris and the Friars Minor \n What Happened to the King and the Tricksters Who Made Cloth \n What Happened to Don Juan Manuel's Saker Falcon and an Eagle and a Heron \n What Happened to a Blind Man Who Was Leading Another \n What Happened to a Young Man Who Married a Strong and Ill-tempered Woman\n What Happened to a Merchant When He Found His Son and His Wife Sleeping Together \n What Happened to Count Fernán González with His Men after He Had Won the Battle of Hacinas \n What Happened to a Man Who Was Loaded down with Precious Stones and Drowned in the River \n What Happened to a Man and a Swallow and a Sparrow \n Why the Seneschal of Carcassonne Lost His Soul \n What Happened to a King of Córdova Named Al-Haquem \n What Happened to a Woman of Sham Piety \n What Happened to Good and Evil and the Wise Man and the Madman \n What Happened to Don Pero Núñez the Loyal, to Don Ruy González de Zavallos, and to Don Gutier Roiz de Blaguiello with Don Rodrigo the Generous \n What Happened to a Man Who Became the Devil's Friend and Vassal \n What Happened to a Philosopher who by Accident Went down a Street Where Prostitutes Lived \n What Befell a Moor and His Sister Who Pretended That She Was Timid \n What Happened to a Man Who Tested His Friends \n What Happened to the Man Whom They Cast out Naked on an Island When They Took away from Him the Kingdom He Ruled \n What Happened to Saladin and a Lady, the Wife of a Knight Who Was His Vassal \n What Happened to a Christian King Who Was Very Powerful and Haughty\n\nReferences\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\n Sturm, Harlan\n\n Wacks, David\n\nExternal links\n\nThe Internet Archive provides free access to the 1868 translation by James York.\nJSTOR has the to the 1977 translation by Keller and Keating.\nSelections in English and Spanish (pedagogical edition) with introduction, notes, and bibliography in Open Iberia/América (open access teaching anthology)\n\n14th-century books\nSpanish literature\n1335 books",
"What Happened to Jones may refer to:\n What Happened to Jones (1897 play), a play by George Broadhurst\n What Happened to Jones (1915 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1920 film), a lost silent film\n What Happened to Jones (1926 film), a silent film comedy"
] |
[
"Taking Back Sunday",
"Major label debut (2005-2007)",
"What happened in 2005?",
"On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros.",
"What happened after this?",
"Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005."
] |
C_5fb9ec4b7f9f450cb99be3f90436ec02_0
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What was the name of the album?
| 3 |
What was the name of the album that Taking Back Sunday released in 2005?
|
Taking Back Sunday
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On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well. On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across. Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?". In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands. On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film. CANNOTANSWER
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That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.
|
Taking Back Sunday is an American rock band from Long Island, New York. The band was formed by guitarist Eddie Reyes and bassist Jesse Lacey in 1999. The band's members currently are Adam Lazzara (lead vocals), John Nolan (lead guitar, keyboards, vocals), Shaun Cooper (bass guitar) and Mark O'Connell (drums), accompanied by Nathan Cogan (guitar) for their live performances. Among the band's former members include Lacey, Reyes and guitarist and vocalist Fred Mascherino.
Lazzara replaced original vocalist Antonio Longo prior to the release of the band's 2002 debut album Tell All Your Friends. Nolan and Cooper left the band in 2003 to form Straylight Run before returning in 2010. The band's breakthrough album, 2006's Louder Now, featured the popular lead single "MakeDamnSure", sold over 900,000 copies and peaked at No. 2 on the United States Billboard 200, surpassing the band's previous Billboard 200 peak in 2004 at No. 3 with Where You Want to Be.
The band most recently released their seventh album Tidal Wave in 2016. Lacey quit Taking Back Sunday in 1999 and formed the critically acclaimed rock band Brand New in 2000, with whom Taking Back Sunday would become embroiled in a highly publicized feud with. Reyes left the band in 2018, leaving Taking Back Sunday without both its founding members.
History
Early years (1999–2002)
Guitarist Eddie Reyes, who had played in The Movielife, Mind Over Matter and Inside, and guitarist Jesse Lacey of the Rookie Lot founded Taking Back Sunday in Amityville, New York in November 1999. Lacey moved to bass with the addition of guitarist John Nolan. The group also included vocalist Antonio Longo of One True Thing and drummer Steven DeJoseph. At a party, Nolan reportedly romanced Lacey's girlfriend, after which Lacey left the band. Lacey formed Brand New a year later. Nolan contacted Adam Lazzara to fill in on bass, which resulted in Lazzara moving from North Carolina to New York. Lazzara had met the band when they played a show near his hometown in North Carolina.
DeJoseph was unable to tour extensively because of personal issues and was waiting until the band had another drummer before leaving the group. Mark O'Connell, a friend of Reyes, heard about the opening and joined the group. After recording Taking Back Sunday's self-titled EP, Longo left the band and eventually played with The Prizefighter and the Mirror. In December 2000, Lazzara switched from bass to lead vocals. He never thought he would become the group's singer: "I remember getting into [Reyes'] Windstar with that [EP] and just driving around singing those songs, just to make myself actually do it." O'Connell suggested that the group needed a bassist, and brought in Shaun Cooper. Lazzara spoke of his initial thoughts on Cooper's talent in an interview with AP magazine, saying with Cooper it was "the best bass playing I’d ever seen in my life. I was like, "Oh my God, people can do that?'" In February 2001, Taking Back Sunday released a five-track demo before touring for a year.
While performing as an unsigned band, which they received contract offers from labels that ultimately amounted to nothing. These included Triple Crown Records, who was apprehensive as they had just signed Brand New, and Drive-Thru Records' offer resulted from co-owner Richard Reines having mistaken Nolan for Lacey. Eventually, a friend of the band shared a demo with Victory Records sales and A&R representative Angel Juarbe. Jurabe then sent a copy to Victory founder Tony Brummel, who asked to see a live performance. Within two weeks of seeing them live, a contract was written up, and the band signed to Victory in December 2001.
Victory Records era: Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want to Be (2002–2005)
Although other labels expressed interest in Taking Back Sunday, Victory Records encouraged them to make an album. The band's debut effort was recorded over a period of two weeks in December 2001 at Big Blue Meenie Recording Studio in New Jersey with producer Sal Villanueva. Lazzara fell ill around Christmas, and the sessions were delayed one to two weeks; recording concluded in early January 2002, and ended up costing $10,000. The debut album's name was revealed in February to be Tell All Your Friends; prior to the release of their debut, a music video for "Great Romances of the 20th Century" was released on March 4, 2002. It was directed by Christian Winters, a friend of the band. Winters made the video before the group signed with Victory, and the record company enjoyed it. The song was distributed to radio stations on March 12, and the full album was released on March 25. A video for "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" followed on December 10, 2002, and "You're so Last Summer" on November 24, 2003, following a radio release the previous September. Both videos were also directed by Winters.
Lazzara was suffering from a drinking problem around this time and cheated on Nolan's sister, Michelle, who he had been dating for a while. After playing Skate & Surf Festival in late April 2003, Lazzara apologized to Nolan later that evening. However, Nolan later learned the apology had been insincere, and both Nolan and Cooper officially told the other three band members they were leaving the band two days later. Nolan publicly reasoned that his departure resulted from exhaustion from touring; Lazzara reiterated this reason, and revealed Cooper had left because he did not want to be in the band without Nolan. In truth, Nolan later revealed there was constant fighting within the group, with each member feeling they were not receiving enough credit for the group's success.
John and Michelle Nolan formed Straylight Run with Cooper and Breaking Pangaea drummer Will Noon in the wake of the split from Taking Back Sunday. Taking Back Sunday underwent a short period where they were unsure what to do next, and even briefly considered breaking up. The band was due to tour the United Kingdom with Brand New in May and June 2003; however, all the shows were cancelled because of rumors of the band breaking up. Eventually, it was decided the band would continue; The two departed Taking Back Sunday members were replaced by Breaking Pangaea frontman Fred Mascherino on guitar and vocals as well as O'Connell's longtime friend Matt Rubano on bass.
After their co-headlining tour with Saves the Day concluded in November 2003, Taking Back Sunday immediately commenced work on a second album. Recording for the second album began on March 1, with Lou Giordano at the helm as producer. Taking Back Sunday self-financed the recording sessions, two weeks of which took place at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, New York. The remainder of the album was completed at Water Music in Hoboken, New Jersey, and recording was officially finished by April. At the suggestion of Giordano, the band experimented with instruments aside from the group's usual instrumentation.
The record, titled Where You Want To Be, was released on July 27, 2004, on Victory Records. Despite sounding slightly different from Tell All Your Friends as a result of Giordano's guidance, the new album managed to do well commercially; preceded by the single "A Decade Under the Influence" on June 22, Where You Want To Be was propelled to the No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart at its debut, with around 163,000 copies sold. It became one of the best-selling independent rock albums within a year, selling 634,000 copies by June 2005. Rolling Stone listed Where You Want To Be as one of the top fifty records of 2004. Instead of spending marketing money towards trying to get radio play, Victory Records deployed a street team handing out sampler CDs and fliers to promote the album.
Tom Delonge of Blink-182 directed the music video for "This Photograph is Proof (I Know You Know)"; Blink-182 had invited the band to open for them during their North American tour in 2004. Taking Back Sunday toured frequently for eight months in support of Where You Want to Be.
Major label debut: Louder Now (2005–2007)
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.
On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across.
Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?".
In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands.
On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film.
Departure of Fred Mascherino and New Again (2007–2010)
In October 2007 the band announced that Taking Back Sunday and guitarist Fred Mascherino would be parting ways, which came after he decided to focus on his then upcoming solo album with The Color Fred. He was later replaced by Matthew Fazzi, who would provide guitar and backing vocals. Mascherino went on to reveal in later interviews: "There were just problems between the five of us about writing, who was going to do it and how we were going to do it, we weren't being very productive because we were fighting too much about that stuff. The band was more about cooking food than making music." This statement inspired the band to write the track "Capital M-E", which features lyrical references to Mascherino's departure and the comments he made afterward. In 2010, Fred Mascherino posted a picture of himself and Adam Lazzara with the caption, "Today was a good day" indicating that he and Lazzara have since made up and are on good terms again.
On November 6, 2008, Taking Back Sunday revealed in Rolling Stone that their fourth studio album was to be titled New Again and would feature the tracks "Winter Passing", "Lonely Lonely", "Catholic Knees", and "Carpathia". They stated that "Winter Passing" was "...a slow dance like the last song at your 8th grade dance [that] moves more like an R&B tune than a rock and roll song", and that "Carpathia" will include the first bass solos in any Taking Back Sunday song. They also commented that "Catholic Knees" is "one of the heavier songs we've ever written", and that "Lonely Lonely" is "relentless – two and a half minutes of punching you in the face". In the build-up to the release of New Again, the band released a number of tracks—the first of which was "Carpathia"—on December 21, 2008 as free digital downloads to those who purchased the band's Christmas holiday set, with a physical limited vinyl release of the track as well as a live version of "Catholic Knees" released on April 18, 2009, secondly title track "New Again" as a free single download from the band's website on April 16, 2009, followed by the first full single "Sink into Me", released on April 20, 2009, premiering on BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe show, and being made available digitally short after. On May 16, 2009, "Everything Must Go" was released to stream on the band's MySpace. Every Monday, the band released a new song on their MySpace from New Again labeling it "New Music Monday".
During their tour supporting New Again, the band played in Dublin, Ireland where guitarist Matt Fazzi fractured his foot. Despite this, the show in Belfast, Northern Ireland went on and the rest of the tour was completed, which included stops in the UK at Sonisphere Festival and the Kerrang! awards show. On August 18, 2009, the band released a digital live album entitled Live from Bamboozle '09. The album consists of 13 live tracks recorded at The Bamboozle, where they played in May of the same year. In September 2009, the band announced they will be co-headlining with The All-American Rejects and Anberlin for a full US tour. They are also set to release a live acoustic DVD around spring 2010 following the tour.
On February 12, 2010, the band released a previously unreleased b-side from New Again, entitled "Winter Passing", on their official website.
Throughout February and March the band played the Australian Soundwave tour, playing songs from various albums to crowds of almost 30,000.
Taking Back Sunday and lineup change (2010–2012)
On March 29, 2010, Matt Rubano and Matthew Fazzi announced that they were no longer members of Taking Back Sunday. The band's official website also posted a picture of the original line-up with the members' eyes crossed out, indicating a possible reunion of the Tell All Your Friends era lineup. On March 31, 2010, tbsnewagain tweeted a link to a video announcing the new lineup of the band. The video ended with a quick stream of words which ended with, "Sometimes it takes some time to remember where you were headed in the first place and the people you intended to go there with. There's no hard feelings, just the future."
On April 12, the band made an official announcement confirming that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had re-joined the band. It was announced that they would soon begin the recording process of their fifth studio album with Louder Now producer Eric Valentine. On the same day, Adam Lazzara did an interview with Alternative Press, in which he discussed how the original line-up got back together and how both Matt Rubano and Matt Fazzi were not fired, but rather "let go". The band finished writing in El Paso with around 15 songs completed, according to Mark O'Connell. Pre-production on the new album began on August 17, 2010, the same day their live acoustic album Live from Orensanz was released. On December 20, 2010, the band put out a new Christmas song entitled "Merry Christmas I Missed You So Much". On April 6, 2011, the band played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, to record footage for an upcoming video for the song "El Paso". Adam Lazzara requested that the audience put away their phones and cameras during the recording. They played the song three times during the set. During this performance, the band also debuted a new song entitled "Faith (When I Let You Down)", live for the first time. "Faith (When I Let You Down)" was released as the official first single from the album on May 3, 2011, with an acoustic version of "Great Romances of the 20th Century" as the b-side. On June 7, 2011, the second official single "This Is All Now" was released on iTunes, with the b-side being an acoustic version of "Ghost Man on Third". On June 26, 2011 in an interview with Robert Herrera of Punkvideosrock.com, Mark and Shaun stated that the reason they returned to their original lineup was because they no longer felt it was Taking Back Sunday without the original members. Mark stated they were miserable as a band, weren't having fun, and didn't like the direction the band was going so they decided to reach out to the original members and after meeting with the band in Texas found that "the chemistry was still there."
On July 8, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "Faith (When I Let You Down)". On November 3, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "You Got Me". This is the second single from their self-titled album. The video was created with the help of Steve Pedulla and Ward McDonald and it features guitarist Eddie Reyes dancing solo on a theater stage. Taking Back Sunday played Warped Tour 2012 at all locations. In honor of Record Store Day 2012, the band released a limited press vinyl LP entitled "We Play Songs", featuring four live acoustic tracks.
TAYF10 anniversary tour (2012–13)
Taking Back Sunday embarked on a "Tell All Your Friends" 10th anniversary tour for 2012, during which the band performed their debut album in its entirety. The full US tour featured Bayside as main support, with Transit, Man Overboard and Gabriel the Marine as special guests. An audio and video recording of the acoustic version of the tour was released for digital download through the band's website on June 18, 2013.
On June 7, 2013 2:33PM, Taking Back Sunday took to Twitter to confirm that the recording of their 6th studio album had begun; they tweeted: "Phase one of recording the new record starts now... Happy Friday!" The band, who are working alongside producers Marc Jacob Hudson and Ray Jeffrey, have confirmed that pre-production of the 6th studio record has been completed, and that drum and bass tracking has begun. On July 1, 2013, the band announced that guitar and vocal tracking had begun as well. They announced on Facebook that the album will be released in early 2014.
On August 29, 2013, Adam Lazzara and John Nolan performed an acoustic set at the Leaky Lifeboat Inn, in Seaford, New York, where they debuted a new song with a working title, "The Bird You Cannot Change". On September 11 and 12 the band played a new song at Starland Ballroom called "Flicker Fade". Song title was later confirmed during a televised concert on September 12 on AXSTV. On October 13, the band performed a new song, with the working title, "Anywhere That You Want to Go / Beat Up Car".
From October 25 through November 2, Underoath vocalist Spencer Chamberlain began filling in on lead vocals following the premature birth of Adam Lazzara's son. On November 8, Lazzara and Nolan performed at the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University as an acoustic act. This featured the appearance of a Stony Brook violinist named Dylan Ebrahimian who also will appear on Taking Back Sunday's next album due in 2014.
Happiness Is, Tidal Wave and departure of Eddie Reyes (2014–present)
On January 11, 2014, Taking Back Sunday revealed that a new album, Happiness Is, was available for pre-order on iTunes, as was a new track: "Flicker, Fade". Happiness Is was released on March 18, 2014 through Hopeless Records.
The band embarked on a North American headline tour in 2015 with The Menzingers and letlive.
On June 27, 2016, the band's next album, Tidal Wave, was announced for release on September 16. Material for the album was written in between tours for Happiness Is.
On April 13, 2018, it was announced that founding guitarist Eddie Reyes has parted ways with the band. This was later confirmed by Reyes stating the reason for his departure was due to his battle with alcoholism and hope to join the band again in the future. In the meantime, he has also stated to have started a new band.
On the subject of ever touring with previous members of Taking Back Sunday, John Nolan said in an interview: "I don’t think that’s something that really interests us. This lineup has been together for three albums now and we’re really focused on continuing to develop and evolve together. Revisiting old songs with past band members just seem like an exercise in nostalgia."
On October 12, 2018, the band began announcing a compilation album to celebrate their 20th anniversary, along with a worldwide tour. The album, entitled Twenty, was released on January 11, 2019. Twenty consists of songs from Taking Back Sunday's Victory Records and Warner Bros. Records albums, which are now owned by Concord Music.
For their 20th Anniversary tour, the band have employed the use of a specially made coin to flip at shows in locations where they are playing two nights in a row. The coin toss will decide the second album to be played the first night of the pair of shows, either Louder Now or Where You Want to Be. (Tell All Your Friends will be played each night.)
In an interview with The Aquarian, John Nolan said that the band was not currently on a label, indicating that they left Hopeless Records.
Musical style and influences
Taking Back Sunday has been described as alternative rock, emo, post-hardcore, pop punk, pop rock, and emo pop. Charles Spano of AllMusic described the band as a "New York-based emo band that blend Southern California post-punk, nu metal and old school hardcore." Taking Back Sunday's influences include the Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dag Nasty, The Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring, Bad Brains, Quicksand, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Celtic Frost, Sunny Day Real Estate, Kreator, Nirvana, and Radiohead.
Band members
Current members
John Nolan – lead guitar, keyboards, vocals (1999–2003; 2010–present)
Adam Lazzara – lead vocals (2001–present); bass guitar, vocals (2000–2001)
Mark O'Connell – drums, percussion (2001–present)
Shaun Cooper – bass guitar (2001–2003; 2010–present)
Discography
Studio albums
Tell All Your Friends (2002)
Where You Want to Be (2004)
Louder Now (2006)
New Again (2009)
Taking Back Sunday (2011)
Happiness Is (2014)
Tidal Wave (2016)
References
Additional notes
Citations
External links
[ Complete discography of Taking Back Sunday], billboard
TBS Hub
Musical groups from Long Island
Alternative rock groups from New York (state)
American emo musical groups
American post-hardcore musical groups
Musical groups established in 1999
Pop punk groups from New York (state)
Warner Records artists
Berklee College of Music alumni
1999 establishments in New York (state)
Victory Records artists
Hopeless Records artists
| true |
[
"White Witch is the title of the second studio album by the group Andrea True Connection. It was released in 1977. The album had two singles: and \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\" and \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\". This was the last album released by the group and the vocalist Andrea True would release a new album as a solo release only in 1980.\n\nBackground and production\nAfter the success of her first album and the gold-certified single More, More, More, the band begun to prepeare for their second release. The album production included studio musicians with a new band assembled for the tour, the second line-up, which included future Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick, it was also produce by the disco pioneers Michael Zager and Jerry Love.\n\nSingles\nThe first single of the album was \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\", it was released in 1977 and became True's second biggest hit, reaching No. 27 on Billboard's pop chart, and #4 on the U.S. club chart, it also peaked #89 in the Canadian RPM's chart. \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\" was released as the second and last single of the album (and also of the group) in 1978 and reached #9 on the U.S. club chart, #34 in the UK and #56 on the Billboard Hot 100\n\nCritical reception\n\nThe album received mixed reviews from music critics. Alex Henderson from the Allmusic website gave the album two and a half stars out of five in a mixed review which he wrote that \"while White Witch isn't a bad album, it falls short of the excellence her first album, More, More, More.\" He also stated that there are a few gems in the album \"including the Michael Zager-produced \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\" and the exuberant, Gregg Diamond-produced \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\"\" according to him they're both \"exercises in unapologetically campy fun.\" He concluded that the album \"LP is strictly for diehard disco collectors.\"\n\nTrack listing\nsource:\n\nReferences\n\n1977 albums\nAndrea True albums\nBuddah Records albums",
"Third Eye Open is a 1992 album by American funk/rock supergroup Hardware. Hardware consists of lead guitarist Stevie Salas, P-Funk bassist Bootsy Collins, and drummer Buddy Miles, formerly of the Band of Gypsys. The album was produced by Bill Laswell and Salas, and was the first release to be part of Laswell's Black Arc Series, which includes Lord of the Harvest by Zillatron, Out of the Dark by O.G. Funk, and Under the 6 by Slave Master.\n\nAlbum history\nWhen the album was first released in Japan on the Polystar label, the band was called The Third Eye and the name of the album was \"Hardware\". When the album secured distribution in the U.S., it was found that another band had owned the name \"The Third Eye\". To avoid any further legal hassles, it was opted that the title of the album and the name of band would simply be switched, thus the name of the band would be Hardware and the title of the album became Third Eye Open.\n\nThe song \"Leakin'\" is a version of a track that appeared on Collins' 1988 album What's Bootsy Doin'?, which featured Salas playing guitar. On this album, the song is credited to Salas, whereas the previous version is credited to Collins, George Clinton and Trey Stone.\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\nStevie Salas – guitars, vocals\nBootsy Collins – space bass, vocals\nBuddy Miles – drums, fuzz bass, vocals\nGeorge Clinton, Gary \"Mudbone\" Cooper, Bernard Fowler – background vocals\nDavid Friendly, Vince McClean, Matt Stein – digital bollocks\n\nHardware (band) albums\n1992 albums\nAlbums produced by Bill Laswell\nRykodisc albums"
] |
[
"Taking Back Sunday",
"Major label debut (2005-2007)",
"What happened in 2005?",
"On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros.",
"What happened after this?",
"Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005.",
"What was the name of the album?",
"That month, the group contributed \"Error: Operator\" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well."
] |
C_5fb9ec4b7f9f450cb99be3f90436ec02_0
|
Was that a hit single?
| 4 |
Was Error: Operator a hit single for Taking Back Sunday?
|
Taking Back Sunday
|
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well. On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across. Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?". In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands. On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Taking Back Sunday is an American rock band from Long Island, New York. The band was formed by guitarist Eddie Reyes and bassist Jesse Lacey in 1999. The band's members currently are Adam Lazzara (lead vocals), John Nolan (lead guitar, keyboards, vocals), Shaun Cooper (bass guitar) and Mark O'Connell (drums), accompanied by Nathan Cogan (guitar) for their live performances. Among the band's former members include Lacey, Reyes and guitarist and vocalist Fred Mascherino.
Lazzara replaced original vocalist Antonio Longo prior to the release of the band's 2002 debut album Tell All Your Friends. Nolan and Cooper left the band in 2003 to form Straylight Run before returning in 2010. The band's breakthrough album, 2006's Louder Now, featured the popular lead single "MakeDamnSure", sold over 900,000 copies and peaked at No. 2 on the United States Billboard 200, surpassing the band's previous Billboard 200 peak in 2004 at No. 3 with Where You Want to Be.
The band most recently released their seventh album Tidal Wave in 2016. Lacey quit Taking Back Sunday in 1999 and formed the critically acclaimed rock band Brand New in 2000, with whom Taking Back Sunday would become embroiled in a highly publicized feud with. Reyes left the band in 2018, leaving Taking Back Sunday without both its founding members.
History
Early years (1999–2002)
Guitarist Eddie Reyes, who had played in The Movielife, Mind Over Matter and Inside, and guitarist Jesse Lacey of the Rookie Lot founded Taking Back Sunday in Amityville, New York in November 1999. Lacey moved to bass with the addition of guitarist John Nolan. The group also included vocalist Antonio Longo of One True Thing and drummer Steven DeJoseph. At a party, Nolan reportedly romanced Lacey's girlfriend, after which Lacey left the band. Lacey formed Brand New a year later. Nolan contacted Adam Lazzara to fill in on bass, which resulted in Lazzara moving from North Carolina to New York. Lazzara had met the band when they played a show near his hometown in North Carolina.
DeJoseph was unable to tour extensively because of personal issues and was waiting until the band had another drummer before leaving the group. Mark O'Connell, a friend of Reyes, heard about the opening and joined the group. After recording Taking Back Sunday's self-titled EP, Longo left the band and eventually played with The Prizefighter and the Mirror. In December 2000, Lazzara switched from bass to lead vocals. He never thought he would become the group's singer: "I remember getting into [Reyes'] Windstar with that [EP] and just driving around singing those songs, just to make myself actually do it." O'Connell suggested that the group needed a bassist, and brought in Shaun Cooper. Lazzara spoke of his initial thoughts on Cooper's talent in an interview with AP magazine, saying with Cooper it was "the best bass playing I’d ever seen in my life. I was like, "Oh my God, people can do that?'" In February 2001, Taking Back Sunday released a five-track demo before touring for a year.
While performing as an unsigned band, which they received contract offers from labels that ultimately amounted to nothing. These included Triple Crown Records, who was apprehensive as they had just signed Brand New, and Drive-Thru Records' offer resulted from co-owner Richard Reines having mistaken Nolan for Lacey. Eventually, a friend of the band shared a demo with Victory Records sales and A&R representative Angel Juarbe. Jurabe then sent a copy to Victory founder Tony Brummel, who asked to see a live performance. Within two weeks of seeing them live, a contract was written up, and the band signed to Victory in December 2001.
Victory Records era: Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want to Be (2002–2005)
Although other labels expressed interest in Taking Back Sunday, Victory Records encouraged them to make an album. The band's debut effort was recorded over a period of two weeks in December 2001 at Big Blue Meenie Recording Studio in New Jersey with producer Sal Villanueva. Lazzara fell ill around Christmas, and the sessions were delayed one to two weeks; recording concluded in early January 2002, and ended up costing $10,000. The debut album's name was revealed in February to be Tell All Your Friends; prior to the release of their debut, a music video for "Great Romances of the 20th Century" was released on March 4, 2002. It was directed by Christian Winters, a friend of the band. Winters made the video before the group signed with Victory, and the record company enjoyed it. The song was distributed to radio stations on March 12, and the full album was released on March 25. A video for "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" followed on December 10, 2002, and "You're so Last Summer" on November 24, 2003, following a radio release the previous September. Both videos were also directed by Winters.
Lazzara was suffering from a drinking problem around this time and cheated on Nolan's sister, Michelle, who he had been dating for a while. After playing Skate & Surf Festival in late April 2003, Lazzara apologized to Nolan later that evening. However, Nolan later learned the apology had been insincere, and both Nolan and Cooper officially told the other three band members they were leaving the band two days later. Nolan publicly reasoned that his departure resulted from exhaustion from touring; Lazzara reiterated this reason, and revealed Cooper had left because he did not want to be in the band without Nolan. In truth, Nolan later revealed there was constant fighting within the group, with each member feeling they were not receiving enough credit for the group's success.
John and Michelle Nolan formed Straylight Run with Cooper and Breaking Pangaea drummer Will Noon in the wake of the split from Taking Back Sunday. Taking Back Sunday underwent a short period where they were unsure what to do next, and even briefly considered breaking up. The band was due to tour the United Kingdom with Brand New in May and June 2003; however, all the shows were cancelled because of rumors of the band breaking up. Eventually, it was decided the band would continue; The two departed Taking Back Sunday members were replaced by Breaking Pangaea frontman Fred Mascherino on guitar and vocals as well as O'Connell's longtime friend Matt Rubano on bass.
After their co-headlining tour with Saves the Day concluded in November 2003, Taking Back Sunday immediately commenced work on a second album. Recording for the second album began on March 1, with Lou Giordano at the helm as producer. Taking Back Sunday self-financed the recording sessions, two weeks of which took place at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, New York. The remainder of the album was completed at Water Music in Hoboken, New Jersey, and recording was officially finished by April. At the suggestion of Giordano, the band experimented with instruments aside from the group's usual instrumentation.
The record, titled Where You Want To Be, was released on July 27, 2004, on Victory Records. Despite sounding slightly different from Tell All Your Friends as a result of Giordano's guidance, the new album managed to do well commercially; preceded by the single "A Decade Under the Influence" on June 22, Where You Want To Be was propelled to the No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart at its debut, with around 163,000 copies sold. It became one of the best-selling independent rock albums within a year, selling 634,000 copies by June 2005. Rolling Stone listed Where You Want To Be as one of the top fifty records of 2004. Instead of spending marketing money towards trying to get radio play, Victory Records deployed a street team handing out sampler CDs and fliers to promote the album.
Tom Delonge of Blink-182 directed the music video for "This Photograph is Proof (I Know You Know)"; Blink-182 had invited the band to open for them during their North American tour in 2004. Taking Back Sunday toured frequently for eight months in support of Where You Want to Be.
Major label debut: Louder Now (2005–2007)
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.
On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across.
Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?".
In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands.
On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film.
Departure of Fred Mascherino and New Again (2007–2010)
In October 2007 the band announced that Taking Back Sunday and guitarist Fred Mascherino would be parting ways, which came after he decided to focus on his then upcoming solo album with The Color Fred. He was later replaced by Matthew Fazzi, who would provide guitar and backing vocals. Mascherino went on to reveal in later interviews: "There were just problems between the five of us about writing, who was going to do it and how we were going to do it, we weren't being very productive because we were fighting too much about that stuff. The band was more about cooking food than making music." This statement inspired the band to write the track "Capital M-E", which features lyrical references to Mascherino's departure and the comments he made afterward. In 2010, Fred Mascherino posted a picture of himself and Adam Lazzara with the caption, "Today was a good day" indicating that he and Lazzara have since made up and are on good terms again.
On November 6, 2008, Taking Back Sunday revealed in Rolling Stone that their fourth studio album was to be titled New Again and would feature the tracks "Winter Passing", "Lonely Lonely", "Catholic Knees", and "Carpathia". They stated that "Winter Passing" was "...a slow dance like the last song at your 8th grade dance [that] moves more like an R&B tune than a rock and roll song", and that "Carpathia" will include the first bass solos in any Taking Back Sunday song. They also commented that "Catholic Knees" is "one of the heavier songs we've ever written", and that "Lonely Lonely" is "relentless – two and a half minutes of punching you in the face". In the build-up to the release of New Again, the band released a number of tracks—the first of which was "Carpathia"—on December 21, 2008 as free digital downloads to those who purchased the band's Christmas holiday set, with a physical limited vinyl release of the track as well as a live version of "Catholic Knees" released on April 18, 2009, secondly title track "New Again" as a free single download from the band's website on April 16, 2009, followed by the first full single "Sink into Me", released on April 20, 2009, premiering on BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe show, and being made available digitally short after. On May 16, 2009, "Everything Must Go" was released to stream on the band's MySpace. Every Monday, the band released a new song on their MySpace from New Again labeling it "New Music Monday".
During their tour supporting New Again, the band played in Dublin, Ireland where guitarist Matt Fazzi fractured his foot. Despite this, the show in Belfast, Northern Ireland went on and the rest of the tour was completed, which included stops in the UK at Sonisphere Festival and the Kerrang! awards show. On August 18, 2009, the band released a digital live album entitled Live from Bamboozle '09. The album consists of 13 live tracks recorded at The Bamboozle, where they played in May of the same year. In September 2009, the band announced they will be co-headlining with The All-American Rejects and Anberlin for a full US tour. They are also set to release a live acoustic DVD around spring 2010 following the tour.
On February 12, 2010, the band released a previously unreleased b-side from New Again, entitled "Winter Passing", on their official website.
Throughout February and March the band played the Australian Soundwave tour, playing songs from various albums to crowds of almost 30,000.
Taking Back Sunday and lineup change (2010–2012)
On March 29, 2010, Matt Rubano and Matthew Fazzi announced that they were no longer members of Taking Back Sunday. The band's official website also posted a picture of the original line-up with the members' eyes crossed out, indicating a possible reunion of the Tell All Your Friends era lineup. On March 31, 2010, tbsnewagain tweeted a link to a video announcing the new lineup of the band. The video ended with a quick stream of words which ended with, "Sometimes it takes some time to remember where you were headed in the first place and the people you intended to go there with. There's no hard feelings, just the future."
On April 12, the band made an official announcement confirming that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had re-joined the band. It was announced that they would soon begin the recording process of their fifth studio album with Louder Now producer Eric Valentine. On the same day, Adam Lazzara did an interview with Alternative Press, in which he discussed how the original line-up got back together and how both Matt Rubano and Matt Fazzi were not fired, but rather "let go". The band finished writing in El Paso with around 15 songs completed, according to Mark O'Connell. Pre-production on the new album began on August 17, 2010, the same day their live acoustic album Live from Orensanz was released. On December 20, 2010, the band put out a new Christmas song entitled "Merry Christmas I Missed You So Much". On April 6, 2011, the band played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, to record footage for an upcoming video for the song "El Paso". Adam Lazzara requested that the audience put away their phones and cameras during the recording. They played the song three times during the set. During this performance, the band also debuted a new song entitled "Faith (When I Let You Down)", live for the first time. "Faith (When I Let You Down)" was released as the official first single from the album on May 3, 2011, with an acoustic version of "Great Romances of the 20th Century" as the b-side. On June 7, 2011, the second official single "This Is All Now" was released on iTunes, with the b-side being an acoustic version of "Ghost Man on Third". On June 26, 2011 in an interview with Robert Herrera of Punkvideosrock.com, Mark and Shaun stated that the reason they returned to their original lineup was because they no longer felt it was Taking Back Sunday without the original members. Mark stated they were miserable as a band, weren't having fun, and didn't like the direction the band was going so they decided to reach out to the original members and after meeting with the band in Texas found that "the chemistry was still there."
On July 8, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "Faith (When I Let You Down)". On November 3, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "You Got Me". This is the second single from their self-titled album. The video was created with the help of Steve Pedulla and Ward McDonald and it features guitarist Eddie Reyes dancing solo on a theater stage. Taking Back Sunday played Warped Tour 2012 at all locations. In honor of Record Store Day 2012, the band released a limited press vinyl LP entitled "We Play Songs", featuring four live acoustic tracks.
TAYF10 anniversary tour (2012–13)
Taking Back Sunday embarked on a "Tell All Your Friends" 10th anniversary tour for 2012, during which the band performed their debut album in its entirety. The full US tour featured Bayside as main support, with Transit, Man Overboard and Gabriel the Marine as special guests. An audio and video recording of the acoustic version of the tour was released for digital download through the band's website on June 18, 2013.
On June 7, 2013 2:33PM, Taking Back Sunday took to Twitter to confirm that the recording of their 6th studio album had begun; they tweeted: "Phase one of recording the new record starts now... Happy Friday!" The band, who are working alongside producers Marc Jacob Hudson and Ray Jeffrey, have confirmed that pre-production of the 6th studio record has been completed, and that drum and bass tracking has begun. On July 1, 2013, the band announced that guitar and vocal tracking had begun as well. They announced on Facebook that the album will be released in early 2014.
On August 29, 2013, Adam Lazzara and John Nolan performed an acoustic set at the Leaky Lifeboat Inn, in Seaford, New York, where they debuted a new song with a working title, "The Bird You Cannot Change". On September 11 and 12 the band played a new song at Starland Ballroom called "Flicker Fade". Song title was later confirmed during a televised concert on September 12 on AXSTV. On October 13, the band performed a new song, with the working title, "Anywhere That You Want to Go / Beat Up Car".
From October 25 through November 2, Underoath vocalist Spencer Chamberlain began filling in on lead vocals following the premature birth of Adam Lazzara's son. On November 8, Lazzara and Nolan performed at the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University as an acoustic act. This featured the appearance of a Stony Brook violinist named Dylan Ebrahimian who also will appear on Taking Back Sunday's next album due in 2014.
Happiness Is, Tidal Wave and departure of Eddie Reyes (2014–present)
On January 11, 2014, Taking Back Sunday revealed that a new album, Happiness Is, was available for pre-order on iTunes, as was a new track: "Flicker, Fade". Happiness Is was released on March 18, 2014 through Hopeless Records.
The band embarked on a North American headline tour in 2015 with The Menzingers and letlive.
On June 27, 2016, the band's next album, Tidal Wave, was announced for release on September 16. Material for the album was written in between tours for Happiness Is.
On April 13, 2018, it was announced that founding guitarist Eddie Reyes has parted ways with the band. This was later confirmed by Reyes stating the reason for his departure was due to his battle with alcoholism and hope to join the band again in the future. In the meantime, he has also stated to have started a new band.
On the subject of ever touring with previous members of Taking Back Sunday, John Nolan said in an interview: "I don’t think that’s something that really interests us. This lineup has been together for three albums now and we’re really focused on continuing to develop and evolve together. Revisiting old songs with past band members just seem like an exercise in nostalgia."
On October 12, 2018, the band began announcing a compilation album to celebrate their 20th anniversary, along with a worldwide tour. The album, entitled Twenty, was released on January 11, 2019. Twenty consists of songs from Taking Back Sunday's Victory Records and Warner Bros. Records albums, which are now owned by Concord Music.
For their 20th Anniversary tour, the band have employed the use of a specially made coin to flip at shows in locations where they are playing two nights in a row. The coin toss will decide the second album to be played the first night of the pair of shows, either Louder Now or Where You Want to Be. (Tell All Your Friends will be played each night.)
In an interview with The Aquarian, John Nolan said that the band was not currently on a label, indicating that they left Hopeless Records.
Musical style and influences
Taking Back Sunday has been described as alternative rock, emo, post-hardcore, pop punk, pop rock, and emo pop. Charles Spano of AllMusic described the band as a "New York-based emo band that blend Southern California post-punk, nu metal and old school hardcore." Taking Back Sunday's influences include the Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dag Nasty, The Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring, Bad Brains, Quicksand, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Celtic Frost, Sunny Day Real Estate, Kreator, Nirvana, and Radiohead.
Band members
Current members
John Nolan – lead guitar, keyboards, vocals (1999–2003; 2010–present)
Adam Lazzara – lead vocals (2001–present); bass guitar, vocals (2000–2001)
Mark O'Connell – drums, percussion (2001–present)
Shaun Cooper – bass guitar (2001–2003; 2010–present)
Discography
Studio albums
Tell All Your Friends (2002)
Where You Want to Be (2004)
Louder Now (2006)
New Again (2009)
Taking Back Sunday (2011)
Happiness Is (2014)
Tidal Wave (2016)
References
Additional notes
Citations
External links
[ Complete discography of Taking Back Sunday], billboard
TBS Hub
Musical groups from Long Island
Alternative rock groups from New York (state)
American emo musical groups
American post-hardcore musical groups
Musical groups established in 1999
Pop punk groups from New York (state)
Warner Records artists
Berklee College of Music alumni
1999 establishments in New York (state)
Victory Records artists
Hopeless Records artists
| false |
[
"\"Something Pretty\" is a song written by Buddy Wayne and Charlie Williams. It was recorded by American country artist Wynn Stewart. It was released as a single in 1968 and became a major hit that same year.\n\nBackground and release\n\"Something Pretty\" was recorded on January 3, 1968 at the Capitol Recording Studio, located in Hollywood, California. The session was produced by Ken Nelson, Stewart's producer at Capitol Records. Three additional tracks were recorded in the same session. Stewart had recently signed with Capitol Records, after first being dropped by the label in the 1950s. He had first number one single on the label, \"It's Such a Pretty World Today.\"\n\n\"Something Pretty\" was released as a single on Capitol Records in March 1968. It was his fifth single release with the label. His backing band, \"The Tourists,\" were given equal billing on the single release by Capitol Records. The single spent 13 weeks on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart before becoming a top ten hit, peaking at number seven in January 1968. \"Something Pretty\" was Stewart's fifth top ten hit single in his career and his seventh major hit altogether. Over the next several years, Stewart would have further major hits for Capitol Records. In Canada, the song became his first charting song and first major hit. It peaked at number 20 on the RPM Country Songs chart that same year.\n\nTrack listings\n7\" vinyl single\n \"Something Pretty\" – 2:30\n \"Built In Love\" – 2:30\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n1968 songs\n1968 singles\nWynn Stewart songs\nSong recordings produced by Ken Nelson (American record producer)",
"\"Sing a Sad Song\" is a song written by Wynn Stewart. It was recorded notably by Merle Haggard in 1963, whose version became his first major hit. It was later recorded by Stewart himself. In 1976, Stewart's own version became a major hit as well.\n\nMerle Haggard version\n\"Sing a Sad Song\" was recorded by Merle Haggard in 1963 for Capitol Records. Haggard cut his version alongside producer Ken Nelson at Capitol Studios. Haggard had recently signed with the Capitol label and later recorded his debut album in the same session as this single.\n\n\"Sing a Sad Song\" was released as a single on Capitol Records in November 1963. It was Haggard's debt single release for the label and became successful. The single spent three weeks on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, peaking at number 19 in January 1964. The song became Haggard's first major hit as a music artist. It was released on his debut studio album called Strangers. Also included on the album was his first number one hit, \"(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers.\"\n\nTrack listings\n7\" vinyl single\n \"Sing a Sad Song\" – 2:25\n \"You Don't Even Try\" – 2:15\n\nChart performance\n\nWynn Stewart version\n\n\"Sing a Sad Song\" was notably recorded later by its writer, Wynn Stewart. He had first recorded a version that appeared on his 1965 debut studio album The Songs of Wynn Stewart. The album was issued on Capitol Records, but the song was not issued as a single. However, in 1975, Stewart signed a recording contract with Playboy Records where he re-cut the track along with several other former recordings. Stewart re-recorded the song on November 4, 1975, at the RCA Victor Studio, located in Nashville, Tennessee. The session was produced by Eddie Kilroy.\n\n\"Sing a Sad Song\" was released as a single on Playboy Records in October 1976. It was Stewart's fourth single release with the label. The single spent 11 weeks on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, peaking at number 11 in January 1977. In Canada, the song became a top 40 hit single. It peaked at number 32 on the RPM Country Songs chart that same year. \"Sing a Sad Song\" was Stewart's final major hit of his career. He died in 1985.\n\nTrack listings\n7\" vinyl single\n \"Sing a Sad Song\" – 3:04\n \"It's Such a Pretty World Today\" – 2:33\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n1963 songs\n1976 singles\n1963 debut singles\nCapitol Records singles\nPlayboy Records singles\nWynn Stewart songs\nMerle Haggard songs\nSongs written by Wynn Stewart\nSong recordings produced by Ken Nelson (American record producer)"
] |
[
"Taking Back Sunday",
"Major label debut (2005-2007)",
"What happened in 2005?",
"On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros.",
"What happened after this?",
"Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005.",
"What was the name of the album?",
"That month, the group contributed \"Error: Operator\" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.",
"Was that a hit single?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_5fb9ec4b7f9f450cb99be3f90436ec02_0
|
What did they do in 2006?
| 5 |
What did Taking Back Sunday do in 2006?
|
Taking Back Sunday
|
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well. On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across. Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?". In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands. On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film. CANNOTANSWER
|
On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records.
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Taking Back Sunday is an American rock band from Long Island, New York. The band was formed by guitarist Eddie Reyes and bassist Jesse Lacey in 1999. The band's members currently are Adam Lazzara (lead vocals), John Nolan (lead guitar, keyboards, vocals), Shaun Cooper (bass guitar) and Mark O'Connell (drums), accompanied by Nathan Cogan (guitar) for their live performances. Among the band's former members include Lacey, Reyes and guitarist and vocalist Fred Mascherino.
Lazzara replaced original vocalist Antonio Longo prior to the release of the band's 2002 debut album Tell All Your Friends. Nolan and Cooper left the band in 2003 to form Straylight Run before returning in 2010. The band's breakthrough album, 2006's Louder Now, featured the popular lead single "MakeDamnSure", sold over 900,000 copies and peaked at No. 2 on the United States Billboard 200, surpassing the band's previous Billboard 200 peak in 2004 at No. 3 with Where You Want to Be.
The band most recently released their seventh album Tidal Wave in 2016. Lacey quit Taking Back Sunday in 1999 and formed the critically acclaimed rock band Brand New in 2000, with whom Taking Back Sunday would become embroiled in a highly publicized feud with. Reyes left the band in 2018, leaving Taking Back Sunday without both its founding members.
History
Early years (1999–2002)
Guitarist Eddie Reyes, who had played in The Movielife, Mind Over Matter and Inside, and guitarist Jesse Lacey of the Rookie Lot founded Taking Back Sunday in Amityville, New York in November 1999. Lacey moved to bass with the addition of guitarist John Nolan. The group also included vocalist Antonio Longo of One True Thing and drummer Steven DeJoseph. At a party, Nolan reportedly romanced Lacey's girlfriend, after which Lacey left the band. Lacey formed Brand New a year later. Nolan contacted Adam Lazzara to fill in on bass, which resulted in Lazzara moving from North Carolina to New York. Lazzara had met the band when they played a show near his hometown in North Carolina.
DeJoseph was unable to tour extensively because of personal issues and was waiting until the band had another drummer before leaving the group. Mark O'Connell, a friend of Reyes, heard about the opening and joined the group. After recording Taking Back Sunday's self-titled EP, Longo left the band and eventually played with The Prizefighter and the Mirror. In December 2000, Lazzara switched from bass to lead vocals. He never thought he would become the group's singer: "I remember getting into [Reyes'] Windstar with that [EP] and just driving around singing those songs, just to make myself actually do it." O'Connell suggested that the group needed a bassist, and brought in Shaun Cooper. Lazzara spoke of his initial thoughts on Cooper's talent in an interview with AP magazine, saying with Cooper it was "the best bass playing I’d ever seen in my life. I was like, "Oh my God, people can do that?'" In February 2001, Taking Back Sunday released a five-track demo before touring for a year.
While performing as an unsigned band, which they received contract offers from labels that ultimately amounted to nothing. These included Triple Crown Records, who was apprehensive as they had just signed Brand New, and Drive-Thru Records' offer resulted from co-owner Richard Reines having mistaken Nolan for Lacey. Eventually, a friend of the band shared a demo with Victory Records sales and A&R representative Angel Juarbe. Jurabe then sent a copy to Victory founder Tony Brummel, who asked to see a live performance. Within two weeks of seeing them live, a contract was written up, and the band signed to Victory in December 2001.
Victory Records era: Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want to Be (2002–2005)
Although other labels expressed interest in Taking Back Sunday, Victory Records encouraged them to make an album. The band's debut effort was recorded over a period of two weeks in December 2001 at Big Blue Meenie Recording Studio in New Jersey with producer Sal Villanueva. Lazzara fell ill around Christmas, and the sessions were delayed one to two weeks; recording concluded in early January 2002, and ended up costing $10,000. The debut album's name was revealed in February to be Tell All Your Friends; prior to the release of their debut, a music video for "Great Romances of the 20th Century" was released on March 4, 2002. It was directed by Christian Winters, a friend of the band. Winters made the video before the group signed with Victory, and the record company enjoyed it. The song was distributed to radio stations on March 12, and the full album was released on March 25. A video for "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" followed on December 10, 2002, and "You're so Last Summer" on November 24, 2003, following a radio release the previous September. Both videos were also directed by Winters.
Lazzara was suffering from a drinking problem around this time and cheated on Nolan's sister, Michelle, who he had been dating for a while. After playing Skate & Surf Festival in late April 2003, Lazzara apologized to Nolan later that evening. However, Nolan later learned the apology had been insincere, and both Nolan and Cooper officially told the other three band members they were leaving the band two days later. Nolan publicly reasoned that his departure resulted from exhaustion from touring; Lazzara reiterated this reason, and revealed Cooper had left because he did not want to be in the band without Nolan. In truth, Nolan later revealed there was constant fighting within the group, with each member feeling they were not receiving enough credit for the group's success.
John and Michelle Nolan formed Straylight Run with Cooper and Breaking Pangaea drummer Will Noon in the wake of the split from Taking Back Sunday. Taking Back Sunday underwent a short period where they were unsure what to do next, and even briefly considered breaking up. The band was due to tour the United Kingdom with Brand New in May and June 2003; however, all the shows were cancelled because of rumors of the band breaking up. Eventually, it was decided the band would continue; The two departed Taking Back Sunday members were replaced by Breaking Pangaea frontman Fred Mascherino on guitar and vocals as well as O'Connell's longtime friend Matt Rubano on bass.
After their co-headlining tour with Saves the Day concluded in November 2003, Taking Back Sunday immediately commenced work on a second album. Recording for the second album began on March 1, with Lou Giordano at the helm as producer. Taking Back Sunday self-financed the recording sessions, two weeks of which took place at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, New York. The remainder of the album was completed at Water Music in Hoboken, New Jersey, and recording was officially finished by April. At the suggestion of Giordano, the band experimented with instruments aside from the group's usual instrumentation.
The record, titled Where You Want To Be, was released on July 27, 2004, on Victory Records. Despite sounding slightly different from Tell All Your Friends as a result of Giordano's guidance, the new album managed to do well commercially; preceded by the single "A Decade Under the Influence" on June 22, Where You Want To Be was propelled to the No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart at its debut, with around 163,000 copies sold. It became one of the best-selling independent rock albums within a year, selling 634,000 copies by June 2005. Rolling Stone listed Where You Want To Be as one of the top fifty records of 2004. Instead of spending marketing money towards trying to get radio play, Victory Records deployed a street team handing out sampler CDs and fliers to promote the album.
Tom Delonge of Blink-182 directed the music video for "This Photograph is Proof (I Know You Know)"; Blink-182 had invited the band to open for them during their North American tour in 2004. Taking Back Sunday toured frequently for eight months in support of Where You Want to Be.
Major label debut: Louder Now (2005–2007)
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.
On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across.
Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?".
In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands.
On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film.
Departure of Fred Mascherino and New Again (2007–2010)
In October 2007 the band announced that Taking Back Sunday and guitarist Fred Mascherino would be parting ways, which came after he decided to focus on his then upcoming solo album with The Color Fred. He was later replaced by Matthew Fazzi, who would provide guitar and backing vocals. Mascherino went on to reveal in later interviews: "There were just problems between the five of us about writing, who was going to do it and how we were going to do it, we weren't being very productive because we were fighting too much about that stuff. The band was more about cooking food than making music." This statement inspired the band to write the track "Capital M-E", which features lyrical references to Mascherino's departure and the comments he made afterward. In 2010, Fred Mascherino posted a picture of himself and Adam Lazzara with the caption, "Today was a good day" indicating that he and Lazzara have since made up and are on good terms again.
On November 6, 2008, Taking Back Sunday revealed in Rolling Stone that their fourth studio album was to be titled New Again and would feature the tracks "Winter Passing", "Lonely Lonely", "Catholic Knees", and "Carpathia". They stated that "Winter Passing" was "...a slow dance like the last song at your 8th grade dance [that] moves more like an R&B tune than a rock and roll song", and that "Carpathia" will include the first bass solos in any Taking Back Sunday song. They also commented that "Catholic Knees" is "one of the heavier songs we've ever written", and that "Lonely Lonely" is "relentless – two and a half minutes of punching you in the face". In the build-up to the release of New Again, the band released a number of tracks—the first of which was "Carpathia"—on December 21, 2008 as free digital downloads to those who purchased the band's Christmas holiday set, with a physical limited vinyl release of the track as well as a live version of "Catholic Knees" released on April 18, 2009, secondly title track "New Again" as a free single download from the band's website on April 16, 2009, followed by the first full single "Sink into Me", released on April 20, 2009, premiering on BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe show, and being made available digitally short after. On May 16, 2009, "Everything Must Go" was released to stream on the band's MySpace. Every Monday, the band released a new song on their MySpace from New Again labeling it "New Music Monday".
During their tour supporting New Again, the band played in Dublin, Ireland where guitarist Matt Fazzi fractured his foot. Despite this, the show in Belfast, Northern Ireland went on and the rest of the tour was completed, which included stops in the UK at Sonisphere Festival and the Kerrang! awards show. On August 18, 2009, the band released a digital live album entitled Live from Bamboozle '09. The album consists of 13 live tracks recorded at The Bamboozle, where they played in May of the same year. In September 2009, the band announced they will be co-headlining with The All-American Rejects and Anberlin for a full US tour. They are also set to release a live acoustic DVD around spring 2010 following the tour.
On February 12, 2010, the band released a previously unreleased b-side from New Again, entitled "Winter Passing", on their official website.
Throughout February and March the band played the Australian Soundwave tour, playing songs from various albums to crowds of almost 30,000.
Taking Back Sunday and lineup change (2010–2012)
On March 29, 2010, Matt Rubano and Matthew Fazzi announced that they were no longer members of Taking Back Sunday. The band's official website also posted a picture of the original line-up with the members' eyes crossed out, indicating a possible reunion of the Tell All Your Friends era lineup. On March 31, 2010, tbsnewagain tweeted a link to a video announcing the new lineup of the band. The video ended with a quick stream of words which ended with, "Sometimes it takes some time to remember where you were headed in the first place and the people you intended to go there with. There's no hard feelings, just the future."
On April 12, the band made an official announcement confirming that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had re-joined the band. It was announced that they would soon begin the recording process of their fifth studio album with Louder Now producer Eric Valentine. On the same day, Adam Lazzara did an interview with Alternative Press, in which he discussed how the original line-up got back together and how both Matt Rubano and Matt Fazzi were not fired, but rather "let go". The band finished writing in El Paso with around 15 songs completed, according to Mark O'Connell. Pre-production on the new album began on August 17, 2010, the same day their live acoustic album Live from Orensanz was released. On December 20, 2010, the band put out a new Christmas song entitled "Merry Christmas I Missed You So Much". On April 6, 2011, the band played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, to record footage for an upcoming video for the song "El Paso". Adam Lazzara requested that the audience put away their phones and cameras during the recording. They played the song three times during the set. During this performance, the band also debuted a new song entitled "Faith (When I Let You Down)", live for the first time. "Faith (When I Let You Down)" was released as the official first single from the album on May 3, 2011, with an acoustic version of "Great Romances of the 20th Century" as the b-side. On June 7, 2011, the second official single "This Is All Now" was released on iTunes, with the b-side being an acoustic version of "Ghost Man on Third". On June 26, 2011 in an interview with Robert Herrera of Punkvideosrock.com, Mark and Shaun stated that the reason they returned to their original lineup was because they no longer felt it was Taking Back Sunday without the original members. Mark stated they were miserable as a band, weren't having fun, and didn't like the direction the band was going so they decided to reach out to the original members and after meeting with the band in Texas found that "the chemistry was still there."
On July 8, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "Faith (When I Let You Down)". On November 3, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "You Got Me". This is the second single from their self-titled album. The video was created with the help of Steve Pedulla and Ward McDonald and it features guitarist Eddie Reyes dancing solo on a theater stage. Taking Back Sunday played Warped Tour 2012 at all locations. In honor of Record Store Day 2012, the band released a limited press vinyl LP entitled "We Play Songs", featuring four live acoustic tracks.
TAYF10 anniversary tour (2012–13)
Taking Back Sunday embarked on a "Tell All Your Friends" 10th anniversary tour for 2012, during which the band performed their debut album in its entirety. The full US tour featured Bayside as main support, with Transit, Man Overboard and Gabriel the Marine as special guests. An audio and video recording of the acoustic version of the tour was released for digital download through the band's website on June 18, 2013.
On June 7, 2013 2:33PM, Taking Back Sunday took to Twitter to confirm that the recording of their 6th studio album had begun; they tweeted: "Phase one of recording the new record starts now... Happy Friday!" The band, who are working alongside producers Marc Jacob Hudson and Ray Jeffrey, have confirmed that pre-production of the 6th studio record has been completed, and that drum and bass tracking has begun. On July 1, 2013, the band announced that guitar and vocal tracking had begun as well. They announced on Facebook that the album will be released in early 2014.
On August 29, 2013, Adam Lazzara and John Nolan performed an acoustic set at the Leaky Lifeboat Inn, in Seaford, New York, where they debuted a new song with a working title, "The Bird You Cannot Change". On September 11 and 12 the band played a new song at Starland Ballroom called "Flicker Fade". Song title was later confirmed during a televised concert on September 12 on AXSTV. On October 13, the band performed a new song, with the working title, "Anywhere That You Want to Go / Beat Up Car".
From October 25 through November 2, Underoath vocalist Spencer Chamberlain began filling in on lead vocals following the premature birth of Adam Lazzara's son. On November 8, Lazzara and Nolan performed at the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University as an acoustic act. This featured the appearance of a Stony Brook violinist named Dylan Ebrahimian who also will appear on Taking Back Sunday's next album due in 2014.
Happiness Is, Tidal Wave and departure of Eddie Reyes (2014–present)
On January 11, 2014, Taking Back Sunday revealed that a new album, Happiness Is, was available for pre-order on iTunes, as was a new track: "Flicker, Fade". Happiness Is was released on March 18, 2014 through Hopeless Records.
The band embarked on a North American headline tour in 2015 with The Menzingers and letlive.
On June 27, 2016, the band's next album, Tidal Wave, was announced for release on September 16. Material for the album was written in between tours for Happiness Is.
On April 13, 2018, it was announced that founding guitarist Eddie Reyes has parted ways with the band. This was later confirmed by Reyes stating the reason for his departure was due to his battle with alcoholism and hope to join the band again in the future. In the meantime, he has also stated to have started a new band.
On the subject of ever touring with previous members of Taking Back Sunday, John Nolan said in an interview: "I don’t think that’s something that really interests us. This lineup has been together for three albums now and we’re really focused on continuing to develop and evolve together. Revisiting old songs with past band members just seem like an exercise in nostalgia."
On October 12, 2018, the band began announcing a compilation album to celebrate their 20th anniversary, along with a worldwide tour. The album, entitled Twenty, was released on January 11, 2019. Twenty consists of songs from Taking Back Sunday's Victory Records and Warner Bros. Records albums, which are now owned by Concord Music.
For their 20th Anniversary tour, the band have employed the use of a specially made coin to flip at shows in locations where they are playing two nights in a row. The coin toss will decide the second album to be played the first night of the pair of shows, either Louder Now or Where You Want to Be. (Tell All Your Friends will be played each night.)
In an interview with The Aquarian, John Nolan said that the band was not currently on a label, indicating that they left Hopeless Records.
Musical style and influences
Taking Back Sunday has been described as alternative rock, emo, post-hardcore, pop punk, pop rock, and emo pop. Charles Spano of AllMusic described the band as a "New York-based emo band that blend Southern California post-punk, nu metal and old school hardcore." Taking Back Sunday's influences include the Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dag Nasty, The Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring, Bad Brains, Quicksand, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Celtic Frost, Sunny Day Real Estate, Kreator, Nirvana, and Radiohead.
Band members
Current members
John Nolan – lead guitar, keyboards, vocals (1999–2003; 2010–present)
Adam Lazzara – lead vocals (2001–present); bass guitar, vocals (2000–2001)
Mark O'Connell – drums, percussion (2001–present)
Shaun Cooper – bass guitar (2001–2003; 2010–present)
Discography
Studio albums
Tell All Your Friends (2002)
Where You Want to Be (2004)
Louder Now (2006)
New Again (2009)
Taking Back Sunday (2011)
Happiness Is (2014)
Tidal Wave (2016)
References
Additional notes
Citations
External links
[ Complete discography of Taking Back Sunday], billboard
TBS Hub
Musical groups from Long Island
Alternative rock groups from New York (state)
American emo musical groups
American post-hardcore musical groups
Musical groups established in 1999
Pop punk groups from New York (state)
Warner Records artists
Berklee College of Music alumni
1999 establishments in New York (state)
Victory Records artists
Hopeless Records artists
| true |
[
"\"What Did I Do to You?\" is a song recorded by British singer Lisa Stansfield for her 1989 album, Affection. It was written by Stansfield, Ian Devaney and Andy Morris, and produced by Devaney and Morris. The song was released as the fourth European single on 30 April 1990. It included three previously unreleased songs written by Stansfield, Devaney and Morris: \"My Apple Heart,\" \"Lay Me Down\" and \"Something's Happenin'.\" \"What Did I Do to You?\" was remixed by Mark Saunders and by the Grammy Award-winning American house music DJ and producer, David Morales. The single became a top forty hit in the European countries reaching number eighteen in Finland, number twenty in Ireland and number twenty-five in the United Kingdom. \"What Did I Do to You?\" was also released in Japan.\n\nIn 2014, the remixes of \"What Did I Do to You?\" were included on the deluxe 2CD + DVD re-release of Affection and on People Hold On ... The Remix Anthology. They were also featured on The Collection 1989–2003 box set (2014), including previously unreleased Red Zone Mix by David Morales.\n\nCritical reception\nThe song received positive reviews from music critics. Matthew Hocter from Albumism viewed it as a \"upbeat offering\". David Giles from Music Week said it is \"beautifully performed\" by Stansfield. A reviewer from Reading Eagle wrote that \"What Did I Do to You?\" \"would be right at home on the \"Saturday Night Fever\" soundtrack.\"\n\nMusic video\nA music video was produced to promote the single, directed by Philip Richardson, who had previously directed the videos for \"All Around the World\" and \"Live Together\". It features Stansfield with her kiss curls, dressed in a white outfit and performing with her band on a stage in front of a jumping audience. The video was later published on Stansfield's official YouTube channel in November 2009. It has amassed more than 1,6 million views as of October 2021.\n\nTrack listings\n\n European/UK 7\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix Edit) – 4:20\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n European/UK/Japanese CD single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix Edit) – 4:20\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 5:19\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 4:17\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n UK 10\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Mark Saunders Remix) – 5:52\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 5:19\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 4:17\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:59\n\n European/UK 12\" single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Morales Mix) – 7:59\n\"My Apple Heart\" – 4:22\n\"Lay Me Down\" – 3:19\n\"Something's Happenin'\" – 3:15\n\n UK 12\" promotional single\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Morales Mix) – 7:59\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Anti Poll Tax Dub) – 6:31\n\n Other remixes\n\"What Did I Do to You?\" (Red Zone Mix) – 7:45\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nLisa Stansfield songs\n1990 singles\nSongs written by Lisa Stansfield\n1989 songs\nArista Records singles\nSongs written by Ian Devaney\nSongs written by Andy Morris (musician)",
"\"What Would Steve Do?\" is the second single released by Mumm-Ra on Columbia Records, which was released on February 19, 2007. It is a re-recorded version of the self-release they did in April 2006. It reached #40 in the UK Singles Chart, making it their highest charting single.\n\nTrack listings\nAll songs written by Mumm-Ra.\n\nCD\n\"What Would Steve Do?\"\n\"Cute As\"\n\"Without You\"\n\n7\"\n\"What Would Steve Do?\"\n\"What Would Steve Do? (Floorboard Mix)\"\n\nGatefold 7\"\n\"What Would Steve Do?\"\n\"Cute As\"\n\nReferences\n\n2007 singles\nMumm-Ra (band) songs\n2006 songs\nColumbia Records singles"
] |
[
"Taking Back Sunday",
"Major label debut (2005-2007)",
"What happened in 2005?",
"On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros.",
"What happened after this?",
"Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005.",
"What was the name of the album?",
"That month, the group contributed \"Error: Operator\" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.",
"Was that a hit single?",
"I don't know.",
"What did they do in 2006?",
"On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records."
] |
C_5fb9ec4b7f9f450cb99be3f90436ec02_0
|
How did that album do?
| 6 |
How did Taking Back Sunday's Louder Now do?
|
Taking Back Sunday
|
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well. On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across. Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?". In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands. On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Taking Back Sunday is an American rock band from Long Island, New York. The band was formed by guitarist Eddie Reyes and bassist Jesse Lacey in 1999. The band's members currently are Adam Lazzara (lead vocals), John Nolan (lead guitar, keyboards, vocals), Shaun Cooper (bass guitar) and Mark O'Connell (drums), accompanied by Nathan Cogan (guitar) for their live performances. Among the band's former members include Lacey, Reyes and guitarist and vocalist Fred Mascherino.
Lazzara replaced original vocalist Antonio Longo prior to the release of the band's 2002 debut album Tell All Your Friends. Nolan and Cooper left the band in 2003 to form Straylight Run before returning in 2010. The band's breakthrough album, 2006's Louder Now, featured the popular lead single "MakeDamnSure", sold over 900,000 copies and peaked at No. 2 on the United States Billboard 200, surpassing the band's previous Billboard 200 peak in 2004 at No. 3 with Where You Want to Be.
The band most recently released their seventh album Tidal Wave in 2016. Lacey quit Taking Back Sunday in 1999 and formed the critically acclaimed rock band Brand New in 2000, with whom Taking Back Sunday would become embroiled in a highly publicized feud with. Reyes left the band in 2018, leaving Taking Back Sunday without both its founding members.
History
Early years (1999–2002)
Guitarist Eddie Reyes, who had played in The Movielife, Mind Over Matter and Inside, and guitarist Jesse Lacey of the Rookie Lot founded Taking Back Sunday in Amityville, New York in November 1999. Lacey moved to bass with the addition of guitarist John Nolan. The group also included vocalist Antonio Longo of One True Thing and drummer Steven DeJoseph. At a party, Nolan reportedly romanced Lacey's girlfriend, after which Lacey left the band. Lacey formed Brand New a year later. Nolan contacted Adam Lazzara to fill in on bass, which resulted in Lazzara moving from North Carolina to New York. Lazzara had met the band when they played a show near his hometown in North Carolina.
DeJoseph was unable to tour extensively because of personal issues and was waiting until the band had another drummer before leaving the group. Mark O'Connell, a friend of Reyes, heard about the opening and joined the group. After recording Taking Back Sunday's self-titled EP, Longo left the band and eventually played with The Prizefighter and the Mirror. In December 2000, Lazzara switched from bass to lead vocals. He never thought he would become the group's singer: "I remember getting into [Reyes'] Windstar with that [EP] and just driving around singing those songs, just to make myself actually do it." O'Connell suggested that the group needed a bassist, and brought in Shaun Cooper. Lazzara spoke of his initial thoughts on Cooper's talent in an interview with AP magazine, saying with Cooper it was "the best bass playing I’d ever seen in my life. I was like, "Oh my God, people can do that?'" In February 2001, Taking Back Sunday released a five-track demo before touring for a year.
While performing as an unsigned band, which they received contract offers from labels that ultimately amounted to nothing. These included Triple Crown Records, who was apprehensive as they had just signed Brand New, and Drive-Thru Records' offer resulted from co-owner Richard Reines having mistaken Nolan for Lacey. Eventually, a friend of the band shared a demo with Victory Records sales and A&R representative Angel Juarbe. Jurabe then sent a copy to Victory founder Tony Brummel, who asked to see a live performance. Within two weeks of seeing them live, a contract was written up, and the band signed to Victory in December 2001.
Victory Records era: Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want to Be (2002–2005)
Although other labels expressed interest in Taking Back Sunday, Victory Records encouraged them to make an album. The band's debut effort was recorded over a period of two weeks in December 2001 at Big Blue Meenie Recording Studio in New Jersey with producer Sal Villanueva. Lazzara fell ill around Christmas, and the sessions were delayed one to two weeks; recording concluded in early January 2002, and ended up costing $10,000. The debut album's name was revealed in February to be Tell All Your Friends; prior to the release of their debut, a music video for "Great Romances of the 20th Century" was released on March 4, 2002. It was directed by Christian Winters, a friend of the band. Winters made the video before the group signed with Victory, and the record company enjoyed it. The song was distributed to radio stations on March 12, and the full album was released on March 25. A video for "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" followed on December 10, 2002, and "You're so Last Summer" on November 24, 2003, following a radio release the previous September. Both videos were also directed by Winters.
Lazzara was suffering from a drinking problem around this time and cheated on Nolan's sister, Michelle, who he had been dating for a while. After playing Skate & Surf Festival in late April 2003, Lazzara apologized to Nolan later that evening. However, Nolan later learned the apology had been insincere, and both Nolan and Cooper officially told the other three band members they were leaving the band two days later. Nolan publicly reasoned that his departure resulted from exhaustion from touring; Lazzara reiterated this reason, and revealed Cooper had left because he did not want to be in the band without Nolan. In truth, Nolan later revealed there was constant fighting within the group, with each member feeling they were not receiving enough credit for the group's success.
John and Michelle Nolan formed Straylight Run with Cooper and Breaking Pangaea drummer Will Noon in the wake of the split from Taking Back Sunday. Taking Back Sunday underwent a short period where they were unsure what to do next, and even briefly considered breaking up. The band was due to tour the United Kingdom with Brand New in May and June 2003; however, all the shows were cancelled because of rumors of the band breaking up. Eventually, it was decided the band would continue; The two departed Taking Back Sunday members were replaced by Breaking Pangaea frontman Fred Mascherino on guitar and vocals as well as O'Connell's longtime friend Matt Rubano on bass.
After their co-headlining tour with Saves the Day concluded in November 2003, Taking Back Sunday immediately commenced work on a second album. Recording for the second album began on March 1, with Lou Giordano at the helm as producer. Taking Back Sunday self-financed the recording sessions, two weeks of which took place at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, New York. The remainder of the album was completed at Water Music in Hoboken, New Jersey, and recording was officially finished by April. At the suggestion of Giordano, the band experimented with instruments aside from the group's usual instrumentation.
The record, titled Where You Want To Be, was released on July 27, 2004, on Victory Records. Despite sounding slightly different from Tell All Your Friends as a result of Giordano's guidance, the new album managed to do well commercially; preceded by the single "A Decade Under the Influence" on June 22, Where You Want To Be was propelled to the No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart at its debut, with around 163,000 copies sold. It became one of the best-selling independent rock albums within a year, selling 634,000 copies by June 2005. Rolling Stone listed Where You Want To Be as one of the top fifty records of 2004. Instead of spending marketing money towards trying to get radio play, Victory Records deployed a street team handing out sampler CDs and fliers to promote the album.
Tom Delonge of Blink-182 directed the music video for "This Photograph is Proof (I Know You Know)"; Blink-182 had invited the band to open for them during their North American tour in 2004. Taking Back Sunday toured frequently for eight months in support of Where You Want to Be.
Major label debut: Louder Now (2005–2007)
On June 10, 2005, it was announced that the band had signed with major label Warner Bros. Records and would begin recording their third album later in 2005. That month, the group contributed "Error: Operator" to the video-game adaption of Fantastic Four, and it was later added to the film's soundtrack as well.
On September 21, 2005, it was announced that Taking Back Sunday had begun recording their third album with Eric Valentine. The group chose Valentine because he had produced Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf (2002) and Third Eye Blind's self-titled album (1997). On April 25, 2006, Taking Back Sunday released their third album, entitled Louder Now, on Warner Bros. Records. The members' comments on the album reflected the dramatic change the band had undergone in the two years since their last release. Matt Rubano noted that the move to a major label was not something the band took lightly, but it was a move that made sense given the band's tumultuous past. Lazzara stated that fans seemed to feel their live shows had more energy than their recordings, and that Louder Now brought more of that across.
Taking Back Sunday received mainstream exposure by appearing on the late night talk shows The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, as well as the teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation in an episode entitled "What's It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?".
In December 2006, the band released its first documentary, Louder Now: PartOne, featuring behind-the-scenes tour footage and four live concerts. Following months of touring to support Louder Now, Taking Back Sunday appeared in the American leg of Live Earth on July 7, 2007. During the summer of 2007, Taking Back Sunday was also a part of Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour, along with My Chemical Romance, HIM, and several other bands.
On October 30, 2006, the band's former record label, Victory Records, released Notes from the Past, which featured four songs from Tell All Your Friends, six songs from Where You Want To Be, and two B-sides: The Ballad of Sal Villanueva and Your Own Disaster ('04 mix). The band then released Louder Now: Part Two on November 20, 2007, a DVD of unreleased live concert footage from their show at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California, which included special features such as the video for "Twenty-Twenty Surgery", made to be released in Europe. The DVD was packaged with a companion CD featuring eight live tracks, two B-sides that were previously unreleased in America, and a special "Twelve Days of Christmas" track. In 2007, the band contributed the song "What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?" to the soundtrack for the science fiction action film Transformers, although the song did not appear in the film.
Departure of Fred Mascherino and New Again (2007–2010)
In October 2007 the band announced that Taking Back Sunday and guitarist Fred Mascherino would be parting ways, which came after he decided to focus on his then upcoming solo album with The Color Fred. He was later replaced by Matthew Fazzi, who would provide guitar and backing vocals. Mascherino went on to reveal in later interviews: "There were just problems between the five of us about writing, who was going to do it and how we were going to do it, we weren't being very productive because we were fighting too much about that stuff. The band was more about cooking food than making music." This statement inspired the band to write the track "Capital M-E", which features lyrical references to Mascherino's departure and the comments he made afterward. In 2010, Fred Mascherino posted a picture of himself and Adam Lazzara with the caption, "Today was a good day" indicating that he and Lazzara have since made up and are on good terms again.
On November 6, 2008, Taking Back Sunday revealed in Rolling Stone that their fourth studio album was to be titled New Again and would feature the tracks "Winter Passing", "Lonely Lonely", "Catholic Knees", and "Carpathia". They stated that "Winter Passing" was "...a slow dance like the last song at your 8th grade dance [that] moves more like an R&B tune than a rock and roll song", and that "Carpathia" will include the first bass solos in any Taking Back Sunday song. They also commented that "Catholic Knees" is "one of the heavier songs we've ever written", and that "Lonely Lonely" is "relentless – two and a half minutes of punching you in the face". In the build-up to the release of New Again, the band released a number of tracks—the first of which was "Carpathia"—on December 21, 2008 as free digital downloads to those who purchased the band's Christmas holiday set, with a physical limited vinyl release of the track as well as a live version of "Catholic Knees" released on April 18, 2009, secondly title track "New Again" as a free single download from the band's website on April 16, 2009, followed by the first full single "Sink into Me", released on April 20, 2009, premiering on BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe show, and being made available digitally short after. On May 16, 2009, "Everything Must Go" was released to stream on the band's MySpace. Every Monday, the band released a new song on their MySpace from New Again labeling it "New Music Monday".
During their tour supporting New Again, the band played in Dublin, Ireland where guitarist Matt Fazzi fractured his foot. Despite this, the show in Belfast, Northern Ireland went on and the rest of the tour was completed, which included stops in the UK at Sonisphere Festival and the Kerrang! awards show. On August 18, 2009, the band released a digital live album entitled Live from Bamboozle '09. The album consists of 13 live tracks recorded at The Bamboozle, where they played in May of the same year. In September 2009, the band announced they will be co-headlining with The All-American Rejects and Anberlin for a full US tour. They are also set to release a live acoustic DVD around spring 2010 following the tour.
On February 12, 2010, the band released a previously unreleased b-side from New Again, entitled "Winter Passing", on their official website.
Throughout February and March the band played the Australian Soundwave tour, playing songs from various albums to crowds of almost 30,000.
Taking Back Sunday and lineup change (2010–2012)
On March 29, 2010, Matt Rubano and Matthew Fazzi announced that they were no longer members of Taking Back Sunday. The band's official website also posted a picture of the original line-up with the members' eyes crossed out, indicating a possible reunion of the Tell All Your Friends era lineup. On March 31, 2010, tbsnewagain tweeted a link to a video announcing the new lineup of the band. The video ended with a quick stream of words which ended with, "Sometimes it takes some time to remember where you were headed in the first place and the people you intended to go there with. There's no hard feelings, just the future."
On April 12, the band made an official announcement confirming that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had re-joined the band. It was announced that they would soon begin the recording process of their fifth studio album with Louder Now producer Eric Valentine. On the same day, Adam Lazzara did an interview with Alternative Press, in which he discussed how the original line-up got back together and how both Matt Rubano and Matt Fazzi were not fired, but rather "let go". The band finished writing in El Paso with around 15 songs completed, according to Mark O'Connell. Pre-production on the new album began on August 17, 2010, the same day their live acoustic album Live from Orensanz was released. On December 20, 2010, the band put out a new Christmas song entitled "Merry Christmas I Missed You So Much". On April 6, 2011, the band played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey, to record footage for an upcoming video for the song "El Paso". Adam Lazzara requested that the audience put away their phones and cameras during the recording. They played the song three times during the set. During this performance, the band also debuted a new song entitled "Faith (When I Let You Down)", live for the first time. "Faith (When I Let You Down)" was released as the official first single from the album on May 3, 2011, with an acoustic version of "Great Romances of the 20th Century" as the b-side. On June 7, 2011, the second official single "This Is All Now" was released on iTunes, with the b-side being an acoustic version of "Ghost Man on Third". On June 26, 2011 in an interview with Robert Herrera of Punkvideosrock.com, Mark and Shaun stated that the reason they returned to their original lineup was because they no longer felt it was Taking Back Sunday without the original members. Mark stated they were miserable as a band, weren't having fun, and didn't like the direction the band was going so they decided to reach out to the original members and after meeting with the band in Texas found that "the chemistry was still there."
On July 8, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "Faith (When I Let You Down)". On November 3, 2011, Taking Back Sunday released an official music video for "You Got Me". This is the second single from their self-titled album. The video was created with the help of Steve Pedulla and Ward McDonald and it features guitarist Eddie Reyes dancing solo on a theater stage. Taking Back Sunday played Warped Tour 2012 at all locations. In honor of Record Store Day 2012, the band released a limited press vinyl LP entitled "We Play Songs", featuring four live acoustic tracks.
TAYF10 anniversary tour (2012–13)
Taking Back Sunday embarked on a "Tell All Your Friends" 10th anniversary tour for 2012, during which the band performed their debut album in its entirety. The full US tour featured Bayside as main support, with Transit, Man Overboard and Gabriel the Marine as special guests. An audio and video recording of the acoustic version of the tour was released for digital download through the band's website on June 18, 2013.
On June 7, 2013 2:33PM, Taking Back Sunday took to Twitter to confirm that the recording of their 6th studio album had begun; they tweeted: "Phase one of recording the new record starts now... Happy Friday!" The band, who are working alongside producers Marc Jacob Hudson and Ray Jeffrey, have confirmed that pre-production of the 6th studio record has been completed, and that drum and bass tracking has begun. On July 1, 2013, the band announced that guitar and vocal tracking had begun as well. They announced on Facebook that the album will be released in early 2014.
On August 29, 2013, Adam Lazzara and John Nolan performed an acoustic set at the Leaky Lifeboat Inn, in Seaford, New York, where they debuted a new song with a working title, "The Bird You Cannot Change". On September 11 and 12 the band played a new song at Starland Ballroom called "Flicker Fade". Song title was later confirmed during a televised concert on September 12 on AXSTV. On October 13, the band performed a new song, with the working title, "Anywhere That You Want to Go / Beat Up Car".
From October 25 through November 2, Underoath vocalist Spencer Chamberlain began filling in on lead vocals following the premature birth of Adam Lazzara's son. On November 8, Lazzara and Nolan performed at the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University as an acoustic act. This featured the appearance of a Stony Brook violinist named Dylan Ebrahimian who also will appear on Taking Back Sunday's next album due in 2014.
Happiness Is, Tidal Wave and departure of Eddie Reyes (2014–present)
On January 11, 2014, Taking Back Sunday revealed that a new album, Happiness Is, was available for pre-order on iTunes, as was a new track: "Flicker, Fade". Happiness Is was released on March 18, 2014 through Hopeless Records.
The band embarked on a North American headline tour in 2015 with The Menzingers and letlive.
On June 27, 2016, the band's next album, Tidal Wave, was announced for release on September 16. Material for the album was written in between tours for Happiness Is.
On April 13, 2018, it was announced that founding guitarist Eddie Reyes has parted ways with the band. This was later confirmed by Reyes stating the reason for his departure was due to his battle with alcoholism and hope to join the band again in the future. In the meantime, he has also stated to have started a new band.
On the subject of ever touring with previous members of Taking Back Sunday, John Nolan said in an interview: "I don’t think that’s something that really interests us. This lineup has been together for three albums now and we’re really focused on continuing to develop and evolve together. Revisiting old songs with past band members just seem like an exercise in nostalgia."
On October 12, 2018, the band began announcing a compilation album to celebrate their 20th anniversary, along with a worldwide tour. The album, entitled Twenty, was released on January 11, 2019. Twenty consists of songs from Taking Back Sunday's Victory Records and Warner Bros. Records albums, which are now owned by Concord Music.
For their 20th Anniversary tour, the band have employed the use of a specially made coin to flip at shows in locations where they are playing two nights in a row. The coin toss will decide the second album to be played the first night of the pair of shows, either Louder Now or Where You Want to Be. (Tell All Your Friends will be played each night.)
In an interview with The Aquarian, John Nolan said that the band was not currently on a label, indicating that they left Hopeless Records.
Musical style and influences
Taking Back Sunday has been described as alternative rock, emo, post-hardcore, pop punk, pop rock, and emo pop. Charles Spano of AllMusic described the band as a "New York-based emo band that blend Southern California post-punk, nu metal and old school hardcore." Taking Back Sunday's influences include the Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Dag Nasty, The Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring, Bad Brains, Quicksand, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Celtic Frost, Sunny Day Real Estate, Kreator, Nirvana, and Radiohead.
Band members
Current members
John Nolan – lead guitar, keyboards, vocals (1999–2003; 2010–present)
Adam Lazzara – lead vocals (2001–present); bass guitar, vocals (2000–2001)
Mark O'Connell – drums, percussion (2001–present)
Shaun Cooper – bass guitar (2001–2003; 2010–present)
Discography
Studio albums
Tell All Your Friends (2002)
Where You Want to Be (2004)
Louder Now (2006)
New Again (2009)
Taking Back Sunday (2011)
Happiness Is (2014)
Tidal Wave (2016)
References
Additional notes
Citations
External links
[ Complete discography of Taking Back Sunday], billboard
TBS Hub
Musical groups from Long Island
Alternative rock groups from New York (state)
American emo musical groups
American post-hardcore musical groups
Musical groups established in 1999
Pop punk groups from New York (state)
Warner Records artists
Berklee College of Music alumni
1999 establishments in New York (state)
Victory Records artists
Hopeless Records artists
| false |
[
"\"How Do I Get Close\" is a song released by the British rock group, the Kinks. Released on the band's critically panned LP, UK Jive, the song was written by the band's main songwriter, Ray Davies.\n\nRelease and reception\n\"How Do I Get Close\" was first released on the Kinks' album UK Jive. UK Jive failed to make an impression on fans and critics alike, as the album failed to chart in the UK and only reached No. 122 in America. However, despite the failure of the album and the lead UK single, \"Down All the Days (Till 1992)\", \"How Do I Get Close\" was released as the second British single from the album, backed with \"Down All the Days (Till 1992)\". The single failed to chart. The single was also released in America (backed with \"War is Over\"), where, although it did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100, it hit No. 21 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, the highest on that chart since \"Working At The Factory\" in 1986. \"How Do I Get Close\" also appeared on the compilation album Lost & Found (1986-1989).\n\nStephen Thomas Erlewine cited \"How Do I Get Close\" as a highlight from both UK Jive and Lost & Found (1986-1989).\n\nReferences\n\nThe Kinks songs\n1990 singles\nSongs written by Ray Davies\nSong recordings produced by Ray Davies\n1989 songs\nMCA Records singles",
"How Do You Do may refer to:\n\nHow Do You Do (Miyuki Nakajima album)\nHow Do You Do (Mayer Hawthorne album)\n\"How Do You Do!\", a song by Roxette\n\"How Do You Do?\" (beFour song)\n\"How Do You Do\" (Mouth & MacNeal song)\n\"How Do You Do\" (Shakira song)\n\"How Do You Do?\", a song by the Boomtown Rats released as the B-side to \"Like Clockwork\"\n\"How Do You Do?\", a song from the Disney film Song of the South\n\"How Do You Do?\", a song from the Wee Sing film The Marvelous Musical Mansion\n\nSee also\n How Are You (disambiguation)\n How Have You Been (disambiguation)\n How You Been (disambiguation)"
] |
[
"Olivier Messiaen",
"Youth and studies"
] |
C_c98b847278d549889a47900bb8acefee_1
|
Where did Massiaen grow up?
| 1 |
Where did Olivier Messiaen grow up?
|
Olivier Messiaen
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Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'ame en bourgeon ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cecile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphine, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music. He took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song...gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition. While a student he composed his first published works--his eight Preludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet celeste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliees. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion. CANNOTANSWER
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Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family.
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Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).
He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography
Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.
He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.
At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism
Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.
In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.
Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.
Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.
Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.
His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.
Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.
In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.
In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.
Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.
On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.
Music
Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.
His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.
Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.
As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).
While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.
Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."
Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.
Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).
Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).
Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.
In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."
Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.
Time
From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.
Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.
Time and rhythm
As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.
A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."
Harmony
In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.
Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).
In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).
Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.
Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".
Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Writings
See also
Olivier Messiaen Competition
Notes
References
Further reading
Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.
Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.
Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon
External links
"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen
My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.
Listening
played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv
1908 births
1992 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
Academics of the École Normale de Musique de Paris
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
French classical composers
French male classical composers
French classical organists
French male organists
French composers of sacred music
French military personnel of World War II
French ornithologists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
French Roman Catholics
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Modernist composers
Organ improvisers
Musicians from Avignon
Pupils of Maurice Emmanuel
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Schola Cantorum de Paris faculty
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
World War II prisoners of war held by Germany
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Commanders of the Order of the Crown (Belgium)
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
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"Grow Up may refer to:\nAdvance in age\nProgress toward psychological maturity\nGrow Up (book), a 2007 book by Keith Allen\nGrow Up (video game), 2016 video game\n\nMusic\nGrow Up (Desperate Journalist album), 2017\nGrow Up (The Queers album), 1990\nGrow Up (Svoy album), 2011\nGrow Up, a 2015 EP by HALO\n\"Grow Up\" (Olly Murs song)\n\"Grow Up\" (Paramore song)\n\"Grow Up\" (Simple Plan song)\n\"Grow Up\", a song by Rockwell\n\"Grow Up\", a song from the Bratz album Rock Angelz\n\"Grow Up\", a song by Cher Lloyd from Sticks and Stones\n\nSee also\nGrowing Up (disambiguation)\nGrow Up, Tony Phillips, a 2013 film by Emily Hagins",
"When I Grow Up may refer to:\n\nFilm and television \n \"When I Grow Up...\", an episode of Barney & Friends\n When I Grow Up (film), a 1951 film starring Bobby Driscoll\n When I Grow Up, a 2008 film by Michael Ferns\n\nLiterature \n When I Grow Up (webcomic), a webcomic by Jeffrey Rowland\n When I Grow up: A Memoir, a 2008 book by Juliana Hatfield\n When I Grow Up, a 2011 children's book by \"Weird Al\" Yankovic\n\nSongs \n \"When I Grow Up\" (Fever Ray song), 2009\n \"When I Grow Up\" (Garbage song), 1999\n \"When I Grow Up\" (The Pussycat Dolls song), 2008\n \"When I Grow Up\" (Matilda), a 2012 song from Matilda the Musical\n \"When I Grow Up\" (NF song), 2019\n \"When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)\", a 1964 song by The Beach Boys\n \"When I Grow Up\", a song by Clint Daniels\n \"When I Grow Up\", a song by Michelle Shocked from Short Sharp Shocked\n \"When I Grow Up\", a song performed by Shirley Temple in Curly Top (film), 1935\n\"When I Grow Up\", a children's song sung on Barney & Friends"
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"Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family."
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Olivier Messiaen
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Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'ame en bourgeon ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cecile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphine, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music. He took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song...gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition. While a student he composed his first published works--his eight Preludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet celeste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliees. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion. CANNOTANSWER
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He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French.
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Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).
He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography
Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.
He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.
At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism
Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.
In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.
Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.
Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.
Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.
His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.
Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.
In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.
In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.
Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.
On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.
Music
Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.
His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.
Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.
As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).
While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.
Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."
Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.
Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).
Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).
Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.
In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."
Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.
Time
From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.
Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.
Time and rhythm
As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.
A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."
Harmony
In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.
Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).
In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).
Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.
Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".
Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Writings
See also
Olivier Messiaen Competition
Notes
References
Further reading
Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.
Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.
Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon
External links
"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen
My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.
Listening
played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv
1908 births
1992 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
Academics of the École Normale de Musique de Paris
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
French classical composers
French male classical composers
French classical organists
French male organists
French composers of sacred music
French military personnel of World War II
French ornithologists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
French Roman Catholics
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Modernist composers
Organ improvisers
Musicians from Avignon
Pupils of Maurice Emmanuel
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Schola Cantorum de Paris faculty
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
World War II prisoners of war held by Germany
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Commanders of the Order of the Crown (Belgium)
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
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"The Extraordinary Tale of Nicholas Pierce is a 2011 adventure novel written by Alexander DeLuca. It follows the journey of a university teacher Nicholas Pierce, who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder as he searches for his biological parents, traveling across states in the United States of America. He travels with a friend, who is an eccentric barista in a cafe in upstate New York, named Sergei Tarasov.\n\nPlot\nNicholas Pierce suffers from OCD. He is also missing the memory of the first five years of his life. Raised by adoptive parents, one day he receives a mysterious box from an \"Uncle Nathan\". Curious, he sets off on a journey to find his biological parents with a Russian friend, Sergei Tarasov. On the trip, they meet several people, face money problems and different challenges. They also pick up a hitchhiker, Jessica, who later turns out to be a criminal.\n\nFinally, Nicholas finds his grandparents, who direct him to his biological parents. When he meets them, he finds out that his vaguely registered biological 'parents' were actually neighbors of his real parents who had died in an accident. The mysterious box that he had received is destroyed. He finds out that it contained photographs from his early life.\n\n2011 American novels\nNovels about obsessive–compulsive disorder",
"Bomba and the Jungle Girl is a 1952 adventure film directed by Ford Beebe and starring Johnny Sheffield. It is the eighth film (of 12) in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy film series.\n\nPlot\nBomba decides to find out who his parents were. He starts with Cody Casson's diary and follows the trail to a native village. An ancient blind woman tells him his parents, along the village's true ruler, were murdered by the current chieftain and his daughter. With the aid of an inspector and his daughter, Bomba battles the usurpers in the cave where his parents were buried.\n\nCast\nJohnny Sheffield\nKaren Sharpe\nWalter Sande\nSuzette Harbin\nMartin Wilkins\nMorris Buchanan\nLeonard Mudie\nDon Blackman.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1952 films\nAmerican films\nAmerican adventure films\nFilms directed by Ford Beebe\nFilms produced by Walter Mirisch\nMonogram Pictures films\n1952 adventure films\nAmerican black-and-white films"
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"Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family.",
"Who were his parents?",
"He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French."
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How many siblings did he have?
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How many siblings did Olivier Messiaen have?
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Olivier Messiaen
|
Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'ame en bourgeon ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cecile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphine, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music. He took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song...gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition. While a student he composed his first published works--his eight Preludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet celeste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliees. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).
He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography
Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.
He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.
At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism
Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.
In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.
Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.
Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.
Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.
His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.
Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.
In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.
In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.
Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.
On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.
Music
Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.
His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.
Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.
As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).
While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.
Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."
Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.
Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).
Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).
Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.
In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."
Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.
Time
From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.
Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.
Time and rhythm
As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.
A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."
Harmony
In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.
Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).
In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).
Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.
Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".
Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Writings
See also
Olivier Messiaen Competition
Notes
References
Further reading
Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.
Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.
Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon
External links
"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen
My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.
Listening
played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv
1908 births
1992 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
Academics of the École Normale de Musique de Paris
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
French classical composers
French male classical composers
French classical organists
French male organists
French composers of sacred music
French military personnel of World War II
French ornithologists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
French Roman Catholics
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Modernist composers
Organ improvisers
Musicians from Avignon
Pupils of Maurice Emmanuel
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Schola Cantorum de Paris faculty
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
World War II prisoners of war held by Germany
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Commanders of the Order of the Crown (Belgium)
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
| false |
[
"Benjamin Smyth (20 June 1838 – 5 October 1906) was an English first-class cricketer who played one first-class match for Kent County Cricket Club in 1858.\n\nSmyth was born in Calcutta in British India but seems to have lived most of his life in Stockwell, close to The Oval, the home of Surrey County Cricket Club. He was educated at Wimbledon Common. Five of his six siblings were also born in India and it is possible that his father was a member of the Indian Civil Service.\n\nLittle is known of Smyth's life, although it is believed that he was a member of Surrey County Cricket Club. It is not known how he came to play for Kent in the only cricket match in which he has been identified - a match against Sussex at Hove in which he scored a single run and did not bowl.\n\nIt is unclear how Smyth made his living - possibly as a solicitor, although by 1891 he was considered to be independently wealthy. He appears to have married but there is no record of whether he had any children. Smyth died at Clapham in 1906 aged 68.\n\nReferences\n\nEnglish cricketers\nKent cricketers\n1838 births\n1906 deaths",
"A sibling is a gender neutral word for a relative that shares at least one parent with the subject. A male sibling is a brother and a female sibling is a sister. A person with no siblings is an only child.\n\nWhile some circumstances can cause siblings to be raised separately (such as foster care) most societies have siblings grow up together. This causes the development of strong emotional bonds, with siblinghood often considered a unique form of relationship in of itself. The emotional bond between siblings is often complicated and is influenced by factors such as parental treatment, birth order, personality, and personal experiences outside the family.\n\nMedically, a full sibling is a first-degree relative and a half sibling is a second-degree relative as they are related by 50% and 25% respectively.\n\nDefinitions\n\nThe word sibling was reintroduced in 1903 in an article in Biometrika, as a translation for the German Geschwister, having not been used since 1425.\n\nSiblings or full siblings ([full] sisters or brothers) share the same biological parents. Full siblings are also the most common type of siblings. Twins are siblings that are born at the same time. Often, twins with a close relationship will develop a twin language from infanthood, a language only shared and understood between the two. Studies suggest that identical twins appear to display more twin talk than fraternal twins. At about 3 years of age, twin talk usually ends. Twins generally share a greater bond due to growing up together and being the same age.\n\nHalf-siblings (half-sisters or half-brothers) are people who share one parent. They may share the same mother but different fathers (in which case they are known as uterine siblings or maternal half-siblings), or they may have the same father but different mothers (in which case, they are known as agnate siblings or paternal half-siblings. In law, the term consanguine is used in place of agnate). In law (and especially inheritance law), half-siblings have often been accorded treatment unequal to that of full siblings. Old English common law at one time incorporated inequalities into the laws of intestate succession, with half-siblings taking only half as much property of their intestate siblings' estates as siblings of full-blood. Unequal treatment of this type has been wholly abolished in England, but still exists in the U.S. state of Florida.\n\nThree-quarter siblings share one parent, while the unshared parents are first-degree relatives to each other, for example if a man has children with two women who are sisters, or a woman has children with a man and his son. In the first case, the children are half-siblings as well as first cousins; in the second, the children are half-siblings as well as an avuncular pair. They are genetically closer than half siblings but less genetically close than full siblings, a degree of genetic relationship that is rare in humans and little-studied.\n\nDiblings, a portmanteau of donor sibling, or donor-conceived sibling, or donor-sperm sibling, are biologically connected through donated eggs or sperm. Diblings are biologically siblings though not legally for the purposes of family rights and inheritance. The anonymity of donation is seen to add complication to the process of courtship.\n\nNon blood relations\nRelated through affinity:\n Stepsiblings (stepbrothers or stepsisters) are the children of one's stepparent from a previous relationship.\n Adoptive siblings are raised by a person who is the adoptive parent of one and the adoptive or biological parent of the other. \n Siblings-in-law are the siblings of one's spouse, the spouse of one's sibling, or the spouse of one's spouse's sibling. The spouse of one's spouse's sibling may also be called a co-sibling.\n\nNot related:\n siblings are children who are raised in the same foster home: foster children of one's parent(s), or the children or foster children of one's foster parent.\n God siblings are the children of the godfather or godmother or the godchildren of the father or mother.\n Milk siblings are children who have been nursed by the same woman. This relationship exists in cultures with milk kinship and in Islamic law.\n Cross-siblings are individuals who share one or more half-siblings; if one person has at least one maternal half-sibling and at least one paternal half-sibling, the maternal and paternal half-siblings are cross-siblings to each other.\n\nConsanguinity and genetics\nConsanguinity is the measure of how closely people are related. Genetic relatedness measures how many genes a person shares. As all humans share over 99% of the same genes, consanguinity only matters for the small fraction of genes which vary between different persons. Inheritance of genes has a random element to it, and these two concepts are different. Consanguinity decreases by half for every generation of reproductive separation through their most recent common ancestor. Siblings are 50% related by consanguinity as they are separated from each other by two generation (sibling to parent to sibling) and they share two parents as common ancestors ().\n\nA fraternal twin is a sibling and therefore is related by 50% consanguinity. Fraternal twins are no more genetically similar than regular siblings. As identical twins come from the same zygote, their most recent common ancestor is each other. They are genetically identical and 100% consanguineous as they are separated by zero generations (). Twin studies have been conducted by scientists to examine the roles that genetics and environment play in the development of various traits. Such studies examine how often identical twins possess the same behavioral trait and compare it to how often fraternal twins possess the same trait. In other studies twins are raised in separate families, and studies compare the passing on of a behavioral trait by the family environment and the possession of a common trait between identical twins. This kind of study has revealed that for personality traits which are known to be heritable, genetics play a substantial role throughout life and an even larger role during early years.\n\nHalf siblings are 25% related by consanguinity as they share one parent and separated from each other by two generations (). There is a very small chance that two half-siblings might not share any genes, if they didn't inherit any of the same chromosomes from their shared parent. This is possible for full siblings as well, though even more unlikely. But because of how homologous chromosomes swap genes (due to chromosomal crossover during meiosis) during the development of an egg or sperm cell, however, the odds of this ever actually occurring are practically non-existent.\n\nA person may share more than the standard consanguinity with their sibling if their parents are related (the coefficient of inbreeding is greater than zero). Interestingly half siblings can be related by as \"three quarters siblings\" (related by 3/8) if their unshared parents have a consanguinity of 50%. This means the unshared parents are either siblings, making the half siblings cousins, or parent and child, making them half aunt-uncle and niece-nephew.\n\nBirth order\n\nBirth order is a person's rank by age among his or her siblings. Typically, researchers classify siblings as \"eldest\", \"middle child\", and \"youngest\" or simply distinguish between \"firstborn\" and \"later-born\" children.\n\nBirth order is commonly believed in pop psychology and popular culture to have a profound and lasting effect on psychological development and personality. For example, firstborns are seen as conservative and high achieving, middle children as natural mediators, and youngest children as charming and outgoing. Despite its lasting presence in the public domain, studies have failed to consistently produce clear, valid, and compelling findings. Therefore, it has earned the title of a pseudo-psychology amongst the scientific psychological community.\n\nHistory\nThe theorizing and study of birth order can be traced back to Francis Galton's (1822–1911) theory of birth order and eminence and Alfred Adler's (1870–1937) theory of birth order and personality characteristics.\n\nGalton \nIn his book English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874), Galton noted that prominent composers and scientists are over-represented as first-borns. He theorized three main reasons as to why first-borns are generally more eminent:\n Primogeniture laws: first-borns have access to their parents' financial resources to continue their education.\n First-borns are given more responsibility than their younger siblings and are treated more as companions by their parents.\n First-borns are given more attention and nourishment in families with limited financial resources.\n\nAdler\n First Borns: Fulfilling family roles of leadership and authority, obedient of protocol and hierarchy. Seek out and prefer order, structure and adherence to norms and rules. They partake in goal-striving behaviour as their lives are centred around achievement and accomplishment themes. They fear the loss of their position in the top of the hierarchy.\n Middle Children: Feel like outcasts of families as they lack primacy of the first child and the \"attention garnering recency\" of the youngest. These children often go to great lengths to de-identify themselves with their siblings, in an attempt to make a different and individualized identity for themselves as they feel like they were \"squeezed out\" of their families.\n Youngest Children: Feel disadvantaged compared to older siblings, are often perceived as less capable or experienced and are therefore indulged and spoiled. Because of this, they are skilled in coaxing/charming others to do things for them or provide. This contributes to the image of them being popular and outgoing, as they engage in attention-seeking behaviour to meet their needs.\n\nContemporary findings \nToday, the flaws and inconsistencies in birth order research eliminate its validity. It is very difficult to control solely for factors related to birth order, and therefore most studies produce ambiguous results. Embedded into theories of birth order is a debate of nature versus nurture. It has been disproved that there is something innate in the position one is born into, and therefore creating a preset role. Birth order has no genetic basis.\n\nThe social interaction that occurs as a result of birth order however is the most notable. Older siblings often become role models of behaviour, and younger siblings become learners and supervisees. Older siblings are at a developmental advantage both cognitively and socially. The role of birth order also depends greatly and varies greatly on family context. Family size, sibling identification, age gap, modeling, parenting techniques, gender, class, race, and temperament are all confounding variables that can influence behaviour and therefore perceived behaviour of specific birth categories. The research on birth order does have stronger correlations, however, in areas such as intelligence and physical features, but are likely caused by other factors other than the actual position of birth. Some research has found that firstborn children have slightly higher IQs on average than later born children. However, other research finds no such effect. It has been found that first-borns score three points higher compared to second borns and that children born earlier in a family are on average, taller and weigh more than those born later. However, it is impossible to generalize birth order characteristics and apply them universally to all individuals in that subgroup.\n\nContemporary explanations for IQ findings\n\nResource dilution model \n(Blake, 1981) provide three potential reasons for the higher scoring of older siblings on IQ tests:\n Parental resources are finite, first-born children get full and primary access to these resources.\n As the number of a children in a family goes up, the more resources must be shared.\n These parental resources have an important impact on a child's educational success.\n\nConfluence model \nRobert Zajonc proposed that the intellectual environment within a family is ever-changing due to three factors, and therefore more permissive of first-born children's intellectual advancement:\n Firstborns do not need to share parental attention and have their parents' complete absorption. More siblings in the family limit the attention devoted to each of them.\n Firstborns are exposed to more adult language. Later-borns are exposed to the less-mature speech of their older siblings.\n Firstborns and older siblings must answer questions and explain things to younger siblings, acting as tutors. This advances their cognitive processing of information and language skills.\n\nIn 1996, interest in the science behind birth order was re-sparked when Frank Sulloway’s book Born To Rebel was published. In this book, Sulloway argues that firstborns are more conscientious, more socially dominant, less agreeable, and less open to new ideas compared to later-borns. While being seemingly empirical and academic, as many studies are cited throughout the book, it is still often criticized as a biased and incomplete account of the whole picture of siblings and birth order. Because it is a novel, the research and theories proposed throughout were not criticized and peer-reviewed by other academics before its release.\nLiterature reviews that have examined many studies and attempted to control for confounding variables tend to find minimal effects for birth order on personality.\nIn her review of the scientific literature, Judith Rich Harris suggests that birth order effects may exist within the context of the family of origin, but that they are not enduring aspects of personality.\n\nIn practice, systematic birth order research is a challenge because it is difficult to control for all of the variables that are statistically related to birth order. For example, large families are generally lower in socioeconomic status than small families, so third-born children are more likely than first-born children to come from poorer families. Spacing of children, parenting style, and gender are additional variables to consider.\n\nRegressive behavior at birth\n\nThe arrival of a new baby is especially stressful for firstborns and for siblings between 3 and 5 years old. Regressive behavior and aggressive behavior, such as handling the baby roughly, can also occur. All of these symptoms are considered to be typical and developmentally appropriate for children between the ages of 3–5. While some can be prevented, the remainder can be improved within a few months. Regressive behavior may include demand for a bottle, thumb sucking, requests to wear diapers (even if toilet-trained), or requests to carry a security blanket.\n\nRegressive behaviors are the child's way of demanding the parents' love and attention.\n\nThe American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that instead of protesting or telling children to act their age, parents should simply grant their requests without becoming upset. The affected children will soon return to their normal routine when they realize that they now have just as important a place in the family as the new sibling. Most of the behaviors can be improved within a few months.\n\nThe University of Michigan Health System advises that most occurrences of regressive behavior are mild and to be expected; however, it recommends parents to contact a pediatrician or child psychologist if the older child tries to hurt the baby, if regressive behavior does not improve within 2 or 3 months, or if the parents have other questions or concerns.\n\nRivalry\n\n\"Sibling rivalry\" is a type of competition or animosity among brothers and sisters. It appears to be particularly intense when children are very close in age or of the same gender. Sibling rivalry can involve aggression; however, it is not the same as sibling abuse where one child victimizes another.\n\nSibling rivalry usually starts right after, or before, the arrival of the second child. While siblings will still love each other, it is not uncommon for them to bicker and be malicious to each other. Children are sensitive from the age of 1 year to differences in parental treatment and by 3 years they have a sophisticated grasp of family rules and can evaluate themselves in relation to their siblings. Sibling rivalry often continues throughout childhood and can be very frustrating and stressful to parents. One study found that the age group 10–15 reported the highest level of competition between siblings. Sibling rivalry can continue into adulthood and sibling relationships can change dramatically over the years. Approximately one-third of adults describe their relationship with siblings as rivalrous or distant. However, rivalry often lessens over time and at least 80% of siblings over age 60 enjoy close ties.\n\nEach child in a family competes to define who they are as persons and want to show that they are separate from their siblings. Sibling rivalry increases when children feel they are getting unequal amounts of their parents' attention, where there is stress in the parents' and children's lives, and where fighting is accepted by the family as a way to resolve conflicts. Sigmund Freud saw the sibling relationship as an extension of the Oedipus complex, where brothers were in competition for their mother's attention and sisters for their father's. Evolutionary psychologists explain sibling rivalry in terms of parental investment and kin selection: a parent is inclined to spread resources equally among all children in the family, but a child wants most of the resources for him or herself.\n\nRelationships\n\nJealousy\n\nJealousy is not a single emotion. The basic emotions expressed in jealous interactions are fear, anger, relief, sadness, and anxiety. Jealousy occurs in a social triangle of relationships which do not require a third person. The social triangle involves the relationships between the jealous individual and the parent, the relationship between the parent and the rival, and the relationship between jealous individual and the rival.\n\nNewborn\nFirst-borns' attachment to their parents is directly related to their jealous behaviour. In a study by Volling, four classes of children were identified based on their different responses of jealousy to new infant siblings and parent interactions.\nRegulated Exploration Children: 60% of children fall into this category. These children closely watch their parents interact with their newborn sibling, approach them positively and sometimes join the interaction. They show fewer behaviour problems in the months following the new birth and do not display problematic behaviours during the parent-infant interaction. These children are considered secure as they act how a child would be expected to act in a familiar home setting with their parents present as secure bases to explore the environment.\nApproach-Avoidant Children: 30% of children fall into this category. These children observe parent-infant interaction closely and are less likely to approach the infant and the parent. They are anxious to explore the new environment as they tend to seek little comfort from their parents.\nAnxious-Clingy Children: 6% of children fell into this category. These children have an intense interest in parent-infant interaction and a strong desire to seek proximity and contact with the parent, and sometimes intrude on parent-child interaction.\nDisruptive Children: 2.7% of children fall into this category. These children are emotionally reactive and aggressive. They have difficulty regulating their negative emotions and may be likely to externalize it as negative behaviour around the newborn.\n\nParental effect\nChildren are more jealous of the interactions between newborns and their mothers than they are with newborns and their fathers. This is logical as up until the birth of the infant, the first-born child had the mother as his or her primary care-giver all to his or herself. Some research has suggested that children display less jealous reactions over father-newborn interactions because fathers tend to punish negative emotion and are less tolerant than mothers of clinginess and visible distress, although this is hard to generalize.\n\nChildren that have parents with a better marital relationship are better at regulating their jealous emotions. Children are more likely to express jealousy when their parents are directing their attention to the sibling as opposed to when the parents are solely interacting with them. Parents who are involved in good marital communication help their children cope adaptively with jealousy. They do this by modelling problem-solving and conflict resolution for their children. Children are also less likely to have jealous feelings when they live in a home in which everyone in the family shares and expresses love and happiness.\n\nImplicit theories\nImplicit theories about relationships are associated with the ways children think of strategies to deal with a new situation. \nChildren can fall into two categories of implicit theorizing. They may be malleable theorists and believe that they can affect change on situations and people. Alternatively, they may be fixed theorists, believing situations and people are not changeable. These implicit beliefs determine both the intensity of their jealous feelings, and how long those jealous feelings last.\nMalleable Theorists display engaging behaviours, like interacting with the parent or sibling in an attempt to improve the situation. They tend to have more intense and longer-lasting feelings of jealousy because they spend more time ruminating on the situation and constructing ways to make it better.\nFixed Theorists display non-engaging behaviours, for example retreating to their room because they believe none of their actions will affect or improve the situation. They tend to have less intense and shorter lasting feelings of jealousy than malleable theorists.\n\nDifferent ages\nOlder children tend to be less jealous than their younger sibling. This is due to their ability to mentally process the social situation in a way that gives them more positive, empathetic feelings toward their younger sibling. Older children are better able to cope with their jealous feelings toward their younger sibling due to their understanding of the necessary relationship between the parent and younger sibling. Older children are also better at self-regulating their emotions and are less dependent on their caregivers for external regulation as opposed to their younger siblings.\nYounger siblings' feelings of jealousy are overpowered by feelings of anger. The quality of the relationship between the younger child and the older child is also a factor in jealousy, as the better the relationship the less jealous feelings occurred and vice versa.\n\nConflict\nSibling conflict is pervasive and often shrugged off as an accepted part of sibling dynamics. In spite of the broad variety of conflict that siblings are often involved in, sibling conflicts can be grouped into two broader categories. The first category is conflict about equality or fairness. It is not uncommon to see siblings who think that their sibling is favored by their teachers, peers, or especially their parents. In fact it is not uncommon to see siblings who both think that their parents favor the other sibling. Perceived inequalities in the division of resources such as who got a larger dessert also fall into this category of conflict. This form of conflict seems to be more prevalent in the younger sibling.\n\nThe second category of conflict involves an invasion of a child's perceived personal domain by their sibling. An example of this type of conflict is when a child enters their sibling's room when they are not welcome, or when a child crosses over into their sibling's side of the car in a long road trip. These types of fights seem to be more important to older siblings due to their larger desire for independence.\n\nWarmth\n\nSibling warmth is a term for the degree of affection and companionship shared by siblings. Sibling warmth seems to have an effect on siblings. Higher sibling warmth is related to better social skill and higher perceived social competence. Even in cases where there is a high level of sibling conflict if there is also a high level of sibling warmth then social skills and competence remain unaffected.\n\nNegative effects of conflict\n\nThe saying that people \"fight like siblings\" shows just how charged sibling conflict can be and how well recognized sibling squabbles are. In spite of how widely acknowledged these squabbles can be, sibling conflict can have several impacts on the sibling pair. It has been shown that increased levels of sibling conflict are related to higher levels of anxiety and depression in siblings, along with lower levels of self-worth and lower levels of academic competence. In addition, sibling warmth is not a protective factor for the negative effects of anxiety, depression, lack of self-worth and lower levels of academic competence. This means that sibling warmth does not counteract these negative effects. Sibling conflict is also linked to an increase in more risky behavior including: smoking cigarettes, skipping days of school, contact with the police, and other behaviors in Caucasian sibling pairs with the exception of firstborns with younger brothers. Except for the elder brother in this pair sibling conflict is positively correlated with risky behavior, thus sibling conflict may be a risk factor for behavioral problems. \nA study on what the topic of the fight was (invasion of personal domain or inequality) also shows that the topic of the fight may have a result on the effects of the conflict. This study showed that sibling conflict over personal domain were related to lower levels of self-esteem, and sibling conflict over perceived inequalities seem to be more related to depressive symptoms. However, the study also showed that greater depressive and anxious symptoms were also related to more frequent sibling conflict and more intense sibling conflict.\n\nParental management techniques of conflict\n\nTechniques used by parents to manage their children's conflicts include parental non-intervention, child-centered parental intervention strategies, and more rarely the encouragement of physical conflict between siblings. Parental non-intervention included techniques in which the parent ignores the siblings' conflict and lets them work it out between themselves without outside guidance. In some cases, this technique is chosen to avoid situations in which the parent decides which sibling is in the right and may favor one sibling over the other, however, by following this technique the parent may sacrifice the opportunity to instruct their children on how to deal with conflict. Child-centered parental interventions include techniques in which the parent mediates the argument between the two children and helps them come to an agreement. Using this technique, parents may help model how the children can deal with conflicts in the future; however, parents should avoid dictating the outcome to the children, and make sure that they are mediating the argument making suggestions, allowing the children to decide the outcome. This may be especially important when some of the children have autism. Techniques in which parents encourage physical aggression between siblings may be chosen by the parents to help children deal with aggression in the future, however, this technique does not appear to be effective as it is linked to greater conflict levels between children. Parental non-intervention is also linked to higher levels of sibling conflict, and lower levels of sibling warmth. It appears that child-centered parental interventions have the best effect on sibling's relationship with a link to greater levels of sibling warmth and lower levels of sibling conflict.\n\nLong-term effects of presence\n\nStudies on social skill and personality differences between only children and children with siblings suggest that overall the presence of a sibling does not have any effect on the child as an adult.\n\nGender roles among children and parents\n\nThere have always been some differences between siblings, especially different sex siblings. Often, different sex sibling may consider things to be unfair because their brother or sister is allowed to do certain things because of their gender, while they get to do something less fun or just different. McHale and her colleague conducted a longitudinal study using middle-childhood aged children and observed the way in which the parents contributed to stereotypical attitudes in their kids. In their study the experimenters analysed two different types of families, one with the same sex siblings, and the other with different sex siblings, as well as the children's birth order. The experiment was conducted using phone interviews, in which the experimenters would ask the children about the activities they performed throughout their day outside of school. The experimenters found that in the homes where there were mixed gender kids, and the father held traditional values, the kids also held traditional values and therefore also played gender based roles in the home. In contrast, in homes where the father did not hold traditional values, the house chores were divided more equally among his kids. However, if fathers had two male children, the younger male tended to help more with household chores, but as he reached his teenage years the younger child stopped being as helpful around the house. However, education may be a confounder affecting both the father's attitude and the siblings' behavior, and the mother's attitudes did not have a noticeable impact.\n\nWestermarck effect\nAnthropologist Edvard Westermarck found that children who are brought up together as siblings are desensitized to sexual attraction to one another later in life. This is known as the Westermarck Effect. It can be seen in biological and adoptive families, but also in other situations where children are brought up in close contact, such as the Israeli kibbutz system and the Chinese shim-pua marriage.\n\nSee also\n\n Immediate family\n List of sibling groups\n Sibling relationship\n Siblings Day\n Sladdbarn\n Step-sibling\n Multiple birth\n List of twins\n Triplet\n Twin\n Other symmetric relations\n Cousin\n Friend\n Sibling-in-law\n Significant other (SO; boyfriend or girlfriend)\n Spouse\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nExternal links\n\n \nFamily\nKinship and descent"
] |
[
"Olivier Messiaen",
"Youth and studies",
"Where did Massiaen grow up?",
"Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family.",
"Who were his parents?",
"He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French.",
"How many siblings did he have?",
"I don't know."
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Where did he attend school?
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Where did Olivier Messiaen attend school?
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Olivier Messiaen
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Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'ame en bourgeon ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cecile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphine, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music. He took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song...gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition. While a student he composed his first published works--his eight Preludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet celeste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliees. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion. CANNOTANSWER
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At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony,
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Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).
He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography
Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.
He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.
At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism
Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.
In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.
Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.
Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.
Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.
His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.
Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.
In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.
In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.
Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.
On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.
Music
Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.
His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.
Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.
As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).
While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.
Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."
Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.
Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).
Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).
Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.
In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."
Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.
Time
From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.
Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.
Time and rhythm
As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.
A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."
Harmony
In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.
Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).
In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).
Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.
Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".
Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Writings
See also
Olivier Messiaen Competition
Notes
References
Further reading
Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.
Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.
Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon
External links
"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen
My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.
Listening
played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv
1908 births
1992 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
Academics of the École Normale de Musique de Paris
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
French classical composers
French male classical composers
French classical organists
French male organists
French composers of sacred music
French military personnel of World War II
French ornithologists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
French Roman Catholics
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Modernist composers
Organ improvisers
Musicians from Avignon
Pupils of Maurice Emmanuel
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Schola Cantorum de Paris faculty
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
World War II prisoners of war held by Germany
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Commanders of the Order of the Crown (Belgium)
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
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[
"Ben Ivery Wilson (born March 9, 1939) is a former professional American football fullback in the National Football League.\n\nHigh school\nWilson attended Aldine Carver High School where he played football and was also the state champ in the shot put. While at Carver, he was a Jones scholar who was offered an academic scholarship to attend the University of Cincinnati, but he wanted to play football. Although he was an exceptional football player, he did not receive a scholarship offer from any white college in Texas because of segregation.\n\nCollege career\nThe superintendent of Wilson's high school had contacts at USC and Wilson received a scholarship to attend USC. While at USC, Wilson became the starting fullback and team captain of USC's 1962 national championship team.\n\nProfessional career\nWilson played running back for five seasons in the NFL. He was traded from the Los Angeles Rams to the Green Bay Packers prior to the 1967 season. Wilson started at fullback in Super Bowl II for Green Bay and led both teams in rushing with 62 yards in 17 carries. Late in the game he lost a contact lens on the sidelines after being tackled, and missed the rest of the game.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n NFL.com player page\n\n1939 births\nLiving people\nAmerican football running backs\nGreen Bay Packers players\nLos Angeles Rams players\nUSC Trojans football players\nPlayers of American football from Houston",
"Indiana has some of the most segregated schools in the United States. Despite laws demanding school integration since 1949, a 2017 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project and Indiana University found that Indiana still has significant segregation in its classrooms.\n\nThe average black student in Indiana is likely to attend a school where 68% of the students are non-white. The average white student is likely to attend a school where 81% of the students are white.\n\nHistory\nIndiana became a state in 1816. In 1843 the Legislature stated that the public schools were only for white children between the ages of 5 and 21, and as a result, Quakers and communities of free Black people founded schools like Union Literary Institute for Black students to attend. In 1869, the legislature authorized separate but equal public schools for black children. In 1877, the legislature revised the law to allow black attendance at a white school if a black school was not nearby. Home rule for municipalities meant that application was uneven. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) legitimized separate but equal as policy. During the 1920's, Indiana became a major base for the Ku Klux Klan further pushing Black residents away from school districts that had a majority white population. Prominent examples of segregated high schools in Indiana in the early 20th Century were Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis (opened in 1927) and Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary (accredited in 1930). In 1946, the Gary School Board issued a non-discriminatory policy. Because neighborhoods had different demographic characteristics, the schools there remained effectively segregated. In 1949, the state adopted language that was unambiguously in favor of integration. It was the last of the northern (non-Confederate) states to do so.\n\nAfter Brown v. Board of Education, the state still needed a legal push. Bell v. School City of Gary (1963) was the first. Three years later came Copeland v. South Bend Community School Corporation (1967). Three years after that came Banks v. Muncie Community Schools (1970). National policy came the next year in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), which relied on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.\n\nIn the 1970s, the federal answer was court-ordered busing. In Indianapolis, busing began in 1981. The bussing requirements in Indiana however were uneven, they did not require white children to be bussed out Black schools making Black children and parents face most of the consequences of the bussing program. Busing in Indianapolis ended in 2016.\n\nDemographics\nHoosiers describe themselves as being more white than much of the rest of the country. In the 2010 Census, 84.4% reported being white, compared with 73.8 for the nation as a whole.\n\nIndiana had never been a big slave state. The 1840 Census reported three slaves and 11,262 “free colored” persons out of a population of 685,866. By 1850, no slaves were reported. That is not to say that the state was welcoming to blacks. The 1851 state constitution said, \"No Negro or mulatto shall come into or settle in the State, after the adoption of this Constitution.” In the early 20th century, mechanization of agriculture in the South stimulated immigration of blacks to large cities like Indianapolis. Migration accelerated in World War II, slowing only in the 1970s. Simultaneously, whites began to move out of the downtown areas to suburbs. \n\nLatinos were a small portion of Indiana's population prior to 1970. In any case the Census did not reliably track Latinos before the 1970 Census. The 2000 Census described 3.5% of Indiana's population as Latino. In the next decade, the state's Latino population grew at twice the national rate. In 2010, the state was 6.0% Latino. They have settled more-or-less evenly distributed across the state.\n\nSchool demographics\nThe demographics of schools in Indiana reflect the composition of the communities in which they are located. The average white student in Indiana is likely to attend a school where 81% of the students are white. The average black student is likely to attend a school where 68% of the students are non-white.\n\nStudies\nSince 1996, the relative segregation of classrooms across the United States has been studied by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard until 2007 and subsequently at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In 2017, the Project cooperated to with Indiana University to study the conditions in the state.\n\nA 2012 UCLA study showed that Indiana had the sixth most segregated classrooms in America.\n\nSchool vouchers\nIndiana has one of the largest school voucher programs in the United States. Critics contend that vouchers contribute to school segregation. Analysis of two recent studies on vouchers garner mixed support for contributing to segregation; however, both contend that black recipients who had been in a majority-black public school used school vouchers to attend a majority-black private school.\n\nReferences \n\nEducation in Indiana\nAfrican-American history of Indiana\nSchool segregation in the United States"
] |
[
"Olivier Messiaen",
"Youth and studies",
"Where did Massiaen grow up?",
"Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family.",
"Who were his parents?",
"He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French.",
"How many siblings did he have?",
"I don't know.",
"Where did he attend school?",
"At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony,"
] |
C_c98b847278d549889a47900bb8acefee_1
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What did he study?
| 5 |
What did Olivier Messiaen study at the Conservatoire?
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Olivier Messiaen
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Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'ame en bourgeon ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cecile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphine, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music. He took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song...gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition. While a student he composed his first published works--his eight Preludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet celeste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliees. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion. CANNOTANSWER
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After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre.
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Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).
He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography
Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.
He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.
At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism
Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.
In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.
Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.
Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.
Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.
His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.
Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.
In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.
In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.
Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.
On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.
Music
Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.
His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.
Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.
As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).
While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.
Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."
Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.
Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).
Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).
Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.
In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."
Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.
Time
From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.
Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.
Time and rhythm
As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.
A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."
Harmony
In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.
Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).
In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).
Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.
Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".
Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Writings
See also
Olivier Messiaen Competition
Notes
References
Further reading
Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.
Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.
Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon
External links
"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen
My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.
Listening
played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv
1908 births
1992 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
Academics of the École Normale de Musique de Paris
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
French classical composers
French male classical composers
French classical organists
French male organists
French composers of sacred music
French military personnel of World War II
French ornithologists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
French Roman Catholics
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Modernist composers
Organ improvisers
Musicians from Avignon
Pupils of Maurice Emmanuel
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Schola Cantorum de Paris faculty
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
World War II prisoners of war held by Germany
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Commanders of the Order of the Crown (Belgium)
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
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[
"The Predator is the third EP by American metalcore band Ice Nine Kills and was self-released by the band on January 15, 2013. The EP debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart.\n\nIt is the only album to feature Steve Koch as bassist and backup singer after his departure in 2013, and the last album to feature Justin Morrow as rhythm guitarist; he would switch to bass guitar and backing vocals (on live performance only) while still playing rhythm guitar in studio in 2013.\n\nThe tracks \"The Coffin Is Moving\" and \"What I Never Learned in Study Hall\" later would be featured on the band's 2014 album The Predator Becomes the Prey.\n\nThe track \"What I Never Learned in Study Hall\" was later re-recorded acoustically for Take Action. Vol. 11 making it similar to the song's predecessors \"What I Really Learned in Study Hall\" and \"What I Should Have Learned in Study Hall\". Unlike the original version, the acoustic version did not feature Tyler Carter as guest vocalist, but instead featured former Kid's Jackson Summer vocalist Kate Ellen Dean.\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel \n Spencer Charnas - lead vocals, piano on \"A Reptile's Dysfunction\"\n Justin \"JD\" DeBlieck - lead guitar, lead vocals\n Justin Morrow - rhythm guitar\n Steve Koch - bass guitar, backing vocals\n Connor Sullivan - drums\n Steve Sopchak - producer, engineer, mixing\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2013 EPs\nIce Nine Kills EPs\nSelf-released EPs",
"Homeric psychology is a field of study with regards to the psychology of ancient Greek culture no later than Mycenaean Greece, around 1700–1200 BCE, during the Homeric epic poems (specifically the Illiad and the Odyssey).\n\nHistory of Homeric psychology\nThe first scholar to present a theory was Bruno Snell in his 1953 book, originally in German. His argument was that the ancient Greek individual did not have a sense of self, and that later the Greek culture \"self-realized\" or \"discovered\" what we consider to be the modern \"intellect\".\n\nLater, Eric Robertson Dodds in 1951, wrote how ancient Greek thought may have been irrational, as compared to modern \"rational\" culture. In this Dodds' theory, the Greeks may have known that an individual did things, but the reason an individual did things were attributed to divine externalities, such as gods or daemons.\n\nJulian Jaynes proposed a theory in 1976. He stipulated that Greek consciousness emerged from the use of special words related to cognition. Some of Jaynes' findings were empirically supported in a 2021 study by Boban Dedović, a psychohistorian. The study compared the word counts of mental language between thirty-four versions of the Iliad and Odyssey.\n\nReferences \n\nConsciousness studies\nPhilosophy of mind\nPhilology\nCognitive psychology\nHistorical linguistics\nArguments in philosophy of mind"
] |
[
"Olivier Messiaen",
"Youth and studies",
"Where did Massiaen grow up?",
"Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family.",
"Who were his parents?",
"He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French.",
"How many siblings did he have?",
"I don't know.",
"Where did he attend school?",
"At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony,",
"What did he study?",
"After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre."
] |
C_c98b847278d549889a47900bb8acefee_1
|
Who else did he study with?
| 6 |
Besides Marcel Dupre, who else did Olivier Messiaen study with?
|
Olivier Messiaen
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Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'ame en bourgeon ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cecile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphine, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music. He took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song...gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition. While a student he composed his first published works--his eight Preludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet celeste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliees. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion. CANNOTANSWER
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After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas.
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Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).
He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography
Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.
He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.
At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism
Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.
In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.
Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.
Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.
Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.
His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.
Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.
In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.
In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.
Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.
On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.
Music
Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.
His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.
Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.
As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).
While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.
Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."
Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.
Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).
Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).
Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.
In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."
Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.
Time
From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.
Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.
Time and rhythm
As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.
A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."
Harmony
In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.
Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).
In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).
Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.
Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".
Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Writings
See also
Olivier Messiaen Competition
Notes
References
Further reading
Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.
Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.
Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon
External links
"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen
My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.
Listening
played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv
1908 births
1992 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
Academics of the École Normale de Musique de Paris
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
French classical composers
French male classical composers
French classical organists
French male organists
French composers of sacred music
French military personnel of World War II
French ornithologists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
French Roman Catholics
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Modernist composers
Organ improvisers
Musicians from Avignon
Pupils of Maurice Emmanuel
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Schola Cantorum de Paris faculty
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
World War II prisoners of war held by Germany
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Commanders of the Order of the Crown (Belgium)
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
| true |
[
"Robert Else (17 November 1876 – 16 September 1955) was an English first-class cricketer who played for Derbyshire in 1901 and 1903.\n\nElse was born at Lea, Holloway, Derbyshire, the son of John Else and his wife Henrietta Lowe. His father was a bobbin maker and in 1881 they were all living with his grandparents at the Old Hat Factory in Wirksworth. Else made his debut for Derbyshire in May 1901 against Surrey, when his scores were 1 and 2. He played again that season against the South Africans when he opened the batting scoring a duck in the first innings and surviving the whole of the second innings for 6 not out. He did not play again until July 1903 when against London County he took a wicket and made his top score of 28. He played his last two matches in 1903 and made little impression in them.\n\nElse was a left-hand batsman and played ten innings in five first-class matches with an average of 7.3 and a top score of 28. He bowled fifteen overs and took 1 first-class wicket for 61 runs in total.\n\nElse died at Broomhill, Sheffield, Yorkshire at the age of 78.\n\nReferences\n\n1876 births\n1955 deaths\nDerbyshire cricketers\nEnglish cricketers\nPeople from Dethick, Lea and Holloway",
"Gerald Frank Else (July 1, 1908 – 6 September 1982) was a distinguished American classicist. He was professor of Greek and Latin at University of Michigan and University of Iowa. Else is substantially credited with the refinement of Aristotelian scholarship in aesthetics in the 20th century to expand the reading of catharsis alone to include the aesthetic triad of mimesis, hamartia, and catharsis as all essentially linked to each other.\n\nBiography\nElse studied classics and philosophy at Harvard University and finished his PhD there in 1934. He taught at Harvard University until he joined the U.S. Marine Corps as a Captain in 1943. After completing his service, in 1945 he became chair of the University of Iowa Classics Department. He spent 1956 to 1957 at The American Academy in Rome and in September of 1957 went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was chair of that department from 1957 to 1968. During that time he founded the Center for Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, seeking to unite the humanities and to show how the study of the ancient world is relevant to modern literature and modern concerns.\n\nAccomplishments\nElse's magnum opus is titled, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument. It is a meticulous, comprehensive reading of Aristotle's treatise that was published in 1957. Widely regarded in its time as a central work of literary theory, Else's other important contribution is The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, which was published in 1965. In this work he argued against the view of tragedy as having arisen from religious ritual. Else wrote several other works on Greek literature and philosophy.\n\nUp to Else's time, Aristotle's concept of catharsis was almost exclusively associated with the reading of Jakob Bernays who defined it as the \"therapeutic purgation of pity and fear.\" In a convincing manner, Else refined this definition to understanding literary catharsis as, \"that moment of insight which arises out of the audience's climactic intellectual, emotional, and spiritual enlightenment, which for Aristotle is both the essential pleasure and essential goal of mimetic art.\" For Else, catharsis is an Aristotelian concept which must be read alongside the literary concepts of mimesis and hamartia as well. These latter two concepts are usually paraphrased as \"literary representation\" and \"intellectual error\" in Else's appraisal of Aristotle's literary aesthetic theory.\n\nElse was a member of the National Council for the Humanities, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, and was President of the American Philological Association in 1964. Else retired in 1977 and died in 1982. A Festschrift in his honor (Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of Gerald F. Else, ed. J. D'Arms and J. W. Eadie) was published in 1977. A volume of collected essays written by Else was edited by Peter Burian, an editor at the University of North Carolina Press, in 1987 fourteen of Else's essays titled Plato and Aristotle on Poetry. The volume is notable for the inclusion of the biography on Else by Burian included in the prefatory section of the book., pp xi-xvi. Gerald Else is commemorated at Michigan by an annual lecture in the humanities.\n\nBooks\n Aristotle's Poetics: the argument. 1957\n Origin and early form of Greek tragedy. 1965\n Ancient and modern : essays in honor of Gerald F. Else. edited by John H. D'Arms, John W. Eadie. 1977\n Plato and Aristotle on poetry. Edited with introduction and notes by Peter Burian. 1986\n Aristotle Poetics. translated with an introd. and notes by Gerald F. Else.\n\nExternal links\n \n \n Picture of Gerald Else\n\nReferences\n\n1908 births\n1982 deaths\nWriters from Lincoln, Nebraska\nHarvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni\nUniversity of Iowa faculty\nUniversity of Michigan faculty\nPeople from Redfield, South Dakota"
] |
[
"Olivier Messiaen",
"Youth and studies",
"Where did Massiaen grow up?",
"Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family.",
"Who were his parents?",
"He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French.",
"How many siblings did he have?",
"I don't know.",
"Where did he attend school?",
"At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony,",
"What did he study?",
"After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre.",
"Who else did he study with?",
"After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas."
] |
C_c98b847278d549889a47900bb8acefee_1
|
Did he have any significant acheivements during his youth?
| 7 |
Did Olivier Messiaen have any significant achievements during his youth?
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Olivier Messiaen
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Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'ame en bourgeon ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cecile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphine, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music. He took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song...gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition. While a student he composed his first published works--his eight Preludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet celeste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliees. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion. CANNOTANSWER
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aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon.
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Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).
He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography
Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.
He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.
At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism
Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.
In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.
Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.
Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.
Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.
His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.
Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.
In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.
In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.
Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.
On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.
Music
Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.
His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.
Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.
As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).
While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.
Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."
Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.
Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).
Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).
Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.
In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."
Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.
Time
From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.
Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.
Time and rhythm
As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.
A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."
Harmony
In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.
Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).
In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).
Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.
Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".
Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Writings
See also
Olivier Messiaen Competition
Notes
References
Further reading
Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.
Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.
Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon
External links
"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen
My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.
Listening
played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv
1908 births
1992 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
Academics of the École Normale de Musique de Paris
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
French classical composers
French male classical composers
French classical organists
French male organists
French composers of sacred music
French military personnel of World War II
French ornithologists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
French Roman Catholics
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Modernist composers
Organ improvisers
Musicians from Avignon
Pupils of Maurice Emmanuel
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Schola Cantorum de Paris faculty
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
World War II prisoners of war held by Germany
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Commanders of the Order of the Crown (Belgium)
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
| true |
[
"East Timor competed at the 2016 Winter Youth Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway from 12 to 21 February 2016.\n\nAlpine skiing\n\nAlexi Goutt was set to make his nation's Winter Youth Olympic debut after qualifying in alpine skiing. Despite appearing at the opening ceremony he did not participate in any event.\n\nSee also\nEast Timor at the 2016 Summer Olympics\n\nReferences\n\n2016 in East Timor\nNations at the 2016 Winter Youth Olympics\nEast Timor at the Youth Olympics",
"Arnold \"Arno\" Doomernik (born 14 August 1970) is a Dutch former footballer who played as a defensive midfielder. He most notably played for Roda JC, where he won two KNVB Cup trophies. He also represented Sparta and NAC.\n\nClub career\nDoomernik first played for OSC '45 and then became part of the youth academy of PSV, where he could not break into the first team. In 1992, he was loaned to Sparta, where he played for one season. In 1993, he was signed by Roda JC, where his former youth coach Huub Stevens had become the new manager. At Roda, he became part of a successful side which finished second in the 1994–95 Eredivisie, and which won the 1996–97 and 1999–2000 KNVB Cups.\n\nDuring the summer of 2000, Doomernik was loaned to NAC, where he stayed for two seasons. He did not play any matches in his second season, however, as a serious hip injury forced his retirement. He played his last match in May 2001, at the age of 30.\n\nPersonal life\nDoomernik was a youth coach at NAC, Roda JC and VV Schaesberg before joining EHC in 2014. He is married to Darlene and the couple have two children.\n\nHonours\nRoda JC\nKNVB Cup: 1996–97, 1999–2000\n\nReferences\n\n1970 births\nLiving people\nSportspeople from 's-Hertogenbosch\nDutch footballers\nAssociation football midfielders\nSparta Rotterdam players\nRoda JC Kerkrade players\nNAC Breda players\nEredivisie players"
] |
[
"Olivier Messiaen",
"Youth and studies",
"Where did Massiaen grow up?",
"Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family.",
"Who were his parents?",
"He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French.",
"How many siblings did he have?",
"I don't know.",
"Where did he attend school?",
"At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony,",
"What did he study?",
"After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre.",
"Who else did he study with?",
"After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas.",
"Did he have any significant acheivements during his youth?",
"aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon."
] |
C_c98b847278d549889a47900bb8acefee_1
|
Did he have any other notable experiences?
| 8 |
Besides being awarded second prize in harmony at the Conservatoire, did Olivier Messiaen have any other notable experiences?
|
Olivier Messiaen
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Olivier-Eugene-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born December 10, 1908 in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cecile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'ame en bourgeon ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre Messiaen enlisted and Cecile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphine, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music. He took piano lessons having already taught himself to play. His interest included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song...gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande, which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11. At the Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupre. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition. While a student he composed his first published works--his eight Preludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet celeste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliees. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion. CANNOTANSWER
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In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue.
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Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and was taught by Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post held for 61 years until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. He was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941 and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions that he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many global musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works).
He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography
Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born at 11:00 on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie-Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career. His younger brother Alain André Prosper Messiaen was also a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother with the help of a home-made toy theatre with translucent backdrops made from old cellophane wrappers. At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble where he composed most of his music.
He took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents. He also saved to buy scores and one such was Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody." Around this time he began to compose. In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. He continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen described as "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me". The following year Pierre Messiaen gained a teaching post in Paris. Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.
At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen made excellent academic progress. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925 he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes. After showing improvisational skills on the piano Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. Messiaen gained first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le banquet céleste was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His public début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, for the organist Charles Quef, who was ill at the time. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931, and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation towards the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness". Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions. During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'ascension ("The Ascension") for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne ("Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own") (). He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant. He was captured at Verdun and taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinettist among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard (), he acquired manuscript paper and pencils, and was able to assemble the three other POWs to help him perform the piece. The Quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Apocalypse, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was finally completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism
Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May of 1941, Messiaen was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until his retirement in 1978. He compiled his Technique de mon langage musical ("Technique of my musical language") published in 1944, in which he quotes many examples from his music, particularly the Quartet. Although only in his mid-thirties, his students described him as an outstanding teacher. Among his early students were the composers Pierre Boulez and Karel Goeyvaerts. Other pupils included Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1952, Alexander Goehr in 1956–57, Tristan Murail in 1967–72 and George Benjamin during the late 1970s. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was referred to him in 1951; Messiaen urged Xenakis to take advantage of his background in mathematics and architecture in his music.
In 1943, Messiaen wrote Visions de l'Amen ("Visions of the Amen") for two pianos for Yvonne Loriod and himself to perform. Shortly thereafter he composed the enormous solo piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus ("Twenty gazes upon the child Jesus") for her. Again for Loriod, he wrote Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine ("Three small liturgies of the Divine Presence") for female chorus and orchestra, which includes a difficult solo piano part.
Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The second of these works about human (as opposed to divine) love was the result of a commission from Serge Koussevitzky. Messiaen stated that the commission did not specify the length of the work or the size of the orchestra. This was the ten-movement Turangalîla-Symphonie. It is not a conventional symphony, but rather an extended meditation on the joy of human union and love. It does not contain the sexual guilt inherent in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because Messiaen believed that sexual love is a divine gift. The third piece inspired by the Tristan myth was Cinq rechants for twelve unaccompanied singers, described by Messiaen as influenced by the alba of the troubadours. Messiaen visited the United States in 1949, where his music was conducted by Koussevitsky and Leopold Stokowski. His Turangalîla-Symphonie was first performed in the US in 1949, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Messiaen taught an analysis class at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1947 he taught (and performed with Loriod) for two weeks in Budapest. In 1949 he taught at Tanglewood. Beginning in summer 1949 he taught in the new music summer school classes at Darmstadt. While he did not employ the twelve-tone technique, after three years teaching analysis of twelve-tone scores, including works by Arnold Schoenberg, he experimented with ways of making scales of other elements (including duration, articulation and dynamics) analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. The results of these innovations was the "Mode de valeurs et d'intensités" for piano (from the Quatre études de rythme) which has been misleadingly described as the first work of "total serialism". It had a large influence on the earliest European serial composers, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. During this period he also experimented with musique concrète, music for recorded sounds.
Birdsong and the 1960s
When in 1952 Messiaen was asked to provide a test piece for flautists at the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano. While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux—its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971). Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod. He began to travel widely, to attend musical events and to seek out and transcribe the songs of more exotic birds in the wild. Loriod frequently assisted her husband's detailed studies of birdsong while walking with him, by making tape recordings for later reference. In 1962 he visited Japan, where Gagaku music and Noh theatre inspired the orchestral "Japanese sketches", Sept haïkaï, which contain stylised imitations of traditional Japanese instruments.
Messiaen's music was by this time championed by, among others, Pierre Boulez, who programmed first performances at his Domaine musical concerts and the Donaueschingen festival. Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival) and Couleurs de la cité céleste. The latter piece was the result of a commission for a composition for three trombones and three xylophones; Messiaen added to this more brass, wind, percussion and piano, and specified a xylophone, xylorimba and marimba rather than three xylophones. Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.
His reputation as a composer continued to grow and in 1959, he was nominated as an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In 1966 he was officially appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, although he had in effect been teaching composition for years. Further honours included election to the Institut de France in 1967 and the Académie des beaux-arts in 1968, the Erasmus Prize in 1971, the award of the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1975, the Sonning Award (Denmark's highest musical honour) in 1977, the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1982, and the presentation of the Croix de Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown in 1980.
Transfiguration, Canyons, St. Francis, and the Beyond
Messiaen's next work was the large-scale La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. The composition occupied him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration. Shortly after its completion, Messiaen received a commission from Alice Tully for a work to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial. He arranged a visit to the US in spring 1972, and was inspired by Bryce Canyon in Utah, where he observed the canyon's distinctive colours and birdsong. The twelve-movement orchestral piece Des canyons aux étoiles... was the result, first performed in 1974 in New York.
In 1971, he was asked to compose a piece for the Paris Opéra. While reluctant to undertake such a major project, he was persuaded in 1975 to accept the commission and began work on his Saint-François d'Assise. The composition was intensive (he also wrote his own libretto) and occupied him from 1975 to 1979; the orchestration was carried out from 1979 until 1983. Messiaen preferred to describe the final work as a "spectacle" rather than an opera. It was first performed in 1983. Some commentators at the time thought that the opera would be his valediction (at times Messiaen himself believed so), but he continued to compose. In 1984, he published a major collection of organ pieces, Livre du Saint Sacrement; other works include birdsong pieces for solo piano, and works for piano with orchestra.
In the summer of 1978, Messiaen retired from teaching at the Paris Conservatoire. He was promoted to the highest rank of the Légion d'honneur, the Grand-Croix, in 1987. An operation prevented his participation in the celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978, but in 1988 tributes for Messiaen's 80th included a complete performance in London's Royal Festival Hall of St. François, which the composer attended, and Erato's publication of a seventeen-CD collection of Messiaen's music including a disc of the composer in conversation with Claude Samuel.
Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back) he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which was premièred six months after his death. He died in Paris on 27 April 1992.
On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to, namely herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin (hence the title Concert à quatre). Four of the five intended movements were substantially complete; Yvonne Loriod undertook the orchestration of the second half of the first movement and of the whole of the fourth with advice from George Benjamin. It was premiered by the dedicatees in September of 1994.
Music
Messiaen's music has been described as outside the western musical tradition, although growing out of that tradition and being influenced by it. Much of his output denies the western conventions of forward motion, development and diatonic harmonic resolution. This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.
His youthful love for the fairy-tale element in Shakespeare prefigured his later expressions of Catholic liturgy. Messiaen was not interested in depicting aspects of theology such as sin; rather he concentrated on the theology of joy, divine love and redemption.
Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition. For many commentators this continual development made every major work from the Quatuor onwards a conscious summation of all that Messiaen had composed up to that time. However, very few of these major works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.
As well as discovering new techniques, Messiaen studied and absorbed foreign music, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (he encountered Śārṅgadeva's list of 120 rhythmic units, the deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, birdsong, and Japanese music (see Example 1 for an instance of his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms).
While he was instrumental in the academic exploration of his techniques (he compiled two treatises: the later one in five volumes was substantially complete when he died and was published posthumously), and was himself a master of music analysis, he considered the development and study of techniques a means to intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional ends. Thus Messiaen maintained that a musical composition must be measured against three separate criteria: it must be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and it must touch the listener.
Messiaen wrote a large body of music for the piano. Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Yvonne Loriod's formidable piano technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onwards he had her in mind. Messiaen said, "I am able to allow myself the greatest eccentricities because to her anything is possible."
Western artistic influences
Developments in modern French music were a major influence on Messiaen, particularly the music of Claude Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1 in his modes of limited transposition). Messiaen rarely used the whole-tone scale in his compositions because, he said, after Debussy and Dukas there was "nothing to add", but the modes he did use are similarly symmetrical.
Messiaen had a great admiration for the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly the use of rhythm in earlier works such as The Rite of Spring, and his use of orchestral colour. He was further influenced by the orchestral brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who lived in Paris in the 1920s and gave acclaimed concerts there. Among composers for the keyboard, Messiaen singled out Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and incorporated varied modifications of what he called the "M-shaped" melodic motif from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, although he modified the final interval in this motif from a perfect fourth to a tritone (Example 3).
Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as may be seen from the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind") and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).
Colour
Colour lies at the heart of Messiaen's music. He believed that terms such as "tonal", "modal" and "serial" are misleading analytical conveniences. For him there were no modal, tonal or serial compositions, only music with or without colour. He said that Claudio Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Richard Wagner, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky all wrote strongly coloured music.
In some of Messiaen's scores, he notated the colours in the music (notably in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles...)—the purpose being to aid the conductor in interpretation rather than to specify which colours the listener should experience. The importance of colour is linked to Messiaen's synaesthesia, which caused him to experience colours when he heard or imagined music (his form of synaesthesia, the most common form, involved experiencing the associated colours in a non-visual form rather than perceiving them visually). In his multi-volume music theory treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie ("Treatise of Rhythm, Colour and Birdsong"), Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours of certain chords. His descriptions range from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant").
When asked what Messiaen's main influence had been on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the sheer ... colour has been so influential, ... rather than being a decorative element, [Messiaen showed that colour] could be a structural, a fundamental element, ... the fundamental material of the music itself."
Symmetry
Many of Messiaen's composition techniques made use of symmetries of time and pitch.
Time
From his earliest works, Messiaen used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms (Example 2). He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" of these processes. He only ever presented a portion of any such process, as if allowing the informed listener a glimpse of something eternal. In the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps the piano and cello together provide an early example.
Pitch
Messiaen used modes he called modes of limited transposition. They are distinguished as groups of notes that can only be transposed by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) only exists in two transpositions: namely C–D–E–F–G–A and D–E–F–G–A–B. Messiaen abstracted these modes from the harmony of his improvisations and early works. Music written using the modes avoids conventional diatonic harmonic progressions, since for example Messiaen's Mode 2 (identical to the octatonic scale used also by other composers) permits precisely the dominant seventh chords whose tonic the mode does not contain.
Time and rhythm
As well as making use of non-retrogradable rhythm and the Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also composed with "additive" rhythms. This involves lengthening individual notes slightly or interpolating a short note into an otherwise regular rhythm (see Example 3), or shortening or lengthening every note of a rhythm by the same duration (adding a semiquaver to every note in a rhythm on its repeat, for example). This led Messiaen to use rhythmic cells that irregularly alternate between two and three units, a process that also occurs in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which Messiaen admired.
A factor that contributes to Messiaen's suspension of the conventional perception of time in his music is the extremely slow tempos he often specifies (the fifth movement Louange à l'eternité de Jésus of Quatuor is actually given the tempo marking infiniment lent). Messiaen also used the concept of "chromatic durations", for example in his Soixante-quatre durées from Livre d'orgue (), which is built from, in Messiaen's words, "64 chromatic durations from 1 to 64 demisemiquavers [thirty-second notes]—invested in groups of 4, from the ends to the centre, forwards and backwards alternately—treated as a retrograde canon. The whole peopled with birdsong."
Harmony
In addition to making harmonic use of the modes of limited transposition, he cited the harmonic series as a physical phenomenon that provides chords with a context he felt was missing in purely serial music. An example of Messiaen's harmonic use of this phenomenon, which he called "resonance", is the last two bars of his first piano Prélude, La colombe ("The dove"): the chord is built from harmonics of the fundamental base note E.
Related to this use of resonance, Messiaen also composed music in which the lowest, or fundamental, note is combined with higher notes or chords played much more quietly. These higher notes, far from being perceived as conventional harmony, function as harmonics that alter the timbre of the fundamental note like mixture stops on a pipe organ. An example is the song of the golden oriole in Le loriot of the Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (Example 4).
In his use of conventional diatonic chords, Messiaen often transcended their historically mundane connotations (for example, his frequent use of the added sixth chord as a resolution).
Birdsong
Birdsong fascinated Messiaen from an early age, and in this he found encouragement from his teacher Dukas, who reportedly urged his pupils to "listen to the birds". Messiaen included stylised birdsong in some of his early compositions (including L'abîme d'oiseaux from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps), integrating it into his sound-world by techniques like the modes of limited transposition and chord colouration. His evocations of birdsong became increasingly sophisticated, and with Le réveil des oiseaux this process reached maturity, the whole piece being built from birdsong: in effect it is a dawn chorus for orchestra. The same can be said for "Epode", the five-minute sixth movement of Chronochromie, which is scored for eighteen violins, each one playing a different birdsong. Messiaen notated the bird species with the music in the score (examples 1 and 4). The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.
Serialism
For some compositions, Messiaen created scales for duration, attack and timbre analogous to the chromatic pitch scale. He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".
Messiaen later introduced what he called a "communicable language", a "musical alphabet" to encode sentences. He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Writings
See also
Olivier Messiaen Competition
Notes
References
Further reading
Baggech, Melody Ann (1998). An English Translation of Olivier Messiaen's "Traite de Rythme, de Couleur, et d'Ornithologie" Norman: The University of Oklahoma.
Barker, Thomas (2012). "The Social and Aesthetic Situation of Olivier Messiaen's Religious Music: Turangalîla Symphonie." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43/1:53–70.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2000). "A Creative Legacy: Messiaen as Teacher of Analysis." College Music Symposium 40: 117–39.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2001). "Pitch Organization and Dramatic Design in Saint François d'Assise of Olivier Messiaen." PhD diss., Bloomington: Indiana University.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2002). "Simultaneous Contrast and Additive Designs in Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise." Music Theory Online 8.2 (August 2002). Music Theory Online
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Aspects of Harmony in Messiaen's Later Music: An Examination of the Chords of Transposed Inversions on the Same Bass Note." Journal of Musicological Research 23, no. 2: 187–226.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2004). "Narrating Saint Francis's Spiritual Journey: Referential Pitch Structures and Symbolic Images in Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise." In Poznan Studies on Opera, edited by Maciej Jablonski, 363–411.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2008). "Messiaen as Improviser." Dutch Journal of Music Theory 13, no. 2 (May 2008): 129–44.
Benitez, Vincent P. (2009). "Reconsidering Messiaen as Serialist." Music Analysis 28, nos. 2–3 (2009): 267–99 (published April 21, 2011).
Benitez, Vincent P. (2010). "Messiaen and Aquinas." In Messiaen the Theologian, edited by Andrew Shenton, 101–26. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Benítez, Vincent Pérez (2019). Olivier Messiaen's Opera, Saint François d'Assise. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. .
Boivin, Jean (1993). "La Classe de Messiaen: Historique, reconstitution, impact". Ph.D. diss. Montreal: Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal.
Boswell-Kurc, Lilise (2001). "Olivier Messiaen's Religious War-Time Works and Their Controversial Reception in France (1941–1946) ". Ph.D. diss. New York: New York University.
Burns, Jeffrey Phillips (1995). "Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition Reconsidered". M.M. thesis, Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2003). "Messiaen's Chord Tables: Ordering the Disordered". Tempo 57, no. 226 (October): 2–10.
Cheong Wai-Ling (2008). "Neumes and Greek Rhythms: The Breakthrough in Messiaen's Birdsong". Acta Musicologica 80, no. 1:1–32.
Dingle, Christopher (2013). Messiaen's Final Works. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. .
Fallon, Robert Joseph (2005). "Messiaen's Mimesis: The Language and Culture of The Bird Styles". Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
Fallon, Robert (2008). "Birds, Beasts, and Bombs in Messiaen's Cold War Mass". The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (Spring): 175–204.
Hardink, Jason M. (2007). "Messiaen and Plainchant". D.M.A. diss. Houston: Rice University.
Harris, Joseph Edward (2004). "Musique coloree: Synesthetic Correspondence in the Works of Olivier Messiaen". Ph.D. diss. Ames: The University of Iowa.
Hill, Matthew Richard (1995). "Messiaen's Regard du silence as an Expression of Catholic Faith". D.M.A. diss. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laycock, Gary Eng Yeow (2010). "Re-evaluating Olivier Messiaen's Musical Language from 1917 to 1935". Ph.D. diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2010.
Luchese, Diane (1998). "Olivier Messiaen's Slow Music: Glimpses of Eternity in Time". Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
McGinnis, Margaret Elizabeth (2003). "Playing the Fields: Messiaen, Music, and the Extramusical". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Nelson, David Lowell (1992). "An Analysis of Olivier Messiaen's Chant Paraphrases". 2 vols. Ph.D. diss. Evanston: Northwestern University
Ngim, Alan Gerald (1997). "Olivier Messiaen as a Pianist: A Study of Tempo and Rhythm Based on His Recordings of Visions de l'amen". D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami.
Peterson, Larry Wayne (1973). "Messiaen and Rhythm: Theory and Practice". Ph.D. diss. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Puspita, Amelia (2008). "The Influence of Balinese Gamelan on the Music of Olivier Messiaen". D.M.A. diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati
Schultz, Rob (2008). "Melodic Contour and Nonretrogradable Structure in the Birdsong of Olivier Messiaen". Music Theory Spectrum 30, no. 1 (Spring): 89–137.
Shenton, Andrew (1998). "The Unspoken Word: Olivier Messiaen's 'langage communicable'". Ph.D. diss. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Simeone, Nigel (2004). "'Chez Messiaen, tout est priére': Messiaen's Appointment at the Trinité". The Musical Times 145, no. 1889 (Winter): 36–53.
Simeone, Nigel (2008). "Messiaen, Koussevitzky and the USA". The Musical Times 149, no. 1905 (Winter): 25–44.
Welsh Ibanez, Deborah (2005). Color, Timbre, and Resonance: Developments in Olivier Messiaen's Use of Percussion Between 1956–1965. D.M.A. diss. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Zheng, Zhong (2004). A Study of Messiaen's Solo Piano Works. Ph.D. diss. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Films
Apparition of the Eternal Church – Paul Festa's 2006 film about responses of 31 artists to Messiaen's music.
Messiaen at 80 (1988). Directed by Sue Knussen. BFI database entry.
Olivier Messiaen et les oiseaux (1973). Directed by Michel Fano and Denise Tual.
Olivier Messiaen – The Crystal Liturgy (2007 [DVD release date]). Directed by Olivier Mille.
Olivier Messiaen: Works (1991). DVD on which Messiaen performs "Improvisations" on the organ at the Paris Trinity Church.
The South Bank Show: Olivier Messiaen: The Music of Faith (1985). Directed by Alan Benson. BFI database entry.
Quartet for the End of Time, with the President's Own Marine Band Ensemble, A Film by H. Paul Moon
External links
"Messiaen, Olivier" in Oxford Music Online (by subscription)
BBC Messiaen Profile
oliviermessiaen.org Up to date website by Malcolm Ball, includes the latest recordings and concerts, a comprehensive bibliography, photos, analyses and reviews, a very extensive bio of Yvonne Loriod with discography, and more.
Infography about Olivier Messiaen
oliviermessiaen.net, hosted by the Boston University Messiaen Project [BUMP]. Includes detailed information on the composer's life and works, events, and links to other Messiaen websites.
www.philharmonia.co.uk/messiaen, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Messiaen website. The site contains articles, unseen images, programme notes and films to go alongside the orchestra's series of concerts celebrating the Centenary of Olivier Messiaen's birth.
Music for the End of Time, David Schiff article in The Nation, posted January 25, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue). Formally a review of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, but provides an overview of Messiaen's life and works.
Music and the Holocaust – Olivier Messiaen
My Messiaen Modes A visual representation of Messiaen's modes of limited transposition.
Listening
played by Martina Trumpp, violin and Bohumir Stehlik, piano
Thème et variations – Helen Kim, violin; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Le merle noir – John McMurtery, flute; Adam Bowles, piano Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Quatuor pour la fin du temps – Luna Nova New Music Ensemble
Regard de l'esprit de joie from Vingt regards..., Tom Poster, pianist
played on a Mühleisen pipe organ
In-depth feature on Olivier Messiaen by Radio France International's English service
by Ukho Ensemble Kyiv
1908 births
1992 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Conservatoire de Paris alumni
Conservatoire de Paris faculty
Academics of the École Normale de Musique de Paris
Composers for piano
Composers for pipe organ
EMI Classics and Virgin Classics artists
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
French classical composers
French male classical composers
French classical organists
French male organists
French composers of sacred music
French military personnel of World War II
French ornithologists
Deutsche Grammophon artists
French Roman Catholics
Kyoto laureates in Arts and Philosophy
Members of the Académie des beaux-arts
Modernist composers
Organ improvisers
Musicians from Avignon
Pupils of Maurice Emmanuel
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists
Schola Cantorum de Paris faculty
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
World War II prisoners of war held by Germany
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Commanders of the Order of the Crown (Belgium)
Recipients of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize
20th-century French composers
20th-century French male musicians
| true |
[
"Exvangelical is a social movement of people who have left evangelicalism, especially white evangelical churches in the United States, for atheism, agnosticism, progressive Christianity, or any other religious belief. The hashtag #exvangelical was coined by Blake Chastain in 2016 to make \"a safe space for people to find solidarity with others who have gone through similar experiences\". Chastain also started a podcast titled Exvangelical, and there are other popular exvangelical podcasts such as Almost Heretical and Straight White American Jesus.\n\nRelated movements include #emptythepews—urging opposition to evangelicalism in the United States due to its support for former president Donald Trump—started by exvangelical Chrissy Stroop and #churchtoo to draw attention to sexual abuse in churches. Deconstructing faith is another movement where traditions are challenged moving many to remain in or leave the Christian faith, written more in-depth Derrick Day's book Deconstructing Religion. Many exvangelicals are young people who choose to leave their religion following disagreements over issues such as science, the role of women, LGBT rights, and Christian nationalism. Specific incidents cited by exvangelicals for leaving include the Nashville Statement and evangelical support for Trump, which they perceived as hypocritical.\n\nReception \nEvangelical churches' responses have often been dismissive, rather than addressing the issues raised by the exvangelical movement. In Christianity Today’s The Rise & Fall of Mars Hill podcast, Baylor University professor Matthew Lee Anderson said the experiences of exvangelicals were \"something very different than deep, difficult, self-examination in order to find the truth\" and any bad experiences that drove people to leave were \"sociologically, actually quite marginal experiences inside of white evangelicalism\". In a Patheos article on August 13, 2021, Grayson Gilbert wrote that the exvangelical movement is \"nothing but an exercise in absurdity on its face\" which \"relies on sheer ignorance\" and is \"nothing more than what Scripture calls the way of the fool\".\n\nWhen a Gallup poll showed that less than half of Americans belonged to any church in March 2021, some commentators acknowledged criticisms raised by the exvangelical perspective. Russell Moore, director of the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today, speculated that if he were a teenager today, he may also have left the church. He found that \"they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings\" and so \"the presenting issue in this secularization is not scientism and hedonism but disillusionment and cynicism.\"\n\nSee also\n\nOrganizations supporting people leaving controlling religions\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nFormer evangelicals\nEvangelicalism in the United States",
"This is a list of notable people who have, or had, the medical condition epilepsy. Following from that, there is a short list of people who have received a speculative, retrospective diagnosis of epilepsy. Finally there is a substantial list of people who are often wrongly believed to have had epilepsy.\n\nEpilepsy and greatness\nA possible link between epilepsy and greatness has fascinated biographers and physicians for centuries. In his Treatise on Epilepsy, the French 17th century physician Jean Taxil refers to Aristotle's \"famous epileptics\". This list includes Heracles, Ajax, Bellerophon, Socrates, Plato, Empedocles, Maracus of Syracuse, and the Sibyls. However, historian of medicine Owsei Temkin argues that Aristotle had in fact made a list of melancholics and had only associated Heracles with the \"Sacred Disease\". Taxil goes on to add his own names: Roman Emperor Caligula, Drusus (tribune of the Roman people), and Petrarch. Neurologist John Hughes concluded that the majority of famous people alleged to have epilepsy did not in fact have this condition.\n\nCertain diagnosis\n\nThe following categorized chronological list contains only those people for whom a firm and uncontested diagnosis was made during their lifetime.\n\nActing\n\nLeadership, politics and royalty\n\nMusic\n\nSport\n\nArt and writing\n\nMiscellaneous\n\nRetrospective diagnosis\n\nThe following people were not diagnosed with epilepsy during their lifetime. A retrospective diagnosis is speculative and, as detailed below, can be wrong.\n\nReligious figures\n\nThere is a long-standing notion that epilepsy and religion are linked, and it has been speculated that many religious figures had temporal lobe epilepsy. The temporal lobes generate the feeling of \"I\", and give a sense of familiarity or strangeness to the perceptions of the senses. The temporal lobes and adjacent anterior insular cortex seem to be involved in mystical experiences, and in the change in personality that may result from such experiences. \n\nRaymond Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (1901) contains several case-studies of persons who have realized \"cosmic consciousness\". James Leuba's The psychology of religious mysticism noted that \"among the dread diseases that afflict humanity there is only one that interests us quite particularly; that disease is epilepsy.\" Several of Bucke's cases are also mentioned in J.E. Bryant's 1953 book, Genius and Epilepsy, which has a list of more than 20 people that combines the great and the mystical. \n\nSlater and Beard and renewed the interest in TLE and religious experience in the 1960s. Dewhurst and Beard (1970) described six cases of TLE-patients who underwent sudden religious conversions. They placed these cases in the context of several western saints who had a sudden conversion, who were or may have been epileptic. Dewhurst and Beard described several aspects of conversion experiences, and did not favor one specific mechanism. \n\nNorman Geschwind described behavioral changes related to temporal lobe epilepsy in the 1970s and 1980s. Now called Geschwind syndrome, he defined a cluster of specific personality characteristics often found in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, which include increased religiosity. Evidence of Geschwind syndrome has been identified in some religious figures, in particular pronounced religiosity and hypergraphia (excessive writing). However, critics note that these characteristics can be the result of any illness, and are not sufficiently descriptive for patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. \n\nNeuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick, in the 1980s and 1990s, also found a relationship between the right temporal lobe and mystical experience, but also found that pathology or brain damage is only one of many possible causal mechanisms for these experiences. He questioned the earlier accounts of religious figures with temporal lobe epilepsy, noticing that \"very few true examples of the ecstatic aura and the temporal lobe seizure had been reported in the world scientific literature prior to 1980\". According to Fenwick, \"It is likely that the earlier accounts of temporal lobe epilepsy and temporal lobe pathology and the relation to mystic and religious states owes more to the enthusiasm of their authors than to a true scientific understanding of the nature of temporal lobe functioning.\" \n\nThe occurrence of intense religious feelings in persons with epilepsy in general is considered rare, with an incident rate of about 2–3%. Sudden religious conversion, together with visions, has been documented in only a small number of individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy. The occurrence of religious experiences in TLE-patients may as well be explained by religious attribution, due to the background of these patients. Nevertheless, the neurological research of mystical experiences is a growing field of research, searching for specific neurological explanations of mystical experiences. Study of ecstatic seizures may provide clues for the neurological mechanisms giving rise to mystical experiences, such as the anterior insular cortex, which is involved in self-awareness and subjective certainty. \n\nPersons listed below are not necessarily known to have epilepsy nor indicate a scholarly consensus in favour of epilepsy; merely that such a diagnosis has been suggested.\n\nMisdiagnosis\n\nMany famous people are incorrectly recorded as having epilepsy. In some cases there is no evidence at all to justify a diagnosis of epilepsy. In others, the symptoms have been misinterpreted. In some, the seizures were provoked by other causes, such as acute illness or alcohol withdrawal.\n\nNo evidence\n\nThe following people are often reported to have had epilepsy but there is no evidence that they had any attacks or illnesses that even resembled epilepsy.\n\nMisdiagnosis by association\n\nMany individuals have been mistakenly recorded as having epilepsy due to an association with someone (real or fictional) who did have epilepsy, or something similar.\n\nProvoked seizures\n\nThe following people may have had one or more epileptic seizures but since the seizures were provoked, they do not result in a diagnosis of epilepsy:\n\nSimilar conditions\n\nThere are many conditions that produce paroxysmal attacks or events. These events (especially in historical, non-medical literature such as biographies) are often called fits, seizures or convulsions. Those terms do not exclusively apply to epilepsy and such events are sometimes categorised as non-epileptic seizures. When studied in detail, the attacks were more fully described as \"fits of spleen\", \"seized by pain\", \"convulsed with anguish\", etc.\n\nNotes and references\n\nSources\n\n \n \n \n\nLists of people with disabilities\n \nEpilepsy"
] |
[
"Katherine Harris",
"2000 US presidential election"
] |
C_77b23c9a2ade484190afa76bfb7b3cbb_1
|
What was Harris's role in the 2000 US Presidential election?
| 1 |
What was Katherine Harris's role in the 2000 US Presidential election?
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Katherine Harris
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As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. The election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for. After several recounts were inconclusive and the laws governing recounts were unclear, Harris halted the recounting process. She certified that the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, had defeated the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, in the popular vote of Florida and thus certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida allowed Bush to win the election. Her ruling was upheld in the state circuit court, but was subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. (2000) In a per curiam decision, by a 7-2 vote, the Court in Bush v. Gore held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court held that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida. The decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining). Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. CANNOTANSWER
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Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida.
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Katherine Harris (born April 5, 1957) is an American former politician. A Republican, Harris served in the Florida Senate from 1994 to 1998, as Secretary of State of Florida from 1999 to 2002, and as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Florida's 13th congressional district from 2003 to 2007. Harris lost her campaign in 2006 for a United States Senate seat from Florida.
In the 2000 presidential election, she received national attention for her role as the Florida's secretary of state during the state's election recount, certifying George W. Bush's narrow victory (537 votes) over Al Gore and awarding him the Florida electors, which gained him the national election.
Background and personal life
Harris was born in Key West, Florida, to one of the state's wealthiest and most politically influential families. She is the daughter of Harriett (Griffin) and George W. Harris Jr., who owned Citrus and Chemical Bank in Lakeland, Florida. Her maternal grandfather was Ben Hill Griffin Jr., a successful businessman in the citrus and cattle industries and a powerful figure in the state legislature. Shortly before his death in 1990, he was ranked as the 261st richest American on the Forbes 400 list. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at the University of Florida is named for him.
Harris' extended family has been active in Christian evangelism. Her grandfather was a Christian missionary in Africa, while her aunt and uncle were missionaries in India. They now head the Arab World Missions. Harris studied under Dr. Francis Schaeffer at a L'Abri Fellowship International center. Harris attended Greystone, an all-girls Christian camp at Asheville, North Carolina. She has said her faith is "the most important thing in my life." Harris has criticized the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for being too liberal; she was reared in the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America. She attends Calvary Chapel, a non-denominational charismatic church in Sarasota, Florida.
Harris married Swedish businessman Sven Anders Axel Ebbeson in 1996 and has one stepdaughter, Louise. Sven Ebbeson committed suicide in November 2013 at their home in Sarasota; he had reportedly been suffering a serious illness. In 2017, after admitting she'd become "a near recluse" since Ebbeson's death, she married Texas banker Richard Ware.
Education and career
Harris graduated from Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida, in 1975. She attended the University of Madrid in 1978. Harris received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, in 1979. She studied under Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer at the L'Abri community in Huemoz, Switzerland, near Lausanne. While in college she worked as an intern for U.S. Representative Andy Ireland.
Before entering politics, Harris worked as a marketing executive at IBM and a vice president of a commercial real estate firm.
Harris earned a M.P.A. from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1996.
Political career
Harris ran for the Florida Senate as a Republican in 1994 in one of the most expensive state races in Florida history to that time. Harris's political career was guided by Dan Berger, Adam Goodman, and Benjamin McKay, along with her campaign manager, David Lapides.
Florida Senate and Riscorp
Harris played a prominent role in introducing William Griffin (with whom she had a close personal relationship), the CEO of Riscorp, to various Florida legislators. In the 1994 state senate election, Sarasota-based Riscorp, Inc. made illegal contributions totaling $400,000 to dozens of political candidates and committees, including $20,600 to the Harris campaign.
Two years later, in 1996, Harris sponsored a bill "to block Riscorp competitors from getting a greater share of Florida workers' compensation market, [and] also pushed a proposal that would hurt a particular competitor." This issue later emerged during her campaign for Florida Secretary of State in 1998.
William Griffin eventually pleaded guilty to illegal campaign donations, among allegations of other serious wrongdoing at Riscorp, and served prison time in 1998. The election of Republican Jeb Bush as governor of Florida is considered to have been a major factor in stopping further state investigation into the Riscorp scandal. According to a Sun-Herald column from June 2005, "Harris denied any knowledge of the scheme, was never charged with any crime and was cleared of wrongdoing by a state investigator."
Secretary of State
Harris was elected Florida Secretary of State in 1998. She defeated then-incumbent Sandra Mortham in the Republican primary and won the general election against Democratic candidate, Karen Gievers, an attorney from Miami. A state constitutional change passed in the same year making the Secretary of State an appointed office made Harris the last person to be elected Secretary of State in Florida.
Harris abruptly resigned in August 2002 while campaigning for Congress when it was discovered that she had violated Florida's "resign to run", which stated "...No officer may qualify as a candidate for another public office, whether state, district, county or municipal, if the terms or any part thereof run concurrently with each other, without resigning from the office he or she presently holds." Since the start of her Congressional term (January 3, 2003) would overlap with the end of her term as Secretary of State (January 7, 2003), she was required to submit a letter of recognition. The law allowed candidates to have the resignation be effective up until the term for the new office began. Since Harris failed to do so, she was required to resign immediately. Harris said the oversight was unintentional. She said that she thought because Florida voters had approved a constitutional amendment that made the position of Secretary of State an appointed office rather than an elected office, the law did not apply to her situation.
International travel
During her first 22 months in office, Harris spent more than $106,000 for travel, more than the governor or any other cabinet officer. She visited eight countries on ten foreign trips.
In early 2001, Florida Senate leaders eliminated the $3.4 million that Harris had budgeted for international relations for the year, assigning it instead to Enterprise Florida, the state's economic development agency. However, Florida House Leader Tom Feeney said that he disagreed with the Senate and believed that Harris was an able advocate to foreign countries. After the House refused to agree with the proposed budget action, the Senate agreed to restore the money; however, it insisted on a review committee, appointed by Senate President John McKay, Feeney, and Governor Jeb Bush, to evaluate all of Harris' expenditures on international affairs since July 1, 1999, and produce a report.
2000 U.S. presidential election
As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. She was involved in purging many individuals from the voter rolls , and the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for.
After several recounts were inconclusive , Harris halted the recounting process, arguing that the laws governing recounts were unclear. The official vote totals showed the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, as the winner of the statewide popular vote in Florida, and so Harris certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida would allow Bush to obtain a majority in the Electoral College and win the election. Her certification was upheld in the state circuit court, but subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court.
The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (2000). In a per curiam decision, by a 7–2 vote, the Court held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, it held, by a 5–4 vote, that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida.
This decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, thus defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining).
Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. It was later revealed that, unimpressed with her performance in the media spotlight of the recount, the Bush Campaign had assigned a staff member to her, essentially as a handler.
United States Congresswoman
In 2002, Harris ran against Sarasota Attorney Jan Schneider for the congressional district vacated by retiring Republican Rep. Dan Miller, winning by 10 percentage points in this solidly Republican district, a victory helped with one of the biggest first term campaign fund raising efforts in the history of this district and substantial support from the Bush family.
Harris considered running for the seat of retiring Senator Bob Graham in 2004 but was reportedly dissuaded by the Bush White House to allow Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez to run instead. Martinez went on to narrowly beat challenger Betty Castor. Harris ran for re-election to her House seat in 2004; she was re-elected with a margin almost identical to her first win.
In a 2004 speech in Venice, Florida, Harris claimed that a "Middle Eastern" man was arrested for attempting to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Indiana; Carmel Mayor James Brainard and a spokesman for Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan said they had no knowledge of such a plot. Brainard said he had never spoken to Harris.
During a 2004 campaign stop in Sarasota, a local resident, Barry Seltzer, "tr[ied] to 'intimidate' a group of Harris supporters" by menacing Harris and her supporters with his automobile. Witnesses described Seltzer as having swerved off the road and onto the sidewalk, directing it at Harris and her supporters. Nobody was injured in the incident. Seltzer, who claimed he was "exercising [his] political expression," was eventually arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
MZM incident
In 2005 and 2006, a major corporate campaign donor to Harris, Mitchell Wade (founder of defense contractor MZM), was implicated in several bribery scandals. Wade had bundled together and donated to Harris's campaign $32,000 in contributions from his employees at MZM, Inc., then reimbursed those employees for the contributions. Regarding this issue, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Wainstein said that Harris did not appear to know the donations were obtained illegally. Harris has maintained she had no personal knowledge that her campaign was given illegal contributions. Wade acknowledged that the donations to the Harris campaign were illegal and were part of an attempt to influence Harris to MZM's benefit.
Documents filed with Wade's plea say that he took Harris to dinner in March 2005, a year after the illegal contributions, where they discussed the possibility of another fundraiser and the possibility of getting funding for a Navy counterintelligence program placed in Harris's district. Harris sent a letter on April 26, 2005, to defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman C. W. Bill Young, in which Harris sought $10 million for a Navy project backed by Wade. In the letter, Harris emphasized the importance of the project, asking that it be added to her list of five priorities and identifying it as her new No. 3. Harris later released the April 26, 2005, letter for legal scrutiny, but neither she nor Young would turn over the request form (RFP) used for the proposal.
CQPolitics noted "Harris's former political strategist, Ed Rollins, spoke on the record about the dinner and detailed a meal that cost $2,800, far in excess of the $50 limit on gifts that members of Congress are allowed to accept" at the Washington restaurant Citronelle. Wade and Harris discussed MZM's desire for a $10 million appropriation, and Wade offered to host a fundraiser for Harris's 2006 Senate campaign. Regarding the MZM contributions, the Sentinel article goes on to say "The Justice Department has said Wade, who personally handed many of the checks to Harris, did not tell Harris the contributions were illegal". Regarding the expensive meal, the article quotes Harris as saying that she personally had only a "beverage and appetizer" worth less than "$100".
Rollins said that he had conducted a thorough internal investigation into Harris's ties to MZM in hopes of finding conclusive proof of her innocence; but when he could not, he and other advisers, including her lawyer, urged her to drop her candidacy rather than risk federal corruption charges. Although he did not believe Harris intentionally broke any laws, "her story kept changing. Our great concern was that you get into trouble when you don't tell the same story twice ... Maybe you don't think you did anything wrong, but then maybe you start getting questioned about it and so forth, and you may perjure yourself. ... Unlike Cunningham, I don't think she set out to violate the law, but I think she was very careless. She heard whatever she wanted to hear, but we could find no evidence whatsoever that this was a project going into her district."
Although Rollins recalled discussing the $2,800 meal with Harris, Harris told the Orlando Sentinel on April 19, 2006, that the cost of the meal was "news to me", and that her campaign had since "reimbursed" the restaurant for the cost of the meal. According to the reporter, when questioned as to why she would reimburse the restaurant for a meal that had been paid for by MZM, Harris abruptly terminated the interview, and her spokesman later called and requested unsuccessfully that the story not be printed. The next day, Harris's campaign issued a statement that she had believed her campaign had reimbursed the restaurant, and that she had donated $100 "which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer". Harris also asserted that most of the cost of the meal was from Wade ordering several unopened bottles of wine to take home, although the management of the restaurant denies ever allowing anyone to take unopened bottles of wine off the premises, saying "Why would we jeopardize our liquor license for the sake of selling a couple bottles of wine?"
In the weeks following the expensive meal, former senior Harris staffers claimed that "they initially rejected a defense contractor's $10 million appropriation request last year but reversed course after being instructed by Harris to approve it." In May 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Christopher Ingram acknowledged that she had also had a previous dinner with Wade in the same restaurant in March 2004, when the $32,000 in illegal donations had been given to her campaign. Ingram told the press that he did not know how much that meal cost, but that a charitable donation of an unknown amount had been given to a charity whose name he did not know, equivalent to her share of the meal. "She takes responsibility for the oversight that there was no reimbursement," he said.
Mona Tate Yost, an aide to Harris, left to work for MZM during the time Wade was pressing Harris to secure federal funding (April or May 2005). On July 17, 2006, Ed Rollins confirmed that Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents had recently questioned her about the $32,000 in donations. Rollins noted: "I assume more [interviews] will be coming, though. They were very serious." On September 7, 2006, Federal investigators questioned Jim Dornan, who quit as Harris's campaign manager the previous November.
2006 Senate race
Overview
On June 7, 2005, with support from her new campaign advisors of Ed Rollins and Jim Dornan, Harris announced her candidacy for the 2006 Florida United States Senate election, challenging Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Both lackluster fundraising relative to Nelson and controversy over campaign contributions from MZM caused Harris to fall far behind in all polls by May 2006.
Late in the primary race, Republican contender Will McBride polled 31 points behind Nelson in a hypothetical election against him, while Harris polled 33 points behind Nelson in the same poll. Harris was still popular among Republican voters and won the September 5 primary over McBride and two other challengers with approximately 50% of the total vote.
Despite Harris's support of many Republican causes and her previous statewide victories, some party leaders expressed doubt about her statewide appeal:
In May 2006, Florida Governor Jeb Bush questioned Harris's ability to win the general election and encouraged others to challenge her in the primary.
Karl Rove expressed doubts about her statewide appeal.
National Republicans openly criticized her campaign and tried to convince other GOP candidates to challenge Harris in the primary.
Florida state House of Representatives Speaker Allan Bense declined the candidacy on May 11 despite public courting by many leaders including Governor Bush.
Conservative pundit and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough was also unsuccessfully recruited to enter the race. Departing Harris aides claim that Harris called potential Scarborough supporters and raised the death of an aide in order to prevent his entry into the race. Scarborough later told Nelson that drawing Harris as an opponent in the race made him "the luckiest man in Washington".
By late July 2006, Harris had gone through three campaign managers and her campaign was floundering. At that time, it was disclosed that state Republican Party leaders had told Harris they would not support her because she could not win in the general election.
Financial problems plagued Harris' Senate campaign from the start. During the primary, it was clear that the incumbent Senator Nelson had a substantial financial advantage.
On the March 15, 2006, edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Harris pledged to spend $10 million of her own money, which she said was all of her inheritance, on her campaign. She also stated that her run was dedicated to the memory of her father.
Despite her promise, the $10 million never materialized. Reports surfaced that Harris would not actually receive the inheritance from her father, who instead left his entire estate to her mother. She donated $3 million to her campaign, but later took back $100,000, fueling speculation that she would be unable to donate the promised amount.
In October, Harris announced that she was trying to sell her house in Washington to raise money for her campaign, but the home was not publicly listed for sale and no sale was ever announced.
Nelson defeated Harris by more than one million votes. Harris received less than 39% of the vote.
Staff resignations
In late February 2006, in the midst of revelations surrounding Mitchell Wade's illegal contributions, Harris's campaign finance director and her campaign treasurer both resigned. On April 1, 2006, Harris's top campaign advisor, pollster and campaign manager all resigned with a half-dozen other staffers. Republican pollster and consultant David Johnson said, "I've never seen staffers go like this. It's just imploding."
In early April 2006, Harris told the Tampa Tribune that some of her ex-campaign staffers and the national Republican party were deliberately sabotaging her campaign by "putting knives in her back" and had warned her that if she did not back out of the campaign, she would get an "April surprise". Former campaign staffer Ed Rollins said "They were all good professionals ... There was no backstabbing. It's insulting that she would even say that. If she wants to know what went wrong with the campaign, maybe she needs to take a good look in the mirror."
In June, the Harris campaign received a legal bill for thousands of dollars that contained a reference to "DOJ subpoena". Later, an ex-aide told the Associated Press that Harris had received a grand jury subpoena from federal investigators, but kept it from her top advisers, prompting several staff members to quit when they found out. On June 8, 2006, Harris's fourth chief of staff, Fred Asbell, left in order to pursue a "business opportunity". Asbell said he'd "greatly enjoyed" his time with the campaign and he would remain in a consultant position. On July 12, 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Chris Christopher Ingram left the campaign. The next day, Harris received resignations from Campaign Manager Glenn Hodas, Field Director Pat Thomas, Political Director Brian Brooks and Deputy Field Director John K. Byers, while Travel Aide Kyle Johnson and Field Director Mike Norris declined to leave, citing loyalty to Harris. Hodas cited Harris's "tantrums" and "increasingly erratic behavior" as his reasons for leaving. An anonymous campaign worker described Harris as "very difficult to work with. The more that we put her out there, the more she shot herself in the foot."
In late August, Harris lost another key staffer, Rhyan Metzler, in the wake of a disastrous political rally at Orlando Executive Airport. Only 40 people showed up for the event, and Harris blamed the paltry turnout in part on a last-minute change in location. She claimed that a tree fell on the hangar that was originally scheduled to hold the rally, forcing her campaign to switch to another hangar. Airport officials, however, stated that not only had no trees fallen, but also that there are no trees as they get in the way of the airplanes; further adding that the event in fact took place in the hangar that Harris's campaign had originally booked. Harris's campaign blamed Metzler for the comments Harris made after the rally. On August 31, 2006, Harris was interviewed on Hardball with Chris Matthews, where she responded to the criticisms from her former staffers with "We have their email traffic, we know what was behind all that, we know who's been paid and who isn't."
Lack of Republican support
The Pensacola News Journal suggested that Harris might withdraw from the Senate race after winning a primary victory, thereby allowing the Republicans to nominate another candidate, such as Tom Gallagher, to run against Bill Nelson.
In August, Katherine Harris touted political endorsements from fellow Republican lawmakers on her campaign web site. However, some of those cited claim that they never endorsed her. This conflict resulted in several Republican congressmen calling the Harris campaign to complain after the St. Petersburg Times notified them of the endorsements listed on Harris's Web site. A short time later, their names were removed without comment from Harris's Web site.
Of Harris's three primary opponents, only Will McBride endorsed her candidacy for the general election. In the first few days after the primary, a number of Republican nominees such as Charlie Crist and Tom Lee went on a statewide unity tour with Gov. Bush. Harris was not invited; Republicans said the tour was only for nominees to statewide offices. Harris claimed Bush would campaign with her sometime in the two months before the election, but the governor's office denied this.
President Bush did not make public appearances or private meetings with Harris before the primary. He did, however, appear with her at a fundraiser on September 21 in Tampa.
When it came time for newspapers to make their op-ed endorsements, all 22 of Florida's major daily newspapers supported Senator Nelson. The only endorsement Harris received was from the Polk County Democrat, a newspaper in Bartow which publishes four days out of the week.
Religious convictions
Harris was a headline speaker at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church's "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference held in Ft. Lauderdale on March 17–18, 2006. The conference web site invited attendees to attend in order to "reclaim this nation for Christ." The stated mission of ReclaimAmerica.org is "To inform, equip, motivate, and support Christians; enabling them to defend and implement the Biblical principles on which our country was founded." As part of her speech, Harris urged conferees to "win back America for God." Her appearance was noted in a Rolling Stone article covering the conference.
In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness on August 24, 2006, Harris called for Christians to vote on religious lines. She said,
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said she was "disgusted" by the comments "and deeply disappointed in Representative Harris personally," adding "clearly shows that she does not deserve to be a representative." Two of Harris' primary opponents denounced her statements, Republican Will McBride (an attorney and son of a pastor) stated "I'm a Christian, and I'm a Republican, and I don't share her views. There are people of other faiths and backgrounds of outstanding integrity who know how to tell the truth." Real estate developer Peter Monroe, another GOP primary opponent, called on her to quit the race and resign from Congress. He called her suggestion that non-Christian voters are ignorant of morality when voting as "contemptible, arrogant and wicked."
On August 26, 2006, Harris's campaign released a "Statement of Clarification", that stated, "In the interview, Harris was speaking to a Christian audience, addressing a common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government. Addressing this Christian publication, Harris provided a statement that explains her deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values." The press release went on to mention her past support of Israel and quoted her Jewish campaign manager Bryan G. Rudnick, who stated "As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I know that she encourages people of all faiths to engage in government so that our country can continue to thrive on the principles set forth by our founding fathers, without malice towards anyone." At an appearance at an Orlando gun show that same day, she said "it breaks my heart" to think people understood her comments as bigoted. When asked if she thought the Founding Fathers intended the nation to have secular laws she replied,
On October 3, 2006, Harris participated in a prayer service via phone call. In one instance, she called for the elimination of the separation of church and state when she said,
Harris then went on and prayed for Jews to be converted to Christianity.
Replacements in the 13th Congressional District
Vern Buchanan was the Republican nominee and Christine Jennings the Democratic nominee to replace Harris in the 2006 election. The race had been ranked as "leaning Democratic" by CQ Politics, but Buchanan scored a very narrow victory, winning the election by a few hundred votes.
Political positions and voting record
Harris is a conservative on most issues. She is anti-abortion and has voted against embryonic stem cell research. She opposes oil-drilling in Florida's coastal waters. Harris supported reforming Social Security to include private accounts. She has voted in favor of granting legal status to fetuses via the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. She supports tax cuts and the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which restricts bankruptcy filings by consumers. Harris is also in favor of welfare reform, school vouchers, the Patriot Act, the Flag Desecration Amendment, the Federal Marriage Amendment, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a televised debate with Nelson on November 1, however, she repeatedly declined to say whether she would still support the Iraq War Resolution knowing that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In an earlier debate with Nelson, Harris was asked to comment on trade of arms with foreign nations and the potential threat of their acquisition by terrorist groups. Harris responded that "we know we don't want to have arms going to the rogue nations like China."
In popular culture
Katherine Harris was the subject of some skits on Saturday Night Live, in which she was played by Ana Gasteyer; she was also portrayed by actress Laura Dern in the 2008 film Recount, for which Dern won a Golden Globe.She is mentioned in Family guy Season 5 Episode16 'No chris left behind'. Harris is also referenced in one of filmmaker Kevin Smith's monologues for the DVD An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. Harris was also satirically portrayed by comedian Janeane Garofalo as "Senator Katherine Harris" on the Internet talk radio and podcast show The Majority Report with Sam Seder.
See also
Florida election recount
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
Profile piece at Washington Post
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1957 births
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American women politicians
2000 United States presidential election in Florida
Agnes Scott College people
Bartow High School alumni
Candidates in the 2006 United States elections
Christians from Florida
Conservatism in the United States
Female members of the United States House of Representatives
Florida Republicans
Harvard Kennedy School alumni
IBM employees
Living people
Members of the United States House of Representatives from Florida
People associated with the 2000 United States presidential election
People from Key West, Florida
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
Secretaries of State of Florida
Women in Florida politics
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[
"Alyson Kennedy (born June 11, 1950) is an American activist and member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). She was a candidate in the 2019 Dallas mayoral election. She was the SWP's nominee for Vice President in the 2008 United States presidential election, President in the 2016 United States presidential election as well as their nominee for President in 2020.\n\nBiography\n\nEarly life and candidacies \nOriginally from Indianapolis, Kennedy joined the socialist movement in 1973 in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked in coal mines in Alabama, Colorado, Utah, and West Virginia. Today she works at a Walmart in Dallas.\n\nIn 1977 she ran as the SWP candidate for mayor of Cleveland, Ohio against incumbent Republican Ralph Perk, garnering 1,225 votes and losing by a wide margin to Dennis Kucinich. She first joined the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1981, and was one of the leaders of a strike in Utah 2004, also being involved in litigation. In 2000, she ran for the United States Senate from Missouri as a certified write-in candidate. She and one other certified write-in candidate combined for 13 votes (out of nearly 2.4 million votes cast).\n\n2008 presidential election \nAs the vice-presidential nominee of two parties, Kennedy ran a campaign focused on the youth. There were two different candidates at the head of the ticket, Roger Calero and James Harris; Harris was an alternate in some states because Calero was constitutionally ineligible because he is a lawful permanent resident of the United States (holding a green card), and not a US citizen. They were the first pair to qualify for the ballot in Louisiana Calero/Kennedy won 5,127 votes and Harris/Kennedy 2,424.\n\n2016 presidential election \nOn February 12, 2016, Kennedy was announced as the nominee for president on the Socialist Workers Party ticket alongside Osborne Hart. Kennedy is the second woman to be the presidential nominee of the SWP, following Linda Jenness. She was on the ballot in eight states: Utah, Louisiana, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Tennessee, Washington and New Jersey. The ticket received 11,743 out of almost 137 million votes cast.\n\n2019 Dallas mayoral election \nIn January 2019, Kennedy declared her candidacy in the 2019 Dallas mayoral election, advocating for the improvement of the public transit system, a public jobs program to provide \"union-scale wages\", and for the Dallas Police Department to address claims of police brutality, pointing to the killing of Botham Jean as an example of such claims. She received 469 votes (0.58% of the vote) which placed her last among the candidates running.\n\n2020 presidential election\nIn February 2020, Kennedy was announced as her party's nominee for President. Her vice-presidential nominee is Malcolm Jarrett, an African-American activist and cook from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The two kicked off their campaign with speeches at campaign headquarters in Dallas on February 8. The ticket received 6,791 votes, out of 158 million votes cast.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \"Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. vice president\", The Militant, January 14, 2008 (accessed February 15, 2008).\n\n1950 births\nLiving people\nFemale candidates for Vice President of the United States\nFemale candidates for President of the United States\nAmerican communists\nCandidates in the 2016 United States presidential election\nCandidates in the 2020 United States presidential election\n2008 United States vice-presidential candidates\n21st-century American politicians\nSocialist Workers Party (United States) vice presidential nominees\nWomen in Missouri politics\nPoliticians from Cleveland\nPoliticians from Indianapolis\nSocialist Workers Party (United States) presidential nominees\n21st-century American women politicians\nTrade unionists from Indiana",
"David C. Harris (born March 26, 1948) an American politician and retired military officer from Illinois who is currently the director the Illinois Department of Revenue. He has previously served two tenures as a Republican member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1983–1993 and 2011–2019 and as the Adjutant General of Illinois from 1999 to 2003.\n\nEarly life and career\nHarris was born March 26, 1948, in Reading, Pennsylvania. He graduated from St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights. Harris graduated from Georgetown University. He became an associate member of the Chicago Board of Trade during the 1970s, but ceased trading prior to 2011. After a brief period of time in Pennsylvania, Harris moved to Arlington Heights, Illinois where he and his wife reside.\n\nMilitary career\nHarris joined the military in 1970 as a military policeman. In 1971, he attended Officer Candidate School and returned to serve as a platoon leader in the 471st Military Police Company of the District of Columbia Army National Guard. From 1974 until 1980, Harris served as a member of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. In 1980, he joined the Illinois Army National Guard as an assistant correctional officer with the 33rd Military Police Battalion in Chicago. He was promoted to Staff Provost Marshal at the State Area Command in Springfield, Illinois. In 1989, he graduated from the United States Army Command and General Staff College. That same year, he became the Chief Historian. In 1992, he was promoted to the Commander of the 44th Support Center. In 1997, he was promoted to Section Chief of the Selective Service.\n\nIn July 1999, George Ryan named Harris the Adjutant General of Illinois to succeed Richard Austin. As Adjutant General, he was the principal advisor to the Governor of Illinois on military matters and served as the Commanding General of both the Illinois Army and Air National Guard. His responsibility the Guard's daily operations and oversight of approximately 13,500 uniformed personnel. Harris was the first Adjutant General appointed under the criteria of Senate Bill 1227. Harris retired from the Illinois National Guard in 2003 and was succeeded as Adjutant General by Randal E. Thomas.\n\nHarris was inducted into the Infantry Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame at Fort Benning in 2002.\n\nPost military service\nHarris served in Iraq with the US Department of State as the deputy director and chief of staff of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.\n\nPolitical career\nHarris served on Ronald Reagan's national advance staff in the 1976 Republican primary, and presidential elections of 1980 and 1984. He was elected an alternate delegate to the 1984 Republican National Convention. In 1987, Ronald Reagan appointed Harris a member of the Intergovernmental Advisory Council on Education.\n\nFirst House tenure\nIn 1980, Illinois voters passed an amendment to the Illinois Constitution that abolished multi-member districts in the Illinois House of Representatives and the process of cumulative voting. In the 1982 general election, Harris ran as a Republican in the newly created 53rd district. His opponent in the general election was Democratic activist and Elk Grove Park Board commissioner Joan E. Brennan. The district was centered around Elk Grove Township. Harris defeated Brennan in the general election.\n\nHarris lost the 1992 Republican primary to Carolyn H. Krause, a former Mayor of Mount Prospect, Illinois. After his loss, he joined the Illinois Hospital & Health Systems Association as the Senior Vice President for Government Relations. In this role, he directed the association's government relations programs at both the state and federal levels.\n\nSecond House tenure\nIn 2010, Harris ran again for the Illinois House of Representatives against incumbent Democrat Mark Walker in the 66th district. The 66th district, which had significant overlap on what was the 53rd district, included parts of Elk Grove Village, Mount Prospect, Arlington Heights, Des Plaines, Rolling Meadows, and Schaumburg, Illinois. Harris defeated Walker in the heavily Republican 2010 election.\n\nAfter the decennial redistricting process, Harris was redistricted to the 53rd District in 2013. The 53rd house district includes parts of Arlington Heights, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Rolling Meadows, and Prospect Heights.\n\nIn the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, Harris was a delegate pledged to the presidential campaign of John Kasich.\n\nHe was a sponsor of Senate Bill 2861 which established the Illinois Code of Military Justice; state legislation analogous to the federal Uniform Code of Military Justice.\n\nOn October 4, 2017, Harris announced his retirement from the Illinois House citing frustration from the Illinois Budget Impasse. He was succeeded by Mark Walker, who he unseated eight years earlier.\n\nIllinois Department of Revenue\nIn 2018, Governor-elect J.B. Pritzker announced his intention to appoint Harris the Director of the Illinois Department of Revenue. Harris subsequently assumed office in this position.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nRepresentative David Harris (R) at the Illinois General Assembly\nBy session: , 97th\nState Representative David Harris constituency site\nDavid Harris for State Representative campaign site\n \nProfile at Ballotpedia\nProfile at OpenStates.org\n\n1948 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Reading, Pennsylvania\nMembers of the Illinois House of Representatives\nIllinois Republicans\nPeople from Arlington Heights, Illinois\nGeorgetown University alumni\nUnited States government people of the Iraq War\nAdjutants General of Illinois\n21st-century American politicians\nNational Guard of the United States generals\nIllinois National Guard personnel\nPennsylvania National Guard personnel"
] |
[
"Katherine Harris",
"2000 US presidential election",
"What was Harris's role in the 2000 US Presidential election?",
"Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida."
] |
C_77b23c9a2ade484190afa76bfb7b3cbb_1
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What was her occupation during the election?
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What was Katherine Harris's occupation during the election?
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Katherine Harris
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As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. The election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for. After several recounts were inconclusive and the laws governing recounts were unclear, Harris halted the recounting process. She certified that the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, had defeated the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, in the popular vote of Florida and thus certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida allowed Bush to win the election. Her ruling was upheld in the state circuit court, but was subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. (2000) In a per curiam decision, by a 7-2 vote, the Court in Bush v. Gore held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court held that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida. The decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining). Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. CANNOTANSWER
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Harris halted the recounting process.
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Katherine Harris (born April 5, 1957) is an American former politician. A Republican, Harris served in the Florida Senate from 1994 to 1998, as Secretary of State of Florida from 1999 to 2002, and as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Florida's 13th congressional district from 2003 to 2007. Harris lost her campaign in 2006 for a United States Senate seat from Florida.
In the 2000 presidential election, she received national attention for her role as the Florida's secretary of state during the state's election recount, certifying George W. Bush's narrow victory (537 votes) over Al Gore and awarding him the Florida electors, which gained him the national election.
Background and personal life
Harris was born in Key West, Florida, to one of the state's wealthiest and most politically influential families. She is the daughter of Harriett (Griffin) and George W. Harris Jr., who owned Citrus and Chemical Bank in Lakeland, Florida. Her maternal grandfather was Ben Hill Griffin Jr., a successful businessman in the citrus and cattle industries and a powerful figure in the state legislature. Shortly before his death in 1990, he was ranked as the 261st richest American on the Forbes 400 list. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at the University of Florida is named for him.
Harris' extended family has been active in Christian evangelism. Her grandfather was a Christian missionary in Africa, while her aunt and uncle were missionaries in India. They now head the Arab World Missions. Harris studied under Dr. Francis Schaeffer at a L'Abri Fellowship International center. Harris attended Greystone, an all-girls Christian camp at Asheville, North Carolina. She has said her faith is "the most important thing in my life." Harris has criticized the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for being too liberal; she was reared in the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America. She attends Calvary Chapel, a non-denominational charismatic church in Sarasota, Florida.
Harris married Swedish businessman Sven Anders Axel Ebbeson in 1996 and has one stepdaughter, Louise. Sven Ebbeson committed suicide in November 2013 at their home in Sarasota; he had reportedly been suffering a serious illness. In 2017, after admitting she'd become "a near recluse" since Ebbeson's death, she married Texas banker Richard Ware.
Education and career
Harris graduated from Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida, in 1975. She attended the University of Madrid in 1978. Harris received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, in 1979. She studied under Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer at the L'Abri community in Huemoz, Switzerland, near Lausanne. While in college she worked as an intern for U.S. Representative Andy Ireland.
Before entering politics, Harris worked as a marketing executive at IBM and a vice president of a commercial real estate firm.
Harris earned a M.P.A. from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1996.
Political career
Harris ran for the Florida Senate as a Republican in 1994 in one of the most expensive state races in Florida history to that time. Harris's political career was guided by Dan Berger, Adam Goodman, and Benjamin McKay, along with her campaign manager, David Lapides.
Florida Senate and Riscorp
Harris played a prominent role in introducing William Griffin (with whom she had a close personal relationship), the CEO of Riscorp, to various Florida legislators. In the 1994 state senate election, Sarasota-based Riscorp, Inc. made illegal contributions totaling $400,000 to dozens of political candidates and committees, including $20,600 to the Harris campaign.
Two years later, in 1996, Harris sponsored a bill "to block Riscorp competitors from getting a greater share of Florida workers' compensation market, [and] also pushed a proposal that would hurt a particular competitor." This issue later emerged during her campaign for Florida Secretary of State in 1998.
William Griffin eventually pleaded guilty to illegal campaign donations, among allegations of other serious wrongdoing at Riscorp, and served prison time in 1998. The election of Republican Jeb Bush as governor of Florida is considered to have been a major factor in stopping further state investigation into the Riscorp scandal. According to a Sun-Herald column from June 2005, "Harris denied any knowledge of the scheme, was never charged with any crime and was cleared of wrongdoing by a state investigator."
Secretary of State
Harris was elected Florida Secretary of State in 1998. She defeated then-incumbent Sandra Mortham in the Republican primary and won the general election against Democratic candidate, Karen Gievers, an attorney from Miami. A state constitutional change passed in the same year making the Secretary of State an appointed office made Harris the last person to be elected Secretary of State in Florida.
Harris abruptly resigned in August 2002 while campaigning for Congress when it was discovered that she had violated Florida's "resign to run", which stated "...No officer may qualify as a candidate for another public office, whether state, district, county or municipal, if the terms or any part thereof run concurrently with each other, without resigning from the office he or she presently holds." Since the start of her Congressional term (January 3, 2003) would overlap with the end of her term as Secretary of State (January 7, 2003), she was required to submit a letter of recognition. The law allowed candidates to have the resignation be effective up until the term for the new office began. Since Harris failed to do so, she was required to resign immediately. Harris said the oversight was unintentional. She said that she thought because Florida voters had approved a constitutional amendment that made the position of Secretary of State an appointed office rather than an elected office, the law did not apply to her situation.
International travel
During her first 22 months in office, Harris spent more than $106,000 for travel, more than the governor or any other cabinet officer. She visited eight countries on ten foreign trips.
In early 2001, Florida Senate leaders eliminated the $3.4 million that Harris had budgeted for international relations for the year, assigning it instead to Enterprise Florida, the state's economic development agency. However, Florida House Leader Tom Feeney said that he disagreed with the Senate and believed that Harris was an able advocate to foreign countries. After the House refused to agree with the proposed budget action, the Senate agreed to restore the money; however, it insisted on a review committee, appointed by Senate President John McKay, Feeney, and Governor Jeb Bush, to evaluate all of Harris' expenditures on international affairs since July 1, 1999, and produce a report.
2000 U.S. presidential election
As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. She was involved in purging many individuals from the voter rolls , and the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for.
After several recounts were inconclusive , Harris halted the recounting process, arguing that the laws governing recounts were unclear. The official vote totals showed the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, as the winner of the statewide popular vote in Florida, and so Harris certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida would allow Bush to obtain a majority in the Electoral College and win the election. Her certification was upheld in the state circuit court, but subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court.
The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (2000). In a per curiam decision, by a 7–2 vote, the Court held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, it held, by a 5–4 vote, that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida.
This decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, thus defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining).
Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. It was later revealed that, unimpressed with her performance in the media spotlight of the recount, the Bush Campaign had assigned a staff member to her, essentially as a handler.
United States Congresswoman
In 2002, Harris ran against Sarasota Attorney Jan Schneider for the congressional district vacated by retiring Republican Rep. Dan Miller, winning by 10 percentage points in this solidly Republican district, a victory helped with one of the biggest first term campaign fund raising efforts in the history of this district and substantial support from the Bush family.
Harris considered running for the seat of retiring Senator Bob Graham in 2004 but was reportedly dissuaded by the Bush White House to allow Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez to run instead. Martinez went on to narrowly beat challenger Betty Castor. Harris ran for re-election to her House seat in 2004; she was re-elected with a margin almost identical to her first win.
In a 2004 speech in Venice, Florida, Harris claimed that a "Middle Eastern" man was arrested for attempting to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Indiana; Carmel Mayor James Brainard and a spokesman for Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan said they had no knowledge of such a plot. Brainard said he had never spoken to Harris.
During a 2004 campaign stop in Sarasota, a local resident, Barry Seltzer, "tr[ied] to 'intimidate' a group of Harris supporters" by menacing Harris and her supporters with his automobile. Witnesses described Seltzer as having swerved off the road and onto the sidewalk, directing it at Harris and her supporters. Nobody was injured in the incident. Seltzer, who claimed he was "exercising [his] political expression," was eventually arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
MZM incident
In 2005 and 2006, a major corporate campaign donor to Harris, Mitchell Wade (founder of defense contractor MZM), was implicated in several bribery scandals. Wade had bundled together and donated to Harris's campaign $32,000 in contributions from his employees at MZM, Inc., then reimbursed those employees for the contributions. Regarding this issue, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Wainstein said that Harris did not appear to know the donations were obtained illegally. Harris has maintained she had no personal knowledge that her campaign was given illegal contributions. Wade acknowledged that the donations to the Harris campaign were illegal and were part of an attempt to influence Harris to MZM's benefit.
Documents filed with Wade's plea say that he took Harris to dinner in March 2005, a year after the illegal contributions, where they discussed the possibility of another fundraiser and the possibility of getting funding for a Navy counterintelligence program placed in Harris's district. Harris sent a letter on April 26, 2005, to defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman C. W. Bill Young, in which Harris sought $10 million for a Navy project backed by Wade. In the letter, Harris emphasized the importance of the project, asking that it be added to her list of five priorities and identifying it as her new No. 3. Harris later released the April 26, 2005, letter for legal scrutiny, but neither she nor Young would turn over the request form (RFP) used for the proposal.
CQPolitics noted "Harris's former political strategist, Ed Rollins, spoke on the record about the dinner and detailed a meal that cost $2,800, far in excess of the $50 limit on gifts that members of Congress are allowed to accept" at the Washington restaurant Citronelle. Wade and Harris discussed MZM's desire for a $10 million appropriation, and Wade offered to host a fundraiser for Harris's 2006 Senate campaign. Regarding the MZM contributions, the Sentinel article goes on to say "The Justice Department has said Wade, who personally handed many of the checks to Harris, did not tell Harris the contributions were illegal". Regarding the expensive meal, the article quotes Harris as saying that she personally had only a "beverage and appetizer" worth less than "$100".
Rollins said that he had conducted a thorough internal investigation into Harris's ties to MZM in hopes of finding conclusive proof of her innocence; but when he could not, he and other advisers, including her lawyer, urged her to drop her candidacy rather than risk federal corruption charges. Although he did not believe Harris intentionally broke any laws, "her story kept changing. Our great concern was that you get into trouble when you don't tell the same story twice ... Maybe you don't think you did anything wrong, but then maybe you start getting questioned about it and so forth, and you may perjure yourself. ... Unlike Cunningham, I don't think she set out to violate the law, but I think she was very careless. She heard whatever she wanted to hear, but we could find no evidence whatsoever that this was a project going into her district."
Although Rollins recalled discussing the $2,800 meal with Harris, Harris told the Orlando Sentinel on April 19, 2006, that the cost of the meal was "news to me", and that her campaign had since "reimbursed" the restaurant for the cost of the meal. According to the reporter, when questioned as to why she would reimburse the restaurant for a meal that had been paid for by MZM, Harris abruptly terminated the interview, and her spokesman later called and requested unsuccessfully that the story not be printed. The next day, Harris's campaign issued a statement that she had believed her campaign had reimbursed the restaurant, and that she had donated $100 "which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer". Harris also asserted that most of the cost of the meal was from Wade ordering several unopened bottles of wine to take home, although the management of the restaurant denies ever allowing anyone to take unopened bottles of wine off the premises, saying "Why would we jeopardize our liquor license for the sake of selling a couple bottles of wine?"
In the weeks following the expensive meal, former senior Harris staffers claimed that "they initially rejected a defense contractor's $10 million appropriation request last year but reversed course after being instructed by Harris to approve it." In May 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Christopher Ingram acknowledged that she had also had a previous dinner with Wade in the same restaurant in March 2004, when the $32,000 in illegal donations had been given to her campaign. Ingram told the press that he did not know how much that meal cost, but that a charitable donation of an unknown amount had been given to a charity whose name he did not know, equivalent to her share of the meal. "She takes responsibility for the oversight that there was no reimbursement," he said.
Mona Tate Yost, an aide to Harris, left to work for MZM during the time Wade was pressing Harris to secure federal funding (April or May 2005). On July 17, 2006, Ed Rollins confirmed that Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents had recently questioned her about the $32,000 in donations. Rollins noted: "I assume more [interviews] will be coming, though. They were very serious." On September 7, 2006, Federal investigators questioned Jim Dornan, who quit as Harris's campaign manager the previous November.
2006 Senate race
Overview
On June 7, 2005, with support from her new campaign advisors of Ed Rollins and Jim Dornan, Harris announced her candidacy for the 2006 Florida United States Senate election, challenging Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Both lackluster fundraising relative to Nelson and controversy over campaign contributions from MZM caused Harris to fall far behind in all polls by May 2006.
Late in the primary race, Republican contender Will McBride polled 31 points behind Nelson in a hypothetical election against him, while Harris polled 33 points behind Nelson in the same poll. Harris was still popular among Republican voters and won the September 5 primary over McBride and two other challengers with approximately 50% of the total vote.
Despite Harris's support of many Republican causes and her previous statewide victories, some party leaders expressed doubt about her statewide appeal:
In May 2006, Florida Governor Jeb Bush questioned Harris's ability to win the general election and encouraged others to challenge her in the primary.
Karl Rove expressed doubts about her statewide appeal.
National Republicans openly criticized her campaign and tried to convince other GOP candidates to challenge Harris in the primary.
Florida state House of Representatives Speaker Allan Bense declined the candidacy on May 11 despite public courting by many leaders including Governor Bush.
Conservative pundit and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough was also unsuccessfully recruited to enter the race. Departing Harris aides claim that Harris called potential Scarborough supporters and raised the death of an aide in order to prevent his entry into the race. Scarborough later told Nelson that drawing Harris as an opponent in the race made him "the luckiest man in Washington".
By late July 2006, Harris had gone through three campaign managers and her campaign was floundering. At that time, it was disclosed that state Republican Party leaders had told Harris they would not support her because she could not win in the general election.
Financial problems plagued Harris' Senate campaign from the start. During the primary, it was clear that the incumbent Senator Nelson had a substantial financial advantage.
On the March 15, 2006, edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Harris pledged to spend $10 million of her own money, which she said was all of her inheritance, on her campaign. She also stated that her run was dedicated to the memory of her father.
Despite her promise, the $10 million never materialized. Reports surfaced that Harris would not actually receive the inheritance from her father, who instead left his entire estate to her mother. She donated $3 million to her campaign, but later took back $100,000, fueling speculation that she would be unable to donate the promised amount.
In October, Harris announced that she was trying to sell her house in Washington to raise money for her campaign, but the home was not publicly listed for sale and no sale was ever announced.
Nelson defeated Harris by more than one million votes. Harris received less than 39% of the vote.
Staff resignations
In late February 2006, in the midst of revelations surrounding Mitchell Wade's illegal contributions, Harris's campaign finance director and her campaign treasurer both resigned. On April 1, 2006, Harris's top campaign advisor, pollster and campaign manager all resigned with a half-dozen other staffers. Republican pollster and consultant David Johnson said, "I've never seen staffers go like this. It's just imploding."
In early April 2006, Harris told the Tampa Tribune that some of her ex-campaign staffers and the national Republican party were deliberately sabotaging her campaign by "putting knives in her back" and had warned her that if she did not back out of the campaign, she would get an "April surprise". Former campaign staffer Ed Rollins said "They were all good professionals ... There was no backstabbing. It's insulting that she would even say that. If she wants to know what went wrong with the campaign, maybe she needs to take a good look in the mirror."
In June, the Harris campaign received a legal bill for thousands of dollars that contained a reference to "DOJ subpoena". Later, an ex-aide told the Associated Press that Harris had received a grand jury subpoena from federal investigators, but kept it from her top advisers, prompting several staff members to quit when they found out. On June 8, 2006, Harris's fourth chief of staff, Fred Asbell, left in order to pursue a "business opportunity". Asbell said he'd "greatly enjoyed" his time with the campaign and he would remain in a consultant position. On July 12, 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Chris Christopher Ingram left the campaign. The next day, Harris received resignations from Campaign Manager Glenn Hodas, Field Director Pat Thomas, Political Director Brian Brooks and Deputy Field Director John K. Byers, while Travel Aide Kyle Johnson and Field Director Mike Norris declined to leave, citing loyalty to Harris. Hodas cited Harris's "tantrums" and "increasingly erratic behavior" as his reasons for leaving. An anonymous campaign worker described Harris as "very difficult to work with. The more that we put her out there, the more she shot herself in the foot."
In late August, Harris lost another key staffer, Rhyan Metzler, in the wake of a disastrous political rally at Orlando Executive Airport. Only 40 people showed up for the event, and Harris blamed the paltry turnout in part on a last-minute change in location. She claimed that a tree fell on the hangar that was originally scheduled to hold the rally, forcing her campaign to switch to another hangar. Airport officials, however, stated that not only had no trees fallen, but also that there are no trees as they get in the way of the airplanes; further adding that the event in fact took place in the hangar that Harris's campaign had originally booked. Harris's campaign blamed Metzler for the comments Harris made after the rally. On August 31, 2006, Harris was interviewed on Hardball with Chris Matthews, where she responded to the criticisms from her former staffers with "We have their email traffic, we know what was behind all that, we know who's been paid and who isn't."
Lack of Republican support
The Pensacola News Journal suggested that Harris might withdraw from the Senate race after winning a primary victory, thereby allowing the Republicans to nominate another candidate, such as Tom Gallagher, to run against Bill Nelson.
In August, Katherine Harris touted political endorsements from fellow Republican lawmakers on her campaign web site. However, some of those cited claim that they never endorsed her. This conflict resulted in several Republican congressmen calling the Harris campaign to complain after the St. Petersburg Times notified them of the endorsements listed on Harris's Web site. A short time later, their names were removed without comment from Harris's Web site.
Of Harris's three primary opponents, only Will McBride endorsed her candidacy for the general election. In the first few days after the primary, a number of Republican nominees such as Charlie Crist and Tom Lee went on a statewide unity tour with Gov. Bush. Harris was not invited; Republicans said the tour was only for nominees to statewide offices. Harris claimed Bush would campaign with her sometime in the two months before the election, but the governor's office denied this.
President Bush did not make public appearances or private meetings with Harris before the primary. He did, however, appear with her at a fundraiser on September 21 in Tampa.
When it came time for newspapers to make their op-ed endorsements, all 22 of Florida's major daily newspapers supported Senator Nelson. The only endorsement Harris received was from the Polk County Democrat, a newspaper in Bartow which publishes four days out of the week.
Religious convictions
Harris was a headline speaker at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church's "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference held in Ft. Lauderdale on March 17–18, 2006. The conference web site invited attendees to attend in order to "reclaim this nation for Christ." The stated mission of ReclaimAmerica.org is "To inform, equip, motivate, and support Christians; enabling them to defend and implement the Biblical principles on which our country was founded." As part of her speech, Harris urged conferees to "win back America for God." Her appearance was noted in a Rolling Stone article covering the conference.
In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness on August 24, 2006, Harris called for Christians to vote on religious lines. She said,
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said she was "disgusted" by the comments "and deeply disappointed in Representative Harris personally," adding "clearly shows that she does not deserve to be a representative." Two of Harris' primary opponents denounced her statements, Republican Will McBride (an attorney and son of a pastor) stated "I'm a Christian, and I'm a Republican, and I don't share her views. There are people of other faiths and backgrounds of outstanding integrity who know how to tell the truth." Real estate developer Peter Monroe, another GOP primary opponent, called on her to quit the race and resign from Congress. He called her suggestion that non-Christian voters are ignorant of morality when voting as "contemptible, arrogant and wicked."
On August 26, 2006, Harris's campaign released a "Statement of Clarification", that stated, "In the interview, Harris was speaking to a Christian audience, addressing a common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government. Addressing this Christian publication, Harris provided a statement that explains her deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values." The press release went on to mention her past support of Israel and quoted her Jewish campaign manager Bryan G. Rudnick, who stated "As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I know that she encourages people of all faiths to engage in government so that our country can continue to thrive on the principles set forth by our founding fathers, without malice towards anyone." At an appearance at an Orlando gun show that same day, she said "it breaks my heart" to think people understood her comments as bigoted. When asked if she thought the Founding Fathers intended the nation to have secular laws she replied,
On October 3, 2006, Harris participated in a prayer service via phone call. In one instance, she called for the elimination of the separation of church and state when she said,
Harris then went on and prayed for Jews to be converted to Christianity.
Replacements in the 13th Congressional District
Vern Buchanan was the Republican nominee and Christine Jennings the Democratic nominee to replace Harris in the 2006 election. The race had been ranked as "leaning Democratic" by CQ Politics, but Buchanan scored a very narrow victory, winning the election by a few hundred votes.
Political positions and voting record
Harris is a conservative on most issues. She is anti-abortion and has voted against embryonic stem cell research. She opposes oil-drilling in Florida's coastal waters. Harris supported reforming Social Security to include private accounts. She has voted in favor of granting legal status to fetuses via the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. She supports tax cuts and the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which restricts bankruptcy filings by consumers. Harris is also in favor of welfare reform, school vouchers, the Patriot Act, the Flag Desecration Amendment, the Federal Marriage Amendment, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a televised debate with Nelson on November 1, however, she repeatedly declined to say whether she would still support the Iraq War Resolution knowing that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In an earlier debate with Nelson, Harris was asked to comment on trade of arms with foreign nations and the potential threat of their acquisition by terrorist groups. Harris responded that "we know we don't want to have arms going to the rogue nations like China."
In popular culture
Katherine Harris was the subject of some skits on Saturday Night Live, in which she was played by Ana Gasteyer; she was also portrayed by actress Laura Dern in the 2008 film Recount, for which Dern won a Golden Globe.She is mentioned in Family guy Season 5 Episode16 'No chris left behind'. Harris is also referenced in one of filmmaker Kevin Smith's monologues for the DVD An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. Harris was also satirically portrayed by comedian Janeane Garofalo as "Senator Katherine Harris" on the Internet talk radio and podcast show The Majority Report with Sam Seder.
See also
Florida election recount
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
Profile piece at Washington Post
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1957 births
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American women politicians
2000 United States presidential election in Florida
Agnes Scott College people
Bartow High School alumni
Candidates in the 2006 United States elections
Christians from Florida
Conservatism in the United States
Female members of the United States House of Representatives
Florida Republicans
Harvard Kennedy School alumni
IBM employees
Living people
Members of the United States House of Representatives from Florida
People associated with the 2000 United States presidential election
People from Key West, Florida
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
Secretaries of State of Florida
Women in Florida politics
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"Ingrid Stahmer (born Ingrid Ulrici: 16 September 1942 – 30 August 2020) was a German politician (SPD). She briefly served as vice mayor of Berlin.\n\nIn 1997, as the popular Berlin senator (councillor) responsible for schools, youth and sport she found herself defending the government's contentious spelling reforms to the press. Two years later she withdrew from politics and embarked on a career as an \"organisation and process consultant\" also identified as a \"group dynamicist\" (\"Gruppendynamikerin\").\n\nLife\nIngrid Ulrici was born in Mittersill, a small town some distance upriver from Salzburg and far from her mother's Berlin home. The remote location of her birth resulted from the disruption caused by the war. Many years later she would tell an interviewer that her parents had been planning for the birth of a son whom they intended to name Günter. Academically out-competing the boys became a theme of her time at school. Her father was killed in the war and she returned with her mother to Berlin where, in 1946, her mother remarried. The family moved to Bremen, which after the end of the war in May 1945 had become part of the British occupation zone. In May 1949 the British occupation zone was merged with the US occupation zone and the French occupation zone (but NOT the Soviet occupation zone) and relaunched as the US-sponsored German Federal Republic. In 1962, by this time the only girl in an otherwise all-male cohort, Ulrici passed her school final exams (\"Abitur\") which opened the way to higher education. She moved on to what was then known as the \"Welfare Academy\" (\"Wohlfahrtsschule\") in Bremen where she studied for and obtained a degree-level qualification in social work. A further period of study between 1971 and 1974 would see this complemented by a training qualification in Group Dynamics.\n\nShe joined the Social Democratic Party in 1964. The next year she married Günter Stahmer, who conspicuously would never share his wife's appetite for a high public profile. Between 1966 and 1971 she worked in the social services in Berlin's Charlottenburg district (part of the British occupation zone in a divided city). In 1971 she took a job with the Berlin Senate (city council), working as head of the working group for children's daycare centres in the section responsible for administration of family, youth and sport matters. Her responsibilities included overseeing the integration of handicapped and foreign children into the mainstream centres. During this period Ingrid Stahmer drew particular inspiration from the example of the Berlin senator Ilse Reichel-Koß. As the senator responsible for the department in which Stahmer was employed, Reichel-Koß was able to encourage Stahmer to take greater political responsibility.\n\nPublic office\nWithin the local party she became department chairman for Charlottenburg in 1978, being also a member of the district party executive and a delegate to the regional party conference. In 1981 she was elected to the Berlin city council, and was appointed as a vice city mayor and senator with responsibility for health and social welfare matters. She retained these offices until the Berlin city council election of 29 January 1989. Between 1985 and 1989 she topped the party poll in the Charlottenburg district for elections to the District Delegates Assembly (\"Bezirksverordnetenversammlung\" / BVV). During these years she combined her other duties with her role as chair of the regional party executive.\n\nThe political backdrop changed dramatically with \"The Turnaround\" of 1989, the political changes in East Germany in March 1990 and the formal reunification of the country and of its capital in October 1990. On 16 March 1989 Stahmer was elected senator with responsibility for health and social welfare matters and became vice city mayor in the new (still West) Berlin city council under the leadership of her SPD colleague, Walter Momper.\n\nFollowing reunification in October 1990, the East Berlin \"Magistrat\" and the West Berlin senate were merged. In response to the resignation of Senator Anne Klein, Stahmer's senatorial remit was extended to include Women, Young People and Family, until the local election of December 1990, which was timed to coincide with Germany's first post-reunification general election. In Berlin the SPD received approximately 30% of the popular vote, placing it second to the CDU with approximately 40%. This result broadly echoed the national election: no party was in a position to run the city without a coalition partner, and what followed for Berlin was a governing \"Grand coalition\" of the CDU and the SPD, under the leadership of Eberhard Diepgen as governing mayor. In Diepgen's team Ingid Stahmer gave up the health part of her portfolio, but retained the core of her earlier portfolio as senator for Social Welfare.\n\nIn 1994 her SPD colleague in the Berlin senate Thomas Krüger was elected to the Bundestag: in the Berlin senate Stahmer took on his Youth and Family portfolio, also retaining her existing Social Welfare remit.\n\nIn the run-up to the Berlin local elections of October 1995 Stahmer stood for election as the party's lead candidate (\"Spitzenkandidat\") – potentially the SPD candidate for governing mayor. Her principal rival was Walter Momper who had already served as governing mayor of West Berlin during the turbulent prelude to reunification. The campaigning approach of both contenders for the backing of party colleagues in the party poll was at times strangely consensual. In the event it was Ingrid Stahmer who won what amounted to the party nomination for the post of governing mayor. However, the political mood reflected in the local elections that followed continued to favour the CDU.\n\nThe local elections of October 1995 produced a disappointing result for the SPD in Berlin, but a \"Grand coalition\" of the CDU and the SPD continued to run the local administration. Stahmer's portfolio changed: between 1995 and 1999 she served as the senator for Schools, Young People and Sport. In 1999 she resigned from the senate and withdrew from her role as a frontline SPD city politician. Since 2000 she has worked on a self-employed basis in various consultancy functions.\n\nReferences\n\nPoliticians from Bremen\nMayors of Berlin\nSenators of Berlin\n20th-century German politicians\nSocial Democratic Party of Germany politicians\n\n1942 births\n2020 deaths",
"Ángela Freitas is an East Timorese politician, who is the leader of the Timorese Workers' Party and ran in the 2017 East Timorese presidential election.\n\nBiography\nWhile a student, Ángela Freitas was tortured by the Indonesian Army during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. In 1988, she worked for the Institute of Human Rights within Indonesia, moving on to work for Amnesty International in 1989 as secretary of human rights. In the 1990s she fled to Australia, where she studied at the University of Queensland. Graduating with qualifications in political science and medicine, she started work at a hospital in Brisbane. This included a secondment into the Royal Australian Navy, where she worked on board a patrol vessel which intercepted refugee boats.\n\nFollowing the end of the Indonesian occupation in 1999, she returned to East Timor. Freitas became the leader of the Timorese Workers' Party, a party founded in 1974 by her father Paulo Freitas. In 2001, she was placed in a men's prison along with her children, accused of the murder of an Australian. After two weeks, she was released without charge, the victim was never found. Freitas attempted to run during the 2012 East Timorese presidential election, but her candidacy was rejected by the President of the Supreme Court after she failed to meet the criteria to stand. She was blamed in 2004 by the East Timor Government for a series of protests against President Xanana Gusmão.\n\nAfter undergoing surgery in Bali in 2014, she was arrested upon her return to East Timor. Freitas was arrested again the following year, after allegedly supporting Mauk Moruk. Freitas ran once again for President during the 2017 East Timorese presidential election. She finished seventh in the polling, with a total of 4,353 votes, equivalent to a 0.84% share.\n\nReferences\n\nLiving people\nEast Timorese politicians\nUniversity of Queensland alumni\nRoyal Australian Navy personnel\nEast Timorese women in politics\nEast Timorese torture victims\nYear of birth missing (living people)"
] |
[
"Katherine Harris",
"2000 US presidential election",
"What was Harris's role in the 2000 US Presidential election?",
"Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida.",
"What was her occupation during the election?",
"Harris halted the recounting process."
] |
C_77b23c9a2ade484190afa76bfb7b3cbb_1
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Why did she stop the process?
| 3 |
Why did Katherine Harris stop the recounting process in the 2000 election?
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Katherine Harris
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As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. The election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for. After several recounts were inconclusive and the laws governing recounts were unclear, Harris halted the recounting process. She certified that the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, had defeated the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, in the popular vote of Florida and thus certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida allowed Bush to win the election. Her ruling was upheld in the state circuit court, but was subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. (2000) In a per curiam decision, by a 7-2 vote, the Court in Bush v. Gore held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court held that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida. The decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining). Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. CANNOTANSWER
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several recounts were inconclusive and the laws governing recounts were unclear,
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Katherine Harris (born April 5, 1957) is an American former politician. A Republican, Harris served in the Florida Senate from 1994 to 1998, as Secretary of State of Florida from 1999 to 2002, and as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Florida's 13th congressional district from 2003 to 2007. Harris lost her campaign in 2006 for a United States Senate seat from Florida.
In the 2000 presidential election, she received national attention for her role as the Florida's secretary of state during the state's election recount, certifying George W. Bush's narrow victory (537 votes) over Al Gore and awarding him the Florida electors, which gained him the national election.
Background and personal life
Harris was born in Key West, Florida, to one of the state's wealthiest and most politically influential families. She is the daughter of Harriett (Griffin) and George W. Harris Jr., who owned Citrus and Chemical Bank in Lakeland, Florida. Her maternal grandfather was Ben Hill Griffin Jr., a successful businessman in the citrus and cattle industries and a powerful figure in the state legislature. Shortly before his death in 1990, he was ranked as the 261st richest American on the Forbes 400 list. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at the University of Florida is named for him.
Harris' extended family has been active in Christian evangelism. Her grandfather was a Christian missionary in Africa, while her aunt and uncle were missionaries in India. They now head the Arab World Missions. Harris studied under Dr. Francis Schaeffer at a L'Abri Fellowship International center. Harris attended Greystone, an all-girls Christian camp at Asheville, North Carolina. She has said her faith is "the most important thing in my life." Harris has criticized the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for being too liberal; she was reared in the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America. She attends Calvary Chapel, a non-denominational charismatic church in Sarasota, Florida.
Harris married Swedish businessman Sven Anders Axel Ebbeson in 1996 and has one stepdaughter, Louise. Sven Ebbeson committed suicide in November 2013 at their home in Sarasota; he had reportedly been suffering a serious illness. In 2017, after admitting she'd become "a near recluse" since Ebbeson's death, she married Texas banker Richard Ware.
Education and career
Harris graduated from Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida, in 1975. She attended the University of Madrid in 1978. Harris received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, in 1979. She studied under Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer at the L'Abri community in Huemoz, Switzerland, near Lausanne. While in college she worked as an intern for U.S. Representative Andy Ireland.
Before entering politics, Harris worked as a marketing executive at IBM and a vice president of a commercial real estate firm.
Harris earned a M.P.A. from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1996.
Political career
Harris ran for the Florida Senate as a Republican in 1994 in one of the most expensive state races in Florida history to that time. Harris's political career was guided by Dan Berger, Adam Goodman, and Benjamin McKay, along with her campaign manager, David Lapides.
Florida Senate and Riscorp
Harris played a prominent role in introducing William Griffin (with whom she had a close personal relationship), the CEO of Riscorp, to various Florida legislators. In the 1994 state senate election, Sarasota-based Riscorp, Inc. made illegal contributions totaling $400,000 to dozens of political candidates and committees, including $20,600 to the Harris campaign.
Two years later, in 1996, Harris sponsored a bill "to block Riscorp competitors from getting a greater share of Florida workers' compensation market, [and] also pushed a proposal that would hurt a particular competitor." This issue later emerged during her campaign for Florida Secretary of State in 1998.
William Griffin eventually pleaded guilty to illegal campaign donations, among allegations of other serious wrongdoing at Riscorp, and served prison time in 1998. The election of Republican Jeb Bush as governor of Florida is considered to have been a major factor in stopping further state investigation into the Riscorp scandal. According to a Sun-Herald column from June 2005, "Harris denied any knowledge of the scheme, was never charged with any crime and was cleared of wrongdoing by a state investigator."
Secretary of State
Harris was elected Florida Secretary of State in 1998. She defeated then-incumbent Sandra Mortham in the Republican primary and won the general election against Democratic candidate, Karen Gievers, an attorney from Miami. A state constitutional change passed in the same year making the Secretary of State an appointed office made Harris the last person to be elected Secretary of State in Florida.
Harris abruptly resigned in August 2002 while campaigning for Congress when it was discovered that she had violated Florida's "resign to run", which stated "...No officer may qualify as a candidate for another public office, whether state, district, county or municipal, if the terms or any part thereof run concurrently with each other, without resigning from the office he or she presently holds." Since the start of her Congressional term (January 3, 2003) would overlap with the end of her term as Secretary of State (January 7, 2003), she was required to submit a letter of recognition. The law allowed candidates to have the resignation be effective up until the term for the new office began. Since Harris failed to do so, she was required to resign immediately. Harris said the oversight was unintentional. She said that she thought because Florida voters had approved a constitutional amendment that made the position of Secretary of State an appointed office rather than an elected office, the law did not apply to her situation.
International travel
During her first 22 months in office, Harris spent more than $106,000 for travel, more than the governor or any other cabinet officer. She visited eight countries on ten foreign trips.
In early 2001, Florida Senate leaders eliminated the $3.4 million that Harris had budgeted for international relations for the year, assigning it instead to Enterprise Florida, the state's economic development agency. However, Florida House Leader Tom Feeney said that he disagreed with the Senate and believed that Harris was an able advocate to foreign countries. After the House refused to agree with the proposed budget action, the Senate agreed to restore the money; however, it insisted on a review committee, appointed by Senate President John McKay, Feeney, and Governor Jeb Bush, to evaluate all of Harris' expenditures on international affairs since July 1, 1999, and produce a report.
2000 U.S. presidential election
As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. She was involved in purging many individuals from the voter rolls , and the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for.
After several recounts were inconclusive , Harris halted the recounting process, arguing that the laws governing recounts were unclear. The official vote totals showed the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, as the winner of the statewide popular vote in Florida, and so Harris certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida would allow Bush to obtain a majority in the Electoral College and win the election. Her certification was upheld in the state circuit court, but subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court.
The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (2000). In a per curiam decision, by a 7–2 vote, the Court held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, it held, by a 5–4 vote, that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida.
This decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, thus defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining).
Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. It was later revealed that, unimpressed with her performance in the media spotlight of the recount, the Bush Campaign had assigned a staff member to her, essentially as a handler.
United States Congresswoman
In 2002, Harris ran against Sarasota Attorney Jan Schneider for the congressional district vacated by retiring Republican Rep. Dan Miller, winning by 10 percentage points in this solidly Republican district, a victory helped with one of the biggest first term campaign fund raising efforts in the history of this district and substantial support from the Bush family.
Harris considered running for the seat of retiring Senator Bob Graham in 2004 but was reportedly dissuaded by the Bush White House to allow Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez to run instead. Martinez went on to narrowly beat challenger Betty Castor. Harris ran for re-election to her House seat in 2004; she was re-elected with a margin almost identical to her first win.
In a 2004 speech in Venice, Florida, Harris claimed that a "Middle Eastern" man was arrested for attempting to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Indiana; Carmel Mayor James Brainard and a spokesman for Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan said they had no knowledge of such a plot. Brainard said he had never spoken to Harris.
During a 2004 campaign stop in Sarasota, a local resident, Barry Seltzer, "tr[ied] to 'intimidate' a group of Harris supporters" by menacing Harris and her supporters with his automobile. Witnesses described Seltzer as having swerved off the road and onto the sidewalk, directing it at Harris and her supporters. Nobody was injured in the incident. Seltzer, who claimed he was "exercising [his] political expression," was eventually arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
MZM incident
In 2005 and 2006, a major corporate campaign donor to Harris, Mitchell Wade (founder of defense contractor MZM), was implicated in several bribery scandals. Wade had bundled together and donated to Harris's campaign $32,000 in contributions from his employees at MZM, Inc., then reimbursed those employees for the contributions. Regarding this issue, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Wainstein said that Harris did not appear to know the donations were obtained illegally. Harris has maintained she had no personal knowledge that her campaign was given illegal contributions. Wade acknowledged that the donations to the Harris campaign were illegal and were part of an attempt to influence Harris to MZM's benefit.
Documents filed with Wade's plea say that he took Harris to dinner in March 2005, a year after the illegal contributions, where they discussed the possibility of another fundraiser and the possibility of getting funding for a Navy counterintelligence program placed in Harris's district. Harris sent a letter on April 26, 2005, to defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman C. W. Bill Young, in which Harris sought $10 million for a Navy project backed by Wade. In the letter, Harris emphasized the importance of the project, asking that it be added to her list of five priorities and identifying it as her new No. 3. Harris later released the April 26, 2005, letter for legal scrutiny, but neither she nor Young would turn over the request form (RFP) used for the proposal.
CQPolitics noted "Harris's former political strategist, Ed Rollins, spoke on the record about the dinner and detailed a meal that cost $2,800, far in excess of the $50 limit on gifts that members of Congress are allowed to accept" at the Washington restaurant Citronelle. Wade and Harris discussed MZM's desire for a $10 million appropriation, and Wade offered to host a fundraiser for Harris's 2006 Senate campaign. Regarding the MZM contributions, the Sentinel article goes on to say "The Justice Department has said Wade, who personally handed many of the checks to Harris, did not tell Harris the contributions were illegal". Regarding the expensive meal, the article quotes Harris as saying that she personally had only a "beverage and appetizer" worth less than "$100".
Rollins said that he had conducted a thorough internal investigation into Harris's ties to MZM in hopes of finding conclusive proof of her innocence; but when he could not, he and other advisers, including her lawyer, urged her to drop her candidacy rather than risk federal corruption charges. Although he did not believe Harris intentionally broke any laws, "her story kept changing. Our great concern was that you get into trouble when you don't tell the same story twice ... Maybe you don't think you did anything wrong, but then maybe you start getting questioned about it and so forth, and you may perjure yourself. ... Unlike Cunningham, I don't think she set out to violate the law, but I think she was very careless. She heard whatever she wanted to hear, but we could find no evidence whatsoever that this was a project going into her district."
Although Rollins recalled discussing the $2,800 meal with Harris, Harris told the Orlando Sentinel on April 19, 2006, that the cost of the meal was "news to me", and that her campaign had since "reimbursed" the restaurant for the cost of the meal. According to the reporter, when questioned as to why she would reimburse the restaurant for a meal that had been paid for by MZM, Harris abruptly terminated the interview, and her spokesman later called and requested unsuccessfully that the story not be printed. The next day, Harris's campaign issued a statement that she had believed her campaign had reimbursed the restaurant, and that she had donated $100 "which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer". Harris also asserted that most of the cost of the meal was from Wade ordering several unopened bottles of wine to take home, although the management of the restaurant denies ever allowing anyone to take unopened bottles of wine off the premises, saying "Why would we jeopardize our liquor license for the sake of selling a couple bottles of wine?"
In the weeks following the expensive meal, former senior Harris staffers claimed that "they initially rejected a defense contractor's $10 million appropriation request last year but reversed course after being instructed by Harris to approve it." In May 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Christopher Ingram acknowledged that she had also had a previous dinner with Wade in the same restaurant in March 2004, when the $32,000 in illegal donations had been given to her campaign. Ingram told the press that he did not know how much that meal cost, but that a charitable donation of an unknown amount had been given to a charity whose name he did not know, equivalent to her share of the meal. "She takes responsibility for the oversight that there was no reimbursement," he said.
Mona Tate Yost, an aide to Harris, left to work for MZM during the time Wade was pressing Harris to secure federal funding (April or May 2005). On July 17, 2006, Ed Rollins confirmed that Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents had recently questioned her about the $32,000 in donations. Rollins noted: "I assume more [interviews] will be coming, though. They were very serious." On September 7, 2006, Federal investigators questioned Jim Dornan, who quit as Harris's campaign manager the previous November.
2006 Senate race
Overview
On June 7, 2005, with support from her new campaign advisors of Ed Rollins and Jim Dornan, Harris announced her candidacy for the 2006 Florida United States Senate election, challenging Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Both lackluster fundraising relative to Nelson and controversy over campaign contributions from MZM caused Harris to fall far behind in all polls by May 2006.
Late in the primary race, Republican contender Will McBride polled 31 points behind Nelson in a hypothetical election against him, while Harris polled 33 points behind Nelson in the same poll. Harris was still popular among Republican voters and won the September 5 primary over McBride and two other challengers with approximately 50% of the total vote.
Despite Harris's support of many Republican causes and her previous statewide victories, some party leaders expressed doubt about her statewide appeal:
In May 2006, Florida Governor Jeb Bush questioned Harris's ability to win the general election and encouraged others to challenge her in the primary.
Karl Rove expressed doubts about her statewide appeal.
National Republicans openly criticized her campaign and tried to convince other GOP candidates to challenge Harris in the primary.
Florida state House of Representatives Speaker Allan Bense declined the candidacy on May 11 despite public courting by many leaders including Governor Bush.
Conservative pundit and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough was also unsuccessfully recruited to enter the race. Departing Harris aides claim that Harris called potential Scarborough supporters and raised the death of an aide in order to prevent his entry into the race. Scarborough later told Nelson that drawing Harris as an opponent in the race made him "the luckiest man in Washington".
By late July 2006, Harris had gone through three campaign managers and her campaign was floundering. At that time, it was disclosed that state Republican Party leaders had told Harris they would not support her because she could not win in the general election.
Financial problems plagued Harris' Senate campaign from the start. During the primary, it was clear that the incumbent Senator Nelson had a substantial financial advantage.
On the March 15, 2006, edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Harris pledged to spend $10 million of her own money, which she said was all of her inheritance, on her campaign. She also stated that her run was dedicated to the memory of her father.
Despite her promise, the $10 million never materialized. Reports surfaced that Harris would not actually receive the inheritance from her father, who instead left his entire estate to her mother. She donated $3 million to her campaign, but later took back $100,000, fueling speculation that she would be unable to donate the promised amount.
In October, Harris announced that she was trying to sell her house in Washington to raise money for her campaign, but the home was not publicly listed for sale and no sale was ever announced.
Nelson defeated Harris by more than one million votes. Harris received less than 39% of the vote.
Staff resignations
In late February 2006, in the midst of revelations surrounding Mitchell Wade's illegal contributions, Harris's campaign finance director and her campaign treasurer both resigned. On April 1, 2006, Harris's top campaign advisor, pollster and campaign manager all resigned with a half-dozen other staffers. Republican pollster and consultant David Johnson said, "I've never seen staffers go like this. It's just imploding."
In early April 2006, Harris told the Tampa Tribune that some of her ex-campaign staffers and the national Republican party were deliberately sabotaging her campaign by "putting knives in her back" and had warned her that if she did not back out of the campaign, she would get an "April surprise". Former campaign staffer Ed Rollins said "They were all good professionals ... There was no backstabbing. It's insulting that she would even say that. If she wants to know what went wrong with the campaign, maybe she needs to take a good look in the mirror."
In June, the Harris campaign received a legal bill for thousands of dollars that contained a reference to "DOJ subpoena". Later, an ex-aide told the Associated Press that Harris had received a grand jury subpoena from federal investigators, but kept it from her top advisers, prompting several staff members to quit when they found out. On June 8, 2006, Harris's fourth chief of staff, Fred Asbell, left in order to pursue a "business opportunity". Asbell said he'd "greatly enjoyed" his time with the campaign and he would remain in a consultant position. On July 12, 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Chris Christopher Ingram left the campaign. The next day, Harris received resignations from Campaign Manager Glenn Hodas, Field Director Pat Thomas, Political Director Brian Brooks and Deputy Field Director John K. Byers, while Travel Aide Kyle Johnson and Field Director Mike Norris declined to leave, citing loyalty to Harris. Hodas cited Harris's "tantrums" and "increasingly erratic behavior" as his reasons for leaving. An anonymous campaign worker described Harris as "very difficult to work with. The more that we put her out there, the more she shot herself in the foot."
In late August, Harris lost another key staffer, Rhyan Metzler, in the wake of a disastrous political rally at Orlando Executive Airport. Only 40 people showed up for the event, and Harris blamed the paltry turnout in part on a last-minute change in location. She claimed that a tree fell on the hangar that was originally scheduled to hold the rally, forcing her campaign to switch to another hangar. Airport officials, however, stated that not only had no trees fallen, but also that there are no trees as they get in the way of the airplanes; further adding that the event in fact took place in the hangar that Harris's campaign had originally booked. Harris's campaign blamed Metzler for the comments Harris made after the rally. On August 31, 2006, Harris was interviewed on Hardball with Chris Matthews, where she responded to the criticisms from her former staffers with "We have their email traffic, we know what was behind all that, we know who's been paid and who isn't."
Lack of Republican support
The Pensacola News Journal suggested that Harris might withdraw from the Senate race after winning a primary victory, thereby allowing the Republicans to nominate another candidate, such as Tom Gallagher, to run against Bill Nelson.
In August, Katherine Harris touted political endorsements from fellow Republican lawmakers on her campaign web site. However, some of those cited claim that they never endorsed her. This conflict resulted in several Republican congressmen calling the Harris campaign to complain after the St. Petersburg Times notified them of the endorsements listed on Harris's Web site. A short time later, their names were removed without comment from Harris's Web site.
Of Harris's three primary opponents, only Will McBride endorsed her candidacy for the general election. In the first few days after the primary, a number of Republican nominees such as Charlie Crist and Tom Lee went on a statewide unity tour with Gov. Bush. Harris was not invited; Republicans said the tour was only for nominees to statewide offices. Harris claimed Bush would campaign with her sometime in the two months before the election, but the governor's office denied this.
President Bush did not make public appearances or private meetings with Harris before the primary. He did, however, appear with her at a fundraiser on September 21 in Tampa.
When it came time for newspapers to make their op-ed endorsements, all 22 of Florida's major daily newspapers supported Senator Nelson. The only endorsement Harris received was from the Polk County Democrat, a newspaper in Bartow which publishes four days out of the week.
Religious convictions
Harris was a headline speaker at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church's "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference held in Ft. Lauderdale on March 17–18, 2006. The conference web site invited attendees to attend in order to "reclaim this nation for Christ." The stated mission of ReclaimAmerica.org is "To inform, equip, motivate, and support Christians; enabling them to defend and implement the Biblical principles on which our country was founded." As part of her speech, Harris urged conferees to "win back America for God." Her appearance was noted in a Rolling Stone article covering the conference.
In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness on August 24, 2006, Harris called for Christians to vote on religious lines. She said,
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said she was "disgusted" by the comments "and deeply disappointed in Representative Harris personally," adding "clearly shows that she does not deserve to be a representative." Two of Harris' primary opponents denounced her statements, Republican Will McBride (an attorney and son of a pastor) stated "I'm a Christian, and I'm a Republican, and I don't share her views. There are people of other faiths and backgrounds of outstanding integrity who know how to tell the truth." Real estate developer Peter Monroe, another GOP primary opponent, called on her to quit the race and resign from Congress. He called her suggestion that non-Christian voters are ignorant of morality when voting as "contemptible, arrogant and wicked."
On August 26, 2006, Harris's campaign released a "Statement of Clarification", that stated, "In the interview, Harris was speaking to a Christian audience, addressing a common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government. Addressing this Christian publication, Harris provided a statement that explains her deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values." The press release went on to mention her past support of Israel and quoted her Jewish campaign manager Bryan G. Rudnick, who stated "As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I know that she encourages people of all faiths to engage in government so that our country can continue to thrive on the principles set forth by our founding fathers, without malice towards anyone." At an appearance at an Orlando gun show that same day, she said "it breaks my heart" to think people understood her comments as bigoted. When asked if she thought the Founding Fathers intended the nation to have secular laws she replied,
On October 3, 2006, Harris participated in a prayer service via phone call. In one instance, she called for the elimination of the separation of church and state when she said,
Harris then went on and prayed for Jews to be converted to Christianity.
Replacements in the 13th Congressional District
Vern Buchanan was the Republican nominee and Christine Jennings the Democratic nominee to replace Harris in the 2006 election. The race had been ranked as "leaning Democratic" by CQ Politics, but Buchanan scored a very narrow victory, winning the election by a few hundred votes.
Political positions and voting record
Harris is a conservative on most issues. She is anti-abortion and has voted against embryonic stem cell research. She opposes oil-drilling in Florida's coastal waters. Harris supported reforming Social Security to include private accounts. She has voted in favor of granting legal status to fetuses via the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. She supports tax cuts and the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which restricts bankruptcy filings by consumers. Harris is also in favor of welfare reform, school vouchers, the Patriot Act, the Flag Desecration Amendment, the Federal Marriage Amendment, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a televised debate with Nelson on November 1, however, she repeatedly declined to say whether she would still support the Iraq War Resolution knowing that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In an earlier debate with Nelson, Harris was asked to comment on trade of arms with foreign nations and the potential threat of their acquisition by terrorist groups. Harris responded that "we know we don't want to have arms going to the rogue nations like China."
In popular culture
Katherine Harris was the subject of some skits on Saturday Night Live, in which she was played by Ana Gasteyer; she was also portrayed by actress Laura Dern in the 2008 film Recount, for which Dern won a Golden Globe.She is mentioned in Family guy Season 5 Episode16 'No chris left behind'. Harris is also referenced in one of filmmaker Kevin Smith's monologues for the DVD An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. Harris was also satirically portrayed by comedian Janeane Garofalo as "Senator Katherine Harris" on the Internet talk radio and podcast show The Majority Report with Sam Seder.
See also
Florida election recount
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
Profile piece at Washington Post
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1957 births
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American women politicians
2000 United States presidential election in Florida
Agnes Scott College people
Bartow High School alumni
Candidates in the 2006 United States elections
Christians from Florida
Conservatism in the United States
Female members of the United States House of Representatives
Florida Republicans
Harvard Kennedy School alumni
IBM employees
Living people
Members of the United States House of Representatives from Florida
People associated with the 2000 United States presidential election
People from Key West, Florida
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
Secretaries of State of Florida
Women in Florida politics
| false |
[
"Strange Is This World is the first English-language album by Polish rock artist Niemen. The album was released in 1972 in West Germany on the CBS Records International (the European section of Columbia Records).\n\nTrack listing \n \"Strange Is This World\" – 6:05 - (lyrics Czesław Niemen)\n \"Why Did You Stop Loving Me\" – 12:05 (lyrics Marek Rymaszewski & Paweł Brodowski) [1]\n \"I've Been Loving You Too Long\" – 4:13 (music Otis Redding, lyrics Jerry Butler) \n \"A Song For The Deceased\" – 13:18 (lyrics Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, translation Paweł Brodowski)\n\n[1] Lyric writers on 'Why Did You Stop Loving Me' as printed on the label of the vinyl version of the CBS album, # S 64896\n\nPersonnel \n Czesław Niemen – organ, vocal\n Józef Skrzek – piano, bass, organ, harmonica\n Helmut Nadolski – double bass\n Antymos Apostolis – guitar\n Jerzy Piotrowski – drums\n\nCzesław Niemen albums\n1972 albums",
"\"Sweet Porridge\" (), often known in English under the title of \"The Magic Porridge Pot\", is a folkloric German fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm, as tale number 103 in Grimm's Fairy Tales, in the 19th century. It is Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 565, the magic mill. Other tales of this type include Why the Sea Is Salt and The Water Mother.\n\nContent\nThere was a poor but good little girl who lived alone with her mother, and they no longer had anything to eat. So the child went into the forest, and there an aged woman met her who was aware of her sorrow, and presented her with a little pot, which when she said, \"Cook, little pot, cook,\" would cook good, sweet millet porridge, and when she said, \"Stop, little pot,\" it ceased to cook.\n\nThe girl took the pot home to her mother, and now they were freed from their poverty and hunger, and ate sweet porridge as often as they chose. Once upon a time when the girl had gone out, her mother said, \"Cook, little pot, cook.\" And it did cook and she ate until she was satisfied, and then she wanted the pot to stop cooking, but did not know the word. So it went on cooking and the porridge rose over the edge, and still it cooked on until the kitchen and whole house were full, and then the next house, and then the whole street, just as if it wanted to satisfy the hunger of the whole world, and there was the greatest distress, but no one knew how to stop it.\n\nAt last when only one single house remained, the child came home and just said, \"Stop, little pot,\" and it stopped and gave up cooking, and whosoever wished to return to the town had to eat their way back.\n\nSee also\n\nThe Sorcerer's Apprentice\nThe Master and His Pupil\nStrega Nona\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nSurLaLune Fairy Tale site, Sweet Porridge\nMagic Porridge Pot PDF, Lesson Plans, and Worksheets\n\nGrimms' Fairy Tales\nFiction about magic"
] |
[
"Katherine Harris",
"2000 US presidential election",
"What was Harris's role in the 2000 US Presidential election?",
"Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida.",
"What was her occupation during the election?",
"Harris halted the recounting process.",
"Why did she stop the process?",
"several recounts were inconclusive and the laws governing recounts were unclear,"
] |
C_77b23c9a2ade484190afa76bfb7b3cbb_1
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Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 4 |
Besides Katherine Harris stopping the recount in the 2000 election, are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
|
Katherine Harris
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As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. The election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for. After several recounts were inconclusive and the laws governing recounts were unclear, Harris halted the recounting process. She certified that the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, had defeated the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, in the popular vote of Florida and thus certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida allowed Bush to win the election. Her ruling was upheld in the state circuit court, but was subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. (2000) In a per curiam decision, by a 7-2 vote, the Court in Bush v. Gore held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court held that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida. The decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining). Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. CANNOTANSWER
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This victory in Florida allowed Bush to win the election. Her ruling was upheld in the state circuit court,
|
Katherine Harris (born April 5, 1957) is an American former politician. A Republican, Harris served in the Florida Senate from 1994 to 1998, as Secretary of State of Florida from 1999 to 2002, and as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Florida's 13th congressional district from 2003 to 2007. Harris lost her campaign in 2006 for a United States Senate seat from Florida.
In the 2000 presidential election, she received national attention for her role as the Florida's secretary of state during the state's election recount, certifying George W. Bush's narrow victory (537 votes) over Al Gore and awarding him the Florida electors, which gained him the national election.
Background and personal life
Harris was born in Key West, Florida, to one of the state's wealthiest and most politically influential families. She is the daughter of Harriett (Griffin) and George W. Harris Jr., who owned Citrus and Chemical Bank in Lakeland, Florida. Her maternal grandfather was Ben Hill Griffin Jr., a successful businessman in the citrus and cattle industries and a powerful figure in the state legislature. Shortly before his death in 1990, he was ranked as the 261st richest American on the Forbes 400 list. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at the University of Florida is named for him.
Harris' extended family has been active in Christian evangelism. Her grandfather was a Christian missionary in Africa, while her aunt and uncle were missionaries in India. They now head the Arab World Missions. Harris studied under Dr. Francis Schaeffer at a L'Abri Fellowship International center. Harris attended Greystone, an all-girls Christian camp at Asheville, North Carolina. She has said her faith is "the most important thing in my life." Harris has criticized the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for being too liberal; she was reared in the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America. She attends Calvary Chapel, a non-denominational charismatic church in Sarasota, Florida.
Harris married Swedish businessman Sven Anders Axel Ebbeson in 1996 and has one stepdaughter, Louise. Sven Ebbeson committed suicide in November 2013 at their home in Sarasota; he had reportedly been suffering a serious illness. In 2017, after admitting she'd become "a near recluse" since Ebbeson's death, she married Texas banker Richard Ware.
Education and career
Harris graduated from Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida, in 1975. She attended the University of Madrid in 1978. Harris received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, in 1979. She studied under Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer at the L'Abri community in Huemoz, Switzerland, near Lausanne. While in college she worked as an intern for U.S. Representative Andy Ireland.
Before entering politics, Harris worked as a marketing executive at IBM and a vice president of a commercial real estate firm.
Harris earned a M.P.A. from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1996.
Political career
Harris ran for the Florida Senate as a Republican in 1994 in one of the most expensive state races in Florida history to that time. Harris's political career was guided by Dan Berger, Adam Goodman, and Benjamin McKay, along with her campaign manager, David Lapides.
Florida Senate and Riscorp
Harris played a prominent role in introducing William Griffin (with whom she had a close personal relationship), the CEO of Riscorp, to various Florida legislators. In the 1994 state senate election, Sarasota-based Riscorp, Inc. made illegal contributions totaling $400,000 to dozens of political candidates and committees, including $20,600 to the Harris campaign.
Two years later, in 1996, Harris sponsored a bill "to block Riscorp competitors from getting a greater share of Florida workers' compensation market, [and] also pushed a proposal that would hurt a particular competitor." This issue later emerged during her campaign for Florida Secretary of State in 1998.
William Griffin eventually pleaded guilty to illegal campaign donations, among allegations of other serious wrongdoing at Riscorp, and served prison time in 1998. The election of Republican Jeb Bush as governor of Florida is considered to have been a major factor in stopping further state investigation into the Riscorp scandal. According to a Sun-Herald column from June 2005, "Harris denied any knowledge of the scheme, was never charged with any crime and was cleared of wrongdoing by a state investigator."
Secretary of State
Harris was elected Florida Secretary of State in 1998. She defeated then-incumbent Sandra Mortham in the Republican primary and won the general election against Democratic candidate, Karen Gievers, an attorney from Miami. A state constitutional change passed in the same year making the Secretary of State an appointed office made Harris the last person to be elected Secretary of State in Florida.
Harris abruptly resigned in August 2002 while campaigning for Congress when it was discovered that she had violated Florida's "resign to run", which stated "...No officer may qualify as a candidate for another public office, whether state, district, county or municipal, if the terms or any part thereof run concurrently with each other, without resigning from the office he or she presently holds." Since the start of her Congressional term (January 3, 2003) would overlap with the end of her term as Secretary of State (January 7, 2003), she was required to submit a letter of recognition. The law allowed candidates to have the resignation be effective up until the term for the new office began. Since Harris failed to do so, she was required to resign immediately. Harris said the oversight was unintentional. She said that she thought because Florida voters had approved a constitutional amendment that made the position of Secretary of State an appointed office rather than an elected office, the law did not apply to her situation.
International travel
During her first 22 months in office, Harris spent more than $106,000 for travel, more than the governor or any other cabinet officer. She visited eight countries on ten foreign trips.
In early 2001, Florida Senate leaders eliminated the $3.4 million that Harris had budgeted for international relations for the year, assigning it instead to Enterprise Florida, the state's economic development agency. However, Florida House Leader Tom Feeney said that he disagreed with the Senate and believed that Harris was an able advocate to foreign countries. After the House refused to agree with the proposed budget action, the Senate agreed to restore the money; however, it insisted on a review committee, appointed by Senate President John McKay, Feeney, and Governor Jeb Bush, to evaluate all of Harris' expenditures on international affairs since July 1, 1999, and produce a report.
2000 U.S. presidential election
As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. She was involved in purging many individuals from the voter rolls , and the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for.
After several recounts were inconclusive , Harris halted the recounting process, arguing that the laws governing recounts were unclear. The official vote totals showed the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, as the winner of the statewide popular vote in Florida, and so Harris certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida would allow Bush to obtain a majority in the Electoral College and win the election. Her certification was upheld in the state circuit court, but subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court.
The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (2000). In a per curiam decision, by a 7–2 vote, the Court held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, it held, by a 5–4 vote, that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida.
This decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, thus defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining).
Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. It was later revealed that, unimpressed with her performance in the media spotlight of the recount, the Bush Campaign had assigned a staff member to her, essentially as a handler.
United States Congresswoman
In 2002, Harris ran against Sarasota Attorney Jan Schneider for the congressional district vacated by retiring Republican Rep. Dan Miller, winning by 10 percentage points in this solidly Republican district, a victory helped with one of the biggest first term campaign fund raising efforts in the history of this district and substantial support from the Bush family.
Harris considered running for the seat of retiring Senator Bob Graham in 2004 but was reportedly dissuaded by the Bush White House to allow Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez to run instead. Martinez went on to narrowly beat challenger Betty Castor. Harris ran for re-election to her House seat in 2004; she was re-elected with a margin almost identical to her first win.
In a 2004 speech in Venice, Florida, Harris claimed that a "Middle Eastern" man was arrested for attempting to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Indiana; Carmel Mayor James Brainard and a spokesman for Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan said they had no knowledge of such a plot. Brainard said he had never spoken to Harris.
During a 2004 campaign stop in Sarasota, a local resident, Barry Seltzer, "tr[ied] to 'intimidate' a group of Harris supporters" by menacing Harris and her supporters with his automobile. Witnesses described Seltzer as having swerved off the road and onto the sidewalk, directing it at Harris and her supporters. Nobody was injured in the incident. Seltzer, who claimed he was "exercising [his] political expression," was eventually arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
MZM incident
In 2005 and 2006, a major corporate campaign donor to Harris, Mitchell Wade (founder of defense contractor MZM), was implicated in several bribery scandals. Wade had bundled together and donated to Harris's campaign $32,000 in contributions from his employees at MZM, Inc., then reimbursed those employees for the contributions. Regarding this issue, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Wainstein said that Harris did not appear to know the donations were obtained illegally. Harris has maintained she had no personal knowledge that her campaign was given illegal contributions. Wade acknowledged that the donations to the Harris campaign were illegal and were part of an attempt to influence Harris to MZM's benefit.
Documents filed with Wade's plea say that he took Harris to dinner in March 2005, a year after the illegal contributions, where they discussed the possibility of another fundraiser and the possibility of getting funding for a Navy counterintelligence program placed in Harris's district. Harris sent a letter on April 26, 2005, to defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman C. W. Bill Young, in which Harris sought $10 million for a Navy project backed by Wade. In the letter, Harris emphasized the importance of the project, asking that it be added to her list of five priorities and identifying it as her new No. 3. Harris later released the April 26, 2005, letter for legal scrutiny, but neither she nor Young would turn over the request form (RFP) used for the proposal.
CQPolitics noted "Harris's former political strategist, Ed Rollins, spoke on the record about the dinner and detailed a meal that cost $2,800, far in excess of the $50 limit on gifts that members of Congress are allowed to accept" at the Washington restaurant Citronelle. Wade and Harris discussed MZM's desire for a $10 million appropriation, and Wade offered to host a fundraiser for Harris's 2006 Senate campaign. Regarding the MZM contributions, the Sentinel article goes on to say "The Justice Department has said Wade, who personally handed many of the checks to Harris, did not tell Harris the contributions were illegal". Regarding the expensive meal, the article quotes Harris as saying that she personally had only a "beverage and appetizer" worth less than "$100".
Rollins said that he had conducted a thorough internal investigation into Harris's ties to MZM in hopes of finding conclusive proof of her innocence; but when he could not, he and other advisers, including her lawyer, urged her to drop her candidacy rather than risk federal corruption charges. Although he did not believe Harris intentionally broke any laws, "her story kept changing. Our great concern was that you get into trouble when you don't tell the same story twice ... Maybe you don't think you did anything wrong, but then maybe you start getting questioned about it and so forth, and you may perjure yourself. ... Unlike Cunningham, I don't think she set out to violate the law, but I think she was very careless. She heard whatever she wanted to hear, but we could find no evidence whatsoever that this was a project going into her district."
Although Rollins recalled discussing the $2,800 meal with Harris, Harris told the Orlando Sentinel on April 19, 2006, that the cost of the meal was "news to me", and that her campaign had since "reimbursed" the restaurant for the cost of the meal. According to the reporter, when questioned as to why she would reimburse the restaurant for a meal that had been paid for by MZM, Harris abruptly terminated the interview, and her spokesman later called and requested unsuccessfully that the story not be printed. The next day, Harris's campaign issued a statement that she had believed her campaign had reimbursed the restaurant, and that she had donated $100 "which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer". Harris also asserted that most of the cost of the meal was from Wade ordering several unopened bottles of wine to take home, although the management of the restaurant denies ever allowing anyone to take unopened bottles of wine off the premises, saying "Why would we jeopardize our liquor license for the sake of selling a couple bottles of wine?"
In the weeks following the expensive meal, former senior Harris staffers claimed that "they initially rejected a defense contractor's $10 million appropriation request last year but reversed course after being instructed by Harris to approve it." In May 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Christopher Ingram acknowledged that she had also had a previous dinner with Wade in the same restaurant in March 2004, when the $32,000 in illegal donations had been given to her campaign. Ingram told the press that he did not know how much that meal cost, but that a charitable donation of an unknown amount had been given to a charity whose name he did not know, equivalent to her share of the meal. "She takes responsibility for the oversight that there was no reimbursement," he said.
Mona Tate Yost, an aide to Harris, left to work for MZM during the time Wade was pressing Harris to secure federal funding (April or May 2005). On July 17, 2006, Ed Rollins confirmed that Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents had recently questioned her about the $32,000 in donations. Rollins noted: "I assume more [interviews] will be coming, though. They were very serious." On September 7, 2006, Federal investigators questioned Jim Dornan, who quit as Harris's campaign manager the previous November.
2006 Senate race
Overview
On June 7, 2005, with support from her new campaign advisors of Ed Rollins and Jim Dornan, Harris announced her candidacy for the 2006 Florida United States Senate election, challenging Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Both lackluster fundraising relative to Nelson and controversy over campaign contributions from MZM caused Harris to fall far behind in all polls by May 2006.
Late in the primary race, Republican contender Will McBride polled 31 points behind Nelson in a hypothetical election against him, while Harris polled 33 points behind Nelson in the same poll. Harris was still popular among Republican voters and won the September 5 primary over McBride and two other challengers with approximately 50% of the total vote.
Despite Harris's support of many Republican causes and her previous statewide victories, some party leaders expressed doubt about her statewide appeal:
In May 2006, Florida Governor Jeb Bush questioned Harris's ability to win the general election and encouraged others to challenge her in the primary.
Karl Rove expressed doubts about her statewide appeal.
National Republicans openly criticized her campaign and tried to convince other GOP candidates to challenge Harris in the primary.
Florida state House of Representatives Speaker Allan Bense declined the candidacy on May 11 despite public courting by many leaders including Governor Bush.
Conservative pundit and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough was also unsuccessfully recruited to enter the race. Departing Harris aides claim that Harris called potential Scarborough supporters and raised the death of an aide in order to prevent his entry into the race. Scarborough later told Nelson that drawing Harris as an opponent in the race made him "the luckiest man in Washington".
By late July 2006, Harris had gone through three campaign managers and her campaign was floundering. At that time, it was disclosed that state Republican Party leaders had told Harris they would not support her because she could not win in the general election.
Financial problems plagued Harris' Senate campaign from the start. During the primary, it was clear that the incumbent Senator Nelson had a substantial financial advantage.
On the March 15, 2006, edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Harris pledged to spend $10 million of her own money, which she said was all of her inheritance, on her campaign. She also stated that her run was dedicated to the memory of her father.
Despite her promise, the $10 million never materialized. Reports surfaced that Harris would not actually receive the inheritance from her father, who instead left his entire estate to her mother. She donated $3 million to her campaign, but later took back $100,000, fueling speculation that she would be unable to donate the promised amount.
In October, Harris announced that she was trying to sell her house in Washington to raise money for her campaign, but the home was not publicly listed for sale and no sale was ever announced.
Nelson defeated Harris by more than one million votes. Harris received less than 39% of the vote.
Staff resignations
In late February 2006, in the midst of revelations surrounding Mitchell Wade's illegal contributions, Harris's campaign finance director and her campaign treasurer both resigned. On April 1, 2006, Harris's top campaign advisor, pollster and campaign manager all resigned with a half-dozen other staffers. Republican pollster and consultant David Johnson said, "I've never seen staffers go like this. It's just imploding."
In early April 2006, Harris told the Tampa Tribune that some of her ex-campaign staffers and the national Republican party were deliberately sabotaging her campaign by "putting knives in her back" and had warned her that if she did not back out of the campaign, she would get an "April surprise". Former campaign staffer Ed Rollins said "They were all good professionals ... There was no backstabbing. It's insulting that she would even say that. If she wants to know what went wrong with the campaign, maybe she needs to take a good look in the mirror."
In June, the Harris campaign received a legal bill for thousands of dollars that contained a reference to "DOJ subpoena". Later, an ex-aide told the Associated Press that Harris had received a grand jury subpoena from federal investigators, but kept it from her top advisers, prompting several staff members to quit when they found out. On June 8, 2006, Harris's fourth chief of staff, Fred Asbell, left in order to pursue a "business opportunity". Asbell said he'd "greatly enjoyed" his time with the campaign and he would remain in a consultant position. On July 12, 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Chris Christopher Ingram left the campaign. The next day, Harris received resignations from Campaign Manager Glenn Hodas, Field Director Pat Thomas, Political Director Brian Brooks and Deputy Field Director John K. Byers, while Travel Aide Kyle Johnson and Field Director Mike Norris declined to leave, citing loyalty to Harris. Hodas cited Harris's "tantrums" and "increasingly erratic behavior" as his reasons for leaving. An anonymous campaign worker described Harris as "very difficult to work with. The more that we put her out there, the more she shot herself in the foot."
In late August, Harris lost another key staffer, Rhyan Metzler, in the wake of a disastrous political rally at Orlando Executive Airport. Only 40 people showed up for the event, and Harris blamed the paltry turnout in part on a last-minute change in location. She claimed that a tree fell on the hangar that was originally scheduled to hold the rally, forcing her campaign to switch to another hangar. Airport officials, however, stated that not only had no trees fallen, but also that there are no trees as they get in the way of the airplanes; further adding that the event in fact took place in the hangar that Harris's campaign had originally booked. Harris's campaign blamed Metzler for the comments Harris made after the rally. On August 31, 2006, Harris was interviewed on Hardball with Chris Matthews, where she responded to the criticisms from her former staffers with "We have their email traffic, we know what was behind all that, we know who's been paid and who isn't."
Lack of Republican support
The Pensacola News Journal suggested that Harris might withdraw from the Senate race after winning a primary victory, thereby allowing the Republicans to nominate another candidate, such as Tom Gallagher, to run against Bill Nelson.
In August, Katherine Harris touted political endorsements from fellow Republican lawmakers on her campaign web site. However, some of those cited claim that they never endorsed her. This conflict resulted in several Republican congressmen calling the Harris campaign to complain after the St. Petersburg Times notified them of the endorsements listed on Harris's Web site. A short time later, their names were removed without comment from Harris's Web site.
Of Harris's three primary opponents, only Will McBride endorsed her candidacy for the general election. In the first few days after the primary, a number of Republican nominees such as Charlie Crist and Tom Lee went on a statewide unity tour with Gov. Bush. Harris was not invited; Republicans said the tour was only for nominees to statewide offices. Harris claimed Bush would campaign with her sometime in the two months before the election, but the governor's office denied this.
President Bush did not make public appearances or private meetings with Harris before the primary. He did, however, appear with her at a fundraiser on September 21 in Tampa.
When it came time for newspapers to make their op-ed endorsements, all 22 of Florida's major daily newspapers supported Senator Nelson. The only endorsement Harris received was from the Polk County Democrat, a newspaper in Bartow which publishes four days out of the week.
Religious convictions
Harris was a headline speaker at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church's "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference held in Ft. Lauderdale on March 17–18, 2006. The conference web site invited attendees to attend in order to "reclaim this nation for Christ." The stated mission of ReclaimAmerica.org is "To inform, equip, motivate, and support Christians; enabling them to defend and implement the Biblical principles on which our country was founded." As part of her speech, Harris urged conferees to "win back America for God." Her appearance was noted in a Rolling Stone article covering the conference.
In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness on August 24, 2006, Harris called for Christians to vote on religious lines. She said,
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said she was "disgusted" by the comments "and deeply disappointed in Representative Harris personally," adding "clearly shows that she does not deserve to be a representative." Two of Harris' primary opponents denounced her statements, Republican Will McBride (an attorney and son of a pastor) stated "I'm a Christian, and I'm a Republican, and I don't share her views. There are people of other faiths and backgrounds of outstanding integrity who know how to tell the truth." Real estate developer Peter Monroe, another GOP primary opponent, called on her to quit the race and resign from Congress. He called her suggestion that non-Christian voters are ignorant of morality when voting as "contemptible, arrogant and wicked."
On August 26, 2006, Harris's campaign released a "Statement of Clarification", that stated, "In the interview, Harris was speaking to a Christian audience, addressing a common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government. Addressing this Christian publication, Harris provided a statement that explains her deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values." The press release went on to mention her past support of Israel and quoted her Jewish campaign manager Bryan G. Rudnick, who stated "As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I know that she encourages people of all faiths to engage in government so that our country can continue to thrive on the principles set forth by our founding fathers, without malice towards anyone." At an appearance at an Orlando gun show that same day, she said "it breaks my heart" to think people understood her comments as bigoted. When asked if she thought the Founding Fathers intended the nation to have secular laws she replied,
On October 3, 2006, Harris participated in a prayer service via phone call. In one instance, she called for the elimination of the separation of church and state when she said,
Harris then went on and prayed for Jews to be converted to Christianity.
Replacements in the 13th Congressional District
Vern Buchanan was the Republican nominee and Christine Jennings the Democratic nominee to replace Harris in the 2006 election. The race had been ranked as "leaning Democratic" by CQ Politics, but Buchanan scored a very narrow victory, winning the election by a few hundred votes.
Political positions and voting record
Harris is a conservative on most issues. She is anti-abortion and has voted against embryonic stem cell research. She opposes oil-drilling in Florida's coastal waters. Harris supported reforming Social Security to include private accounts. She has voted in favor of granting legal status to fetuses via the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. She supports tax cuts and the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which restricts bankruptcy filings by consumers. Harris is also in favor of welfare reform, school vouchers, the Patriot Act, the Flag Desecration Amendment, the Federal Marriage Amendment, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a televised debate with Nelson on November 1, however, she repeatedly declined to say whether she would still support the Iraq War Resolution knowing that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In an earlier debate with Nelson, Harris was asked to comment on trade of arms with foreign nations and the potential threat of their acquisition by terrorist groups. Harris responded that "we know we don't want to have arms going to the rogue nations like China."
In popular culture
Katherine Harris was the subject of some skits on Saturday Night Live, in which she was played by Ana Gasteyer; she was also portrayed by actress Laura Dern in the 2008 film Recount, for which Dern won a Golden Globe.She is mentioned in Family guy Season 5 Episode16 'No chris left behind'. Harris is also referenced in one of filmmaker Kevin Smith's monologues for the DVD An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. Harris was also satirically portrayed by comedian Janeane Garofalo as "Senator Katherine Harris" on the Internet talk radio and podcast show The Majority Report with Sam Seder.
See also
Florida election recount
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
Profile piece at Washington Post
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1957 births
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American women politicians
2000 United States presidential election in Florida
Agnes Scott College people
Bartow High School alumni
Candidates in the 2006 United States elections
Christians from Florida
Conservatism in the United States
Female members of the United States House of Representatives
Florida Republicans
Harvard Kennedy School alumni
IBM employees
Living people
Members of the United States House of Representatives from Florida
People associated with the 2000 United States presidential election
People from Key West, Florida
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
Secretaries of State of Florida
Women in Florida politics
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[
"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
] |
[
"Katherine Harris",
"2000 US presidential election",
"What was Harris's role in the 2000 US Presidential election?",
"Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida.",
"What was her occupation during the election?",
"Harris halted the recounting process.",
"Why did she stop the process?",
"several recounts were inconclusive and the laws governing recounts were unclear,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"This victory in Florida allowed Bush to win the election. Her ruling was upheld in the state circuit court,"
] |
C_77b23c9a2ade484190afa76bfb7b3cbb_1
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Was she known for anything else?
| 5 |
Was Katherine Harris known for anything else, besides stopping the recount process in the 2000 election?
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Katherine Harris
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As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. The election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for. After several recounts were inconclusive and the laws governing recounts were unclear, Harris halted the recounting process. She certified that the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, had defeated the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, in the popular vote of Florida and thus certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida allowed Bush to win the election. Her ruling was upheld in the state circuit court, but was subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. (2000) In a per curiam decision, by a 7-2 vote, the Court in Bush v. Gore held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By a 5-4 vote, the US Supreme Court held that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida. The decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining). Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Katherine Harris (born April 5, 1957) is an American former politician. A Republican, Harris served in the Florida Senate from 1994 to 1998, as Secretary of State of Florida from 1999 to 2002, and as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Florida's 13th congressional district from 2003 to 2007. Harris lost her campaign in 2006 for a United States Senate seat from Florida.
In the 2000 presidential election, she received national attention for her role as the Florida's secretary of state during the state's election recount, certifying George W. Bush's narrow victory (537 votes) over Al Gore and awarding him the Florida electors, which gained him the national election.
Background and personal life
Harris was born in Key West, Florida, to one of the state's wealthiest and most politically influential families. She is the daughter of Harriett (Griffin) and George W. Harris Jr., who owned Citrus and Chemical Bank in Lakeland, Florida. Her maternal grandfather was Ben Hill Griffin Jr., a successful businessman in the citrus and cattle industries and a powerful figure in the state legislature. Shortly before his death in 1990, he was ranked as the 261st richest American on the Forbes 400 list. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at the University of Florida is named for him.
Harris' extended family has been active in Christian evangelism. Her grandfather was a Christian missionary in Africa, while her aunt and uncle were missionaries in India. They now head the Arab World Missions. Harris studied under Dr. Francis Schaeffer at a L'Abri Fellowship International center. Harris attended Greystone, an all-girls Christian camp at Asheville, North Carolina. She has said her faith is "the most important thing in my life." Harris has criticized the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for being too liberal; she was reared in the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America. She attends Calvary Chapel, a non-denominational charismatic church in Sarasota, Florida.
Harris married Swedish businessman Sven Anders Axel Ebbeson in 1996 and has one stepdaughter, Louise. Sven Ebbeson committed suicide in November 2013 at their home in Sarasota; he had reportedly been suffering a serious illness. In 2017, after admitting she'd become "a near recluse" since Ebbeson's death, she married Texas banker Richard Ware.
Education and career
Harris graduated from Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida, in 1975. She attended the University of Madrid in 1978. Harris received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, in 1979. She studied under Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer at the L'Abri community in Huemoz, Switzerland, near Lausanne. While in college she worked as an intern for U.S. Representative Andy Ireland.
Before entering politics, Harris worked as a marketing executive at IBM and a vice president of a commercial real estate firm.
Harris earned a M.P.A. from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1996.
Political career
Harris ran for the Florida Senate as a Republican in 1994 in one of the most expensive state races in Florida history to that time. Harris's political career was guided by Dan Berger, Adam Goodman, and Benjamin McKay, along with her campaign manager, David Lapides.
Florida Senate and Riscorp
Harris played a prominent role in introducing William Griffin (with whom she had a close personal relationship), the CEO of Riscorp, to various Florida legislators. In the 1994 state senate election, Sarasota-based Riscorp, Inc. made illegal contributions totaling $400,000 to dozens of political candidates and committees, including $20,600 to the Harris campaign.
Two years later, in 1996, Harris sponsored a bill "to block Riscorp competitors from getting a greater share of Florida workers' compensation market, [and] also pushed a proposal that would hurt a particular competitor." This issue later emerged during her campaign for Florida Secretary of State in 1998.
William Griffin eventually pleaded guilty to illegal campaign donations, among allegations of other serious wrongdoing at Riscorp, and served prison time in 1998. The election of Republican Jeb Bush as governor of Florida is considered to have been a major factor in stopping further state investigation into the Riscorp scandal. According to a Sun-Herald column from June 2005, "Harris denied any knowledge of the scheme, was never charged with any crime and was cleared of wrongdoing by a state investigator."
Secretary of State
Harris was elected Florida Secretary of State in 1998. She defeated then-incumbent Sandra Mortham in the Republican primary and won the general election against Democratic candidate, Karen Gievers, an attorney from Miami. A state constitutional change passed in the same year making the Secretary of State an appointed office made Harris the last person to be elected Secretary of State in Florida.
Harris abruptly resigned in August 2002 while campaigning for Congress when it was discovered that she had violated Florida's "resign to run", which stated "...No officer may qualify as a candidate for another public office, whether state, district, county or municipal, if the terms or any part thereof run concurrently with each other, without resigning from the office he or she presently holds." Since the start of her Congressional term (January 3, 2003) would overlap with the end of her term as Secretary of State (January 7, 2003), she was required to submit a letter of recognition. The law allowed candidates to have the resignation be effective up until the term for the new office began. Since Harris failed to do so, she was required to resign immediately. Harris said the oversight was unintentional. She said that she thought because Florida voters had approved a constitutional amendment that made the position of Secretary of State an appointed office rather than an elected office, the law did not apply to her situation.
International travel
During her first 22 months in office, Harris spent more than $106,000 for travel, more than the governor or any other cabinet officer. She visited eight countries on ten foreign trips.
In early 2001, Florida Senate leaders eliminated the $3.4 million that Harris had budgeted for international relations for the year, assigning it instead to Enterprise Florida, the state's economic development agency. However, Florida House Leader Tom Feeney said that he disagreed with the Senate and believed that Harris was an able advocate to foreign countries. After the House refused to agree with the proposed budget action, the Senate agreed to restore the money; however, it insisted on a review committee, appointed by Senate President John McKay, Feeney, and Governor Jeb Bush, to evaluate all of Harris' expenditures on international affairs since July 1, 1999, and produce a report.
2000 U.S. presidential election
As Secretary of State for the State of Florida (and co-chair of George W. Bush's election efforts in Florida), Harris was a central figure in the 2000 US presidential election in Florida. She was involved in purging many individuals from the voter rolls , and the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so close in Florida, separated by 537 votes, that a recount of the votes was called for.
After several recounts were inconclusive , Harris halted the recounting process, arguing that the laws governing recounts were unclear. The official vote totals showed the Republican candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush, as the winner of the statewide popular vote in Florida, and so Harris certified the Republican slate of electors. This victory in Florida would allow Bush to obtain a majority in the Electoral College and win the election. Her certification was upheld in the state circuit court, but subsequently overturned on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court.
The Florida Supreme Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (2000). In a per curiam decision, by a 7–2 vote, the Court held that the Florida Supreme Court's method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, it held, by a 5–4 vote, that no alternative method for a recount could be established within the time limits set by the State of Florida.
This decision allowed Harris' previous certification of Bush as the winner of Florida's electoral votes to stand. Florida's 25 electoral votes gave Bush, the Republican candidate, 271 electoral votes, thus defeating Gore, who ended up with 266 electoral votes (with one D.C. elector abstaining).
Harris later published Center of the Storm, her memoir of the 2000 election controversy. It was later revealed that, unimpressed with her performance in the media spotlight of the recount, the Bush Campaign had assigned a staff member to her, essentially as a handler.
United States Congresswoman
In 2002, Harris ran against Sarasota Attorney Jan Schneider for the congressional district vacated by retiring Republican Rep. Dan Miller, winning by 10 percentage points in this solidly Republican district, a victory helped with one of the biggest first term campaign fund raising efforts in the history of this district and substantial support from the Bush family.
Harris considered running for the seat of retiring Senator Bob Graham in 2004 but was reportedly dissuaded by the Bush White House to allow Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez to run instead. Martinez went on to narrowly beat challenger Betty Castor. Harris ran for re-election to her House seat in 2004; she was re-elected with a margin almost identical to her first win.
In a 2004 speech in Venice, Florida, Harris claimed that a "Middle Eastern" man was arrested for attempting to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Indiana; Carmel Mayor James Brainard and a spokesman for Indiana Gov. Joe Kernan said they had no knowledge of such a plot. Brainard said he had never spoken to Harris.
During a 2004 campaign stop in Sarasota, a local resident, Barry Seltzer, "tr[ied] to 'intimidate' a group of Harris supporters" by menacing Harris and her supporters with his automobile. Witnesses described Seltzer as having swerved off the road and onto the sidewalk, directing it at Harris and her supporters. Nobody was injured in the incident. Seltzer, who claimed he was "exercising [his] political expression," was eventually arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
MZM incident
In 2005 and 2006, a major corporate campaign donor to Harris, Mitchell Wade (founder of defense contractor MZM), was implicated in several bribery scandals. Wade had bundled together and donated to Harris's campaign $32,000 in contributions from his employees at MZM, Inc., then reimbursed those employees for the contributions. Regarding this issue, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Wainstein said that Harris did not appear to know the donations were obtained illegally. Harris has maintained she had no personal knowledge that her campaign was given illegal contributions. Wade acknowledged that the donations to the Harris campaign were illegal and were part of an attempt to influence Harris to MZM's benefit.
Documents filed with Wade's plea say that he took Harris to dinner in March 2005, a year after the illegal contributions, where they discussed the possibility of another fundraiser and the possibility of getting funding for a Navy counterintelligence program placed in Harris's district. Harris sent a letter on April 26, 2005, to defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman C. W. Bill Young, in which Harris sought $10 million for a Navy project backed by Wade. In the letter, Harris emphasized the importance of the project, asking that it be added to her list of five priorities and identifying it as her new No. 3. Harris later released the April 26, 2005, letter for legal scrutiny, but neither she nor Young would turn over the request form (RFP) used for the proposal.
CQPolitics noted "Harris's former political strategist, Ed Rollins, spoke on the record about the dinner and detailed a meal that cost $2,800, far in excess of the $50 limit on gifts that members of Congress are allowed to accept" at the Washington restaurant Citronelle. Wade and Harris discussed MZM's desire for a $10 million appropriation, and Wade offered to host a fundraiser for Harris's 2006 Senate campaign. Regarding the MZM contributions, the Sentinel article goes on to say "The Justice Department has said Wade, who personally handed many of the checks to Harris, did not tell Harris the contributions were illegal". Regarding the expensive meal, the article quotes Harris as saying that she personally had only a "beverage and appetizer" worth less than "$100".
Rollins said that he had conducted a thorough internal investigation into Harris's ties to MZM in hopes of finding conclusive proof of her innocence; but when he could not, he and other advisers, including her lawyer, urged her to drop her candidacy rather than risk federal corruption charges. Although he did not believe Harris intentionally broke any laws, "her story kept changing. Our great concern was that you get into trouble when you don't tell the same story twice ... Maybe you don't think you did anything wrong, but then maybe you start getting questioned about it and so forth, and you may perjure yourself. ... Unlike Cunningham, I don't think she set out to violate the law, but I think she was very careless. She heard whatever she wanted to hear, but we could find no evidence whatsoever that this was a project going into her district."
Although Rollins recalled discussing the $2,800 meal with Harris, Harris told the Orlando Sentinel on April 19, 2006, that the cost of the meal was "news to me", and that her campaign had since "reimbursed" the restaurant for the cost of the meal. According to the reporter, when questioned as to why she would reimburse the restaurant for a meal that had been paid for by MZM, Harris abruptly terminated the interview, and her spokesman later called and requested unsuccessfully that the story not be printed. The next day, Harris's campaign issued a statement that she had believed her campaign had reimbursed the restaurant, and that she had donated $100 "which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer". Harris also asserted that most of the cost of the meal was from Wade ordering several unopened bottles of wine to take home, although the management of the restaurant denies ever allowing anyone to take unopened bottles of wine off the premises, saying "Why would we jeopardize our liquor license for the sake of selling a couple bottles of wine?"
In the weeks following the expensive meal, former senior Harris staffers claimed that "they initially rejected a defense contractor's $10 million appropriation request last year but reversed course after being instructed by Harris to approve it." In May 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Christopher Ingram acknowledged that she had also had a previous dinner with Wade in the same restaurant in March 2004, when the $32,000 in illegal donations had been given to her campaign. Ingram told the press that he did not know how much that meal cost, but that a charitable donation of an unknown amount had been given to a charity whose name he did not know, equivalent to her share of the meal. "She takes responsibility for the oversight that there was no reimbursement," he said.
Mona Tate Yost, an aide to Harris, left to work for MZM during the time Wade was pressing Harris to secure federal funding (April or May 2005). On July 17, 2006, Ed Rollins confirmed that Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents had recently questioned her about the $32,000 in donations. Rollins noted: "I assume more [interviews] will be coming, though. They were very serious." On September 7, 2006, Federal investigators questioned Jim Dornan, who quit as Harris's campaign manager the previous November.
2006 Senate race
Overview
On June 7, 2005, with support from her new campaign advisors of Ed Rollins and Jim Dornan, Harris announced her candidacy for the 2006 Florida United States Senate election, challenging Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Both lackluster fundraising relative to Nelson and controversy over campaign contributions from MZM caused Harris to fall far behind in all polls by May 2006.
Late in the primary race, Republican contender Will McBride polled 31 points behind Nelson in a hypothetical election against him, while Harris polled 33 points behind Nelson in the same poll. Harris was still popular among Republican voters and won the September 5 primary over McBride and two other challengers with approximately 50% of the total vote.
Despite Harris's support of many Republican causes and her previous statewide victories, some party leaders expressed doubt about her statewide appeal:
In May 2006, Florida Governor Jeb Bush questioned Harris's ability to win the general election and encouraged others to challenge her in the primary.
Karl Rove expressed doubts about her statewide appeal.
National Republicans openly criticized her campaign and tried to convince other GOP candidates to challenge Harris in the primary.
Florida state House of Representatives Speaker Allan Bense declined the candidacy on May 11 despite public courting by many leaders including Governor Bush.
Conservative pundit and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough was also unsuccessfully recruited to enter the race. Departing Harris aides claim that Harris called potential Scarborough supporters and raised the death of an aide in order to prevent his entry into the race. Scarborough later told Nelson that drawing Harris as an opponent in the race made him "the luckiest man in Washington".
By late July 2006, Harris had gone through three campaign managers and her campaign was floundering. At that time, it was disclosed that state Republican Party leaders had told Harris they would not support her because she could not win in the general election.
Financial problems plagued Harris' Senate campaign from the start. During the primary, it was clear that the incumbent Senator Nelson had a substantial financial advantage.
On the March 15, 2006, edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Harris pledged to spend $10 million of her own money, which she said was all of her inheritance, on her campaign. She also stated that her run was dedicated to the memory of her father.
Despite her promise, the $10 million never materialized. Reports surfaced that Harris would not actually receive the inheritance from her father, who instead left his entire estate to her mother. She donated $3 million to her campaign, but later took back $100,000, fueling speculation that she would be unable to donate the promised amount.
In October, Harris announced that she was trying to sell her house in Washington to raise money for her campaign, but the home was not publicly listed for sale and no sale was ever announced.
Nelson defeated Harris by more than one million votes. Harris received less than 39% of the vote.
Staff resignations
In late February 2006, in the midst of revelations surrounding Mitchell Wade's illegal contributions, Harris's campaign finance director and her campaign treasurer both resigned. On April 1, 2006, Harris's top campaign advisor, pollster and campaign manager all resigned with a half-dozen other staffers. Republican pollster and consultant David Johnson said, "I've never seen staffers go like this. It's just imploding."
In early April 2006, Harris told the Tampa Tribune that some of her ex-campaign staffers and the national Republican party were deliberately sabotaging her campaign by "putting knives in her back" and had warned her that if she did not back out of the campaign, she would get an "April surprise". Former campaign staffer Ed Rollins said "They were all good professionals ... There was no backstabbing. It's insulting that she would even say that. If she wants to know what went wrong with the campaign, maybe she needs to take a good look in the mirror."
In June, the Harris campaign received a legal bill for thousands of dollars that contained a reference to "DOJ subpoena". Later, an ex-aide told the Associated Press that Harris had received a grand jury subpoena from federal investigators, but kept it from her top advisers, prompting several staff members to quit when they found out. On June 8, 2006, Harris's fourth chief of staff, Fred Asbell, left in order to pursue a "business opportunity". Asbell said he'd "greatly enjoyed" his time with the campaign and he would remain in a consultant position. On July 12, 2006, Harris's campaign spokesman Chris Christopher Ingram left the campaign. The next day, Harris received resignations from Campaign Manager Glenn Hodas, Field Director Pat Thomas, Political Director Brian Brooks and Deputy Field Director John K. Byers, while Travel Aide Kyle Johnson and Field Director Mike Norris declined to leave, citing loyalty to Harris. Hodas cited Harris's "tantrums" and "increasingly erratic behavior" as his reasons for leaving. An anonymous campaign worker described Harris as "very difficult to work with. The more that we put her out there, the more she shot herself in the foot."
In late August, Harris lost another key staffer, Rhyan Metzler, in the wake of a disastrous political rally at Orlando Executive Airport. Only 40 people showed up for the event, and Harris blamed the paltry turnout in part on a last-minute change in location. She claimed that a tree fell on the hangar that was originally scheduled to hold the rally, forcing her campaign to switch to another hangar. Airport officials, however, stated that not only had no trees fallen, but also that there are no trees as they get in the way of the airplanes; further adding that the event in fact took place in the hangar that Harris's campaign had originally booked. Harris's campaign blamed Metzler for the comments Harris made after the rally. On August 31, 2006, Harris was interviewed on Hardball with Chris Matthews, where she responded to the criticisms from her former staffers with "We have their email traffic, we know what was behind all that, we know who's been paid and who isn't."
Lack of Republican support
The Pensacola News Journal suggested that Harris might withdraw from the Senate race after winning a primary victory, thereby allowing the Republicans to nominate another candidate, such as Tom Gallagher, to run against Bill Nelson.
In August, Katherine Harris touted political endorsements from fellow Republican lawmakers on her campaign web site. However, some of those cited claim that they never endorsed her. This conflict resulted in several Republican congressmen calling the Harris campaign to complain after the St. Petersburg Times notified them of the endorsements listed on Harris's Web site. A short time later, their names were removed without comment from Harris's Web site.
Of Harris's three primary opponents, only Will McBride endorsed her candidacy for the general election. In the first few days after the primary, a number of Republican nominees such as Charlie Crist and Tom Lee went on a statewide unity tour with Gov. Bush. Harris was not invited; Republicans said the tour was only for nominees to statewide offices. Harris claimed Bush would campaign with her sometime in the two months before the election, but the governor's office denied this.
President Bush did not make public appearances or private meetings with Harris before the primary. He did, however, appear with her at a fundraiser on September 21 in Tampa.
When it came time for newspapers to make their op-ed endorsements, all 22 of Florida's major daily newspapers supported Senator Nelson. The only endorsement Harris received was from the Polk County Democrat, a newspaper in Bartow which publishes four days out of the week.
Religious convictions
Harris was a headline speaker at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church's "Reclaiming America for Christ" conference held in Ft. Lauderdale on March 17–18, 2006. The conference web site invited attendees to attend in order to "reclaim this nation for Christ." The stated mission of ReclaimAmerica.org is "To inform, equip, motivate, and support Christians; enabling them to defend and implement the Biblical principles on which our country was founded." As part of her speech, Harris urged conferees to "win back America for God." Her appearance was noted in a Rolling Stone article covering the conference.
In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness on August 24, 2006, Harris called for Christians to vote on religious lines. She said,
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said she was "disgusted" by the comments "and deeply disappointed in Representative Harris personally," adding "clearly shows that she does not deserve to be a representative." Two of Harris' primary opponents denounced her statements, Republican Will McBride (an attorney and son of a pastor) stated "I'm a Christian, and I'm a Republican, and I don't share her views. There are people of other faiths and backgrounds of outstanding integrity who know how to tell the truth." Real estate developer Peter Monroe, another GOP primary opponent, called on her to quit the race and resign from Congress. He called her suggestion that non-Christian voters are ignorant of morality when voting as "contemptible, arrogant and wicked."
On August 26, 2006, Harris's campaign released a "Statement of Clarification", that stated, "In the interview, Harris was speaking to a Christian audience, addressing a common misperception that people of faith should not be actively involved in government. Addressing this Christian publication, Harris provided a statement that explains her deep grounding in Judeo-Christian values." The press release went on to mention her past support of Israel and quoted her Jewish campaign manager Bryan G. Rudnick, who stated "As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I know that she encourages people of all faiths to engage in government so that our country can continue to thrive on the principles set forth by our founding fathers, without malice towards anyone." At an appearance at an Orlando gun show that same day, she said "it breaks my heart" to think people understood her comments as bigoted. When asked if she thought the Founding Fathers intended the nation to have secular laws she replied,
On October 3, 2006, Harris participated in a prayer service via phone call. In one instance, she called for the elimination of the separation of church and state when she said,
Harris then went on and prayed for Jews to be converted to Christianity.
Replacements in the 13th Congressional District
Vern Buchanan was the Republican nominee and Christine Jennings the Democratic nominee to replace Harris in the 2006 election. The race had been ranked as "leaning Democratic" by CQ Politics, but Buchanan scored a very narrow victory, winning the election by a few hundred votes.
Political positions and voting record
Harris is a conservative on most issues. She is anti-abortion and has voted against embryonic stem cell research. She opposes oil-drilling in Florida's coastal waters. Harris supported reforming Social Security to include private accounts. She has voted in favor of granting legal status to fetuses via the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. She supports tax cuts and the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which restricts bankruptcy filings by consumers. Harris is also in favor of welfare reform, school vouchers, the Patriot Act, the Flag Desecration Amendment, the Federal Marriage Amendment, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a televised debate with Nelson on November 1, however, she repeatedly declined to say whether she would still support the Iraq War Resolution knowing that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In an earlier debate with Nelson, Harris was asked to comment on trade of arms with foreign nations and the potential threat of their acquisition by terrorist groups. Harris responded that "we know we don't want to have arms going to the rogue nations like China."
In popular culture
Katherine Harris was the subject of some skits on Saturday Night Live, in which she was played by Ana Gasteyer; she was also portrayed by actress Laura Dern in the 2008 film Recount, for which Dern won a Golden Globe.She is mentioned in Family guy Season 5 Episode16 'No chris left behind'. Harris is also referenced in one of filmmaker Kevin Smith's monologues for the DVD An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. Harris was also satirically portrayed by comedian Janeane Garofalo as "Senator Katherine Harris" on the Internet talk radio and podcast show The Majority Report with Sam Seder.
See also
Florida election recount
Women in the United States House of Representatives
References
External links
Profile piece at Washington Post
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1957 births
21st-century American politicians
21st-century American women politicians
2000 United States presidential election in Florida
Agnes Scott College people
Bartow High School alumni
Candidates in the 2006 United States elections
Christians from Florida
Conservatism in the United States
Female members of the United States House of Representatives
Florida Republicans
Harvard Kennedy School alumni
IBM employees
Living people
Members of the United States House of Representatives from Florida
People associated with the 2000 United States presidential election
People from Key West, Florida
Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
Secretaries of State of Florida
Women in Florida politics
| false |
[
", born June 1, 1979, in Osaka Prefecture, known as \"Namie-han\" to her fans, is a Japanese gag manga artist. Her works have been featured in Shueisha's magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump and, more recently, its sister publications Business Jump, Ultra Jump and Young Jump.\n\nOdama says she \"became a manga artist because [she] can't do anything else\". She debuted in the autumn of 1995 after winning an honorable mention for the Shikishō Prize given out by Kodansha's manga magazine Afternoon. She also was the runner-up for the Akatsuka Award in 2000 for her manga Junjō Pine.\n\nWorks (in chronological order)\n\nSeries\n2000-2001 \n2002 \n2003 \n2004 \n2006 \n2007- \n2009-\n\nShort stories\n2008\n\nShort story collections\n2005\n\nSources\n\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)",
"\"If You Can Do Anything Else\" is a song written by Billy Livsey and Don Schlitz, and recorded by American country music artist George Strait. It was released in February 2001 as the third and final single from his self-titled album. The song reached number 5 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart in July 2001. It also peaked at number 51 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.\n\nContent\nThe song is about man who is giving his woman the option to leave him. He gives her many different options for all the things she can do. At the end he gives her the option to stay with him if she really can’t find anything else to do. He says he will be alright if she leaves, but really it seems he wants her to stay.\n\nChart performance\n\"If You Can Do Anything Else\" debuted at number 60 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks for the week of March 3, 2001.\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\n2001 singles\n2000 songs\nGeorge Strait songs\nSongs written by Billy Livsey\nSongs written by Don Schlitz\nSong recordings produced by Tony Brown (record producer)\nMCA Nashville Records singles"
] |
[
"Take That",
"2006-2007: Beautiful World"
] |
C_6c5899211c324f1f99f593ecdcb72d87_1
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What singles were released from Beautiful World?
| 1 |
What singles were released from Take That's Beautiful World?
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Take That
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On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records in a deal reportedly worth PS3 million. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK album chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history. In the album Beautiful World all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Gary Barlow who received a sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks, regardless of whether they contributed to the writing process or not. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November. On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry making it the group's ninth No. 1 and stayed there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis in a live version of "A Million Love Songs" in the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006. The week after Take That's comeback album Beautiful World was released it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts. The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single taken from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This was due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. CANNOTANSWER
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"Patience",
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Take That are an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990. The group currently consists of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen. The original line-up also featured Jason Orange and Robbie Williams. Barlow is the group's lead singer and primary songwriter, with Owen and Williams initially providing backing vocals and Donald and Orange serving primarily as dancers.
The group have had 28 top 40 singles and 17 top 5 singles on the UK Singles Chart, 12 of which have reached number one, including "Back for Good", "Never Forget", "Patience" and "Greatest Day". They have also had eight number one albums on the UK Albums Chart. Internationally, the band have had 56 number one singles and 39 number one albums. They have received eight Brit Awards—winning for Best British Group and Best British Live Act. In 2012 they received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Take That has been certified for 14 million albums and 11.4 million singles in the UK.
Williams left the band in 1995 while the four remaining members completed their world tour and released a final single before splitting up in 1996. After filming a 2005 Take That: For the Record about the group and releasing a new greatest hits album, a four-piece Take That without Williams officially announced a 2006 reunion tour around the UK, entitled The Ultimate Tour. On 9 May 2006, it was announced that the group were set to record new material together once again; their fourth studio album, Beautiful World, was released in 2006 and was followed up with The Circus, in 2008. The group achieved new success as a four-piece, scoring a string of chart hits across the UK and Europe while selling over 45 million records worldwide. Williams rejoined Take That in 2010 for the band's sixth studio album, Progress. Released on 15 November of that year, it was the first album of new material to feature Take That's original line-up since their 1995 album, Nobody Else. It became the fastest-selling album of the 21st century and the second fastest-selling album in British history.
In 2014, the band recorded a seventh studio album, this time as a trio without Williams and Orange. The album, titled III, was released in November 2014 and became the band's seventh number one. It was preceded by the single "These Days", which became the band's 12th number one single in the UK.
In 2011, Take That set the new record for the fastest-selling tour of all time in the UK with Progress Live, beating the previous record set by their Circus Live Tour in 2009. At the 2011 Brit Awards they won Best British Group. In 2012, Forbes named them the fifth highest-earning music stars in the world. The group performed at the London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony, playing "Rule the World" while the Olympic Flame was extinguished. In the same year, the Official Charts Company revealed the biggest-selling singles artists in British music chart history with Take That currently placed at 15th overall, making them the most successful boy band in UK chart history. Four of their albums are listed in the best-selling albums of the millennium, with three of them among the 60 best-selling albums in UK chart history.
History
1989–1990: Formation
In 1989, Manchester-based Nigel Martin-Smith sought to create a British male vocal singing group modelled on New Kids on the Block. Martin-Smith's vision, however, was a teen-orientated group that would appeal to more than one demographic segment of the music industry. Martin-Smith was then introduced to young singer-songwriter Gary Barlow, who had been performing in clubs since the age of 15. Impressed with Barlow's catalogue of self-written material, Martin-Smith decided to build his new-look boy band around Barlow's musical abilities. A campaign to audition young men with abilities in dancing and singing followed and took place in Manchester and other surrounding cities in 1990. At 22, Howard Donald was one of the oldest to audition, but he was chosen after he got time off work as a vehicle painter to continue the process. Prior to auditioning, Jason Orange had appeared as a breakdancer on the popular television programme The Hit Man and Her. Martin-Smith also selected 18-year-old bank employee Mark Owen and finally 16-year-old Robbie Williams to round out the group, which initially went by the name Kick It.
1990–1992: Take That & Party
Take That's first TV appearance was on The Hit Man and Her in 1990, where they performed Barlow's self-written, unreleased song, "My Kind of Girl". They later appeared a second time to perform "Waiting Around", which would become the B-side for the first single, "Do What U Like". "Promises" and "Once You've Tasted Love" were also released as singles but were minor hits in the UK. Take That initially worked the same territory as their American counterparts, singing new jack R&B, urban soul, and mainstream pop. However, they worked their way toward Hi-NRG dance music, while also pursuing an adult contemporary ballad direction. As they aimed to break into the mainstream music industry, they worked a number of small clubs, schools, and events across the country building up a fanbase as they travelled to gigs constantly for months.
Take That's breakthrough single was a cover of the 1975 Tavares hit "It Only Takes a Minute", which peaked at number seven on the UK Singles Chart in June 1992. This success was followed by "I Found Heaven", then by the first Barlow ballad "A Million Love Songs", which also reached number seven in October. Their cover of the Barry Manilow hit "Could It Be Magic" gave them their first big success, peaking at number three in the UK in the first chart of 1993. Their first album, Take That & Party, was released in 1992, and included all the hit singles to date.
1993–1995: Everything Changes, Nobody Else and superstardom
1993 saw the release of Everything Changes, based on Barlow's original material. It peaked at number one in the UK and spawned six singles, with four being consecutive UK number one singles – their first number one "Pray", "Relight My Fire", "Babe" and the title track "Everything Changes". The lead single "Why Can't I Wake Up with You" had narrowly missed the top spot in the UK peaking at number two and the sixth and final single "Love Ain't Here Anymore" taken from the album reached number three on the UK charts. Everything Changes saw the band gain international success with the album being nominated for the 1994 Mercury Prize, but it failed to crack the U.S. market, where an exclusive remix of "Love Ain't Here Anymore" (U.S. version) gained little success.
By 1994, Take That had become radio and television stars across Europe and Asia, but it was not until 1995 that they did their first World Tour. It was during the years 1993–95 that the band fronted scores of magazine covers ranging from Smash Hits to GQ, becoming mass merchandised on all sorts of paraphernalia ranging from picture books, to posters, stickers, their own dolls, jewellery, caps, T-shirts, toothbrushes and even had their own annuals released. The band had also developed a large female teenage fanbase at the time. During this time, they performed at numerous music awards shows and chart shows such as the BRIT Awards and Top of the Pops, also winning the Best Live Act award in 1995 at the MTV Europe Music Awards, having been renowned for their breakdance routines, high energy and creative tour productions.
In 1995, Take That released their third studio album Nobody Else, again based on Barlow's own material which reached number 1 in the UK and across Europe, capturing new audiences along the way, with Take That also able to make inroads in the adult audience in Britain through Barlow's melodic, sensitive ballads. For nearly five years, Take That's popularity was unsurpassed in Britain. The release of the first single from the album, "Sure", achieved yet another number one in the UK charts. It was not until their second release from that album, however, that they would experience what would become their biggest hit single, "Back for Good", which reached number one in many countries including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Norway. It was also their only US hit, where it reached number seven.
The song was initially unveiled for the first time via live performance while at the 1995 BRIT Awards, and based on the reception of that performance, the record pre-sold more records than expected and forced the record label to bring the release date forward by an unprecedented six weeks. The album was also noted for its cover, which was a parody of the famed cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover sleeve.
1995–1996: Break-up and Greatest Hits
Robbie Williams's drug abuse had escalated to a near drug overdose the night before the group was scheduled to perform at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 1994.
In June 1995, Williams was photographed by the press partying with Oasis at the Glastonbury Festival. The following month, the band offered him an ultimatum; he was to adhere to the band's responsibilities or leave before their scheduled world tour. Williams chose the latter. Williams claimed he was bored with Barlow's leadership and jealous of Barlow. Despite the loss of Williams, Take That continued to promote Nobody Else as a four-piece, scoring a further hit single with "Never Forget" with Donald on lead vocal. They subsequently went to America and completed the Nobody Else Tour in October 1995. Following the tour, the band began to plan for their next album; however, when they spent Christmas together, they mutually agreed it was time to part ways.
On 13 February 1996, Take That formally announced that they were disbanding. This was followed by the Greatest Hits compilation in 1996, which contained a new recording, a cover of the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love". The single went on to become what was to be the band's final UK number one until their 2006 comeback a decade later. Take That gave what was thought to be their final performance in April 1996 at Amsterdam. Following the band's announcement, millions of their fans were distraught around the world and in the UK alone, teenage girls threatened suicide and were seen lining streets in tears, to the point that telephone hotlines were set up by the government to deal with counselling them. After the band broke up, highly respected music figures such as Elton John noted that Take That were different from other boy bands before and after them, in that they wrote their own material through Gary Barlow. Barlow is one of only a small number of people who have won an Ivor Novello award during their time in a boy band, with George Michael whilst in Wham! and Tony Mortimer whilst in East 17 being two others who have achieved this feat. Take That had also left a legacy of being immaculate performers with a very high work ethic, causing them to be voted in as the greatest boy band of all time.
2005–2006: Reunion as a quartet and Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection
On 14 November 2005, Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection, a new compilation of their hit singles including a new previously unreleased song, also achieved great success and peaked at number 2 on UK charts, selling over 2.1 million copies in the UK alone. The new song "Today I've Lost You" (recorded in September 2005) was originally written by Barlow as the follow up to "Back for Good" but was never recorded. On 16 November 2005, the group got back together for the ITV documentary Take That: For the Record, in which they aired their views over their fame, success, the split and what the post-Williams line-up had done since. On 25 November 2005, there was an official press conference by the band announcing that the post-Robbie Williams line-up was going to tour in 2006. The tour, entitled The Ultimate Tour, ran from April to June 2006. The tour featured a guest appearance by British soul singer Beverley Knight, who replaced Lulu's vocals on the song "Relight My Fire"; although Lulu did appear during the stadium shows on "Relight My Fire" and "Never Forget". The American female ensemble Pussycat Dolls supported the group at their Dublin concert, and the Sugababes supported the group on the final five dates of the stadium leg. In a seven-year study analysing over one billion online searches via Google conducted by AccuraCast, a leading digital search agency, their comeback was ranked at number one in the UK.
2006–2007: Beautiful World
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK Albums Chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history.
On Beautiful World, all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals and contribute in the songwriting. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Barlow who received sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November.
On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry, making it the group's ninth No. 1, and staying there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis on a live version of "A Million Love Songs" during the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006.
The week after Beautiful World was released, it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts.
The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single chosen from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This may have been due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. The single "Rule the World", included on the deluxe version of Beautiful World, was recorded for the soundtrack of the film Stardust (2007). It reached number two in the UK and went on to become the group's second best selling single, shifting over 1.2 million units in the UK. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. According to a 2007 MSN UK internet poll, Take That were voted as the "comeback kings" of the year.
2008–2009: The Circus
"Greatest Day", the first single from the album The Circus, made its radio premiere on 13 October 2008 and it was released on 24 November. It debuted at number 1 on the UK Singles Chart on 30 November 2008. An album launch party for The Circus was held in Paris on 2 December. On its first day of release The Circus sold 133,000 copies, and after four days on sale it sold 306,000 copies (going platinum) making The Circus the fastest selling album of the year. The album reached number 1 on the UK Albums Chart on 7 December 2008 with total first-week sales of 432,490, the third highest opening sales week in UK history.
On 28 October 2008, on the Radio 1 Chris Moyles show, it was announced that Take That would be touring again in June/July 2009, covering the UK and Ireland. Tickets for the Take That Present: The Circus Live tour went on sale on 31 October. The promoters, SJM, have said that the band's tour is "the fastest selling in UK history".
On 22 May 2008, Barlow and Donald attended the 2008 Ivor Novello Awards where Take That won the award for Most Performed Work with their single "Shine". Take That won the Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year award at the Vodafone music awards on 18 September 2008. They were unable to attend as they were in LA finishing off The Circus. They did send a video link message, which was shown at the awards. On 22 November 2008, Take That appeared on week 7 of the talent show The X Factor where the finalists performed some of their greatest hits and Owen and Barlow made a guest appearance to personally coach the contestants. The band also performed on Children in Need 2008, singing their new single, "Greatest Day", before donating £250,000 to the charity from their Marks and Spencer fee. The band were also voted the Greatest Boy Band of All Time, reflecting their ongoing marketability and success in the pop arena, even after two decades.
At the 2009 Brit Awards they were nominated for Best British Group and they performed "Greatest Day" at the ceremony. "Up All Night", the second single from The Circus, was released on 2 March 2009, and peaked at number 14 on the UK Singles Chart, despite heavy airplay. In Germany and Australia, "The Garden" was released as the second single instead. On 7 May 2009, Take That's official website confirmed that the third single from The Circus would be "Said It All" which was released on 15 June 2009, peaking at number 9 on the UK Singles chart. The video premiered on GMTV on 8 May 2009. It features all four band members dressed up as vintage circus clowns, which tied in with their forthcoming Take That Present: The Circus Live tour. Take That started their Circus Live tour at the Stadium of Light on 5 June 2009 in Sunderland and ended at the Wembley Stadium in London on 5 July 2009, which over 80,000 people attended. This tour quickly became the fastest-selling of all time, breaking all records by selling all of their 650,000 tickets in less than four and a half hours.
In November 2009 Take That released the official DVD of their Circus tour, which became the fastest-selling music DVD of all time in the UK on its first day of release and stayed in the top 10 of the videos chart for over a year. This overtook the previous record sales holder, which was Take That's Beautiful World Live tour and stayed at the number 1 spot for 8 weeks. The following week Take That released their first live album, The Greatest Day – Take That Present: The Circus Live, which sold 98,000 copies on its first day of release and was certified Platinum in July 2013. "Hold up a Light" was released as the fifth and final single from The Circus to radio stations and as a digital download to promote the release of the live album. The live album also featured a stripped down session recorded live at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. It featured the members singing the setlist from the preceding tour, albeit in a studio setting.
2010–2011: Williams' return and Progress
On 7 June 2010, the news broke of a single called "Shame", which had been written by Barlow and Williams and would feature the vocals of both artists. This was the first time the pair had worked together since 1995 and would appear on the second greatest hits collection of Williams. "Heart and I", another track from the same album, was also co-written by Williams and Barlow. The single "Shame" peaked at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart while also achieving success throughout Europe, charting in over 19 countries.
After working with the band on new material in Los Angeles, on 15 July 2010 Robbie Williams announced he was returning to Take That. After months of working together, assembling new songs for a new album and even debating a band-name change to "The English", a joint statement between Williams and the group read, "The rumours are true ... Take That: the original lineup, have written and recorded a new album for release later this year." The statement went on to say, "Following months of speculation Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange, Mark Owen, and Robbie Williams confirmed they have been recording a new studio album as a five-piece, which they will release in November." The lead single from Take That's album Progress was announced as "The Flood" and was released 7 November as a digital download, and on 8 November as a physical copy, with the album released a week later on 15 November. The single peaked at number 2 in the UK Singles Charts and to date has sold over 500,000 copies in the UK alone. The single also achieved success across Europe, charting inside the top 10 in ten countries while also charting in another nine countries whilst also being nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for best work.
On 26 October the band announced that they would be embarking on a huge UK stadium tour entitled Progress Live, starting in Sunderland on 27 May, and finishing with a record-breaking 8 nights at London's Wembley Stadium in July 2011. It was also announced that Williams would perform hit singles from his solo career during the tour. The band then played at some of the biggest venues across Europe for the second leg of the tour. The phenomenal demand for tickets across the country led to the web sites of all the major UK ticket suppliers either crashing or considerably slowing for hours on end. The demand and sheer volume of fans also created problems for the UK telephone network. Take That's Progress Live also broke all records for ticket sales selling over 1.1 million tickets in one day, smashing the previous box office record set by Take That's Circus tour in 2008.
On the first day of release Progress became the fastest selling album of the century, with 235,000 copies sold in just one day. The album reached number 1 in the UK, selling around 520,000 copies in its first week, becoming the second fastest-selling album in history. After the release of Progress it was announced that Take That have become Amazon UK's top-selling music artist of all time.
The album retained the number one spot for six consecutive weeks in the UK since its release, selling 2.8 million copies in the UK alone and becoming the best selling album of 2010
Progress also achieved success across Europe where it debuted at number one in Ireland, Greece, Germany and Denmark. and the European Top 100 Albums chart. It also debuted inside the top 10 of the charts in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.
"Kidz" was announced as the second single from Progress, it was released 21 February 2011 and charted well across Europe. The band performed the song live at the 2011 Brit Awards hosted at The O2 Arena, where they won a Brit for Best British Group and were nominated for Best British Album. Their performance of "Kidz", praised by critics, involved a highly choreographed routine featuring dancers dressed in police-styled riot gear bearing the Take That symbol on the uniform and shields. On 19 May 2011, Take That announced a new EP entitled Progressed, which contained eight tracks written by the band since they had reunited as a five-piece. It was packaged alongside the album Progress and returned the band to number 1 in the UK Album Chart the week after it was released on 13 June 2011.
Take That announced that the Progress Live tour would be released worldwide as their second live album to date and would also be released on home media formats across the UK and Europe on 21 November 2011. The DVD debuted at number 1 on the UK Music Video top 40 in its first week on release and sold over 200,000 copies in two weeks of release in the UK alone. Take That's efforts were recognised further when they were awarded Virgin Media's Best Live Act of 2012.
On 4 October, it was reported that Take That were to take a break after the completion of the Progress tour, with Barlow continuing his role as a judge on The X Factor and Williams recording new solo material. Take That were presented with an Ivor Novello Award for their Outstanding Contribution to British Music in May 2012.
In August 2012, Take That performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, despite Barlow announcing that his daughter had been stillborn the previous week. The performance earned him praise for appearing live so soon after the tragedy. Williams was due to perform with the band but dropped out due to his wife giving birth at around the same time and thus the group performed as a four-piece. In November 2012, Take That reunited as a five-piece for the last time to perform "Never Forget" at the Music Industry Trust Awards. In 2013, Donald became a judge on the German version of the television dancing show Got to Dance.
2014–2015: Line-up change and III
In May 2013, Owen announced that Take That was to begin recording their seventh studio album in 2014, and on 14 January 2014, Donald and Barlow both tweeted that Take That had entered the studio to begin recording the album, although it was not initially clear if Williams was present at these recording sessions. On 28 April 2014, Williams announced on Twitter he was to become a father for a second time, and consequently suggested he would be unable to join Take That on their album and tour. Although welcome to return to the band at any time, Williams chose not to return for group's seventh and eighth studio albums and their accompanying tours, focusing instead on his solo commitments. He continued to write music with his colleagues and has performed with the group on several occasions since 2011's Progress tour and plans on returning at some point in the future.
On 24 September 2014, it was announced that Jason Orange had left the band. He said: 'At a band meeting last week I confirmed to Mark, Gary and Howard that I do not wish to commit to recording and promoting a new album. 'At the end of The Progress Tour I began to question whether it might be the right time for me to not continue on with Take That,' he continued. 'There have been no fallings out, only a decision on my part that I no longer wish to do this,' he added. Barlow, Donald, and Owen issued a joint statement about Orange's decision which said: "This is a sad day for us. Jason leaving is a huge loss both professionally and even more so personally ... Jason's energy and belief in what this band could achieve has made it what it is today, and we'll forever be grateful for his enthusiasm, dedication and inspiration over the years." A day after the announcement, Robbie Williams took to Twitter to show support of Orange's decision. "Mr Orange. Until we ride again. Much love, Bro.", Williams tweeted.
On 10 October 2014, Take That unveiled their first song as a three-piece and lead single from their upcoming album. Titled "These Days", it was released on 23 November 2014 and went to No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart, knocking Band Aid 30 off the top spot and becoming their 12th number one single. The album itself, called III, was released on 28 November 2014 and became the band's seventh No. 1 album. It was then followed by a sell-out arena tour entitled Take That Live. On 14 October 2015, the band announced their new single "Hey Boy", released on 16 October, which is the first single from the 2015 re-release of III. The 2015 edition of the album was released on 20 November.
In December 2015, British media buzzed about the group embarking on a stint in Las Vegas, starting 2017. Reports indicated the group impressed U.S. promoters and would headline their own residency show. Many venues circulated, including The AXIS at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, The Foundry at SLS Las Vegas and the Linq Theater at The LINQ Hotel & Casino. Local newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun writes that everything is still unconfirmed, despite Barlow confirming the rumour on Twitter.
2016–2017: Wonderland
On 2 February 2016, in an interview with The Sun, Barlow revealed that Take That would release their eighth studio album later in the year. On 4 May 2016, English drum and bass duo Sigma announced their newest single would feature Take That. "Cry" received its first radio play on 20 May 2016 and was released on that date. On 21 October 2016, the band posted a teaser on their social media pages and website depicting the logo of the band flickering with the hashtag "#WONDERLAND". The following day, it was announced that their new album, titled Wonderland, was scheduled to be released on 24 March 2017. It was then followed by a UK and Ireland arena tour entitled Wonderland Live, that commenced on 5 May 2017 at the Genting Arena in Birmingham. On 17 February 2017, the lead single of Wonderland was released. Titled "Giants", it debuted at 13 in the UK charts, which became the band's 24th UK top 20 single.
On 8 April 2017, ITV aired a specially commissioned hour-length television special titled An Evening with Take That, where the band performed some songs from the album, along with some old classics including "Never Forget", "Back for Good" and "Rule the World". The band also took part in a Q&A session with the audience members. On 27 April, it was announced on Twitter that "New Day" would be released as the next single from the album Wonderland. The band were seen recording the music video in a field in Luton the days leading up the opening night of the Wonderland Live tour. Due to the Manchester Arena bombing just days before they were due to perform at the venue, their Manchester and Liverpool dates were rescheduled or relocated. The band returned a month later to perform at the One Love Manchester benefit concert.
On 16 September 2017, Barlow, Owen and Donald were set to perform a special one-off show in Jersey after a fan bid more than £1.2 million to win a performance from the band. This then turned in to a ticketed charity event where the money from tickets sold would go towards benefiting Children in Need. The auction was held on BBC Radio 2. On 11 November 2017, Take That began their foreign tour in Perth, Australia, the first time they have performed in the country in over twenty years. They also played in New Zealand, United Arab Emirates and Israel for the first time. Unlike the other tours, a DVD for Wonderland Live was not released. Instead, it was broadcast on Sky 1 on 23 December and in cinemas.
2018–2020: The 30th Anniversary, and Odyssey
On 16 July 2018, while performing at first ever Hits Radio Live at the Manchester Arena, Barlow, Donald and Owen confirmed that they would be touring in 2019. The tour was a Greatest Hits tour and celebrated the 30th anniversary of the band. There was also a Greatest Hits album, Odyssey, which was released on 23 November 2018. The Greatest Hits album features existing songs from their back catalogue that have been re-imagined and 3 brand new songs. It also includes collaborations with Boyz II Men, Lulu, Sigma and Barry Gibb. Odyssey reached number one in the UK album chart and was certified as a platinum selling record. The following year, Odyssey Live, the recording of their tour, reached number 5, becoming the band's 13th top 5 album, with the DVD becoming the biggest live music sale of 2019.
In May 2020, Barlow, Donald, and Owen reunited with Williams for a virtual performance from their respective homes, hosted by price comparison website comparethemarket.com, to raise money for the music charity Nordoff Robbins and Crew Nation.
In other media
In April 2006, EMI licensed the band's songs to be used in the musical Never Forget, a musical based on songs of the band from the 1990s. Take That posted and then later removed a statement on their website distancing themselves from it.
Take That wrote and recorded the theme song "Rule the World" for the film Stardust directed by Matthew Vaughn, which was released in cinemas across the globe in October 2007. In 2007, their song "Back for Good" was used as part of the soundtrack for popular Korean drama The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince.
Take That presented their own TV show Take That Come to Town, a variety show in which they performed some of their biggest hits. The show also featured comedy sketches with one of Peter Kay's alter egos Geraldine McQueen. It aired on 7 December 2008 on ITV1. Sony launched their first Take That video game, SingStar Take That in 2009 for the PlayStation 3.
In November 2010, ITV aired Take That: Look Back, Don't Stare, a black-and-white documentary which focused on the band working together for the first time in 15 years. Through a series of interviews, the band look back at their achievements while also looking forward to what the future holds for them. On 18 November 2010, Williams and Barlow appeared together live on television for the first time on the Popstars program in Germany singing their hit "Shame".
In 2011, Take That's song "Love Love" was used in the credits of the 2011 film X-Men: First Class and later, "When We Were Young" was chosen as the main theme for The Three Musketeers movie. In 2015, the song "Get Ready for It" from their album III, was chosen as the theme song for the film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
In 2017, Take That launched The Band, a musical written by Tim Firth featuring the five winners of Let It Shine and some of Take That's biggest hits. Take That, including Robbie Williams, were billed as executive producers.
The group's music is regularly featured in the Channel 4 show Derry Girls, notably in the third episode of the second series, when the lead characters sneak off to attend the 1993 Take That concert in Belfast; the episode features the music video for "Pray" and ends on footage of the band performing "Everything Changes".
Artistry
Early in their career, Take That were known for party anthems such as "Do What U Like" and more mature ballads such as "A Million Love Songs" and "Back for Good". Since reuniting in 2006, they have become more experimental: their post-2006 albums Beautiful World and The Circus have featured "stadium-filling pop-rock" while Progress largely leaned towards electropop. Having been dubbed the "comeback kings" by the media for their highly successful reunion, the group has won widespread praise for their seamless transformation from teen idols to "man band" without overly relying on nostalgia, instead showcasing a more mature image and sound and reinventing themselves while maintaining their artistic integrity. Jude Rogers of The Guardian commented on Take That's post-reunion success, in light of a string of reunions by the group's disbanded counterparts from the 1990s: "Only Take That are penetrating pop's wider consciousness by becoming a man-band rather than a boy-band, singing mature, proper pop songs that cross the generations."
Take That have garnered critical acclaim and popularity as consummate live performers and for their musical output. Their domestic concert tours have been described as "some of the most flamboyant, imaginative and extravagant pop tours around". Aside from covers, all of their material is composed by the members themselves; Barlow was initially the principal songwriter who received sole credit but the other members have since taken a more active role in the composition and production process, including playing instruments for the backing track.
Band members
Current members
Gary Barlow (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Howard Donald (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Mark Owen (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Former members
Robbie Williams (1990–1995, 2010–2012)
Jason Orange (1990–1996, 2005–2014)
Timeline
Awards and nominations
|-
| 2016
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2015
| "These Days"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2012
| "Pray"
|The Guardian Music Award for Best Number 1 Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|The Official Charts Company UK Recognition award for United Kingdom's Favourite Number One Single
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Music Video
|
|-
| rowspan="10" style="text-align:center;"|2011
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards for Best Live Sound Event
|
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards Grand Prix Award
|
|-
| Take That
|Phonographic Performance Limited Award for most played UK artist
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Spex German Entertainment for Best Music Video
|
|-
| The Circus Live Tour
| Greatest Event ever at Wembley Stadium
|
|-
| Take That
|ECHO Award for Best International Group
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Progress
| BRIT Award for MasterCard Album of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2010
|-
| "Up All Night"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|iTunes Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Progress
| iTunes Award for Best Album
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award Hall of Fame
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best Live Performance of the past 30 Years
|
|-
| rowspan="5" style="text-align:center;"|2009
| Take That
|GQ Men of the Year Awards for Best Band
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Greatest Day"
|Q Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="7" style="text-align:center;"|2008
| "Shine"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| "Rule the World"
|Virgin for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year Award for Take That Arena Tour
|
|-
| "Shine"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Live Act
|
|-
| Beautiful World
|BRIT Award for Best British Album
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2007
| "Patience"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2006
| Take That
|Q Idol Award
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1996
| "Back for Good"
|Billboard International Hit of the Year
|
|-
| "Never Forget"
|Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Song
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1995
| "Back for Good"
|Ivor Novello Award for the Song of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|1994
| "Babe"
|MTV Video Music Award for International Viewer's Choice Award for MTV Europe
|
|-
| Everything Changes
|Mercury Prize for Best Album
|
|-
| "Pray"
|Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Video
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="4" style="text-align:center;"|1993
| "Could It Be Magic"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "A Million Love Songs"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "It Only Takes a Minute"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Newcomer
|
|}
Discography
Take That & Party (1992)
Everything Changes (1993)
Nobody Else (1995)
Beautiful World (2006)
The Circus (2008)
Progress (2010)
III (2014)
Wonderland (2017)
Tours
Party Tour (1992–93)
Everything Changes Tour (1993–94)
Pops Tour (1994–95)
Nobody Else Tour (1995)
The Ultimate Tour (2006)
Beautiful World Tour 2007 (2007)
Take That Present: The Circus Live (2009)
Progress Live (2011)
Take That Live (2015)
Wonderland Live (2017)
Greatest Hits Live (2019)
See also
List of best-selling boy bands
References
External links
Chinese Fansite
1990 establishments in England
1996 disestablishments in England
2005 establishments in England
Brit Award winners
Dance-pop groups
Echo (music award) winners
English boy bands
English dance music groups
Interscope Records artists
Ivor Novello Award winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups disestablished in 1996
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups from Cheshire
Musical groups from Manchester
Musical groups reestablished in 2005
Polydor Records artists
Teen pop groups
Universal Music Group artists
Vocal quartets
Vocal quintets
Vocal trios
| true |
[
"Beautiful World is the fourth studio album by Connie Talbot. It was released on 26 November 2012 by Hong Kong-based Evolution Media Ltd's Evosound label. It charted at number 1 in Taiwan.\nThe album is produced by Grammy-winning producer Kipper together with Phil Taylor.\nThe title track is a rerecorded version of Talbot's self-penned track \"Beautiful World\", previously released as a single in 2011.\n\nTalbot promoted the album by performing in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia for her Beautiful World tour in December 2012. Her debut headline concert appearance was on 21 December at the Taiwan International Convention Centre in front of an audience of 1800. This was followed by two headline concerts at KITEC, Hong Kong. She also made guest appearances in several TV shows, namely Eat Bulaga!.\n\nOn 28 July 2014, a DVD and Blu-ray was released of Talbot’s concerts in Hong Kong and Taiwan during her Beautiful World tour in 2012. It features live performances of the songs from the Beautiful World album, and two additional songs, \"I Will Always Love You\" and \"Over the Rainbow\".\n\nSince 26 November 2012, Connie Talbot released her fourth album Beautiful World, 3 years later after her previous album Connie Talbot's Holiday Magic, which was released on 20 October 2009\n\nSince 26 November 2012, Connie Talbot released 10 Singles from her Beautiful World album within 4 years until her fifth album called Matters to Me was released on 25 March 2016\n\nTrack listing\n\nSingles\n\"Beautiful World\" was taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's lead single, which was released on 22 November 2011 in the UK. The music video for the single Beautiful World was published on 22 December 2012 from her official Music Channel called ConnieTalbotOfficial on Youtube.\n\nBut a year later, Connie released her same music video on her own music cChannel on Youtube called ConnieTalbotVEVO, that was released on 26 June 2013.\n\n\"Hero\", taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's second single in April 2013 in the UK. The music video for the single Hero was published on 5 April 2013.\n\n\"Heal The World\", taken from Hero, was released as Talbot's third single in late April 2013 in the UK. The music video for the single Heal The World was published on 24 April 2013.\n\n\"Let It Be\" was taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's second single that came out on the same day as her other single Count On Me in 2013 in the UK. The music video for the single Let It Be was published on 14 June 2013.\n\n\"Count On Me\" taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's third single on 2013 in the UK, which was released on the same day as her other single Let It Be in 2013 in the UK. The music video for the single Let It Be was published on 14 June 2013.\n\n\"Colours of The Wind\" taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's sixth single in late 2013 in the UK. The music video for the single Colours of The Wind was published on 26 June 2013.\n\n\"Pray\" taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's seventh single in September 2013 in the UK. The music video for the single Pray was published on 28 September 2013.\n\n\"Gift Of A Friend\" taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's ninth single in December 2013, which was released on the same day as the Single What The World Needs Now in the UK. The music video for the single Gift Of A Friend was published on 23 December 2013.\n\n\"What The World Needs Now\" taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's tenth single in December 2013, which was released on the same day as the Single Gift Of A Friend in the UK. The music video for the single What The World Needs Now was published on 23 December 2013.\n\nPromotional singles\n\n\"The Climb\" taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's first promotional single in June 2013 in the UK. The music video for The Climb was published on 19 June 2013.\n\n\"Amazing Grace\" taken from Beautiful World, was released as Talbot's second promotional single near the end of June 2013 in the UK. The music video for the single Amazing Grace was published on 22 June 2013.\n\nChart performance\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nConnie Talbot albums\n2012 albums",
"\"What's Going On\" is a song by Australian singer Casey Donovan. The song was released in February 2005 as the second single from her debut studio album For You (2004). The song peaked at number 18 on the ARIA Charts.\n\nTrack listing\n \"What's Going On\"\t\n \"Something Beautiful\" \n \"What's Going On\" (CD-ROM video)\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2004 songs\n2005 singles\nSony BMG singles\nCasey Donovan (singer) songs\nSongs written by Jessica Origliasso\nSongs written by Lisa Origliasso"
] |
[
"Take That",
"2006-2007: Beautiful World",
"What singles were released from Beautiful World?",
"\"Patience\","
] |
C_6c5899211c324f1f99f593ecdcb72d87_1
|
Was that the only single on the album?
| 2 |
Was "Patience" the only single on the album Beautiful World?
|
Take That
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On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records in a deal reportedly worth PS3 million. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK album chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history. In the album Beautiful World all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Gary Barlow who received a sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks, regardless of whether they contributed to the writing process or not. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November. On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry making it the group's ninth No. 1 and stayed there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis in a live version of "A Million Love Songs" in the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006. The week after Take That's comeback album Beautiful World was released it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts. The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single taken from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This was due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Take That are an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990. The group currently consists of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen. The original line-up also featured Jason Orange and Robbie Williams. Barlow is the group's lead singer and primary songwriter, with Owen and Williams initially providing backing vocals and Donald and Orange serving primarily as dancers.
The group have had 28 top 40 singles and 17 top 5 singles on the UK Singles Chart, 12 of which have reached number one, including "Back for Good", "Never Forget", "Patience" and "Greatest Day". They have also had eight number one albums on the UK Albums Chart. Internationally, the band have had 56 number one singles and 39 number one albums. They have received eight Brit Awards—winning for Best British Group and Best British Live Act. In 2012 they received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Take That has been certified for 14 million albums and 11.4 million singles in the UK.
Williams left the band in 1995 while the four remaining members completed their world tour and released a final single before splitting up in 1996. After filming a 2005 Take That: For the Record about the group and releasing a new greatest hits album, a four-piece Take That without Williams officially announced a 2006 reunion tour around the UK, entitled The Ultimate Tour. On 9 May 2006, it was announced that the group were set to record new material together once again; their fourth studio album, Beautiful World, was released in 2006 and was followed up with The Circus, in 2008. The group achieved new success as a four-piece, scoring a string of chart hits across the UK and Europe while selling over 45 million records worldwide. Williams rejoined Take That in 2010 for the band's sixth studio album, Progress. Released on 15 November of that year, it was the first album of new material to feature Take That's original line-up since their 1995 album, Nobody Else. It became the fastest-selling album of the 21st century and the second fastest-selling album in British history.
In 2014, the band recorded a seventh studio album, this time as a trio without Williams and Orange. The album, titled III, was released in November 2014 and became the band's seventh number one. It was preceded by the single "These Days", which became the band's 12th number one single in the UK.
In 2011, Take That set the new record for the fastest-selling tour of all time in the UK with Progress Live, beating the previous record set by their Circus Live Tour in 2009. At the 2011 Brit Awards they won Best British Group. In 2012, Forbes named them the fifth highest-earning music stars in the world. The group performed at the London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony, playing "Rule the World" while the Olympic Flame was extinguished. In the same year, the Official Charts Company revealed the biggest-selling singles artists in British music chart history with Take That currently placed at 15th overall, making them the most successful boy band in UK chart history. Four of their albums are listed in the best-selling albums of the millennium, with three of them among the 60 best-selling albums in UK chart history.
History
1989–1990: Formation
In 1989, Manchester-based Nigel Martin-Smith sought to create a British male vocal singing group modelled on New Kids on the Block. Martin-Smith's vision, however, was a teen-orientated group that would appeal to more than one demographic segment of the music industry. Martin-Smith was then introduced to young singer-songwriter Gary Barlow, who had been performing in clubs since the age of 15. Impressed with Barlow's catalogue of self-written material, Martin-Smith decided to build his new-look boy band around Barlow's musical abilities. A campaign to audition young men with abilities in dancing and singing followed and took place in Manchester and other surrounding cities in 1990. At 22, Howard Donald was one of the oldest to audition, but he was chosen after he got time off work as a vehicle painter to continue the process. Prior to auditioning, Jason Orange had appeared as a breakdancer on the popular television programme The Hit Man and Her. Martin-Smith also selected 18-year-old bank employee Mark Owen and finally 16-year-old Robbie Williams to round out the group, which initially went by the name Kick It.
1990–1992: Take That & Party
Take That's first TV appearance was on The Hit Man and Her in 1990, where they performed Barlow's self-written, unreleased song, "My Kind of Girl". They later appeared a second time to perform "Waiting Around", which would become the B-side for the first single, "Do What U Like". "Promises" and "Once You've Tasted Love" were also released as singles but were minor hits in the UK. Take That initially worked the same territory as their American counterparts, singing new jack R&B, urban soul, and mainstream pop. However, they worked their way toward Hi-NRG dance music, while also pursuing an adult contemporary ballad direction. As they aimed to break into the mainstream music industry, they worked a number of small clubs, schools, and events across the country building up a fanbase as they travelled to gigs constantly for months.
Take That's breakthrough single was a cover of the 1975 Tavares hit "It Only Takes a Minute", which peaked at number seven on the UK Singles Chart in June 1992. This success was followed by "I Found Heaven", then by the first Barlow ballad "A Million Love Songs", which also reached number seven in October. Their cover of the Barry Manilow hit "Could It Be Magic" gave them their first big success, peaking at number three in the UK in the first chart of 1993. Their first album, Take That & Party, was released in 1992, and included all the hit singles to date.
1993–1995: Everything Changes, Nobody Else and superstardom
1993 saw the release of Everything Changes, based on Barlow's original material. It peaked at number one in the UK and spawned six singles, with four being consecutive UK number one singles – their first number one "Pray", "Relight My Fire", "Babe" and the title track "Everything Changes". The lead single "Why Can't I Wake Up with You" had narrowly missed the top spot in the UK peaking at number two and the sixth and final single "Love Ain't Here Anymore" taken from the album reached number three on the UK charts. Everything Changes saw the band gain international success with the album being nominated for the 1994 Mercury Prize, but it failed to crack the U.S. market, where an exclusive remix of "Love Ain't Here Anymore" (U.S. version) gained little success.
By 1994, Take That had become radio and television stars across Europe and Asia, but it was not until 1995 that they did their first World Tour. It was during the years 1993–95 that the band fronted scores of magazine covers ranging from Smash Hits to GQ, becoming mass merchandised on all sorts of paraphernalia ranging from picture books, to posters, stickers, their own dolls, jewellery, caps, T-shirts, toothbrushes and even had their own annuals released. The band had also developed a large female teenage fanbase at the time. During this time, they performed at numerous music awards shows and chart shows such as the BRIT Awards and Top of the Pops, also winning the Best Live Act award in 1995 at the MTV Europe Music Awards, having been renowned for their breakdance routines, high energy and creative tour productions.
In 1995, Take That released their third studio album Nobody Else, again based on Barlow's own material which reached number 1 in the UK and across Europe, capturing new audiences along the way, with Take That also able to make inroads in the adult audience in Britain through Barlow's melodic, sensitive ballads. For nearly five years, Take That's popularity was unsurpassed in Britain. The release of the first single from the album, "Sure", achieved yet another number one in the UK charts. It was not until their second release from that album, however, that they would experience what would become their biggest hit single, "Back for Good", which reached number one in many countries including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Norway. It was also their only US hit, where it reached number seven.
The song was initially unveiled for the first time via live performance while at the 1995 BRIT Awards, and based on the reception of that performance, the record pre-sold more records than expected and forced the record label to bring the release date forward by an unprecedented six weeks. The album was also noted for its cover, which was a parody of the famed cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover sleeve.
1995–1996: Break-up and Greatest Hits
Robbie Williams's drug abuse had escalated to a near drug overdose the night before the group was scheduled to perform at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 1994.
In June 1995, Williams was photographed by the press partying with Oasis at the Glastonbury Festival. The following month, the band offered him an ultimatum; he was to adhere to the band's responsibilities or leave before their scheduled world tour. Williams chose the latter. Williams claimed he was bored with Barlow's leadership and jealous of Barlow. Despite the loss of Williams, Take That continued to promote Nobody Else as a four-piece, scoring a further hit single with "Never Forget" with Donald on lead vocal. They subsequently went to America and completed the Nobody Else Tour in October 1995. Following the tour, the band began to plan for their next album; however, when they spent Christmas together, they mutually agreed it was time to part ways.
On 13 February 1996, Take That formally announced that they were disbanding. This was followed by the Greatest Hits compilation in 1996, which contained a new recording, a cover of the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love". The single went on to become what was to be the band's final UK number one until their 2006 comeback a decade later. Take That gave what was thought to be their final performance in April 1996 at Amsterdam. Following the band's announcement, millions of their fans were distraught around the world and in the UK alone, teenage girls threatened suicide and were seen lining streets in tears, to the point that telephone hotlines were set up by the government to deal with counselling them. After the band broke up, highly respected music figures such as Elton John noted that Take That were different from other boy bands before and after them, in that they wrote their own material through Gary Barlow. Barlow is one of only a small number of people who have won an Ivor Novello award during their time in a boy band, with George Michael whilst in Wham! and Tony Mortimer whilst in East 17 being two others who have achieved this feat. Take That had also left a legacy of being immaculate performers with a very high work ethic, causing them to be voted in as the greatest boy band of all time.
2005–2006: Reunion as a quartet and Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection
On 14 November 2005, Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection, a new compilation of their hit singles including a new previously unreleased song, also achieved great success and peaked at number 2 on UK charts, selling over 2.1 million copies in the UK alone. The new song "Today I've Lost You" (recorded in September 2005) was originally written by Barlow as the follow up to "Back for Good" but was never recorded. On 16 November 2005, the group got back together for the ITV documentary Take That: For the Record, in which they aired their views over their fame, success, the split and what the post-Williams line-up had done since. On 25 November 2005, there was an official press conference by the band announcing that the post-Robbie Williams line-up was going to tour in 2006. The tour, entitled The Ultimate Tour, ran from April to June 2006. The tour featured a guest appearance by British soul singer Beverley Knight, who replaced Lulu's vocals on the song "Relight My Fire"; although Lulu did appear during the stadium shows on "Relight My Fire" and "Never Forget". The American female ensemble Pussycat Dolls supported the group at their Dublin concert, and the Sugababes supported the group on the final five dates of the stadium leg. In a seven-year study analysing over one billion online searches via Google conducted by AccuraCast, a leading digital search agency, their comeback was ranked at number one in the UK.
2006–2007: Beautiful World
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK Albums Chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history.
On Beautiful World, all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals and contribute in the songwriting. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Barlow who received sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November.
On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry, making it the group's ninth No. 1, and staying there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis on a live version of "A Million Love Songs" during the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006.
The week after Beautiful World was released, it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts.
The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single chosen from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This may have been due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. The single "Rule the World", included on the deluxe version of Beautiful World, was recorded for the soundtrack of the film Stardust (2007). It reached number two in the UK and went on to become the group's second best selling single, shifting over 1.2 million units in the UK. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. According to a 2007 MSN UK internet poll, Take That were voted as the "comeback kings" of the year.
2008–2009: The Circus
"Greatest Day", the first single from the album The Circus, made its radio premiere on 13 October 2008 and it was released on 24 November. It debuted at number 1 on the UK Singles Chart on 30 November 2008. An album launch party for The Circus was held in Paris on 2 December. On its first day of release The Circus sold 133,000 copies, and after four days on sale it sold 306,000 copies (going platinum) making The Circus the fastest selling album of the year. The album reached number 1 on the UK Albums Chart on 7 December 2008 with total first-week sales of 432,490, the third highest opening sales week in UK history.
On 28 October 2008, on the Radio 1 Chris Moyles show, it was announced that Take That would be touring again in June/July 2009, covering the UK and Ireland. Tickets for the Take That Present: The Circus Live tour went on sale on 31 October. The promoters, SJM, have said that the band's tour is "the fastest selling in UK history".
On 22 May 2008, Barlow and Donald attended the 2008 Ivor Novello Awards where Take That won the award for Most Performed Work with their single "Shine". Take That won the Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year award at the Vodafone music awards on 18 September 2008. They were unable to attend as they were in LA finishing off The Circus. They did send a video link message, which was shown at the awards. On 22 November 2008, Take That appeared on week 7 of the talent show The X Factor where the finalists performed some of their greatest hits and Owen and Barlow made a guest appearance to personally coach the contestants. The band also performed on Children in Need 2008, singing their new single, "Greatest Day", before donating £250,000 to the charity from their Marks and Spencer fee. The band were also voted the Greatest Boy Band of All Time, reflecting their ongoing marketability and success in the pop arena, even after two decades.
At the 2009 Brit Awards they were nominated for Best British Group and they performed "Greatest Day" at the ceremony. "Up All Night", the second single from The Circus, was released on 2 March 2009, and peaked at number 14 on the UK Singles Chart, despite heavy airplay. In Germany and Australia, "The Garden" was released as the second single instead. On 7 May 2009, Take That's official website confirmed that the third single from The Circus would be "Said It All" which was released on 15 June 2009, peaking at number 9 on the UK Singles chart. The video premiered on GMTV on 8 May 2009. It features all four band members dressed up as vintage circus clowns, which tied in with their forthcoming Take That Present: The Circus Live tour. Take That started their Circus Live tour at the Stadium of Light on 5 June 2009 in Sunderland and ended at the Wembley Stadium in London on 5 July 2009, which over 80,000 people attended. This tour quickly became the fastest-selling of all time, breaking all records by selling all of their 650,000 tickets in less than four and a half hours.
In November 2009 Take That released the official DVD of their Circus tour, which became the fastest-selling music DVD of all time in the UK on its first day of release and stayed in the top 10 of the videos chart for over a year. This overtook the previous record sales holder, which was Take That's Beautiful World Live tour and stayed at the number 1 spot for 8 weeks. The following week Take That released their first live album, The Greatest Day – Take That Present: The Circus Live, which sold 98,000 copies on its first day of release and was certified Platinum in July 2013. "Hold up a Light" was released as the fifth and final single from The Circus to radio stations and as a digital download to promote the release of the live album. The live album also featured a stripped down session recorded live at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. It featured the members singing the setlist from the preceding tour, albeit in a studio setting.
2010–2011: Williams' return and Progress
On 7 June 2010, the news broke of a single called "Shame", which had been written by Barlow and Williams and would feature the vocals of both artists. This was the first time the pair had worked together since 1995 and would appear on the second greatest hits collection of Williams. "Heart and I", another track from the same album, was also co-written by Williams and Barlow. The single "Shame" peaked at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart while also achieving success throughout Europe, charting in over 19 countries.
After working with the band on new material in Los Angeles, on 15 July 2010 Robbie Williams announced he was returning to Take That. After months of working together, assembling new songs for a new album and even debating a band-name change to "The English", a joint statement between Williams and the group read, "The rumours are true ... Take That: the original lineup, have written and recorded a new album for release later this year." The statement went on to say, "Following months of speculation Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange, Mark Owen, and Robbie Williams confirmed they have been recording a new studio album as a five-piece, which they will release in November." The lead single from Take That's album Progress was announced as "The Flood" and was released 7 November as a digital download, and on 8 November as a physical copy, with the album released a week later on 15 November. The single peaked at number 2 in the UK Singles Charts and to date has sold over 500,000 copies in the UK alone. The single also achieved success across Europe, charting inside the top 10 in ten countries while also charting in another nine countries whilst also being nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for best work.
On 26 October the band announced that they would be embarking on a huge UK stadium tour entitled Progress Live, starting in Sunderland on 27 May, and finishing with a record-breaking 8 nights at London's Wembley Stadium in July 2011. It was also announced that Williams would perform hit singles from his solo career during the tour. The band then played at some of the biggest venues across Europe for the second leg of the tour. The phenomenal demand for tickets across the country led to the web sites of all the major UK ticket suppliers either crashing or considerably slowing for hours on end. The demand and sheer volume of fans also created problems for the UK telephone network. Take That's Progress Live also broke all records for ticket sales selling over 1.1 million tickets in one day, smashing the previous box office record set by Take That's Circus tour in 2008.
On the first day of release Progress became the fastest selling album of the century, with 235,000 copies sold in just one day. The album reached number 1 in the UK, selling around 520,000 copies in its first week, becoming the second fastest-selling album in history. After the release of Progress it was announced that Take That have become Amazon UK's top-selling music artist of all time.
The album retained the number one spot for six consecutive weeks in the UK since its release, selling 2.8 million copies in the UK alone and becoming the best selling album of 2010
Progress also achieved success across Europe where it debuted at number one in Ireland, Greece, Germany and Denmark. and the European Top 100 Albums chart. It also debuted inside the top 10 of the charts in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.
"Kidz" was announced as the second single from Progress, it was released 21 February 2011 and charted well across Europe. The band performed the song live at the 2011 Brit Awards hosted at The O2 Arena, where they won a Brit for Best British Group and were nominated for Best British Album. Their performance of "Kidz", praised by critics, involved a highly choreographed routine featuring dancers dressed in police-styled riot gear bearing the Take That symbol on the uniform and shields. On 19 May 2011, Take That announced a new EP entitled Progressed, which contained eight tracks written by the band since they had reunited as a five-piece. It was packaged alongside the album Progress and returned the band to number 1 in the UK Album Chart the week after it was released on 13 June 2011.
Take That announced that the Progress Live tour would be released worldwide as their second live album to date and would also be released on home media formats across the UK and Europe on 21 November 2011. The DVD debuted at number 1 on the UK Music Video top 40 in its first week on release and sold over 200,000 copies in two weeks of release in the UK alone. Take That's efforts were recognised further when they were awarded Virgin Media's Best Live Act of 2012.
On 4 October, it was reported that Take That were to take a break after the completion of the Progress tour, with Barlow continuing his role as a judge on The X Factor and Williams recording new solo material. Take That were presented with an Ivor Novello Award for their Outstanding Contribution to British Music in May 2012.
In August 2012, Take That performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, despite Barlow announcing that his daughter had been stillborn the previous week. The performance earned him praise for appearing live so soon after the tragedy. Williams was due to perform with the band but dropped out due to his wife giving birth at around the same time and thus the group performed as a four-piece. In November 2012, Take That reunited as a five-piece for the last time to perform "Never Forget" at the Music Industry Trust Awards. In 2013, Donald became a judge on the German version of the television dancing show Got to Dance.
2014–2015: Line-up change and III
In May 2013, Owen announced that Take That was to begin recording their seventh studio album in 2014, and on 14 January 2014, Donald and Barlow both tweeted that Take That had entered the studio to begin recording the album, although it was not initially clear if Williams was present at these recording sessions. On 28 April 2014, Williams announced on Twitter he was to become a father for a second time, and consequently suggested he would be unable to join Take That on their album and tour. Although welcome to return to the band at any time, Williams chose not to return for group's seventh and eighth studio albums and their accompanying tours, focusing instead on his solo commitments. He continued to write music with his colleagues and has performed with the group on several occasions since 2011's Progress tour and plans on returning at some point in the future.
On 24 September 2014, it was announced that Jason Orange had left the band. He said: 'At a band meeting last week I confirmed to Mark, Gary and Howard that I do not wish to commit to recording and promoting a new album. 'At the end of The Progress Tour I began to question whether it might be the right time for me to not continue on with Take That,' he continued. 'There have been no fallings out, only a decision on my part that I no longer wish to do this,' he added. Barlow, Donald, and Owen issued a joint statement about Orange's decision which said: "This is a sad day for us. Jason leaving is a huge loss both professionally and even more so personally ... Jason's energy and belief in what this band could achieve has made it what it is today, and we'll forever be grateful for his enthusiasm, dedication and inspiration over the years." A day after the announcement, Robbie Williams took to Twitter to show support of Orange's decision. "Mr Orange. Until we ride again. Much love, Bro.", Williams tweeted.
On 10 October 2014, Take That unveiled their first song as a three-piece and lead single from their upcoming album. Titled "These Days", it was released on 23 November 2014 and went to No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart, knocking Band Aid 30 off the top spot and becoming their 12th number one single. The album itself, called III, was released on 28 November 2014 and became the band's seventh No. 1 album. It was then followed by a sell-out arena tour entitled Take That Live. On 14 October 2015, the band announced their new single "Hey Boy", released on 16 October, which is the first single from the 2015 re-release of III. The 2015 edition of the album was released on 20 November.
In December 2015, British media buzzed about the group embarking on a stint in Las Vegas, starting 2017. Reports indicated the group impressed U.S. promoters and would headline their own residency show. Many venues circulated, including The AXIS at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, The Foundry at SLS Las Vegas and the Linq Theater at The LINQ Hotel & Casino. Local newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun writes that everything is still unconfirmed, despite Barlow confirming the rumour on Twitter.
2016–2017: Wonderland
On 2 February 2016, in an interview with The Sun, Barlow revealed that Take That would release their eighth studio album later in the year. On 4 May 2016, English drum and bass duo Sigma announced their newest single would feature Take That. "Cry" received its first radio play on 20 May 2016 and was released on that date. On 21 October 2016, the band posted a teaser on their social media pages and website depicting the logo of the band flickering with the hashtag "#WONDERLAND". The following day, it was announced that their new album, titled Wonderland, was scheduled to be released on 24 March 2017. It was then followed by a UK and Ireland arena tour entitled Wonderland Live, that commenced on 5 May 2017 at the Genting Arena in Birmingham. On 17 February 2017, the lead single of Wonderland was released. Titled "Giants", it debuted at 13 in the UK charts, which became the band's 24th UK top 20 single.
On 8 April 2017, ITV aired a specially commissioned hour-length television special titled An Evening with Take That, where the band performed some songs from the album, along with some old classics including "Never Forget", "Back for Good" and "Rule the World". The band also took part in a Q&A session with the audience members. On 27 April, it was announced on Twitter that "New Day" would be released as the next single from the album Wonderland. The band were seen recording the music video in a field in Luton the days leading up the opening night of the Wonderland Live tour. Due to the Manchester Arena bombing just days before they were due to perform at the venue, their Manchester and Liverpool dates were rescheduled or relocated. The band returned a month later to perform at the One Love Manchester benefit concert.
On 16 September 2017, Barlow, Owen and Donald were set to perform a special one-off show in Jersey after a fan bid more than £1.2 million to win a performance from the band. This then turned in to a ticketed charity event where the money from tickets sold would go towards benefiting Children in Need. The auction was held on BBC Radio 2. On 11 November 2017, Take That began their foreign tour in Perth, Australia, the first time they have performed in the country in over twenty years. They also played in New Zealand, United Arab Emirates and Israel for the first time. Unlike the other tours, a DVD for Wonderland Live was not released. Instead, it was broadcast on Sky 1 on 23 December and in cinemas.
2018–2020: The 30th Anniversary, and Odyssey
On 16 July 2018, while performing at first ever Hits Radio Live at the Manchester Arena, Barlow, Donald and Owen confirmed that they would be touring in 2019. The tour was a Greatest Hits tour and celebrated the 30th anniversary of the band. There was also a Greatest Hits album, Odyssey, which was released on 23 November 2018. The Greatest Hits album features existing songs from their back catalogue that have been re-imagined and 3 brand new songs. It also includes collaborations with Boyz II Men, Lulu, Sigma and Barry Gibb. Odyssey reached number one in the UK album chart and was certified as a platinum selling record. The following year, Odyssey Live, the recording of their tour, reached number 5, becoming the band's 13th top 5 album, with the DVD becoming the biggest live music sale of 2019.
In May 2020, Barlow, Donald, and Owen reunited with Williams for a virtual performance from their respective homes, hosted by price comparison website comparethemarket.com, to raise money for the music charity Nordoff Robbins and Crew Nation.
In other media
In April 2006, EMI licensed the band's songs to be used in the musical Never Forget, a musical based on songs of the band from the 1990s. Take That posted and then later removed a statement on their website distancing themselves from it.
Take That wrote and recorded the theme song "Rule the World" for the film Stardust directed by Matthew Vaughn, which was released in cinemas across the globe in October 2007. In 2007, their song "Back for Good" was used as part of the soundtrack for popular Korean drama The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince.
Take That presented their own TV show Take That Come to Town, a variety show in which they performed some of their biggest hits. The show also featured comedy sketches with one of Peter Kay's alter egos Geraldine McQueen. It aired on 7 December 2008 on ITV1. Sony launched their first Take That video game, SingStar Take That in 2009 for the PlayStation 3.
In November 2010, ITV aired Take That: Look Back, Don't Stare, a black-and-white documentary which focused on the band working together for the first time in 15 years. Through a series of interviews, the band look back at their achievements while also looking forward to what the future holds for them. On 18 November 2010, Williams and Barlow appeared together live on television for the first time on the Popstars program in Germany singing their hit "Shame".
In 2011, Take That's song "Love Love" was used in the credits of the 2011 film X-Men: First Class and later, "When We Were Young" was chosen as the main theme for The Three Musketeers movie. In 2015, the song "Get Ready for It" from their album III, was chosen as the theme song for the film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
In 2017, Take That launched The Band, a musical written by Tim Firth featuring the five winners of Let It Shine and some of Take That's biggest hits. Take That, including Robbie Williams, were billed as executive producers.
The group's music is regularly featured in the Channel 4 show Derry Girls, notably in the third episode of the second series, when the lead characters sneak off to attend the 1993 Take That concert in Belfast; the episode features the music video for "Pray" and ends on footage of the band performing "Everything Changes".
Artistry
Early in their career, Take That were known for party anthems such as "Do What U Like" and more mature ballads such as "A Million Love Songs" and "Back for Good". Since reuniting in 2006, they have become more experimental: their post-2006 albums Beautiful World and The Circus have featured "stadium-filling pop-rock" while Progress largely leaned towards electropop. Having been dubbed the "comeback kings" by the media for their highly successful reunion, the group has won widespread praise for their seamless transformation from teen idols to "man band" without overly relying on nostalgia, instead showcasing a more mature image and sound and reinventing themselves while maintaining their artistic integrity. Jude Rogers of The Guardian commented on Take That's post-reunion success, in light of a string of reunions by the group's disbanded counterparts from the 1990s: "Only Take That are penetrating pop's wider consciousness by becoming a man-band rather than a boy-band, singing mature, proper pop songs that cross the generations."
Take That have garnered critical acclaim and popularity as consummate live performers and for their musical output. Their domestic concert tours have been described as "some of the most flamboyant, imaginative and extravagant pop tours around". Aside from covers, all of their material is composed by the members themselves; Barlow was initially the principal songwriter who received sole credit but the other members have since taken a more active role in the composition and production process, including playing instruments for the backing track.
Band members
Current members
Gary Barlow (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Howard Donald (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Mark Owen (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Former members
Robbie Williams (1990–1995, 2010–2012)
Jason Orange (1990–1996, 2005–2014)
Timeline
Awards and nominations
|-
| 2016
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2015
| "These Days"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2012
| "Pray"
|The Guardian Music Award for Best Number 1 Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|The Official Charts Company UK Recognition award for United Kingdom's Favourite Number One Single
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Music Video
|
|-
| rowspan="10" style="text-align:center;"|2011
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards for Best Live Sound Event
|
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards Grand Prix Award
|
|-
| Take That
|Phonographic Performance Limited Award for most played UK artist
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Spex German Entertainment for Best Music Video
|
|-
| The Circus Live Tour
| Greatest Event ever at Wembley Stadium
|
|-
| Take That
|ECHO Award for Best International Group
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Progress
| BRIT Award for MasterCard Album of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2010
|-
| "Up All Night"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|iTunes Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Progress
| iTunes Award for Best Album
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award Hall of Fame
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best Live Performance of the past 30 Years
|
|-
| rowspan="5" style="text-align:center;"|2009
| Take That
|GQ Men of the Year Awards for Best Band
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Greatest Day"
|Q Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="7" style="text-align:center;"|2008
| "Shine"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| "Rule the World"
|Virgin for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year Award for Take That Arena Tour
|
|-
| "Shine"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Live Act
|
|-
| Beautiful World
|BRIT Award for Best British Album
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2007
| "Patience"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2006
| Take That
|Q Idol Award
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1996
| "Back for Good"
|Billboard International Hit of the Year
|
|-
| "Never Forget"
|Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Song
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1995
| "Back for Good"
|Ivor Novello Award for the Song of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|1994
| "Babe"
|MTV Video Music Award for International Viewer's Choice Award for MTV Europe
|
|-
| Everything Changes
|Mercury Prize for Best Album
|
|-
| "Pray"
|Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Video
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="4" style="text-align:center;"|1993
| "Could It Be Magic"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "A Million Love Songs"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "It Only Takes a Minute"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Newcomer
|
|}
Discography
Take That & Party (1992)
Everything Changes (1993)
Nobody Else (1995)
Beautiful World (2006)
The Circus (2008)
Progress (2010)
III (2014)
Wonderland (2017)
Tours
Party Tour (1992–93)
Everything Changes Tour (1993–94)
Pops Tour (1994–95)
Nobody Else Tour (1995)
The Ultimate Tour (2006)
Beautiful World Tour 2007 (2007)
Take That Present: The Circus Live (2009)
Progress Live (2011)
Take That Live (2015)
Wonderland Live (2017)
Greatest Hits Live (2019)
See also
List of best-selling boy bands
References
External links
Chinese Fansite
1990 establishments in England
1996 disestablishments in England
2005 establishments in England
Brit Award winners
Dance-pop groups
Echo (music award) winners
English boy bands
English dance music groups
Interscope Records artists
Ivor Novello Award winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups disestablished in 1996
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups from Cheshire
Musical groups from Manchester
Musical groups reestablished in 2005
Polydor Records artists
Teen pop groups
Universal Music Group artists
Vocal quartets
Vocal quintets
Vocal trios
| false |
[
"Yo Soy (English: I Am) is the debut studio album by Mexican-American singer Pee Wee. It was released on August 11, 2009, by EMI Latin.\n\nSingles\n \"Cumbayá\" was the lead single of the album. \"Cumbayá\" was released on May 26, 2009, and was released worldwide on June 1, 2009. \"Cumbayá\" was released on iTunes on June 30, 2009.\n \"Quédate\" was the second official single of the album. Pee Wee debuted the song live on El Show de los Sueños in November 2008. Back later the song was officially taken as the third official single on December 24, 2009.\n\nOther songs\n \"Life Is a Dance Floor\" was the first solo track. Pee Wee sang the song live for the first time on 2008 Premios Juventud on July 17, 2008. It was thought that it would be the first single but it was never released as an official single or studio version, however for unknown reasons the song wasn't included on the album, only as a pre-order bonus track on iTunes.\n \"Tan Feliz\" was the promotional single of the album. \"Tan Feliz\" was released on September 6, 2009, and chosen to promote Camaleones.\n \"Esto Es Amor\" was a song that was recorded but wasn't included on the album. The song was released on Rhapsody.com on July 21, 2009.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Pee Wee official website\n\n2009 debut albums\nPee Wee (singer) albums\nAlbums produced by Luny Tunes\nAlbums produced by Noriega\nEMI Latin albums\nSpanish-language albums",
"MZW is the second solo album from Swedish singer and model Måns Zelmerlöw. The album fits more into the dance genre than pop as his debut album Stand By For... did. The album features 'Hope & Glory', Måns' entry into Melodifestivalen 2009, Sweden's selection process to decide their Eurovision entry. The album has peaked at number 1 on the Swedish album charts matching the success of the first album. Three single have charted from the album, \"Hope & Glory\", \"Hold On\" and \"Impossible\". The album was first released in Sweden on 25 March 2009. The limited edition was released one week after the initial album release on 1 April 2009 and does not differ musically from the standard edition. The only notable differences are that the text on the album cover is printed onto the case itself and not on the paper booklet. Also in the top left hand corner on the reverse of the case there is a Limited Edition number.\n\nSingles\n \"Hope & Glory\" was released as the lead single from the album on 1 March 2009. It entered the Swedish Singles Chart at number 22 = but peaked at number 2 due to promotion from the Melodifestivalen performances. 'Hope & Glory' was physically released as a single, the CD features an instrumental version of the track. The live performance from Melodifestivalen has served as the official video for the song.\n \"Hold On\" was released as the second single from the album on 18 May 2009. The song peaked to number 22 on the Swedish Singles Chart. It was released on 3 June 2009 as a download only single. No official video has been made for the single.\n \"Impossible\" was released as the third and final single from the album on 16 November 2009. The song peaked to number 48 on the Swedish Singles Chart.\n \"Rewind\" was released as single promoting the CD in Poland.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nRelease history\n\nReferences\n\n2009 albums\nMåns Zelmerlöw albums\nWarner Music Sweden albums"
] |
[
"Take That",
"2006-2007: Beautiful World",
"What singles were released from Beautiful World?",
"\"Patience\",",
"Was that the only single on the album?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_6c5899211c324f1f99f593ecdcb72d87_1
|
How did "Patience" do on the charts?
| 3 |
How did Take That's "Patience" do on the charts?
|
Take That
|
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records in a deal reportedly worth PS3 million. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK album chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history. In the album Beautiful World all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Gary Barlow who received a sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks, regardless of whether they contributed to the writing process or not. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November. On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry making it the group's ninth No. 1 and stayed there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis in a live version of "A Million Love Songs" in the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006. The week after Take That's comeback album Beautiful World was released it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts. The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single taken from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This was due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry
|
Take That are an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990. The group currently consists of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen. The original line-up also featured Jason Orange and Robbie Williams. Barlow is the group's lead singer and primary songwriter, with Owen and Williams initially providing backing vocals and Donald and Orange serving primarily as dancers.
The group have had 28 top 40 singles and 17 top 5 singles on the UK Singles Chart, 12 of which have reached number one, including "Back for Good", "Never Forget", "Patience" and "Greatest Day". They have also had eight number one albums on the UK Albums Chart. Internationally, the band have had 56 number one singles and 39 number one albums. They have received eight Brit Awards—winning for Best British Group and Best British Live Act. In 2012 they received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Take That has been certified for 14 million albums and 11.4 million singles in the UK.
Williams left the band in 1995 while the four remaining members completed their world tour and released a final single before splitting up in 1996. After filming a 2005 Take That: For the Record about the group and releasing a new greatest hits album, a four-piece Take That without Williams officially announced a 2006 reunion tour around the UK, entitled The Ultimate Tour. On 9 May 2006, it was announced that the group were set to record new material together once again; their fourth studio album, Beautiful World, was released in 2006 and was followed up with The Circus, in 2008. The group achieved new success as a four-piece, scoring a string of chart hits across the UK and Europe while selling over 45 million records worldwide. Williams rejoined Take That in 2010 for the band's sixth studio album, Progress. Released on 15 November of that year, it was the first album of new material to feature Take That's original line-up since their 1995 album, Nobody Else. It became the fastest-selling album of the 21st century and the second fastest-selling album in British history.
In 2014, the band recorded a seventh studio album, this time as a trio without Williams and Orange. The album, titled III, was released in November 2014 and became the band's seventh number one. It was preceded by the single "These Days", which became the band's 12th number one single in the UK.
In 2011, Take That set the new record for the fastest-selling tour of all time in the UK with Progress Live, beating the previous record set by their Circus Live Tour in 2009. At the 2011 Brit Awards they won Best British Group. In 2012, Forbes named them the fifth highest-earning music stars in the world. The group performed at the London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony, playing "Rule the World" while the Olympic Flame was extinguished. In the same year, the Official Charts Company revealed the biggest-selling singles artists in British music chart history with Take That currently placed at 15th overall, making them the most successful boy band in UK chart history. Four of their albums are listed in the best-selling albums of the millennium, with three of them among the 60 best-selling albums in UK chart history.
History
1989–1990: Formation
In 1989, Manchester-based Nigel Martin-Smith sought to create a British male vocal singing group modelled on New Kids on the Block. Martin-Smith's vision, however, was a teen-orientated group that would appeal to more than one demographic segment of the music industry. Martin-Smith was then introduced to young singer-songwriter Gary Barlow, who had been performing in clubs since the age of 15. Impressed with Barlow's catalogue of self-written material, Martin-Smith decided to build his new-look boy band around Barlow's musical abilities. A campaign to audition young men with abilities in dancing and singing followed and took place in Manchester and other surrounding cities in 1990. At 22, Howard Donald was one of the oldest to audition, but he was chosen after he got time off work as a vehicle painter to continue the process. Prior to auditioning, Jason Orange had appeared as a breakdancer on the popular television programme The Hit Man and Her. Martin-Smith also selected 18-year-old bank employee Mark Owen and finally 16-year-old Robbie Williams to round out the group, which initially went by the name Kick It.
1990–1992: Take That & Party
Take That's first TV appearance was on The Hit Man and Her in 1990, where they performed Barlow's self-written, unreleased song, "My Kind of Girl". They later appeared a second time to perform "Waiting Around", which would become the B-side for the first single, "Do What U Like". "Promises" and "Once You've Tasted Love" were also released as singles but were minor hits in the UK. Take That initially worked the same territory as their American counterparts, singing new jack R&B, urban soul, and mainstream pop. However, they worked their way toward Hi-NRG dance music, while also pursuing an adult contemporary ballad direction. As they aimed to break into the mainstream music industry, they worked a number of small clubs, schools, and events across the country building up a fanbase as they travelled to gigs constantly for months.
Take That's breakthrough single was a cover of the 1975 Tavares hit "It Only Takes a Minute", which peaked at number seven on the UK Singles Chart in June 1992. This success was followed by "I Found Heaven", then by the first Barlow ballad "A Million Love Songs", which also reached number seven in October. Their cover of the Barry Manilow hit "Could It Be Magic" gave them their first big success, peaking at number three in the UK in the first chart of 1993. Their first album, Take That & Party, was released in 1992, and included all the hit singles to date.
1993–1995: Everything Changes, Nobody Else and superstardom
1993 saw the release of Everything Changes, based on Barlow's original material. It peaked at number one in the UK and spawned six singles, with four being consecutive UK number one singles – their first number one "Pray", "Relight My Fire", "Babe" and the title track "Everything Changes". The lead single "Why Can't I Wake Up with You" had narrowly missed the top spot in the UK peaking at number two and the sixth and final single "Love Ain't Here Anymore" taken from the album reached number three on the UK charts. Everything Changes saw the band gain international success with the album being nominated for the 1994 Mercury Prize, but it failed to crack the U.S. market, where an exclusive remix of "Love Ain't Here Anymore" (U.S. version) gained little success.
By 1994, Take That had become radio and television stars across Europe and Asia, but it was not until 1995 that they did their first World Tour. It was during the years 1993–95 that the band fronted scores of magazine covers ranging from Smash Hits to GQ, becoming mass merchandised on all sorts of paraphernalia ranging from picture books, to posters, stickers, their own dolls, jewellery, caps, T-shirts, toothbrushes and even had their own annuals released. The band had also developed a large female teenage fanbase at the time. During this time, they performed at numerous music awards shows and chart shows such as the BRIT Awards and Top of the Pops, also winning the Best Live Act award in 1995 at the MTV Europe Music Awards, having been renowned for their breakdance routines, high energy and creative tour productions.
In 1995, Take That released their third studio album Nobody Else, again based on Barlow's own material which reached number 1 in the UK and across Europe, capturing new audiences along the way, with Take That also able to make inroads in the adult audience in Britain through Barlow's melodic, sensitive ballads. For nearly five years, Take That's popularity was unsurpassed in Britain. The release of the first single from the album, "Sure", achieved yet another number one in the UK charts. It was not until their second release from that album, however, that they would experience what would become their biggest hit single, "Back for Good", which reached number one in many countries including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Norway. It was also their only US hit, where it reached number seven.
The song was initially unveiled for the first time via live performance while at the 1995 BRIT Awards, and based on the reception of that performance, the record pre-sold more records than expected and forced the record label to bring the release date forward by an unprecedented six weeks. The album was also noted for its cover, which was a parody of the famed cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover sleeve.
1995–1996: Break-up and Greatest Hits
Robbie Williams's drug abuse had escalated to a near drug overdose the night before the group was scheduled to perform at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 1994.
In June 1995, Williams was photographed by the press partying with Oasis at the Glastonbury Festival. The following month, the band offered him an ultimatum; he was to adhere to the band's responsibilities or leave before their scheduled world tour. Williams chose the latter. Williams claimed he was bored with Barlow's leadership and jealous of Barlow. Despite the loss of Williams, Take That continued to promote Nobody Else as a four-piece, scoring a further hit single with "Never Forget" with Donald on lead vocal. They subsequently went to America and completed the Nobody Else Tour in October 1995. Following the tour, the band began to plan for their next album; however, when they spent Christmas together, they mutually agreed it was time to part ways.
On 13 February 1996, Take That formally announced that they were disbanding. This was followed by the Greatest Hits compilation in 1996, which contained a new recording, a cover of the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love". The single went on to become what was to be the band's final UK number one until their 2006 comeback a decade later. Take That gave what was thought to be their final performance in April 1996 at Amsterdam. Following the band's announcement, millions of their fans were distraught around the world and in the UK alone, teenage girls threatened suicide and were seen lining streets in tears, to the point that telephone hotlines were set up by the government to deal with counselling them. After the band broke up, highly respected music figures such as Elton John noted that Take That were different from other boy bands before and after them, in that they wrote their own material through Gary Barlow. Barlow is one of only a small number of people who have won an Ivor Novello award during their time in a boy band, with George Michael whilst in Wham! and Tony Mortimer whilst in East 17 being two others who have achieved this feat. Take That had also left a legacy of being immaculate performers with a very high work ethic, causing them to be voted in as the greatest boy band of all time.
2005–2006: Reunion as a quartet and Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection
On 14 November 2005, Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection, a new compilation of their hit singles including a new previously unreleased song, also achieved great success and peaked at number 2 on UK charts, selling over 2.1 million copies in the UK alone. The new song "Today I've Lost You" (recorded in September 2005) was originally written by Barlow as the follow up to "Back for Good" but was never recorded. On 16 November 2005, the group got back together for the ITV documentary Take That: For the Record, in which they aired their views over their fame, success, the split and what the post-Williams line-up had done since. On 25 November 2005, there was an official press conference by the band announcing that the post-Robbie Williams line-up was going to tour in 2006. The tour, entitled The Ultimate Tour, ran from April to June 2006. The tour featured a guest appearance by British soul singer Beverley Knight, who replaced Lulu's vocals on the song "Relight My Fire"; although Lulu did appear during the stadium shows on "Relight My Fire" and "Never Forget". The American female ensemble Pussycat Dolls supported the group at their Dublin concert, and the Sugababes supported the group on the final five dates of the stadium leg. In a seven-year study analysing over one billion online searches via Google conducted by AccuraCast, a leading digital search agency, their comeback was ranked at number one in the UK.
2006–2007: Beautiful World
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK Albums Chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history.
On Beautiful World, all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals and contribute in the songwriting. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Barlow who received sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November.
On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry, making it the group's ninth No. 1, and staying there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis on a live version of "A Million Love Songs" during the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006.
The week after Beautiful World was released, it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts.
The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single chosen from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This may have been due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. The single "Rule the World", included on the deluxe version of Beautiful World, was recorded for the soundtrack of the film Stardust (2007). It reached number two in the UK and went on to become the group's second best selling single, shifting over 1.2 million units in the UK. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. According to a 2007 MSN UK internet poll, Take That were voted as the "comeback kings" of the year.
2008–2009: The Circus
"Greatest Day", the first single from the album The Circus, made its radio premiere on 13 October 2008 and it was released on 24 November. It debuted at number 1 on the UK Singles Chart on 30 November 2008. An album launch party for The Circus was held in Paris on 2 December. On its first day of release The Circus sold 133,000 copies, and after four days on sale it sold 306,000 copies (going platinum) making The Circus the fastest selling album of the year. The album reached number 1 on the UK Albums Chart on 7 December 2008 with total first-week sales of 432,490, the third highest opening sales week in UK history.
On 28 October 2008, on the Radio 1 Chris Moyles show, it was announced that Take That would be touring again in June/July 2009, covering the UK and Ireland. Tickets for the Take That Present: The Circus Live tour went on sale on 31 October. The promoters, SJM, have said that the band's tour is "the fastest selling in UK history".
On 22 May 2008, Barlow and Donald attended the 2008 Ivor Novello Awards where Take That won the award for Most Performed Work with their single "Shine". Take That won the Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year award at the Vodafone music awards on 18 September 2008. They were unable to attend as they were in LA finishing off The Circus. They did send a video link message, which was shown at the awards. On 22 November 2008, Take That appeared on week 7 of the talent show The X Factor where the finalists performed some of their greatest hits and Owen and Barlow made a guest appearance to personally coach the contestants. The band also performed on Children in Need 2008, singing their new single, "Greatest Day", before donating £250,000 to the charity from their Marks and Spencer fee. The band were also voted the Greatest Boy Band of All Time, reflecting their ongoing marketability and success in the pop arena, even after two decades.
At the 2009 Brit Awards they were nominated for Best British Group and they performed "Greatest Day" at the ceremony. "Up All Night", the second single from The Circus, was released on 2 March 2009, and peaked at number 14 on the UK Singles Chart, despite heavy airplay. In Germany and Australia, "The Garden" was released as the second single instead. On 7 May 2009, Take That's official website confirmed that the third single from The Circus would be "Said It All" which was released on 15 June 2009, peaking at number 9 on the UK Singles chart. The video premiered on GMTV on 8 May 2009. It features all four band members dressed up as vintage circus clowns, which tied in with their forthcoming Take That Present: The Circus Live tour. Take That started their Circus Live tour at the Stadium of Light on 5 June 2009 in Sunderland and ended at the Wembley Stadium in London on 5 July 2009, which over 80,000 people attended. This tour quickly became the fastest-selling of all time, breaking all records by selling all of their 650,000 tickets in less than four and a half hours.
In November 2009 Take That released the official DVD of their Circus tour, which became the fastest-selling music DVD of all time in the UK on its first day of release and stayed in the top 10 of the videos chart for over a year. This overtook the previous record sales holder, which was Take That's Beautiful World Live tour and stayed at the number 1 spot for 8 weeks. The following week Take That released their first live album, The Greatest Day – Take That Present: The Circus Live, which sold 98,000 copies on its first day of release and was certified Platinum in July 2013. "Hold up a Light" was released as the fifth and final single from The Circus to radio stations and as a digital download to promote the release of the live album. The live album also featured a stripped down session recorded live at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. It featured the members singing the setlist from the preceding tour, albeit in a studio setting.
2010–2011: Williams' return and Progress
On 7 June 2010, the news broke of a single called "Shame", which had been written by Barlow and Williams and would feature the vocals of both artists. This was the first time the pair had worked together since 1995 and would appear on the second greatest hits collection of Williams. "Heart and I", another track from the same album, was also co-written by Williams and Barlow. The single "Shame" peaked at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart while also achieving success throughout Europe, charting in over 19 countries.
After working with the band on new material in Los Angeles, on 15 July 2010 Robbie Williams announced he was returning to Take That. After months of working together, assembling new songs for a new album and even debating a band-name change to "The English", a joint statement between Williams and the group read, "The rumours are true ... Take That: the original lineup, have written and recorded a new album for release later this year." The statement went on to say, "Following months of speculation Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange, Mark Owen, and Robbie Williams confirmed they have been recording a new studio album as a five-piece, which they will release in November." The lead single from Take That's album Progress was announced as "The Flood" and was released 7 November as a digital download, and on 8 November as a physical copy, with the album released a week later on 15 November. The single peaked at number 2 in the UK Singles Charts and to date has sold over 500,000 copies in the UK alone. The single also achieved success across Europe, charting inside the top 10 in ten countries while also charting in another nine countries whilst also being nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for best work.
On 26 October the band announced that they would be embarking on a huge UK stadium tour entitled Progress Live, starting in Sunderland on 27 May, and finishing with a record-breaking 8 nights at London's Wembley Stadium in July 2011. It was also announced that Williams would perform hit singles from his solo career during the tour. The band then played at some of the biggest venues across Europe for the second leg of the tour. The phenomenal demand for tickets across the country led to the web sites of all the major UK ticket suppliers either crashing or considerably slowing for hours on end. The demand and sheer volume of fans also created problems for the UK telephone network. Take That's Progress Live also broke all records for ticket sales selling over 1.1 million tickets in one day, smashing the previous box office record set by Take That's Circus tour in 2008.
On the first day of release Progress became the fastest selling album of the century, with 235,000 copies sold in just one day. The album reached number 1 in the UK, selling around 520,000 copies in its first week, becoming the second fastest-selling album in history. After the release of Progress it was announced that Take That have become Amazon UK's top-selling music artist of all time.
The album retained the number one spot for six consecutive weeks in the UK since its release, selling 2.8 million copies in the UK alone and becoming the best selling album of 2010
Progress also achieved success across Europe where it debuted at number one in Ireland, Greece, Germany and Denmark. and the European Top 100 Albums chart. It also debuted inside the top 10 of the charts in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.
"Kidz" was announced as the second single from Progress, it was released 21 February 2011 and charted well across Europe. The band performed the song live at the 2011 Brit Awards hosted at The O2 Arena, where they won a Brit for Best British Group and were nominated for Best British Album. Their performance of "Kidz", praised by critics, involved a highly choreographed routine featuring dancers dressed in police-styled riot gear bearing the Take That symbol on the uniform and shields. On 19 May 2011, Take That announced a new EP entitled Progressed, which contained eight tracks written by the band since they had reunited as a five-piece. It was packaged alongside the album Progress and returned the band to number 1 in the UK Album Chart the week after it was released on 13 June 2011.
Take That announced that the Progress Live tour would be released worldwide as their second live album to date and would also be released on home media formats across the UK and Europe on 21 November 2011. The DVD debuted at number 1 on the UK Music Video top 40 in its first week on release and sold over 200,000 copies in two weeks of release in the UK alone. Take That's efforts were recognised further when they were awarded Virgin Media's Best Live Act of 2012.
On 4 October, it was reported that Take That were to take a break after the completion of the Progress tour, with Barlow continuing his role as a judge on The X Factor and Williams recording new solo material. Take That were presented with an Ivor Novello Award for their Outstanding Contribution to British Music in May 2012.
In August 2012, Take That performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, despite Barlow announcing that his daughter had been stillborn the previous week. The performance earned him praise for appearing live so soon after the tragedy. Williams was due to perform with the band but dropped out due to his wife giving birth at around the same time and thus the group performed as a four-piece. In November 2012, Take That reunited as a five-piece for the last time to perform "Never Forget" at the Music Industry Trust Awards. In 2013, Donald became a judge on the German version of the television dancing show Got to Dance.
2014–2015: Line-up change and III
In May 2013, Owen announced that Take That was to begin recording their seventh studio album in 2014, and on 14 January 2014, Donald and Barlow both tweeted that Take That had entered the studio to begin recording the album, although it was not initially clear if Williams was present at these recording sessions. On 28 April 2014, Williams announced on Twitter he was to become a father for a second time, and consequently suggested he would be unable to join Take That on their album and tour. Although welcome to return to the band at any time, Williams chose not to return for group's seventh and eighth studio albums and their accompanying tours, focusing instead on his solo commitments. He continued to write music with his colleagues and has performed with the group on several occasions since 2011's Progress tour and plans on returning at some point in the future.
On 24 September 2014, it was announced that Jason Orange had left the band. He said: 'At a band meeting last week I confirmed to Mark, Gary and Howard that I do not wish to commit to recording and promoting a new album. 'At the end of The Progress Tour I began to question whether it might be the right time for me to not continue on with Take That,' he continued. 'There have been no fallings out, only a decision on my part that I no longer wish to do this,' he added. Barlow, Donald, and Owen issued a joint statement about Orange's decision which said: "This is a sad day for us. Jason leaving is a huge loss both professionally and even more so personally ... Jason's energy and belief in what this band could achieve has made it what it is today, and we'll forever be grateful for his enthusiasm, dedication and inspiration over the years." A day after the announcement, Robbie Williams took to Twitter to show support of Orange's decision. "Mr Orange. Until we ride again. Much love, Bro.", Williams tweeted.
On 10 October 2014, Take That unveiled their first song as a three-piece and lead single from their upcoming album. Titled "These Days", it was released on 23 November 2014 and went to No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart, knocking Band Aid 30 off the top spot and becoming their 12th number one single. The album itself, called III, was released on 28 November 2014 and became the band's seventh No. 1 album. It was then followed by a sell-out arena tour entitled Take That Live. On 14 October 2015, the band announced their new single "Hey Boy", released on 16 October, which is the first single from the 2015 re-release of III. The 2015 edition of the album was released on 20 November.
In December 2015, British media buzzed about the group embarking on a stint in Las Vegas, starting 2017. Reports indicated the group impressed U.S. promoters and would headline their own residency show. Many venues circulated, including The AXIS at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, The Foundry at SLS Las Vegas and the Linq Theater at The LINQ Hotel & Casino. Local newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun writes that everything is still unconfirmed, despite Barlow confirming the rumour on Twitter.
2016–2017: Wonderland
On 2 February 2016, in an interview with The Sun, Barlow revealed that Take That would release their eighth studio album later in the year. On 4 May 2016, English drum and bass duo Sigma announced their newest single would feature Take That. "Cry" received its first radio play on 20 May 2016 and was released on that date. On 21 October 2016, the band posted a teaser on their social media pages and website depicting the logo of the band flickering with the hashtag "#WONDERLAND". The following day, it was announced that their new album, titled Wonderland, was scheduled to be released on 24 March 2017. It was then followed by a UK and Ireland arena tour entitled Wonderland Live, that commenced on 5 May 2017 at the Genting Arena in Birmingham. On 17 February 2017, the lead single of Wonderland was released. Titled "Giants", it debuted at 13 in the UK charts, which became the band's 24th UK top 20 single.
On 8 April 2017, ITV aired a specially commissioned hour-length television special titled An Evening with Take That, where the band performed some songs from the album, along with some old classics including "Never Forget", "Back for Good" and "Rule the World". The band also took part in a Q&A session with the audience members. On 27 April, it was announced on Twitter that "New Day" would be released as the next single from the album Wonderland. The band were seen recording the music video in a field in Luton the days leading up the opening night of the Wonderland Live tour. Due to the Manchester Arena bombing just days before they were due to perform at the venue, their Manchester and Liverpool dates were rescheduled or relocated. The band returned a month later to perform at the One Love Manchester benefit concert.
On 16 September 2017, Barlow, Owen and Donald were set to perform a special one-off show in Jersey after a fan bid more than £1.2 million to win a performance from the band. This then turned in to a ticketed charity event where the money from tickets sold would go towards benefiting Children in Need. The auction was held on BBC Radio 2. On 11 November 2017, Take That began their foreign tour in Perth, Australia, the first time they have performed in the country in over twenty years. They also played in New Zealand, United Arab Emirates and Israel for the first time. Unlike the other tours, a DVD for Wonderland Live was not released. Instead, it was broadcast on Sky 1 on 23 December and in cinemas.
2018–2020: The 30th Anniversary, and Odyssey
On 16 July 2018, while performing at first ever Hits Radio Live at the Manchester Arena, Barlow, Donald and Owen confirmed that they would be touring in 2019. The tour was a Greatest Hits tour and celebrated the 30th anniversary of the band. There was also a Greatest Hits album, Odyssey, which was released on 23 November 2018. The Greatest Hits album features existing songs from their back catalogue that have been re-imagined and 3 brand new songs. It also includes collaborations with Boyz II Men, Lulu, Sigma and Barry Gibb. Odyssey reached number one in the UK album chart and was certified as a platinum selling record. The following year, Odyssey Live, the recording of their tour, reached number 5, becoming the band's 13th top 5 album, with the DVD becoming the biggest live music sale of 2019.
In May 2020, Barlow, Donald, and Owen reunited with Williams for a virtual performance from their respective homes, hosted by price comparison website comparethemarket.com, to raise money for the music charity Nordoff Robbins and Crew Nation.
In other media
In April 2006, EMI licensed the band's songs to be used in the musical Never Forget, a musical based on songs of the band from the 1990s. Take That posted and then later removed a statement on their website distancing themselves from it.
Take That wrote and recorded the theme song "Rule the World" for the film Stardust directed by Matthew Vaughn, which was released in cinemas across the globe in October 2007. In 2007, their song "Back for Good" was used as part of the soundtrack for popular Korean drama The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince.
Take That presented their own TV show Take That Come to Town, a variety show in which they performed some of their biggest hits. The show also featured comedy sketches with one of Peter Kay's alter egos Geraldine McQueen. It aired on 7 December 2008 on ITV1. Sony launched their first Take That video game, SingStar Take That in 2009 for the PlayStation 3.
In November 2010, ITV aired Take That: Look Back, Don't Stare, a black-and-white documentary which focused on the band working together for the first time in 15 years. Through a series of interviews, the band look back at their achievements while also looking forward to what the future holds for them. On 18 November 2010, Williams and Barlow appeared together live on television for the first time on the Popstars program in Germany singing their hit "Shame".
In 2011, Take That's song "Love Love" was used in the credits of the 2011 film X-Men: First Class and later, "When We Were Young" was chosen as the main theme for The Three Musketeers movie. In 2015, the song "Get Ready for It" from their album III, was chosen as the theme song for the film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
In 2017, Take That launched The Band, a musical written by Tim Firth featuring the five winners of Let It Shine and some of Take That's biggest hits. Take That, including Robbie Williams, were billed as executive producers.
The group's music is regularly featured in the Channel 4 show Derry Girls, notably in the third episode of the second series, when the lead characters sneak off to attend the 1993 Take That concert in Belfast; the episode features the music video for "Pray" and ends on footage of the band performing "Everything Changes".
Artistry
Early in their career, Take That were known for party anthems such as "Do What U Like" and more mature ballads such as "A Million Love Songs" and "Back for Good". Since reuniting in 2006, they have become more experimental: their post-2006 albums Beautiful World and The Circus have featured "stadium-filling pop-rock" while Progress largely leaned towards electropop. Having been dubbed the "comeback kings" by the media for their highly successful reunion, the group has won widespread praise for their seamless transformation from teen idols to "man band" without overly relying on nostalgia, instead showcasing a more mature image and sound and reinventing themselves while maintaining their artistic integrity. Jude Rogers of The Guardian commented on Take That's post-reunion success, in light of a string of reunions by the group's disbanded counterparts from the 1990s: "Only Take That are penetrating pop's wider consciousness by becoming a man-band rather than a boy-band, singing mature, proper pop songs that cross the generations."
Take That have garnered critical acclaim and popularity as consummate live performers and for their musical output. Their domestic concert tours have been described as "some of the most flamboyant, imaginative and extravagant pop tours around". Aside from covers, all of their material is composed by the members themselves; Barlow was initially the principal songwriter who received sole credit but the other members have since taken a more active role in the composition and production process, including playing instruments for the backing track.
Band members
Current members
Gary Barlow (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Howard Donald (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Mark Owen (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Former members
Robbie Williams (1990–1995, 2010–2012)
Jason Orange (1990–1996, 2005–2014)
Timeline
Awards and nominations
|-
| 2016
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2015
| "These Days"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2012
| "Pray"
|The Guardian Music Award for Best Number 1 Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|The Official Charts Company UK Recognition award for United Kingdom's Favourite Number One Single
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Music Video
|
|-
| rowspan="10" style="text-align:center;"|2011
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards for Best Live Sound Event
|
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards Grand Prix Award
|
|-
| Take That
|Phonographic Performance Limited Award for most played UK artist
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Spex German Entertainment for Best Music Video
|
|-
| The Circus Live Tour
| Greatest Event ever at Wembley Stadium
|
|-
| Take That
|ECHO Award for Best International Group
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Progress
| BRIT Award for MasterCard Album of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2010
|-
| "Up All Night"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|iTunes Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Progress
| iTunes Award for Best Album
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award Hall of Fame
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best Live Performance of the past 30 Years
|
|-
| rowspan="5" style="text-align:center;"|2009
| Take That
|GQ Men of the Year Awards for Best Band
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Greatest Day"
|Q Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="7" style="text-align:center;"|2008
| "Shine"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| "Rule the World"
|Virgin for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year Award for Take That Arena Tour
|
|-
| "Shine"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Live Act
|
|-
| Beautiful World
|BRIT Award for Best British Album
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2007
| "Patience"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2006
| Take That
|Q Idol Award
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1996
| "Back for Good"
|Billboard International Hit of the Year
|
|-
| "Never Forget"
|Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Song
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1995
| "Back for Good"
|Ivor Novello Award for the Song of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|1994
| "Babe"
|MTV Video Music Award for International Viewer's Choice Award for MTV Europe
|
|-
| Everything Changes
|Mercury Prize for Best Album
|
|-
| "Pray"
|Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Video
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="4" style="text-align:center;"|1993
| "Could It Be Magic"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "A Million Love Songs"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "It Only Takes a Minute"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Newcomer
|
|}
Discography
Take That & Party (1992)
Everything Changes (1993)
Nobody Else (1995)
Beautiful World (2006)
The Circus (2008)
Progress (2010)
III (2014)
Wonderland (2017)
Tours
Party Tour (1992–93)
Everything Changes Tour (1993–94)
Pops Tour (1994–95)
Nobody Else Tour (1995)
The Ultimate Tour (2006)
Beautiful World Tour 2007 (2007)
Take That Present: The Circus Live (2009)
Progress Live (2011)
Take That Live (2015)
Wonderland Live (2017)
Greatest Hits Live (2019)
See also
List of best-selling boy bands
References
External links
Chinese Fansite
1990 establishments in England
1996 disestablishments in England
2005 establishments in England
Brit Award winners
Dance-pop groups
Echo (music award) winners
English boy bands
English dance music groups
Interscope Records artists
Ivor Novello Award winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups disestablished in 1996
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups from Cheshire
Musical groups from Manchester
Musical groups reestablished in 2005
Polydor Records artists
Teen pop groups
Universal Music Group artists
Vocal quartets
Vocal quintets
Vocal trios
| true |
[
"\"Patience\" is a song by British boy band Take That. It was released on 13 November 2006 as the first single from their comeback album, Beautiful World. The single peaked at the top of the UK Singles Chart, and also topped the charts in Germany, Spain and Switzerland, as well as peaking in the top ten of the charts in Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Austria and Sweden.\n\nChart performance\n\"Patience\" debuted at number four on the UK Singles Chart and rose to number one in its second week, staying there for four weeks. It was the UK's eighth best-selling single of 2006 and spent eleven weeks in the top ten, making it the longest that any Take That single had spent in the top ten until the release of 2007's \"Rule the World\". The song also became the 30th best selling single of 2007, the following year. The song just missed out on being the UK Christmas number one of 2006, being knocked off the top spot on Christmas Eve by The X Factor winner Leona Lewis' \"A Moment Like This\".\n\nThe song was also the 20th best selling single of 2006 in Ireland. On 18 February 2007, it re-entered the UK top 10 after 14 weeks in the charts and on 11 August 2007, following the band's performance at the Concert for Diana, the single reentered the UK top 40. The song debuted at number one on the German Singles Chart, and since its release it has sold over 150,000 copies being certified Gold by the IFPI. The song, as of March 2017, has sold 713,000 copies in the UK.\n\nAccolades\nThe song also won the Best British Single Award at the 2007 BRIT Awards and was voted The Record of the Year for 2006, polling 15.5% of the final vote.\n\nUsage in media\nThe song is used as the opening theme for the German-Austrian medical drama television series Der Bergdoktor.\n\nReception and legacy\nIn 2009, Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers hailed \"Patience\" as \"the greatest comeback single in history. If Neil Young had written it, people would be calling it a masterpiece.\" He praised the dark lyrics of the chorus and concluded: \"You get so many alternative bands banging on about how to make perfect pop, and ['Patience'] kicks all their arses.\" Tom Eames of Digital Spy felt similarly, saying in a 2016 article that \"'Patience' remains one of pop's greatest ever comeback songs.\" In 2015, Kitty Empire of The Guardian wrote that the song \"remains one of the strongest songs [Take That] have ever put out.\"\n\nMusic video\nThe video was directed by David Mould and was shot in Iceland. The video shows each of the members trekking across the rough terrain dragging their microphone stands. After the middle eight, the band are shown on top of a cliff singing the song together at night whilst a storm occurs behind them.\n\nTrack listing\nDigital download single (Released 13 November 2006)\n \"Patience\" – 3:20\n\nUK CD single (1714832)\n \"Patience\" – 3:20\n \"Beautiful Morning\" – 3:37\n\nWorldwide (except UK) maxi single, UK iTunes E.P.\n \"Patience\" – 3:20\n \"Beautiful Morning\" – 3:37\n \"Trouble With Me\" – 3:24\n \"Patience\" (Video) – 3:21\n\nPersonnel\nGary Barlow – lead vocals\nHoward Donald – backing vocals\nJason Orange – backing vocals\nMark Owen – backing vocals\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nDecade-end charts\n\nCertifications\n\nCover versions\nIndie-rock band The Wombats also chose to cover this song on 9 January 2008 for BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge. Hank Marvin also covered this song on his 2007 album Guitar Man and Nick Lachey released a version as a single in the US.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n2006 singles\nBrit Award for British Single\nUK Singles Chart number-one singles\nEuropean Hot 100 Singles number-one singles\nNumber-one singles in Germany\nNumber-one singles in Scotland\nNumber-one singles in Spain\nNumber-one singles in Switzerland\nSong recordings produced by John Shanks\nTake That songs\n2009 singles\nNick Lachey songs\nSongs written by John Shanks\nSongs written by Gary Barlow\nSongs written by Mark Owen\nSongs written by Jason Orange\nSongs written by Howard Donald\nRock ballads\n2006 songs\nPolydor Records singles",
"This Is How We Do It is the debut studio album by Montell Jordan. The album peaked at #12 on the Billboard 200 and #4 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and was certified platinum. The album also featured the single \"This Is How We Do It\", which made it to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, #1 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks and #1 on the Rhythmic Top 40. Another single, \"Somethin' 4 da Honeyz\", peaked at #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #18 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks chart.\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nWeekly charts\n\nYear-end charts\n\nReferences\n\nMontell Jordan albums\n1995 debut albums\nDef Jam Recordings albums"
] |
[
"Take That",
"2006-2007: Beautiful World",
"What singles were released from Beautiful World?",
"\"Patience\",",
"Was that the only single on the album?",
"I don't know.",
"How did \"Patience\" do on the charts?",
"hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry"
] |
C_6c5899211c324f1f99f593ecdcb72d87_1
|
When did the album debut?
| 4 |
When did the Take That album Beautiful World debut?
|
Take That
|
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records in a deal reportedly worth PS3 million. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK album chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history. In the album Beautiful World all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Gary Barlow who received a sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks, regardless of whether they contributed to the writing process or not. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November. On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry making it the group's ninth No. 1 and stayed there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis in a live version of "A Million Love Songs" in the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006. The week after Take That's comeback album Beautiful World was released it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts. The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single taken from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This was due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
released on 18 June 2007
|
Take That are an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990. The group currently consists of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen. The original line-up also featured Jason Orange and Robbie Williams. Barlow is the group's lead singer and primary songwriter, with Owen and Williams initially providing backing vocals and Donald and Orange serving primarily as dancers.
The group have had 28 top 40 singles and 17 top 5 singles on the UK Singles Chart, 12 of which have reached number one, including "Back for Good", "Never Forget", "Patience" and "Greatest Day". They have also had eight number one albums on the UK Albums Chart. Internationally, the band have had 56 number one singles and 39 number one albums. They have received eight Brit Awards—winning for Best British Group and Best British Live Act. In 2012 they received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Take That has been certified for 14 million albums and 11.4 million singles in the UK.
Williams left the band in 1995 while the four remaining members completed their world tour and released a final single before splitting up in 1996. After filming a 2005 Take That: For the Record about the group and releasing a new greatest hits album, a four-piece Take That without Williams officially announced a 2006 reunion tour around the UK, entitled The Ultimate Tour. On 9 May 2006, it was announced that the group were set to record new material together once again; their fourth studio album, Beautiful World, was released in 2006 and was followed up with The Circus, in 2008. The group achieved new success as a four-piece, scoring a string of chart hits across the UK and Europe while selling over 45 million records worldwide. Williams rejoined Take That in 2010 for the band's sixth studio album, Progress. Released on 15 November of that year, it was the first album of new material to feature Take That's original line-up since their 1995 album, Nobody Else. It became the fastest-selling album of the 21st century and the second fastest-selling album in British history.
In 2014, the band recorded a seventh studio album, this time as a trio without Williams and Orange. The album, titled III, was released in November 2014 and became the band's seventh number one. It was preceded by the single "These Days", which became the band's 12th number one single in the UK.
In 2011, Take That set the new record for the fastest-selling tour of all time in the UK with Progress Live, beating the previous record set by their Circus Live Tour in 2009. At the 2011 Brit Awards they won Best British Group. In 2012, Forbes named them the fifth highest-earning music stars in the world. The group performed at the London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony, playing "Rule the World" while the Olympic Flame was extinguished. In the same year, the Official Charts Company revealed the biggest-selling singles artists in British music chart history with Take That currently placed at 15th overall, making them the most successful boy band in UK chart history. Four of their albums are listed in the best-selling albums of the millennium, with three of them among the 60 best-selling albums in UK chart history.
History
1989–1990: Formation
In 1989, Manchester-based Nigel Martin-Smith sought to create a British male vocal singing group modelled on New Kids on the Block. Martin-Smith's vision, however, was a teen-orientated group that would appeal to more than one demographic segment of the music industry. Martin-Smith was then introduced to young singer-songwriter Gary Barlow, who had been performing in clubs since the age of 15. Impressed with Barlow's catalogue of self-written material, Martin-Smith decided to build his new-look boy band around Barlow's musical abilities. A campaign to audition young men with abilities in dancing and singing followed and took place in Manchester and other surrounding cities in 1990. At 22, Howard Donald was one of the oldest to audition, but he was chosen after he got time off work as a vehicle painter to continue the process. Prior to auditioning, Jason Orange had appeared as a breakdancer on the popular television programme The Hit Man and Her. Martin-Smith also selected 18-year-old bank employee Mark Owen and finally 16-year-old Robbie Williams to round out the group, which initially went by the name Kick It.
1990–1992: Take That & Party
Take That's first TV appearance was on The Hit Man and Her in 1990, where they performed Barlow's self-written, unreleased song, "My Kind of Girl". They later appeared a second time to perform "Waiting Around", which would become the B-side for the first single, "Do What U Like". "Promises" and "Once You've Tasted Love" were also released as singles but were minor hits in the UK. Take That initially worked the same territory as their American counterparts, singing new jack R&B, urban soul, and mainstream pop. However, they worked their way toward Hi-NRG dance music, while also pursuing an adult contemporary ballad direction. As they aimed to break into the mainstream music industry, they worked a number of small clubs, schools, and events across the country building up a fanbase as they travelled to gigs constantly for months.
Take That's breakthrough single was a cover of the 1975 Tavares hit "It Only Takes a Minute", which peaked at number seven on the UK Singles Chart in June 1992. This success was followed by "I Found Heaven", then by the first Barlow ballad "A Million Love Songs", which also reached number seven in October. Their cover of the Barry Manilow hit "Could It Be Magic" gave them their first big success, peaking at number three in the UK in the first chart of 1993. Their first album, Take That & Party, was released in 1992, and included all the hit singles to date.
1993–1995: Everything Changes, Nobody Else and superstardom
1993 saw the release of Everything Changes, based on Barlow's original material. It peaked at number one in the UK and spawned six singles, with four being consecutive UK number one singles – their first number one "Pray", "Relight My Fire", "Babe" and the title track "Everything Changes". The lead single "Why Can't I Wake Up with You" had narrowly missed the top spot in the UK peaking at number two and the sixth and final single "Love Ain't Here Anymore" taken from the album reached number three on the UK charts. Everything Changes saw the band gain international success with the album being nominated for the 1994 Mercury Prize, but it failed to crack the U.S. market, where an exclusive remix of "Love Ain't Here Anymore" (U.S. version) gained little success.
By 1994, Take That had become radio and television stars across Europe and Asia, but it was not until 1995 that they did their first World Tour. It was during the years 1993–95 that the band fronted scores of magazine covers ranging from Smash Hits to GQ, becoming mass merchandised on all sorts of paraphernalia ranging from picture books, to posters, stickers, their own dolls, jewellery, caps, T-shirts, toothbrushes and even had their own annuals released. The band had also developed a large female teenage fanbase at the time. During this time, they performed at numerous music awards shows and chart shows such as the BRIT Awards and Top of the Pops, also winning the Best Live Act award in 1995 at the MTV Europe Music Awards, having been renowned for their breakdance routines, high energy and creative tour productions.
In 1995, Take That released their third studio album Nobody Else, again based on Barlow's own material which reached number 1 in the UK and across Europe, capturing new audiences along the way, with Take That also able to make inroads in the adult audience in Britain through Barlow's melodic, sensitive ballads. For nearly five years, Take That's popularity was unsurpassed in Britain. The release of the first single from the album, "Sure", achieved yet another number one in the UK charts. It was not until their second release from that album, however, that they would experience what would become their biggest hit single, "Back for Good", which reached number one in many countries including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Norway. It was also their only US hit, where it reached number seven.
The song was initially unveiled for the first time via live performance while at the 1995 BRIT Awards, and based on the reception of that performance, the record pre-sold more records than expected and forced the record label to bring the release date forward by an unprecedented six weeks. The album was also noted for its cover, which was a parody of the famed cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover sleeve.
1995–1996: Break-up and Greatest Hits
Robbie Williams's drug abuse had escalated to a near drug overdose the night before the group was scheduled to perform at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 1994.
In June 1995, Williams was photographed by the press partying with Oasis at the Glastonbury Festival. The following month, the band offered him an ultimatum; he was to adhere to the band's responsibilities or leave before their scheduled world tour. Williams chose the latter. Williams claimed he was bored with Barlow's leadership and jealous of Barlow. Despite the loss of Williams, Take That continued to promote Nobody Else as a four-piece, scoring a further hit single with "Never Forget" with Donald on lead vocal. They subsequently went to America and completed the Nobody Else Tour in October 1995. Following the tour, the band began to plan for their next album; however, when they spent Christmas together, they mutually agreed it was time to part ways.
On 13 February 1996, Take That formally announced that they were disbanding. This was followed by the Greatest Hits compilation in 1996, which contained a new recording, a cover of the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love". The single went on to become what was to be the band's final UK number one until their 2006 comeback a decade later. Take That gave what was thought to be their final performance in April 1996 at Amsterdam. Following the band's announcement, millions of their fans were distraught around the world and in the UK alone, teenage girls threatened suicide and were seen lining streets in tears, to the point that telephone hotlines were set up by the government to deal with counselling them. After the band broke up, highly respected music figures such as Elton John noted that Take That were different from other boy bands before and after them, in that they wrote their own material through Gary Barlow. Barlow is one of only a small number of people who have won an Ivor Novello award during their time in a boy band, with George Michael whilst in Wham! and Tony Mortimer whilst in East 17 being two others who have achieved this feat. Take That had also left a legacy of being immaculate performers with a very high work ethic, causing them to be voted in as the greatest boy band of all time.
2005–2006: Reunion as a quartet and Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection
On 14 November 2005, Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection, a new compilation of their hit singles including a new previously unreleased song, also achieved great success and peaked at number 2 on UK charts, selling over 2.1 million copies in the UK alone. The new song "Today I've Lost You" (recorded in September 2005) was originally written by Barlow as the follow up to "Back for Good" but was never recorded. On 16 November 2005, the group got back together for the ITV documentary Take That: For the Record, in which they aired their views over their fame, success, the split and what the post-Williams line-up had done since. On 25 November 2005, there was an official press conference by the band announcing that the post-Robbie Williams line-up was going to tour in 2006. The tour, entitled The Ultimate Tour, ran from April to June 2006. The tour featured a guest appearance by British soul singer Beverley Knight, who replaced Lulu's vocals on the song "Relight My Fire"; although Lulu did appear during the stadium shows on "Relight My Fire" and "Never Forget". The American female ensemble Pussycat Dolls supported the group at their Dublin concert, and the Sugababes supported the group on the final five dates of the stadium leg. In a seven-year study analysing over one billion online searches via Google conducted by AccuraCast, a leading digital search agency, their comeback was ranked at number one in the UK.
2006–2007: Beautiful World
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK Albums Chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history.
On Beautiful World, all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals and contribute in the songwriting. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Barlow who received sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November.
On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry, making it the group's ninth No. 1, and staying there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis on a live version of "A Million Love Songs" during the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006.
The week after Beautiful World was released, it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts.
The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single chosen from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This may have been due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. The single "Rule the World", included on the deluxe version of Beautiful World, was recorded for the soundtrack of the film Stardust (2007). It reached number two in the UK and went on to become the group's second best selling single, shifting over 1.2 million units in the UK. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. According to a 2007 MSN UK internet poll, Take That were voted as the "comeback kings" of the year.
2008–2009: The Circus
"Greatest Day", the first single from the album The Circus, made its radio premiere on 13 October 2008 and it was released on 24 November. It debuted at number 1 on the UK Singles Chart on 30 November 2008. An album launch party for The Circus was held in Paris on 2 December. On its first day of release The Circus sold 133,000 copies, and after four days on sale it sold 306,000 copies (going platinum) making The Circus the fastest selling album of the year. The album reached number 1 on the UK Albums Chart on 7 December 2008 with total first-week sales of 432,490, the third highest opening sales week in UK history.
On 28 October 2008, on the Radio 1 Chris Moyles show, it was announced that Take That would be touring again in June/July 2009, covering the UK and Ireland. Tickets for the Take That Present: The Circus Live tour went on sale on 31 October. The promoters, SJM, have said that the band's tour is "the fastest selling in UK history".
On 22 May 2008, Barlow and Donald attended the 2008 Ivor Novello Awards where Take That won the award for Most Performed Work with their single "Shine". Take That won the Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year award at the Vodafone music awards on 18 September 2008. They were unable to attend as they were in LA finishing off The Circus. They did send a video link message, which was shown at the awards. On 22 November 2008, Take That appeared on week 7 of the talent show The X Factor where the finalists performed some of their greatest hits and Owen and Barlow made a guest appearance to personally coach the contestants. The band also performed on Children in Need 2008, singing their new single, "Greatest Day", before donating £250,000 to the charity from their Marks and Spencer fee. The band were also voted the Greatest Boy Band of All Time, reflecting their ongoing marketability and success in the pop arena, even after two decades.
At the 2009 Brit Awards they were nominated for Best British Group and they performed "Greatest Day" at the ceremony. "Up All Night", the second single from The Circus, was released on 2 March 2009, and peaked at number 14 on the UK Singles Chart, despite heavy airplay. In Germany and Australia, "The Garden" was released as the second single instead. On 7 May 2009, Take That's official website confirmed that the third single from The Circus would be "Said It All" which was released on 15 June 2009, peaking at number 9 on the UK Singles chart. The video premiered on GMTV on 8 May 2009. It features all four band members dressed up as vintage circus clowns, which tied in with their forthcoming Take That Present: The Circus Live tour. Take That started their Circus Live tour at the Stadium of Light on 5 June 2009 in Sunderland and ended at the Wembley Stadium in London on 5 July 2009, which over 80,000 people attended. This tour quickly became the fastest-selling of all time, breaking all records by selling all of their 650,000 tickets in less than four and a half hours.
In November 2009 Take That released the official DVD of their Circus tour, which became the fastest-selling music DVD of all time in the UK on its first day of release and stayed in the top 10 of the videos chart for over a year. This overtook the previous record sales holder, which was Take That's Beautiful World Live tour and stayed at the number 1 spot for 8 weeks. The following week Take That released their first live album, The Greatest Day – Take That Present: The Circus Live, which sold 98,000 copies on its first day of release and was certified Platinum in July 2013. "Hold up a Light" was released as the fifth and final single from The Circus to radio stations and as a digital download to promote the release of the live album. The live album also featured a stripped down session recorded live at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. It featured the members singing the setlist from the preceding tour, albeit in a studio setting.
2010–2011: Williams' return and Progress
On 7 June 2010, the news broke of a single called "Shame", which had been written by Barlow and Williams and would feature the vocals of both artists. This was the first time the pair had worked together since 1995 and would appear on the second greatest hits collection of Williams. "Heart and I", another track from the same album, was also co-written by Williams and Barlow. The single "Shame" peaked at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart while also achieving success throughout Europe, charting in over 19 countries.
After working with the band on new material in Los Angeles, on 15 July 2010 Robbie Williams announced he was returning to Take That. After months of working together, assembling new songs for a new album and even debating a band-name change to "The English", a joint statement between Williams and the group read, "The rumours are true ... Take That: the original lineup, have written and recorded a new album for release later this year." The statement went on to say, "Following months of speculation Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange, Mark Owen, and Robbie Williams confirmed they have been recording a new studio album as a five-piece, which they will release in November." The lead single from Take That's album Progress was announced as "The Flood" and was released 7 November as a digital download, and on 8 November as a physical copy, with the album released a week later on 15 November. The single peaked at number 2 in the UK Singles Charts and to date has sold over 500,000 copies in the UK alone. The single also achieved success across Europe, charting inside the top 10 in ten countries while also charting in another nine countries whilst also being nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for best work.
On 26 October the band announced that they would be embarking on a huge UK stadium tour entitled Progress Live, starting in Sunderland on 27 May, and finishing with a record-breaking 8 nights at London's Wembley Stadium in July 2011. It was also announced that Williams would perform hit singles from his solo career during the tour. The band then played at some of the biggest venues across Europe for the second leg of the tour. The phenomenal demand for tickets across the country led to the web sites of all the major UK ticket suppliers either crashing or considerably slowing for hours on end. The demand and sheer volume of fans also created problems for the UK telephone network. Take That's Progress Live also broke all records for ticket sales selling over 1.1 million tickets in one day, smashing the previous box office record set by Take That's Circus tour in 2008.
On the first day of release Progress became the fastest selling album of the century, with 235,000 copies sold in just one day. The album reached number 1 in the UK, selling around 520,000 copies in its first week, becoming the second fastest-selling album in history. After the release of Progress it was announced that Take That have become Amazon UK's top-selling music artist of all time.
The album retained the number one spot for six consecutive weeks in the UK since its release, selling 2.8 million copies in the UK alone and becoming the best selling album of 2010
Progress also achieved success across Europe where it debuted at number one in Ireland, Greece, Germany and Denmark. and the European Top 100 Albums chart. It also debuted inside the top 10 of the charts in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.
"Kidz" was announced as the second single from Progress, it was released 21 February 2011 and charted well across Europe. The band performed the song live at the 2011 Brit Awards hosted at The O2 Arena, where they won a Brit for Best British Group and were nominated for Best British Album. Their performance of "Kidz", praised by critics, involved a highly choreographed routine featuring dancers dressed in police-styled riot gear bearing the Take That symbol on the uniform and shields. On 19 May 2011, Take That announced a new EP entitled Progressed, which contained eight tracks written by the band since they had reunited as a five-piece. It was packaged alongside the album Progress and returned the band to number 1 in the UK Album Chart the week after it was released on 13 June 2011.
Take That announced that the Progress Live tour would be released worldwide as their second live album to date and would also be released on home media formats across the UK and Europe on 21 November 2011. The DVD debuted at number 1 on the UK Music Video top 40 in its first week on release and sold over 200,000 copies in two weeks of release in the UK alone. Take That's efforts were recognised further when they were awarded Virgin Media's Best Live Act of 2012.
On 4 October, it was reported that Take That were to take a break after the completion of the Progress tour, with Barlow continuing his role as a judge on The X Factor and Williams recording new solo material. Take That were presented with an Ivor Novello Award for their Outstanding Contribution to British Music in May 2012.
In August 2012, Take That performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, despite Barlow announcing that his daughter had been stillborn the previous week. The performance earned him praise for appearing live so soon after the tragedy. Williams was due to perform with the band but dropped out due to his wife giving birth at around the same time and thus the group performed as a four-piece. In November 2012, Take That reunited as a five-piece for the last time to perform "Never Forget" at the Music Industry Trust Awards. In 2013, Donald became a judge on the German version of the television dancing show Got to Dance.
2014–2015: Line-up change and III
In May 2013, Owen announced that Take That was to begin recording their seventh studio album in 2014, and on 14 January 2014, Donald and Barlow both tweeted that Take That had entered the studio to begin recording the album, although it was not initially clear if Williams was present at these recording sessions. On 28 April 2014, Williams announced on Twitter he was to become a father for a second time, and consequently suggested he would be unable to join Take That on their album and tour. Although welcome to return to the band at any time, Williams chose not to return for group's seventh and eighth studio albums and their accompanying tours, focusing instead on his solo commitments. He continued to write music with his colleagues and has performed with the group on several occasions since 2011's Progress tour and plans on returning at some point in the future.
On 24 September 2014, it was announced that Jason Orange had left the band. He said: 'At a band meeting last week I confirmed to Mark, Gary and Howard that I do not wish to commit to recording and promoting a new album. 'At the end of The Progress Tour I began to question whether it might be the right time for me to not continue on with Take That,' he continued. 'There have been no fallings out, only a decision on my part that I no longer wish to do this,' he added. Barlow, Donald, and Owen issued a joint statement about Orange's decision which said: "This is a sad day for us. Jason leaving is a huge loss both professionally and even more so personally ... Jason's energy and belief in what this band could achieve has made it what it is today, and we'll forever be grateful for his enthusiasm, dedication and inspiration over the years." A day after the announcement, Robbie Williams took to Twitter to show support of Orange's decision. "Mr Orange. Until we ride again. Much love, Bro.", Williams tweeted.
On 10 October 2014, Take That unveiled their first song as a three-piece and lead single from their upcoming album. Titled "These Days", it was released on 23 November 2014 and went to No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart, knocking Band Aid 30 off the top spot and becoming their 12th number one single. The album itself, called III, was released on 28 November 2014 and became the band's seventh No. 1 album. It was then followed by a sell-out arena tour entitled Take That Live. On 14 October 2015, the band announced their new single "Hey Boy", released on 16 October, which is the first single from the 2015 re-release of III. The 2015 edition of the album was released on 20 November.
In December 2015, British media buzzed about the group embarking on a stint in Las Vegas, starting 2017. Reports indicated the group impressed U.S. promoters and would headline their own residency show. Many venues circulated, including The AXIS at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, The Foundry at SLS Las Vegas and the Linq Theater at The LINQ Hotel & Casino. Local newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun writes that everything is still unconfirmed, despite Barlow confirming the rumour on Twitter.
2016–2017: Wonderland
On 2 February 2016, in an interview with The Sun, Barlow revealed that Take That would release their eighth studio album later in the year. On 4 May 2016, English drum and bass duo Sigma announced their newest single would feature Take That. "Cry" received its first radio play on 20 May 2016 and was released on that date. On 21 October 2016, the band posted a teaser on their social media pages and website depicting the logo of the band flickering with the hashtag "#WONDERLAND". The following day, it was announced that their new album, titled Wonderland, was scheduled to be released on 24 March 2017. It was then followed by a UK and Ireland arena tour entitled Wonderland Live, that commenced on 5 May 2017 at the Genting Arena in Birmingham. On 17 February 2017, the lead single of Wonderland was released. Titled "Giants", it debuted at 13 in the UK charts, which became the band's 24th UK top 20 single.
On 8 April 2017, ITV aired a specially commissioned hour-length television special titled An Evening with Take That, where the band performed some songs from the album, along with some old classics including "Never Forget", "Back for Good" and "Rule the World". The band also took part in a Q&A session with the audience members. On 27 April, it was announced on Twitter that "New Day" would be released as the next single from the album Wonderland. The band were seen recording the music video in a field in Luton the days leading up the opening night of the Wonderland Live tour. Due to the Manchester Arena bombing just days before they were due to perform at the venue, their Manchester and Liverpool dates were rescheduled or relocated. The band returned a month later to perform at the One Love Manchester benefit concert.
On 16 September 2017, Barlow, Owen and Donald were set to perform a special one-off show in Jersey after a fan bid more than £1.2 million to win a performance from the band. This then turned in to a ticketed charity event where the money from tickets sold would go towards benefiting Children in Need. The auction was held on BBC Radio 2. On 11 November 2017, Take That began their foreign tour in Perth, Australia, the first time they have performed in the country in over twenty years. They also played in New Zealand, United Arab Emirates and Israel for the first time. Unlike the other tours, a DVD for Wonderland Live was not released. Instead, it was broadcast on Sky 1 on 23 December and in cinemas.
2018–2020: The 30th Anniversary, and Odyssey
On 16 July 2018, while performing at first ever Hits Radio Live at the Manchester Arena, Barlow, Donald and Owen confirmed that they would be touring in 2019. The tour was a Greatest Hits tour and celebrated the 30th anniversary of the band. There was also a Greatest Hits album, Odyssey, which was released on 23 November 2018. The Greatest Hits album features existing songs from their back catalogue that have been re-imagined and 3 brand new songs. It also includes collaborations with Boyz II Men, Lulu, Sigma and Barry Gibb. Odyssey reached number one in the UK album chart and was certified as a platinum selling record. The following year, Odyssey Live, the recording of their tour, reached number 5, becoming the band's 13th top 5 album, with the DVD becoming the biggest live music sale of 2019.
In May 2020, Barlow, Donald, and Owen reunited with Williams for a virtual performance from their respective homes, hosted by price comparison website comparethemarket.com, to raise money for the music charity Nordoff Robbins and Crew Nation.
In other media
In April 2006, EMI licensed the band's songs to be used in the musical Never Forget, a musical based on songs of the band from the 1990s. Take That posted and then later removed a statement on their website distancing themselves from it.
Take That wrote and recorded the theme song "Rule the World" for the film Stardust directed by Matthew Vaughn, which was released in cinemas across the globe in October 2007. In 2007, their song "Back for Good" was used as part of the soundtrack for popular Korean drama The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince.
Take That presented their own TV show Take That Come to Town, a variety show in which they performed some of their biggest hits. The show also featured comedy sketches with one of Peter Kay's alter egos Geraldine McQueen. It aired on 7 December 2008 on ITV1. Sony launched their first Take That video game, SingStar Take That in 2009 for the PlayStation 3.
In November 2010, ITV aired Take That: Look Back, Don't Stare, a black-and-white documentary which focused on the band working together for the first time in 15 years. Through a series of interviews, the band look back at their achievements while also looking forward to what the future holds for them. On 18 November 2010, Williams and Barlow appeared together live on television for the first time on the Popstars program in Germany singing their hit "Shame".
In 2011, Take That's song "Love Love" was used in the credits of the 2011 film X-Men: First Class and later, "When We Were Young" was chosen as the main theme for The Three Musketeers movie. In 2015, the song "Get Ready for It" from their album III, was chosen as the theme song for the film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
In 2017, Take That launched The Band, a musical written by Tim Firth featuring the five winners of Let It Shine and some of Take That's biggest hits. Take That, including Robbie Williams, were billed as executive producers.
The group's music is regularly featured in the Channel 4 show Derry Girls, notably in the third episode of the second series, when the lead characters sneak off to attend the 1993 Take That concert in Belfast; the episode features the music video for "Pray" and ends on footage of the band performing "Everything Changes".
Artistry
Early in their career, Take That were known for party anthems such as "Do What U Like" and more mature ballads such as "A Million Love Songs" and "Back for Good". Since reuniting in 2006, they have become more experimental: their post-2006 albums Beautiful World and The Circus have featured "stadium-filling pop-rock" while Progress largely leaned towards electropop. Having been dubbed the "comeback kings" by the media for their highly successful reunion, the group has won widespread praise for their seamless transformation from teen idols to "man band" without overly relying on nostalgia, instead showcasing a more mature image and sound and reinventing themselves while maintaining their artistic integrity. Jude Rogers of The Guardian commented on Take That's post-reunion success, in light of a string of reunions by the group's disbanded counterparts from the 1990s: "Only Take That are penetrating pop's wider consciousness by becoming a man-band rather than a boy-band, singing mature, proper pop songs that cross the generations."
Take That have garnered critical acclaim and popularity as consummate live performers and for their musical output. Their domestic concert tours have been described as "some of the most flamboyant, imaginative and extravagant pop tours around". Aside from covers, all of their material is composed by the members themselves; Barlow was initially the principal songwriter who received sole credit but the other members have since taken a more active role in the composition and production process, including playing instruments for the backing track.
Band members
Current members
Gary Barlow (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Howard Donald (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Mark Owen (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Former members
Robbie Williams (1990–1995, 2010–2012)
Jason Orange (1990–1996, 2005–2014)
Timeline
Awards and nominations
|-
| 2016
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Live Act
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|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2015
| "These Days"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
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|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2012
| "Pray"
|The Guardian Music Award for Best Number 1 Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|The Official Charts Company UK Recognition award for United Kingdom's Favourite Number One Single
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Music Video
|
|-
| rowspan="10" style="text-align:center;"|2011
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards for Best Live Sound Event
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|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards Grand Prix Award
|
|-
| Take That
|Phonographic Performance Limited Award for most played UK artist
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Spex German Entertainment for Best Music Video
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|-
| The Circus Live Tour
| Greatest Event ever at Wembley Stadium
|
|-
| Take That
|ECHO Award for Best International Group
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Progress
| BRIT Award for MasterCard Album of the Year
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|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2010
|-
| "Up All Night"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
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|-
| "The Flood"
|iTunes Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Progress
| iTunes Award for Best Album
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award Hall of Fame
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best Live Performance of the past 30 Years
|
|-
| rowspan="5" style="text-align:center;"|2009
| Take That
|GQ Men of the Year Awards for Best Band
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Greatest Day"
|Q Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="7" style="text-align:center;"|2008
| "Shine"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| "Rule the World"
|Virgin for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year Award for Take That Arena Tour
|
|-
| "Shine"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Live Act
|
|-
| Beautiful World
|BRIT Award for Best British Album
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2007
| "Patience"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2006
| Take That
|Q Idol Award
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1996
| "Back for Good"
|Billboard International Hit of the Year
|
|-
| "Never Forget"
|Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Song
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1995
| "Back for Good"
|Ivor Novello Award for the Song of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|1994
| "Babe"
|MTV Video Music Award for International Viewer's Choice Award for MTV Europe
|
|-
| Everything Changes
|Mercury Prize for Best Album
|
|-
| "Pray"
|Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Video
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="4" style="text-align:center;"|1993
| "Could It Be Magic"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "A Million Love Songs"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "It Only Takes a Minute"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Newcomer
|
|}
Discography
Take That & Party (1992)
Everything Changes (1993)
Nobody Else (1995)
Beautiful World (2006)
The Circus (2008)
Progress (2010)
III (2014)
Wonderland (2017)
Tours
Party Tour (1992–93)
Everything Changes Tour (1993–94)
Pops Tour (1994–95)
Nobody Else Tour (1995)
The Ultimate Tour (2006)
Beautiful World Tour 2007 (2007)
Take That Present: The Circus Live (2009)
Progress Live (2011)
Take That Live (2015)
Wonderland Live (2017)
Greatest Hits Live (2019)
See also
List of best-selling boy bands
References
External links
Chinese Fansite
1990 establishments in England
1996 disestablishments in England
2005 establishments in England
Brit Award winners
Dance-pop groups
Echo (music award) winners
English boy bands
English dance music groups
Interscope Records artists
Ivor Novello Award winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups disestablished in 1996
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups from Cheshire
Musical groups from Manchester
Musical groups reestablished in 2005
Polydor Records artists
Teen pop groups
Universal Music Group artists
Vocal quartets
Vocal quintets
Vocal trios
| true |
[
"TunnelVision Brilliance is the 2006 debut album by Scott Reeder, former bassist of Kyuss. The album was recorded intermittently over an 18 year period, mainly with song ideas that did not quite fit with the bands Reeder was active with over that time. Reeder performed, recorded and produced the album entirely on his own.\n\nTrack listing\n\"When I Was\" - 1:17 \n\"Thanks\" – 2:56 \n\"The Silver Tree\" – 3:06 \n\"Away\" – 1:29 \n\"Diamond\" – 4:42 \n\"When?\" – 2:24 \n\"For Renee\" – 3:25 \n\"The Day of Neverending\" – 4:12 \n\"Queen of Greed\" – 2:40 \n\"Fuck You All\" – 4:11 \n\"To an End\" – 3:17 \n\"The Fourth\" – 3:34 \n\"As I'm Dreamin'\" – 4:28\n\nPersonnel\nWritten, performed, recorded, and mixed by Scott Reeder\n\nReferences\n\n2006 debut albums\nScott Reeder (bassist) albums",
"\"Streiht Up Menace\" is the debut single by MC Eiht off the soundtrack of 1993 movie Menace II Society. The lyrics of the song focus on the life of the main character in the movie, Kaydee \"Caine\" Lawson (Tyrin Turner), acting as a sort of plot summary for the film. Compton's Most Wanted also did this with another song from a soundtrack with the song \"Growin' Up In The Hood\" from the Boyz n the Hood soundtrack.\nThe track was later released on the 2001 Compton's Most Wanted compilation album \"When We Wuz Bangin\" and on the 2010 MC Eiht compilation album \"The Best Of MC Eiht\".\n\nVideo\nThe video for \"Streiht Up Menace\" depicts MC Eiht alone in a slightly foggy bedroom. The video also features clips from the movie.\n\nLegacy \nMontell Jordan's \"Falling\" from his second album, \"More...\" (1996) sampled \"Streiht up Menace\" as did \"Rapfilm\" by Kool Savas (2009). The song is featured in the in-game radio station West Coast Classics in the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V. In 2010, Bruno Mars did a wedding remix of MC Eiht's Straight Up Menace on his debut album Doo-Wops & Hooligans.\n\nReferences\n\n1993 songs\nJive Records singles\n1993 singles\nGangsta rap songs"
] |
[
"Take That",
"2006-2007: Beautiful World",
"What singles were released from Beautiful World?",
"\"Patience\",",
"Was that the only single on the album?",
"I don't know.",
"How did \"Patience\" do on the charts?",
"hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry",
"When did the album debut?",
"released on 18 June 2007"
] |
C_6c5899211c324f1f99f593ecdcb72d87_1
|
Who produced Beautiful World?
| 5 |
Who produced Take That's Beautiful World?
|
Take That
|
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records in a deal reportedly worth PS3 million. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK album chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history. In the album Beautiful World all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Gary Barlow who received a sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks, regardless of whether they contributed to the writing process or not. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November. On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry making it the group's ninth No. 1 and stayed there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis in a live version of "A Million Love Songs" in the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006. The week after Take That's comeback album Beautiful World was released it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts. The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single taken from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This was due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
Gary Barlow
|
Take That are an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990. The group currently consists of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen. The original line-up also featured Jason Orange and Robbie Williams. Barlow is the group's lead singer and primary songwriter, with Owen and Williams initially providing backing vocals and Donald and Orange serving primarily as dancers.
The group have had 28 top 40 singles and 17 top 5 singles on the UK Singles Chart, 12 of which have reached number one, including "Back for Good", "Never Forget", "Patience" and "Greatest Day". They have also had eight number one albums on the UK Albums Chart. Internationally, the band have had 56 number one singles and 39 number one albums. They have received eight Brit Awards—winning for Best British Group and Best British Live Act. In 2012 they received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Take That has been certified for 14 million albums and 11.4 million singles in the UK.
Williams left the band in 1995 while the four remaining members completed their world tour and released a final single before splitting up in 1996. After filming a 2005 Take That: For the Record about the group and releasing a new greatest hits album, a four-piece Take That without Williams officially announced a 2006 reunion tour around the UK, entitled The Ultimate Tour. On 9 May 2006, it was announced that the group were set to record new material together once again; their fourth studio album, Beautiful World, was released in 2006 and was followed up with The Circus, in 2008. The group achieved new success as a four-piece, scoring a string of chart hits across the UK and Europe while selling over 45 million records worldwide. Williams rejoined Take That in 2010 for the band's sixth studio album, Progress. Released on 15 November of that year, it was the first album of new material to feature Take That's original line-up since their 1995 album, Nobody Else. It became the fastest-selling album of the 21st century and the second fastest-selling album in British history.
In 2014, the band recorded a seventh studio album, this time as a trio without Williams and Orange. The album, titled III, was released in November 2014 and became the band's seventh number one. It was preceded by the single "These Days", which became the band's 12th number one single in the UK.
In 2011, Take That set the new record for the fastest-selling tour of all time in the UK with Progress Live, beating the previous record set by their Circus Live Tour in 2009. At the 2011 Brit Awards they won Best British Group. In 2012, Forbes named them the fifth highest-earning music stars in the world. The group performed at the London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony, playing "Rule the World" while the Olympic Flame was extinguished. In the same year, the Official Charts Company revealed the biggest-selling singles artists in British music chart history with Take That currently placed at 15th overall, making them the most successful boy band in UK chart history. Four of their albums are listed in the best-selling albums of the millennium, with three of them among the 60 best-selling albums in UK chart history.
History
1989–1990: Formation
In 1989, Manchester-based Nigel Martin-Smith sought to create a British male vocal singing group modelled on New Kids on the Block. Martin-Smith's vision, however, was a teen-orientated group that would appeal to more than one demographic segment of the music industry. Martin-Smith was then introduced to young singer-songwriter Gary Barlow, who had been performing in clubs since the age of 15. Impressed with Barlow's catalogue of self-written material, Martin-Smith decided to build his new-look boy band around Barlow's musical abilities. A campaign to audition young men with abilities in dancing and singing followed and took place in Manchester and other surrounding cities in 1990. At 22, Howard Donald was one of the oldest to audition, but he was chosen after he got time off work as a vehicle painter to continue the process. Prior to auditioning, Jason Orange had appeared as a breakdancer on the popular television programme The Hit Man and Her. Martin-Smith also selected 18-year-old bank employee Mark Owen and finally 16-year-old Robbie Williams to round out the group, which initially went by the name Kick It.
1990–1992: Take That & Party
Take That's first TV appearance was on The Hit Man and Her in 1990, where they performed Barlow's self-written, unreleased song, "My Kind of Girl". They later appeared a second time to perform "Waiting Around", which would become the B-side for the first single, "Do What U Like". "Promises" and "Once You've Tasted Love" were also released as singles but were minor hits in the UK. Take That initially worked the same territory as their American counterparts, singing new jack R&B, urban soul, and mainstream pop. However, they worked their way toward Hi-NRG dance music, while also pursuing an adult contemporary ballad direction. As they aimed to break into the mainstream music industry, they worked a number of small clubs, schools, and events across the country building up a fanbase as they travelled to gigs constantly for months.
Take That's breakthrough single was a cover of the 1975 Tavares hit "It Only Takes a Minute", which peaked at number seven on the UK Singles Chart in June 1992. This success was followed by "I Found Heaven", then by the first Barlow ballad "A Million Love Songs", which also reached number seven in October. Their cover of the Barry Manilow hit "Could It Be Magic" gave them their first big success, peaking at number three in the UK in the first chart of 1993. Their first album, Take That & Party, was released in 1992, and included all the hit singles to date.
1993–1995: Everything Changes, Nobody Else and superstardom
1993 saw the release of Everything Changes, based on Barlow's original material. It peaked at number one in the UK and spawned six singles, with four being consecutive UK number one singles – their first number one "Pray", "Relight My Fire", "Babe" and the title track "Everything Changes". The lead single "Why Can't I Wake Up with You" had narrowly missed the top spot in the UK peaking at number two and the sixth and final single "Love Ain't Here Anymore" taken from the album reached number three on the UK charts. Everything Changes saw the band gain international success with the album being nominated for the 1994 Mercury Prize, but it failed to crack the U.S. market, where an exclusive remix of "Love Ain't Here Anymore" (U.S. version) gained little success.
By 1994, Take That had become radio and television stars across Europe and Asia, but it was not until 1995 that they did their first World Tour. It was during the years 1993–95 that the band fronted scores of magazine covers ranging from Smash Hits to GQ, becoming mass merchandised on all sorts of paraphernalia ranging from picture books, to posters, stickers, their own dolls, jewellery, caps, T-shirts, toothbrushes and even had their own annuals released. The band had also developed a large female teenage fanbase at the time. During this time, they performed at numerous music awards shows and chart shows such as the BRIT Awards and Top of the Pops, also winning the Best Live Act award in 1995 at the MTV Europe Music Awards, having been renowned for their breakdance routines, high energy and creative tour productions.
In 1995, Take That released their third studio album Nobody Else, again based on Barlow's own material which reached number 1 in the UK and across Europe, capturing new audiences along the way, with Take That also able to make inroads in the adult audience in Britain through Barlow's melodic, sensitive ballads. For nearly five years, Take That's popularity was unsurpassed in Britain. The release of the first single from the album, "Sure", achieved yet another number one in the UK charts. It was not until their second release from that album, however, that they would experience what would become their biggest hit single, "Back for Good", which reached number one in many countries including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Norway. It was also their only US hit, where it reached number seven.
The song was initially unveiled for the first time via live performance while at the 1995 BRIT Awards, and based on the reception of that performance, the record pre-sold more records than expected and forced the record label to bring the release date forward by an unprecedented six weeks. The album was also noted for its cover, which was a parody of the famed cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover sleeve.
1995–1996: Break-up and Greatest Hits
Robbie Williams's drug abuse had escalated to a near drug overdose the night before the group was scheduled to perform at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 1994.
In June 1995, Williams was photographed by the press partying with Oasis at the Glastonbury Festival. The following month, the band offered him an ultimatum; he was to adhere to the band's responsibilities or leave before their scheduled world tour. Williams chose the latter. Williams claimed he was bored with Barlow's leadership and jealous of Barlow. Despite the loss of Williams, Take That continued to promote Nobody Else as a four-piece, scoring a further hit single with "Never Forget" with Donald on lead vocal. They subsequently went to America and completed the Nobody Else Tour in October 1995. Following the tour, the band began to plan for their next album; however, when they spent Christmas together, they mutually agreed it was time to part ways.
On 13 February 1996, Take That formally announced that they were disbanding. This was followed by the Greatest Hits compilation in 1996, which contained a new recording, a cover of the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love". The single went on to become what was to be the band's final UK number one until their 2006 comeback a decade later. Take That gave what was thought to be their final performance in April 1996 at Amsterdam. Following the band's announcement, millions of their fans were distraught around the world and in the UK alone, teenage girls threatened suicide and were seen lining streets in tears, to the point that telephone hotlines were set up by the government to deal with counselling them. After the band broke up, highly respected music figures such as Elton John noted that Take That were different from other boy bands before and after them, in that they wrote their own material through Gary Barlow. Barlow is one of only a small number of people who have won an Ivor Novello award during their time in a boy band, with George Michael whilst in Wham! and Tony Mortimer whilst in East 17 being two others who have achieved this feat. Take That had also left a legacy of being immaculate performers with a very high work ethic, causing them to be voted in as the greatest boy band of all time.
2005–2006: Reunion as a quartet and Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection
On 14 November 2005, Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection, a new compilation of their hit singles including a new previously unreleased song, also achieved great success and peaked at number 2 on UK charts, selling over 2.1 million copies in the UK alone. The new song "Today I've Lost You" (recorded in September 2005) was originally written by Barlow as the follow up to "Back for Good" but was never recorded. On 16 November 2005, the group got back together for the ITV documentary Take That: For the Record, in which they aired their views over their fame, success, the split and what the post-Williams line-up had done since. On 25 November 2005, there was an official press conference by the band announcing that the post-Robbie Williams line-up was going to tour in 2006. The tour, entitled The Ultimate Tour, ran from April to June 2006. The tour featured a guest appearance by British soul singer Beverley Knight, who replaced Lulu's vocals on the song "Relight My Fire"; although Lulu did appear during the stadium shows on "Relight My Fire" and "Never Forget". The American female ensemble Pussycat Dolls supported the group at their Dublin concert, and the Sugababes supported the group on the final five dates of the stadium leg. In a seven-year study analysing over one billion online searches via Google conducted by AccuraCast, a leading digital search agency, their comeback was ranked at number one in the UK.
2006–2007: Beautiful World
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK Albums Chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history.
On Beautiful World, all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals and contribute in the songwriting. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Barlow who received sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November.
On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry, making it the group's ninth No. 1, and staying there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis on a live version of "A Million Love Songs" during the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006.
The week after Beautiful World was released, it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts.
The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single chosen from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This may have been due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. The single "Rule the World", included on the deluxe version of Beautiful World, was recorded for the soundtrack of the film Stardust (2007). It reached number two in the UK and went on to become the group's second best selling single, shifting over 1.2 million units in the UK. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. According to a 2007 MSN UK internet poll, Take That were voted as the "comeback kings" of the year.
2008–2009: The Circus
"Greatest Day", the first single from the album The Circus, made its radio premiere on 13 October 2008 and it was released on 24 November. It debuted at number 1 on the UK Singles Chart on 30 November 2008. An album launch party for The Circus was held in Paris on 2 December. On its first day of release The Circus sold 133,000 copies, and after four days on sale it sold 306,000 copies (going platinum) making The Circus the fastest selling album of the year. The album reached number 1 on the UK Albums Chart on 7 December 2008 with total first-week sales of 432,490, the third highest opening sales week in UK history.
On 28 October 2008, on the Radio 1 Chris Moyles show, it was announced that Take That would be touring again in June/July 2009, covering the UK and Ireland. Tickets for the Take That Present: The Circus Live tour went on sale on 31 October. The promoters, SJM, have said that the band's tour is "the fastest selling in UK history".
On 22 May 2008, Barlow and Donald attended the 2008 Ivor Novello Awards where Take That won the award for Most Performed Work with their single "Shine". Take That won the Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year award at the Vodafone music awards on 18 September 2008. They were unable to attend as they were in LA finishing off The Circus. They did send a video link message, which was shown at the awards. On 22 November 2008, Take That appeared on week 7 of the talent show The X Factor where the finalists performed some of their greatest hits and Owen and Barlow made a guest appearance to personally coach the contestants. The band also performed on Children in Need 2008, singing their new single, "Greatest Day", before donating £250,000 to the charity from their Marks and Spencer fee. The band were also voted the Greatest Boy Band of All Time, reflecting their ongoing marketability and success in the pop arena, even after two decades.
At the 2009 Brit Awards they were nominated for Best British Group and they performed "Greatest Day" at the ceremony. "Up All Night", the second single from The Circus, was released on 2 March 2009, and peaked at number 14 on the UK Singles Chart, despite heavy airplay. In Germany and Australia, "The Garden" was released as the second single instead. On 7 May 2009, Take That's official website confirmed that the third single from The Circus would be "Said It All" which was released on 15 June 2009, peaking at number 9 on the UK Singles chart. The video premiered on GMTV on 8 May 2009. It features all four band members dressed up as vintage circus clowns, which tied in with their forthcoming Take That Present: The Circus Live tour. Take That started their Circus Live tour at the Stadium of Light on 5 June 2009 in Sunderland and ended at the Wembley Stadium in London on 5 July 2009, which over 80,000 people attended. This tour quickly became the fastest-selling of all time, breaking all records by selling all of their 650,000 tickets in less than four and a half hours.
In November 2009 Take That released the official DVD of their Circus tour, which became the fastest-selling music DVD of all time in the UK on its first day of release and stayed in the top 10 of the videos chart for over a year. This overtook the previous record sales holder, which was Take That's Beautiful World Live tour and stayed at the number 1 spot for 8 weeks. The following week Take That released their first live album, The Greatest Day – Take That Present: The Circus Live, which sold 98,000 copies on its first day of release and was certified Platinum in July 2013. "Hold up a Light" was released as the fifth and final single from The Circus to radio stations and as a digital download to promote the release of the live album. The live album also featured a stripped down session recorded live at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. It featured the members singing the setlist from the preceding tour, albeit in a studio setting.
2010–2011: Williams' return and Progress
On 7 June 2010, the news broke of a single called "Shame", which had been written by Barlow and Williams and would feature the vocals of both artists. This was the first time the pair had worked together since 1995 and would appear on the second greatest hits collection of Williams. "Heart and I", another track from the same album, was also co-written by Williams and Barlow. The single "Shame" peaked at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart while also achieving success throughout Europe, charting in over 19 countries.
After working with the band on new material in Los Angeles, on 15 July 2010 Robbie Williams announced he was returning to Take That. After months of working together, assembling new songs for a new album and even debating a band-name change to "The English", a joint statement between Williams and the group read, "The rumours are true ... Take That: the original lineup, have written and recorded a new album for release later this year." The statement went on to say, "Following months of speculation Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange, Mark Owen, and Robbie Williams confirmed they have been recording a new studio album as a five-piece, which they will release in November." The lead single from Take That's album Progress was announced as "The Flood" and was released 7 November as a digital download, and on 8 November as a physical copy, with the album released a week later on 15 November. The single peaked at number 2 in the UK Singles Charts and to date has sold over 500,000 copies in the UK alone. The single also achieved success across Europe, charting inside the top 10 in ten countries while also charting in another nine countries whilst also being nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for best work.
On 26 October the band announced that they would be embarking on a huge UK stadium tour entitled Progress Live, starting in Sunderland on 27 May, and finishing with a record-breaking 8 nights at London's Wembley Stadium in July 2011. It was also announced that Williams would perform hit singles from his solo career during the tour. The band then played at some of the biggest venues across Europe for the second leg of the tour. The phenomenal demand for tickets across the country led to the web sites of all the major UK ticket suppliers either crashing or considerably slowing for hours on end. The demand and sheer volume of fans also created problems for the UK telephone network. Take That's Progress Live also broke all records for ticket sales selling over 1.1 million tickets in one day, smashing the previous box office record set by Take That's Circus tour in 2008.
On the first day of release Progress became the fastest selling album of the century, with 235,000 copies sold in just one day. The album reached number 1 in the UK, selling around 520,000 copies in its first week, becoming the second fastest-selling album in history. After the release of Progress it was announced that Take That have become Amazon UK's top-selling music artist of all time.
The album retained the number one spot for six consecutive weeks in the UK since its release, selling 2.8 million copies in the UK alone and becoming the best selling album of 2010
Progress also achieved success across Europe where it debuted at number one in Ireland, Greece, Germany and Denmark. and the European Top 100 Albums chart. It also debuted inside the top 10 of the charts in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.
"Kidz" was announced as the second single from Progress, it was released 21 February 2011 and charted well across Europe. The band performed the song live at the 2011 Brit Awards hosted at The O2 Arena, where they won a Brit for Best British Group and were nominated for Best British Album. Their performance of "Kidz", praised by critics, involved a highly choreographed routine featuring dancers dressed in police-styled riot gear bearing the Take That symbol on the uniform and shields. On 19 May 2011, Take That announced a new EP entitled Progressed, which contained eight tracks written by the band since they had reunited as a five-piece. It was packaged alongside the album Progress and returned the band to number 1 in the UK Album Chart the week after it was released on 13 June 2011.
Take That announced that the Progress Live tour would be released worldwide as their second live album to date and would also be released on home media formats across the UK and Europe on 21 November 2011. The DVD debuted at number 1 on the UK Music Video top 40 in its first week on release and sold over 200,000 copies in two weeks of release in the UK alone. Take That's efforts were recognised further when they were awarded Virgin Media's Best Live Act of 2012.
On 4 October, it was reported that Take That were to take a break after the completion of the Progress tour, with Barlow continuing his role as a judge on The X Factor and Williams recording new solo material. Take That were presented with an Ivor Novello Award for their Outstanding Contribution to British Music in May 2012.
In August 2012, Take That performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, despite Barlow announcing that his daughter had been stillborn the previous week. The performance earned him praise for appearing live so soon after the tragedy. Williams was due to perform with the band but dropped out due to his wife giving birth at around the same time and thus the group performed as a four-piece. In November 2012, Take That reunited as a five-piece for the last time to perform "Never Forget" at the Music Industry Trust Awards. In 2013, Donald became a judge on the German version of the television dancing show Got to Dance.
2014–2015: Line-up change and III
In May 2013, Owen announced that Take That was to begin recording their seventh studio album in 2014, and on 14 January 2014, Donald and Barlow both tweeted that Take That had entered the studio to begin recording the album, although it was not initially clear if Williams was present at these recording sessions. On 28 April 2014, Williams announced on Twitter he was to become a father for a second time, and consequently suggested he would be unable to join Take That on their album and tour. Although welcome to return to the band at any time, Williams chose not to return for group's seventh and eighth studio albums and their accompanying tours, focusing instead on his solo commitments. He continued to write music with his colleagues and has performed with the group on several occasions since 2011's Progress tour and plans on returning at some point in the future.
On 24 September 2014, it was announced that Jason Orange had left the band. He said: 'At a band meeting last week I confirmed to Mark, Gary and Howard that I do not wish to commit to recording and promoting a new album. 'At the end of The Progress Tour I began to question whether it might be the right time for me to not continue on with Take That,' he continued. 'There have been no fallings out, only a decision on my part that I no longer wish to do this,' he added. Barlow, Donald, and Owen issued a joint statement about Orange's decision which said: "This is a sad day for us. Jason leaving is a huge loss both professionally and even more so personally ... Jason's energy and belief in what this band could achieve has made it what it is today, and we'll forever be grateful for his enthusiasm, dedication and inspiration over the years." A day after the announcement, Robbie Williams took to Twitter to show support of Orange's decision. "Mr Orange. Until we ride again. Much love, Bro.", Williams tweeted.
On 10 October 2014, Take That unveiled their first song as a three-piece and lead single from their upcoming album. Titled "These Days", it was released on 23 November 2014 and went to No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart, knocking Band Aid 30 off the top spot and becoming their 12th number one single. The album itself, called III, was released on 28 November 2014 and became the band's seventh No. 1 album. It was then followed by a sell-out arena tour entitled Take That Live. On 14 October 2015, the band announced their new single "Hey Boy", released on 16 October, which is the first single from the 2015 re-release of III. The 2015 edition of the album was released on 20 November.
In December 2015, British media buzzed about the group embarking on a stint in Las Vegas, starting 2017. Reports indicated the group impressed U.S. promoters and would headline their own residency show. Many venues circulated, including The AXIS at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, The Foundry at SLS Las Vegas and the Linq Theater at The LINQ Hotel & Casino. Local newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun writes that everything is still unconfirmed, despite Barlow confirming the rumour on Twitter.
2016–2017: Wonderland
On 2 February 2016, in an interview with The Sun, Barlow revealed that Take That would release their eighth studio album later in the year. On 4 May 2016, English drum and bass duo Sigma announced their newest single would feature Take That. "Cry" received its first radio play on 20 May 2016 and was released on that date. On 21 October 2016, the band posted a teaser on their social media pages and website depicting the logo of the band flickering with the hashtag "#WONDERLAND". The following day, it was announced that their new album, titled Wonderland, was scheduled to be released on 24 March 2017. It was then followed by a UK and Ireland arena tour entitled Wonderland Live, that commenced on 5 May 2017 at the Genting Arena in Birmingham. On 17 February 2017, the lead single of Wonderland was released. Titled "Giants", it debuted at 13 in the UK charts, which became the band's 24th UK top 20 single.
On 8 April 2017, ITV aired a specially commissioned hour-length television special titled An Evening with Take That, where the band performed some songs from the album, along with some old classics including "Never Forget", "Back for Good" and "Rule the World". The band also took part in a Q&A session with the audience members. On 27 April, it was announced on Twitter that "New Day" would be released as the next single from the album Wonderland. The band were seen recording the music video in a field in Luton the days leading up the opening night of the Wonderland Live tour. Due to the Manchester Arena bombing just days before they were due to perform at the venue, their Manchester and Liverpool dates were rescheduled or relocated. The band returned a month later to perform at the One Love Manchester benefit concert.
On 16 September 2017, Barlow, Owen and Donald were set to perform a special one-off show in Jersey after a fan bid more than £1.2 million to win a performance from the band. This then turned in to a ticketed charity event where the money from tickets sold would go towards benefiting Children in Need. The auction was held on BBC Radio 2. On 11 November 2017, Take That began their foreign tour in Perth, Australia, the first time they have performed in the country in over twenty years. They also played in New Zealand, United Arab Emirates and Israel for the first time. Unlike the other tours, a DVD for Wonderland Live was not released. Instead, it was broadcast on Sky 1 on 23 December and in cinemas.
2018–2020: The 30th Anniversary, and Odyssey
On 16 July 2018, while performing at first ever Hits Radio Live at the Manchester Arena, Barlow, Donald and Owen confirmed that they would be touring in 2019. The tour was a Greatest Hits tour and celebrated the 30th anniversary of the band. There was also a Greatest Hits album, Odyssey, which was released on 23 November 2018. The Greatest Hits album features existing songs from their back catalogue that have been re-imagined and 3 brand new songs. It also includes collaborations with Boyz II Men, Lulu, Sigma and Barry Gibb. Odyssey reached number one in the UK album chart and was certified as a platinum selling record. The following year, Odyssey Live, the recording of their tour, reached number 5, becoming the band's 13th top 5 album, with the DVD becoming the biggest live music sale of 2019.
In May 2020, Barlow, Donald, and Owen reunited with Williams for a virtual performance from their respective homes, hosted by price comparison website comparethemarket.com, to raise money for the music charity Nordoff Robbins and Crew Nation.
In other media
In April 2006, EMI licensed the band's songs to be used in the musical Never Forget, a musical based on songs of the band from the 1990s. Take That posted and then later removed a statement on their website distancing themselves from it.
Take That wrote and recorded the theme song "Rule the World" for the film Stardust directed by Matthew Vaughn, which was released in cinemas across the globe in October 2007. In 2007, their song "Back for Good" was used as part of the soundtrack for popular Korean drama The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince.
Take That presented their own TV show Take That Come to Town, a variety show in which they performed some of their biggest hits. The show also featured comedy sketches with one of Peter Kay's alter egos Geraldine McQueen. It aired on 7 December 2008 on ITV1. Sony launched their first Take That video game, SingStar Take That in 2009 for the PlayStation 3.
In November 2010, ITV aired Take That: Look Back, Don't Stare, a black-and-white documentary which focused on the band working together for the first time in 15 years. Through a series of interviews, the band look back at their achievements while also looking forward to what the future holds for them. On 18 November 2010, Williams and Barlow appeared together live on television for the first time on the Popstars program in Germany singing their hit "Shame".
In 2011, Take That's song "Love Love" was used in the credits of the 2011 film X-Men: First Class and later, "When We Were Young" was chosen as the main theme for The Three Musketeers movie. In 2015, the song "Get Ready for It" from their album III, was chosen as the theme song for the film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
In 2017, Take That launched The Band, a musical written by Tim Firth featuring the five winners of Let It Shine and some of Take That's biggest hits. Take That, including Robbie Williams, were billed as executive producers.
The group's music is regularly featured in the Channel 4 show Derry Girls, notably in the third episode of the second series, when the lead characters sneak off to attend the 1993 Take That concert in Belfast; the episode features the music video for "Pray" and ends on footage of the band performing "Everything Changes".
Artistry
Early in their career, Take That were known for party anthems such as "Do What U Like" and more mature ballads such as "A Million Love Songs" and "Back for Good". Since reuniting in 2006, they have become more experimental: their post-2006 albums Beautiful World and The Circus have featured "stadium-filling pop-rock" while Progress largely leaned towards electropop. Having been dubbed the "comeback kings" by the media for their highly successful reunion, the group has won widespread praise for their seamless transformation from teen idols to "man band" without overly relying on nostalgia, instead showcasing a more mature image and sound and reinventing themselves while maintaining their artistic integrity. Jude Rogers of The Guardian commented on Take That's post-reunion success, in light of a string of reunions by the group's disbanded counterparts from the 1990s: "Only Take That are penetrating pop's wider consciousness by becoming a man-band rather than a boy-band, singing mature, proper pop songs that cross the generations."
Take That have garnered critical acclaim and popularity as consummate live performers and for their musical output. Their domestic concert tours have been described as "some of the most flamboyant, imaginative and extravagant pop tours around". Aside from covers, all of their material is composed by the members themselves; Barlow was initially the principal songwriter who received sole credit but the other members have since taken a more active role in the composition and production process, including playing instruments for the backing track.
Band members
Current members
Gary Barlow (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Howard Donald (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Mark Owen (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Former members
Robbie Williams (1990–1995, 2010–2012)
Jason Orange (1990–1996, 2005–2014)
Timeline
Awards and nominations
|-
| 2016
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2015
| "These Days"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2012
| "Pray"
|The Guardian Music Award for Best Number 1 Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|The Official Charts Company UK Recognition award for United Kingdom's Favourite Number One Single
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Music Video
|
|-
| rowspan="10" style="text-align:center;"|2011
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards for Best Live Sound Event
|
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards Grand Prix Award
|
|-
| Take That
|Phonographic Performance Limited Award for most played UK artist
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Spex German Entertainment for Best Music Video
|
|-
| The Circus Live Tour
| Greatest Event ever at Wembley Stadium
|
|-
| Take That
|ECHO Award for Best International Group
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Progress
| BRIT Award for MasterCard Album of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2010
|-
| "Up All Night"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|iTunes Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Progress
| iTunes Award for Best Album
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award Hall of Fame
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best Live Performance of the past 30 Years
|
|-
| rowspan="5" style="text-align:center;"|2009
| Take That
|GQ Men of the Year Awards for Best Band
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Greatest Day"
|Q Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="7" style="text-align:center;"|2008
| "Shine"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| "Rule the World"
|Virgin for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year Award for Take That Arena Tour
|
|-
| "Shine"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Live Act
|
|-
| Beautiful World
|BRIT Award for Best British Album
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2007
| "Patience"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2006
| Take That
|Q Idol Award
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1996
| "Back for Good"
|Billboard International Hit of the Year
|
|-
| "Never Forget"
|Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Song
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1995
| "Back for Good"
|Ivor Novello Award for the Song of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|1994
| "Babe"
|MTV Video Music Award for International Viewer's Choice Award for MTV Europe
|
|-
| Everything Changes
|Mercury Prize for Best Album
|
|-
| "Pray"
|Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Video
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="4" style="text-align:center;"|1993
| "Could It Be Magic"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "A Million Love Songs"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "It Only Takes a Minute"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Newcomer
|
|}
Discography
Take That & Party (1992)
Everything Changes (1993)
Nobody Else (1995)
Beautiful World (2006)
The Circus (2008)
Progress (2010)
III (2014)
Wonderland (2017)
Tours
Party Tour (1992–93)
Everything Changes Tour (1993–94)
Pops Tour (1994–95)
Nobody Else Tour (1995)
The Ultimate Tour (2006)
Beautiful World Tour 2007 (2007)
Take That Present: The Circus Live (2009)
Progress Live (2011)
Take That Live (2015)
Wonderland Live (2017)
Greatest Hits Live (2019)
See also
List of best-selling boy bands
References
External links
Chinese Fansite
1990 establishments in England
1996 disestablishments in England
2005 establishments in England
Brit Award winners
Dance-pop groups
Echo (music award) winners
English boy bands
English dance music groups
Interscope Records artists
Ivor Novello Award winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups disestablished in 1996
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups from Cheshire
Musical groups from Manchester
Musical groups reestablished in 2005
Polydor Records artists
Teen pop groups
Universal Music Group artists
Vocal quartets
Vocal quintets
Vocal trios
| true |
[
"Beautiful World may refer to:\n\nAlbums \n Beautiful World (Arashi album), 2011\n Beautiful World (Big Head Todd album), or the title song, 1997\n Beautiful World (Connie Talbot album), 2012, or the title song, released as a single in 2011\n Beautiful World (Take 6 album), or the title song (see below), 2002\n Beautiful World (Take That album), or the title song, 2006\n Beautiful World (Paul Carrack album)\n A Beautiful World, a 2003 album by Robin Thicke\n Beautiful World, a 2003 album by Patrick O'Hearn\n\nSongs \n \"Beautiful World\" (Devo song), a 1981 song by Devo from New Traditionalists\n \"Beautiful World\" (Hikaru Utada song), a 2007 single by Hikaru Utada\n \"Beautiful World\" (Westlife song), a 2011 song by Westlife from Greatest Hits\n \"I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)\", a 1982 song by Donald Fagen, covered as \"Beautiful World\" by Take 6\n \"Beautiful World\", a song by Bon Jovi\n \"Beautiful World\", a song by Archive from Londinium\n \"Beautiful World\", a song by Colin Hay from Man @ Work\n \"Beautiful World\", a song by Dierks Bentley from Feel That Fire\n \"Beautiful World\", a song by Sara Jorge from R3MIX\n \"Beautiful World\", a song by The Chevin from Borderland\n \"The Beautiful World\", a song by Ai Maeda, a theme from the light novel Kino's Journey (see below)\n \"Don't Panic\" (Coldplay song), a 1999 song by Coldplay, sometimes miscredited as \"Beautiful World\"\n\nOther uses \n Phil Sawyer (born 1947), English musician who recorded as Beautiful World during the mid-1990s\n Kino's Journey: the Beautiful World, a 2003 Japanese light novel series by Keiichi Sigsawa\n Beautiful World (TV series), a 2019 South Korean television series\nA Beautiful World. The journal of the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising (founded 1893)",
"Beautiful Life, also known as Beautiful Life: A Slight Miscalculation, is the third solo studio album by Martha Davis, who is better known as the lead singer for the band The Motels. The 2008 album is a concept album Martha developed with some help from Matthew Morgan about her mother's life and death by suicide.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Watching the World Go By\" – 4:05\n\"Beautiful Life\" – 2:57\n\"Interlude #1\" – 1:21\n\"Let Me Fall\" – 3:59\n\"Life Alone\" – 4:03\n\"Deep End\" – 2:59\n\"The Rain\" – 4:40\n\"I Will Breathe\" – 3:43\n\"Interlude #2\" – 2:04\n\"When It's Over\" – 3:21\n\"4:30 Friday\" – 4:37\n\"Outro\" – 1:15\n\nPersonnel\n\nThe Motels\nMartha Davis – vocals, guitar \nClint Walsh – guitars, vocals, synthesizer\nJon Siebels – bass guitar\nNick Johns – keyboard\nEric Gardner – drums, percussion\n\nProduction\nProduced by Martha Davis\nMixed by Jon Siebels\nMastered by Mark Chalecki\n\nReferences\n\n2008 albums\nMartha Davis (rock singer) albums"
] |
[
"Take That",
"2006-2007: Beautiful World",
"What singles were released from Beautiful World?",
"\"Patience\",",
"Was that the only single on the album?",
"I don't know.",
"How did \"Patience\" do on the charts?",
"hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry",
"When did the album debut?",
"released on 18 June 2007",
"Who produced Beautiful World?",
"Gary Barlow"
] |
C_6c5899211c324f1f99f593ecdcb72d87_1
|
Were there any guest appearances or features on the album?
| 6 |
Were there any guest appearances or features on Take That's Beautiful World?
|
Take That
|
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records in a deal reportedly worth PS3 million. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK album chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history. In the album Beautiful World all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Gary Barlow who received a sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks, regardless of whether they contributed to the writing process or not. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November. On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry making it the group's ninth No. 1 and stayed there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis in a live version of "A Million Love Songs" in the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006. The week after Take That's comeback album Beautiful World was released it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts. The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single taken from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This was due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
|
Take That are an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990. The group currently consists of Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen. The original line-up also featured Jason Orange and Robbie Williams. Barlow is the group's lead singer and primary songwriter, with Owen and Williams initially providing backing vocals and Donald and Orange serving primarily as dancers.
The group have had 28 top 40 singles and 17 top 5 singles on the UK Singles Chart, 12 of which have reached number one, including "Back for Good", "Never Forget", "Patience" and "Greatest Day". They have also had eight number one albums on the UK Albums Chart. Internationally, the band have had 56 number one singles and 39 number one albums. They have received eight Brit Awards—winning for Best British Group and Best British Live Act. In 2012 they received an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Take That has been certified for 14 million albums and 11.4 million singles in the UK.
Williams left the band in 1995 while the four remaining members completed their world tour and released a final single before splitting up in 1996. After filming a 2005 Take That: For the Record about the group and releasing a new greatest hits album, a four-piece Take That without Williams officially announced a 2006 reunion tour around the UK, entitled The Ultimate Tour. On 9 May 2006, it was announced that the group were set to record new material together once again; their fourth studio album, Beautiful World, was released in 2006 and was followed up with The Circus, in 2008. The group achieved new success as a four-piece, scoring a string of chart hits across the UK and Europe while selling over 45 million records worldwide. Williams rejoined Take That in 2010 for the band's sixth studio album, Progress. Released on 15 November of that year, it was the first album of new material to feature Take That's original line-up since their 1995 album, Nobody Else. It became the fastest-selling album of the 21st century and the second fastest-selling album in British history.
In 2014, the band recorded a seventh studio album, this time as a trio without Williams and Orange. The album, titled III, was released in November 2014 and became the band's seventh number one. It was preceded by the single "These Days", which became the band's 12th number one single in the UK.
In 2011, Take That set the new record for the fastest-selling tour of all time in the UK with Progress Live, beating the previous record set by their Circus Live Tour in 2009. At the 2011 Brit Awards they won Best British Group. In 2012, Forbes named them the fifth highest-earning music stars in the world. The group performed at the London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony, playing "Rule the World" while the Olympic Flame was extinguished. In the same year, the Official Charts Company revealed the biggest-selling singles artists in British music chart history with Take That currently placed at 15th overall, making them the most successful boy band in UK chart history. Four of their albums are listed in the best-selling albums of the millennium, with three of them among the 60 best-selling albums in UK chart history.
History
1989–1990: Formation
In 1989, Manchester-based Nigel Martin-Smith sought to create a British male vocal singing group modelled on New Kids on the Block. Martin-Smith's vision, however, was a teen-orientated group that would appeal to more than one demographic segment of the music industry. Martin-Smith was then introduced to young singer-songwriter Gary Barlow, who had been performing in clubs since the age of 15. Impressed with Barlow's catalogue of self-written material, Martin-Smith decided to build his new-look boy band around Barlow's musical abilities. A campaign to audition young men with abilities in dancing and singing followed and took place in Manchester and other surrounding cities in 1990. At 22, Howard Donald was one of the oldest to audition, but he was chosen after he got time off work as a vehicle painter to continue the process. Prior to auditioning, Jason Orange had appeared as a breakdancer on the popular television programme The Hit Man and Her. Martin-Smith also selected 18-year-old bank employee Mark Owen and finally 16-year-old Robbie Williams to round out the group, which initially went by the name Kick It.
1990–1992: Take That & Party
Take That's first TV appearance was on The Hit Man and Her in 1990, where they performed Barlow's self-written, unreleased song, "My Kind of Girl". They later appeared a second time to perform "Waiting Around", which would become the B-side for the first single, "Do What U Like". "Promises" and "Once You've Tasted Love" were also released as singles but were minor hits in the UK. Take That initially worked the same territory as their American counterparts, singing new jack R&B, urban soul, and mainstream pop. However, they worked their way toward Hi-NRG dance music, while also pursuing an adult contemporary ballad direction. As they aimed to break into the mainstream music industry, they worked a number of small clubs, schools, and events across the country building up a fanbase as they travelled to gigs constantly for months.
Take That's breakthrough single was a cover of the 1975 Tavares hit "It Only Takes a Minute", which peaked at number seven on the UK Singles Chart in June 1992. This success was followed by "I Found Heaven", then by the first Barlow ballad "A Million Love Songs", which also reached number seven in October. Their cover of the Barry Manilow hit "Could It Be Magic" gave them their first big success, peaking at number three in the UK in the first chart of 1993. Their first album, Take That & Party, was released in 1992, and included all the hit singles to date.
1993–1995: Everything Changes, Nobody Else and superstardom
1993 saw the release of Everything Changes, based on Barlow's original material. It peaked at number one in the UK and spawned six singles, with four being consecutive UK number one singles – their first number one "Pray", "Relight My Fire", "Babe" and the title track "Everything Changes". The lead single "Why Can't I Wake Up with You" had narrowly missed the top spot in the UK peaking at number two and the sixth and final single "Love Ain't Here Anymore" taken from the album reached number three on the UK charts. Everything Changes saw the band gain international success with the album being nominated for the 1994 Mercury Prize, but it failed to crack the U.S. market, where an exclusive remix of "Love Ain't Here Anymore" (U.S. version) gained little success.
By 1994, Take That had become radio and television stars across Europe and Asia, but it was not until 1995 that they did their first World Tour. It was during the years 1993–95 that the band fronted scores of magazine covers ranging from Smash Hits to GQ, becoming mass merchandised on all sorts of paraphernalia ranging from picture books, to posters, stickers, their own dolls, jewellery, caps, T-shirts, toothbrushes and even had their own annuals released. The band had also developed a large female teenage fanbase at the time. During this time, they performed at numerous music awards shows and chart shows such as the BRIT Awards and Top of the Pops, also winning the Best Live Act award in 1995 at the MTV Europe Music Awards, having been renowned for their breakdance routines, high energy and creative tour productions.
In 1995, Take That released their third studio album Nobody Else, again based on Barlow's own material which reached number 1 in the UK and across Europe, capturing new audiences along the way, with Take That also able to make inroads in the adult audience in Britain through Barlow's melodic, sensitive ballads. For nearly five years, Take That's popularity was unsurpassed in Britain. The release of the first single from the album, "Sure", achieved yet another number one in the UK charts. It was not until their second release from that album, however, that they would experience what would become their biggest hit single, "Back for Good", which reached number one in many countries including the UK, Germany, Australia, and Norway. It was also their only US hit, where it reached number seven.
The song was initially unveiled for the first time via live performance while at the 1995 BRIT Awards, and based on the reception of that performance, the record pre-sold more records than expected and forced the record label to bring the release date forward by an unprecedented six weeks. The album was also noted for its cover, which was a parody of the famed cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover sleeve.
1995–1996: Break-up and Greatest Hits
Robbie Williams's drug abuse had escalated to a near drug overdose the night before the group was scheduled to perform at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 1994.
In June 1995, Williams was photographed by the press partying with Oasis at the Glastonbury Festival. The following month, the band offered him an ultimatum; he was to adhere to the band's responsibilities or leave before their scheduled world tour. Williams chose the latter. Williams claimed he was bored with Barlow's leadership and jealous of Barlow. Despite the loss of Williams, Take That continued to promote Nobody Else as a four-piece, scoring a further hit single with "Never Forget" with Donald on lead vocal. They subsequently went to America and completed the Nobody Else Tour in October 1995. Following the tour, the band began to plan for their next album; however, when they spent Christmas together, they mutually agreed it was time to part ways.
On 13 February 1996, Take That formally announced that they were disbanding. This was followed by the Greatest Hits compilation in 1996, which contained a new recording, a cover of the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love". The single went on to become what was to be the band's final UK number one until their 2006 comeback a decade later. Take That gave what was thought to be their final performance in April 1996 at Amsterdam. Following the band's announcement, millions of their fans were distraught around the world and in the UK alone, teenage girls threatened suicide and were seen lining streets in tears, to the point that telephone hotlines were set up by the government to deal with counselling them. After the band broke up, highly respected music figures such as Elton John noted that Take That were different from other boy bands before and after them, in that they wrote their own material through Gary Barlow. Barlow is one of only a small number of people who have won an Ivor Novello award during their time in a boy band, with George Michael whilst in Wham! and Tony Mortimer whilst in East 17 being two others who have achieved this feat. Take That had also left a legacy of being immaculate performers with a very high work ethic, causing them to be voted in as the greatest boy band of all time.
2005–2006: Reunion as a quartet and Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection
On 14 November 2005, Never Forget – The Ultimate Collection, a new compilation of their hit singles including a new previously unreleased song, also achieved great success and peaked at number 2 on UK charts, selling over 2.1 million copies in the UK alone. The new song "Today I've Lost You" (recorded in September 2005) was originally written by Barlow as the follow up to "Back for Good" but was never recorded. On 16 November 2005, the group got back together for the ITV documentary Take That: For the Record, in which they aired their views over their fame, success, the split and what the post-Williams line-up had done since. On 25 November 2005, there was an official press conference by the band announcing that the post-Robbie Williams line-up was going to tour in 2006. The tour, entitled The Ultimate Tour, ran from April to June 2006. The tour featured a guest appearance by British soul singer Beverley Knight, who replaced Lulu's vocals on the song "Relight My Fire"; although Lulu did appear during the stadium shows on "Relight My Fire" and "Never Forget". The American female ensemble Pussycat Dolls supported the group at their Dublin concert, and the Sugababes supported the group on the final five dates of the stadium leg. In a seven-year study analysing over one billion online searches via Google conducted by AccuraCast, a leading digital search agency, their comeback was ranked at number one in the UK.
2006–2007: Beautiful World
On 9 May 2006, Take That returned to the recorded music scene after more than ten years of absence, signing with Polydor Records. The band's comeback album, Beautiful World, entered the UK Albums Chart at no. 1 and, as of June 2009, had sold over 2.8 million copies in the UK. It is the 35th best selling album in UK music history.
On Beautiful World, all four members of the band had the opportunity to sing lead vocals and contribute in the songwriting. Unlike the band's earlier works, where the majority of their material was written by Barlow who received sole credit, all four band members are credited as co-writers, along with John Shanks. The comeback single, "Patience", was released on 20 November 2006, with a special event launching it on 5 November.
On 26 November "Patience" hit number 1 in the UK in its second week of chart entry, making it the group's ninth No. 1, and staying there for 4 weeks. Take That also accompanied eventual winner Leona Lewis on a live version of "A Million Love Songs" during the final of The X Factor on 16 December 2006.
The week after Beautiful World was released, it was announced that Take That had become the first artists ever to top the UK official single and album charts along with the download single, download album and DVD charts in the same week, as well as topping the radio charts.
The video for the number 1 hit single "Shine", the follow-up to "Patience", premiered on 25 January 2007 on Channel 4, ahead of its release on 26 February 2007. The band's success continued on 14 February 2007 when Take That performed live at the BRIT Awards ceremony at Earl's Court. Their single "Patience" won the Best British Single category. The third single chosen from Beautiful World was "I'd Wait For Life", released on 18 June 2007 in the UK. The single reached 17 in the UK Singles Chart. This may have been due to lack of promotion, as the band decided to take a pre-tour break rather than do any promotion for the single. The single "Rule the World", included on the deluxe version of Beautiful World, was recorded for the soundtrack of the film Stardust (2007). It reached number two in the UK and went on to become the group's second best selling single, shifting over 1.2 million units in the UK. Beautiful World was the fourth biggest-selling album of 2007. It was announced at the start of 2007 that Take That signed a record deal with American label Interscope, and would also release their album in Canada. Starting on 11 October 2007, Take That began their Beautiful World Tour 2007 in Belfast. The tour included 49 shows throughout Europe and the UK and ended in Manchester on 23 December 2007. The band received four nominations at the 2008 BRIT Awards. Nominated for Best British Group, Best British Single ("Shine"), Best British Album (Beautiful World) and Best Live Act, they took home the Best Live Act and the Best British Single awards. According to a 2007 MSN UK internet poll, Take That were voted as the "comeback kings" of the year.
2008–2009: The Circus
"Greatest Day", the first single from the album The Circus, made its radio premiere on 13 October 2008 and it was released on 24 November. It debuted at number 1 on the UK Singles Chart on 30 November 2008. An album launch party for The Circus was held in Paris on 2 December. On its first day of release The Circus sold 133,000 copies, and after four days on sale it sold 306,000 copies (going platinum) making The Circus the fastest selling album of the year. The album reached number 1 on the UK Albums Chart on 7 December 2008 with total first-week sales of 432,490, the third highest opening sales week in UK history.
On 28 October 2008, on the Radio 1 Chris Moyles show, it was announced that Take That would be touring again in June/July 2009, covering the UK and Ireland. Tickets for the Take That Present: The Circus Live tour went on sale on 31 October. The promoters, SJM, have said that the band's tour is "the fastest selling in UK history".
On 22 May 2008, Barlow and Donald attended the 2008 Ivor Novello Awards where Take That won the award for Most Performed Work with their single "Shine". Take That won the Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year award at the Vodafone music awards on 18 September 2008. They were unable to attend as they were in LA finishing off The Circus. They did send a video link message, which was shown at the awards. On 22 November 2008, Take That appeared on week 7 of the talent show The X Factor where the finalists performed some of their greatest hits and Owen and Barlow made a guest appearance to personally coach the contestants. The band also performed on Children in Need 2008, singing their new single, "Greatest Day", before donating £250,000 to the charity from their Marks and Spencer fee. The band were also voted the Greatest Boy Band of All Time, reflecting their ongoing marketability and success in the pop arena, even after two decades.
At the 2009 Brit Awards they were nominated for Best British Group and they performed "Greatest Day" at the ceremony. "Up All Night", the second single from The Circus, was released on 2 March 2009, and peaked at number 14 on the UK Singles Chart, despite heavy airplay. In Germany and Australia, "The Garden" was released as the second single instead. On 7 May 2009, Take That's official website confirmed that the third single from The Circus would be "Said It All" which was released on 15 June 2009, peaking at number 9 on the UK Singles chart. The video premiered on GMTV on 8 May 2009. It features all four band members dressed up as vintage circus clowns, which tied in with their forthcoming Take That Present: The Circus Live tour. Take That started their Circus Live tour at the Stadium of Light on 5 June 2009 in Sunderland and ended at the Wembley Stadium in London on 5 July 2009, which over 80,000 people attended. This tour quickly became the fastest-selling of all time, breaking all records by selling all of their 650,000 tickets in less than four and a half hours.
In November 2009 Take That released the official DVD of their Circus tour, which became the fastest-selling music DVD of all time in the UK on its first day of release and stayed in the top 10 of the videos chart for over a year. This overtook the previous record sales holder, which was Take That's Beautiful World Live tour and stayed at the number 1 spot for 8 weeks. The following week Take That released their first live album, The Greatest Day – Take That Present: The Circus Live, which sold 98,000 copies on its first day of release and was certified Platinum in July 2013. "Hold up a Light" was released as the fifth and final single from The Circus to radio stations and as a digital download to promote the release of the live album. The live album also featured a stripped down session recorded live at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London. It featured the members singing the setlist from the preceding tour, albeit in a studio setting.
2010–2011: Williams' return and Progress
On 7 June 2010, the news broke of a single called "Shame", which had been written by Barlow and Williams and would feature the vocals of both artists. This was the first time the pair had worked together since 1995 and would appear on the second greatest hits collection of Williams. "Heart and I", another track from the same album, was also co-written by Williams and Barlow. The single "Shame" peaked at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart while also achieving success throughout Europe, charting in over 19 countries.
After working with the band on new material in Los Angeles, on 15 July 2010 Robbie Williams announced he was returning to Take That. After months of working together, assembling new songs for a new album and even debating a band-name change to "The English", a joint statement between Williams and the group read, "The rumours are true ... Take That: the original lineup, have written and recorded a new album for release later this year." The statement went on to say, "Following months of speculation Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange, Mark Owen, and Robbie Williams confirmed they have been recording a new studio album as a five-piece, which they will release in November." The lead single from Take That's album Progress was announced as "The Flood" and was released 7 November as a digital download, and on 8 November as a physical copy, with the album released a week later on 15 November. The single peaked at number 2 in the UK Singles Charts and to date has sold over 500,000 copies in the UK alone. The single also achieved success across Europe, charting inside the top 10 in ten countries while also charting in another nine countries whilst also being nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for best work.
On 26 October the band announced that they would be embarking on a huge UK stadium tour entitled Progress Live, starting in Sunderland on 27 May, and finishing with a record-breaking 8 nights at London's Wembley Stadium in July 2011. It was also announced that Williams would perform hit singles from his solo career during the tour. The band then played at some of the biggest venues across Europe for the second leg of the tour. The phenomenal demand for tickets across the country led to the web sites of all the major UK ticket suppliers either crashing or considerably slowing for hours on end. The demand and sheer volume of fans also created problems for the UK telephone network. Take That's Progress Live also broke all records for ticket sales selling over 1.1 million tickets in one day, smashing the previous box office record set by Take That's Circus tour in 2008.
On the first day of release Progress became the fastest selling album of the century, with 235,000 copies sold in just one day. The album reached number 1 in the UK, selling around 520,000 copies in its first week, becoming the second fastest-selling album in history. After the release of Progress it was announced that Take That have become Amazon UK's top-selling music artist of all time.
The album retained the number one spot for six consecutive weeks in the UK since its release, selling 2.8 million copies in the UK alone and becoming the best selling album of 2010
Progress also achieved success across Europe where it debuted at number one in Ireland, Greece, Germany and Denmark. and the European Top 100 Albums chart. It also debuted inside the top 10 of the charts in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.
"Kidz" was announced as the second single from Progress, it was released 21 February 2011 and charted well across Europe. The band performed the song live at the 2011 Brit Awards hosted at The O2 Arena, where they won a Brit for Best British Group and were nominated for Best British Album. Their performance of "Kidz", praised by critics, involved a highly choreographed routine featuring dancers dressed in police-styled riot gear bearing the Take That symbol on the uniform and shields. On 19 May 2011, Take That announced a new EP entitled Progressed, which contained eight tracks written by the band since they had reunited as a five-piece. It was packaged alongside the album Progress and returned the band to number 1 in the UK Album Chart the week after it was released on 13 June 2011.
Take That announced that the Progress Live tour would be released worldwide as their second live album to date and would also be released on home media formats across the UK and Europe on 21 November 2011. The DVD debuted at number 1 on the UK Music Video top 40 in its first week on release and sold over 200,000 copies in two weeks of release in the UK alone. Take That's efforts were recognised further when they were awarded Virgin Media's Best Live Act of 2012.
On 4 October, it was reported that Take That were to take a break after the completion of the Progress tour, with Barlow continuing his role as a judge on The X Factor and Williams recording new solo material. Take That were presented with an Ivor Novello Award for their Outstanding Contribution to British Music in May 2012.
In August 2012, Take That performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, despite Barlow announcing that his daughter had been stillborn the previous week. The performance earned him praise for appearing live so soon after the tragedy. Williams was due to perform with the band but dropped out due to his wife giving birth at around the same time and thus the group performed as a four-piece. In November 2012, Take That reunited as a five-piece for the last time to perform "Never Forget" at the Music Industry Trust Awards. In 2013, Donald became a judge on the German version of the television dancing show Got to Dance.
2014–2015: Line-up change and III
In May 2013, Owen announced that Take That was to begin recording their seventh studio album in 2014, and on 14 January 2014, Donald and Barlow both tweeted that Take That had entered the studio to begin recording the album, although it was not initially clear if Williams was present at these recording sessions. On 28 April 2014, Williams announced on Twitter he was to become a father for a second time, and consequently suggested he would be unable to join Take That on their album and tour. Although welcome to return to the band at any time, Williams chose not to return for group's seventh and eighth studio albums and their accompanying tours, focusing instead on his solo commitments. He continued to write music with his colleagues and has performed with the group on several occasions since 2011's Progress tour and plans on returning at some point in the future.
On 24 September 2014, it was announced that Jason Orange had left the band. He said: 'At a band meeting last week I confirmed to Mark, Gary and Howard that I do not wish to commit to recording and promoting a new album. 'At the end of The Progress Tour I began to question whether it might be the right time for me to not continue on with Take That,' he continued. 'There have been no fallings out, only a decision on my part that I no longer wish to do this,' he added. Barlow, Donald, and Owen issued a joint statement about Orange's decision which said: "This is a sad day for us. Jason leaving is a huge loss both professionally and even more so personally ... Jason's energy and belief in what this band could achieve has made it what it is today, and we'll forever be grateful for his enthusiasm, dedication and inspiration over the years." A day after the announcement, Robbie Williams took to Twitter to show support of Orange's decision. "Mr Orange. Until we ride again. Much love, Bro.", Williams tweeted.
On 10 October 2014, Take That unveiled their first song as a three-piece and lead single from their upcoming album. Titled "These Days", it was released on 23 November 2014 and went to No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart, knocking Band Aid 30 off the top spot and becoming their 12th number one single. The album itself, called III, was released on 28 November 2014 and became the band's seventh No. 1 album. It was then followed by a sell-out arena tour entitled Take That Live. On 14 October 2015, the band announced their new single "Hey Boy", released on 16 October, which is the first single from the 2015 re-release of III. The 2015 edition of the album was released on 20 November.
In December 2015, British media buzzed about the group embarking on a stint in Las Vegas, starting 2017. Reports indicated the group impressed U.S. promoters and would headline their own residency show. Many venues circulated, including The AXIS at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, The Foundry at SLS Las Vegas and the Linq Theater at The LINQ Hotel & Casino. Local newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun writes that everything is still unconfirmed, despite Barlow confirming the rumour on Twitter.
2016–2017: Wonderland
On 2 February 2016, in an interview with The Sun, Barlow revealed that Take That would release their eighth studio album later in the year. On 4 May 2016, English drum and bass duo Sigma announced their newest single would feature Take That. "Cry" received its first radio play on 20 May 2016 and was released on that date. On 21 October 2016, the band posted a teaser on their social media pages and website depicting the logo of the band flickering with the hashtag "#WONDERLAND". The following day, it was announced that their new album, titled Wonderland, was scheduled to be released on 24 March 2017. It was then followed by a UK and Ireland arena tour entitled Wonderland Live, that commenced on 5 May 2017 at the Genting Arena in Birmingham. On 17 February 2017, the lead single of Wonderland was released. Titled "Giants", it debuted at 13 in the UK charts, which became the band's 24th UK top 20 single.
On 8 April 2017, ITV aired a specially commissioned hour-length television special titled An Evening with Take That, where the band performed some songs from the album, along with some old classics including "Never Forget", "Back for Good" and "Rule the World". The band also took part in a Q&A session with the audience members. On 27 April, it was announced on Twitter that "New Day" would be released as the next single from the album Wonderland. The band were seen recording the music video in a field in Luton the days leading up the opening night of the Wonderland Live tour. Due to the Manchester Arena bombing just days before they were due to perform at the venue, their Manchester and Liverpool dates were rescheduled or relocated. The band returned a month later to perform at the One Love Manchester benefit concert.
On 16 September 2017, Barlow, Owen and Donald were set to perform a special one-off show in Jersey after a fan bid more than £1.2 million to win a performance from the band. This then turned in to a ticketed charity event where the money from tickets sold would go towards benefiting Children in Need. The auction was held on BBC Radio 2. On 11 November 2017, Take That began their foreign tour in Perth, Australia, the first time they have performed in the country in over twenty years. They also played in New Zealand, United Arab Emirates and Israel for the first time. Unlike the other tours, a DVD for Wonderland Live was not released. Instead, it was broadcast on Sky 1 on 23 December and in cinemas.
2018–2020: The 30th Anniversary, and Odyssey
On 16 July 2018, while performing at first ever Hits Radio Live at the Manchester Arena, Barlow, Donald and Owen confirmed that they would be touring in 2019. The tour was a Greatest Hits tour and celebrated the 30th anniversary of the band. There was also a Greatest Hits album, Odyssey, which was released on 23 November 2018. The Greatest Hits album features existing songs from their back catalogue that have been re-imagined and 3 brand new songs. It also includes collaborations with Boyz II Men, Lulu, Sigma and Barry Gibb. Odyssey reached number one in the UK album chart and was certified as a platinum selling record. The following year, Odyssey Live, the recording of their tour, reached number 5, becoming the band's 13th top 5 album, with the DVD becoming the biggest live music sale of 2019.
In May 2020, Barlow, Donald, and Owen reunited with Williams for a virtual performance from their respective homes, hosted by price comparison website comparethemarket.com, to raise money for the music charity Nordoff Robbins and Crew Nation.
In other media
In April 2006, EMI licensed the band's songs to be used in the musical Never Forget, a musical based on songs of the band from the 1990s. Take That posted and then later removed a statement on their website distancing themselves from it.
Take That wrote and recorded the theme song "Rule the World" for the film Stardust directed by Matthew Vaughn, which was released in cinemas across the globe in October 2007. In 2007, their song "Back for Good" was used as part of the soundtrack for popular Korean drama The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince.
Take That presented their own TV show Take That Come to Town, a variety show in which they performed some of their biggest hits. The show also featured comedy sketches with one of Peter Kay's alter egos Geraldine McQueen. It aired on 7 December 2008 on ITV1. Sony launched their first Take That video game, SingStar Take That in 2009 for the PlayStation 3.
In November 2010, ITV aired Take That: Look Back, Don't Stare, a black-and-white documentary which focused on the band working together for the first time in 15 years. Through a series of interviews, the band look back at their achievements while also looking forward to what the future holds for them. On 18 November 2010, Williams and Barlow appeared together live on television for the first time on the Popstars program in Germany singing their hit "Shame".
In 2011, Take That's song "Love Love" was used in the credits of the 2011 film X-Men: First Class and later, "When We Were Young" was chosen as the main theme for The Three Musketeers movie. In 2015, the song "Get Ready for It" from their album III, was chosen as the theme song for the film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
In 2017, Take That launched The Band, a musical written by Tim Firth featuring the five winners of Let It Shine and some of Take That's biggest hits. Take That, including Robbie Williams, were billed as executive producers.
The group's music is regularly featured in the Channel 4 show Derry Girls, notably in the third episode of the second series, when the lead characters sneak off to attend the 1993 Take That concert in Belfast; the episode features the music video for "Pray" and ends on footage of the band performing "Everything Changes".
Artistry
Early in their career, Take That were known for party anthems such as "Do What U Like" and more mature ballads such as "A Million Love Songs" and "Back for Good". Since reuniting in 2006, they have become more experimental: their post-2006 albums Beautiful World and The Circus have featured "stadium-filling pop-rock" while Progress largely leaned towards electropop. Having been dubbed the "comeback kings" by the media for their highly successful reunion, the group has won widespread praise for their seamless transformation from teen idols to "man band" without overly relying on nostalgia, instead showcasing a more mature image and sound and reinventing themselves while maintaining their artistic integrity. Jude Rogers of The Guardian commented on Take That's post-reunion success, in light of a string of reunions by the group's disbanded counterparts from the 1990s: "Only Take That are penetrating pop's wider consciousness by becoming a man-band rather than a boy-band, singing mature, proper pop songs that cross the generations."
Take That have garnered critical acclaim and popularity as consummate live performers and for their musical output. Their domestic concert tours have been described as "some of the most flamboyant, imaginative and extravagant pop tours around". Aside from covers, all of their material is composed by the members themselves; Barlow was initially the principal songwriter who received sole credit but the other members have since taken a more active role in the composition and production process, including playing instruments for the backing track.
Band members
Current members
Gary Barlow (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Howard Donald (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Mark Owen (1990–1996, 2005–present)
Former members
Robbie Williams (1990–1995, 2010–2012)
Jason Orange (1990–1996, 2005–2014)
Timeline
Awards and nominations
|-
| 2016
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2015
| "These Days"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2012
| "Pray"
|The Guardian Music Award for Best Number 1 Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|The Official Charts Company UK Recognition award for United Kingdom's Favourite Number One Single
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Virgin Media Music Awards for Best Music Video
|
|-
| rowspan="10" style="text-align:center;"|2011
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards for Best Live Sound Event
|
|-
| Progress Live
|Audio Pro International Awards Grand Prix Award
|
|-
| Take That
|Phonographic Performance Limited Award for most played UK artist
|
|-
| "Kidz"
|Spex German Entertainment for Best Music Video
|
|-
| The Circus Live Tour
| Greatest Event ever at Wembley Stadium
|
|-
| Take That
|ECHO Award for Best International Group
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Progress
| BRIT Award for MasterCard Album of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|Virgin Media for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|2010
|-
| "Up All Night"
| UK Music Video Awards for Best Art Direction
|
|-
| "The Flood"
|iTunes Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Progress
| iTunes Award for Best Album
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award Hall of Fame
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best Live Performance of the past 30 Years
|
|-
| rowspan="5" style="text-align:center;"|2009
| Take That
|GQ Men of the Year Awards for Best Band
|
|-
| Take That
|Q Award for Best Live Act
|
|-
| "Greatest Day"
|Q Award for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="7" style="text-align:center;"|2008
| "Shine"
|Ivor Novello Award for PRS Most Performed Work
|
|-
| "Rule the World"
|Virgin for Best Single
|
|-
| Take That
|Sony Ericsson Tour of the Year Award for Take That Arena Tour
|
|-
| "Shine"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Live Act
|
|-
| Beautiful World
|BRIT Award for Best British Album
|
|-
| Take That
|BRIT Award for Best British Group
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2007
| "Patience"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| style="text-align:center;"|2006
| Take That
|Q Idol Award
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1996
| "Back for Good"
|Billboard International Hit of the Year
|
|-
| "Never Forget"
|Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Song
|
|-
| "Back for Good"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| rowspan="3" style="text-align:center;"|1995
| "Back for Good"
|Ivor Novello Award for the Song of the Year
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Live Act
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award
|
|-
| rowspan="6" style="text-align:center;"|1994
| "Babe"
|MTV Video Music Award for International Viewer's Choice Award for MTV Europe
|
|-
| Everything Changes
|Mercury Prize for Best Album
|
|-
| "Pray"
|Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "Pray"
|BRIT Award for Best British Video
|
|-
| Take That
|MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Group
|
|-
| rowspan="4" style="text-align:center;"|1993
| "Could It Be Magic"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "A Million Love Songs"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| "It Only Takes a Minute"
|BRIT Award for Best British Single
|
|-
| Take That
| Silver Clef Award for Best Newcomer
|
|}
Discography
Take That & Party (1992)
Everything Changes (1993)
Nobody Else (1995)
Beautiful World (2006)
The Circus (2008)
Progress (2010)
III (2014)
Wonderland (2017)
Tours
Party Tour (1992–93)
Everything Changes Tour (1993–94)
Pops Tour (1994–95)
Nobody Else Tour (1995)
The Ultimate Tour (2006)
Beautiful World Tour 2007 (2007)
Take That Present: The Circus Live (2009)
Progress Live (2011)
Take That Live (2015)
Wonderland Live (2017)
Greatest Hits Live (2019)
See also
List of best-selling boy bands
References
External links
Chinese Fansite
1990 establishments in England
1996 disestablishments in England
2005 establishments in England
Brit Award winners
Dance-pop groups
Echo (music award) winners
English boy bands
English dance music groups
Interscope Records artists
Ivor Novello Award winners
MTV Europe Music Award winners
Musical groups disestablished in 1996
Musical groups established in 1990
Musical groups from Cheshire
Musical groups from Manchester
Musical groups reestablished in 2005
Polydor Records artists
Teen pop groups
Universal Music Group artists
Vocal quartets
Vocal quintets
Vocal trios
| false |
[
"American rapper JID (also stylized J.I.D) has released two studio albums, three compilation albums, two extended plays (EP), four mixtapes and fifteen singles.\n\nJID's debut studio album, The Never Story, was released on March 10, 2017. It peaked at number 197 on the US Billboard 200 chart. The album features guest appearances from 6LACK, EarthGang and Mereba. The album's lead single, \"NEVER\", was released prior to the album. JID's lyrics details a narrative on his upbringing in East Atlanta.\n\nOn November 26, 2018, JID released his second studio album, DiCaprio 2. It serves as a sequel to his extended play DiCaprio released in 2015. The album was supported by two singles, \"151 Rum\" and \"Off Deez\" featuring J. Cole. The album features guest appearances from 6LACK, ASAP Ferg, BJ the Chicago Kid, Ella Mai, J. Cole, Joey Badass and Method Man.\n\nStudio albums\n\nMixtapes\n\nCompilation albums\n\nCollaborative albums\n\nExtended plays\n\nSingles\n\nAs lead artist\n\nAs featured artist\n\nGuest appearances\n\nMusic videos\n\nAs lead artist\n\nAs featured artist\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nHip hop discographies\nDiscographies of American artists",
"Eremita is the fourth studio solo album by former Emperor frontman Ihsahn. The album features guest appearances by several notable musicians, including Devin Townsend and Jeff Loomis of Nevermore.\n\nBackground\nThe album is Ihsahn's first solo outing since the conclusion of the conceptual trilogy encompassing his first three albums, The Adversary, angL, and After. Ihsahn said that Eremita was the product of an intentional contrast with After. He described After as \"a very desolate, bleak landscape. There were no signs of life in any of the lyrics,\" while, for Eremita, the atmosphere is \"much more introverted, much more paranoid and kind of schizophrenic. I tend to bring up many of the same themes, but lyrically it comes from a different perspective.\"\n\nThe album's sense of introversion, paranoia, and schizophrenia is represented in the album cover, with which Ihsahn's ongoing interest in Nietzsche turned to Nietzsche's mad final years. Nietzsche is represented in the cover, which features an upside-down image of his face from later in his life, when he was on the verge of insanity. As Ihsahn explained, Eremita is \"a reflective album that’s filtered through the eyes of a madman.\" He elaborated upon the connection, explaining that \"There's an escapism to this album, there's a paranoia, a lot of issues that are dealt with, and these pictures of Nietzsche are from very close to when he tipped over into madness.\"\n\nGuest appearances\nEremita featured a guest appearance by Devin Townsend. Previously, Ihsahn had guested on Townsend's album, Deconstruction. Jens Bogren, who mixed Deconstruction, was also tapped to mix Eremita. Ihsahn noted that\n\nConcept\nThe title is Latin for \"hermit\", which Ihsahn identified as a critical term in his intellectual and musical development:\n\nContinuing, Ihsahn elaborated on his connection to mythological hermits as follows:\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel\n\nBand\n Ihsahn – vocals, guitar, bass, keyboard\n Tobias Ørnes Andersen – drums\n Jørgen Munkeby – saxophone\n\nGuest musicians\n Jeff Loomis – solo guitar on \"The Eagle and the Snake\"\n Devin Townsend – vocals on \"Introspection\"\n Einar Solberg (Leprous) – vocals on \"Arrival\"\n Heidi S. Tveitan – vocals on \"Departure\"\n\nProduction\n Ihsahn – production\n Jens Bogren – mixing at Fascination Street Studios in Örebro, Sweden\n Ritxi Ostáriz – album artwork and packaging\n\nReferences\n\n2012 albums\nIhsahn albums"
] |
[
"Rahul Bose",
"Early career: 1993-2003"
] |
C_23b8d3d4084c455ba2a0e0ab26019637_1
|
What did Bose begin his career doing?
| 1 |
What did Rahul Bose begin his career doing?
|
Rahul Bose
|
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers In The Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals. After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time--along with the 2002 Gujarat riots--as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle. In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming. After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews. In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey
|
Rahul Bose (born 27 July 1967) is an Indian actor, director, screenwriter, and social activist. Bose has appeared in Bengali films such as Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Kalpurush, Anuranan, Antaheen, Laptop and The Japanese Wife. He has also appeared in Hindi films such as Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam, Jhankaar Beats, Kucch Luv Jaisaa, Chameli and Shaurya. He also played the antagonist in the Tamil thriller Vishwaroopam (2013) and its sequel. Time magazine named him "the superstar of Indian arthouse cinema" while Maxim named him "the Sean Penn of Oriental cinema" for his work in parallel cinema films like English, August and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. He is also notable for his social activism: he participated in the relief efforts that followed the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and is also the founder of the anti-discrimination NGO, The Foundation.
Early life
Rahul Bose was born to father Rupen and mother Kumud Bose on 27 July 1967.
Bose's first acting role was at the age of six when he played the lead character in a school play, Tom, the Piper's Son. As a child he took an interest in sports after his mother introduced him to boxing and rugby union. He also played cricket and was coached by cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi.
He is an alumnus of the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. After being rejected by a number of American universities, Bose attended Sydenham College. While at the college he played on the school's rugby team and competed in the Western India Championships, winning a silver medal in boxing. After his mother's death in 1987, Bose began working as a copywriter at Rediffusion and was later promoted to advertising creative director. Bose left the job to become a full-time actor after the release of his first film, English, August.
Stage and film career
Early career: 1993–2003
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers in the Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals.
After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time—along with the 2002 Gujarat riots—as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle.
In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming.
After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews.
Bose also appeared as "Vikal" a villain in the 1998 Science fiction TV series Captain Vyom
In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards.
2003–present
In 2003, Bose entered mainstream Bollywood cinema with Jhankaar Beats in which he played one of two friends, R.D. Burman fans who are obsessed with winning a music competition. Boosted by a successful soundtrack, Jhankaar Beats was a surprise hit in urban multiplexes and went on to win several awards for its music. The same year, Bose appeared in another Bollywood film, Mumbai Matinee which saw a UK release. He starred in Chameli opposite Kareena Kapoor, playing a wealthy chain-smoking Mumbai banker who is stranded in the monsoon rains with a prostitute. The film was not a box office success, but won several Filmfare and IIFA awards.
He was the screenwriter of Hero Bhakti Hi Shakti Hai of Hungama TV in 2005.
Bose's second film pairing with Konkona Sen Sharma, 15 Park Avenue released in January 2006. Directed by Aparna Sen and filmed in English, 15 Park Avenue won the 2006 National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English.
With his next effort, the romantic comedy Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Bose moved once more into mainstream Bollywood cinema. The film follows the rocky relationship of Bose's commitment phobic Mumbai DJ Sid and his Punjabi girlfriend, Trisha played by Mallika Sherawat. Critics noted the freshness of Bose's narration style which involves breaking the fourth wall, a device not commonly used in Indian cinema. The film opened well in multiplexes and was a moderate financial success, eventually ranking among the top-grossing films of 2006. Both Bose and Sherawat received positive reviews for their performances. Sherawat and Bose also starred together in another Bollywood comedy, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam (2008), which was a commercial and critical failure.
In 2006, Bose starred in the first of a trio of Bengali films, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's Anuranan. Anuranan was well received on the festival circuit and ran successfully for three months in Bengal. It was then dubbed into Hindi and released nationally. Kaalpurush, Bose's second Bengali film, was released commercially in April 2008. Kaalpurush details a father-son relationship and earned writer-director Buddhadeb Dasgupta a National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Bose teamed with Chowdhury again in 2009 for Antaheen which tells the story of online relationships. Like Anuranan, Antaheen was released commercially in West Bengal and was screened at various film festivals, including the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIACC) and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Antaheen went on to win several National Awards including one for Best Film.
Bose continued working in a mix of mainstream and arthouse films in 2008, with the English-language film, Before the Rains. Before the Rains was released in the US and the UK and Bose's performance was praised by many critics, although the film received mixed reviews. Bose also appeared in Shaurya, a military court room drama modelled on the American film A Few Good Men. Bose's performance was well-received; critic Taran Adarsh said his "performance easily ranks as one of his finest works". His appearance in Dil Kabaddi paired him with Konkona Sen Sharma for the third time, this time playing a husband and wife undergoing marital difficulties. The Japanese Wife, with Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku, the third Aparna Sen film in which he has appeared, released on 9 April 2010. He also appeared as a contestant in the reality show Khatron Ke Khiladi where he was eliminated in the 12th round. He hosted the second series of Bloomberg UTV reality show The Pitch. His role as a gay man harassed by the police in I Am was appreciated by critics.
He appeared in Deepa Mehta's version of Midnight's Children where he played the role of General Zulfikar. He also played the villain in the 2013 Tamil film Vishwaroopam. Naren Weiss who was 19 years old at the time, acted opposite Bose in all of his scenes for Vishwaroopam, and credited Bose for working with him during filming. He was scheduled to begin shooting his adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel, Moth Smoke in early 2010, but the project was postponed after the film's financial backers pulled out. In 2013, he also played opposite Konkona Sen Sharma again in Suman Mukhopadhyay's Shesher Kabita. In 2017, he directed, produced and acted in the biopic Poorna about the youngest girl to climb Mount Everest.
Filmography
Playback singing
Writer/director
Producer
Television
Stage
Awards
2007 – "Artiste for Change" Karmaveer Puraskaar award
2008 – IBN Eminent Citizen Journalist Award
2009 – Youth Icon Award for Social Justice and Welfare
2010 – Green Globe Foundation Award for Extraordinary Work by a Public Figure
2012 – Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration – Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation
2012 – Lt. Governor's Commendation Award for services to Andaman & Nicobar Islands
2020 - Filmfare OTT Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Web Original Film for Bulbbul
Sports career
In 1998, Bose was part of the first Indian national rugby team to play in an international event, the Asian Rugby Football Union Championship. He has played both scrum-half and right-winger positions. In an interview with Daily News & Analysis, Bose announced that he would not return to the team for the 2009 season.
Activism
Bose assisted in the relief efforts in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. As a result of this work, Bose launched the Andaman and Nicobar Scholarship Initiative through his NGO, The Foundation. The scholarship program provides for the education of underprivileged children from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Bose is associated with several charitable organizations such as Teach for India, Akshara Centre, Breakthrough, Citizens for Justice and Peace and the Spastics Society of India. He is closely associated with the Teach For India movement to eradicate inequity in education. In addition, he became the first Indian Oxfam global ambassador in 2007. He is the founder and chairman of The Group of Groups, an umbrella organisation for 51 Mumbai charitable organisations and NGOs. He is also an ambassador for the American India Foundation, the World Youth Peace Movement and Planet Alert. He was also a vocal proponent of Narmada Bachao Andolan and its efforts to halt the construction of the Narmada dam. He also recorded the Terre des hommes audio book Goodgoodi karna, gale lagana; Sparsh ke niyam sikhiye (English: Tickle and hugs: Learning the touching rules), which is designed to give children resources against sexual abuse.
Bose has given lectures on gender equality and human rights at Oxford and during the 2004 World Youth Peace Summit. In 2009, he toured Canada lecturing on global climate change under the auspices of Climate Action Network and demonstrated with protesters at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. In 2011, he worked in conjunction with Bhaichung Bhutia to raise funds for victims of the Sikkim earthquake.
At the 8th convocation of BRAC University Bangladesh on 17 February 2013, Bose delivered the convocation speech.
Personal life
Bose has one elder sister, Anuradha, who is married to Tariq Ansari, the owner and director of Mid-Day Multimedia. She had a cameo role in Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Bose is single.
In July 2019, Bose complained of having been charged ₹442 for two bananas at JW Marriott, Chandigarh, and provoked an outcry on Twitter and other social media, where he gained much attention.
References
External links
Rahul Bose environmental blog
1967 births
Living people
Indian rugby union players
Indian male journalists
Male actors from Mumbai
Activists from Maharashtra
Bengali people
Punjabi people
Marathi people
Male actors in Hindi cinema
University of Mumbai alumni
Rugby union wings
Cathedral and John Connon School alumni
Indian atheists
20th-century Indian male actors
Journalists from Maharashtra
Rugby players from Mumbai
| true |
[
"Shukla Bose is the founder and CEO of the Parikrma Humanity Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs English-medium schools for under-privileged children in Bangalore, India.\n\nShe volunteered with Mother Teresa at Missionaries of Charity for 7 years. Her career began as a teacher in a convent school in Kolkata, and she later moved on to work at an army school in Bhutan.\n\nShe then worked with the Oberoi Group, and afterwards as the Managing Director of Resort Condominiums India (RCI (company)). However, as she approached her mid-30s, she began to question what impact she could make in life. She admits, \"by 1997, I was doing something bizarre, looking at obits and writing my own too, trying to understand from other people’s lives what leaves behind an impact.\"\n\nIn 2000, she accepted an offer run a multinational NGO for children, and started their Indian operations. Within two years of applying her leadership and institution-building skills there, she felt inspired to start an NGO of her own.\n\nShukla Bose spent 26 years in the hospitality industry before giving up her CEO position to begin Parikrma in 2003.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n \n Shukla Bose: Teaching one child at a time (TEDIndia 2009)\n\nSocial workers\nPeople from Darjeeling\nLoreto College, Kolkata alumni\nUniversity of Calcutta alumni\nLiving people\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nFounders of Indian schools and colleges\nIndian women philanthropists\nIndian philanthropists\nWomen educators from West Bengal\nEducators from West Bengal\nWomen educators",
"Dr. Jagabandhu Bose was an eminent physician and philanthropist of Bengal.\n\nEducation\nBose began his studies at Dhaka College, and moved to Calcutta Medical College in 1851 to begin his undergraduate medical studies. He received the Goodeve Medal for his dissection work in his first year at the school, and was appointed prosector under Dr. Alen Web. He received several honours and awards during his university career, including honours in anatomy and botany in his second year, gold medals in Pharmacology and Chemistry in his third year, and a gold medal in Medicine and the Goodeve Medal in Obstetrics in his fourth year. He received his medical degree from Calcutta University in 1863.\n\nCareer\nBose served for seven years as Second Practical Teacher under Dr. H. Walker at Calcutta Medical College. He next worked for six years as teacher of cadaver dissection in the Bengali medium. He next was appointed as a teacher of pharmacology, a post he held for 12 years.\n\nCalcutta Medical School\nIn 1886, Bose was one of the founders of R. G. Kar Medical College and Hospital. He served as its first president and as Professor of pharmacology. He lobbied the government for permission for his students to dissect cadavers.\n\nCollege of Physicians and Surgeons of Bengal\nIn 1895, Bose helped found the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Bengal, and he served as its first president.\n\nIn the Village: Dandirhat, under Basirhat subdivision in the 24 Parganas (North) the Durga Puja famous in the name of \"Dactar Barir Puja\" founded by this family is still running.\n\nReferences\n\n1831 births\nYear of death missing\n20th-century Indian medical doctors\nIndian philanthropists"
] |
[
"Rahul Bose",
"Early career: 1993-2003",
"What did Bose begin his career doing?",
"Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey"
] |
C_23b8d3d4084c455ba2a0e0ab26019637_1
|
What was Bose's educational background?
| 2 |
What was Rahul Bose's educational background?
|
Rahul Bose
|
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers In The Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals. After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time--along with the 2002 Gujarat riots--as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle. In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming. After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews. In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Rahul Bose (born 27 July 1967) is an Indian actor, director, screenwriter, and social activist. Bose has appeared in Bengali films such as Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Kalpurush, Anuranan, Antaheen, Laptop and The Japanese Wife. He has also appeared in Hindi films such as Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam, Jhankaar Beats, Kucch Luv Jaisaa, Chameli and Shaurya. He also played the antagonist in the Tamil thriller Vishwaroopam (2013) and its sequel. Time magazine named him "the superstar of Indian arthouse cinema" while Maxim named him "the Sean Penn of Oriental cinema" for his work in parallel cinema films like English, August and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. He is also notable for his social activism: he participated in the relief efforts that followed the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and is also the founder of the anti-discrimination NGO, The Foundation.
Early life
Rahul Bose was born to father Rupen and mother Kumud Bose on 27 July 1967.
Bose's first acting role was at the age of six when he played the lead character in a school play, Tom, the Piper's Son. As a child he took an interest in sports after his mother introduced him to boxing and rugby union. He also played cricket and was coached by cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi.
He is an alumnus of the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. After being rejected by a number of American universities, Bose attended Sydenham College. While at the college he played on the school's rugby team and competed in the Western India Championships, winning a silver medal in boxing. After his mother's death in 1987, Bose began working as a copywriter at Rediffusion and was later promoted to advertising creative director. Bose left the job to become a full-time actor after the release of his first film, English, August.
Stage and film career
Early career: 1993–2003
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers in the Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals.
After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time—along with the 2002 Gujarat riots—as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle.
In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming.
After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews.
Bose also appeared as "Vikal" a villain in the 1998 Science fiction TV series Captain Vyom
In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards.
2003–present
In 2003, Bose entered mainstream Bollywood cinema with Jhankaar Beats in which he played one of two friends, R.D. Burman fans who are obsessed with winning a music competition. Boosted by a successful soundtrack, Jhankaar Beats was a surprise hit in urban multiplexes and went on to win several awards for its music. The same year, Bose appeared in another Bollywood film, Mumbai Matinee which saw a UK release. He starred in Chameli opposite Kareena Kapoor, playing a wealthy chain-smoking Mumbai banker who is stranded in the monsoon rains with a prostitute. The film was not a box office success, but won several Filmfare and IIFA awards.
He was the screenwriter of Hero Bhakti Hi Shakti Hai of Hungama TV in 2005.
Bose's second film pairing with Konkona Sen Sharma, 15 Park Avenue released in January 2006. Directed by Aparna Sen and filmed in English, 15 Park Avenue won the 2006 National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English.
With his next effort, the romantic comedy Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Bose moved once more into mainstream Bollywood cinema. The film follows the rocky relationship of Bose's commitment phobic Mumbai DJ Sid and his Punjabi girlfriend, Trisha played by Mallika Sherawat. Critics noted the freshness of Bose's narration style which involves breaking the fourth wall, a device not commonly used in Indian cinema. The film opened well in multiplexes and was a moderate financial success, eventually ranking among the top-grossing films of 2006. Both Bose and Sherawat received positive reviews for their performances. Sherawat and Bose also starred together in another Bollywood comedy, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam (2008), which was a commercial and critical failure.
In 2006, Bose starred in the first of a trio of Bengali films, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's Anuranan. Anuranan was well received on the festival circuit and ran successfully for three months in Bengal. It was then dubbed into Hindi and released nationally. Kaalpurush, Bose's second Bengali film, was released commercially in April 2008. Kaalpurush details a father-son relationship and earned writer-director Buddhadeb Dasgupta a National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Bose teamed with Chowdhury again in 2009 for Antaheen which tells the story of online relationships. Like Anuranan, Antaheen was released commercially in West Bengal and was screened at various film festivals, including the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIACC) and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Antaheen went on to win several National Awards including one for Best Film.
Bose continued working in a mix of mainstream and arthouse films in 2008, with the English-language film, Before the Rains. Before the Rains was released in the US and the UK and Bose's performance was praised by many critics, although the film received mixed reviews. Bose also appeared in Shaurya, a military court room drama modelled on the American film A Few Good Men. Bose's performance was well-received; critic Taran Adarsh said his "performance easily ranks as one of his finest works". His appearance in Dil Kabaddi paired him with Konkona Sen Sharma for the third time, this time playing a husband and wife undergoing marital difficulties. The Japanese Wife, with Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku, the third Aparna Sen film in which he has appeared, released on 9 April 2010. He also appeared as a contestant in the reality show Khatron Ke Khiladi where he was eliminated in the 12th round. He hosted the second series of Bloomberg UTV reality show The Pitch. His role as a gay man harassed by the police in I Am was appreciated by critics.
He appeared in Deepa Mehta's version of Midnight's Children where he played the role of General Zulfikar. He also played the villain in the 2013 Tamil film Vishwaroopam. Naren Weiss who was 19 years old at the time, acted opposite Bose in all of his scenes for Vishwaroopam, and credited Bose for working with him during filming. He was scheduled to begin shooting his adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel, Moth Smoke in early 2010, but the project was postponed after the film's financial backers pulled out. In 2013, he also played opposite Konkona Sen Sharma again in Suman Mukhopadhyay's Shesher Kabita. In 2017, he directed, produced and acted in the biopic Poorna about the youngest girl to climb Mount Everest.
Filmography
Playback singing
Writer/director
Producer
Television
Stage
Awards
2007 – "Artiste for Change" Karmaveer Puraskaar award
2008 – IBN Eminent Citizen Journalist Award
2009 – Youth Icon Award for Social Justice and Welfare
2010 – Green Globe Foundation Award for Extraordinary Work by a Public Figure
2012 – Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration – Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation
2012 – Lt. Governor's Commendation Award for services to Andaman & Nicobar Islands
2020 - Filmfare OTT Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Web Original Film for Bulbbul
Sports career
In 1998, Bose was part of the first Indian national rugby team to play in an international event, the Asian Rugby Football Union Championship. He has played both scrum-half and right-winger positions. In an interview with Daily News & Analysis, Bose announced that he would not return to the team for the 2009 season.
Activism
Bose assisted in the relief efforts in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. As a result of this work, Bose launched the Andaman and Nicobar Scholarship Initiative through his NGO, The Foundation. The scholarship program provides for the education of underprivileged children from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Bose is associated with several charitable organizations such as Teach for India, Akshara Centre, Breakthrough, Citizens for Justice and Peace and the Spastics Society of India. He is closely associated with the Teach For India movement to eradicate inequity in education. In addition, he became the first Indian Oxfam global ambassador in 2007. He is the founder and chairman of The Group of Groups, an umbrella organisation for 51 Mumbai charitable organisations and NGOs. He is also an ambassador for the American India Foundation, the World Youth Peace Movement and Planet Alert. He was also a vocal proponent of Narmada Bachao Andolan and its efforts to halt the construction of the Narmada dam. He also recorded the Terre des hommes audio book Goodgoodi karna, gale lagana; Sparsh ke niyam sikhiye (English: Tickle and hugs: Learning the touching rules), which is designed to give children resources against sexual abuse.
Bose has given lectures on gender equality and human rights at Oxford and during the 2004 World Youth Peace Summit. In 2009, he toured Canada lecturing on global climate change under the auspices of Climate Action Network and demonstrated with protesters at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. In 2011, he worked in conjunction with Bhaichung Bhutia to raise funds for victims of the Sikkim earthquake.
At the 8th convocation of BRAC University Bangladesh on 17 February 2013, Bose delivered the convocation speech.
Personal life
Bose has one elder sister, Anuradha, who is married to Tariq Ansari, the owner and director of Mid-Day Multimedia. She had a cameo role in Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Bose is single.
In July 2019, Bose complained of having been charged ₹442 for two bananas at JW Marriott, Chandigarh, and provoked an outcry on Twitter and other social media, where he gained much attention.
References
External links
Rahul Bose environmental blog
1967 births
Living people
Indian rugby union players
Indian male journalists
Male actors from Mumbai
Activists from Maharashtra
Bengali people
Punjabi people
Marathi people
Male actors in Hindi cinema
University of Mumbai alumni
Rugby union wings
Cathedral and John Connon School alumni
Indian atheists
20th-century Indian male actors
Journalists from Maharashtra
Rugby players from Mumbai
| false |
[
"Ananda Mohan College is a public higher secondary school and college in Mymensingh, Bangladesh. It is affiliated with National University, Bangladesh. One of the oldest educational premises in South Asia, the institute was established in 1883 by Ananda Mohan Bose as the City Collegiate School.\n\nHistory\nAnandamohan Bose, who founded the City College in 1878, decided to open a branch of it at his home town in Mymensingh. In 1883, an educational institution was established at the residence of Ananda Mohan as the City Collegiate School. Later the college section of the institution was shifted to College Road on 1 January 1908 as a college and it was named after him. In 1964, the college was nationalized.\n\nNotable alumni\n Nurul Amin – prime minister\n Abul Fateh — diplomat, statesman and Sufi\n Surendra Mohan Ghose — revolutionary\n Nirmalendu Goon — poet\n Prabodh Chandra Goswami — educationist\n Niharranjan Ray — historian\n P. C. Sorcar — magician\n Syed Waliullah — novelist\n\nSee also\n Gurudayal Government College\n Muminunnesa Women's College\n Pakundia Adarsha Mohila College\n\nNotes\n\nColleges affiliated to National University, Bangladesh\nEducational institutions established in 1908\n1908 establishments in India\nColleges in Mymensingh District",
"The Mahila Rashtriya Sangha (MRS, and also known as the Mahila Rashtriya Sangh) was the first organisation established in India with the aim of engaging women in political activism. It was formed in Bengal Presidency, British India, in 1928 by Latika Ghosh upon the instigation of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, a prominent Indian nationalist leader. Believing that improvement of the status of women and achievement of self-governance for India were inseparable aims, the MRS was an empowerment institution body that placed much emphasis on education as a means to achieve its goal.\n\nThe name translates as the Women's Political Association.\n\nBackground \nLatika Bose (née Ghosh), a niece of Aurobindo Ghose, had impressed Subhas Chandra Bose with her marshalling of a women's protest against the Simon Commission, following which the latter asked her to organise the MRS in 1928. Latika, who was a teacher educated at the University of Oxford and a supporter of Gandhi's satyagraha, recruited and led around 300 women from colleges and academic departments as part of the protest by the Bengal Volunteers at the 1928 session of the Indian National Congress. She baulked at Subhas's command that all involved in this event should wear military uniform, deciding instead that the women would wear red-bordered dark green saris and white blouses. This and other decisions, such as ensuring that the women did not stay in the protesters' camp overnight, together with a threat to withdraw their aid in matters such as selling tickets and supplying tea, ensured that she overcame the opposition of Sarat Bose, who had been concerned that the presence of women might offend conservative supporters of Congress.\n\nFormation and aims \nLatika Bose agreed to form the MRS only after some thought because she knew that this would involve her having a high-profile connection to the Indian National Congress and thus would pit her against the British Raj authorities and prevent her from being accepted for employment by the Raj Educational Service. Despite the opinion of Subhas, Latika selected his mother, Prabhabati Bose, to be the first president and Latika's sister-in-law, Bivabati, became the first vice-president. Subhas had wanted Basanti Devi to be president but Latika considered her to be too distant for most Bengali women because of the extent to which Devi had been westernised, and she also appreciated that having the mother of the most prominent Bengali nationalist as an office-holder would appeal to potential supporters. Latika Bose herself took the role of secretary.\n\nThe MRS, which was founded in Chittagong, Bengal Presidency, saw their aim of improvements in the status of women and the achievement of swaraj (self-governance) as being mutually dependent. Education of women was a key to this and the MRS involved ten existing local educational groups from the outset. According to historian Geraldine Forbes, MRS leaders \"argued the nation could never be free unless women's lives improved and improving women's lives depended on freedom from foreign domination\". Latika Bose appealed for women to see the similarities of the women's struggle in the battles waged between the devas and asuras of Hindu mythology, and in the self-sacrifices of Rajput queens who had surrendered their male relatives to battle before preparing to die themselves in acts of jauhar (self-immolation).\n\nRecruits came initially from the families of existing INC members because without their approval the women would not have been allowed to participate. The members were taught about independence and also received instruction in literacy, first aid, motherhood, and self-defence.\n\nReferences \n\nCitations\n\nBibliography\n\n1928 establishments in India\nIndian independence movement\nHistory of Bengal\n \nPolitical organisations based in India\nEducational organisations based in India\nEducational institutions established in 1928"
] |
[
"Rahul Bose",
"Early career: 1993-2003",
"What did Bose begin his career doing?",
"Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey",
"What was Bose's educational background?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_23b8d3d4084c455ba2a0e0ab26019637_1
|
What was his first performance?
| 3 |
What was Rahul Bose's first performance?
|
Rahul Bose
|
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers In The Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals. After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time--along with the 2002 Gujarat riots--as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle. In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming. After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews. In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen.
|
Rahul Bose (born 27 July 1967) is an Indian actor, director, screenwriter, and social activist. Bose has appeared in Bengali films such as Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Kalpurush, Anuranan, Antaheen, Laptop and The Japanese Wife. He has also appeared in Hindi films such as Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam, Jhankaar Beats, Kucch Luv Jaisaa, Chameli and Shaurya. He also played the antagonist in the Tamil thriller Vishwaroopam (2013) and its sequel. Time magazine named him "the superstar of Indian arthouse cinema" while Maxim named him "the Sean Penn of Oriental cinema" for his work in parallel cinema films like English, August and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. He is also notable for his social activism: he participated in the relief efforts that followed the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and is also the founder of the anti-discrimination NGO, The Foundation.
Early life
Rahul Bose was born to father Rupen and mother Kumud Bose on 27 July 1967.
Bose's first acting role was at the age of six when he played the lead character in a school play, Tom, the Piper's Son. As a child he took an interest in sports after his mother introduced him to boxing and rugby union. He also played cricket and was coached by cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi.
He is an alumnus of the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. After being rejected by a number of American universities, Bose attended Sydenham College. While at the college he played on the school's rugby team and competed in the Western India Championships, winning a silver medal in boxing. After his mother's death in 1987, Bose began working as a copywriter at Rediffusion and was later promoted to advertising creative director. Bose left the job to become a full-time actor after the release of his first film, English, August.
Stage and film career
Early career: 1993–2003
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers in the Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals.
After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time—along with the 2002 Gujarat riots—as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle.
In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming.
After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews.
Bose also appeared as "Vikal" a villain in the 1998 Science fiction TV series Captain Vyom
In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards.
2003–present
In 2003, Bose entered mainstream Bollywood cinema with Jhankaar Beats in which he played one of two friends, R.D. Burman fans who are obsessed with winning a music competition. Boosted by a successful soundtrack, Jhankaar Beats was a surprise hit in urban multiplexes and went on to win several awards for its music. The same year, Bose appeared in another Bollywood film, Mumbai Matinee which saw a UK release. He starred in Chameli opposite Kareena Kapoor, playing a wealthy chain-smoking Mumbai banker who is stranded in the monsoon rains with a prostitute. The film was not a box office success, but won several Filmfare and IIFA awards.
He was the screenwriter of Hero Bhakti Hi Shakti Hai of Hungama TV in 2005.
Bose's second film pairing with Konkona Sen Sharma, 15 Park Avenue released in January 2006. Directed by Aparna Sen and filmed in English, 15 Park Avenue won the 2006 National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English.
With his next effort, the romantic comedy Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Bose moved once more into mainstream Bollywood cinema. The film follows the rocky relationship of Bose's commitment phobic Mumbai DJ Sid and his Punjabi girlfriend, Trisha played by Mallika Sherawat. Critics noted the freshness of Bose's narration style which involves breaking the fourth wall, a device not commonly used in Indian cinema. The film opened well in multiplexes and was a moderate financial success, eventually ranking among the top-grossing films of 2006. Both Bose and Sherawat received positive reviews for their performances. Sherawat and Bose also starred together in another Bollywood comedy, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam (2008), which was a commercial and critical failure.
In 2006, Bose starred in the first of a trio of Bengali films, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's Anuranan. Anuranan was well received on the festival circuit and ran successfully for three months in Bengal. It was then dubbed into Hindi and released nationally. Kaalpurush, Bose's second Bengali film, was released commercially in April 2008. Kaalpurush details a father-son relationship and earned writer-director Buddhadeb Dasgupta a National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Bose teamed with Chowdhury again in 2009 for Antaheen which tells the story of online relationships. Like Anuranan, Antaheen was released commercially in West Bengal and was screened at various film festivals, including the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIACC) and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Antaheen went on to win several National Awards including one for Best Film.
Bose continued working in a mix of mainstream and arthouse films in 2008, with the English-language film, Before the Rains. Before the Rains was released in the US and the UK and Bose's performance was praised by many critics, although the film received mixed reviews. Bose also appeared in Shaurya, a military court room drama modelled on the American film A Few Good Men. Bose's performance was well-received; critic Taran Adarsh said his "performance easily ranks as one of his finest works". His appearance in Dil Kabaddi paired him with Konkona Sen Sharma for the third time, this time playing a husband and wife undergoing marital difficulties. The Japanese Wife, with Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku, the third Aparna Sen film in which he has appeared, released on 9 April 2010. He also appeared as a contestant in the reality show Khatron Ke Khiladi where he was eliminated in the 12th round. He hosted the second series of Bloomberg UTV reality show The Pitch. His role as a gay man harassed by the police in I Am was appreciated by critics.
He appeared in Deepa Mehta's version of Midnight's Children where he played the role of General Zulfikar. He also played the villain in the 2013 Tamil film Vishwaroopam. Naren Weiss who was 19 years old at the time, acted opposite Bose in all of his scenes for Vishwaroopam, and credited Bose for working with him during filming. He was scheduled to begin shooting his adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel, Moth Smoke in early 2010, but the project was postponed after the film's financial backers pulled out. In 2013, he also played opposite Konkona Sen Sharma again in Suman Mukhopadhyay's Shesher Kabita. In 2017, he directed, produced and acted in the biopic Poorna about the youngest girl to climb Mount Everest.
Filmography
Playback singing
Writer/director
Producer
Television
Stage
Awards
2007 – "Artiste for Change" Karmaveer Puraskaar award
2008 – IBN Eminent Citizen Journalist Award
2009 – Youth Icon Award for Social Justice and Welfare
2010 – Green Globe Foundation Award for Extraordinary Work by a Public Figure
2012 – Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration – Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation
2012 – Lt. Governor's Commendation Award for services to Andaman & Nicobar Islands
2020 - Filmfare OTT Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Web Original Film for Bulbbul
Sports career
In 1998, Bose was part of the first Indian national rugby team to play in an international event, the Asian Rugby Football Union Championship. He has played both scrum-half and right-winger positions. In an interview with Daily News & Analysis, Bose announced that he would not return to the team for the 2009 season.
Activism
Bose assisted in the relief efforts in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. As a result of this work, Bose launched the Andaman and Nicobar Scholarship Initiative through his NGO, The Foundation. The scholarship program provides for the education of underprivileged children from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Bose is associated with several charitable organizations such as Teach for India, Akshara Centre, Breakthrough, Citizens for Justice and Peace and the Spastics Society of India. He is closely associated with the Teach For India movement to eradicate inequity in education. In addition, he became the first Indian Oxfam global ambassador in 2007. He is the founder and chairman of The Group of Groups, an umbrella organisation for 51 Mumbai charitable organisations and NGOs. He is also an ambassador for the American India Foundation, the World Youth Peace Movement and Planet Alert. He was also a vocal proponent of Narmada Bachao Andolan and its efforts to halt the construction of the Narmada dam. He also recorded the Terre des hommes audio book Goodgoodi karna, gale lagana; Sparsh ke niyam sikhiye (English: Tickle and hugs: Learning the touching rules), which is designed to give children resources against sexual abuse.
Bose has given lectures on gender equality and human rights at Oxford and during the 2004 World Youth Peace Summit. In 2009, he toured Canada lecturing on global climate change under the auspices of Climate Action Network and demonstrated with protesters at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. In 2011, he worked in conjunction with Bhaichung Bhutia to raise funds for victims of the Sikkim earthquake.
At the 8th convocation of BRAC University Bangladesh on 17 February 2013, Bose delivered the convocation speech.
Personal life
Bose has one elder sister, Anuradha, who is married to Tariq Ansari, the owner and director of Mid-Day Multimedia. She had a cameo role in Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Bose is single.
In July 2019, Bose complained of having been charged ₹442 for two bananas at JW Marriott, Chandigarh, and provoked an outcry on Twitter and other social media, where he gained much attention.
References
External links
Rahul Bose environmental blog
1967 births
Living people
Indian rugby union players
Indian male journalists
Male actors from Mumbai
Activists from Maharashtra
Bengali people
Punjabi people
Marathi people
Male actors in Hindi cinema
University of Mumbai alumni
Rugby union wings
Cathedral and John Connon School alumni
Indian atheists
20th-century Indian male actors
Journalists from Maharashtra
Rugby players from Mumbai
| true |
[
"\"That's What It's Like to Be Lonesome\" is a song written and recorded by American country singer-songwriter Bill Anderson. It was released as a single in December 1958 via Decca Records and became a major hit. A similar version was released by American country artist Ray Price the same year via Columbia Records.\n\nBill Anderson version\n\"That's What It's Like to Be Lonesome\" was recorded at the Bradley Studio, located in Nashville, Tennessee. The sessions were produced by Owen Bradley, who would serve as Anderson's producer through most of years with Decca Records.\n\n\"That's What It's Like to Be Lonesome\" was released as a single by Decca Records in December 1958. It spent a total of 17 weeks on the Billboard Hot Country and Western Sides chart before reaching number 12 in February 1959. It became Anderson's first major hit as a music artist and his first charting record. It was not first released on a proper album. However, seven years later, it appeared on his compilation From This Pen.\n\nTrack listings\n7\" vinyl single<ref>{{cite web |title=Bill Anderson -- That's What It's Like to Be Lonesome\" (1958, Vinyl) |url=https://www.discogs.com/Bill-Anderson-Thats-What-Its-Like-To-Be-Lonesome-The-Thrill-Of-My-Life/release/14241289 |website=Discogs |accessdate=21 July 2020}}</ref>\n \"That's What It's Like to Be Lonesome\" – 2:30\n \"The Thrill of My Life\" – 2:25\n\nChart performance\n\nRay Price version\n\n\"That's What It's Like to Be Lonesome\" was recorded at the Columbia Studio, located in Nashville, Tennessee. The sessions were produced by Don Law.\n\n\"That's What It's Like to Be Lonesome\" was released as a single by Columbia Records in December 1958. It spent a total of 19 weeks on the Billboard'' Hot Country and Western Sides chart before reaching number 7 in February 1959. It was one of many top ten hits for Price on the Columbia label and was followed by several number one hits as well. It was not first released on a proper album.\n\nTrack listings\n7\" vinyl single\n \"That's What It's Like to Be Lonesome\" – 2:44\n \"Kissing Your Picture Is So Cold\" – 2:39\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\n1958 singles\n1958 songs\nBill Anderson (singer) songs\nDecca Records singles\nColumbia Records singles\nSong recordings produced by Owen Bradley\nSongs written by Bill Anderson (singer)\nRay Price (musician) songs",
"TG Now is an album by English industrial band Throbbing Gristle. It was released in 2004 through the band's own record label Industrial Records and was their first album of original material since 1982's Journey Through a Body.\n\nRelease \n\nThe album's 12\" vinyl version was limited to 500 copies and the CD version was limited to 3,000 copies.\n\nCritical reception\nPopMatters called the album \"an appetizing return from a band that had toyed significantly with the idea of what an artistically valid record release might be.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nPersonnel \n Throbbing Gristle\n\n Genesis P-Orridge – uncredited performance, recording\n Cosey Fanni Tutti – uncredited performance, recording\n Peter Christopherson – uncredited performance, recording\n Chris Carter – uncredited performance, recording\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n \n\nThrobbing Gristle albums\n2004 albums"
] |
[
"Rahul Bose",
"Early career: 1993-2003",
"What did Bose begin his career doing?",
"Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey",
"What was Bose's educational background?",
"I don't know.",
"What was his first performance?",
"role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen."
] |
C_23b8d3d4084c455ba2a0e0ab26019637_1
|
When did he get his first big break?
| 4 |
When did Rahul Bose get his first big break?
|
Rahul Bose
|
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers In The Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals. After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time--along with the 2002 Gujarat riots--as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle. In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming. After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews. In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award
|
Rahul Bose (born 27 July 1967) is an Indian actor, director, screenwriter, and social activist. Bose has appeared in Bengali films such as Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Kalpurush, Anuranan, Antaheen, Laptop and The Japanese Wife. He has also appeared in Hindi films such as Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam, Jhankaar Beats, Kucch Luv Jaisaa, Chameli and Shaurya. He also played the antagonist in the Tamil thriller Vishwaroopam (2013) and its sequel. Time magazine named him "the superstar of Indian arthouse cinema" while Maxim named him "the Sean Penn of Oriental cinema" for his work in parallel cinema films like English, August and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. He is also notable for his social activism: he participated in the relief efforts that followed the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and is also the founder of the anti-discrimination NGO, The Foundation.
Early life
Rahul Bose was born to father Rupen and mother Kumud Bose on 27 July 1967.
Bose's first acting role was at the age of six when he played the lead character in a school play, Tom, the Piper's Son. As a child he took an interest in sports after his mother introduced him to boxing and rugby union. He also played cricket and was coached by cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi.
He is an alumnus of the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. After being rejected by a number of American universities, Bose attended Sydenham College. While at the college he played on the school's rugby team and competed in the Western India Championships, winning a silver medal in boxing. After his mother's death in 1987, Bose began working as a copywriter at Rediffusion and was later promoted to advertising creative director. Bose left the job to become a full-time actor after the release of his first film, English, August.
Stage and film career
Early career: 1993–2003
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers in the Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals.
After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time—along with the 2002 Gujarat riots—as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle.
In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming.
After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews.
Bose also appeared as "Vikal" a villain in the 1998 Science fiction TV series Captain Vyom
In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards.
2003–present
In 2003, Bose entered mainstream Bollywood cinema with Jhankaar Beats in which he played one of two friends, R.D. Burman fans who are obsessed with winning a music competition. Boosted by a successful soundtrack, Jhankaar Beats was a surprise hit in urban multiplexes and went on to win several awards for its music. The same year, Bose appeared in another Bollywood film, Mumbai Matinee which saw a UK release. He starred in Chameli opposite Kareena Kapoor, playing a wealthy chain-smoking Mumbai banker who is stranded in the monsoon rains with a prostitute. The film was not a box office success, but won several Filmfare and IIFA awards.
He was the screenwriter of Hero Bhakti Hi Shakti Hai of Hungama TV in 2005.
Bose's second film pairing with Konkona Sen Sharma, 15 Park Avenue released in January 2006. Directed by Aparna Sen and filmed in English, 15 Park Avenue won the 2006 National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English.
With his next effort, the romantic comedy Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Bose moved once more into mainstream Bollywood cinema. The film follows the rocky relationship of Bose's commitment phobic Mumbai DJ Sid and his Punjabi girlfriend, Trisha played by Mallika Sherawat. Critics noted the freshness of Bose's narration style which involves breaking the fourth wall, a device not commonly used in Indian cinema. The film opened well in multiplexes and was a moderate financial success, eventually ranking among the top-grossing films of 2006. Both Bose and Sherawat received positive reviews for their performances. Sherawat and Bose also starred together in another Bollywood comedy, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam (2008), which was a commercial and critical failure.
In 2006, Bose starred in the first of a trio of Bengali films, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's Anuranan. Anuranan was well received on the festival circuit and ran successfully for three months in Bengal. It was then dubbed into Hindi and released nationally. Kaalpurush, Bose's second Bengali film, was released commercially in April 2008. Kaalpurush details a father-son relationship and earned writer-director Buddhadeb Dasgupta a National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Bose teamed with Chowdhury again in 2009 for Antaheen which tells the story of online relationships. Like Anuranan, Antaheen was released commercially in West Bengal and was screened at various film festivals, including the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIACC) and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Antaheen went on to win several National Awards including one for Best Film.
Bose continued working in a mix of mainstream and arthouse films in 2008, with the English-language film, Before the Rains. Before the Rains was released in the US and the UK and Bose's performance was praised by many critics, although the film received mixed reviews. Bose also appeared in Shaurya, a military court room drama modelled on the American film A Few Good Men. Bose's performance was well-received; critic Taran Adarsh said his "performance easily ranks as one of his finest works". His appearance in Dil Kabaddi paired him with Konkona Sen Sharma for the third time, this time playing a husband and wife undergoing marital difficulties. The Japanese Wife, with Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku, the third Aparna Sen film in which he has appeared, released on 9 April 2010. He also appeared as a contestant in the reality show Khatron Ke Khiladi where he was eliminated in the 12th round. He hosted the second series of Bloomberg UTV reality show The Pitch. His role as a gay man harassed by the police in I Am was appreciated by critics.
He appeared in Deepa Mehta's version of Midnight's Children where he played the role of General Zulfikar. He also played the villain in the 2013 Tamil film Vishwaroopam. Naren Weiss who was 19 years old at the time, acted opposite Bose in all of his scenes for Vishwaroopam, and credited Bose for working with him during filming. He was scheduled to begin shooting his adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel, Moth Smoke in early 2010, but the project was postponed after the film's financial backers pulled out. In 2013, he also played opposite Konkona Sen Sharma again in Suman Mukhopadhyay's Shesher Kabita. In 2017, he directed, produced and acted in the biopic Poorna about the youngest girl to climb Mount Everest.
Filmography
Playback singing
Writer/director
Producer
Television
Stage
Awards
2007 – "Artiste for Change" Karmaveer Puraskaar award
2008 – IBN Eminent Citizen Journalist Award
2009 – Youth Icon Award for Social Justice and Welfare
2010 – Green Globe Foundation Award for Extraordinary Work by a Public Figure
2012 – Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration – Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation
2012 – Lt. Governor's Commendation Award for services to Andaman & Nicobar Islands
2020 - Filmfare OTT Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Web Original Film for Bulbbul
Sports career
In 1998, Bose was part of the first Indian national rugby team to play in an international event, the Asian Rugby Football Union Championship. He has played both scrum-half and right-winger positions. In an interview with Daily News & Analysis, Bose announced that he would not return to the team for the 2009 season.
Activism
Bose assisted in the relief efforts in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. As a result of this work, Bose launched the Andaman and Nicobar Scholarship Initiative through his NGO, The Foundation. The scholarship program provides for the education of underprivileged children from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Bose is associated with several charitable organizations such as Teach for India, Akshara Centre, Breakthrough, Citizens for Justice and Peace and the Spastics Society of India. He is closely associated with the Teach For India movement to eradicate inequity in education. In addition, he became the first Indian Oxfam global ambassador in 2007. He is the founder and chairman of The Group of Groups, an umbrella organisation for 51 Mumbai charitable organisations and NGOs. He is also an ambassador for the American India Foundation, the World Youth Peace Movement and Planet Alert. He was also a vocal proponent of Narmada Bachao Andolan and its efforts to halt the construction of the Narmada dam. He also recorded the Terre des hommes audio book Goodgoodi karna, gale lagana; Sparsh ke niyam sikhiye (English: Tickle and hugs: Learning the touching rules), which is designed to give children resources against sexual abuse.
Bose has given lectures on gender equality and human rights at Oxford and during the 2004 World Youth Peace Summit. In 2009, he toured Canada lecturing on global climate change under the auspices of Climate Action Network and demonstrated with protesters at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. In 2011, he worked in conjunction with Bhaichung Bhutia to raise funds for victims of the Sikkim earthquake.
At the 8th convocation of BRAC University Bangladesh on 17 February 2013, Bose delivered the convocation speech.
Personal life
Bose has one elder sister, Anuradha, who is married to Tariq Ansari, the owner and director of Mid-Day Multimedia. She had a cameo role in Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Bose is single.
In July 2019, Bose complained of having been charged ₹442 for two bananas at JW Marriott, Chandigarh, and provoked an outcry on Twitter and other social media, where he gained much attention.
References
External links
Rahul Bose environmental blog
1967 births
Living people
Indian rugby union players
Indian male journalists
Male actors from Mumbai
Activists from Maharashtra
Bengali people
Punjabi people
Marathi people
Male actors in Hindi cinema
University of Mumbai alumni
Rugby union wings
Cathedral and John Connon School alumni
Indian atheists
20th-century Indian male actors
Journalists from Maharashtra
Rugby players from Mumbai
| true |
[
"Break of Dawn is the final album by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock. It was released in 1994 via Rob Base's label, Funky Base Records. It was produced by DJ E-Z Rock, Rob Base, Al Dellentash, Dave Kowolski, Kyle Robinson and Jeff Dovner. Break of Dawn was met with lackluster sales; also, the album did not chart and its only single, \"Break of Dawn\", did not chart either.\n\nCritical reception\nThe Cincinnati Post called the album \"a pleasant surprise\" and \"slammin' big fun with stellar grooves.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\"Interlude\"- :26 \n\"Break of Dawn\"- 3:42 \n\"Interlude\"- :30 \n\"Run Things\"- 2:43 \n\"Let the Funk Flow\"- 3:17 \n\"Symphony\"- 3:20 \n\"Interlude\"- 1:50 \n\"Are You With Me?\"- 4:29 \n\"Bike Tights\"- 2:45 \n\"Interlude\"- :26 \n\"Make It Hot\"- 3:03 \n\"Chillin'\"- 3:50 \n\"I'm Comin'... I'm Comin'... I Came\"- 3:21 \n\"Interlude\"- :17 \n\"Get Your Hands Up\"- 3:20\n\nReferences\n\n1994 albums\nRob Base and DJ E-Z Rock albums",
"Ronny Døhli (born 3 March 1978) is a retired Norwegian football defender.\n\nHe went from Strømmen IF's junior team to its senior team in 1995. In 1997 he went on to Skjetten SK, only to get his big break in July 1998 when signed by Vålerenga for the coming season. He got almost 100 league and cup games for Vålerenga and played in the victorious 2002 Norwegian Football Cup Final. He finished his career in Sandefjord and Strømsgodset.\n\nReferences\n\n1978 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Skedsmo\nNorwegian footballers\nStrømmen IF players\nSkjetten SK players\nVålerenga Fotball players\nSandefjord Fotball players\nStrømsgodset Toppfotball players\nNorwegian First Division players\nEliteserien players\nAssociation football defenders"
] |
[
"Rahul Bose",
"Early career: 1993-2003",
"What did Bose begin his career doing?",
"Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey",
"What was Bose's educational background?",
"I don't know.",
"What was his first performance?",
"role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen.",
"When did he get his first big break?",
"Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award"
] |
C_23b8d3d4084c455ba2a0e0ab26019637_1
|
What year did that happen?
| 5 |
What year did "Split Wide Open" happen?
|
Rahul Bose
|
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers In The Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals. After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time--along with the 2002 Gujarat riots--as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle. In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming. After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews. In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
2000
|
Rahul Bose (born 27 July 1967) is an Indian actor, director, screenwriter, and social activist. Bose has appeared in Bengali films such as Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Kalpurush, Anuranan, Antaheen, Laptop and The Japanese Wife. He has also appeared in Hindi films such as Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam, Jhankaar Beats, Kucch Luv Jaisaa, Chameli and Shaurya. He also played the antagonist in the Tamil thriller Vishwaroopam (2013) and its sequel. Time magazine named him "the superstar of Indian arthouse cinema" while Maxim named him "the Sean Penn of Oriental cinema" for his work in parallel cinema films like English, August and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. He is also notable for his social activism: he participated in the relief efforts that followed the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and is also the founder of the anti-discrimination NGO, The Foundation.
Early life
Rahul Bose was born to father Rupen and mother Kumud Bose on 27 July 1967.
Bose's first acting role was at the age of six when he played the lead character in a school play, Tom, the Piper's Son. As a child he took an interest in sports after his mother introduced him to boxing and rugby union. He also played cricket and was coached by cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi.
He is an alumnus of the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. After being rejected by a number of American universities, Bose attended Sydenham College. While at the college he played on the school's rugby team and competed in the Western India Championships, winning a silver medal in boxing. After his mother's death in 1987, Bose began working as a copywriter at Rediffusion and was later promoted to advertising creative director. Bose left the job to become a full-time actor after the release of his first film, English, August.
Stage and film career
Early career: 1993–2003
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers in the Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals.
After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time—along with the 2002 Gujarat riots—as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle.
In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming.
After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews.
Bose also appeared as "Vikal" a villain in the 1998 Science fiction TV series Captain Vyom
In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards.
2003–present
In 2003, Bose entered mainstream Bollywood cinema with Jhankaar Beats in which he played one of two friends, R.D. Burman fans who are obsessed with winning a music competition. Boosted by a successful soundtrack, Jhankaar Beats was a surprise hit in urban multiplexes and went on to win several awards for its music. The same year, Bose appeared in another Bollywood film, Mumbai Matinee which saw a UK release. He starred in Chameli opposite Kareena Kapoor, playing a wealthy chain-smoking Mumbai banker who is stranded in the monsoon rains with a prostitute. The film was not a box office success, but won several Filmfare and IIFA awards.
He was the screenwriter of Hero Bhakti Hi Shakti Hai of Hungama TV in 2005.
Bose's second film pairing with Konkona Sen Sharma, 15 Park Avenue released in January 2006. Directed by Aparna Sen and filmed in English, 15 Park Avenue won the 2006 National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English.
With his next effort, the romantic comedy Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Bose moved once more into mainstream Bollywood cinema. The film follows the rocky relationship of Bose's commitment phobic Mumbai DJ Sid and his Punjabi girlfriend, Trisha played by Mallika Sherawat. Critics noted the freshness of Bose's narration style which involves breaking the fourth wall, a device not commonly used in Indian cinema. The film opened well in multiplexes and was a moderate financial success, eventually ranking among the top-grossing films of 2006. Both Bose and Sherawat received positive reviews for their performances. Sherawat and Bose also starred together in another Bollywood comedy, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam (2008), which was a commercial and critical failure.
In 2006, Bose starred in the first of a trio of Bengali films, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's Anuranan. Anuranan was well received on the festival circuit and ran successfully for three months in Bengal. It was then dubbed into Hindi and released nationally. Kaalpurush, Bose's second Bengali film, was released commercially in April 2008. Kaalpurush details a father-son relationship and earned writer-director Buddhadeb Dasgupta a National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Bose teamed with Chowdhury again in 2009 for Antaheen which tells the story of online relationships. Like Anuranan, Antaheen was released commercially in West Bengal and was screened at various film festivals, including the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIACC) and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Antaheen went on to win several National Awards including one for Best Film.
Bose continued working in a mix of mainstream and arthouse films in 2008, with the English-language film, Before the Rains. Before the Rains was released in the US and the UK and Bose's performance was praised by many critics, although the film received mixed reviews. Bose also appeared in Shaurya, a military court room drama modelled on the American film A Few Good Men. Bose's performance was well-received; critic Taran Adarsh said his "performance easily ranks as one of his finest works". His appearance in Dil Kabaddi paired him with Konkona Sen Sharma for the third time, this time playing a husband and wife undergoing marital difficulties. The Japanese Wife, with Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku, the third Aparna Sen film in which he has appeared, released on 9 April 2010. He also appeared as a contestant in the reality show Khatron Ke Khiladi where he was eliminated in the 12th round. He hosted the second series of Bloomberg UTV reality show The Pitch. His role as a gay man harassed by the police in I Am was appreciated by critics.
He appeared in Deepa Mehta's version of Midnight's Children where he played the role of General Zulfikar. He also played the villain in the 2013 Tamil film Vishwaroopam. Naren Weiss who was 19 years old at the time, acted opposite Bose in all of his scenes for Vishwaroopam, and credited Bose for working with him during filming. He was scheduled to begin shooting his adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel, Moth Smoke in early 2010, but the project was postponed after the film's financial backers pulled out. In 2013, he also played opposite Konkona Sen Sharma again in Suman Mukhopadhyay's Shesher Kabita. In 2017, he directed, produced and acted in the biopic Poorna about the youngest girl to climb Mount Everest.
Filmography
Playback singing
Writer/director
Producer
Television
Stage
Awards
2007 – "Artiste for Change" Karmaveer Puraskaar award
2008 – IBN Eminent Citizen Journalist Award
2009 – Youth Icon Award for Social Justice and Welfare
2010 – Green Globe Foundation Award for Extraordinary Work by a Public Figure
2012 – Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration – Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation
2012 – Lt. Governor's Commendation Award for services to Andaman & Nicobar Islands
2020 - Filmfare OTT Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Web Original Film for Bulbbul
Sports career
In 1998, Bose was part of the first Indian national rugby team to play in an international event, the Asian Rugby Football Union Championship. He has played both scrum-half and right-winger positions. In an interview with Daily News & Analysis, Bose announced that he would not return to the team for the 2009 season.
Activism
Bose assisted in the relief efforts in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. As a result of this work, Bose launched the Andaman and Nicobar Scholarship Initiative through his NGO, The Foundation. The scholarship program provides for the education of underprivileged children from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Bose is associated with several charitable organizations such as Teach for India, Akshara Centre, Breakthrough, Citizens for Justice and Peace and the Spastics Society of India. He is closely associated with the Teach For India movement to eradicate inequity in education. In addition, he became the first Indian Oxfam global ambassador in 2007. He is the founder and chairman of The Group of Groups, an umbrella organisation for 51 Mumbai charitable organisations and NGOs. He is also an ambassador for the American India Foundation, the World Youth Peace Movement and Planet Alert. He was also a vocal proponent of Narmada Bachao Andolan and its efforts to halt the construction of the Narmada dam. He also recorded the Terre des hommes audio book Goodgoodi karna, gale lagana; Sparsh ke niyam sikhiye (English: Tickle and hugs: Learning the touching rules), which is designed to give children resources against sexual abuse.
Bose has given lectures on gender equality and human rights at Oxford and during the 2004 World Youth Peace Summit. In 2009, he toured Canada lecturing on global climate change under the auspices of Climate Action Network and demonstrated with protesters at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. In 2011, he worked in conjunction with Bhaichung Bhutia to raise funds for victims of the Sikkim earthquake.
At the 8th convocation of BRAC University Bangladesh on 17 February 2013, Bose delivered the convocation speech.
Personal life
Bose has one elder sister, Anuradha, who is married to Tariq Ansari, the owner and director of Mid-Day Multimedia. She had a cameo role in Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Bose is single.
In July 2019, Bose complained of having been charged ₹442 for two bananas at JW Marriott, Chandigarh, and provoked an outcry on Twitter and other social media, where he gained much attention.
References
External links
Rahul Bose environmental blog
1967 births
Living people
Indian rugby union players
Indian male journalists
Male actors from Mumbai
Activists from Maharashtra
Bengali people
Punjabi people
Marathi people
Male actors in Hindi cinema
University of Mumbai alumni
Rugby union wings
Cathedral and John Connon School alumni
Indian atheists
20th-century Indian male actors
Journalists from Maharashtra
Rugby players from Mumbai
| true |
[
"What Did You Think Was Going to Happen? is the debut studio album from Los Angeles band 2AM Club. It was released September 14, 2010 by RCA Records.\n\nCritical reception\n\nMatt Collar of AllMusic stated that with this album \"2AM Club reveal themselves as the best and brightest of the nu-eyed-soul set\".\n\nTrack listing\n\nOn May 31, the band released a song named \"Baseline\" that was a bonus track on What Did You Think Was Going to Happen? (sold on iTunes). It was advertised by them via Twitter, and was available for free download through a file sharing website, Hulk Share.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2010 albums\nPop rock albums by American artists",
"Worry About You may refer to:\n\n \"Worry About You\" (Tyler James song)\n \"Worry About You\" (Ivy song)\n \"Worry About You\", a song by 2AM Club from album What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?\n\nSee also \n \"I Worry About You\", also spelled \"I Worry 'Bout You\", a song written by Norman Mapp"
] |
[
"Rahul Bose",
"Early career: 1993-2003",
"What did Bose begin his career doing?",
"Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey",
"What was Bose's educational background?",
"I don't know.",
"What was his first performance?",
"role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen.",
"When did he get his first big break?",
"Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award",
"What year did that happen?",
"2000"
] |
C_23b8d3d4084c455ba2a0e0ab26019637_1
|
Who did he work with in Split Wide Open?
| 6 |
Who did Rahul Bose work with in Split Wide Open?
|
Rahul Bose
|
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers In The Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals. After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time--along with the 2002 Gujarat riots--as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle. In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming. After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews. In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards. CANNOTANSWER
|
starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open.
|
Rahul Bose (born 27 July 1967) is an Indian actor, director, screenwriter, and social activist. Bose has appeared in Bengali films such as Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Kalpurush, Anuranan, Antaheen, Laptop and The Japanese Wife. He has also appeared in Hindi films such as Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam, Jhankaar Beats, Kucch Luv Jaisaa, Chameli and Shaurya. He also played the antagonist in the Tamil thriller Vishwaroopam (2013) and its sequel. Time magazine named him "the superstar of Indian arthouse cinema" while Maxim named him "the Sean Penn of Oriental cinema" for his work in parallel cinema films like English, August and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. He is also notable for his social activism: he participated in the relief efforts that followed the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and is also the founder of the anti-discrimination NGO, The Foundation.
Early life
Rahul Bose was born to father Rupen and mother Kumud Bose on 27 July 1967.
Bose's first acting role was at the age of six when he played the lead character in a school play, Tom, the Piper's Son. As a child he took an interest in sports after his mother introduced him to boxing and rugby union. He also played cricket and was coached by cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi.
He is an alumnus of the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. After being rejected by a number of American universities, Bose attended Sydenham College. While at the college he played on the school's rugby team and competed in the Western India Championships, winning a silver medal in boxing. After his mother's death in 1987, Bose began working as a copywriter at Rediffusion and was later promoted to advertising creative director. Bose left the job to become a full-time actor after the release of his first film, English, August.
Stage and film career
Early career: 1993–2003
Bose started his acting career on the Mumbai stage in Rahul D'Cunha's Topsy Turvey and Are There Tigers in the Congo?. D'Cunha's aunt was the casting director for director Dev Benegal's film English, August and suggested that Bose should play the lead role. After filming a screen test, Benegal decided to cast him as civil servant Agastya Sen. Based on the novel of the same name by Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August was one of the first Hinglish films and gained Bose international recognition when it became the first Indian film to be purchased by 20th Century Fox and won several awards at international film festivals.
After English, August Bose found work in television; he was offered a role in India's first English-language television serial, A Mouthful of Sky and also co-hosted BBC World's Style! with Laila Rouass. In 1998 he appeared in Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys with Naseeruddin Shah and starred in Dev Benegal's second film, Split Wide Open. To prepare for his role as a roving water vendor, Bose lived in Mumbai's slums and observed a drug dealer for two weeks. He later cited this time—along with the 2002 Gujarat riots—as the beginning of the awakening of his social conscience. Although Split Wide Open was controversial in India because of its depictions of sexual abuse, Bose received the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Actor at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival for his performance. He also performed abroad in the Leicester Haymarket in England where he starred in the English version of Tim Murari's play, The Square Circle.
In 1997, Bose was cast to play the role of Saleem Sinai in the BBC adaptation of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children. The project was eventually canceled after the Indian and Sri Lankan governments refused to allow filming.
After seeing Bose in English, August, director Govind Nihalani cast him in the villain role opposite Ajay Devgan in the mainstream film Thakshak. The film was not a financial success, although Bose received positive reviews.
Bose also appeared as "Vikal" a villain in the 1998 Science fiction TV series Captain Vyom
In 2001, Bose made his directorial debut with Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Starring Rehaan Engineer and Koel Purie and featuring Bose in a supporting role, Everybody received mixed reviews from critics, but won Bose the runner-up John Schlesinger Award for best directorial debut at the 2003 Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2002, Bose starred opposite Konkona Sen Sharma in Aparna Sen's art film Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. The film, a critique of communal violence, was a critical success and won several awards at international film festivals as well as three National Film Awards.
2003–present
In 2003, Bose entered mainstream Bollywood cinema with Jhankaar Beats in which he played one of two friends, R.D. Burman fans who are obsessed with winning a music competition. Boosted by a successful soundtrack, Jhankaar Beats was a surprise hit in urban multiplexes and went on to win several awards for its music. The same year, Bose appeared in another Bollywood film, Mumbai Matinee which saw a UK release. He starred in Chameli opposite Kareena Kapoor, playing a wealthy chain-smoking Mumbai banker who is stranded in the monsoon rains with a prostitute. The film was not a box office success, but won several Filmfare and IIFA awards.
He was the screenwriter of Hero Bhakti Hi Shakti Hai of Hungama TV in 2005.
Bose's second film pairing with Konkona Sen Sharma, 15 Park Avenue released in January 2006. Directed by Aparna Sen and filmed in English, 15 Park Avenue won the 2006 National Film Award for Best Feature Film in English.
With his next effort, the romantic comedy Pyaar Ke Side Effects, Bose moved once more into mainstream Bollywood cinema. The film follows the rocky relationship of Bose's commitment phobic Mumbai DJ Sid and his Punjabi girlfriend, Trisha played by Mallika Sherawat. Critics noted the freshness of Bose's narration style which involves breaking the fourth wall, a device not commonly used in Indian cinema. The film opened well in multiplexes and was a moderate financial success, eventually ranking among the top-grossing films of 2006. Both Bose and Sherawat received positive reviews for their performances. Sherawat and Bose also starred together in another Bollywood comedy, Maan Gaye Mughal-e-Azam (2008), which was a commercial and critical failure.
In 2006, Bose starred in the first of a trio of Bengali films, Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's Anuranan. Anuranan was well received on the festival circuit and ran successfully for three months in Bengal. It was then dubbed into Hindi and released nationally. Kaalpurush, Bose's second Bengali film, was released commercially in April 2008. Kaalpurush details a father-son relationship and earned writer-director Buddhadeb Dasgupta a National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Bose teamed with Chowdhury again in 2009 for Antaheen which tells the story of online relationships. Like Anuranan, Antaheen was released commercially in West Bengal and was screened at various film festivals, including the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIACC) and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Antaheen went on to win several National Awards including one for Best Film.
Bose continued working in a mix of mainstream and arthouse films in 2008, with the English-language film, Before the Rains. Before the Rains was released in the US and the UK and Bose's performance was praised by many critics, although the film received mixed reviews. Bose also appeared in Shaurya, a military court room drama modelled on the American film A Few Good Men. Bose's performance was well-received; critic Taran Adarsh said his "performance easily ranks as one of his finest works". His appearance in Dil Kabaddi paired him with Konkona Sen Sharma for the third time, this time playing a husband and wife undergoing marital difficulties. The Japanese Wife, with Japanese actress Chigusa Takaku, the third Aparna Sen film in which he has appeared, released on 9 April 2010. He also appeared as a contestant in the reality show Khatron Ke Khiladi where he was eliminated in the 12th round. He hosted the second series of Bloomberg UTV reality show The Pitch. His role as a gay man harassed by the police in I Am was appreciated by critics.
He appeared in Deepa Mehta's version of Midnight's Children where he played the role of General Zulfikar. He also played the villain in the 2013 Tamil film Vishwaroopam. Naren Weiss who was 19 years old at the time, acted opposite Bose in all of his scenes for Vishwaroopam, and credited Bose for working with him during filming. He was scheduled to begin shooting his adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel, Moth Smoke in early 2010, but the project was postponed after the film's financial backers pulled out. In 2013, he also played opposite Konkona Sen Sharma again in Suman Mukhopadhyay's Shesher Kabita. In 2017, he directed, produced and acted in the biopic Poorna about the youngest girl to climb Mount Everest.
Filmography
Playback singing
Writer/director
Producer
Television
Stage
Awards
2007 – "Artiste for Change" Karmaveer Puraskaar award
2008 – IBN Eminent Citizen Journalist Award
2009 – Youth Icon Award for Social Justice and Welfare
2010 – Green Globe Foundation Award for Extraordinary Work by a Public Figure
2012 – Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration – Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation
2012 – Lt. Governor's Commendation Award for services to Andaman & Nicobar Islands
2020 - Filmfare OTT Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a Web Original Film for Bulbbul
Sports career
In 1998, Bose was part of the first Indian national rugby team to play in an international event, the Asian Rugby Football Union Championship. He has played both scrum-half and right-winger positions. In an interview with Daily News & Analysis, Bose announced that he would not return to the team for the 2009 season.
Activism
Bose assisted in the relief efforts in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. As a result of this work, Bose launched the Andaman and Nicobar Scholarship Initiative through his NGO, The Foundation. The scholarship program provides for the education of underprivileged children from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Bose is associated with several charitable organizations such as Teach for India, Akshara Centre, Breakthrough, Citizens for Justice and Peace and the Spastics Society of India. He is closely associated with the Teach For India movement to eradicate inequity in education. In addition, he became the first Indian Oxfam global ambassador in 2007. He is the founder and chairman of The Group of Groups, an umbrella organisation for 51 Mumbai charitable organisations and NGOs. He is also an ambassador for the American India Foundation, the World Youth Peace Movement and Planet Alert. He was also a vocal proponent of Narmada Bachao Andolan and its efforts to halt the construction of the Narmada dam. He also recorded the Terre des hommes audio book Goodgoodi karna, gale lagana; Sparsh ke niyam sikhiye (English: Tickle and hugs: Learning the touching rules), which is designed to give children resources against sexual abuse.
Bose has given lectures on gender equality and human rights at Oxford and during the 2004 World Youth Peace Summit. In 2009, he toured Canada lecturing on global climate change under the auspices of Climate Action Network and demonstrated with protesters at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. In 2011, he worked in conjunction with Bhaichung Bhutia to raise funds for victims of the Sikkim earthquake.
At the 8th convocation of BRAC University Bangladesh on 17 February 2013, Bose delivered the convocation speech.
Personal life
Bose has one elder sister, Anuradha, who is married to Tariq Ansari, the owner and director of Mid-Day Multimedia. She had a cameo role in Everybody Says I'm Fine!. Bose is single.
In July 2019, Bose complained of having been charged ₹442 for two bananas at JW Marriott, Chandigarh, and provoked an outcry on Twitter and other social media, where he gained much attention.
References
External links
Rahul Bose environmental blog
1967 births
Living people
Indian rugby union players
Indian male journalists
Male actors from Mumbai
Activists from Maharashtra
Bengali people
Punjabi people
Marathi people
Male actors in Hindi cinema
University of Mumbai alumni
Rugby union wings
Cathedral and John Connon School alumni
Indian atheists
20th-century Indian male actors
Journalists from Maharashtra
Rugby players from Mumbai
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[
"Dev Benegal is an Indian filmmaker and screenwriter, most known for his debut film English, August (1994), which won the Best Feature Film in English at the 42nd National Film Awards.\n\nEarly life and education\nDev was born in New Delhi to Som Benegal, a theatre director, and his wife Suman.\n\nDev Benegal grew up in New Delhi. In 1979, he left Delhi for Mumbai (then Bombay), to pursue a career in movies. He won an Asian Cultural Council grant in Film, Video & Photography to study Film History in the Cinema Studies Program at New York University from 1989–90.\n\nCareer\n\nEarly career\n\nHe began his career with legendary animator Ram Mohan and got his first job with Shashi Kapoor's Filmvalas. After assisting Shyam Benegal in films like Kalyug (1980), Mandi (1983) and his famous documentary on Satyajit Ray—Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker (1984)—Dev Benegal directed a series of short short films, Kalpavriksha: The Tree of Life (1988), Kanakambaram: Cloth: of Gold (1987), and Anantarupam: The Infinite Forms (1987). He directed several documentaries, including Shabana! (2003) with Indian film star Shabana Azmi and Abhivardhan: Building for a New Life (1992).\n\nDebut Feature Film and India's National Film Award\n\nIn 1994 he wrote and directed his adaptation of Upamanyu Chatterjee's 1989 novel by the same name, based on the Indian Administrative Service, English, August (1994). The film received praise from critics for its modern and urban themes and was hailed as the cinematic counterpart to the later Anglo-Indian literary movement. It also won the Best Feature Film in English Award at National Film Awards, and is now hailed as a landmark in contemporary Indian cinema as it ushered in a wave of independent Indian filmmakers, commonly known as \"multiplex films\" in India.\n\nThe New York Times wrote: In \"English, August\", his first feature film, Mr. Benegal deftly manages the feat of using the scalpel of humor to lay bare a young man's painful but edifying immersion in an alien culture within his own land and to deliver potent sociological and political messages. Irreverent humor, frustrated idealism and earnest compassion are blended with a keen sense of character, place and political reality in the auspicious English, August.\n\n\"English, August\" won the Special Jury Award at the 12th Torino Film Festival 1994. It won both the Silver Montgolfiere (Silver Grand Prix) and the Gilberto Martinez Solares prize for the Best First Film at the 16th Festival des 3 Continents, Nantes France, 1994\n\nLater Films and Upcoming Projects\n\nSplit Wide Open (1999), another Hinglish film, was also a critical success and won a Special Jury Prize at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival. Writing for The Hindu, Savitha Padmanabhan said: \"Split Wide Open is a bold and strong statement on the filth and lawlessness that have wormed their way into the city of dreams, Mumbai\". In an article for The Times of India, the film's lead actor Rahul Bose wrote: \"Critics flayed me: After Split Wide Open was released, critics ripped apart my character. To be an English-speaking slum-dweller who is also a smuggler, I spent a month in slums and even shadowed a cocaine-dealer for two weeks. Ironically, the criticism at home turned into praise when I won the Best Actor award for Split Wide Open at the Singapore Film Festival.\"\n\nBenegal's latest film, Road, Movie (2009), about a travelling cinema troupe in Rajasthan, and starring Abhay Deol and Tannishtha Chatterjee as the lead, premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. In its review, The Hollywood Reporter wrote: \"Dev Benegal's 'Road, Movie' takes you on a magical mystery tour into the heart of India and its robust cinema. It is, in fact, a road movie without the comma, but it is also about being on the road in a vast Indian landscape and about the phenomenon of touring cinemas that still exist in rural India. The film is specifically Indian, yet designed for wider appreciation in festivals and, if all goes well at the European Film Market, in cross-over releases in international territories.\"\n\nHis project Bombay Samourai was an official selection for the Hong Kong Asia Film Finance Forum (HAF) at the HongKong International Film Festival. This film is in development.\n\nDev Benegal is also developing a film on the life of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.\n\nOther works\n\n24x7 Making Movies\n\nIn 2006, Benegal started a production program called 24×7 Making Movies, where he invited young people from all over India to come and make a film in 24 hours. The program has produced over 60 short feature films.\n\nScreenwriting\nBenegal is a long time advisor to eQuinoxe Screenwriting Workshops for Professionals. He has been invited by Under The Volcano, the international program of writing master classes to create and conduct a screenwriting master class for their 2020 program.\n\nThemes and style \nPritish Nandy while describing Benegal's films, said: \"Dev Benegal spearheads the brat pack of movie directors who are all out to prove that indian movies is not all pelvis thrusting and running around trees.\"\n\nAn academic paper (Prateek, Prateek. (2013). \"Popart\": The 'global' avatar of bollywood. 5. 247-257) on Bollywood draws upon insights from his work and describes it as follows: \"Benegal's cinematic dialogue with Indianness of English along with Englishness of India, with narratives of belonging, and with the compacted heterogeneity of urban-industrial India, established in his early cinema... Benegal understands the gravity of the national metaphor of 'unity in diversity', and tries to manifest it in the polyphony of various languages and different dialects – English, Hindi, and Telugu. Equally important are his 'artistic' story-telling skills, a trait usually found in the art cinema: the capacity to create credible characters (human or otherwise, like Dadru, the frog) and cultures, skilful scene-setting, mastery of pace and timing, and power of imagination.\"\n\nFilmography\n\nScreenplays\n\nDocumentaries\n\nAwards\n\n|-\n|2014\n|Dead, End (screenplay)\n|Network of Asian Fantastic Films Prize\n|\n|Hong Kong International Film Festival\n|-\n|2011\n|Road, Movie\n|Best Sound for Vikram Joglekar\n|\n|17th Annual Star Screen Awards\n\n|-\n|2010\n|Road, Movie\n|Golden Duke Award\n|\n|Odessa International Film Festival\n|-\n|2009\n|Road, Movie\n|Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix Award\n|\n|Tokyo International Film Festival\n|-\n|2000\n|Split Wide Open\n|Special Jury Prize\n|\n|Singapore International Film Festival\n|-\n|2000\n|Split Wide Open\n|Silver Screen Award\n|\n|Singapore International Film Festival\n\n|-\n|2000\n|Split Wide Open\n|The Grand Prix\n|\n|Turnhout International Film Festival Belgium (Focus Op Het Zuiden)\n|-\n|2000\n|Split Wide Open\n|Grand Prix\n|\n|Bratislava International Film Festival\n|-\n|2000\n|Split Wide Open\n|Best Actor for Rahul Bose\n|\n|Singapore International Film Festival\n|-\n| 1995\n|English, August\n|Best Feature Film in English\n|\n|National Film Awards\n|-\n| 1994 \n|English, August\n|Silver Montgolfiere (Silver Grand Prix)\n|\n|Festival des 3 Continents\n|-\n| 1994 \n|English, August\n|Golden Montgolfiere (Golden Grand Prix)\n|\n|Festival des 3 Continents\n|-\n|1994\n|English, August\n|Gilberto Martinez Solares (Best First Film)\n|\n|Festival des 3 Continents\n|-\n|1994\n|English, August\n|Special Jury Award\n|\n|Torino International Film Festival\n|-\n|1994\n|English, August\n|Prize of the City of Torino\n|\n|Torino International Film Festival\n\n|-\n|1988\n|Kalpavriksha\n|Certificate of Merit\n|\n|Indian Documentary Producers Association Awards for Excellence\n|-\n|1987\n|Anantarupam\n|Special Jury Award\n|\n|Indian Documentary Producers Association Awards for Excellence\n|-\n|1987\n|Anantarupam\n|Best Cinematography\n|\n|Indian Documentary Producers Association Awards for Excellence\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nDev Benegal Weblog\n\n1960 births\nLiving people\nFilm directors from Delhi\nHindi-language film directors\nIndian male screenwriters\nIndian documentary filmmakers\n20th-century Indian film directors\n21st-century Indian film directors",
"Joseph Hatze (1879–1959) was one of the first and most prominent Croatian composers in the Mediterranean style in the first half of last century.\n\nHatze was born in Split (then Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Croatia) to a family of craftsmen from Split. During school he was absorbed with musical events, especially with sacred music and folk songs. Accidentally discovering his musicality, and with family support, he attended all the performances in the newly opened Municipal Theater in Split. Strong experience of orchestral and choir performances in the Split theater encouraged the 16-year-old Hatze to sing at Chapel Mass. During that time he wrote \"Misa a Kapela\" (in Croatian text), which was performed with great success. Later other Dalmatian school choirs started performing his musical work.\n\nHe completed his studies in composition in 1902 at the Rossini Conservatory in Pesaro with the operatic composer Pietro Mascagni. Returning home to Split, he worked as a choir teacher at the Central Technical School in Split and was the choirmaster at the choral society Zvonimir.\n\nDuring World War I, he was on the front, away from home, and did not know that his wife Gilda had died of the Spanish flu. Gilda was from the patrician Marulić family (related to Marko Marulić). Afterwards he was the choirmaster of the choral society Guslar. During World War II Hatze became a refugee in El Shatt in Egypt. There he organized a camp choir. Hatze taught the basics of music to his grandson, Ruben Radica (b. 1941), who became a professional musician, teacher and composer.\n\nHatze wrote up to 60 songs. He wrote the cantatas \"Night at Una\" (verses by Hugo Badalić), \"Exodus\" (1912) and \"Golemi Pan\" (1917). The work \"Golemi Pan\" (Huge Pan) was written to the poetry of Vladimir Nazor. Hatze's sense of drama was applied in both the orchestral work of the operas of The Return (1910) and Adel and Mara (1932). The Return is the story of a Croatian peasant who had to go to a foreign land and then return to his family home.\n\nJoseph Hatze died in Split at the age of 80.\n\nOn the 125th Anniversary of the birth of Josip Hatze, Croatia issued a stamp in his honor. In Split, a secondary music school, Glazbena Škola Josipa Hatzea (Josip Hatze Music School), is named in his honor, as is Hatzeov Perivoj (Hatze Park).\n\nSee also \nMusic of Croatia\nSplit\nDalmatia\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n performed in HNK Split on a concert dedicated to Hatze's birth. The piece was done by Split's music schools choir and string orchestra.\n\n1879 births\n1959 deaths\nCroatian composers\nRomantic composers\nMusicians from Split, Croatia\nPeople from the Kingdom of Dalmatia\nAustro-Hungarian military personnel of World War I\nMale classical composers\nCroatian refugees\n20th-century male musicians\n19th-century male musicians"
] |
[
"Neil Diamond",
"Early life and education"
] |
C_dbc4fe5d6c2d49e8bc391ff36db3ca8d_1
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Where was he born?
| 1 |
Where was Neil Diamond born?
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Neil Diamond
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Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. His parents were Rose (nee Rapaport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand. They were not close friends at the time, Diamond recalls: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved he then attended Abraham Lincoln High School, and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen. For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16, and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He adds that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, besides helping him release his youthful "frustrations". Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife. Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$405 per week, in 2017 dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it. CANNOTANSWER
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Brooklyn, New York,
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Neil Leslie Diamond (born January 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and occasional actor. He has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has had ten No. 1 singles on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts: "Cracklin' Rosie", "Song Sung Blue", "Longfellow Serenade", "I've Been This Way Before", "If You Know What I Mean", "Desirée", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "America", "Yesterday's Songs", and "Heartlight". Thirty-eight songs by Diamond have been featured in the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts. He also played in movies such as The Jazz Singer, a musical drama film.
Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In 2011, he was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Early life and education
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. All four of his grandparents were immigrants, from Poland on his father's side and Russia on his mother's. His parents were Rose (née Rapoport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand; Diamond recalled they were not close friends at the time: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved to Brighton Beach, he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen.
For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16 and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He added that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, while also helping him release his youthful "frustrations".
Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them, which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife.
Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$ per week, in dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it.
Career
1960s
Diamond was not rehired after his 16 weeks with Sunbeam, and he began writing and singing his own songs for demos. "I never really chose songwriting," he says. "It just absorbed me and became more and more important in my life." His first recording contract was billed as "Neil and Jack", an Everly Brothers-type duet with high school friend Jack Packer. They recorded the unsuccessful singles "You Are My Love at Last" with "What Will I Do", and "I'm Afraid" with "Till You've Tried Love", both records released in 1962. Cashbox and Billboard magazines gave all four sides excellent reviews, and Diamond signed with Columbia Records as a solo performer later in 1962. In July 1963, Columbia released the single "At Night" with "Clown Town"; Billboard gave an excellent review to Clown Town, and Cashbox gave both sides excellent reviews, but it still failed to make the charts. Columbia dropped him from their label and he went back to writing songs in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years.
He wrote wherever he could, including on buses, and used an upright piano above the Birdland Club in New York City. One of the causes of this early nomadic life as a songwriter was his songs' wordiness: "I'd spent a lot of time on lyrics, and they were looking for hooks, and I didn't really understand the nature of that," he says. He was able to sell only about one song a week during those years, barely enough to survive on. He found himself only earning enough to spend 35 cents a day on food (US$ in dollars). But the privacy that he had above the Birdland Club allowed him to focus on writing without distractions. "Something new began to happen. I wasn't under the gun, and suddenly interesting songs began to happen, songs that had things none of the others did." Among them were "Cherry, Cherry" and "Solitary Man". "Solitary Man" was the first record that Diamond recorded under his own name which made the charts. It remains one of his personal all-time favorites, as it was about his early years as a songwriter, even though he failed to realize it at the time. He describes the song as "an outgrowth of my despair".
Diamond spent his early career in the Brill Building. His first success as a songwriter came in November 1965 with "Sunday and Me", a Top 20 hit for Jay and the Americans. Greater success followed with "I'm a Believer", "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You", "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)", and "Love to Love", all performed by the Monkees. He wrote and recorded the songs for himself, but the cover versions were released before his own. The unintended consequence was that Diamond began to gain fame as a songwriter. "I'm a Believer" became a gold record within two days of its release and stayed at the top of the charts for seven weeks, making it the Popular Music Song of the Year in 1966.
"And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" brought covers from Elvis Presley (who also interpreted "Sweet Caroline") and Mark Lindsay, former lead singer for Paul Revere & the Raiders. Other notable artists who recorded his early songs were the English hard-rock band Deep Purple, Lulu, and Cliff Richard.
In 1966, Diamond signed a deal with Bert Berns's Bang Records, then a subsidiary of Atlantic. His first release on that label was "Solitary Man", which was his first true hit as a solo artist. Diamond followed with "Cherry, Cherry" and "Kentucky Woman". His early concerts featured him opening for bands such as Herman's Hermits and the Who. As a guest performer with The Who, he was shocked to see Pete Townshend swinging his guitar like a club and then throwing it against walls and off the stage until the instrument's neck broke.
Diamond began to feel restricted by Bang Records because he wanted to record more ambitious, introspective music, such as "Brooklyn Roads" from 1968. Berns wanted to release "Kentucky Woman" as a single, but Diamond was no longer satisfied writing simple pop songs, so he proposed "Shilo", which was not about the Civil War but rather an imaginary childhood friend. Bang believed that the song was not commercial enough, so it was relegated to being an LP track on "Just for You". Diamond was also dissatisfied with his royalties and tried to sign with another record label after discovering a loophole in his contract that did not bind him exclusively to either WEB IV or Tallyrand, but the result was a series of lawsuits that coincided with a slump in his record sales and professional success. A magistrate refused WEB IV's request for a temporary injunction to prevent Diamond from joining another record company while his contract dispute continued in court, but the lawsuits persisted until February 18, 1977, when he triumphed in court and purchased the rights to his Bang-era master tapes.
On March 18, 1968, Diamond signed a deal with Uni Records; the label was named after Universal Pictures, the owner of which, MCA Inc., later consolidated its labels into MCA Records (now called Universal Music after merging with PolyGram in 1999). His debut album for Uni/MCA was Velvet Gloves and Spit, produced by Tom Catalano, which did not chart, and he recorded the follow-up Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show at American Sound Studios in Memphis with Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman producing.
1970s
In late 1969, he moved to Los Angeles. His sound mellowed with such songs as "Sweet Caroline" (1969), "Holly Holy" (1969), "Cracklin' Rosie" (1970) and "Song Sung Blue" (1972), the last two reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. "Sweet Caroline" was Diamond's first major hit after his slump. In 2007 Diamond said he had written "Sweet Caroline" for Caroline Kennedy after seeing her on the cover of Life in an equestrian riding outfit, but in 2014 he said in an interview on the Today Show that it was written for his then wife, Marcia. He could not find a good rhyme with the name "Marcia" and so used the name Caroline. It took him just one hour, in a Memphis hotel, to write and compose it. The 1971 release "I Am...I Said" was a Top 5 hit in both the US and UK and was his most intensely personal effort to date, taking over four months to complete.
In 1971, Diamond played 7 sold-out concerts at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The outdoor theater, which was noted for showcasing the best of current entertainers, added a stereo sound system for the first time. Diamond was also backed by a 35-piece string orchestra and six backing singers. After the first night, one leading newspaper called it "the finest concert in Greek Theater history."
In August 1972, he played again at the Greek, this time doing 10 shows. When the show was first announced, tickets at the 5000-seat theater sold out rapidly. He added a quadraphonic sound system for his performance to create full surround-sound. The performance of August 24, 1972, was recorded and released as the live double album Hot August Night. Hot August Night demonstrates Diamond's skills as a performer and showman, as he reinvigorated his back catalogue of hits with new energy. Diamond recalled: "Hot August Night captures a very special show for me. We went all out to really knock 'em dead in L.A." Many consider it his best work; critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Hot August Night "the ultimate Neil Diamond record... [which] shows Diamond the icon in full glory." The album became a classic, and was remastered in 2000 with additional selections. In Australia, which at the time had the most Neil Diamond fans per capita of any country, the album ranked No. 1 for 29 weeks and stayed in their top 20 bestsellers for two years.
In the fall of 1972, Diamond performed for 20 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. That theater had not staged a one-man show since Al Jolson in the 1930s. The approximately 1,600-seat Broadway venue provided an intimate concert setting not common at the time, with every performance reportedly sold out. It also made Diamond the first rock-era star to headline on Broadway. The review in the New York Times stated:
After the Winter Garden shows, Diamond announced that he needed a break, and he engaged in no more live performances till 1976. He used those four years to work on the score for Hall Bartlett's film version of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and to record two albums, Serenade and Beautiful Noise. He said years later, "I knew I'd come back, but I wasn't sure when. I spent one year on each of those albums...I'd been on the road six years. I had a son 2½ and I felt he needed me more than the audience did. So for four years I devoted myself to my son Jesse." He also said he needed to get back to having a private life, one where he could be anonymous.
In 1973, Diamond switched labels again, returning to Columbia Records for a million-dollar-advance-per-album contract (about US$ million per album in dollars). His first project, released as a solo album, was the soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The film received hostile reviews and did poorly at the box office, and the album grossed more than the film did. Richard D. Bach, author of the best-selling source story, disowned the film, and he and Diamond sued Bartlett, though for differing reasons; in Bach's case, it was because he felt the film omitted too much from the original novella, whereas in Diamond's case, it was because he felt the film had butchered his score. "After 'Jonathan,'" Diamond declared, "I vowed never to get involved in a movie again unless I had complete control." Bartlett angrily responded to Diamond's lawsuit by criticizing his music as having become "too slick...and it's not as much from his heart as it used to be." Bartlett also added, "Neil is extraordinarily talented. Often his arrogance is just a cover for the lonely and insecure person underneath."
Despite the controversy surrounding the film, the soundtrack was a success, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart. Diamond also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture. Thereafter, Diamond often included a Jonathan Livingston Seagull suite in his live performances, as he did in his 1976 "Love at the Greek" concert and for his show in Las Vegas that same year.
Diamond returned to live shows in 1976 with an Australian tour, "The 'Thank You Australia' Concert", which was broadcast to 36 television outlets nationwide. He also again appeared at the Greek Theater in a 1976 concert, Love at the Greek. An album and accompanying video/DVD of the show includes a version of "Song Sung Blue" with duets with Helen Reddy and Henry Winkler, a.k.a. Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli of Happy Days.
He began wearing colorful beaded shirts in concert, originally so that everyone in the audience could see him without binoculars. Bill Whitten designed and made the shirts for Diamond from the 1970s till approximately 2007.
In 1974, Diamond released the album Serenade, from which "Longfellow Serenade" and "I've Been This Way Before" were issued as singles. The latter had been intended for the Jonathan Livingston Seagull score, but Diamond had completed it too late for inclusion. That same year he appeared on a TV special for Shirley Bassey and sang a duet with her.
In 1976, he released Beautiful Noise, produced by Robbie Robertson of The Band. On Thanksgiving 1976, Diamond made an appearance at The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, performing "Dry Your Eyes", which he wrote jointly with Robertson, and which had appeared on Beautiful Noise. He also joined the rest of the performers onstage at the end in a rendition of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released".
Diamond was paid $650,000 (about US$ million in dollars) from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, to open its new $10 million Theater For the Performing Arts on July 2, 1976. The show played through July 5 and drew sold-out crowds at the 7,500-seat theater. A "who's who" of Hollywood attended opening night, ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Chevy Chase, and Diamond walked out on stage to a standing ovation. He opened the show with a story about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him before he became successful. His lead-in line to the first song of the evening was, "You may have dumped me a bit too soon, baby, because look who's standing here tonight."
He performed at Woburn Abbey on July 2, 1977, to an audience of 55,000 British fans. The concert and interviews were taped by film director William Friedkin, who used six cameras to capture the performance.
In 1977, Diamond released I'm Glad You're Here With Me Tonight, including "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", for which he composed the music and on the writing of whose lyrics he collaborated with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. Barbra Streisand covered the song on her album Songbird, and later, a Diamond-Streisand duet was recorded, spurred by the success of radio mash-ups. That version hit No. 1 in 1978, his third song to top the Hot 100. They appeared unannounced at the 1980 Grammy awards ceremony, where they performed the song to a surprised and rapturous audience.
His last 1970s album was September Morn, which included a new version of "I'm a Believer". It and "Red Red Wine" are his best-known original songs made more famous by other artists. In February 1979, the uptempo "Forever in Blue Jeans", co-written and jointly composed with his guitarist, Richard Bennett, was released as a single from You Don't Bring Me Flowers, Diamond's album from the previous year.
In 1979, Diamond collapsed on stage in San Francisco and was taken to the hospital, where he endured a 12-hour operation to remove what turned out to be a tumor on his spine. He said he had been losing feeling in his right leg "for a number of years but ignored it." When he collapsed, he had no strength in either leg. He underwent a long rehabilitation process just before starting principal photography on his film The Jazz Singer (1980). He was so convinced he was going to die that he wrote farewell letters to his friends.
1980s
A planned film version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" to star Diamond and Streisand fell through when Diamond instead starred in a 1980 remake of the Al Jolson classic The Jazz Singer alongside Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz. Though the movie received poor reviews, the soundtrack spawned three Top 10 singles, "Love on the Rocks", "Hello Again", and "America", the last of which had emotional significance for Diamond. "'America' was the story of my grandparents," he told an interviewer. "It's my gift to them, and it's very real for me ... In a way, it speaks to the immigrant in all of us." The song was performed in full by Diamond during the film's finale. An abbreviated version played over the film's opening titles.
The song was also the one he was most proud of, partly because of when it was later used: national news shows played it when the hostages were shown returning home after the Iran hostage crisis ended; it was played on the air during the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty; and at a tribute to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Vietnam Vets Welcome Home concert, he was asked to perform it live. At the time, a national poll found the song to be the number-one most recognized song about America, more than "God Bless America". It also became the anthem of his world tour two weeks after the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, when he changed the lyric at the end from; "They're coming to America", to "Stand up for America!" Earlier that year he performed it after a request from former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.
The film's failure was due in part to Diamond never having acted professionally before. "I didn't think I could handle it," he said later, seeing himself as "a fish out of water." For his performance, Diamond became the first-ever winner of a Worst Actor Razzie Award, even though he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the same role. Critic David Wild noted that the film showed that Diamond was open about his religion: "Who else but this Jewish Elvis could go multi-platinum with an album that featured a version of 'the Kol Nidre?'" Diamond later told the Los Angeles Times, "For me, this was the ultimate bar mitzvah."
Another Top 10 selection, "Heartlight", was inspired by the blockbuster 1982 movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Though the film's title character is never mentioned in the lyrics, Universal Pictures, which had released E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and was the parent company of the Uni Records label, by then called MCA Records, for which Diamond had recorded for years, briefly threatened legal action against both Diamond and Columbia Records.
Diamond's record sales slumped somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, his last single to make the Billboard's Pop Singles chart coming in 1986, but his concert tours continued to be big draws. Billboard magazine ranked Diamond as the most profitable solo performer of 1986. He released his 17th studio album in 1986, Headed for the Future, which reached number 20 on the Billboard 200. Three weeks later he starred in Hello Again, his first television special in nine years, performing comedy sketches and a duo medley with Carol Burnett.
In January 1987, Diamond sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. His "America" became the theme song for the Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign. That same year, UB40's reggae interpretation of Diamond's ballad "Red Red Wine" topped the Billboard Pop Singles chart and, like the Monkees' version of "I'm a Believer", became better known than Diamond's original version.
1990s
During the 1990s, Diamond produced six studio albums. He covered many classic songs from the movies and from famous Brill Building-era songwriters. He also released two Christmas albums, the first of which peaked at No. 8 on Billboard's Album chart. Diamond also recorded two albums of mostly new material during this period. In 1992, he performed for President George H.W. Bush's final Christmas in Washington NBC special. In 1993, Diamond opened the Mark of the Quad Cities (now the iWireless Center) with two shows on May 27 and 28 to a crowd of 27,000-plus.
The 1990s saw a resurgence in Diamond's popularity. "Sweet Caroline" became a popular sing-along at sporting events. It was used at Boston College football and basketball games. College sporting events in other states also played it, and it was even played at sports events in other countries, such as a Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament or a soccer match in Northern Ireland. It is played at every home game of the Sydney Swans of the Australian Football League. It became the theme song of Red Sox Nation, the fans of the Boston Red Sox.
The New York Rangers also adapted it as their own and played it whenever they were winning at the end of the third period of their games. The Pitt Panthers football team also played it after the third quarter of all home games, with the crowd cheering, "Let's go Pitt". The Carolina Panthers played it at the end of every home game they won. The Davidson College pep band likewise played it in the second half of every Davidson Wildcats men's basketball home game.
2000s
A more severely stripped-down-to-basics album, 12 Songs, produced by Rick Rubin, was released on November 8, 2005, in two editions: a standard 12-song release, and a special edition with two bonus tracks, including one featuring backing vocals by Brian Wilson. The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard chart, and received generally positive reviews; Earliwine describes the album as "inarguably Neil Diamond's best set of songs in a long, long time." 12 Songs also became noteworthy as one of the last albums to be pressed and released by Sony BMG with the Extended Copy Protection software embedded in the disc. (See the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal.)
In 2007, Diamond was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
On March 19, 2008, it was announced on the television show American Idol that Diamond would be a guest mentor to the remaining Idol contestants, who would sing Diamond songs for the broadcasts of April 29 and 30, 2008. On the April 30 broadcast, Diamond premiered a new song, "Pretty Amazing Grace", from his then recently released album Home Before Dark. On May 2, 2008, Sirius Satellite Radio started Neil Diamond Radio. On April 8, 2008, Diamond made a surprise announcement in a big-screen broadcast at Fenway Park that he would be appearing there "live in concert" on August 23, 2008, as part of his world tour. The announcement, which marked the first official confirmation of any 2008 concert dates in the US, came during the traditional eighth-inning singalong of "Sweet Caroline", which had by that time become an anthem for Boston fans.
On April 28, 2008, Diamond appeared on the roof of the Jimmy Kimmel building to sing "Sweet Caroline" after Kimmel was jokingly arrested for singing the song dressed as a Diamond impersonator.
Home Before Dark was released May 6, 2008, and topped the album charts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
On June 29, 2008, Diamond played to an estimated 108,000 fans at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England on the Concert of a Lifetime Tour; technical problems marred the concert.
In August, Diamond allowed cameras to record his entire four-night run at New York's Madison Square Garden; he released the resulting DVD in the U.S. in 2009, one year to the day of the first concert. Hot August Night/NYC debuted at No. 2 on the charts. On the same day the DVD was released, CBS aired an edited version, which won the ratings hour with 13 million viewers. The next day, the sales of the DVD surged, prompting Sony to order more copies to meet the high demand.
On August 25, 2008, Diamond performed at The Ohio State University while suffering from laryngitis. The result disappointed him as well as his fans, and on August 26, he offered refunds to anyone who applied by September 5.
Diamond was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 6, 2009, two nights before the 51st Annual Grammy Awards.
Long loved in Boston, Diamond was invited to sing at the July 4, 2009, Independence Day celebration.
On October 13, 2009, he released A Cherry Cherry Christmas, his third album of holiday music.
2010s
On November 2, 2010, Diamond released the album Dreams, a collection of 14 interpretations of his favorite songs by artists from the rock era. The album also included a new slow-tempo arrangement of his "I'm a Believer". In December, he performed a track from the album, "Ain't No Sunshine", on NBC's The Sing-Off with Committed and Street Corner Symphony, two a cappella groups featured on the show. The Very Best of Neil Diamond, a compilation CD of Diamond's 23 studio recordings from the Bang, UNI/MCA, & Columbia catalogs, was released on December 6, 2011, on the Sony Legacy label.
The years 2011 and 2012 were marked by several milestones in Diamond's career. On March 14, 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. In December, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Kennedy Center at the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors. On August 10, 2012, Diamond received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In November 2012, he topped the bill at the centenary edition of the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, which was transmitted on December 3. He also appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On April 20, 2013, Diamond made an unannounced appearance at Fenway Park to sing "Sweet Caroline" during the 8th inning. It was the first game at Fenway since the Boston Marathon bombing. On July 2, he released the single "Freedom Song (They'll Never Take Us Down)", with 100% of the purchase price benefiting One Fund Boston and the Wounded Warrior Project.
Sporting a beard, Diamond performed live on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol as part of A Capitol Fourth, which was broadcast nationally by PBS on July 4, 2013.
In January 2014, it was confirmed that Diamond had signed with the Capitol Music Group unit of Universal Music Group, which also owned Diamond's Uni/MCA catalog. UMG also took over Diamond's Columbia and Bang catalogues, which meant that all of his recorded output would be consolidated for the first time.
On July 8, 2014, Capitol Records announced, via a flyer included with Diamond's latest greatest hits compilations, All-Time Greatest Hits, which charted at 15 in the Billboard 200, that his next album, Melody Road, which was to be produced by Don Was and Jacknife Lee, would be released on September 30, 2014. In August, the release date was moved to October 21.
In September 2014, Diamond performed a surprise concert at his alma mater, Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. The show was announced via Twitter that afternoon. On the same day, he announced a 2015 "Melody Road" World Tour. The North American leg of the World Tour 2015 launched with a concert in Allentown, PA at the PPL Center on February 27 and ended at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado on May 31, 2015. Diamond used new media platforms and social media extensively throughout the tour, streaming several shows live on Periscope and showing tweets from fans who used the hashtag #tweetcaroline on two large screens. The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote: "This, my friends, wasn’t your grandfather's Neil Diamond concert. It was a multimedia extravaganza. Twitter. Periscope...It was a social media blitzkrieg that, by all accounts, proved to be an innovative way to widen his fan base."
In October 2016, Diamond released Acoustic Christmas, a folk-inspired Christmas album of original songs as well as acoustic versions of holiday classics. Produced by Was and Lee, who had produced Melody Road, the idea for the album began to take shape as the Melody Road sessions ended. To "channel the intimate atmosphere of '60s folk, Diamond recorded Acoustic Christmas with a handful of musicians, sitting around a circle of microphones, wires and, of course, Christmas lights."
In March 2017, the career-spanning anthology Neil Diamond 50 – 50th Anniversary Collection was released. He began his final concert tour, the 50 Year Anniversary World Tour in Fresno, California, in April.
In 2019, his 1969 signature song "Sweet Caroline" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
2020s
On March 7, 2020, despite his retirement due to Parkinson's disease, Diamond gave a rare performance at the Keep Memory Alive Power of Love Gala at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, where he was being honored.
On March 22, 2020, Diamond posted a video to YouTube playing "Sweet Caroline" with slightly modified lyrics ("...washing hands, don't touch me, I won't touch you...") in response to the widespread social distancing measures implemented due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2021, The New York Times reported that A Beautiful Noise, a musical based on Diamond's life and featuring his songs, would open at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston in the summer of 2022. The musical was scheduled to open on Broadway following the monthlong run in Boston.
Universal Music Group acquired Diamond's songwriting catalog and the rights to his recordings in February 2022. The acquisition also included 110 unreleased tracks, an unreleased album and archival videos.
Retirement
In January 2018, Diamond announced that he would immediately retire from touring due to having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Tour dates on the final leg of Diamond's "50 Year Anniversary World Tour" in Australia and New Zealand were cancelled. An announcement on his official website said he was not retiring from music and that the cancellation of the live performances would allow him to "continue his writing, recording and development of new projects."
On July 28, 2018, Diamond and his wife Katie McNeil made a surprise visit to the Incident Command post in Basalt, Colorado—near where Diamond lives—to thank the firefighters and families with a solo acoustic guitar concert for efforts in containing the Lake Christine Fire, which began on July 3 and had scorched of land.
In pop culture
In 1967, Diamond was featured on the fourth episode of the detective drama Mannix as the 'featured' artist in a small underground club called 'The BAD SCENE' and was interrupted during his singing by one of many fights that took place weekly on the show.
In 2000, Neil Diamond appeared onstage with Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond, surprising them before their show at House of Blues in Los Angeles.
In the 2001 comedy film Saving Silverman, the main characters play in a Diamond cover band, and Diamond made an extended cameo appearance as himself. Diamond even wrote and composed a new song, "I Believe in Happy Endings", for the film. He sat in with the tribute band Super Diamond at the film's premiere party.
In 2008, Diamond gave film-maker Greg Kohs permission to use his songs in a documentary. Kohs, a director from Philadelphia, had met a popular Milwaukee, Wisconsin, duo, Lightning & Thunder, composed of Mike Sardina, who did a Diamond impersonation, and his wife Claire. Kohs followed them for eight years and produced the film Song Sung Blue. Though Sardina had died in 2006, Diamond invited his widow and her family to be his front-row guests at his show in Milwaukee, where he told them he was moved by the film.
In the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, main characters Howard Wolowitz and Amy Farrah-Fowler are fans of Diamond's work.
Personal life
Diamond has been married three times. In 1963, he married his high-school sweetheart, Jaye Posner, who had become a schoolteacher. They had two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn. They separated in 1967 and divorced in 1969.
On December 5, 1969, Diamond married production assistant Marcia Murphey. They had two sons, Jesse and Micah. The marriage lasted 25 years, ending in 1994 or 1995.
In 1996, Diamond began a lengthy, live-in relationship with Australian Rae Farley after the two met in Brisbane, Australia. The songs on Home Before Dark were written and composed during her struggle with chronic back pain.
On September 7, 2011, in a message on Twitter, the 70-year-old Diamond announced his engagement to the 41-year-old Katie McNeil. Diamond said that his 2014 album Melody Road was fueled by their relationship, explaining:
There's no better inspiration or motivation for work than being in love. It's what you dream of as a creative person. I was able to complete this album—start it, write it and complete it—under the spell of love, and I think it shows somehow.
The couple married in front of family and close friends in Los Angeles in 2012. In addition to serving as Diamond's manager, McNeil produced the documentary Neil Diamond: Hot August Nights NYC.
Discography
Filmography
Diamond had a television appearance and roles in some movies, notably:
Mannix, "The Many Deaths of Saint Christopher" (1967) as himself
The Jazz Singer, starring role as Jess Robin
Saving Silverman appearing as himself
Notes
References
External links
Neil Diamond's Band's Official Site
1941 births
Living people
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American pianists
20th-century American singers
21st-century American pianists
21st-century American singers
Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American acoustic guitarists
American baritones
American folk guitarists
American male guitarists
American male pianists
American male singer-songwriters
American pop guitarists
American pop rock singers
American rock guitarists
American rock songwriters
American soft rock musicians
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American musicians
Jewish American songwriters
Jewish singers
Jewish folk singers
Jewish rock musicians
Erasmus Hall High School alumni
Capitol Records artists
Columbia Records artists
MCA Records artists
NYU Violets fencers
Uni Records artists
Golden Globe Award-winning musicians
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Kennedy Center honorees
Rhythm guitarists
Musicians from Brooklyn
Guitarists from New York City
Singers from New York City
People with Parkinson's disease
Singer-songwriters from New York (state)
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"Miguel Skrobot (Warsaw, 1873 – Curitiba, February 20, 1912) was a businessman Brazilian of Polish origin.\n\nMiguel Skrobot was born in 1873, in Warsaw, Poland, to José Skrobot and Rosa Skrobot. When he was 18 he migrated to Brazil and settled in Curitiba as a merchant.\n\nHe married Maria Pansardi, who was born in Tibagi, Paraná, to Italian immigrants, and she bore him three children. He kept a steam-powered factory where he worked on grinding and toasting coffee beans under the \"Rio Branco\" brand, located on the spot where today stands the square called Praça Zacarias (square located in the center of Curitiba). He also owned a grocery store near Praça Tiradentes (also a square in the center of Curitiba, where the city was born). He died an early death, when he was 39, on February 20, 1912.\n\nReferences\n\n1873 births\n1912 deaths\nBrazilian businesspeople\nPeople from Curitiba\nPolish emigrants to Brazil",
"Adolf von Rauch (22 April 1798 - 12 December 1882) was a German paper manufacturer in Heilbronn, where he was born and died and where he was a major builder of social housing.\n\nPapermakers\n1798 births\n1882 deaths\nPeople from Heilbronn"
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"Neil Diamond",
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"Where was he born?",
"Brooklyn, New York,"
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Where was he born?
| 2 |
Where was Neil Diamond born?
|
Neil Diamond
|
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. His parents were Rose (nee Rapaport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand. They were not close friends at the time, Diamond recalls: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved he then attended Abraham Lincoln High School, and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen. For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16, and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He adds that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, besides helping him release his youthful "frustrations". Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife. Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$405 per week, in 2017 dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it. CANNOTANSWER
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Brooklyn, New York,
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Neil Leslie Diamond (born January 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and occasional actor. He has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has had ten No. 1 singles on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts: "Cracklin' Rosie", "Song Sung Blue", "Longfellow Serenade", "I've Been This Way Before", "If You Know What I Mean", "Desirée", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "America", "Yesterday's Songs", and "Heartlight". Thirty-eight songs by Diamond have been featured in the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts. He also played in movies such as The Jazz Singer, a musical drama film.
Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In 2011, he was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Early life and education
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. All four of his grandparents were immigrants, from Poland on his father's side and Russia on his mother's. His parents were Rose (née Rapoport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand; Diamond recalled they were not close friends at the time: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved to Brighton Beach, he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen.
For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16 and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He added that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, while also helping him release his youthful "frustrations".
Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them, which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife.
Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$ per week, in dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it.
Career
1960s
Diamond was not rehired after his 16 weeks with Sunbeam, and he began writing and singing his own songs for demos. "I never really chose songwriting," he says. "It just absorbed me and became more and more important in my life." His first recording contract was billed as "Neil and Jack", an Everly Brothers-type duet with high school friend Jack Packer. They recorded the unsuccessful singles "You Are My Love at Last" with "What Will I Do", and "I'm Afraid" with "Till You've Tried Love", both records released in 1962. Cashbox and Billboard magazines gave all four sides excellent reviews, and Diamond signed with Columbia Records as a solo performer later in 1962. In July 1963, Columbia released the single "At Night" with "Clown Town"; Billboard gave an excellent review to Clown Town, and Cashbox gave both sides excellent reviews, but it still failed to make the charts. Columbia dropped him from their label and he went back to writing songs in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years.
He wrote wherever he could, including on buses, and used an upright piano above the Birdland Club in New York City. One of the causes of this early nomadic life as a songwriter was his songs' wordiness: "I'd spent a lot of time on lyrics, and they were looking for hooks, and I didn't really understand the nature of that," he says. He was able to sell only about one song a week during those years, barely enough to survive on. He found himself only earning enough to spend 35 cents a day on food (US$ in dollars). But the privacy that he had above the Birdland Club allowed him to focus on writing without distractions. "Something new began to happen. I wasn't under the gun, and suddenly interesting songs began to happen, songs that had things none of the others did." Among them were "Cherry, Cherry" and "Solitary Man". "Solitary Man" was the first record that Diamond recorded under his own name which made the charts. It remains one of his personal all-time favorites, as it was about his early years as a songwriter, even though he failed to realize it at the time. He describes the song as "an outgrowth of my despair".
Diamond spent his early career in the Brill Building. His first success as a songwriter came in November 1965 with "Sunday and Me", a Top 20 hit for Jay and the Americans. Greater success followed with "I'm a Believer", "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You", "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)", and "Love to Love", all performed by the Monkees. He wrote and recorded the songs for himself, but the cover versions were released before his own. The unintended consequence was that Diamond began to gain fame as a songwriter. "I'm a Believer" became a gold record within two days of its release and stayed at the top of the charts for seven weeks, making it the Popular Music Song of the Year in 1966.
"And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" brought covers from Elvis Presley (who also interpreted "Sweet Caroline") and Mark Lindsay, former lead singer for Paul Revere & the Raiders. Other notable artists who recorded his early songs were the English hard-rock band Deep Purple, Lulu, and Cliff Richard.
In 1966, Diamond signed a deal with Bert Berns's Bang Records, then a subsidiary of Atlantic. His first release on that label was "Solitary Man", which was his first true hit as a solo artist. Diamond followed with "Cherry, Cherry" and "Kentucky Woman". His early concerts featured him opening for bands such as Herman's Hermits and the Who. As a guest performer with The Who, he was shocked to see Pete Townshend swinging his guitar like a club and then throwing it against walls and off the stage until the instrument's neck broke.
Diamond began to feel restricted by Bang Records because he wanted to record more ambitious, introspective music, such as "Brooklyn Roads" from 1968. Berns wanted to release "Kentucky Woman" as a single, but Diamond was no longer satisfied writing simple pop songs, so he proposed "Shilo", which was not about the Civil War but rather an imaginary childhood friend. Bang believed that the song was not commercial enough, so it was relegated to being an LP track on "Just for You". Diamond was also dissatisfied with his royalties and tried to sign with another record label after discovering a loophole in his contract that did not bind him exclusively to either WEB IV or Tallyrand, but the result was a series of lawsuits that coincided with a slump in his record sales and professional success. A magistrate refused WEB IV's request for a temporary injunction to prevent Diamond from joining another record company while his contract dispute continued in court, but the lawsuits persisted until February 18, 1977, when he triumphed in court and purchased the rights to his Bang-era master tapes.
On March 18, 1968, Diamond signed a deal with Uni Records; the label was named after Universal Pictures, the owner of which, MCA Inc., later consolidated its labels into MCA Records (now called Universal Music after merging with PolyGram in 1999). His debut album for Uni/MCA was Velvet Gloves and Spit, produced by Tom Catalano, which did not chart, and he recorded the follow-up Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show at American Sound Studios in Memphis with Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman producing.
1970s
In late 1969, he moved to Los Angeles. His sound mellowed with such songs as "Sweet Caroline" (1969), "Holly Holy" (1969), "Cracklin' Rosie" (1970) and "Song Sung Blue" (1972), the last two reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. "Sweet Caroline" was Diamond's first major hit after his slump. In 2007 Diamond said he had written "Sweet Caroline" for Caroline Kennedy after seeing her on the cover of Life in an equestrian riding outfit, but in 2014 he said in an interview on the Today Show that it was written for his then wife, Marcia. He could not find a good rhyme with the name "Marcia" and so used the name Caroline. It took him just one hour, in a Memphis hotel, to write and compose it. The 1971 release "I Am...I Said" was a Top 5 hit in both the US and UK and was his most intensely personal effort to date, taking over four months to complete.
In 1971, Diamond played 7 sold-out concerts at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The outdoor theater, which was noted for showcasing the best of current entertainers, added a stereo sound system for the first time. Diamond was also backed by a 35-piece string orchestra and six backing singers. After the first night, one leading newspaper called it "the finest concert in Greek Theater history."
In August 1972, he played again at the Greek, this time doing 10 shows. When the show was first announced, tickets at the 5000-seat theater sold out rapidly. He added a quadraphonic sound system for his performance to create full surround-sound. The performance of August 24, 1972, was recorded and released as the live double album Hot August Night. Hot August Night demonstrates Diamond's skills as a performer and showman, as he reinvigorated his back catalogue of hits with new energy. Diamond recalled: "Hot August Night captures a very special show for me. We went all out to really knock 'em dead in L.A." Many consider it his best work; critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Hot August Night "the ultimate Neil Diamond record... [which] shows Diamond the icon in full glory." The album became a classic, and was remastered in 2000 with additional selections. In Australia, which at the time had the most Neil Diamond fans per capita of any country, the album ranked No. 1 for 29 weeks and stayed in their top 20 bestsellers for two years.
In the fall of 1972, Diamond performed for 20 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. That theater had not staged a one-man show since Al Jolson in the 1930s. The approximately 1,600-seat Broadway venue provided an intimate concert setting not common at the time, with every performance reportedly sold out. It also made Diamond the first rock-era star to headline on Broadway. The review in the New York Times stated:
After the Winter Garden shows, Diamond announced that he needed a break, and he engaged in no more live performances till 1976. He used those four years to work on the score for Hall Bartlett's film version of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and to record two albums, Serenade and Beautiful Noise. He said years later, "I knew I'd come back, but I wasn't sure when. I spent one year on each of those albums...I'd been on the road six years. I had a son 2½ and I felt he needed me more than the audience did. So for four years I devoted myself to my son Jesse." He also said he needed to get back to having a private life, one where he could be anonymous.
In 1973, Diamond switched labels again, returning to Columbia Records for a million-dollar-advance-per-album contract (about US$ million per album in dollars). His first project, released as a solo album, was the soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The film received hostile reviews and did poorly at the box office, and the album grossed more than the film did. Richard D. Bach, author of the best-selling source story, disowned the film, and he and Diamond sued Bartlett, though for differing reasons; in Bach's case, it was because he felt the film omitted too much from the original novella, whereas in Diamond's case, it was because he felt the film had butchered his score. "After 'Jonathan,'" Diamond declared, "I vowed never to get involved in a movie again unless I had complete control." Bartlett angrily responded to Diamond's lawsuit by criticizing his music as having become "too slick...and it's not as much from his heart as it used to be." Bartlett also added, "Neil is extraordinarily talented. Often his arrogance is just a cover for the lonely and insecure person underneath."
Despite the controversy surrounding the film, the soundtrack was a success, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart. Diamond also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture. Thereafter, Diamond often included a Jonathan Livingston Seagull suite in his live performances, as he did in his 1976 "Love at the Greek" concert and for his show in Las Vegas that same year.
Diamond returned to live shows in 1976 with an Australian tour, "The 'Thank You Australia' Concert", which was broadcast to 36 television outlets nationwide. He also again appeared at the Greek Theater in a 1976 concert, Love at the Greek. An album and accompanying video/DVD of the show includes a version of "Song Sung Blue" with duets with Helen Reddy and Henry Winkler, a.k.a. Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli of Happy Days.
He began wearing colorful beaded shirts in concert, originally so that everyone in the audience could see him without binoculars. Bill Whitten designed and made the shirts for Diamond from the 1970s till approximately 2007.
In 1974, Diamond released the album Serenade, from which "Longfellow Serenade" and "I've Been This Way Before" were issued as singles. The latter had been intended for the Jonathan Livingston Seagull score, but Diamond had completed it too late for inclusion. That same year he appeared on a TV special for Shirley Bassey and sang a duet with her.
In 1976, he released Beautiful Noise, produced by Robbie Robertson of The Band. On Thanksgiving 1976, Diamond made an appearance at The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, performing "Dry Your Eyes", which he wrote jointly with Robertson, and which had appeared on Beautiful Noise. He also joined the rest of the performers onstage at the end in a rendition of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released".
Diamond was paid $650,000 (about US$ million in dollars) from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, to open its new $10 million Theater For the Performing Arts on July 2, 1976. The show played through July 5 and drew sold-out crowds at the 7,500-seat theater. A "who's who" of Hollywood attended opening night, ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Chevy Chase, and Diamond walked out on stage to a standing ovation. He opened the show with a story about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him before he became successful. His lead-in line to the first song of the evening was, "You may have dumped me a bit too soon, baby, because look who's standing here tonight."
He performed at Woburn Abbey on July 2, 1977, to an audience of 55,000 British fans. The concert and interviews were taped by film director William Friedkin, who used six cameras to capture the performance.
In 1977, Diamond released I'm Glad You're Here With Me Tonight, including "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", for which he composed the music and on the writing of whose lyrics he collaborated with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. Barbra Streisand covered the song on her album Songbird, and later, a Diamond-Streisand duet was recorded, spurred by the success of radio mash-ups. That version hit No. 1 in 1978, his third song to top the Hot 100. They appeared unannounced at the 1980 Grammy awards ceremony, where they performed the song to a surprised and rapturous audience.
His last 1970s album was September Morn, which included a new version of "I'm a Believer". It and "Red Red Wine" are his best-known original songs made more famous by other artists. In February 1979, the uptempo "Forever in Blue Jeans", co-written and jointly composed with his guitarist, Richard Bennett, was released as a single from You Don't Bring Me Flowers, Diamond's album from the previous year.
In 1979, Diamond collapsed on stage in San Francisco and was taken to the hospital, where he endured a 12-hour operation to remove what turned out to be a tumor on his spine. He said he had been losing feeling in his right leg "for a number of years but ignored it." When he collapsed, he had no strength in either leg. He underwent a long rehabilitation process just before starting principal photography on his film The Jazz Singer (1980). He was so convinced he was going to die that he wrote farewell letters to his friends.
1980s
A planned film version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" to star Diamond and Streisand fell through when Diamond instead starred in a 1980 remake of the Al Jolson classic The Jazz Singer alongside Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz. Though the movie received poor reviews, the soundtrack spawned three Top 10 singles, "Love on the Rocks", "Hello Again", and "America", the last of which had emotional significance for Diamond. "'America' was the story of my grandparents," he told an interviewer. "It's my gift to them, and it's very real for me ... In a way, it speaks to the immigrant in all of us." The song was performed in full by Diamond during the film's finale. An abbreviated version played over the film's opening titles.
The song was also the one he was most proud of, partly because of when it was later used: national news shows played it when the hostages were shown returning home after the Iran hostage crisis ended; it was played on the air during the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty; and at a tribute to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Vietnam Vets Welcome Home concert, he was asked to perform it live. At the time, a national poll found the song to be the number-one most recognized song about America, more than "God Bless America". It also became the anthem of his world tour two weeks after the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, when he changed the lyric at the end from; "They're coming to America", to "Stand up for America!" Earlier that year he performed it after a request from former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.
The film's failure was due in part to Diamond never having acted professionally before. "I didn't think I could handle it," he said later, seeing himself as "a fish out of water." For his performance, Diamond became the first-ever winner of a Worst Actor Razzie Award, even though he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the same role. Critic David Wild noted that the film showed that Diamond was open about his religion: "Who else but this Jewish Elvis could go multi-platinum with an album that featured a version of 'the Kol Nidre?'" Diamond later told the Los Angeles Times, "For me, this was the ultimate bar mitzvah."
Another Top 10 selection, "Heartlight", was inspired by the blockbuster 1982 movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Though the film's title character is never mentioned in the lyrics, Universal Pictures, which had released E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and was the parent company of the Uni Records label, by then called MCA Records, for which Diamond had recorded for years, briefly threatened legal action against both Diamond and Columbia Records.
Diamond's record sales slumped somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, his last single to make the Billboard's Pop Singles chart coming in 1986, but his concert tours continued to be big draws. Billboard magazine ranked Diamond as the most profitable solo performer of 1986. He released his 17th studio album in 1986, Headed for the Future, which reached number 20 on the Billboard 200. Three weeks later he starred in Hello Again, his first television special in nine years, performing comedy sketches and a duo medley with Carol Burnett.
In January 1987, Diamond sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. His "America" became the theme song for the Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign. That same year, UB40's reggae interpretation of Diamond's ballad "Red Red Wine" topped the Billboard Pop Singles chart and, like the Monkees' version of "I'm a Believer", became better known than Diamond's original version.
1990s
During the 1990s, Diamond produced six studio albums. He covered many classic songs from the movies and from famous Brill Building-era songwriters. He also released two Christmas albums, the first of which peaked at No. 8 on Billboard's Album chart. Diamond also recorded two albums of mostly new material during this period. In 1992, he performed for President George H.W. Bush's final Christmas in Washington NBC special. In 1993, Diamond opened the Mark of the Quad Cities (now the iWireless Center) with two shows on May 27 and 28 to a crowd of 27,000-plus.
The 1990s saw a resurgence in Diamond's popularity. "Sweet Caroline" became a popular sing-along at sporting events. It was used at Boston College football and basketball games. College sporting events in other states also played it, and it was even played at sports events in other countries, such as a Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament or a soccer match in Northern Ireland. It is played at every home game of the Sydney Swans of the Australian Football League. It became the theme song of Red Sox Nation, the fans of the Boston Red Sox.
The New York Rangers also adapted it as their own and played it whenever they were winning at the end of the third period of their games. The Pitt Panthers football team also played it after the third quarter of all home games, with the crowd cheering, "Let's go Pitt". The Carolina Panthers played it at the end of every home game they won. The Davidson College pep band likewise played it in the second half of every Davidson Wildcats men's basketball home game.
2000s
A more severely stripped-down-to-basics album, 12 Songs, produced by Rick Rubin, was released on November 8, 2005, in two editions: a standard 12-song release, and a special edition with two bonus tracks, including one featuring backing vocals by Brian Wilson. The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard chart, and received generally positive reviews; Earliwine describes the album as "inarguably Neil Diamond's best set of songs in a long, long time." 12 Songs also became noteworthy as one of the last albums to be pressed and released by Sony BMG with the Extended Copy Protection software embedded in the disc. (See the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal.)
In 2007, Diamond was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
On March 19, 2008, it was announced on the television show American Idol that Diamond would be a guest mentor to the remaining Idol contestants, who would sing Diamond songs for the broadcasts of April 29 and 30, 2008. On the April 30 broadcast, Diamond premiered a new song, "Pretty Amazing Grace", from his then recently released album Home Before Dark. On May 2, 2008, Sirius Satellite Radio started Neil Diamond Radio. On April 8, 2008, Diamond made a surprise announcement in a big-screen broadcast at Fenway Park that he would be appearing there "live in concert" on August 23, 2008, as part of his world tour. The announcement, which marked the first official confirmation of any 2008 concert dates in the US, came during the traditional eighth-inning singalong of "Sweet Caroline", which had by that time become an anthem for Boston fans.
On April 28, 2008, Diamond appeared on the roof of the Jimmy Kimmel building to sing "Sweet Caroline" after Kimmel was jokingly arrested for singing the song dressed as a Diamond impersonator.
Home Before Dark was released May 6, 2008, and topped the album charts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
On June 29, 2008, Diamond played to an estimated 108,000 fans at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England on the Concert of a Lifetime Tour; technical problems marred the concert.
In August, Diamond allowed cameras to record his entire four-night run at New York's Madison Square Garden; he released the resulting DVD in the U.S. in 2009, one year to the day of the first concert. Hot August Night/NYC debuted at No. 2 on the charts. On the same day the DVD was released, CBS aired an edited version, which won the ratings hour with 13 million viewers. The next day, the sales of the DVD surged, prompting Sony to order more copies to meet the high demand.
On August 25, 2008, Diamond performed at The Ohio State University while suffering from laryngitis. The result disappointed him as well as his fans, and on August 26, he offered refunds to anyone who applied by September 5.
Diamond was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 6, 2009, two nights before the 51st Annual Grammy Awards.
Long loved in Boston, Diamond was invited to sing at the July 4, 2009, Independence Day celebration.
On October 13, 2009, he released A Cherry Cherry Christmas, his third album of holiday music.
2010s
On November 2, 2010, Diamond released the album Dreams, a collection of 14 interpretations of his favorite songs by artists from the rock era. The album also included a new slow-tempo arrangement of his "I'm a Believer". In December, he performed a track from the album, "Ain't No Sunshine", on NBC's The Sing-Off with Committed and Street Corner Symphony, two a cappella groups featured on the show. The Very Best of Neil Diamond, a compilation CD of Diamond's 23 studio recordings from the Bang, UNI/MCA, & Columbia catalogs, was released on December 6, 2011, on the Sony Legacy label.
The years 2011 and 2012 were marked by several milestones in Diamond's career. On March 14, 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. In December, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Kennedy Center at the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors. On August 10, 2012, Diamond received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In November 2012, he topped the bill at the centenary edition of the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, which was transmitted on December 3. He also appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On April 20, 2013, Diamond made an unannounced appearance at Fenway Park to sing "Sweet Caroline" during the 8th inning. It was the first game at Fenway since the Boston Marathon bombing. On July 2, he released the single "Freedom Song (They'll Never Take Us Down)", with 100% of the purchase price benefiting One Fund Boston and the Wounded Warrior Project.
Sporting a beard, Diamond performed live on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol as part of A Capitol Fourth, which was broadcast nationally by PBS on July 4, 2013.
In January 2014, it was confirmed that Diamond had signed with the Capitol Music Group unit of Universal Music Group, which also owned Diamond's Uni/MCA catalog. UMG also took over Diamond's Columbia and Bang catalogues, which meant that all of his recorded output would be consolidated for the first time.
On July 8, 2014, Capitol Records announced, via a flyer included with Diamond's latest greatest hits compilations, All-Time Greatest Hits, which charted at 15 in the Billboard 200, that his next album, Melody Road, which was to be produced by Don Was and Jacknife Lee, would be released on September 30, 2014. In August, the release date was moved to October 21.
In September 2014, Diamond performed a surprise concert at his alma mater, Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. The show was announced via Twitter that afternoon. On the same day, he announced a 2015 "Melody Road" World Tour. The North American leg of the World Tour 2015 launched with a concert in Allentown, PA at the PPL Center on February 27 and ended at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado on May 31, 2015. Diamond used new media platforms and social media extensively throughout the tour, streaming several shows live on Periscope and showing tweets from fans who used the hashtag #tweetcaroline on two large screens. The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote: "This, my friends, wasn’t your grandfather's Neil Diamond concert. It was a multimedia extravaganza. Twitter. Periscope...It was a social media blitzkrieg that, by all accounts, proved to be an innovative way to widen his fan base."
In October 2016, Diamond released Acoustic Christmas, a folk-inspired Christmas album of original songs as well as acoustic versions of holiday classics. Produced by Was and Lee, who had produced Melody Road, the idea for the album began to take shape as the Melody Road sessions ended. To "channel the intimate atmosphere of '60s folk, Diamond recorded Acoustic Christmas with a handful of musicians, sitting around a circle of microphones, wires and, of course, Christmas lights."
In March 2017, the career-spanning anthology Neil Diamond 50 – 50th Anniversary Collection was released. He began his final concert tour, the 50 Year Anniversary World Tour in Fresno, California, in April.
In 2019, his 1969 signature song "Sweet Caroline" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
2020s
On March 7, 2020, despite his retirement due to Parkinson's disease, Diamond gave a rare performance at the Keep Memory Alive Power of Love Gala at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, where he was being honored.
On March 22, 2020, Diamond posted a video to YouTube playing "Sweet Caroline" with slightly modified lyrics ("...washing hands, don't touch me, I won't touch you...") in response to the widespread social distancing measures implemented due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2021, The New York Times reported that A Beautiful Noise, a musical based on Diamond's life and featuring his songs, would open at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston in the summer of 2022. The musical was scheduled to open on Broadway following the monthlong run in Boston.
Universal Music Group acquired Diamond's songwriting catalog and the rights to his recordings in February 2022. The acquisition also included 110 unreleased tracks, an unreleased album and archival videos.
Retirement
In January 2018, Diamond announced that he would immediately retire from touring due to having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Tour dates on the final leg of Diamond's "50 Year Anniversary World Tour" in Australia and New Zealand were cancelled. An announcement on his official website said he was not retiring from music and that the cancellation of the live performances would allow him to "continue his writing, recording and development of new projects."
On July 28, 2018, Diamond and his wife Katie McNeil made a surprise visit to the Incident Command post in Basalt, Colorado—near where Diamond lives—to thank the firefighters and families with a solo acoustic guitar concert for efforts in containing the Lake Christine Fire, which began on July 3 and had scorched of land.
In pop culture
In 1967, Diamond was featured on the fourth episode of the detective drama Mannix as the 'featured' artist in a small underground club called 'The BAD SCENE' and was interrupted during his singing by one of many fights that took place weekly on the show.
In 2000, Neil Diamond appeared onstage with Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond, surprising them before their show at House of Blues in Los Angeles.
In the 2001 comedy film Saving Silverman, the main characters play in a Diamond cover band, and Diamond made an extended cameo appearance as himself. Diamond even wrote and composed a new song, "I Believe in Happy Endings", for the film. He sat in with the tribute band Super Diamond at the film's premiere party.
In 2008, Diamond gave film-maker Greg Kohs permission to use his songs in a documentary. Kohs, a director from Philadelphia, had met a popular Milwaukee, Wisconsin, duo, Lightning & Thunder, composed of Mike Sardina, who did a Diamond impersonation, and his wife Claire. Kohs followed them for eight years and produced the film Song Sung Blue. Though Sardina had died in 2006, Diamond invited his widow and her family to be his front-row guests at his show in Milwaukee, where he told them he was moved by the film.
In the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, main characters Howard Wolowitz and Amy Farrah-Fowler are fans of Diamond's work.
Personal life
Diamond has been married three times. In 1963, he married his high-school sweetheart, Jaye Posner, who had become a schoolteacher. They had two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn. They separated in 1967 and divorced in 1969.
On December 5, 1969, Diamond married production assistant Marcia Murphey. They had two sons, Jesse and Micah. The marriage lasted 25 years, ending in 1994 or 1995.
In 1996, Diamond began a lengthy, live-in relationship with Australian Rae Farley after the two met in Brisbane, Australia. The songs on Home Before Dark were written and composed during her struggle with chronic back pain.
On September 7, 2011, in a message on Twitter, the 70-year-old Diamond announced his engagement to the 41-year-old Katie McNeil. Diamond said that his 2014 album Melody Road was fueled by their relationship, explaining:
There's no better inspiration or motivation for work than being in love. It's what you dream of as a creative person. I was able to complete this album—start it, write it and complete it—under the spell of love, and I think it shows somehow.
The couple married in front of family and close friends in Los Angeles in 2012. In addition to serving as Diamond's manager, McNeil produced the documentary Neil Diamond: Hot August Nights NYC.
Discography
Filmography
Diamond had a television appearance and roles in some movies, notably:
Mannix, "The Many Deaths of Saint Christopher" (1967) as himself
The Jazz Singer, starring role as Jess Robin
Saving Silverman appearing as himself
Notes
References
External links
Neil Diamond's Band's Official Site
1941 births
Living people
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American pianists
20th-century American singers
21st-century American pianists
21st-century American singers
Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American acoustic guitarists
American baritones
American folk guitarists
American male guitarists
American male pianists
American male singer-songwriters
American pop guitarists
American pop rock singers
American rock guitarists
American rock songwriters
American soft rock musicians
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American musicians
Jewish American songwriters
Jewish singers
Jewish folk singers
Jewish rock musicians
Erasmus Hall High School alumni
Capitol Records artists
Columbia Records artists
MCA Records artists
NYU Violets fencers
Uni Records artists
Golden Globe Award-winning musicians
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Kennedy Center honorees
Rhythm guitarists
Musicians from Brooklyn
Guitarists from New York City
Singers from New York City
People with Parkinson's disease
Singer-songwriters from New York (state)
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"Miguel Skrobot (Warsaw, 1873 – Curitiba, February 20, 1912) was a businessman Brazilian of Polish origin.\n\nMiguel Skrobot was born in 1873, in Warsaw, Poland, to José Skrobot and Rosa Skrobot. When he was 18 he migrated to Brazil and settled in Curitiba as a merchant.\n\nHe married Maria Pansardi, who was born in Tibagi, Paraná, to Italian immigrants, and she bore him three children. He kept a steam-powered factory where he worked on grinding and toasting coffee beans under the \"Rio Branco\" brand, located on the spot where today stands the square called Praça Zacarias (square located in the center of Curitiba). He also owned a grocery store near Praça Tiradentes (also a square in the center of Curitiba, where the city was born). He died an early death, when he was 39, on February 20, 1912.\n\nReferences\n\n1873 births\n1912 deaths\nBrazilian businesspeople\nPeople from Curitiba\nPolish emigrants to Brazil",
"Adolf von Rauch (22 April 1798 - 12 December 1882) was a German paper manufacturer in Heilbronn, where he was born and died and where he was a major builder of social housing.\n\nPapermakers\n1798 births\n1882 deaths\nPeople from Heilbronn"
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"Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants."
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Where did Neil Diamond go to school?
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Neil Diamond
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Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. His parents were Rose (nee Rapaport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand. They were not close friends at the time, Diamond recalls: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved he then attended Abraham Lincoln High School, and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen. For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16, and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He adds that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, besides helping him release his youthful "frustrations". Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife. Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$405 per week, in 2017 dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it. CANNOTANSWER
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attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand.
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Neil Leslie Diamond (born January 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and occasional actor. He has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has had ten No. 1 singles on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts: "Cracklin' Rosie", "Song Sung Blue", "Longfellow Serenade", "I've Been This Way Before", "If You Know What I Mean", "Desirée", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "America", "Yesterday's Songs", and "Heartlight". Thirty-eight songs by Diamond have been featured in the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts. He also played in movies such as The Jazz Singer, a musical drama film.
Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In 2011, he was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Early life and education
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. All four of his grandparents were immigrants, from Poland on his father's side and Russia on his mother's. His parents were Rose (née Rapoport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand; Diamond recalled they were not close friends at the time: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved to Brighton Beach, he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen.
For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16 and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He added that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, while also helping him release his youthful "frustrations".
Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them, which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife.
Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$ per week, in dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it.
Career
1960s
Diamond was not rehired after his 16 weeks with Sunbeam, and he began writing and singing his own songs for demos. "I never really chose songwriting," he says. "It just absorbed me and became more and more important in my life." His first recording contract was billed as "Neil and Jack", an Everly Brothers-type duet with high school friend Jack Packer. They recorded the unsuccessful singles "You Are My Love at Last" with "What Will I Do", and "I'm Afraid" with "Till You've Tried Love", both records released in 1962. Cashbox and Billboard magazines gave all four sides excellent reviews, and Diamond signed with Columbia Records as a solo performer later in 1962. In July 1963, Columbia released the single "At Night" with "Clown Town"; Billboard gave an excellent review to Clown Town, and Cashbox gave both sides excellent reviews, but it still failed to make the charts. Columbia dropped him from their label and he went back to writing songs in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years.
He wrote wherever he could, including on buses, and used an upright piano above the Birdland Club in New York City. One of the causes of this early nomadic life as a songwriter was his songs' wordiness: "I'd spent a lot of time on lyrics, and they were looking for hooks, and I didn't really understand the nature of that," he says. He was able to sell only about one song a week during those years, barely enough to survive on. He found himself only earning enough to spend 35 cents a day on food (US$ in dollars). But the privacy that he had above the Birdland Club allowed him to focus on writing without distractions. "Something new began to happen. I wasn't under the gun, and suddenly interesting songs began to happen, songs that had things none of the others did." Among them were "Cherry, Cherry" and "Solitary Man". "Solitary Man" was the first record that Diamond recorded under his own name which made the charts. It remains one of his personal all-time favorites, as it was about his early years as a songwriter, even though he failed to realize it at the time. He describes the song as "an outgrowth of my despair".
Diamond spent his early career in the Brill Building. His first success as a songwriter came in November 1965 with "Sunday and Me", a Top 20 hit for Jay and the Americans. Greater success followed with "I'm a Believer", "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You", "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)", and "Love to Love", all performed by the Monkees. He wrote and recorded the songs for himself, but the cover versions were released before his own. The unintended consequence was that Diamond began to gain fame as a songwriter. "I'm a Believer" became a gold record within two days of its release and stayed at the top of the charts for seven weeks, making it the Popular Music Song of the Year in 1966.
"And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" brought covers from Elvis Presley (who also interpreted "Sweet Caroline") and Mark Lindsay, former lead singer for Paul Revere & the Raiders. Other notable artists who recorded his early songs were the English hard-rock band Deep Purple, Lulu, and Cliff Richard.
In 1966, Diamond signed a deal with Bert Berns's Bang Records, then a subsidiary of Atlantic. His first release on that label was "Solitary Man", which was his first true hit as a solo artist. Diamond followed with "Cherry, Cherry" and "Kentucky Woman". His early concerts featured him opening for bands such as Herman's Hermits and the Who. As a guest performer with The Who, he was shocked to see Pete Townshend swinging his guitar like a club and then throwing it against walls and off the stage until the instrument's neck broke.
Diamond began to feel restricted by Bang Records because he wanted to record more ambitious, introspective music, such as "Brooklyn Roads" from 1968. Berns wanted to release "Kentucky Woman" as a single, but Diamond was no longer satisfied writing simple pop songs, so he proposed "Shilo", which was not about the Civil War but rather an imaginary childhood friend. Bang believed that the song was not commercial enough, so it was relegated to being an LP track on "Just for You". Diamond was also dissatisfied with his royalties and tried to sign with another record label after discovering a loophole in his contract that did not bind him exclusively to either WEB IV or Tallyrand, but the result was a series of lawsuits that coincided with a slump in his record sales and professional success. A magistrate refused WEB IV's request for a temporary injunction to prevent Diamond from joining another record company while his contract dispute continued in court, but the lawsuits persisted until February 18, 1977, when he triumphed in court and purchased the rights to his Bang-era master tapes.
On March 18, 1968, Diamond signed a deal with Uni Records; the label was named after Universal Pictures, the owner of which, MCA Inc., later consolidated its labels into MCA Records (now called Universal Music after merging with PolyGram in 1999). His debut album for Uni/MCA was Velvet Gloves and Spit, produced by Tom Catalano, which did not chart, and he recorded the follow-up Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show at American Sound Studios in Memphis with Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman producing.
1970s
In late 1969, he moved to Los Angeles. His sound mellowed with such songs as "Sweet Caroline" (1969), "Holly Holy" (1969), "Cracklin' Rosie" (1970) and "Song Sung Blue" (1972), the last two reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. "Sweet Caroline" was Diamond's first major hit after his slump. In 2007 Diamond said he had written "Sweet Caroline" for Caroline Kennedy after seeing her on the cover of Life in an equestrian riding outfit, but in 2014 he said in an interview on the Today Show that it was written for his then wife, Marcia. He could not find a good rhyme with the name "Marcia" and so used the name Caroline. It took him just one hour, in a Memphis hotel, to write and compose it. The 1971 release "I Am...I Said" was a Top 5 hit in both the US and UK and was his most intensely personal effort to date, taking over four months to complete.
In 1971, Diamond played 7 sold-out concerts at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The outdoor theater, which was noted for showcasing the best of current entertainers, added a stereo sound system for the first time. Diamond was also backed by a 35-piece string orchestra and six backing singers. After the first night, one leading newspaper called it "the finest concert in Greek Theater history."
In August 1972, he played again at the Greek, this time doing 10 shows. When the show was first announced, tickets at the 5000-seat theater sold out rapidly. He added a quadraphonic sound system for his performance to create full surround-sound. The performance of August 24, 1972, was recorded and released as the live double album Hot August Night. Hot August Night demonstrates Diamond's skills as a performer and showman, as he reinvigorated his back catalogue of hits with new energy. Diamond recalled: "Hot August Night captures a very special show for me. We went all out to really knock 'em dead in L.A." Many consider it his best work; critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Hot August Night "the ultimate Neil Diamond record... [which] shows Diamond the icon in full glory." The album became a classic, and was remastered in 2000 with additional selections. In Australia, which at the time had the most Neil Diamond fans per capita of any country, the album ranked No. 1 for 29 weeks and stayed in their top 20 bestsellers for two years.
In the fall of 1972, Diamond performed for 20 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. That theater had not staged a one-man show since Al Jolson in the 1930s. The approximately 1,600-seat Broadway venue provided an intimate concert setting not common at the time, with every performance reportedly sold out. It also made Diamond the first rock-era star to headline on Broadway. The review in the New York Times stated:
After the Winter Garden shows, Diamond announced that he needed a break, and he engaged in no more live performances till 1976. He used those four years to work on the score for Hall Bartlett's film version of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and to record two albums, Serenade and Beautiful Noise. He said years later, "I knew I'd come back, but I wasn't sure when. I spent one year on each of those albums...I'd been on the road six years. I had a son 2½ and I felt he needed me more than the audience did. So for four years I devoted myself to my son Jesse." He also said he needed to get back to having a private life, one where he could be anonymous.
In 1973, Diamond switched labels again, returning to Columbia Records for a million-dollar-advance-per-album contract (about US$ million per album in dollars). His first project, released as a solo album, was the soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The film received hostile reviews and did poorly at the box office, and the album grossed more than the film did. Richard D. Bach, author of the best-selling source story, disowned the film, and he and Diamond sued Bartlett, though for differing reasons; in Bach's case, it was because he felt the film omitted too much from the original novella, whereas in Diamond's case, it was because he felt the film had butchered his score. "After 'Jonathan,'" Diamond declared, "I vowed never to get involved in a movie again unless I had complete control." Bartlett angrily responded to Diamond's lawsuit by criticizing his music as having become "too slick...and it's not as much from his heart as it used to be." Bartlett also added, "Neil is extraordinarily talented. Often his arrogance is just a cover for the lonely and insecure person underneath."
Despite the controversy surrounding the film, the soundtrack was a success, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart. Diamond also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture. Thereafter, Diamond often included a Jonathan Livingston Seagull suite in his live performances, as he did in his 1976 "Love at the Greek" concert and for his show in Las Vegas that same year.
Diamond returned to live shows in 1976 with an Australian tour, "The 'Thank You Australia' Concert", which was broadcast to 36 television outlets nationwide. He also again appeared at the Greek Theater in a 1976 concert, Love at the Greek. An album and accompanying video/DVD of the show includes a version of "Song Sung Blue" with duets with Helen Reddy and Henry Winkler, a.k.a. Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli of Happy Days.
He began wearing colorful beaded shirts in concert, originally so that everyone in the audience could see him without binoculars. Bill Whitten designed and made the shirts for Diamond from the 1970s till approximately 2007.
In 1974, Diamond released the album Serenade, from which "Longfellow Serenade" and "I've Been This Way Before" were issued as singles. The latter had been intended for the Jonathan Livingston Seagull score, but Diamond had completed it too late for inclusion. That same year he appeared on a TV special for Shirley Bassey and sang a duet with her.
In 1976, he released Beautiful Noise, produced by Robbie Robertson of The Band. On Thanksgiving 1976, Diamond made an appearance at The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, performing "Dry Your Eyes", which he wrote jointly with Robertson, and which had appeared on Beautiful Noise. He also joined the rest of the performers onstage at the end in a rendition of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released".
Diamond was paid $650,000 (about US$ million in dollars) from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, to open its new $10 million Theater For the Performing Arts on July 2, 1976. The show played through July 5 and drew sold-out crowds at the 7,500-seat theater. A "who's who" of Hollywood attended opening night, ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Chevy Chase, and Diamond walked out on stage to a standing ovation. He opened the show with a story about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him before he became successful. His lead-in line to the first song of the evening was, "You may have dumped me a bit too soon, baby, because look who's standing here tonight."
He performed at Woburn Abbey on July 2, 1977, to an audience of 55,000 British fans. The concert and interviews were taped by film director William Friedkin, who used six cameras to capture the performance.
In 1977, Diamond released I'm Glad You're Here With Me Tonight, including "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", for which he composed the music and on the writing of whose lyrics he collaborated with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. Barbra Streisand covered the song on her album Songbird, and later, a Diamond-Streisand duet was recorded, spurred by the success of radio mash-ups. That version hit No. 1 in 1978, his third song to top the Hot 100. They appeared unannounced at the 1980 Grammy awards ceremony, where they performed the song to a surprised and rapturous audience.
His last 1970s album was September Morn, which included a new version of "I'm a Believer". It and "Red Red Wine" are his best-known original songs made more famous by other artists. In February 1979, the uptempo "Forever in Blue Jeans", co-written and jointly composed with his guitarist, Richard Bennett, was released as a single from You Don't Bring Me Flowers, Diamond's album from the previous year.
In 1979, Diamond collapsed on stage in San Francisco and was taken to the hospital, where he endured a 12-hour operation to remove what turned out to be a tumor on his spine. He said he had been losing feeling in his right leg "for a number of years but ignored it." When he collapsed, he had no strength in either leg. He underwent a long rehabilitation process just before starting principal photography on his film The Jazz Singer (1980). He was so convinced he was going to die that he wrote farewell letters to his friends.
1980s
A planned film version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" to star Diamond and Streisand fell through when Diamond instead starred in a 1980 remake of the Al Jolson classic The Jazz Singer alongside Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz. Though the movie received poor reviews, the soundtrack spawned three Top 10 singles, "Love on the Rocks", "Hello Again", and "America", the last of which had emotional significance for Diamond. "'America' was the story of my grandparents," he told an interviewer. "It's my gift to them, and it's very real for me ... In a way, it speaks to the immigrant in all of us." The song was performed in full by Diamond during the film's finale. An abbreviated version played over the film's opening titles.
The song was also the one he was most proud of, partly because of when it was later used: national news shows played it when the hostages were shown returning home after the Iran hostage crisis ended; it was played on the air during the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty; and at a tribute to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Vietnam Vets Welcome Home concert, he was asked to perform it live. At the time, a national poll found the song to be the number-one most recognized song about America, more than "God Bless America". It also became the anthem of his world tour two weeks after the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, when he changed the lyric at the end from; "They're coming to America", to "Stand up for America!" Earlier that year he performed it after a request from former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.
The film's failure was due in part to Diamond never having acted professionally before. "I didn't think I could handle it," he said later, seeing himself as "a fish out of water." For his performance, Diamond became the first-ever winner of a Worst Actor Razzie Award, even though he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the same role. Critic David Wild noted that the film showed that Diamond was open about his religion: "Who else but this Jewish Elvis could go multi-platinum with an album that featured a version of 'the Kol Nidre?'" Diamond later told the Los Angeles Times, "For me, this was the ultimate bar mitzvah."
Another Top 10 selection, "Heartlight", was inspired by the blockbuster 1982 movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Though the film's title character is never mentioned in the lyrics, Universal Pictures, which had released E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and was the parent company of the Uni Records label, by then called MCA Records, for which Diamond had recorded for years, briefly threatened legal action against both Diamond and Columbia Records.
Diamond's record sales slumped somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, his last single to make the Billboard's Pop Singles chart coming in 1986, but his concert tours continued to be big draws. Billboard magazine ranked Diamond as the most profitable solo performer of 1986. He released his 17th studio album in 1986, Headed for the Future, which reached number 20 on the Billboard 200. Three weeks later he starred in Hello Again, his first television special in nine years, performing comedy sketches and a duo medley with Carol Burnett.
In January 1987, Diamond sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. His "America" became the theme song for the Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign. That same year, UB40's reggae interpretation of Diamond's ballad "Red Red Wine" topped the Billboard Pop Singles chart and, like the Monkees' version of "I'm a Believer", became better known than Diamond's original version.
1990s
During the 1990s, Diamond produced six studio albums. He covered many classic songs from the movies and from famous Brill Building-era songwriters. He also released two Christmas albums, the first of which peaked at No. 8 on Billboard's Album chart. Diamond also recorded two albums of mostly new material during this period. In 1992, he performed for President George H.W. Bush's final Christmas in Washington NBC special. In 1993, Diamond opened the Mark of the Quad Cities (now the iWireless Center) with two shows on May 27 and 28 to a crowd of 27,000-plus.
The 1990s saw a resurgence in Diamond's popularity. "Sweet Caroline" became a popular sing-along at sporting events. It was used at Boston College football and basketball games. College sporting events in other states also played it, and it was even played at sports events in other countries, such as a Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament or a soccer match in Northern Ireland. It is played at every home game of the Sydney Swans of the Australian Football League. It became the theme song of Red Sox Nation, the fans of the Boston Red Sox.
The New York Rangers also adapted it as their own and played it whenever they were winning at the end of the third period of their games. The Pitt Panthers football team also played it after the third quarter of all home games, with the crowd cheering, "Let's go Pitt". The Carolina Panthers played it at the end of every home game they won. The Davidson College pep band likewise played it in the second half of every Davidson Wildcats men's basketball home game.
2000s
A more severely stripped-down-to-basics album, 12 Songs, produced by Rick Rubin, was released on November 8, 2005, in two editions: a standard 12-song release, and a special edition with two bonus tracks, including one featuring backing vocals by Brian Wilson. The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard chart, and received generally positive reviews; Earliwine describes the album as "inarguably Neil Diamond's best set of songs in a long, long time." 12 Songs also became noteworthy as one of the last albums to be pressed and released by Sony BMG with the Extended Copy Protection software embedded in the disc. (See the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal.)
In 2007, Diamond was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
On March 19, 2008, it was announced on the television show American Idol that Diamond would be a guest mentor to the remaining Idol contestants, who would sing Diamond songs for the broadcasts of April 29 and 30, 2008. On the April 30 broadcast, Diamond premiered a new song, "Pretty Amazing Grace", from his then recently released album Home Before Dark. On May 2, 2008, Sirius Satellite Radio started Neil Diamond Radio. On April 8, 2008, Diamond made a surprise announcement in a big-screen broadcast at Fenway Park that he would be appearing there "live in concert" on August 23, 2008, as part of his world tour. The announcement, which marked the first official confirmation of any 2008 concert dates in the US, came during the traditional eighth-inning singalong of "Sweet Caroline", which had by that time become an anthem for Boston fans.
On April 28, 2008, Diamond appeared on the roof of the Jimmy Kimmel building to sing "Sweet Caroline" after Kimmel was jokingly arrested for singing the song dressed as a Diamond impersonator.
Home Before Dark was released May 6, 2008, and topped the album charts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
On June 29, 2008, Diamond played to an estimated 108,000 fans at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England on the Concert of a Lifetime Tour; technical problems marred the concert.
In August, Diamond allowed cameras to record his entire four-night run at New York's Madison Square Garden; he released the resulting DVD in the U.S. in 2009, one year to the day of the first concert. Hot August Night/NYC debuted at No. 2 on the charts. On the same day the DVD was released, CBS aired an edited version, which won the ratings hour with 13 million viewers. The next day, the sales of the DVD surged, prompting Sony to order more copies to meet the high demand.
On August 25, 2008, Diamond performed at The Ohio State University while suffering from laryngitis. The result disappointed him as well as his fans, and on August 26, he offered refunds to anyone who applied by September 5.
Diamond was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 6, 2009, two nights before the 51st Annual Grammy Awards.
Long loved in Boston, Diamond was invited to sing at the July 4, 2009, Independence Day celebration.
On October 13, 2009, he released A Cherry Cherry Christmas, his third album of holiday music.
2010s
On November 2, 2010, Diamond released the album Dreams, a collection of 14 interpretations of his favorite songs by artists from the rock era. The album also included a new slow-tempo arrangement of his "I'm a Believer". In December, he performed a track from the album, "Ain't No Sunshine", on NBC's The Sing-Off with Committed and Street Corner Symphony, two a cappella groups featured on the show. The Very Best of Neil Diamond, a compilation CD of Diamond's 23 studio recordings from the Bang, UNI/MCA, & Columbia catalogs, was released on December 6, 2011, on the Sony Legacy label.
The years 2011 and 2012 were marked by several milestones in Diamond's career. On March 14, 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. In December, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Kennedy Center at the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors. On August 10, 2012, Diamond received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In November 2012, he topped the bill at the centenary edition of the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, which was transmitted on December 3. He also appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On April 20, 2013, Diamond made an unannounced appearance at Fenway Park to sing "Sweet Caroline" during the 8th inning. It was the first game at Fenway since the Boston Marathon bombing. On July 2, he released the single "Freedom Song (They'll Never Take Us Down)", with 100% of the purchase price benefiting One Fund Boston and the Wounded Warrior Project.
Sporting a beard, Diamond performed live on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol as part of A Capitol Fourth, which was broadcast nationally by PBS on July 4, 2013.
In January 2014, it was confirmed that Diamond had signed with the Capitol Music Group unit of Universal Music Group, which also owned Diamond's Uni/MCA catalog. UMG also took over Diamond's Columbia and Bang catalogues, which meant that all of his recorded output would be consolidated for the first time.
On July 8, 2014, Capitol Records announced, via a flyer included with Diamond's latest greatest hits compilations, All-Time Greatest Hits, which charted at 15 in the Billboard 200, that his next album, Melody Road, which was to be produced by Don Was and Jacknife Lee, would be released on September 30, 2014. In August, the release date was moved to October 21.
In September 2014, Diamond performed a surprise concert at his alma mater, Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. The show was announced via Twitter that afternoon. On the same day, he announced a 2015 "Melody Road" World Tour. The North American leg of the World Tour 2015 launched with a concert in Allentown, PA at the PPL Center on February 27 and ended at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado on May 31, 2015. Diamond used new media platforms and social media extensively throughout the tour, streaming several shows live on Periscope and showing tweets from fans who used the hashtag #tweetcaroline on two large screens. The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote: "This, my friends, wasn’t your grandfather's Neil Diamond concert. It was a multimedia extravaganza. Twitter. Periscope...It was a social media blitzkrieg that, by all accounts, proved to be an innovative way to widen his fan base."
In October 2016, Diamond released Acoustic Christmas, a folk-inspired Christmas album of original songs as well as acoustic versions of holiday classics. Produced by Was and Lee, who had produced Melody Road, the idea for the album began to take shape as the Melody Road sessions ended. To "channel the intimate atmosphere of '60s folk, Diamond recorded Acoustic Christmas with a handful of musicians, sitting around a circle of microphones, wires and, of course, Christmas lights."
In March 2017, the career-spanning anthology Neil Diamond 50 – 50th Anniversary Collection was released. He began his final concert tour, the 50 Year Anniversary World Tour in Fresno, California, in April.
In 2019, his 1969 signature song "Sweet Caroline" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
2020s
On March 7, 2020, despite his retirement due to Parkinson's disease, Diamond gave a rare performance at the Keep Memory Alive Power of Love Gala at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, where he was being honored.
On March 22, 2020, Diamond posted a video to YouTube playing "Sweet Caroline" with slightly modified lyrics ("...washing hands, don't touch me, I won't touch you...") in response to the widespread social distancing measures implemented due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2021, The New York Times reported that A Beautiful Noise, a musical based on Diamond's life and featuring his songs, would open at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston in the summer of 2022. The musical was scheduled to open on Broadway following the monthlong run in Boston.
Universal Music Group acquired Diamond's songwriting catalog and the rights to his recordings in February 2022. The acquisition also included 110 unreleased tracks, an unreleased album and archival videos.
Retirement
In January 2018, Diamond announced that he would immediately retire from touring due to having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Tour dates on the final leg of Diamond's "50 Year Anniversary World Tour" in Australia and New Zealand were cancelled. An announcement on his official website said he was not retiring from music and that the cancellation of the live performances would allow him to "continue his writing, recording and development of new projects."
On July 28, 2018, Diamond and his wife Katie McNeil made a surprise visit to the Incident Command post in Basalt, Colorado—near where Diamond lives—to thank the firefighters and families with a solo acoustic guitar concert for efforts in containing the Lake Christine Fire, which began on July 3 and had scorched of land.
In pop culture
In 1967, Diamond was featured on the fourth episode of the detective drama Mannix as the 'featured' artist in a small underground club called 'The BAD SCENE' and was interrupted during his singing by one of many fights that took place weekly on the show.
In 2000, Neil Diamond appeared onstage with Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond, surprising them before their show at House of Blues in Los Angeles.
In the 2001 comedy film Saving Silverman, the main characters play in a Diamond cover band, and Diamond made an extended cameo appearance as himself. Diamond even wrote and composed a new song, "I Believe in Happy Endings", for the film. He sat in with the tribute band Super Diamond at the film's premiere party.
In 2008, Diamond gave film-maker Greg Kohs permission to use his songs in a documentary. Kohs, a director from Philadelphia, had met a popular Milwaukee, Wisconsin, duo, Lightning & Thunder, composed of Mike Sardina, who did a Diamond impersonation, and his wife Claire. Kohs followed them for eight years and produced the film Song Sung Blue. Though Sardina had died in 2006, Diamond invited his widow and her family to be his front-row guests at his show in Milwaukee, where he told them he was moved by the film.
In the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, main characters Howard Wolowitz and Amy Farrah-Fowler are fans of Diamond's work.
Personal life
Diamond has been married three times. In 1963, he married his high-school sweetheart, Jaye Posner, who had become a schoolteacher. They had two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn. They separated in 1967 and divorced in 1969.
On December 5, 1969, Diamond married production assistant Marcia Murphey. They had two sons, Jesse and Micah. The marriage lasted 25 years, ending in 1994 or 1995.
In 1996, Diamond began a lengthy, live-in relationship with Australian Rae Farley after the two met in Brisbane, Australia. The songs on Home Before Dark were written and composed during her struggle with chronic back pain.
On September 7, 2011, in a message on Twitter, the 70-year-old Diamond announced his engagement to the 41-year-old Katie McNeil. Diamond said that his 2014 album Melody Road was fueled by their relationship, explaining:
There's no better inspiration or motivation for work than being in love. It's what you dream of as a creative person. I was able to complete this album—start it, write it and complete it—under the spell of love, and I think it shows somehow.
The couple married in front of family and close friends in Los Angeles in 2012. In addition to serving as Diamond's manager, McNeil produced the documentary Neil Diamond: Hot August Nights NYC.
Discography
Filmography
Diamond had a television appearance and roles in some movies, notably:
Mannix, "The Many Deaths of Saint Christopher" (1967) as himself
The Jazz Singer, starring role as Jess Robin
Saving Silverman appearing as himself
Notes
References
External links
Neil Diamond's Band's Official Site
1941 births
Living people
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American pianists
20th-century American singers
21st-century American pianists
21st-century American singers
Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American acoustic guitarists
American baritones
American folk guitarists
American male guitarists
American male pianists
American male singer-songwriters
American pop guitarists
American pop rock singers
American rock guitarists
American rock songwriters
American soft rock musicians
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American musicians
Jewish American songwriters
Jewish singers
Jewish folk singers
Jewish rock musicians
Erasmus Hall High School alumni
Capitol Records artists
Columbia Records artists
MCA Records artists
NYU Violets fencers
Uni Records artists
Golden Globe Award-winning musicians
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Kennedy Center honorees
Rhythm guitarists
Musicians from Brooklyn
Guitarists from New York City
Singers from New York City
People with Parkinson's disease
Singer-songwriters from New York (state)
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"Where Did We Go Wrong may refer to:\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\" (Dondria song), 2010\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\" (Toni Braxton and Babyface song), 2013\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a song by Petula Clark from the album My Love\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a song by Diana Ross from the album Ross\n \"Where Did We Go Wrong\", a 1980 song by Frankie Valli",
"California Concordia College existed in Oakland, California, United States from 1906 until 1973.\n\nAmong the presidents of California Concordia College was Johann Theodore Gotthold Brohm Jr.\n\nCalifornia Concordia College and the Academy of California College were located at 2365 Camden Street, Oakland, California. Some of the school buildings still exist at this location, but older buildings that housed the earlier classrooms and later the dormitories are gone. The site is now the location of the Spectrum Center Camden Campus, a provider of special education services.\n\nThe \"Academy\" was the official name for the high school. California Concordia was a six-year institution patterned after the German gymnasium. This provided four years of high school, plus two years of junior college. Years in the school took their names from Latin numbers and referred to the years to go before graduation. The classes were named:\n\n Sexta - 6 years to go; high school freshman\n Qunita - 5 years to go; high school sophomore\n Quarta - 4 years to go; high school junior\n Tertia - 3 years to go; high school senior\n Secunda - 2 years to go; college freshman\n Prima - 1 year to go; college sophomore\n\nThose in Sexta were usually hazed in a mild way by upperclassmen. In addition, those in Sexta were required to do a certain amount of clean-up work around the school, such as picking up trash.\n\nMost students, even high school freshmen, lived in dormitories. High school students were supervised by \"proctors\" (selected high school seniors in Tertia). High school students were required to study for two hours each night in their study rooms from 7:00 to 9:00 pm. Students could not leave their rooms for any reason without permission. This requirement came as quite a shock to those in Sexta (freshmen) on their first night, when they were caught and scolded by a proctor when they left their study room to go to the bathroom without permission. Seniors (those in Tertia) were allowed one night off where they did not need to be in their study hall.\n\nFrom 9:00 to 9:30 pm all students gathered for a chapel service. From 9:30 to 10 pm, high school students were free to roam, and sometimes went to the local Lucky Supermarket to purchase snacks. All high school students were required to be in bed with lights out by 10:00 pm. There were generally five students in each dormitory room. The room had two sections: a bedroom area and (across the hallway) another room for studying. Four beds, including at least one bunk bed, were in the bedroom, and four or five desks were in the study room\n\nA few interesting words used by Concordia students were \"fink\" and \"rack.\" To \"fink\" meant to \"sing like a canary\" or \"squeal.\" A student who finked told everything he knew about a misbehavior committed by another student. \"Rack\" was actually an official term used by proctors and administrators who lived on campus in the dormitories with students. When students misbehaved they were racked (punished). Proctors held a meeting once a week and decided which students, if any, deserved to be racked. If a student were racked, he might be forbidden from leaving the campus grounds, even during normal free time School hours were from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm. After 3:30 pm and until 7:00 pm, students could normally explore the local area surrounding the school, for example, to go to a local store to buy a snack. However, if a student were racked for the week, he could not do so.\n\nProctors made their rounds in the morning to make sure beds were made and inspected rooms in the evening to ensure that students were in bed by 10:00 pm. Often after the proctors left a room at night, the room lights would go back on and students enjoyed studying their National Geographic magazines. Student might be racked if they failed to make their beds or did not make them neatly enough.\n\nAlthough California Concordia College no longer exists, it does receive some recognition by Concordia University Irvine. This is also the location of its old academic records.\n\nSources\n\nExternal links \n Photos of old campus\n\nEducational institutions disestablished in 1973\nDefunct private universities and colleges in California\nEducational institutions established in 1906\n1906 establishments in California\n1973 disestablishments in California\nUniversities and colleges affiliated with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod"
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When did he become interested in music?
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When did Neil Diamond become interested in music?
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Neil Diamond
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Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. His parents were Rose (nee Rapaport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand. They were not close friends at the time, Diamond recalls: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved he then attended Abraham Lincoln High School, and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen. For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16, and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He adds that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, besides helping him release his youthful "frustrations". Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife. Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$405 per week, in 2017 dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it. CANNOTANSWER
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For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar.
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Neil Leslie Diamond (born January 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and occasional actor. He has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has had ten No. 1 singles on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts: "Cracklin' Rosie", "Song Sung Blue", "Longfellow Serenade", "I've Been This Way Before", "If You Know What I Mean", "Desirée", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "America", "Yesterday's Songs", and "Heartlight". Thirty-eight songs by Diamond have been featured in the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts. He also played in movies such as The Jazz Singer, a musical drama film.
Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In 2011, he was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Early life and education
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. All four of his grandparents were immigrants, from Poland on his father's side and Russia on his mother's. His parents were Rose (née Rapoport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand; Diamond recalled they were not close friends at the time: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved to Brighton Beach, he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen.
For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16 and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He added that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, while also helping him release his youthful "frustrations".
Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them, which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife.
Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$ per week, in dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it.
Career
1960s
Diamond was not rehired after his 16 weeks with Sunbeam, and he began writing and singing his own songs for demos. "I never really chose songwriting," he says. "It just absorbed me and became more and more important in my life." His first recording contract was billed as "Neil and Jack", an Everly Brothers-type duet with high school friend Jack Packer. They recorded the unsuccessful singles "You Are My Love at Last" with "What Will I Do", and "I'm Afraid" with "Till You've Tried Love", both records released in 1962. Cashbox and Billboard magazines gave all four sides excellent reviews, and Diamond signed with Columbia Records as a solo performer later in 1962. In July 1963, Columbia released the single "At Night" with "Clown Town"; Billboard gave an excellent review to Clown Town, and Cashbox gave both sides excellent reviews, but it still failed to make the charts. Columbia dropped him from their label and he went back to writing songs in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years.
He wrote wherever he could, including on buses, and used an upright piano above the Birdland Club in New York City. One of the causes of this early nomadic life as a songwriter was his songs' wordiness: "I'd spent a lot of time on lyrics, and they were looking for hooks, and I didn't really understand the nature of that," he says. He was able to sell only about one song a week during those years, barely enough to survive on. He found himself only earning enough to spend 35 cents a day on food (US$ in dollars). But the privacy that he had above the Birdland Club allowed him to focus on writing without distractions. "Something new began to happen. I wasn't under the gun, and suddenly interesting songs began to happen, songs that had things none of the others did." Among them were "Cherry, Cherry" and "Solitary Man". "Solitary Man" was the first record that Diamond recorded under his own name which made the charts. It remains one of his personal all-time favorites, as it was about his early years as a songwriter, even though he failed to realize it at the time. He describes the song as "an outgrowth of my despair".
Diamond spent his early career in the Brill Building. His first success as a songwriter came in November 1965 with "Sunday and Me", a Top 20 hit for Jay and the Americans. Greater success followed with "I'm a Believer", "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You", "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)", and "Love to Love", all performed by the Monkees. He wrote and recorded the songs for himself, but the cover versions were released before his own. The unintended consequence was that Diamond began to gain fame as a songwriter. "I'm a Believer" became a gold record within two days of its release and stayed at the top of the charts for seven weeks, making it the Popular Music Song of the Year in 1966.
"And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" brought covers from Elvis Presley (who also interpreted "Sweet Caroline") and Mark Lindsay, former lead singer for Paul Revere & the Raiders. Other notable artists who recorded his early songs were the English hard-rock band Deep Purple, Lulu, and Cliff Richard.
In 1966, Diamond signed a deal with Bert Berns's Bang Records, then a subsidiary of Atlantic. His first release on that label was "Solitary Man", which was his first true hit as a solo artist. Diamond followed with "Cherry, Cherry" and "Kentucky Woman". His early concerts featured him opening for bands such as Herman's Hermits and the Who. As a guest performer with The Who, he was shocked to see Pete Townshend swinging his guitar like a club and then throwing it against walls and off the stage until the instrument's neck broke.
Diamond began to feel restricted by Bang Records because he wanted to record more ambitious, introspective music, such as "Brooklyn Roads" from 1968. Berns wanted to release "Kentucky Woman" as a single, but Diamond was no longer satisfied writing simple pop songs, so he proposed "Shilo", which was not about the Civil War but rather an imaginary childhood friend. Bang believed that the song was not commercial enough, so it was relegated to being an LP track on "Just for You". Diamond was also dissatisfied with his royalties and tried to sign with another record label after discovering a loophole in his contract that did not bind him exclusively to either WEB IV or Tallyrand, but the result was a series of lawsuits that coincided with a slump in his record sales and professional success. A magistrate refused WEB IV's request for a temporary injunction to prevent Diamond from joining another record company while his contract dispute continued in court, but the lawsuits persisted until February 18, 1977, when he triumphed in court and purchased the rights to his Bang-era master tapes.
On March 18, 1968, Diamond signed a deal with Uni Records; the label was named after Universal Pictures, the owner of which, MCA Inc., later consolidated its labels into MCA Records (now called Universal Music after merging with PolyGram in 1999). His debut album for Uni/MCA was Velvet Gloves and Spit, produced by Tom Catalano, which did not chart, and he recorded the follow-up Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show at American Sound Studios in Memphis with Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman producing.
1970s
In late 1969, he moved to Los Angeles. His sound mellowed with such songs as "Sweet Caroline" (1969), "Holly Holy" (1969), "Cracklin' Rosie" (1970) and "Song Sung Blue" (1972), the last two reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. "Sweet Caroline" was Diamond's first major hit after his slump. In 2007 Diamond said he had written "Sweet Caroline" for Caroline Kennedy after seeing her on the cover of Life in an equestrian riding outfit, but in 2014 he said in an interview on the Today Show that it was written for his then wife, Marcia. He could not find a good rhyme with the name "Marcia" and so used the name Caroline. It took him just one hour, in a Memphis hotel, to write and compose it. The 1971 release "I Am...I Said" was a Top 5 hit in both the US and UK and was his most intensely personal effort to date, taking over four months to complete.
In 1971, Diamond played 7 sold-out concerts at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The outdoor theater, which was noted for showcasing the best of current entertainers, added a stereo sound system for the first time. Diamond was also backed by a 35-piece string orchestra and six backing singers. After the first night, one leading newspaper called it "the finest concert in Greek Theater history."
In August 1972, he played again at the Greek, this time doing 10 shows. When the show was first announced, tickets at the 5000-seat theater sold out rapidly. He added a quadraphonic sound system for his performance to create full surround-sound. The performance of August 24, 1972, was recorded and released as the live double album Hot August Night. Hot August Night demonstrates Diamond's skills as a performer and showman, as he reinvigorated his back catalogue of hits with new energy. Diamond recalled: "Hot August Night captures a very special show for me. We went all out to really knock 'em dead in L.A." Many consider it his best work; critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Hot August Night "the ultimate Neil Diamond record... [which] shows Diamond the icon in full glory." The album became a classic, and was remastered in 2000 with additional selections. In Australia, which at the time had the most Neil Diamond fans per capita of any country, the album ranked No. 1 for 29 weeks and stayed in their top 20 bestsellers for two years.
In the fall of 1972, Diamond performed for 20 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. That theater had not staged a one-man show since Al Jolson in the 1930s. The approximately 1,600-seat Broadway venue provided an intimate concert setting not common at the time, with every performance reportedly sold out. It also made Diamond the first rock-era star to headline on Broadway. The review in the New York Times stated:
After the Winter Garden shows, Diamond announced that he needed a break, and he engaged in no more live performances till 1976. He used those four years to work on the score for Hall Bartlett's film version of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and to record two albums, Serenade and Beautiful Noise. He said years later, "I knew I'd come back, but I wasn't sure when. I spent one year on each of those albums...I'd been on the road six years. I had a son 2½ and I felt he needed me more than the audience did. So for four years I devoted myself to my son Jesse." He also said he needed to get back to having a private life, one where he could be anonymous.
In 1973, Diamond switched labels again, returning to Columbia Records for a million-dollar-advance-per-album contract (about US$ million per album in dollars). His first project, released as a solo album, was the soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The film received hostile reviews and did poorly at the box office, and the album grossed more than the film did. Richard D. Bach, author of the best-selling source story, disowned the film, and he and Diamond sued Bartlett, though for differing reasons; in Bach's case, it was because he felt the film omitted too much from the original novella, whereas in Diamond's case, it was because he felt the film had butchered his score. "After 'Jonathan,'" Diamond declared, "I vowed never to get involved in a movie again unless I had complete control." Bartlett angrily responded to Diamond's lawsuit by criticizing his music as having become "too slick...and it's not as much from his heart as it used to be." Bartlett also added, "Neil is extraordinarily talented. Often his arrogance is just a cover for the lonely and insecure person underneath."
Despite the controversy surrounding the film, the soundtrack was a success, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart. Diamond also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture. Thereafter, Diamond often included a Jonathan Livingston Seagull suite in his live performances, as he did in his 1976 "Love at the Greek" concert and for his show in Las Vegas that same year.
Diamond returned to live shows in 1976 with an Australian tour, "The 'Thank You Australia' Concert", which was broadcast to 36 television outlets nationwide. He also again appeared at the Greek Theater in a 1976 concert, Love at the Greek. An album and accompanying video/DVD of the show includes a version of "Song Sung Blue" with duets with Helen Reddy and Henry Winkler, a.k.a. Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli of Happy Days.
He began wearing colorful beaded shirts in concert, originally so that everyone in the audience could see him without binoculars. Bill Whitten designed and made the shirts for Diamond from the 1970s till approximately 2007.
In 1974, Diamond released the album Serenade, from which "Longfellow Serenade" and "I've Been This Way Before" were issued as singles. The latter had been intended for the Jonathan Livingston Seagull score, but Diamond had completed it too late for inclusion. That same year he appeared on a TV special for Shirley Bassey and sang a duet with her.
In 1976, he released Beautiful Noise, produced by Robbie Robertson of The Band. On Thanksgiving 1976, Diamond made an appearance at The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, performing "Dry Your Eyes", which he wrote jointly with Robertson, and which had appeared on Beautiful Noise. He also joined the rest of the performers onstage at the end in a rendition of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released".
Diamond was paid $650,000 (about US$ million in dollars) from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, to open its new $10 million Theater For the Performing Arts on July 2, 1976. The show played through July 5 and drew sold-out crowds at the 7,500-seat theater. A "who's who" of Hollywood attended opening night, ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Chevy Chase, and Diamond walked out on stage to a standing ovation. He opened the show with a story about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him before he became successful. His lead-in line to the first song of the evening was, "You may have dumped me a bit too soon, baby, because look who's standing here tonight."
He performed at Woburn Abbey on July 2, 1977, to an audience of 55,000 British fans. The concert and interviews were taped by film director William Friedkin, who used six cameras to capture the performance.
In 1977, Diamond released I'm Glad You're Here With Me Tonight, including "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", for which he composed the music and on the writing of whose lyrics he collaborated with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. Barbra Streisand covered the song on her album Songbird, and later, a Diamond-Streisand duet was recorded, spurred by the success of radio mash-ups. That version hit No. 1 in 1978, his third song to top the Hot 100. They appeared unannounced at the 1980 Grammy awards ceremony, where they performed the song to a surprised and rapturous audience.
His last 1970s album was September Morn, which included a new version of "I'm a Believer". It and "Red Red Wine" are his best-known original songs made more famous by other artists. In February 1979, the uptempo "Forever in Blue Jeans", co-written and jointly composed with his guitarist, Richard Bennett, was released as a single from You Don't Bring Me Flowers, Diamond's album from the previous year.
In 1979, Diamond collapsed on stage in San Francisco and was taken to the hospital, where he endured a 12-hour operation to remove what turned out to be a tumor on his spine. He said he had been losing feeling in his right leg "for a number of years but ignored it." When he collapsed, he had no strength in either leg. He underwent a long rehabilitation process just before starting principal photography on his film The Jazz Singer (1980). He was so convinced he was going to die that he wrote farewell letters to his friends.
1980s
A planned film version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" to star Diamond and Streisand fell through when Diamond instead starred in a 1980 remake of the Al Jolson classic The Jazz Singer alongside Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz. Though the movie received poor reviews, the soundtrack spawned three Top 10 singles, "Love on the Rocks", "Hello Again", and "America", the last of which had emotional significance for Diamond. "'America' was the story of my grandparents," he told an interviewer. "It's my gift to them, and it's very real for me ... In a way, it speaks to the immigrant in all of us." The song was performed in full by Diamond during the film's finale. An abbreviated version played over the film's opening titles.
The song was also the one he was most proud of, partly because of when it was later used: national news shows played it when the hostages were shown returning home after the Iran hostage crisis ended; it was played on the air during the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty; and at a tribute to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Vietnam Vets Welcome Home concert, he was asked to perform it live. At the time, a national poll found the song to be the number-one most recognized song about America, more than "God Bless America". It also became the anthem of his world tour two weeks after the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, when he changed the lyric at the end from; "They're coming to America", to "Stand up for America!" Earlier that year he performed it after a request from former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.
The film's failure was due in part to Diamond never having acted professionally before. "I didn't think I could handle it," he said later, seeing himself as "a fish out of water." For his performance, Diamond became the first-ever winner of a Worst Actor Razzie Award, even though he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the same role. Critic David Wild noted that the film showed that Diamond was open about his religion: "Who else but this Jewish Elvis could go multi-platinum with an album that featured a version of 'the Kol Nidre?'" Diamond later told the Los Angeles Times, "For me, this was the ultimate bar mitzvah."
Another Top 10 selection, "Heartlight", was inspired by the blockbuster 1982 movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Though the film's title character is never mentioned in the lyrics, Universal Pictures, which had released E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and was the parent company of the Uni Records label, by then called MCA Records, for which Diamond had recorded for years, briefly threatened legal action against both Diamond and Columbia Records.
Diamond's record sales slumped somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, his last single to make the Billboard's Pop Singles chart coming in 1986, but his concert tours continued to be big draws. Billboard magazine ranked Diamond as the most profitable solo performer of 1986. He released his 17th studio album in 1986, Headed for the Future, which reached number 20 on the Billboard 200. Three weeks later he starred in Hello Again, his first television special in nine years, performing comedy sketches and a duo medley with Carol Burnett.
In January 1987, Diamond sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. His "America" became the theme song for the Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign. That same year, UB40's reggae interpretation of Diamond's ballad "Red Red Wine" topped the Billboard Pop Singles chart and, like the Monkees' version of "I'm a Believer", became better known than Diamond's original version.
1990s
During the 1990s, Diamond produced six studio albums. He covered many classic songs from the movies and from famous Brill Building-era songwriters. He also released two Christmas albums, the first of which peaked at No. 8 on Billboard's Album chart. Diamond also recorded two albums of mostly new material during this period. In 1992, he performed for President George H.W. Bush's final Christmas in Washington NBC special. In 1993, Diamond opened the Mark of the Quad Cities (now the iWireless Center) with two shows on May 27 and 28 to a crowd of 27,000-plus.
The 1990s saw a resurgence in Diamond's popularity. "Sweet Caroline" became a popular sing-along at sporting events. It was used at Boston College football and basketball games. College sporting events in other states also played it, and it was even played at sports events in other countries, such as a Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament or a soccer match in Northern Ireland. It is played at every home game of the Sydney Swans of the Australian Football League. It became the theme song of Red Sox Nation, the fans of the Boston Red Sox.
The New York Rangers also adapted it as their own and played it whenever they were winning at the end of the third period of their games. The Pitt Panthers football team also played it after the third quarter of all home games, with the crowd cheering, "Let's go Pitt". The Carolina Panthers played it at the end of every home game they won. The Davidson College pep band likewise played it in the second half of every Davidson Wildcats men's basketball home game.
2000s
A more severely stripped-down-to-basics album, 12 Songs, produced by Rick Rubin, was released on November 8, 2005, in two editions: a standard 12-song release, and a special edition with two bonus tracks, including one featuring backing vocals by Brian Wilson. The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard chart, and received generally positive reviews; Earliwine describes the album as "inarguably Neil Diamond's best set of songs in a long, long time." 12 Songs also became noteworthy as one of the last albums to be pressed and released by Sony BMG with the Extended Copy Protection software embedded in the disc. (See the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal.)
In 2007, Diamond was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
On March 19, 2008, it was announced on the television show American Idol that Diamond would be a guest mentor to the remaining Idol contestants, who would sing Diamond songs for the broadcasts of April 29 and 30, 2008. On the April 30 broadcast, Diamond premiered a new song, "Pretty Amazing Grace", from his then recently released album Home Before Dark. On May 2, 2008, Sirius Satellite Radio started Neil Diamond Radio. On April 8, 2008, Diamond made a surprise announcement in a big-screen broadcast at Fenway Park that he would be appearing there "live in concert" on August 23, 2008, as part of his world tour. The announcement, which marked the first official confirmation of any 2008 concert dates in the US, came during the traditional eighth-inning singalong of "Sweet Caroline", which had by that time become an anthem for Boston fans.
On April 28, 2008, Diamond appeared on the roof of the Jimmy Kimmel building to sing "Sweet Caroline" after Kimmel was jokingly arrested for singing the song dressed as a Diamond impersonator.
Home Before Dark was released May 6, 2008, and topped the album charts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
On June 29, 2008, Diamond played to an estimated 108,000 fans at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England on the Concert of a Lifetime Tour; technical problems marred the concert.
In August, Diamond allowed cameras to record his entire four-night run at New York's Madison Square Garden; he released the resulting DVD in the U.S. in 2009, one year to the day of the first concert. Hot August Night/NYC debuted at No. 2 on the charts. On the same day the DVD was released, CBS aired an edited version, which won the ratings hour with 13 million viewers. The next day, the sales of the DVD surged, prompting Sony to order more copies to meet the high demand.
On August 25, 2008, Diamond performed at The Ohio State University while suffering from laryngitis. The result disappointed him as well as his fans, and on August 26, he offered refunds to anyone who applied by September 5.
Diamond was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 6, 2009, two nights before the 51st Annual Grammy Awards.
Long loved in Boston, Diamond was invited to sing at the July 4, 2009, Independence Day celebration.
On October 13, 2009, he released A Cherry Cherry Christmas, his third album of holiday music.
2010s
On November 2, 2010, Diamond released the album Dreams, a collection of 14 interpretations of his favorite songs by artists from the rock era. The album also included a new slow-tempo arrangement of his "I'm a Believer". In December, he performed a track from the album, "Ain't No Sunshine", on NBC's The Sing-Off with Committed and Street Corner Symphony, two a cappella groups featured on the show. The Very Best of Neil Diamond, a compilation CD of Diamond's 23 studio recordings from the Bang, UNI/MCA, & Columbia catalogs, was released on December 6, 2011, on the Sony Legacy label.
The years 2011 and 2012 were marked by several milestones in Diamond's career. On March 14, 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. In December, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Kennedy Center at the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors. On August 10, 2012, Diamond received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In November 2012, he topped the bill at the centenary edition of the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, which was transmitted on December 3. He also appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On April 20, 2013, Diamond made an unannounced appearance at Fenway Park to sing "Sweet Caroline" during the 8th inning. It was the first game at Fenway since the Boston Marathon bombing. On July 2, he released the single "Freedom Song (They'll Never Take Us Down)", with 100% of the purchase price benefiting One Fund Boston and the Wounded Warrior Project.
Sporting a beard, Diamond performed live on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol as part of A Capitol Fourth, which was broadcast nationally by PBS on July 4, 2013.
In January 2014, it was confirmed that Diamond had signed with the Capitol Music Group unit of Universal Music Group, which also owned Diamond's Uni/MCA catalog. UMG also took over Diamond's Columbia and Bang catalogues, which meant that all of his recorded output would be consolidated for the first time.
On July 8, 2014, Capitol Records announced, via a flyer included with Diamond's latest greatest hits compilations, All-Time Greatest Hits, which charted at 15 in the Billboard 200, that his next album, Melody Road, which was to be produced by Don Was and Jacknife Lee, would be released on September 30, 2014. In August, the release date was moved to October 21.
In September 2014, Diamond performed a surprise concert at his alma mater, Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. The show was announced via Twitter that afternoon. On the same day, he announced a 2015 "Melody Road" World Tour. The North American leg of the World Tour 2015 launched with a concert in Allentown, PA at the PPL Center on February 27 and ended at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado on May 31, 2015. Diamond used new media platforms and social media extensively throughout the tour, streaming several shows live on Periscope and showing tweets from fans who used the hashtag #tweetcaroline on two large screens. The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote: "This, my friends, wasn’t your grandfather's Neil Diamond concert. It was a multimedia extravaganza. Twitter. Periscope...It was a social media blitzkrieg that, by all accounts, proved to be an innovative way to widen his fan base."
In October 2016, Diamond released Acoustic Christmas, a folk-inspired Christmas album of original songs as well as acoustic versions of holiday classics. Produced by Was and Lee, who had produced Melody Road, the idea for the album began to take shape as the Melody Road sessions ended. To "channel the intimate atmosphere of '60s folk, Diamond recorded Acoustic Christmas with a handful of musicians, sitting around a circle of microphones, wires and, of course, Christmas lights."
In March 2017, the career-spanning anthology Neil Diamond 50 – 50th Anniversary Collection was released. He began his final concert tour, the 50 Year Anniversary World Tour in Fresno, California, in April.
In 2019, his 1969 signature song "Sweet Caroline" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
2020s
On March 7, 2020, despite his retirement due to Parkinson's disease, Diamond gave a rare performance at the Keep Memory Alive Power of Love Gala at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, where he was being honored.
On March 22, 2020, Diamond posted a video to YouTube playing "Sweet Caroline" with slightly modified lyrics ("...washing hands, don't touch me, I won't touch you...") in response to the widespread social distancing measures implemented due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2021, The New York Times reported that A Beautiful Noise, a musical based on Diamond's life and featuring his songs, would open at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston in the summer of 2022. The musical was scheduled to open on Broadway following the monthlong run in Boston.
Universal Music Group acquired Diamond's songwriting catalog and the rights to his recordings in February 2022. The acquisition also included 110 unreleased tracks, an unreleased album and archival videos.
Retirement
In January 2018, Diamond announced that he would immediately retire from touring due to having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Tour dates on the final leg of Diamond's "50 Year Anniversary World Tour" in Australia and New Zealand were cancelled. An announcement on his official website said he was not retiring from music and that the cancellation of the live performances would allow him to "continue his writing, recording and development of new projects."
On July 28, 2018, Diamond and his wife Katie McNeil made a surprise visit to the Incident Command post in Basalt, Colorado—near where Diamond lives—to thank the firefighters and families with a solo acoustic guitar concert for efforts in containing the Lake Christine Fire, which began on July 3 and had scorched of land.
In pop culture
In 1967, Diamond was featured on the fourth episode of the detective drama Mannix as the 'featured' artist in a small underground club called 'The BAD SCENE' and was interrupted during his singing by one of many fights that took place weekly on the show.
In 2000, Neil Diamond appeared onstage with Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond, surprising them before their show at House of Blues in Los Angeles.
In the 2001 comedy film Saving Silverman, the main characters play in a Diamond cover band, and Diamond made an extended cameo appearance as himself. Diamond even wrote and composed a new song, "I Believe in Happy Endings", for the film. He sat in with the tribute band Super Diamond at the film's premiere party.
In 2008, Diamond gave film-maker Greg Kohs permission to use his songs in a documentary. Kohs, a director from Philadelphia, had met a popular Milwaukee, Wisconsin, duo, Lightning & Thunder, composed of Mike Sardina, who did a Diamond impersonation, and his wife Claire. Kohs followed them for eight years and produced the film Song Sung Blue. Though Sardina had died in 2006, Diamond invited his widow and her family to be his front-row guests at his show in Milwaukee, where he told them he was moved by the film.
In the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, main characters Howard Wolowitz and Amy Farrah-Fowler are fans of Diamond's work.
Personal life
Diamond has been married three times. In 1963, he married his high-school sweetheart, Jaye Posner, who had become a schoolteacher. They had two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn. They separated in 1967 and divorced in 1969.
On December 5, 1969, Diamond married production assistant Marcia Murphey. They had two sons, Jesse and Micah. The marriage lasted 25 years, ending in 1994 or 1995.
In 1996, Diamond began a lengthy, live-in relationship with Australian Rae Farley after the two met in Brisbane, Australia. The songs on Home Before Dark were written and composed during her struggle with chronic back pain.
On September 7, 2011, in a message on Twitter, the 70-year-old Diamond announced his engagement to the 41-year-old Katie McNeil. Diamond said that his 2014 album Melody Road was fueled by their relationship, explaining:
There's no better inspiration or motivation for work than being in love. It's what you dream of as a creative person. I was able to complete this album—start it, write it and complete it—under the spell of love, and I think it shows somehow.
The couple married in front of family and close friends in Los Angeles in 2012. In addition to serving as Diamond's manager, McNeil produced the documentary Neil Diamond: Hot August Nights NYC.
Discography
Filmography
Diamond had a television appearance and roles in some movies, notably:
Mannix, "The Many Deaths of Saint Christopher" (1967) as himself
The Jazz Singer, starring role as Jess Robin
Saving Silverman appearing as himself
Notes
References
External links
Neil Diamond's Band's Official Site
1941 births
Living people
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American pianists
20th-century American singers
21st-century American pianists
21st-century American singers
Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American acoustic guitarists
American baritones
American folk guitarists
American male guitarists
American male pianists
American male singer-songwriters
American pop guitarists
American pop rock singers
American rock guitarists
American rock songwriters
American soft rock musicians
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American musicians
Jewish American songwriters
Jewish singers
Jewish folk singers
Jewish rock musicians
Erasmus Hall High School alumni
Capitol Records artists
Columbia Records artists
MCA Records artists
NYU Violets fencers
Uni Records artists
Golden Globe Award-winning musicians
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Kennedy Center honorees
Rhythm guitarists
Musicians from Brooklyn
Guitarists from New York City
Singers from New York City
People with Parkinson's disease
Singer-songwriters from New York (state)
| true |
[
"William Martin Haddow (29 March 1865 – 19 January 1945) was a Scottish socialist activist.\n\nBorn in Glasgow, Haddow was educated up to the age of fourteen, then became a pupil teacher, but resigned before completing his apprenticeship to work at the Post Office. There, he was trained in electronics to work at the National Telephone Company, and in 1884 began working as an electrician at a shipyard, followed by time at sea, then at a power station. By the start of the 1890s, he had saved enough money to found his own company, Haddow & Co, which generated and distributed electricity. Concerned that his workers did not have a trade union to join, he founded one in 1890, and became its first secretary.\n\nHaddow became interested in socialism in the late 1880s, and built a friendship with Keir Hardie. He was a founder member of the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, and later of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893. The ILP was a founder constituent of the Labour Representation Committee, and Haddow was elected as its first Glasgow chairman. In 1900, he stood for Glasgow City Council as an ILP candidate in the Gorbals, but was not elected. In 1903, he was elected to the Glasgow School Board, on which he championed Socialist Sunday Schools, and campaigned for the introduction of school meals and medical checks on children's health.\n\nIn 1906, Haddow was one of the founding directors of Forward, a socialist newspaper based in Glasgow. He was involved in a range of artistic ventures, including becoming a governor of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, founding the Glasgow Music Festival, the Socialist Music Festival, and the Socialist Art Circle. He opposed World War I, but did not participate in the Red Clydeside protests; instead, in 1915, he resigned from the School Board to become Deputy Master of Works, and later served on Glasgow City Council's Educational Committee.\n\nWhen the ILP split from the Labour Party, Haddow left the ILP, retaining membership of the Labour Party until his death in 1945.\n\nReferences\n\n1865 births\n1945 deaths\nIndependent Labour Party politicians\nPoliticians from Glasgow",
"Brij Bhushan Kabra (1937 – 12 April 2018) was an Indian musician who popularized the guitar as an instrument in Indian classical music.\n\nKabra was born in 1937 to Goverdhanlal Kabra in Jodhpur where he spent his youth. He was interested in sports and listened to Indian classical music but did not intend to become a musician and trained as a geologist. During a visit to Kolkata he discovered the Hawaiian lap slide guitar and convinced his father to let him learn it by promising to only play classical music. Kabra then lived in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, learnt the instrument by imitating records, and later studied under Ali Akbar Khan. He modified the guitar by adding sympathetic and drone strings.\n\nKabra became the first Indian musician to play raga on the guitar, performed publicly, and recorded the successful album Call of the Valley (1967) with bansuri player Hariprasad Chaurasia and santoor player Shivkumar Sharma. The guitar was seldom used in Indian classical music, and his guitar playing gained popularity in the 1970s hippie culture. Kabra recorded solo albums and concentrated on teaching since the 1990s but continued to perform.\n\nHe was awarded the Rajasthan Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for 1983–84, was made a fellow of the Rajasthan Sangeet Natak Akademi for 1995–96, and received the national Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for 2005.\n\nKabra died on 12 April 2018 in Ahmedabad at age 81.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1937 births\n2018 deaths\nHindustani instrumentalists\nIndian guitarists\nRajasthani people\nPeople from Jodhpur\nRecipients of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award\nSlide guitarists"
] |
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"Neil Diamond",
"Early life and education",
"Where was he born?",
"Brooklyn, New York,",
"Where was he born?",
"Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants.",
"Where did he go to school?",
"attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand.",
"When did he become interested in music?",
"For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar."
] |
C_dbc4fe5d6c2d49e8bc391ff36db3ca8d_1
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Did he attend college?
| 5 |
Did Neil Diamond attend college?
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Neil Diamond
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Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. His parents were Rose (nee Rapaport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand. They were not close friends at the time, Diamond recalls: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved he then attended Abraham Lincoln High School, and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen. For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16, and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He adds that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, besides helping him release his youthful "frustrations". Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife. Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$405 per week, in 2017 dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it. CANNOTANSWER
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Diamond next attended New York University
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Neil Leslie Diamond (born January 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and occasional actor. He has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has had ten No. 1 singles on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts: "Cracklin' Rosie", "Song Sung Blue", "Longfellow Serenade", "I've Been This Way Before", "If You Know What I Mean", "Desirée", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "America", "Yesterday's Songs", and "Heartlight". Thirty-eight songs by Diamond have been featured in the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts. He also played in movies such as The Jazz Singer, a musical drama film.
Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In 2011, he was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Early life and education
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. All four of his grandparents were immigrants, from Poland on his father's side and Russia on his mother's. His parents were Rose (née Rapoport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand; Diamond recalled they were not close friends at the time: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved to Brighton Beach, he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen.
For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16 and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He added that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, while also helping him release his youthful "frustrations".
Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them, which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife.
Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$ per week, in dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it.
Career
1960s
Diamond was not rehired after his 16 weeks with Sunbeam, and he began writing and singing his own songs for demos. "I never really chose songwriting," he says. "It just absorbed me and became more and more important in my life." His first recording contract was billed as "Neil and Jack", an Everly Brothers-type duet with high school friend Jack Packer. They recorded the unsuccessful singles "You Are My Love at Last" with "What Will I Do", and "I'm Afraid" with "Till You've Tried Love", both records released in 1962. Cashbox and Billboard magazines gave all four sides excellent reviews, and Diamond signed with Columbia Records as a solo performer later in 1962. In July 1963, Columbia released the single "At Night" with "Clown Town"; Billboard gave an excellent review to Clown Town, and Cashbox gave both sides excellent reviews, but it still failed to make the charts. Columbia dropped him from their label and he went back to writing songs in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years.
He wrote wherever he could, including on buses, and used an upright piano above the Birdland Club in New York City. One of the causes of this early nomadic life as a songwriter was his songs' wordiness: "I'd spent a lot of time on lyrics, and they were looking for hooks, and I didn't really understand the nature of that," he says. He was able to sell only about one song a week during those years, barely enough to survive on. He found himself only earning enough to spend 35 cents a day on food (US$ in dollars). But the privacy that he had above the Birdland Club allowed him to focus on writing without distractions. "Something new began to happen. I wasn't under the gun, and suddenly interesting songs began to happen, songs that had things none of the others did." Among them were "Cherry, Cherry" and "Solitary Man". "Solitary Man" was the first record that Diamond recorded under his own name which made the charts. It remains one of his personal all-time favorites, as it was about his early years as a songwriter, even though he failed to realize it at the time. He describes the song as "an outgrowth of my despair".
Diamond spent his early career in the Brill Building. His first success as a songwriter came in November 1965 with "Sunday and Me", a Top 20 hit for Jay and the Americans. Greater success followed with "I'm a Believer", "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You", "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)", and "Love to Love", all performed by the Monkees. He wrote and recorded the songs for himself, but the cover versions were released before his own. The unintended consequence was that Diamond began to gain fame as a songwriter. "I'm a Believer" became a gold record within two days of its release and stayed at the top of the charts for seven weeks, making it the Popular Music Song of the Year in 1966.
"And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" brought covers from Elvis Presley (who also interpreted "Sweet Caroline") and Mark Lindsay, former lead singer for Paul Revere & the Raiders. Other notable artists who recorded his early songs were the English hard-rock band Deep Purple, Lulu, and Cliff Richard.
In 1966, Diamond signed a deal with Bert Berns's Bang Records, then a subsidiary of Atlantic. His first release on that label was "Solitary Man", which was his first true hit as a solo artist. Diamond followed with "Cherry, Cherry" and "Kentucky Woman". His early concerts featured him opening for bands such as Herman's Hermits and the Who. As a guest performer with The Who, he was shocked to see Pete Townshend swinging his guitar like a club and then throwing it against walls and off the stage until the instrument's neck broke.
Diamond began to feel restricted by Bang Records because he wanted to record more ambitious, introspective music, such as "Brooklyn Roads" from 1968. Berns wanted to release "Kentucky Woman" as a single, but Diamond was no longer satisfied writing simple pop songs, so he proposed "Shilo", which was not about the Civil War but rather an imaginary childhood friend. Bang believed that the song was not commercial enough, so it was relegated to being an LP track on "Just for You". Diamond was also dissatisfied with his royalties and tried to sign with another record label after discovering a loophole in his contract that did not bind him exclusively to either WEB IV or Tallyrand, but the result was a series of lawsuits that coincided with a slump in his record sales and professional success. A magistrate refused WEB IV's request for a temporary injunction to prevent Diamond from joining another record company while his contract dispute continued in court, but the lawsuits persisted until February 18, 1977, when he triumphed in court and purchased the rights to his Bang-era master tapes.
On March 18, 1968, Diamond signed a deal with Uni Records; the label was named after Universal Pictures, the owner of which, MCA Inc., later consolidated its labels into MCA Records (now called Universal Music after merging with PolyGram in 1999). His debut album for Uni/MCA was Velvet Gloves and Spit, produced by Tom Catalano, which did not chart, and he recorded the follow-up Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show at American Sound Studios in Memphis with Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman producing.
1970s
In late 1969, he moved to Los Angeles. His sound mellowed with such songs as "Sweet Caroline" (1969), "Holly Holy" (1969), "Cracklin' Rosie" (1970) and "Song Sung Blue" (1972), the last two reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. "Sweet Caroline" was Diamond's first major hit after his slump. In 2007 Diamond said he had written "Sweet Caroline" for Caroline Kennedy after seeing her on the cover of Life in an equestrian riding outfit, but in 2014 he said in an interview on the Today Show that it was written for his then wife, Marcia. He could not find a good rhyme with the name "Marcia" and so used the name Caroline. It took him just one hour, in a Memphis hotel, to write and compose it. The 1971 release "I Am...I Said" was a Top 5 hit in both the US and UK and was his most intensely personal effort to date, taking over four months to complete.
In 1971, Diamond played 7 sold-out concerts at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The outdoor theater, which was noted for showcasing the best of current entertainers, added a stereo sound system for the first time. Diamond was also backed by a 35-piece string orchestra and six backing singers. After the first night, one leading newspaper called it "the finest concert in Greek Theater history."
In August 1972, he played again at the Greek, this time doing 10 shows. When the show was first announced, tickets at the 5000-seat theater sold out rapidly. He added a quadraphonic sound system for his performance to create full surround-sound. The performance of August 24, 1972, was recorded and released as the live double album Hot August Night. Hot August Night demonstrates Diamond's skills as a performer and showman, as he reinvigorated his back catalogue of hits with new energy. Diamond recalled: "Hot August Night captures a very special show for me. We went all out to really knock 'em dead in L.A." Many consider it his best work; critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Hot August Night "the ultimate Neil Diamond record... [which] shows Diamond the icon in full glory." The album became a classic, and was remastered in 2000 with additional selections. In Australia, which at the time had the most Neil Diamond fans per capita of any country, the album ranked No. 1 for 29 weeks and stayed in their top 20 bestsellers for two years.
In the fall of 1972, Diamond performed for 20 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. That theater had not staged a one-man show since Al Jolson in the 1930s. The approximately 1,600-seat Broadway venue provided an intimate concert setting not common at the time, with every performance reportedly sold out. It also made Diamond the first rock-era star to headline on Broadway. The review in the New York Times stated:
After the Winter Garden shows, Diamond announced that he needed a break, and he engaged in no more live performances till 1976. He used those four years to work on the score for Hall Bartlett's film version of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and to record two albums, Serenade and Beautiful Noise. He said years later, "I knew I'd come back, but I wasn't sure when. I spent one year on each of those albums...I'd been on the road six years. I had a son 2½ and I felt he needed me more than the audience did. So for four years I devoted myself to my son Jesse." He also said he needed to get back to having a private life, one where he could be anonymous.
In 1973, Diamond switched labels again, returning to Columbia Records for a million-dollar-advance-per-album contract (about US$ million per album in dollars). His first project, released as a solo album, was the soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The film received hostile reviews and did poorly at the box office, and the album grossed more than the film did. Richard D. Bach, author of the best-selling source story, disowned the film, and he and Diamond sued Bartlett, though for differing reasons; in Bach's case, it was because he felt the film omitted too much from the original novella, whereas in Diamond's case, it was because he felt the film had butchered his score. "After 'Jonathan,'" Diamond declared, "I vowed never to get involved in a movie again unless I had complete control." Bartlett angrily responded to Diamond's lawsuit by criticizing his music as having become "too slick...and it's not as much from his heart as it used to be." Bartlett also added, "Neil is extraordinarily talented. Often his arrogance is just a cover for the lonely and insecure person underneath."
Despite the controversy surrounding the film, the soundtrack was a success, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart. Diamond also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture. Thereafter, Diamond often included a Jonathan Livingston Seagull suite in his live performances, as he did in his 1976 "Love at the Greek" concert and for his show in Las Vegas that same year.
Diamond returned to live shows in 1976 with an Australian tour, "The 'Thank You Australia' Concert", which was broadcast to 36 television outlets nationwide. He also again appeared at the Greek Theater in a 1976 concert, Love at the Greek. An album and accompanying video/DVD of the show includes a version of "Song Sung Blue" with duets with Helen Reddy and Henry Winkler, a.k.a. Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli of Happy Days.
He began wearing colorful beaded shirts in concert, originally so that everyone in the audience could see him without binoculars. Bill Whitten designed and made the shirts for Diamond from the 1970s till approximately 2007.
In 1974, Diamond released the album Serenade, from which "Longfellow Serenade" and "I've Been This Way Before" were issued as singles. The latter had been intended for the Jonathan Livingston Seagull score, but Diamond had completed it too late for inclusion. That same year he appeared on a TV special for Shirley Bassey and sang a duet with her.
In 1976, he released Beautiful Noise, produced by Robbie Robertson of The Band. On Thanksgiving 1976, Diamond made an appearance at The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, performing "Dry Your Eyes", which he wrote jointly with Robertson, and which had appeared on Beautiful Noise. He also joined the rest of the performers onstage at the end in a rendition of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released".
Diamond was paid $650,000 (about US$ million in dollars) from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, to open its new $10 million Theater For the Performing Arts on July 2, 1976. The show played through July 5 and drew sold-out crowds at the 7,500-seat theater. A "who's who" of Hollywood attended opening night, ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Chevy Chase, and Diamond walked out on stage to a standing ovation. He opened the show with a story about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him before he became successful. His lead-in line to the first song of the evening was, "You may have dumped me a bit too soon, baby, because look who's standing here tonight."
He performed at Woburn Abbey on July 2, 1977, to an audience of 55,000 British fans. The concert and interviews were taped by film director William Friedkin, who used six cameras to capture the performance.
In 1977, Diamond released I'm Glad You're Here With Me Tonight, including "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", for which he composed the music and on the writing of whose lyrics he collaborated with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. Barbra Streisand covered the song on her album Songbird, and later, a Diamond-Streisand duet was recorded, spurred by the success of radio mash-ups. That version hit No. 1 in 1978, his third song to top the Hot 100. They appeared unannounced at the 1980 Grammy awards ceremony, where they performed the song to a surprised and rapturous audience.
His last 1970s album was September Morn, which included a new version of "I'm a Believer". It and "Red Red Wine" are his best-known original songs made more famous by other artists. In February 1979, the uptempo "Forever in Blue Jeans", co-written and jointly composed with his guitarist, Richard Bennett, was released as a single from You Don't Bring Me Flowers, Diamond's album from the previous year.
In 1979, Diamond collapsed on stage in San Francisco and was taken to the hospital, where he endured a 12-hour operation to remove what turned out to be a tumor on his spine. He said he had been losing feeling in his right leg "for a number of years but ignored it." When he collapsed, he had no strength in either leg. He underwent a long rehabilitation process just before starting principal photography on his film The Jazz Singer (1980). He was so convinced he was going to die that he wrote farewell letters to his friends.
1980s
A planned film version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" to star Diamond and Streisand fell through when Diamond instead starred in a 1980 remake of the Al Jolson classic The Jazz Singer alongside Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz. Though the movie received poor reviews, the soundtrack spawned three Top 10 singles, "Love on the Rocks", "Hello Again", and "America", the last of which had emotional significance for Diamond. "'America' was the story of my grandparents," he told an interviewer. "It's my gift to them, and it's very real for me ... In a way, it speaks to the immigrant in all of us." The song was performed in full by Diamond during the film's finale. An abbreviated version played over the film's opening titles.
The song was also the one he was most proud of, partly because of when it was later used: national news shows played it when the hostages were shown returning home after the Iran hostage crisis ended; it was played on the air during the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty; and at a tribute to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Vietnam Vets Welcome Home concert, he was asked to perform it live. At the time, a national poll found the song to be the number-one most recognized song about America, more than "God Bless America". It also became the anthem of his world tour two weeks after the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, when he changed the lyric at the end from; "They're coming to America", to "Stand up for America!" Earlier that year he performed it after a request from former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.
The film's failure was due in part to Diamond never having acted professionally before. "I didn't think I could handle it," he said later, seeing himself as "a fish out of water." For his performance, Diamond became the first-ever winner of a Worst Actor Razzie Award, even though he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the same role. Critic David Wild noted that the film showed that Diamond was open about his religion: "Who else but this Jewish Elvis could go multi-platinum with an album that featured a version of 'the Kol Nidre?'" Diamond later told the Los Angeles Times, "For me, this was the ultimate bar mitzvah."
Another Top 10 selection, "Heartlight", was inspired by the blockbuster 1982 movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Though the film's title character is never mentioned in the lyrics, Universal Pictures, which had released E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and was the parent company of the Uni Records label, by then called MCA Records, for which Diamond had recorded for years, briefly threatened legal action against both Diamond and Columbia Records.
Diamond's record sales slumped somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, his last single to make the Billboard's Pop Singles chart coming in 1986, but his concert tours continued to be big draws. Billboard magazine ranked Diamond as the most profitable solo performer of 1986. He released his 17th studio album in 1986, Headed for the Future, which reached number 20 on the Billboard 200. Three weeks later he starred in Hello Again, his first television special in nine years, performing comedy sketches and a duo medley with Carol Burnett.
In January 1987, Diamond sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. His "America" became the theme song for the Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign. That same year, UB40's reggae interpretation of Diamond's ballad "Red Red Wine" topped the Billboard Pop Singles chart and, like the Monkees' version of "I'm a Believer", became better known than Diamond's original version.
1990s
During the 1990s, Diamond produced six studio albums. He covered many classic songs from the movies and from famous Brill Building-era songwriters. He also released two Christmas albums, the first of which peaked at No. 8 on Billboard's Album chart. Diamond also recorded two albums of mostly new material during this period. In 1992, he performed for President George H.W. Bush's final Christmas in Washington NBC special. In 1993, Diamond opened the Mark of the Quad Cities (now the iWireless Center) with two shows on May 27 and 28 to a crowd of 27,000-plus.
The 1990s saw a resurgence in Diamond's popularity. "Sweet Caroline" became a popular sing-along at sporting events. It was used at Boston College football and basketball games. College sporting events in other states also played it, and it was even played at sports events in other countries, such as a Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament or a soccer match in Northern Ireland. It is played at every home game of the Sydney Swans of the Australian Football League. It became the theme song of Red Sox Nation, the fans of the Boston Red Sox.
The New York Rangers also adapted it as their own and played it whenever they were winning at the end of the third period of their games. The Pitt Panthers football team also played it after the third quarter of all home games, with the crowd cheering, "Let's go Pitt". The Carolina Panthers played it at the end of every home game they won. The Davidson College pep band likewise played it in the second half of every Davidson Wildcats men's basketball home game.
2000s
A more severely stripped-down-to-basics album, 12 Songs, produced by Rick Rubin, was released on November 8, 2005, in two editions: a standard 12-song release, and a special edition with two bonus tracks, including one featuring backing vocals by Brian Wilson. The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard chart, and received generally positive reviews; Earliwine describes the album as "inarguably Neil Diamond's best set of songs in a long, long time." 12 Songs also became noteworthy as one of the last albums to be pressed and released by Sony BMG with the Extended Copy Protection software embedded in the disc. (See the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal.)
In 2007, Diamond was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
On March 19, 2008, it was announced on the television show American Idol that Diamond would be a guest mentor to the remaining Idol contestants, who would sing Diamond songs for the broadcasts of April 29 and 30, 2008. On the April 30 broadcast, Diamond premiered a new song, "Pretty Amazing Grace", from his then recently released album Home Before Dark. On May 2, 2008, Sirius Satellite Radio started Neil Diamond Radio. On April 8, 2008, Diamond made a surprise announcement in a big-screen broadcast at Fenway Park that he would be appearing there "live in concert" on August 23, 2008, as part of his world tour. The announcement, which marked the first official confirmation of any 2008 concert dates in the US, came during the traditional eighth-inning singalong of "Sweet Caroline", which had by that time become an anthem for Boston fans.
On April 28, 2008, Diamond appeared on the roof of the Jimmy Kimmel building to sing "Sweet Caroline" after Kimmel was jokingly arrested for singing the song dressed as a Diamond impersonator.
Home Before Dark was released May 6, 2008, and topped the album charts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
On June 29, 2008, Diamond played to an estimated 108,000 fans at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England on the Concert of a Lifetime Tour; technical problems marred the concert.
In August, Diamond allowed cameras to record his entire four-night run at New York's Madison Square Garden; he released the resulting DVD in the U.S. in 2009, one year to the day of the first concert. Hot August Night/NYC debuted at No. 2 on the charts. On the same day the DVD was released, CBS aired an edited version, which won the ratings hour with 13 million viewers. The next day, the sales of the DVD surged, prompting Sony to order more copies to meet the high demand.
On August 25, 2008, Diamond performed at The Ohio State University while suffering from laryngitis. The result disappointed him as well as his fans, and on August 26, he offered refunds to anyone who applied by September 5.
Diamond was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 6, 2009, two nights before the 51st Annual Grammy Awards.
Long loved in Boston, Diamond was invited to sing at the July 4, 2009, Independence Day celebration.
On October 13, 2009, he released A Cherry Cherry Christmas, his third album of holiday music.
2010s
On November 2, 2010, Diamond released the album Dreams, a collection of 14 interpretations of his favorite songs by artists from the rock era. The album also included a new slow-tempo arrangement of his "I'm a Believer". In December, he performed a track from the album, "Ain't No Sunshine", on NBC's The Sing-Off with Committed and Street Corner Symphony, two a cappella groups featured on the show. The Very Best of Neil Diamond, a compilation CD of Diamond's 23 studio recordings from the Bang, UNI/MCA, & Columbia catalogs, was released on December 6, 2011, on the Sony Legacy label.
The years 2011 and 2012 were marked by several milestones in Diamond's career. On March 14, 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. In December, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Kennedy Center at the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors. On August 10, 2012, Diamond received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In November 2012, he topped the bill at the centenary edition of the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, which was transmitted on December 3. He also appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On April 20, 2013, Diamond made an unannounced appearance at Fenway Park to sing "Sweet Caroline" during the 8th inning. It was the first game at Fenway since the Boston Marathon bombing. On July 2, he released the single "Freedom Song (They'll Never Take Us Down)", with 100% of the purchase price benefiting One Fund Boston and the Wounded Warrior Project.
Sporting a beard, Diamond performed live on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol as part of A Capitol Fourth, which was broadcast nationally by PBS on July 4, 2013.
In January 2014, it was confirmed that Diamond had signed with the Capitol Music Group unit of Universal Music Group, which also owned Diamond's Uni/MCA catalog. UMG also took over Diamond's Columbia and Bang catalogues, which meant that all of his recorded output would be consolidated for the first time.
On July 8, 2014, Capitol Records announced, via a flyer included with Diamond's latest greatest hits compilations, All-Time Greatest Hits, which charted at 15 in the Billboard 200, that his next album, Melody Road, which was to be produced by Don Was and Jacknife Lee, would be released on September 30, 2014. In August, the release date was moved to October 21.
In September 2014, Diamond performed a surprise concert at his alma mater, Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. The show was announced via Twitter that afternoon. On the same day, he announced a 2015 "Melody Road" World Tour. The North American leg of the World Tour 2015 launched with a concert in Allentown, PA at the PPL Center on February 27 and ended at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado on May 31, 2015. Diamond used new media platforms and social media extensively throughout the tour, streaming several shows live on Periscope and showing tweets from fans who used the hashtag #tweetcaroline on two large screens. The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote: "This, my friends, wasn’t your grandfather's Neil Diamond concert. It was a multimedia extravaganza. Twitter. Periscope...It was a social media blitzkrieg that, by all accounts, proved to be an innovative way to widen his fan base."
In October 2016, Diamond released Acoustic Christmas, a folk-inspired Christmas album of original songs as well as acoustic versions of holiday classics. Produced by Was and Lee, who had produced Melody Road, the idea for the album began to take shape as the Melody Road sessions ended. To "channel the intimate atmosphere of '60s folk, Diamond recorded Acoustic Christmas with a handful of musicians, sitting around a circle of microphones, wires and, of course, Christmas lights."
In March 2017, the career-spanning anthology Neil Diamond 50 – 50th Anniversary Collection was released. He began his final concert tour, the 50 Year Anniversary World Tour in Fresno, California, in April.
In 2019, his 1969 signature song "Sweet Caroline" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
2020s
On March 7, 2020, despite his retirement due to Parkinson's disease, Diamond gave a rare performance at the Keep Memory Alive Power of Love Gala at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, where he was being honored.
On March 22, 2020, Diamond posted a video to YouTube playing "Sweet Caroline" with slightly modified lyrics ("...washing hands, don't touch me, I won't touch you...") in response to the widespread social distancing measures implemented due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2021, The New York Times reported that A Beautiful Noise, a musical based on Diamond's life and featuring his songs, would open at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston in the summer of 2022. The musical was scheduled to open on Broadway following the monthlong run in Boston.
Universal Music Group acquired Diamond's songwriting catalog and the rights to his recordings in February 2022. The acquisition also included 110 unreleased tracks, an unreleased album and archival videos.
Retirement
In January 2018, Diamond announced that he would immediately retire from touring due to having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Tour dates on the final leg of Diamond's "50 Year Anniversary World Tour" in Australia and New Zealand were cancelled. An announcement on his official website said he was not retiring from music and that the cancellation of the live performances would allow him to "continue his writing, recording and development of new projects."
On July 28, 2018, Diamond and his wife Katie McNeil made a surprise visit to the Incident Command post in Basalt, Colorado—near where Diamond lives—to thank the firefighters and families with a solo acoustic guitar concert for efforts in containing the Lake Christine Fire, which began on July 3 and had scorched of land.
In pop culture
In 1967, Diamond was featured on the fourth episode of the detective drama Mannix as the 'featured' artist in a small underground club called 'The BAD SCENE' and was interrupted during his singing by one of many fights that took place weekly on the show.
In 2000, Neil Diamond appeared onstage with Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond, surprising them before their show at House of Blues in Los Angeles.
In the 2001 comedy film Saving Silverman, the main characters play in a Diamond cover band, and Diamond made an extended cameo appearance as himself. Diamond even wrote and composed a new song, "I Believe in Happy Endings", for the film. He sat in with the tribute band Super Diamond at the film's premiere party.
In 2008, Diamond gave film-maker Greg Kohs permission to use his songs in a documentary. Kohs, a director from Philadelphia, had met a popular Milwaukee, Wisconsin, duo, Lightning & Thunder, composed of Mike Sardina, who did a Diamond impersonation, and his wife Claire. Kohs followed them for eight years and produced the film Song Sung Blue. Though Sardina had died in 2006, Diamond invited his widow and her family to be his front-row guests at his show in Milwaukee, where he told them he was moved by the film.
In the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, main characters Howard Wolowitz and Amy Farrah-Fowler are fans of Diamond's work.
Personal life
Diamond has been married three times. In 1963, he married his high-school sweetheart, Jaye Posner, who had become a schoolteacher. They had two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn. They separated in 1967 and divorced in 1969.
On December 5, 1969, Diamond married production assistant Marcia Murphey. They had two sons, Jesse and Micah. The marriage lasted 25 years, ending in 1994 or 1995.
In 1996, Diamond began a lengthy, live-in relationship with Australian Rae Farley after the two met in Brisbane, Australia. The songs on Home Before Dark were written and composed during her struggle with chronic back pain.
On September 7, 2011, in a message on Twitter, the 70-year-old Diamond announced his engagement to the 41-year-old Katie McNeil. Diamond said that his 2014 album Melody Road was fueled by their relationship, explaining:
There's no better inspiration or motivation for work than being in love. It's what you dream of as a creative person. I was able to complete this album—start it, write it and complete it—under the spell of love, and I think it shows somehow.
The couple married in front of family and close friends in Los Angeles in 2012. In addition to serving as Diamond's manager, McNeil produced the documentary Neil Diamond: Hot August Nights NYC.
Discography
Filmography
Diamond had a television appearance and roles in some movies, notably:
Mannix, "The Many Deaths of Saint Christopher" (1967) as himself
The Jazz Singer, starring role as Jess Robin
Saving Silverman appearing as himself
Notes
References
External links
Neil Diamond's Band's Official Site
1941 births
Living people
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American pianists
20th-century American singers
21st-century American pianists
21st-century American singers
Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American acoustic guitarists
American baritones
American folk guitarists
American male guitarists
American male pianists
American male singer-songwriters
American pop guitarists
American pop rock singers
American rock guitarists
American rock songwriters
American soft rock musicians
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American musicians
Jewish American songwriters
Jewish singers
Jewish folk singers
Jewish rock musicians
Erasmus Hall High School alumni
Capitol Records artists
Columbia Records artists
MCA Records artists
NYU Violets fencers
Uni Records artists
Golden Globe Award-winning musicians
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Kennedy Center honorees
Rhythm guitarists
Musicians from Brooklyn
Guitarists from New York City
Singers from New York City
People with Parkinson's disease
Singer-songwriters from New York (state)
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[
"Walter Drumstead (born Dremstadt; September 4, 1898 – May 18, 1946) was an American football guard who played one game in the National Football League (NFL) for the Hammond Pros. He did not attend college, and also played independent ball with the Hammond Scatenas, Boosters, and Colonials.\n\nHe was born Walter Dremstadt on September 4, 1898, in Hammond, Indiana. He did not attend college, and a 1923 article called him, \"from the college of hard knocks.\"\n\nIn 1921, Drumstead started a football career with the independent Hammond Scatenas. He joined the Hammond Boosters in 1924 after three seasons played with the Scatenas, and scored a touchdown in one of his first appearances with the team.\n\nAfter playing most of the 1925 season with the Boosters, Drumstead left the team for one game to play in the National Football League (NFL) with the Hammond Pros. He was a starter in their 0–13 loss against the Chicago Cardinals, and returned to the Boosters afterwards. The Times reported him as a \"fan favorite\". He played for the Boosters again in 1926.\n\nDrumstead played the left guard position for the Hammond Colonials in 1929.\n\nHe died in on May 18, 1946, at the age of 47.\n\nReferences\n\n1898 births\n1946 deaths\nPlayers of American football from Indiana\nPeople from Hammond, Indiana\nAmerican football guards\nHammond Pros players",
"James Thomas Norman (born January 2, 1934 in Fortress Monroe, Virginia) is a former American football offensive lineman in the National Football League for the Washington Redskins. He did not attend college.\n\n1934 births\nLiving people\nSportspeople from Hampton, Virginia\nAmerican football offensive tackles\nWashington Redskins players\nHamilton Tiger-Cats players"
] |
[
"Neil Diamond",
"Early life and education",
"Where was he born?",
"Brooklyn, New York,",
"Where was he born?",
"Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants.",
"Where did he go to school?",
"attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand.",
"When did he become interested in music?",
"For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar.",
"Did he attend college?",
"Diamond next attended New York University"
] |
C_dbc4fe5d6c2d49e8bc391ff36db3ca8d_1
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What did he major in?
| 6 |
What did Neil Diamond major in at college?
|
Neil Diamond
|
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. His parents were Rose (nee Rapaport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand. They were not close friends at the time, Diamond recalls: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved he then attended Abraham Lincoln High School, and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen. For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16, and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He adds that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, besides helping him release his youthful "frustrations". Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife. Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$405 per week, in 2017 dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it. CANNOTANSWER
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pre-med major on a fencing scholarship,
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Neil Leslie Diamond (born January 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and occasional actor. He has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has had ten No. 1 singles on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts: "Cracklin' Rosie", "Song Sung Blue", "Longfellow Serenade", "I've Been This Way Before", "If You Know What I Mean", "Desirée", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "America", "Yesterday's Songs", and "Heartlight". Thirty-eight songs by Diamond have been featured in the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts. He also played in movies such as The Jazz Singer, a musical drama film.
Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In 2011, he was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Early life and education
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. All four of his grandparents were immigrants, from Poland on his father's side and Russia on his mother's. His parents were Rose (née Rapoport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand; Diamond recalled they were not close friends at the time: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved to Brighton Beach, he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen.
For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16 and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He added that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, while also helping him release his youthful "frustrations".
Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them, which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife.
Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$ per week, in dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it.
Career
1960s
Diamond was not rehired after his 16 weeks with Sunbeam, and he began writing and singing his own songs for demos. "I never really chose songwriting," he says. "It just absorbed me and became more and more important in my life." His first recording contract was billed as "Neil and Jack", an Everly Brothers-type duet with high school friend Jack Packer. They recorded the unsuccessful singles "You Are My Love at Last" with "What Will I Do", and "I'm Afraid" with "Till You've Tried Love", both records released in 1962. Cashbox and Billboard magazines gave all four sides excellent reviews, and Diamond signed with Columbia Records as a solo performer later in 1962. In July 1963, Columbia released the single "At Night" with "Clown Town"; Billboard gave an excellent review to Clown Town, and Cashbox gave both sides excellent reviews, but it still failed to make the charts. Columbia dropped him from their label and he went back to writing songs in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years.
He wrote wherever he could, including on buses, and used an upright piano above the Birdland Club in New York City. One of the causes of this early nomadic life as a songwriter was his songs' wordiness: "I'd spent a lot of time on lyrics, and they were looking for hooks, and I didn't really understand the nature of that," he says. He was able to sell only about one song a week during those years, barely enough to survive on. He found himself only earning enough to spend 35 cents a day on food (US$ in dollars). But the privacy that he had above the Birdland Club allowed him to focus on writing without distractions. "Something new began to happen. I wasn't under the gun, and suddenly interesting songs began to happen, songs that had things none of the others did." Among them were "Cherry, Cherry" and "Solitary Man". "Solitary Man" was the first record that Diamond recorded under his own name which made the charts. It remains one of his personal all-time favorites, as it was about his early years as a songwriter, even though he failed to realize it at the time. He describes the song as "an outgrowth of my despair".
Diamond spent his early career in the Brill Building. His first success as a songwriter came in November 1965 with "Sunday and Me", a Top 20 hit for Jay and the Americans. Greater success followed with "I'm a Believer", "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You", "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)", and "Love to Love", all performed by the Monkees. He wrote and recorded the songs for himself, but the cover versions were released before his own. The unintended consequence was that Diamond began to gain fame as a songwriter. "I'm a Believer" became a gold record within two days of its release and stayed at the top of the charts for seven weeks, making it the Popular Music Song of the Year in 1966.
"And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" brought covers from Elvis Presley (who also interpreted "Sweet Caroline") and Mark Lindsay, former lead singer for Paul Revere & the Raiders. Other notable artists who recorded his early songs were the English hard-rock band Deep Purple, Lulu, and Cliff Richard.
In 1966, Diamond signed a deal with Bert Berns's Bang Records, then a subsidiary of Atlantic. His first release on that label was "Solitary Man", which was his first true hit as a solo artist. Diamond followed with "Cherry, Cherry" and "Kentucky Woman". His early concerts featured him opening for bands such as Herman's Hermits and the Who. As a guest performer with The Who, he was shocked to see Pete Townshend swinging his guitar like a club and then throwing it against walls and off the stage until the instrument's neck broke.
Diamond began to feel restricted by Bang Records because he wanted to record more ambitious, introspective music, such as "Brooklyn Roads" from 1968. Berns wanted to release "Kentucky Woman" as a single, but Diamond was no longer satisfied writing simple pop songs, so he proposed "Shilo", which was not about the Civil War but rather an imaginary childhood friend. Bang believed that the song was not commercial enough, so it was relegated to being an LP track on "Just for You". Diamond was also dissatisfied with his royalties and tried to sign with another record label after discovering a loophole in his contract that did not bind him exclusively to either WEB IV or Tallyrand, but the result was a series of lawsuits that coincided with a slump in his record sales and professional success. A magistrate refused WEB IV's request for a temporary injunction to prevent Diamond from joining another record company while his contract dispute continued in court, but the lawsuits persisted until February 18, 1977, when he triumphed in court and purchased the rights to his Bang-era master tapes.
On March 18, 1968, Diamond signed a deal with Uni Records; the label was named after Universal Pictures, the owner of which, MCA Inc., later consolidated its labels into MCA Records (now called Universal Music after merging with PolyGram in 1999). His debut album for Uni/MCA was Velvet Gloves and Spit, produced by Tom Catalano, which did not chart, and he recorded the follow-up Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show at American Sound Studios in Memphis with Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman producing.
1970s
In late 1969, he moved to Los Angeles. His sound mellowed with such songs as "Sweet Caroline" (1969), "Holly Holy" (1969), "Cracklin' Rosie" (1970) and "Song Sung Blue" (1972), the last two reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. "Sweet Caroline" was Diamond's first major hit after his slump. In 2007 Diamond said he had written "Sweet Caroline" for Caroline Kennedy after seeing her on the cover of Life in an equestrian riding outfit, but in 2014 he said in an interview on the Today Show that it was written for his then wife, Marcia. He could not find a good rhyme with the name "Marcia" and so used the name Caroline. It took him just one hour, in a Memphis hotel, to write and compose it. The 1971 release "I Am...I Said" was a Top 5 hit in both the US and UK and was his most intensely personal effort to date, taking over four months to complete.
In 1971, Diamond played 7 sold-out concerts at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The outdoor theater, which was noted for showcasing the best of current entertainers, added a stereo sound system for the first time. Diamond was also backed by a 35-piece string orchestra and six backing singers. After the first night, one leading newspaper called it "the finest concert in Greek Theater history."
In August 1972, he played again at the Greek, this time doing 10 shows. When the show was first announced, tickets at the 5000-seat theater sold out rapidly. He added a quadraphonic sound system for his performance to create full surround-sound. The performance of August 24, 1972, was recorded and released as the live double album Hot August Night. Hot August Night demonstrates Diamond's skills as a performer and showman, as he reinvigorated his back catalogue of hits with new energy. Diamond recalled: "Hot August Night captures a very special show for me. We went all out to really knock 'em dead in L.A." Many consider it his best work; critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Hot August Night "the ultimate Neil Diamond record... [which] shows Diamond the icon in full glory." The album became a classic, and was remastered in 2000 with additional selections. In Australia, which at the time had the most Neil Diamond fans per capita of any country, the album ranked No. 1 for 29 weeks and stayed in their top 20 bestsellers for two years.
In the fall of 1972, Diamond performed for 20 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. That theater had not staged a one-man show since Al Jolson in the 1930s. The approximately 1,600-seat Broadway venue provided an intimate concert setting not common at the time, with every performance reportedly sold out. It also made Diamond the first rock-era star to headline on Broadway. The review in the New York Times stated:
After the Winter Garden shows, Diamond announced that he needed a break, and he engaged in no more live performances till 1976. He used those four years to work on the score for Hall Bartlett's film version of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and to record two albums, Serenade and Beautiful Noise. He said years later, "I knew I'd come back, but I wasn't sure when. I spent one year on each of those albums...I'd been on the road six years. I had a son 2½ and I felt he needed me more than the audience did. So for four years I devoted myself to my son Jesse." He also said he needed to get back to having a private life, one where he could be anonymous.
In 1973, Diamond switched labels again, returning to Columbia Records for a million-dollar-advance-per-album contract (about US$ million per album in dollars). His first project, released as a solo album, was the soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The film received hostile reviews and did poorly at the box office, and the album grossed more than the film did. Richard D. Bach, author of the best-selling source story, disowned the film, and he and Diamond sued Bartlett, though for differing reasons; in Bach's case, it was because he felt the film omitted too much from the original novella, whereas in Diamond's case, it was because he felt the film had butchered his score. "After 'Jonathan,'" Diamond declared, "I vowed never to get involved in a movie again unless I had complete control." Bartlett angrily responded to Diamond's lawsuit by criticizing his music as having become "too slick...and it's not as much from his heart as it used to be." Bartlett also added, "Neil is extraordinarily talented. Often his arrogance is just a cover for the lonely and insecure person underneath."
Despite the controversy surrounding the film, the soundtrack was a success, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart. Diamond also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture. Thereafter, Diamond often included a Jonathan Livingston Seagull suite in his live performances, as he did in his 1976 "Love at the Greek" concert and for his show in Las Vegas that same year.
Diamond returned to live shows in 1976 with an Australian tour, "The 'Thank You Australia' Concert", which was broadcast to 36 television outlets nationwide. He also again appeared at the Greek Theater in a 1976 concert, Love at the Greek. An album and accompanying video/DVD of the show includes a version of "Song Sung Blue" with duets with Helen Reddy and Henry Winkler, a.k.a. Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli of Happy Days.
He began wearing colorful beaded shirts in concert, originally so that everyone in the audience could see him without binoculars. Bill Whitten designed and made the shirts for Diamond from the 1970s till approximately 2007.
In 1974, Diamond released the album Serenade, from which "Longfellow Serenade" and "I've Been This Way Before" were issued as singles. The latter had been intended for the Jonathan Livingston Seagull score, but Diamond had completed it too late for inclusion. That same year he appeared on a TV special for Shirley Bassey and sang a duet with her.
In 1976, he released Beautiful Noise, produced by Robbie Robertson of The Band. On Thanksgiving 1976, Diamond made an appearance at The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, performing "Dry Your Eyes", which he wrote jointly with Robertson, and which had appeared on Beautiful Noise. He also joined the rest of the performers onstage at the end in a rendition of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released".
Diamond was paid $650,000 (about US$ million in dollars) from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, to open its new $10 million Theater For the Performing Arts on July 2, 1976. The show played through July 5 and drew sold-out crowds at the 7,500-seat theater. A "who's who" of Hollywood attended opening night, ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Chevy Chase, and Diamond walked out on stage to a standing ovation. He opened the show with a story about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him before he became successful. His lead-in line to the first song of the evening was, "You may have dumped me a bit too soon, baby, because look who's standing here tonight."
He performed at Woburn Abbey on July 2, 1977, to an audience of 55,000 British fans. The concert and interviews were taped by film director William Friedkin, who used six cameras to capture the performance.
In 1977, Diamond released I'm Glad You're Here With Me Tonight, including "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", for which he composed the music and on the writing of whose lyrics he collaborated with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. Barbra Streisand covered the song on her album Songbird, and later, a Diamond-Streisand duet was recorded, spurred by the success of radio mash-ups. That version hit No. 1 in 1978, his third song to top the Hot 100. They appeared unannounced at the 1980 Grammy awards ceremony, where they performed the song to a surprised and rapturous audience.
His last 1970s album was September Morn, which included a new version of "I'm a Believer". It and "Red Red Wine" are his best-known original songs made more famous by other artists. In February 1979, the uptempo "Forever in Blue Jeans", co-written and jointly composed with his guitarist, Richard Bennett, was released as a single from You Don't Bring Me Flowers, Diamond's album from the previous year.
In 1979, Diamond collapsed on stage in San Francisco and was taken to the hospital, where he endured a 12-hour operation to remove what turned out to be a tumor on his spine. He said he had been losing feeling in his right leg "for a number of years but ignored it." When he collapsed, he had no strength in either leg. He underwent a long rehabilitation process just before starting principal photography on his film The Jazz Singer (1980). He was so convinced he was going to die that he wrote farewell letters to his friends.
1980s
A planned film version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" to star Diamond and Streisand fell through when Diamond instead starred in a 1980 remake of the Al Jolson classic The Jazz Singer alongside Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz. Though the movie received poor reviews, the soundtrack spawned three Top 10 singles, "Love on the Rocks", "Hello Again", and "America", the last of which had emotional significance for Diamond. "'America' was the story of my grandparents," he told an interviewer. "It's my gift to them, and it's very real for me ... In a way, it speaks to the immigrant in all of us." The song was performed in full by Diamond during the film's finale. An abbreviated version played over the film's opening titles.
The song was also the one he was most proud of, partly because of when it was later used: national news shows played it when the hostages were shown returning home after the Iran hostage crisis ended; it was played on the air during the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty; and at a tribute to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Vietnam Vets Welcome Home concert, he was asked to perform it live. At the time, a national poll found the song to be the number-one most recognized song about America, more than "God Bless America". It also became the anthem of his world tour two weeks after the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, when he changed the lyric at the end from; "They're coming to America", to "Stand up for America!" Earlier that year he performed it after a request from former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.
The film's failure was due in part to Diamond never having acted professionally before. "I didn't think I could handle it," he said later, seeing himself as "a fish out of water." For his performance, Diamond became the first-ever winner of a Worst Actor Razzie Award, even though he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the same role. Critic David Wild noted that the film showed that Diamond was open about his religion: "Who else but this Jewish Elvis could go multi-platinum with an album that featured a version of 'the Kol Nidre?'" Diamond later told the Los Angeles Times, "For me, this was the ultimate bar mitzvah."
Another Top 10 selection, "Heartlight", was inspired by the blockbuster 1982 movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Though the film's title character is never mentioned in the lyrics, Universal Pictures, which had released E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and was the parent company of the Uni Records label, by then called MCA Records, for which Diamond had recorded for years, briefly threatened legal action against both Diamond and Columbia Records.
Diamond's record sales slumped somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, his last single to make the Billboard's Pop Singles chart coming in 1986, but his concert tours continued to be big draws. Billboard magazine ranked Diamond as the most profitable solo performer of 1986. He released his 17th studio album in 1986, Headed for the Future, which reached number 20 on the Billboard 200. Three weeks later he starred in Hello Again, his first television special in nine years, performing comedy sketches and a duo medley with Carol Burnett.
In January 1987, Diamond sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. His "America" became the theme song for the Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign. That same year, UB40's reggae interpretation of Diamond's ballad "Red Red Wine" topped the Billboard Pop Singles chart and, like the Monkees' version of "I'm a Believer", became better known than Diamond's original version.
1990s
During the 1990s, Diamond produced six studio albums. He covered many classic songs from the movies and from famous Brill Building-era songwriters. He also released two Christmas albums, the first of which peaked at No. 8 on Billboard's Album chart. Diamond also recorded two albums of mostly new material during this period. In 1992, he performed for President George H.W. Bush's final Christmas in Washington NBC special. In 1993, Diamond opened the Mark of the Quad Cities (now the iWireless Center) with two shows on May 27 and 28 to a crowd of 27,000-plus.
The 1990s saw a resurgence in Diamond's popularity. "Sweet Caroline" became a popular sing-along at sporting events. It was used at Boston College football and basketball games. College sporting events in other states also played it, and it was even played at sports events in other countries, such as a Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament or a soccer match in Northern Ireland. It is played at every home game of the Sydney Swans of the Australian Football League. It became the theme song of Red Sox Nation, the fans of the Boston Red Sox.
The New York Rangers also adapted it as their own and played it whenever they were winning at the end of the third period of their games. The Pitt Panthers football team also played it after the third quarter of all home games, with the crowd cheering, "Let's go Pitt". The Carolina Panthers played it at the end of every home game they won. The Davidson College pep band likewise played it in the second half of every Davidson Wildcats men's basketball home game.
2000s
A more severely stripped-down-to-basics album, 12 Songs, produced by Rick Rubin, was released on November 8, 2005, in two editions: a standard 12-song release, and a special edition with two bonus tracks, including one featuring backing vocals by Brian Wilson. The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard chart, and received generally positive reviews; Earliwine describes the album as "inarguably Neil Diamond's best set of songs in a long, long time." 12 Songs also became noteworthy as one of the last albums to be pressed and released by Sony BMG with the Extended Copy Protection software embedded in the disc. (See the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal.)
In 2007, Diamond was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
On March 19, 2008, it was announced on the television show American Idol that Diamond would be a guest mentor to the remaining Idol contestants, who would sing Diamond songs for the broadcasts of April 29 and 30, 2008. On the April 30 broadcast, Diamond premiered a new song, "Pretty Amazing Grace", from his then recently released album Home Before Dark. On May 2, 2008, Sirius Satellite Radio started Neil Diamond Radio. On April 8, 2008, Diamond made a surprise announcement in a big-screen broadcast at Fenway Park that he would be appearing there "live in concert" on August 23, 2008, as part of his world tour. The announcement, which marked the first official confirmation of any 2008 concert dates in the US, came during the traditional eighth-inning singalong of "Sweet Caroline", which had by that time become an anthem for Boston fans.
On April 28, 2008, Diamond appeared on the roof of the Jimmy Kimmel building to sing "Sweet Caroline" after Kimmel was jokingly arrested for singing the song dressed as a Diamond impersonator.
Home Before Dark was released May 6, 2008, and topped the album charts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
On June 29, 2008, Diamond played to an estimated 108,000 fans at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England on the Concert of a Lifetime Tour; technical problems marred the concert.
In August, Diamond allowed cameras to record his entire four-night run at New York's Madison Square Garden; he released the resulting DVD in the U.S. in 2009, one year to the day of the first concert. Hot August Night/NYC debuted at No. 2 on the charts. On the same day the DVD was released, CBS aired an edited version, which won the ratings hour with 13 million viewers. The next day, the sales of the DVD surged, prompting Sony to order more copies to meet the high demand.
On August 25, 2008, Diamond performed at The Ohio State University while suffering from laryngitis. The result disappointed him as well as his fans, and on August 26, he offered refunds to anyone who applied by September 5.
Diamond was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 6, 2009, two nights before the 51st Annual Grammy Awards.
Long loved in Boston, Diamond was invited to sing at the July 4, 2009, Independence Day celebration.
On October 13, 2009, he released A Cherry Cherry Christmas, his third album of holiday music.
2010s
On November 2, 2010, Diamond released the album Dreams, a collection of 14 interpretations of his favorite songs by artists from the rock era. The album also included a new slow-tempo arrangement of his "I'm a Believer". In December, he performed a track from the album, "Ain't No Sunshine", on NBC's The Sing-Off with Committed and Street Corner Symphony, two a cappella groups featured on the show. The Very Best of Neil Diamond, a compilation CD of Diamond's 23 studio recordings from the Bang, UNI/MCA, & Columbia catalogs, was released on December 6, 2011, on the Sony Legacy label.
The years 2011 and 2012 were marked by several milestones in Diamond's career. On March 14, 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. In December, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Kennedy Center at the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors. On August 10, 2012, Diamond received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In November 2012, he topped the bill at the centenary edition of the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, which was transmitted on December 3. He also appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On April 20, 2013, Diamond made an unannounced appearance at Fenway Park to sing "Sweet Caroline" during the 8th inning. It was the first game at Fenway since the Boston Marathon bombing. On July 2, he released the single "Freedom Song (They'll Never Take Us Down)", with 100% of the purchase price benefiting One Fund Boston and the Wounded Warrior Project.
Sporting a beard, Diamond performed live on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol as part of A Capitol Fourth, which was broadcast nationally by PBS on July 4, 2013.
In January 2014, it was confirmed that Diamond had signed with the Capitol Music Group unit of Universal Music Group, which also owned Diamond's Uni/MCA catalog. UMG also took over Diamond's Columbia and Bang catalogues, which meant that all of his recorded output would be consolidated for the first time.
On July 8, 2014, Capitol Records announced, via a flyer included with Diamond's latest greatest hits compilations, All-Time Greatest Hits, which charted at 15 in the Billboard 200, that his next album, Melody Road, which was to be produced by Don Was and Jacknife Lee, would be released on September 30, 2014. In August, the release date was moved to October 21.
In September 2014, Diamond performed a surprise concert at his alma mater, Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. The show was announced via Twitter that afternoon. On the same day, he announced a 2015 "Melody Road" World Tour. The North American leg of the World Tour 2015 launched with a concert in Allentown, PA at the PPL Center on February 27 and ended at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado on May 31, 2015. Diamond used new media platforms and social media extensively throughout the tour, streaming several shows live on Periscope and showing tweets from fans who used the hashtag #tweetcaroline on two large screens. The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote: "This, my friends, wasn’t your grandfather's Neil Diamond concert. It was a multimedia extravaganza. Twitter. Periscope...It was a social media blitzkrieg that, by all accounts, proved to be an innovative way to widen his fan base."
In October 2016, Diamond released Acoustic Christmas, a folk-inspired Christmas album of original songs as well as acoustic versions of holiday classics. Produced by Was and Lee, who had produced Melody Road, the idea for the album began to take shape as the Melody Road sessions ended. To "channel the intimate atmosphere of '60s folk, Diamond recorded Acoustic Christmas with a handful of musicians, sitting around a circle of microphones, wires and, of course, Christmas lights."
In March 2017, the career-spanning anthology Neil Diamond 50 – 50th Anniversary Collection was released. He began his final concert tour, the 50 Year Anniversary World Tour in Fresno, California, in April.
In 2019, his 1969 signature song "Sweet Caroline" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
2020s
On March 7, 2020, despite his retirement due to Parkinson's disease, Diamond gave a rare performance at the Keep Memory Alive Power of Love Gala at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, where he was being honored.
On March 22, 2020, Diamond posted a video to YouTube playing "Sweet Caroline" with slightly modified lyrics ("...washing hands, don't touch me, I won't touch you...") in response to the widespread social distancing measures implemented due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2021, The New York Times reported that A Beautiful Noise, a musical based on Diamond's life and featuring his songs, would open at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston in the summer of 2022. The musical was scheduled to open on Broadway following the monthlong run in Boston.
Universal Music Group acquired Diamond's songwriting catalog and the rights to his recordings in February 2022. The acquisition also included 110 unreleased tracks, an unreleased album and archival videos.
Retirement
In January 2018, Diamond announced that he would immediately retire from touring due to having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Tour dates on the final leg of Diamond's "50 Year Anniversary World Tour" in Australia and New Zealand were cancelled. An announcement on his official website said he was not retiring from music and that the cancellation of the live performances would allow him to "continue his writing, recording and development of new projects."
On July 28, 2018, Diamond and his wife Katie McNeil made a surprise visit to the Incident Command post in Basalt, Colorado—near where Diamond lives—to thank the firefighters and families with a solo acoustic guitar concert for efforts in containing the Lake Christine Fire, which began on July 3 and had scorched of land.
In pop culture
In 1967, Diamond was featured on the fourth episode of the detective drama Mannix as the 'featured' artist in a small underground club called 'The BAD SCENE' and was interrupted during his singing by one of many fights that took place weekly on the show.
In 2000, Neil Diamond appeared onstage with Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond, surprising them before their show at House of Blues in Los Angeles.
In the 2001 comedy film Saving Silverman, the main characters play in a Diamond cover band, and Diamond made an extended cameo appearance as himself. Diamond even wrote and composed a new song, "I Believe in Happy Endings", for the film. He sat in with the tribute band Super Diamond at the film's premiere party.
In 2008, Diamond gave film-maker Greg Kohs permission to use his songs in a documentary. Kohs, a director from Philadelphia, had met a popular Milwaukee, Wisconsin, duo, Lightning & Thunder, composed of Mike Sardina, who did a Diamond impersonation, and his wife Claire. Kohs followed them for eight years and produced the film Song Sung Blue. Though Sardina had died in 2006, Diamond invited his widow and her family to be his front-row guests at his show in Milwaukee, where he told them he was moved by the film.
In the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, main characters Howard Wolowitz and Amy Farrah-Fowler are fans of Diamond's work.
Personal life
Diamond has been married three times. In 1963, he married his high-school sweetheart, Jaye Posner, who had become a schoolteacher. They had two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn. They separated in 1967 and divorced in 1969.
On December 5, 1969, Diamond married production assistant Marcia Murphey. They had two sons, Jesse and Micah. The marriage lasted 25 years, ending in 1994 or 1995.
In 1996, Diamond began a lengthy, live-in relationship with Australian Rae Farley after the two met in Brisbane, Australia. The songs on Home Before Dark were written and composed during her struggle with chronic back pain.
On September 7, 2011, in a message on Twitter, the 70-year-old Diamond announced his engagement to the 41-year-old Katie McNeil. Diamond said that his 2014 album Melody Road was fueled by their relationship, explaining:
There's no better inspiration or motivation for work than being in love. It's what you dream of as a creative person. I was able to complete this album—start it, write it and complete it—under the spell of love, and I think it shows somehow.
The couple married in front of family and close friends in Los Angeles in 2012. In addition to serving as Diamond's manager, McNeil produced the documentary Neil Diamond: Hot August Nights NYC.
Discography
Filmography
Diamond had a television appearance and roles in some movies, notably:
Mannix, "The Many Deaths of Saint Christopher" (1967) as himself
The Jazz Singer, starring role as Jess Robin
Saving Silverman appearing as himself
Notes
References
External links
Neil Diamond's Band's Official Site
1941 births
Living people
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American pianists
20th-century American singers
21st-century American pianists
21st-century American singers
Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American acoustic guitarists
American baritones
American folk guitarists
American male guitarists
American male pianists
American male singer-songwriters
American pop guitarists
American pop rock singers
American rock guitarists
American rock songwriters
American soft rock musicians
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American musicians
Jewish American songwriters
Jewish singers
Jewish folk singers
Jewish rock musicians
Erasmus Hall High School alumni
Capitol Records artists
Columbia Records artists
MCA Records artists
NYU Violets fencers
Uni Records artists
Golden Globe Award-winning musicians
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Kennedy Center honorees
Rhythm guitarists
Musicians from Brooklyn
Guitarists from New York City
Singers from New York City
People with Parkinson's disease
Singer-songwriters from New York (state)
| true |
[
"Eber Worthington Cave (July 14, 1831 - March 28, 1904) was a journalist, civic promoter, and politician in Texas. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and began working as a printer in New Jersey. He moved to Texas in 1853 and bought the Nacogdoches Chronicle in 1854. As editor of this newspaper, he opposed re-opening the African slave trade and supported Sam Houston in his effort to become Governor in the late 1850s. Houston made Cave his Secretary of State in late 1859. An opponent of secession, Cave resigned in early 1861. He did later materially support the Confederacy and served as a Confederate officer with the rank of Major. In 1864 he sold what was later known as the Mrs. Sam Houston House to his friend Margaret Lea Houston.\n\nIn his later years, Cave was an executive with railroad and shipping companies. He helped to promote what eventually became the Houston Ship Channel.\n\nMajor Cave died March 28, 1904, several days after falling from a streetcar, and was buried in Houston in Glenwood Cemetery.\n\nReferences \nHandbook of Texas Online - Eber Worthington Cave\nNational Park Service Soldiers and Sailors Database\nFindagrave - Major Eber Worthington Cave\n\n1831 births\n1904 deaths\nAccidental deaths from falls\nAccidental deaths in Texas\nSecretaries of State of Texas",
"Mahlon Jesse Higbee (August 16, 1901 – April 7, 1968) was a Major League Baseball outfielder who started three games for the New York Giants during the last week of the 1922 season.\n\nThe 21-year-old rookie began the season with the Hopkinsville Hoppers of the KITTY League. The Louisville, Kentucky native dominated the Class D circuit, leading the league with a .385 batting average, 161 hits and 101 runs scored. Impressed, the Giants (who had already clinched the National League pennant) brought Higbee to New York, and the kid did not disappoint, with a .400 average (4-for-10), five runs batted in and two runs scored. (Higbee's 5 RBI is the most for any MLB player who appeared in three games or fewer.) All three of Higbee's games were played at the Polo Grounds, and all were Giant victories. Higbee also socked an inside-the-park home run in what would be his final major league at bat. It was the only home run of his Major League career. In the field, he played left field and right field, with two putouts and no errors.\n\nHigbee did not play in the 1922 World Series (a victory for the Giants over the New York Yankees), and was returned to the minors. Higbee did not play at all in 1923, then spent two seasons with the Portsmouth Truckers of the Class B Virginia League, batting .273 in 153 games. After another break in 1926, Higbee returned to pro ball in 1927 with the Evansville Hubs of the Three-I League, retiring after hitting just .188 in sixteen games.\n\nHigbee died at the age of 66 in Depauw, Indiana.\n\nSee also\nList of Major League Baseball players with a home run in their final major league at bat\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nBaseball Reference\nRetrosheet\n\nMajor League Baseball outfielders\nBaseball players from Louisville, Kentucky\nNew York Giants (NL) players\n1901 births\n1968 deaths\nMajor League Baseball left fielders\nMajor League Baseball right fielders"
] |
[
"Neil Diamond",
"Early life and education",
"Where was he born?",
"Brooklyn, New York,",
"Where was he born?",
"Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants.",
"Where did he go to school?",
"attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand.",
"When did he become interested in music?",
"For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar.",
"Did he attend college?",
"Diamond next attended New York University",
"What did he major in?",
"pre-med major on a fencing scholarship,"
] |
C_dbc4fe5d6c2d49e8bc391ff36db3ca8d_1
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Did he get married?
| 7 |
Did Neil Diamond get married?
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Neil Diamond
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Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. His parents were Rose (nee Rapaport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand. They were not close friends at the time, Diamond recalls: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved he then attended Abraham Lincoln High School, and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen. For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16, and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He adds that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, besides helping him release his youthful "frustrations". Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife. Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$405 per week, in 2017 dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Neil Leslie Diamond (born January 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter, musician and occasional actor. He has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has had ten No. 1 singles on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts: "Cracklin' Rosie", "Song Sung Blue", "Longfellow Serenade", "I've Been This Way Before", "If You Know What I Mean", "Desirée", "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", "America", "Yesterday's Songs", and "Heartlight". Thirty-eight songs by Diamond have been featured in the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts. He also played in movies such as The Jazz Singer, a musical drama film.
Diamond was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, and he received the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. In 2011, he was an honoree at the Kennedy Center Honors, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Early life and education
Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. All four of his grandparents were immigrants, from Poland on his father's side and Russia on his mother's. His parents were Rose (née Rapoport) and Akeeba "Kieve" Diamond, a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, having also spent four years in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his father was stationed in the army. In Brooklyn he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a member of the Freshman Chorus and Choral Club, along with classmate Barbra Streisand; Diamond recalled they were not close friends at the time: "We were two poor kids in Brooklyn. We hung out in the front of Erasmus High and smoked cigarettes." After his family moved to Brighton Beach, he attended Abraham Lincoln High School and was a member of the fencing team. Also on the team was his best friend, future Olympic fencer Herb Cohen.
For his 16th birthday, he received his first guitar. When he was 16 and still in high school, Diamond spent a number of weeks at Surprise Lake Camp, a camp for Jewish children in upstate New York, when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert. Seeing the widely recognized singer perform, and watching other children singing songs for Seeger that they wrote themselves, had an immediate effect on Diamond, who then became aware of the possibility of writing his own songs. "And the next thing, I got a guitar when we got back to Brooklyn, started to take lessons and almost immediately began to write songs," he said. He added that his attraction to songwriting was the "first real interest" he had growing up, while also helping him release his youthful "frustrations".
Diamond also used his newly developing skill to write poetry. By writing poems for girls he was attracted to in school, he soon learned it often won their hearts. His male classmates took note and began asking him to write poems for them, which they would sing and use with equal success. He spent the summer following his graduation as a waiter in the Catskills resort area. There he first met Jaye Posner, who would years later become his wife.
Diamond next attended New York University as a pre-med major on a fencing scholarship, again on the fencing team with Herb Cohen. He was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team. Often bored in class, he found writing song lyrics more to his liking. He began cutting classes and taking the train up to Tin Pan Alley, where he tried to get some of his songs heard by local music publishers. In his senior year, when he was just 10 units short of graduation, Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a 16-week job writing songs for $50 a week (equivalent to about US$ per week, in dollars), and he dropped out of college to accept it.
Career
1960s
Diamond was not rehired after his 16 weeks with Sunbeam, and he began writing and singing his own songs for demos. "I never really chose songwriting," he says. "It just absorbed me and became more and more important in my life." His first recording contract was billed as "Neil and Jack", an Everly Brothers-type duet with high school friend Jack Packer. They recorded the unsuccessful singles "You Are My Love at Last" with "What Will I Do", and "I'm Afraid" with "Till You've Tried Love", both records released in 1962. Cashbox and Billboard magazines gave all four sides excellent reviews, and Diamond signed with Columbia Records as a solo performer later in 1962. In July 1963, Columbia released the single "At Night" with "Clown Town"; Billboard gave an excellent review to Clown Town, and Cashbox gave both sides excellent reviews, but it still failed to make the charts. Columbia dropped him from their label and he went back to writing songs in and out of publishing houses for the next seven years.
He wrote wherever he could, including on buses, and used an upright piano above the Birdland Club in New York City. One of the causes of this early nomadic life as a songwriter was his songs' wordiness: "I'd spent a lot of time on lyrics, and they were looking for hooks, and I didn't really understand the nature of that," he says. He was able to sell only about one song a week during those years, barely enough to survive on. He found himself only earning enough to spend 35 cents a day on food (US$ in dollars). But the privacy that he had above the Birdland Club allowed him to focus on writing without distractions. "Something new began to happen. I wasn't under the gun, and suddenly interesting songs began to happen, songs that had things none of the others did." Among them were "Cherry, Cherry" and "Solitary Man". "Solitary Man" was the first record that Diamond recorded under his own name which made the charts. It remains one of his personal all-time favorites, as it was about his early years as a songwriter, even though he failed to realize it at the time. He describes the song as "an outgrowth of my despair".
Diamond spent his early career in the Brill Building. His first success as a songwriter came in November 1965 with "Sunday and Me", a Top 20 hit for Jay and the Americans. Greater success followed with "I'm a Believer", "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You", "Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)", and "Love to Love", all performed by the Monkees. He wrote and recorded the songs for himself, but the cover versions were released before his own. The unintended consequence was that Diamond began to gain fame as a songwriter. "I'm a Believer" became a gold record within two days of its release and stayed at the top of the charts for seven weeks, making it the Popular Music Song of the Year in 1966.
"And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" brought covers from Elvis Presley (who also interpreted "Sweet Caroline") and Mark Lindsay, former lead singer for Paul Revere & the Raiders. Other notable artists who recorded his early songs were the English hard-rock band Deep Purple, Lulu, and Cliff Richard.
In 1966, Diamond signed a deal with Bert Berns's Bang Records, then a subsidiary of Atlantic. His first release on that label was "Solitary Man", which was his first true hit as a solo artist. Diamond followed with "Cherry, Cherry" and "Kentucky Woman". His early concerts featured him opening for bands such as Herman's Hermits and the Who. As a guest performer with The Who, he was shocked to see Pete Townshend swinging his guitar like a club and then throwing it against walls and off the stage until the instrument's neck broke.
Diamond began to feel restricted by Bang Records because he wanted to record more ambitious, introspective music, such as "Brooklyn Roads" from 1968. Berns wanted to release "Kentucky Woman" as a single, but Diamond was no longer satisfied writing simple pop songs, so he proposed "Shilo", which was not about the Civil War but rather an imaginary childhood friend. Bang believed that the song was not commercial enough, so it was relegated to being an LP track on "Just for You". Diamond was also dissatisfied with his royalties and tried to sign with another record label after discovering a loophole in his contract that did not bind him exclusively to either WEB IV or Tallyrand, but the result was a series of lawsuits that coincided with a slump in his record sales and professional success. A magistrate refused WEB IV's request for a temporary injunction to prevent Diamond from joining another record company while his contract dispute continued in court, but the lawsuits persisted until February 18, 1977, when he triumphed in court and purchased the rights to his Bang-era master tapes.
On March 18, 1968, Diamond signed a deal with Uni Records; the label was named after Universal Pictures, the owner of which, MCA Inc., later consolidated its labels into MCA Records (now called Universal Music after merging with PolyGram in 1999). His debut album for Uni/MCA was Velvet Gloves and Spit, produced by Tom Catalano, which did not chart, and he recorded the follow-up Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show at American Sound Studios in Memphis with Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman producing.
1970s
In late 1969, he moved to Los Angeles. His sound mellowed with such songs as "Sweet Caroline" (1969), "Holly Holy" (1969), "Cracklin' Rosie" (1970) and "Song Sung Blue" (1972), the last two reaching No. 1 on the Hot 100. "Sweet Caroline" was Diamond's first major hit after his slump. In 2007 Diamond said he had written "Sweet Caroline" for Caroline Kennedy after seeing her on the cover of Life in an equestrian riding outfit, but in 2014 he said in an interview on the Today Show that it was written for his then wife, Marcia. He could not find a good rhyme with the name "Marcia" and so used the name Caroline. It took him just one hour, in a Memphis hotel, to write and compose it. The 1971 release "I Am...I Said" was a Top 5 hit in both the US and UK and was his most intensely personal effort to date, taking over four months to complete.
In 1971, Diamond played 7 sold-out concerts at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. The outdoor theater, which was noted for showcasing the best of current entertainers, added a stereo sound system for the first time. Diamond was also backed by a 35-piece string orchestra and six backing singers. After the first night, one leading newspaper called it "the finest concert in Greek Theater history."
In August 1972, he played again at the Greek, this time doing 10 shows. When the show was first announced, tickets at the 5000-seat theater sold out rapidly. He added a quadraphonic sound system for his performance to create full surround-sound. The performance of August 24, 1972, was recorded and released as the live double album Hot August Night. Hot August Night demonstrates Diamond's skills as a performer and showman, as he reinvigorated his back catalogue of hits with new energy. Diamond recalled: "Hot August Night captures a very special show for me. We went all out to really knock 'em dead in L.A." Many consider it his best work; critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Hot August Night "the ultimate Neil Diamond record... [which] shows Diamond the icon in full glory." The album became a classic, and was remastered in 2000 with additional selections. In Australia, which at the time had the most Neil Diamond fans per capita of any country, the album ranked No. 1 for 29 weeks and stayed in their top 20 bestsellers for two years.
In the fall of 1972, Diamond performed for 20 consecutive nights at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City. That theater had not staged a one-man show since Al Jolson in the 1930s. The approximately 1,600-seat Broadway venue provided an intimate concert setting not common at the time, with every performance reportedly sold out. It also made Diamond the first rock-era star to headline on Broadway. The review in the New York Times stated:
After the Winter Garden shows, Diamond announced that he needed a break, and he engaged in no more live performances till 1976. He used those four years to work on the score for Hall Bartlett's film version of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull and to record two albums, Serenade and Beautiful Noise. He said years later, "I knew I'd come back, but I wasn't sure when. I spent one year on each of those albums...I'd been on the road six years. I had a son 2½ and I felt he needed me more than the audience did. So for four years I devoted myself to my son Jesse." He also said he needed to get back to having a private life, one where he could be anonymous.
In 1973, Diamond switched labels again, returning to Columbia Records for a million-dollar-advance-per-album contract (about US$ million per album in dollars). His first project, released as a solo album, was the soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The film received hostile reviews and did poorly at the box office, and the album grossed more than the film did. Richard D. Bach, author of the best-selling source story, disowned the film, and he and Diamond sued Bartlett, though for differing reasons; in Bach's case, it was because he felt the film omitted too much from the original novella, whereas in Diamond's case, it was because he felt the film had butchered his score. "After 'Jonathan,'" Diamond declared, "I vowed never to get involved in a movie again unless I had complete control." Bartlett angrily responded to Diamond's lawsuit by criticizing his music as having become "too slick...and it's not as much from his heart as it used to be." Bartlett also added, "Neil is extraordinarily talented. Often his arrogance is just a cover for the lonely and insecure person underneath."
Despite the controversy surrounding the film, the soundtrack was a success, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart. Diamond also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture. Thereafter, Diamond often included a Jonathan Livingston Seagull suite in his live performances, as he did in his 1976 "Love at the Greek" concert and for his show in Las Vegas that same year.
Diamond returned to live shows in 1976 with an Australian tour, "The 'Thank You Australia' Concert", which was broadcast to 36 television outlets nationwide. He also again appeared at the Greek Theater in a 1976 concert, Love at the Greek. An album and accompanying video/DVD of the show includes a version of "Song Sung Blue" with duets with Helen Reddy and Henry Winkler, a.k.a. Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli of Happy Days.
He began wearing colorful beaded shirts in concert, originally so that everyone in the audience could see him without binoculars. Bill Whitten designed and made the shirts for Diamond from the 1970s till approximately 2007.
In 1974, Diamond released the album Serenade, from which "Longfellow Serenade" and "I've Been This Way Before" were issued as singles. The latter had been intended for the Jonathan Livingston Seagull score, but Diamond had completed it too late for inclusion. That same year he appeared on a TV special for Shirley Bassey and sang a duet with her.
In 1976, he released Beautiful Noise, produced by Robbie Robertson of The Band. On Thanksgiving 1976, Diamond made an appearance at The Band's farewell concert, The Last Waltz, performing "Dry Your Eyes", which he wrote jointly with Robertson, and which had appeared on Beautiful Noise. He also joined the rest of the performers onstage at the end in a rendition of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released".
Diamond was paid $650,000 (about US$ million in dollars) from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, to open its new $10 million Theater For the Performing Arts on July 2, 1976. The show played through July 5 and drew sold-out crowds at the 7,500-seat theater. A "who's who" of Hollywood attended opening night, ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Chevy Chase, and Diamond walked out on stage to a standing ovation. He opened the show with a story about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him before he became successful. His lead-in line to the first song of the evening was, "You may have dumped me a bit too soon, baby, because look who's standing here tonight."
He performed at Woburn Abbey on July 2, 1977, to an audience of 55,000 British fans. The concert and interviews were taped by film director William Friedkin, who used six cameras to capture the performance.
In 1977, Diamond released I'm Glad You're Here With Me Tonight, including "You Don't Bring Me Flowers", for which he composed the music and on the writing of whose lyrics he collaborated with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman. Barbra Streisand covered the song on her album Songbird, and later, a Diamond-Streisand duet was recorded, spurred by the success of radio mash-ups. That version hit No. 1 in 1978, his third song to top the Hot 100. They appeared unannounced at the 1980 Grammy awards ceremony, where they performed the song to a surprised and rapturous audience.
His last 1970s album was September Morn, which included a new version of "I'm a Believer". It and "Red Red Wine" are his best-known original songs made more famous by other artists. In February 1979, the uptempo "Forever in Blue Jeans", co-written and jointly composed with his guitarist, Richard Bennett, was released as a single from You Don't Bring Me Flowers, Diamond's album from the previous year.
In 1979, Diamond collapsed on stage in San Francisco and was taken to the hospital, where he endured a 12-hour operation to remove what turned out to be a tumor on his spine. He said he had been losing feeling in his right leg "for a number of years but ignored it." When he collapsed, he had no strength in either leg. He underwent a long rehabilitation process just before starting principal photography on his film The Jazz Singer (1980). He was so convinced he was going to die that he wrote farewell letters to his friends.
1980s
A planned film version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" to star Diamond and Streisand fell through when Diamond instead starred in a 1980 remake of the Al Jolson classic The Jazz Singer alongside Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz. Though the movie received poor reviews, the soundtrack spawned three Top 10 singles, "Love on the Rocks", "Hello Again", and "America", the last of which had emotional significance for Diamond. "'America' was the story of my grandparents," he told an interviewer. "It's my gift to them, and it's very real for me ... In a way, it speaks to the immigrant in all of us." The song was performed in full by Diamond during the film's finale. An abbreviated version played over the film's opening titles.
The song was also the one he was most proud of, partly because of when it was later used: national news shows played it when the hostages were shown returning home after the Iran hostage crisis ended; it was played on the air during the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty; and at a tribute to slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the Vietnam Vets Welcome Home concert, he was asked to perform it live. At the time, a national poll found the song to be the number-one most recognized song about America, more than "God Bless America". It also became the anthem of his world tour two weeks after the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, when he changed the lyric at the end from; "They're coming to America", to "Stand up for America!" Earlier that year he performed it after a request from former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.
The film's failure was due in part to Diamond never having acted professionally before. "I didn't think I could handle it," he said later, seeing himself as "a fish out of water." For his performance, Diamond became the first-ever winner of a Worst Actor Razzie Award, even though he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the same role. Critic David Wild noted that the film showed that Diamond was open about his religion: "Who else but this Jewish Elvis could go multi-platinum with an album that featured a version of 'the Kol Nidre?'" Diamond later told the Los Angeles Times, "For me, this was the ultimate bar mitzvah."
Another Top 10 selection, "Heartlight", was inspired by the blockbuster 1982 movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Though the film's title character is never mentioned in the lyrics, Universal Pictures, which had released E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and was the parent company of the Uni Records label, by then called MCA Records, for which Diamond had recorded for years, briefly threatened legal action against both Diamond and Columbia Records.
Diamond's record sales slumped somewhat in the 1980s and 1990s, his last single to make the Billboard's Pop Singles chart coming in 1986, but his concert tours continued to be big draws. Billboard magazine ranked Diamond as the most profitable solo performer of 1986. He released his 17th studio album in 1986, Headed for the Future, which reached number 20 on the Billboard 200. Three weeks later he starred in Hello Again, his first television special in nine years, performing comedy sketches and a duo medley with Carol Burnett.
In January 1987, Diamond sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. His "America" became the theme song for the Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign. That same year, UB40's reggae interpretation of Diamond's ballad "Red Red Wine" topped the Billboard Pop Singles chart and, like the Monkees' version of "I'm a Believer", became better known than Diamond's original version.
1990s
During the 1990s, Diamond produced six studio albums. He covered many classic songs from the movies and from famous Brill Building-era songwriters. He also released two Christmas albums, the first of which peaked at No. 8 on Billboard's Album chart. Diamond also recorded two albums of mostly new material during this period. In 1992, he performed for President George H.W. Bush's final Christmas in Washington NBC special. In 1993, Diamond opened the Mark of the Quad Cities (now the iWireless Center) with two shows on May 27 and 28 to a crowd of 27,000-plus.
The 1990s saw a resurgence in Diamond's popularity. "Sweet Caroline" became a popular sing-along at sporting events. It was used at Boston College football and basketball games. College sporting events in other states also played it, and it was even played at sports events in other countries, such as a Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament or a soccer match in Northern Ireland. It is played at every home game of the Sydney Swans of the Australian Football League. It became the theme song of Red Sox Nation, the fans of the Boston Red Sox.
The New York Rangers also adapted it as their own and played it whenever they were winning at the end of the third period of their games. The Pitt Panthers football team also played it after the third quarter of all home games, with the crowd cheering, "Let's go Pitt". The Carolina Panthers played it at the end of every home game they won. The Davidson College pep band likewise played it in the second half of every Davidson Wildcats men's basketball home game.
2000s
A more severely stripped-down-to-basics album, 12 Songs, produced by Rick Rubin, was released on November 8, 2005, in two editions: a standard 12-song release, and a special edition with two bonus tracks, including one featuring backing vocals by Brian Wilson. The album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard chart, and received generally positive reviews; Earliwine describes the album as "inarguably Neil Diamond's best set of songs in a long, long time." 12 Songs also became noteworthy as one of the last albums to be pressed and released by Sony BMG with the Extended Copy Protection software embedded in the disc. (See the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal.)
In 2007, Diamond was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
On March 19, 2008, it was announced on the television show American Idol that Diamond would be a guest mentor to the remaining Idol contestants, who would sing Diamond songs for the broadcasts of April 29 and 30, 2008. On the April 30 broadcast, Diamond premiered a new song, "Pretty Amazing Grace", from his then recently released album Home Before Dark. On May 2, 2008, Sirius Satellite Radio started Neil Diamond Radio. On April 8, 2008, Diamond made a surprise announcement in a big-screen broadcast at Fenway Park that he would be appearing there "live in concert" on August 23, 2008, as part of his world tour. The announcement, which marked the first official confirmation of any 2008 concert dates in the US, came during the traditional eighth-inning singalong of "Sweet Caroline", which had by that time become an anthem for Boston fans.
On April 28, 2008, Diamond appeared on the roof of the Jimmy Kimmel building to sing "Sweet Caroline" after Kimmel was jokingly arrested for singing the song dressed as a Diamond impersonator.
Home Before Dark was released May 6, 2008, and topped the album charts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
On June 29, 2008, Diamond played to an estimated 108,000 fans at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England on the Concert of a Lifetime Tour; technical problems marred the concert.
In August, Diamond allowed cameras to record his entire four-night run at New York's Madison Square Garden; he released the resulting DVD in the U.S. in 2009, one year to the day of the first concert. Hot August Night/NYC debuted at No. 2 on the charts. On the same day the DVD was released, CBS aired an edited version, which won the ratings hour with 13 million viewers. The next day, the sales of the DVD surged, prompting Sony to order more copies to meet the high demand.
On August 25, 2008, Diamond performed at The Ohio State University while suffering from laryngitis. The result disappointed him as well as his fans, and on August 26, he offered refunds to anyone who applied by September 5.
Diamond was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 6, 2009, two nights before the 51st Annual Grammy Awards.
Long loved in Boston, Diamond was invited to sing at the July 4, 2009, Independence Day celebration.
On October 13, 2009, he released A Cherry Cherry Christmas, his third album of holiday music.
2010s
On November 2, 2010, Diamond released the album Dreams, a collection of 14 interpretations of his favorite songs by artists from the rock era. The album also included a new slow-tempo arrangement of his "I'm a Believer". In December, he performed a track from the album, "Ain't No Sunshine", on NBC's The Sing-Off with Committed and Street Corner Symphony, two a cappella groups featured on the show. The Very Best of Neil Diamond, a compilation CD of Diamond's 23 studio recordings from the Bang, UNI/MCA, & Columbia catalogs, was released on December 6, 2011, on the Sony Legacy label.
The years 2011 and 2012 were marked by several milestones in Diamond's career. On March 14, 2011, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. In December, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Kennedy Center at the 2011 Kennedy Center Honors. On August 10, 2012, Diamond received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In November 2012, he topped the bill at the centenary edition of the Royal Variety Performance in the UK, which was transmitted on December 3. He also appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
On April 20, 2013, Diamond made an unannounced appearance at Fenway Park to sing "Sweet Caroline" during the 8th inning. It was the first game at Fenway since the Boston Marathon bombing. On July 2, he released the single "Freedom Song (They'll Never Take Us Down)", with 100% of the purchase price benefiting One Fund Boston and the Wounded Warrior Project.
Sporting a beard, Diamond performed live on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol as part of A Capitol Fourth, which was broadcast nationally by PBS on July 4, 2013.
In January 2014, it was confirmed that Diamond had signed with the Capitol Music Group unit of Universal Music Group, which also owned Diamond's Uni/MCA catalog. UMG also took over Diamond's Columbia and Bang catalogues, which meant that all of his recorded output would be consolidated for the first time.
On July 8, 2014, Capitol Records announced, via a flyer included with Diamond's latest greatest hits compilations, All-Time Greatest Hits, which charted at 15 in the Billboard 200, that his next album, Melody Road, which was to be produced by Don Was and Jacknife Lee, would be released on September 30, 2014. In August, the release date was moved to October 21.
In September 2014, Diamond performed a surprise concert at his alma mater, Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. The show was announced via Twitter that afternoon. On the same day, he announced a 2015 "Melody Road" World Tour. The North American leg of the World Tour 2015 launched with a concert in Allentown, PA at the PPL Center on February 27 and ended at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado on May 31, 2015. Diamond used new media platforms and social media extensively throughout the tour, streaming several shows live on Periscope and showing tweets from fans who used the hashtag #tweetcaroline on two large screens. The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote: "This, my friends, wasn’t your grandfather's Neil Diamond concert. It was a multimedia extravaganza. Twitter. Periscope...It was a social media blitzkrieg that, by all accounts, proved to be an innovative way to widen his fan base."
In October 2016, Diamond released Acoustic Christmas, a folk-inspired Christmas album of original songs as well as acoustic versions of holiday classics. Produced by Was and Lee, who had produced Melody Road, the idea for the album began to take shape as the Melody Road sessions ended. To "channel the intimate atmosphere of '60s folk, Diamond recorded Acoustic Christmas with a handful of musicians, sitting around a circle of microphones, wires and, of course, Christmas lights."
In March 2017, the career-spanning anthology Neil Diamond 50 – 50th Anniversary Collection was released. He began his final concert tour, the 50 Year Anniversary World Tour in Fresno, California, in April.
In 2019, his 1969 signature song "Sweet Caroline" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
2020s
On March 7, 2020, despite his retirement due to Parkinson's disease, Diamond gave a rare performance at the Keep Memory Alive Power of Love Gala at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, where he was being honored.
On March 22, 2020, Diamond posted a video to YouTube playing "Sweet Caroline" with slightly modified lyrics ("...washing hands, don't touch me, I won't touch you...") in response to the widespread social distancing measures implemented due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.
In April 2021, The New York Times reported that A Beautiful Noise, a musical based on Diamond's life and featuring his songs, would open at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston in the summer of 2022. The musical was scheduled to open on Broadway following the monthlong run in Boston.
Universal Music Group acquired Diamond's songwriting catalog and the rights to his recordings in February 2022. The acquisition also included 110 unreleased tracks, an unreleased album and archival videos.
Retirement
In January 2018, Diamond announced that he would immediately retire from touring due to having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Tour dates on the final leg of Diamond's "50 Year Anniversary World Tour" in Australia and New Zealand were cancelled. An announcement on his official website said he was not retiring from music and that the cancellation of the live performances would allow him to "continue his writing, recording and development of new projects."
On July 28, 2018, Diamond and his wife Katie McNeil made a surprise visit to the Incident Command post in Basalt, Colorado—near where Diamond lives—to thank the firefighters and families with a solo acoustic guitar concert for efforts in containing the Lake Christine Fire, which began on July 3 and had scorched of land.
In pop culture
In 1967, Diamond was featured on the fourth episode of the detective drama Mannix as the 'featured' artist in a small underground club called 'The BAD SCENE' and was interrupted during his singing by one of many fights that took place weekly on the show.
In 2000, Neil Diamond appeared onstage with Diamond tribute band, Super Diamond, surprising them before their show at House of Blues in Los Angeles.
In the 2001 comedy film Saving Silverman, the main characters play in a Diamond cover band, and Diamond made an extended cameo appearance as himself. Diamond even wrote and composed a new song, "I Believe in Happy Endings", for the film. He sat in with the tribute band Super Diamond at the film's premiere party.
In 2008, Diamond gave film-maker Greg Kohs permission to use his songs in a documentary. Kohs, a director from Philadelphia, had met a popular Milwaukee, Wisconsin, duo, Lightning & Thunder, composed of Mike Sardina, who did a Diamond impersonation, and his wife Claire. Kohs followed them for eight years and produced the film Song Sung Blue. Though Sardina had died in 2006, Diamond invited his widow and her family to be his front-row guests at his show in Milwaukee, where he told them he was moved by the film.
In the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, main characters Howard Wolowitz and Amy Farrah-Fowler are fans of Diamond's work.
Personal life
Diamond has been married three times. In 1963, he married his high-school sweetheart, Jaye Posner, who had become a schoolteacher. They had two daughters, Marjorie and Elyn. They separated in 1967 and divorced in 1969.
On December 5, 1969, Diamond married production assistant Marcia Murphey. They had two sons, Jesse and Micah. The marriage lasted 25 years, ending in 1994 or 1995.
In 1996, Diamond began a lengthy, live-in relationship with Australian Rae Farley after the two met in Brisbane, Australia. The songs on Home Before Dark were written and composed during her struggle with chronic back pain.
On September 7, 2011, in a message on Twitter, the 70-year-old Diamond announced his engagement to the 41-year-old Katie McNeil. Diamond said that his 2014 album Melody Road was fueled by their relationship, explaining:
There's no better inspiration or motivation for work than being in love. It's what you dream of as a creative person. I was able to complete this album—start it, write it and complete it—under the spell of love, and I think it shows somehow.
The couple married in front of family and close friends in Los Angeles in 2012. In addition to serving as Diamond's manager, McNeil produced the documentary Neil Diamond: Hot August Nights NYC.
Discography
Filmography
Diamond had a television appearance and roles in some movies, notably:
Mannix, "The Many Deaths of Saint Christopher" (1967) as himself
The Jazz Singer, starring role as Jess Robin
Saving Silverman appearing as himself
Notes
References
External links
Neil Diamond's Band's Official Site
1941 births
Living people
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American pianists
20th-century American singers
21st-century American pianists
21st-century American singers
Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American acoustic guitarists
American baritones
American folk guitarists
American male guitarists
American male pianists
American male singer-songwriters
American pop guitarists
American pop rock singers
American rock guitarists
American rock songwriters
American soft rock musicians
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Jewish American musicians
Jewish American songwriters
Jewish singers
Jewish folk singers
Jewish rock musicians
Erasmus Hall High School alumni
Capitol Records artists
Columbia Records artists
MCA Records artists
NYU Violets fencers
Uni Records artists
Golden Globe Award-winning musicians
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Kennedy Center honorees
Rhythm guitarists
Musicians from Brooklyn
Guitarists from New York City
Singers from New York City
People with Parkinson's disease
Singer-songwriters from New York (state)
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[
"Yuri Ponomaryov (; 24 March 1932 – 13 April 2005) was a Russian cosmonaut.\n\nHe married fellow cosmonaut Valentina Ponomaryova in 1972 and the couple had two children before divorcing. As with Valentina, Yuri did not get to fly into space although he did serve on the Soyuz 18 backup crew.\n\nReferences\n\n1932 births\n2005 deaths\nRussian cosmonauts\nSoviet cosmonauts",
"Richard Timothy Jones (born January 16, 1972) is an American actor. He has worked extensively in both film and television productions since the early 1990s. His television roles include Ally McBeal (1997), Judging Amy (1998–2005), CSI: Miami (2006), Girlfriends (2007), Grey's Anatomy (2010), Hawaii Five-0 (2011–2014), Narcos (2015), and Criminal Minds (2017). Since 2018, he has played Sergeant Wade Grey on the ABC police drama The Rookie.\n\nHis film roles include portrayals of Lamont Carr in Disney's Full Court Miracle (2003), Laveinio \"Slim\" Hightower in Rick Famuyiwa's coming-of-age film The Wood (1999), Mike in Tyler Perry's dramatic films Why Did I Get Married? (2007) and Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010), and Captain Russell Hampton in the Hollywood blockbuster Godzilla (2014).\n\nEarly life\nJones was born in Kobe, Japan to American parents. He grew up in Carson, California. He is the son of Lorene, a computer analyst, and Clarence Jones, a professional baseball player and hitting instructor for the Cleveland Indians. He has an older brother, Clarence Jones Jr., who works as a coach. His parents later divorced. Jones attended Bishop Montgomery High School in Torrance, California, then graduated from Tuskegee University.\n\nCareer \nSince the early 1990s, Jones has worked in both film and television productions.\n\nHis first television role was in a 1993 episode of the series California Dreams. That same year, he appeared as Ike Turner, Jr. in What's Love Got to Do with It. From 1999 to 2005, he starred as Bruce Calvin van Exel in the CBS legal drama series Judging Amy.\n\nOver the next two decades, Jones starred or guest-starred in high-profile television series such as Ally McBeal (1997), CSI: Miami (2006), Girlfriends (2007), Grey's Anatomy (2010), Hawaii Five-0 (2011–2014), Narcos (2015), and Criminal Minds (2017).\n\nHis film roles include portrayals of Lamont Carr in the Disney film Full Court Miracle (2003), Laveinio \"Slim\" Hightower in Rick Famuyiwa's coming-of-age film The Wood (1999), and Mike in Tyler Perry's dramatic films Why Did I Get Married? (2007) and Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010), and Captain Russell Hampton in the Hollywood blockbuster Godzilla (2014).\n\nFrom 2017 to 2018, Jones played Detective Tommy Cavanaugh in the CBS drama series Wisdom of the Crowd.\n\nSince February 2018, Jones has played the role of Sergeant Wade Gray in the ABC police procedural drama series The Rookie with Nathan Fillion.\n\nPersonal life\nHe married Nancy Robinson in October 1996. He is also a preacher/minister.\n\nFilmography\n\nFilm\n\nTelevision\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1972 births\nAfrican-American male actors\nAmerican expatriates in Japan\nAmerican male film actors\nAmerican male television actors\nLiving people\nMale actors from California\nPeople from Carson, California\nPeople from Kobe\nActors from Kobe\n21st-century African-American people\n20th-century African-American people"
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"Tristan Tzara",
"Name"
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C_e27fa2123565461580f1ec274da842df_1
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When did Tristan change his name?
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When was Tristan Tzara's name changed?
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Tristan Tzara
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S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan. In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper). In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbiere or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara ("the land", Romanian pronunciation: ['tsara]). CANNOTANSWER
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in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
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Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man.
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
Name
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as țara ("the land", ).
Biography
Early life and Simbolul years
Tzara was born in Moinești, Bacău County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis. Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors, active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Rașcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as the journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski. Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages. Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment." During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret." According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.
Birth of Dada
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]." Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists. Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in the German Empire—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason. In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." The same commentator, however, dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists." According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada. When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage. In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"). Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation
By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.
Evening of the Bearded Heart
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity". In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.
In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."
In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray. During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art. Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds"). This period saw the publication of The Approximate Man (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935). By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas's magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care. In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces. Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism, his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.
World War II and Resistance
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime. On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse. His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see Romania during World War II), the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen. During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly. According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]." In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).
International leftism
Over the following decade, Tzara lent his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization. Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet. He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The speeches he and Sașa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe). In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).
In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila József. In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership), and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years
In October 1956, Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin). Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary". However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion". The statement he issued, widely quoted in the Hungarian and international press, forced a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's reply, the party deplored the fact that one of its members was being used in support of "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."
His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did. Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."
He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet François Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. In early 1957, Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him. In August 1960, one year after the Fifth Republic had been established by President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (see Algerian War). Together with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jérôme Lindon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned French Broadcasting Service.
In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize. One of his final public activities took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, organized by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Literary contributions
Identity issues
Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers." Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular, while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."
Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with Maja Kruscek at Zuntfhaus zür Waag featured samples of African literature, to which Tzara added Romanian-language fragments. He is also known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moară la Hârța ("At the Mill in Hârța") during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire. Addressing the Romanian public in 1947, he claimed to have been captivated by "the sweet language of Moldavian peasants".
Tzara nonetheless rebelled against his birthplace and upbringing. His earliest poems depict provincial Moldavia as a desolate and unsettling place. In Cernat's view, this imagery was in common use among Moldavian-born writers who also belonged to the avant-garde trend, notably Benjamin Fondane and George Bacovia. Like in the cases of Eugène Ionesco and Fondane, Cernat proposes, Samyro sought self-exile to Western Europe as a "modern, voluntarist" means of breaking with "the peripheral condition", which may also serve to explain the pun he selected for a pseudonym. According to the same author, two important elements in this process were "a maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", an "Oedipus complex" which he also argued was evident in the biographies of other Symbolist and avant-garde Romanian authors, from Urmuz to Mateiu Caragiale. Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would also help explain their impossibility to communicate. In particular, Cernat argues, the writer sought to emancipate himself from competing nationalisms, and addressed himself directly to the center of European culture, with Zürich serving as a stage on his way to Paris. The 1916 Monsieur's Antipyrine's Manifesto featured a cosmopolitan appeal: "DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates."
With time, Tristan Tzara came to be regarded by his Dada associates as an exotic character, whose attitudes were intrinsically linked with Eastern Europe. Early on, Ball referred to him and the Janco brothers as "Orientals". Hans Richter believed him to be a fiery and impulsive figure, having little in common with his German collaborators. According to Cernat, Richter's perspective seems to indicate a vision of Tzara having a "Latin" temperament. This type of perception also had negative implications for Tzara, particularly after the 1922 split within Dada. In the 1940s, Richard Huelsenbeck alleged that his former colleague had always been separated from other Dadaists by his failure to appreciate the legacy of "German humanism", and that, compared to his German colleagues, he was "a barbarian". In his polemic with Tzara, Breton also repeatedly placed stress on his rival's foreign origin.
At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism". Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage. This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius. Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".
Symbolist poetry
Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.
During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).
Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."
Collaboration with Vinea
The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).
In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject. However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic". Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free. His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:
In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:
Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:
Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation. Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse, Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style". In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness." In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."
Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage", Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes". It opens with the lyrics:
The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.
Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"
Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire. Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group. In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire and Marinetti. Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.
For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language. Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism", and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.
With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to Hans Arp, the first instance of Surrealist automatism. Ball stated that the subject of such pieces was "the value of the human voice." Together with Arp, Tzara and Walter Serner produced the German-language Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock ("The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's Hairdresser and the Walking-Stick"), in which, Arp stated, "the poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star." Another noted simultaneist poem was L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer ("The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent"), co-authored by Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbach.
Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence". Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.
Dada and anti-art
The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry, and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage". Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel", and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly." Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs. His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth." Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none." In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false", probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution". According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."
Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art." He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:
La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves. This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language." Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois". Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.
The Dada series makes ample use of contrast, ellipses, ridiculous imagery and nonsensical verdicts. Tzara was aware that the public could find it difficult to follow his intentions, and, in a piece titled Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage ("The White Leprous Giant in the Landscape") even alluded to the "skinny, idiotic, dirty" reader who "does not understand my poetry." He called some of his own poems lampisteries, from a French word designating storage areas for light fixtures. The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing". According to American literary historian Mary Ann Caws, Tzara's poems may be seen as having an "internal order", and read as "a simple spectacle, as creation complete in itself and completely obvious."
Plays of the 1920s
Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words. Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".
In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet. Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names, and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name. Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events." Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields. Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater." The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.
The Approximate Man and later works
After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition. According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom." The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision." In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.
This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature. While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape. Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty", while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects. The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure. One of the appeals in the text reads:
The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a humanist vision with communist theses. The 1935 Grains et issues, described by Beitchman as "fascinating", was a prose poem of social criticism connected with The Approximate Man, expanding on the vision of a possible society, in which haste has been abandoned in favor of oblivion. The world imagined by Tzara abandons symbols of the past, from literature to public transportation and currency, while, like psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the poet depicts violence as a natural means of human expression. People of the future live in a state which combines waking life and the realm of dreams, and life itself turns into revery. Grains et issues was accompanied by Personage d'insomnie ("Personage of Insomnia"), which went unpublished.
Cardinal notes: "In retrospect, harmony and contact had been Tzara's goals all along." The post-World War II volumes in the series focus on political subjects related to the conflict. In his last writings, Tzara toned down experimentation, exercising more control over the lyrical aspects. He was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and François Villon, whom he deeply admired.
Legacy
Influence
Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers. This was the case in his homeland during 1928, when the first avant-garde manifesto issued by unu magazine, written by Sașa Pană and Moldov, cited as its mentors Tzara, writers Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vinea, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Tudor Arghezi, as well as artists Constantin Brâncuși and Theo van Doesburg. One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G. Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man. The Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, also appears to have been directly inspired by Tzara's views on art. Other authors from that generation to have been inspired by Tzara were Polish Futurist writer Bruno Jasieński, Japanese poet and Zen thinker Takahashi Shinkichi, and Chilean poet and Dadaist sympathizer Vicente Huidobro, who cited him as a precursor for his own Creacionismo.
An immediate precursor of Absurdism, he was acknowledged as a mentor by Eugène Ionesco, who developed on his principles for his early essays of literary and social criticism, as well as in tragic farces such as The Bald Soprano. Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett (who translated some of it into English); the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart. In the United States, the Romanian author is cited as an influence on Beat Generation members. Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, who made his acquaintance in Paris, cites him among the Europeans who influenced him and William S. Burroughs. The latter also mentioned Tzara's use of chance in writing poetry as an early example of what became the cut-up technique, adopted by Brion Gysin and Burroughs himself. Gysin, who conversed with Tzara in the late 1950s, records the latter's indignation that Beat poets were "going back over the ground we [Dadaists] covered in 1920", and accuses Tzara of having consumed his creative energies into becoming a "Communist Party bureaucrat".
Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada, declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote." For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara. He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."
In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s. Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk. Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science. Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period. Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.
Tributes and portrayals
In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975, and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.
According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara. Vinea's fragment speaks of "the Wandering Jew", a character whom people notice because he sings La moară la Hârța, "a suspicious song from Greater Romania." The poet is a character in Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand's Thieves of Fire, part four of his The Bubble (1984), as well as in The Prince of West End Avenue, a 1994 book by the American Alan Isler. Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oișteanu. Tzara's legacy in literature also covers specific episodes of his biography, beginning with Gertrude Stein's controversial memoir. One of his performances is enthusiastically recorded by Malcolm Cowley in his autobiographical book of 1934, Exile's Return, and he is also mentioned in Harold Loeb's memoir The Way It Was. Among his biographers is the French author François Buot, who records some of the lesser-known aspects of Tzara's life.
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist Peter Weiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). His role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.
Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists. Max Ernst depicts him as the only mobile character in the Dadaists' group portrait Au Rendez-vous des Amis ("A Friends' Reunion", 1922), while, in one of Man Ray's photographs, he is shown kneeling to kiss the hand of an androgynous Nancy Cunard. Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tzara's calligraphed name in Moléculaire ("Molecular"), a composition printed on the cover of 391. The same artist also completed his schematic portrait, which showed a series of circles connected by two perpendicular arrows. In 1949, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made Tzara the subject of one of his first experiments with lithography. Portraits of Tzara were also made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M. H. Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi. As an homage to Tzara the performer, art rocker David Bowie adopted his accessories and mannerisms during a number of public appearances. In 1996, he was depicted on a series of Romanian stamps, and, the same year, a concrete and steel monument dedicated to the writer was erected in Moinești.
Several of Tzara's Dadaist editions had illustrations by Picabia, Janco and Hans Arp. In its 1925 edition, Handkerchief of Clouds featured etchings by Juan Gris, while his late writings Parler seul, Le Signe de vie, De mémoire d'homme, Le Temps naissant, and Le Fruit permis were illustrated with works by, respectively, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Nejad Devrim and Sonia Delaunay. Tzara was the subject of a 1949 eponymous documentary film directed by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Roos, and footage of him featured prominently in the 1953 production Les statues meurent aussi ("Statues Also Die"), jointly directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Posthumous controversies
The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).
A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a "Lumpenproletarian". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion [...] which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, [together] with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.
From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to "protochronism", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.
Notes
References
Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in Justin Wintle (ed.), Makers of Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2002.
Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1988.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 2007.
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet, C. Hurst & Co., London, 1999.
Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
Irina Livezeanu, " 'From Dada to Gaga': The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism", in Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Lucia Dragomir (eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique. Colloque tenu à Bucarest (Roumanie), 30 et 31 mai 2003, Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Editura Paralela 45, Paris, 2005.
Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 1999.
Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005.
Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde, Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, Bucharest & Paris, 1999.
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art (with a postscript by Werner Haftmann), Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
External links
From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition, Europeana database
Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb
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[
"Tristan is a Knight of the Round Table in Arthurian legend.\n\nTristan may also refer to:\n\nPlaces\n Tristan (Guinea), the largest island in the Tristan and Capken Islands\n Tristan da Cunha, a British volcanic island and eponymous archipelago in the mid-south Atlantic, often shortened to \"Tristan\"\n Tristan Island or the Île Tristan, located at the mouth of the Pouldavid Estuary off the French port of Douarnenez in south-western Brittany\n Tristan hotspot, a volcanic hotspot which is responsible for the volcanic activity which forms the volcanoes in the southern Atlantic Ocean\n\nLiterature\n Tristan, a 12th-century French poem by Thomas of Britain\n Tristan, a 12th-century French poem by Béroul\n Tristan, a 13th-century German poem by Gottfried von Strassburg\n Tristan (novella), a 1903 novella by Thomas Mann\nThe Tristan Betrayal, a novel by Robert Ludlum\n Prose Tristan (Tristan en prose), an adaptation of the Tristan and Iseult story into a long prose romance\n\nMusic\n Tristan (musician) or Tristan Cooke (born 1970), British psytrance and Goa trance DJ and producer\n Tristan D (born Tristan Dorian, 1988), British Trance DJ and EDM\n Tristan (Henze), composition for piano, tape and orchestra by Hans Werner Henze\n \"Tristan\" (song), by Patrick Wolf from his second album Wind in the Wires\n Tristan und Isolde, an opera by Richard Wagner\n The Tristan chord, a variant on the half-diminished chord\n\nScience and Technology\n Tristan (dinosaur), a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen\n TRISTAN, a particle accelerator in Japan that was the first site to confirm vacuum polarization around an electron\n\nOther uses\n Tristan (name), a moderately common male given name\n Tristan (horse), a British Thoroughbred racehorse\n\nSee also\n \n \n Tristan and Iseult (disambiguation)\n Tristrant, a 13th-century German poem by Eilhart von Oberge\n Sir Tristrem",
"Iseult (), alternatively Isolde (), is the name of several characters in the legend of Tristan and Iseult. The most prominent is Iseult of Ireland, the wife of Mark of Cornwall and the lover of Tristan. Her mother, the queen of Ireland, is also named Iseult. The third is Iseult of the White Hands, the daughter of Hoel of Brittany and the sister of Kahedin.\n\nName\nHer name is variously given as Iseult, Isolde, Yseult, Ysolt, Isode, Isoude, Iseut, Isaut (Old French), Iosóid (Irish), Esyllt (Welsh), Ysella (Cornish) Isolda (Portuguese, Spanish), Isotta (Italian). The oldest source, Béroul's 12th-century romance, spells her name as Yseut or Iseut. The etymology is uncertain, with most sources linking it to the Old High German words īs (\"ice\") and hiltja (\"battle\"). Other writers derive it from a Brythonic *Adsiltia, \"she who is gazed upon.\"\n\nIseult of Ireland\n\nThe Irish princess, Iseult of Ireland (also Iseult La Belle or Iseult la Blonde, \"Iseult the Fair\"), is the daughter of King Anguish of Ireland and Queen Iseult the Elder. She is a main character in the Tristan poems of Béroul, Thomas of Britain, and Gottfried von Strassburg and in the opera Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner.\n\nIseult is first seen as a young princess who heals Tristan from wounds he received fighting her uncle, Morholt. When his identity is revealed, Tristan flees back to his own land. Later, Tristan returns to Ireland to gain Iseult's hand in marriage for his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall. She is betrothed to an evil steward who claims to have killed a dragon and displays its head, but when Tristan proves he killed the dragon by showing that he already took its tongue, Iseult's parents agree to let him take her to Mark. On the journey back to Cornwall, Iseult and Tristan accidentally drink a love potion prepared for her and Mark by Iseult and guarded by Brangaine, Iseult's lady-in-waiting. The two fall hopelessly in love, and begin an affair that ends when Mark banishes Tristan from Cornwall.\n\nIn the verse tradition, the lovers do not meet again until Tristan is on his death bed (see below), but in the later Prose Tristan and works based upon it, Tristan returns from Brittany and they resume their affair. Mark is much less sympathetic in these versions, and the lovers eventually flee from his wrath. Lancelot gives them refuge in his estate Joyous Garde, and they engage in many further adventures.\n\nIn the prose versions, the lovers' end comes when Mark finds them as Tristan plays the harp for Iseult beneath a tree. The cruel king stabs his nephew in the back, and Tristan, at Iseult's request, fatally crushes his beloved in a tight embrace as his final act. One of her rumored burial sites is Chapelizod in Dublin, Ireland.\n\nIseult of Brittany\n\nAfter King Mark learns of the secret love affair between Tristan and Iseult, he banishes Tristan to Brittany, never to return to Cornwall. There, Tristan is placed in the care of Hoel of Brittany after receiving a wound. He meets and marries Hoel's daughter, Iseult Blanchmains (Iseult \"of the White Hands\"), because she shares the name of his former lover. They never consummate the marriage because of Tristan's love for Iseult of Ireland.\n\nDuring one adventure in Brittany, Tristan suffers a poisoned wound that only Iseult of Ireland, the world's most skilled physician, can cure. He sends a ship for her, asking that its crew fly white sails on the return if Iseult is aboard, and black if she is not. Iseult agrees to go, and the ship races home, white sails high. However, Tristan is too weak to look out his window to see the signal, so he asks his wife to check for him. In a moment of jealousy, Iseult of the White Hands tells him the sails are black, and Tristan expires immediately of despair. When the Irish Iseult arrives to find her lover dead, grief overcomes her, and she passes away at his side.\n\nThis death sequence does not appear in the Prose Tristan. In fact, while Iseult of the White Hands figures into some of the new episodes, she is never mentioned again after Tristan returns to Cornwall, although her brother Kahedin remains a prominent character. The plot element of the fatal misunderstanding of the white and black sails is similar to—and might have been derived from—the story of Aegeus and Theseus in Greek mythology.\n\nModern portrayals\nGerman composer Richard Wagner composed the opera Tristan und Isolde based upon Tristan, a tale of chivalrous romance from the Middle Ages by Gottfried von Strassburg.\n In Tennyson's The Last Tournament Isolt is depicted much less favorably. \"She is petulant and demanding, disdainful of Mark, and prideful towards Tristram, loving and hating irrationally and unevenly.\"\n Matthew Arnold, in his 1852 poem Tristram and Iseult, focuses on Iseult of Brittany in the context of the Victorian cult of domesticity. \nIseult of Ireland (as Isolde) was played by Sophia Myles in the 2006 film adaptation, Tristan & Isolde.\nIsolde is confused with Minerva in the 1960 film by Jean Cocteau, The Testament of Orpheus.\nAuthor, scholar and historian Rosalind Miles wrote a trilogy of fictional novels based upon the romance of Iseult, beginning with Isolde: Queen of the Western Isle (2002), followed by The Maid of the White Hands (2005), and concluding with The Lady of the Sea (2005). \nIseult was played by Irish actress Charlie Murphy in The Last Kingdom, a British historical fiction television series based on Bernard Cornwell's The Saxon Stories series of novels where Iseult hails from Kernow or Cornwalum (modern Cornwall).\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n\nRonan Coghlan The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Arthurian Legends, New York, 1993.\nNorris J. Lacy (editor) The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, New York: Garland, 1996.\n\nSee also\nTristan and Iseult\n211 Isolda\n\nArthurian characters\nBreton mythology and folklore\nMythological queens\nMythological princesses\nIseult\nWelsh mythology"
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[
"Tristan Tzara",
"Name",
"When did Tristan change his name?",
"in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan."
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C_e27fa2123565461580f1ec274da842df_1
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Why did he change his name?
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Why did Tristan Tzara change his name?
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Tristan Tzara
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S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan. In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper). In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbiere or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara ("the land", Romanian pronunciation: ['tsara]). CANNOTANSWER
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Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name,
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Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man.
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
Name
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as țara ("the land", ).
Biography
Early life and Simbolul years
Tzara was born in Moinești, Bacău County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis. Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors, active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Rașcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as the journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski. Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages. Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment." During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret." According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.
Birth of Dada
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]." Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists. Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in the German Empire—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason. In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." The same commentator, however, dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists." According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada. When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage. In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"). Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation
By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.
Evening of the Bearded Heart
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity". In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.
In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."
In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray. During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art. Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds"). This period saw the publication of The Approximate Man (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935). By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas's magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care. In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces. Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism, his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.
World War II and Resistance
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime. On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse. His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see Romania during World War II), the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen. During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly. According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]." In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).
International leftism
Over the following decade, Tzara lent his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization. Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet. He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The speeches he and Sașa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe). In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).
In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila József. In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership), and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years
In October 1956, Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin). Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary". However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion". The statement he issued, widely quoted in the Hungarian and international press, forced a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's reply, the party deplored the fact that one of its members was being used in support of "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."
His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did. Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."
He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet François Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. In early 1957, Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him. In August 1960, one year after the Fifth Republic had been established by President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (see Algerian War). Together with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jérôme Lindon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned French Broadcasting Service.
In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize. One of his final public activities took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, organized by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Literary contributions
Identity issues
Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers." Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular, while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."
Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with Maja Kruscek at Zuntfhaus zür Waag featured samples of African literature, to which Tzara added Romanian-language fragments. He is also known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moară la Hârța ("At the Mill in Hârța") during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire. Addressing the Romanian public in 1947, he claimed to have been captivated by "the sweet language of Moldavian peasants".
Tzara nonetheless rebelled against his birthplace and upbringing. His earliest poems depict provincial Moldavia as a desolate and unsettling place. In Cernat's view, this imagery was in common use among Moldavian-born writers who also belonged to the avant-garde trend, notably Benjamin Fondane and George Bacovia. Like in the cases of Eugène Ionesco and Fondane, Cernat proposes, Samyro sought self-exile to Western Europe as a "modern, voluntarist" means of breaking with "the peripheral condition", which may also serve to explain the pun he selected for a pseudonym. According to the same author, two important elements in this process were "a maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", an "Oedipus complex" which he also argued was evident in the biographies of other Symbolist and avant-garde Romanian authors, from Urmuz to Mateiu Caragiale. Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would also help explain their impossibility to communicate. In particular, Cernat argues, the writer sought to emancipate himself from competing nationalisms, and addressed himself directly to the center of European culture, with Zürich serving as a stage on his way to Paris. The 1916 Monsieur's Antipyrine's Manifesto featured a cosmopolitan appeal: "DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates."
With time, Tristan Tzara came to be regarded by his Dada associates as an exotic character, whose attitudes were intrinsically linked with Eastern Europe. Early on, Ball referred to him and the Janco brothers as "Orientals". Hans Richter believed him to be a fiery and impulsive figure, having little in common with his German collaborators. According to Cernat, Richter's perspective seems to indicate a vision of Tzara having a "Latin" temperament. This type of perception also had negative implications for Tzara, particularly after the 1922 split within Dada. In the 1940s, Richard Huelsenbeck alleged that his former colleague had always been separated from other Dadaists by his failure to appreciate the legacy of "German humanism", and that, compared to his German colleagues, he was "a barbarian". In his polemic with Tzara, Breton also repeatedly placed stress on his rival's foreign origin.
At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism". Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage. This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius. Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".
Symbolist poetry
Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.
During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).
Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."
Collaboration with Vinea
The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).
In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject. However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic". Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free. His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:
In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:
Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:
Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation. Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse, Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style". In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness." In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."
Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage", Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes". It opens with the lyrics:
The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.
Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"
Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire. Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group. In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire and Marinetti. Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.
For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language. Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism", and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.
With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to Hans Arp, the first instance of Surrealist automatism. Ball stated that the subject of such pieces was "the value of the human voice." Together with Arp, Tzara and Walter Serner produced the German-language Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock ("The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's Hairdresser and the Walking-Stick"), in which, Arp stated, "the poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star." Another noted simultaneist poem was L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer ("The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent"), co-authored by Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbach.
Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence". Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.
Dada and anti-art
The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry, and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage". Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel", and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly." Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs. His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth." Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none." In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false", probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution". According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."
Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art." He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:
La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves. This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language." Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois". Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.
The Dada series makes ample use of contrast, ellipses, ridiculous imagery and nonsensical verdicts. Tzara was aware that the public could find it difficult to follow his intentions, and, in a piece titled Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage ("The White Leprous Giant in the Landscape") even alluded to the "skinny, idiotic, dirty" reader who "does not understand my poetry." He called some of his own poems lampisteries, from a French word designating storage areas for light fixtures. The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing". According to American literary historian Mary Ann Caws, Tzara's poems may be seen as having an "internal order", and read as "a simple spectacle, as creation complete in itself and completely obvious."
Plays of the 1920s
Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words. Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".
In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet. Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names, and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name. Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events." Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields. Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater." The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.
The Approximate Man and later works
After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition. According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom." The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision." In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.
This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature. While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape. Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty", while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects. The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure. One of the appeals in the text reads:
The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a humanist vision with communist theses. The 1935 Grains et issues, described by Beitchman as "fascinating", was a prose poem of social criticism connected with The Approximate Man, expanding on the vision of a possible society, in which haste has been abandoned in favor of oblivion. The world imagined by Tzara abandons symbols of the past, from literature to public transportation and currency, while, like psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the poet depicts violence as a natural means of human expression. People of the future live in a state which combines waking life and the realm of dreams, and life itself turns into revery. Grains et issues was accompanied by Personage d'insomnie ("Personage of Insomnia"), which went unpublished.
Cardinal notes: "In retrospect, harmony and contact had been Tzara's goals all along." The post-World War II volumes in the series focus on political subjects related to the conflict. In his last writings, Tzara toned down experimentation, exercising more control over the lyrical aspects. He was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and François Villon, whom he deeply admired.
Legacy
Influence
Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers. This was the case in his homeland during 1928, when the first avant-garde manifesto issued by unu magazine, written by Sașa Pană and Moldov, cited as its mentors Tzara, writers Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vinea, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Tudor Arghezi, as well as artists Constantin Brâncuși and Theo van Doesburg. One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G. Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man. The Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, also appears to have been directly inspired by Tzara's views on art. Other authors from that generation to have been inspired by Tzara were Polish Futurist writer Bruno Jasieński, Japanese poet and Zen thinker Takahashi Shinkichi, and Chilean poet and Dadaist sympathizer Vicente Huidobro, who cited him as a precursor for his own Creacionismo.
An immediate precursor of Absurdism, he was acknowledged as a mentor by Eugène Ionesco, who developed on his principles for his early essays of literary and social criticism, as well as in tragic farces such as The Bald Soprano. Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett (who translated some of it into English); the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart. In the United States, the Romanian author is cited as an influence on Beat Generation members. Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, who made his acquaintance in Paris, cites him among the Europeans who influenced him and William S. Burroughs. The latter also mentioned Tzara's use of chance in writing poetry as an early example of what became the cut-up technique, adopted by Brion Gysin and Burroughs himself. Gysin, who conversed with Tzara in the late 1950s, records the latter's indignation that Beat poets were "going back over the ground we [Dadaists] covered in 1920", and accuses Tzara of having consumed his creative energies into becoming a "Communist Party bureaucrat".
Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada, declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote." For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara. He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."
In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s. Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk. Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science. Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period. Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.
Tributes and portrayals
In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975, and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.
According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara. Vinea's fragment speaks of "the Wandering Jew", a character whom people notice because he sings La moară la Hârța, "a suspicious song from Greater Romania." The poet is a character in Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand's Thieves of Fire, part four of his The Bubble (1984), as well as in The Prince of West End Avenue, a 1994 book by the American Alan Isler. Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oișteanu. Tzara's legacy in literature also covers specific episodes of his biography, beginning with Gertrude Stein's controversial memoir. One of his performances is enthusiastically recorded by Malcolm Cowley in his autobiographical book of 1934, Exile's Return, and he is also mentioned in Harold Loeb's memoir The Way It Was. Among his biographers is the French author François Buot, who records some of the lesser-known aspects of Tzara's life.
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist Peter Weiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). His role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.
Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists. Max Ernst depicts him as the only mobile character in the Dadaists' group portrait Au Rendez-vous des Amis ("A Friends' Reunion", 1922), while, in one of Man Ray's photographs, he is shown kneeling to kiss the hand of an androgynous Nancy Cunard. Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tzara's calligraphed name in Moléculaire ("Molecular"), a composition printed on the cover of 391. The same artist also completed his schematic portrait, which showed a series of circles connected by two perpendicular arrows. In 1949, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made Tzara the subject of one of his first experiments with lithography. Portraits of Tzara were also made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M. H. Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi. As an homage to Tzara the performer, art rocker David Bowie adopted his accessories and mannerisms during a number of public appearances. In 1996, he was depicted on a series of Romanian stamps, and, the same year, a concrete and steel monument dedicated to the writer was erected in Moinești.
Several of Tzara's Dadaist editions had illustrations by Picabia, Janco and Hans Arp. In its 1925 edition, Handkerchief of Clouds featured etchings by Juan Gris, while his late writings Parler seul, Le Signe de vie, De mémoire d'homme, Le Temps naissant, and Le Fruit permis were illustrated with works by, respectively, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Nejad Devrim and Sonia Delaunay. Tzara was the subject of a 1949 eponymous documentary film directed by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Roos, and footage of him featured prominently in the 1953 production Les statues meurent aussi ("Statues Also Die"), jointly directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Posthumous controversies
The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).
A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a "Lumpenproletarian". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion [...] which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, [together] with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.
From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to "protochronism", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.
Notes
References
Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in Justin Wintle (ed.), Makers of Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2002.
Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1988.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 2007.
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet, C. Hurst & Co., London, 1999.
Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
Irina Livezeanu, " 'From Dada to Gaga': The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism", in Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Lucia Dragomir (eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique. Colloque tenu à Bucarest (Roumanie), 30 et 31 mai 2003, Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Editura Paralela 45, Paris, 2005.
Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 1999.
Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005.
Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde, Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, Bucharest & Paris, 1999.
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art (with a postscript by Werner Haftmann), Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
External links
From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition, Europeana database
Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb
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[
"George Marshall (born 1964) is a British environmental campaigner, communications specialist and writer. He is the founder of Climate Outreach and is a specialist in climate change communications. He is the author of Carbon Detox (2007) and Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (2014). He lives in mid-Wales.\n\nLife and work\n\nEnvironmental campaigning \n\nFrom 1988 to 2000, Marshall worked on campaigns for tropical forest conservation and defence of indigenous land rights with the Australian-based Rainforest Information Centre and The Ecologist magazine, specialising in the exposure of corruption and illegal logging in Papua New Guinea. Marshall subsequently worked as international campaigns director for the Rainforest Foundation and the director of the forests campaign for Greenpeace USA.\n\nIn 2004, he co-founded (with Richard Sexton) Climate Outreach, a UK charity that specialises in increasing public engagement in climate-change related issues. He is currently the Director of Projects at Climate Outreach and leads on a range of projects applying the latest research in climate communications.\n\nEco-renovation \n\nIn 2000, George Marshall took a year's sabbatical to renovate a terrace house for his family as a model low energy retrofit that reduced energy and water use by two thirds. His website on the project won a Millennium Award and led The Ecologist to list Marshall as one of their Ten Green Visionaries in 2009.\n\nResearch \nMarshall has spoken and written extensively on the need to engage new audiences on climate change, especially conservatives and people of religious faith.\n\nPublished works \n\nMarshall is the author of Carbon Detox (Hamlyn Gaia, 2007) on personal action to reduce emissions. This subsequently became the basis of a stand-up one man show.\n\nHis second book, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (Bloomsbury 2014), explores the underlying social and psychological obstacles to accepting climate change. The book has been widely praised and was described by the journalist George Monbiot in The Guardian as \"the most important book published on climate change in the past few years\".\n\nSee also \n Flight Behavior\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nRecent published work \nNarratives for Sustainable Development in Wales (2012)\nAfter the floods: communicating climate change around extreme weather (2014)\nStarting a New Conversation on Climate Change with the European Centre-Right (2015)\nA campaigner’s guide to talking with centre-right politicians and MEPs (2015)\n\nSelected presentations and articles \nHow to talk to a Climate Change denier - YouTube video synthesising research for the general public\nWhy we still don't believe in climate change - Opinion piece for New Scientist, July 2010\nWhy we find it so hard to act on climate change - Yes Magazine,\nWhy do We Ignore Climate Change in conversation with Robert Manne\n\n1964 births\nLiving people\nBritish environmentalists\nBritish writers\nScience bloggers\nClimate communication",
"Jason Zook, originally called Jason Sadler, is the founder of I Wear Your Shirt, born in 1982 to Kelly and Steve Sadler.\n\nEarly life\nDuring his early years, Sadler lived in San Diego and New Jersey. Later, in 2000, he moved to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida so that he could join the basketball team at Jacksonville University. However, before the beginning of basketball season of his freshman year, he hurt his knee. Shortly thereafter, he transferred to the University of North Florida. At the University of North Florida, Sadler received the Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2005, with an emphasis on marketing and graphic design.\n\nT-shirts\n\nSadler said that he wore the shirts for the entire day even if attending a wedding or eating a fancy dinner with his girlfriend.\n\nName changes\nIn 2012, Sadler auctioned off the rights to change his last name to whatever company bid the highest. Headsets.com eventually won, paying $45,500 to change his name to Jason HeadsetsDotCom. In 2013, he legally changed his name to Jason SurfrApp, a surfing application, that purchased his last name for $50,000. \nSadler said he did not have a constant father figure in his childhood, so he did not feel a bond to his last name. He finally changed his name to Jason Zook, adopting the last name of his great-grandfather Roy Zook.\n\nReferences\n\n1982 births\nLiving people\n21st-century American businesspeople"
] |
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"Tristan Tzara",
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"When did Tristan change his name?",
"in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.",
"Why did he change his name?",
"Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name,"
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Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
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Are there any other interesting aspects about Tristan Tzara other than a name change?
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Tristan Tzara
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S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan. In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper). In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbiere or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara ("the land", Romanian pronunciation: ['tsara]). CANNOTANSWER
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Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara").
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Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man.
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
Name
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as țara ("the land", ).
Biography
Early life and Simbolul years
Tzara was born in Moinești, Bacău County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis. Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors, active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Rașcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as the journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski. Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages. Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment." During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret." According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.
Birth of Dada
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]." Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists. Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in the German Empire—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason. In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." The same commentator, however, dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists." According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada. When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage. In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"). Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation
By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.
Evening of the Bearded Heart
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity". In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.
In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."
In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray. During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art. Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds"). This period saw the publication of The Approximate Man (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935). By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas's magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care. In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces. Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism, his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.
World War II and Resistance
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime. On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse. His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see Romania during World War II), the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen. During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly. According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]." In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).
International leftism
Over the following decade, Tzara lent his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization. Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet. He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The speeches he and Sașa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe). In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).
In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila József. In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership), and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years
In October 1956, Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin). Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary". However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion". The statement he issued, widely quoted in the Hungarian and international press, forced a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's reply, the party deplored the fact that one of its members was being used in support of "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."
His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did. Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."
He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet François Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. In early 1957, Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him. In August 1960, one year after the Fifth Republic had been established by President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (see Algerian War). Together with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jérôme Lindon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned French Broadcasting Service.
In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize. One of his final public activities took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, organized by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Literary contributions
Identity issues
Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers." Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular, while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."
Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with Maja Kruscek at Zuntfhaus zür Waag featured samples of African literature, to which Tzara added Romanian-language fragments. He is also known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moară la Hârța ("At the Mill in Hârța") during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire. Addressing the Romanian public in 1947, he claimed to have been captivated by "the sweet language of Moldavian peasants".
Tzara nonetheless rebelled against his birthplace and upbringing. His earliest poems depict provincial Moldavia as a desolate and unsettling place. In Cernat's view, this imagery was in common use among Moldavian-born writers who also belonged to the avant-garde trend, notably Benjamin Fondane and George Bacovia. Like in the cases of Eugène Ionesco and Fondane, Cernat proposes, Samyro sought self-exile to Western Europe as a "modern, voluntarist" means of breaking with "the peripheral condition", which may also serve to explain the pun he selected for a pseudonym. According to the same author, two important elements in this process were "a maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", an "Oedipus complex" which he also argued was evident in the biographies of other Symbolist and avant-garde Romanian authors, from Urmuz to Mateiu Caragiale. Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would also help explain their impossibility to communicate. In particular, Cernat argues, the writer sought to emancipate himself from competing nationalisms, and addressed himself directly to the center of European culture, with Zürich serving as a stage on his way to Paris. The 1916 Monsieur's Antipyrine's Manifesto featured a cosmopolitan appeal: "DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates."
With time, Tristan Tzara came to be regarded by his Dada associates as an exotic character, whose attitudes were intrinsically linked with Eastern Europe. Early on, Ball referred to him and the Janco brothers as "Orientals". Hans Richter believed him to be a fiery and impulsive figure, having little in common with his German collaborators. According to Cernat, Richter's perspective seems to indicate a vision of Tzara having a "Latin" temperament. This type of perception also had negative implications for Tzara, particularly after the 1922 split within Dada. In the 1940s, Richard Huelsenbeck alleged that his former colleague had always been separated from other Dadaists by his failure to appreciate the legacy of "German humanism", and that, compared to his German colleagues, he was "a barbarian". In his polemic with Tzara, Breton also repeatedly placed stress on his rival's foreign origin.
At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism". Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage. This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius. Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".
Symbolist poetry
Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.
During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).
Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."
Collaboration with Vinea
The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).
In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject. However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic". Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free. His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:
In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:
Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:
Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation. Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse, Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style". In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness." In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."
Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage", Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes". It opens with the lyrics:
The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.
Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"
Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire. Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group. In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire and Marinetti. Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.
For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language. Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism", and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.
With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to Hans Arp, the first instance of Surrealist automatism. Ball stated that the subject of such pieces was "the value of the human voice." Together with Arp, Tzara and Walter Serner produced the German-language Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock ("The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's Hairdresser and the Walking-Stick"), in which, Arp stated, "the poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star." Another noted simultaneist poem was L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer ("The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent"), co-authored by Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbach.
Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence". Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.
Dada and anti-art
The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry, and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage". Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel", and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly." Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs. His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth." Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none." In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false", probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution". According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."
Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art." He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:
La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves. This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language." Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois". Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.
The Dada series makes ample use of contrast, ellipses, ridiculous imagery and nonsensical verdicts. Tzara was aware that the public could find it difficult to follow his intentions, and, in a piece titled Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage ("The White Leprous Giant in the Landscape") even alluded to the "skinny, idiotic, dirty" reader who "does not understand my poetry." He called some of his own poems lampisteries, from a French word designating storage areas for light fixtures. The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing". According to American literary historian Mary Ann Caws, Tzara's poems may be seen as having an "internal order", and read as "a simple spectacle, as creation complete in itself and completely obvious."
Plays of the 1920s
Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words. Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".
In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet. Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names, and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name. Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events." Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields. Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater." The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.
The Approximate Man and later works
After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition. According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom." The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision." In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.
This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature. While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape. Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty", while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects. The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure. One of the appeals in the text reads:
The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a humanist vision with communist theses. The 1935 Grains et issues, described by Beitchman as "fascinating", was a prose poem of social criticism connected with The Approximate Man, expanding on the vision of a possible society, in which haste has been abandoned in favor of oblivion. The world imagined by Tzara abandons symbols of the past, from literature to public transportation and currency, while, like psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the poet depicts violence as a natural means of human expression. People of the future live in a state which combines waking life and the realm of dreams, and life itself turns into revery. Grains et issues was accompanied by Personage d'insomnie ("Personage of Insomnia"), which went unpublished.
Cardinal notes: "In retrospect, harmony and contact had been Tzara's goals all along." The post-World War II volumes in the series focus on political subjects related to the conflict. In his last writings, Tzara toned down experimentation, exercising more control over the lyrical aspects. He was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and François Villon, whom he deeply admired.
Legacy
Influence
Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers. This was the case in his homeland during 1928, when the first avant-garde manifesto issued by unu magazine, written by Sașa Pană and Moldov, cited as its mentors Tzara, writers Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vinea, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Tudor Arghezi, as well as artists Constantin Brâncuși and Theo van Doesburg. One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G. Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man. The Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, also appears to have been directly inspired by Tzara's views on art. Other authors from that generation to have been inspired by Tzara were Polish Futurist writer Bruno Jasieński, Japanese poet and Zen thinker Takahashi Shinkichi, and Chilean poet and Dadaist sympathizer Vicente Huidobro, who cited him as a precursor for his own Creacionismo.
An immediate precursor of Absurdism, he was acknowledged as a mentor by Eugène Ionesco, who developed on his principles for his early essays of literary and social criticism, as well as in tragic farces such as The Bald Soprano. Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett (who translated some of it into English); the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart. In the United States, the Romanian author is cited as an influence on Beat Generation members. Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, who made his acquaintance in Paris, cites him among the Europeans who influenced him and William S. Burroughs. The latter also mentioned Tzara's use of chance in writing poetry as an early example of what became the cut-up technique, adopted by Brion Gysin and Burroughs himself. Gysin, who conversed with Tzara in the late 1950s, records the latter's indignation that Beat poets were "going back over the ground we [Dadaists] covered in 1920", and accuses Tzara of having consumed his creative energies into becoming a "Communist Party bureaucrat".
Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada, declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote." For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara. He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."
In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s. Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk. Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science. Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period. Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.
Tributes and portrayals
In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975, and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.
According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara. Vinea's fragment speaks of "the Wandering Jew", a character whom people notice because he sings La moară la Hârța, "a suspicious song from Greater Romania." The poet is a character in Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand's Thieves of Fire, part four of his The Bubble (1984), as well as in The Prince of West End Avenue, a 1994 book by the American Alan Isler. Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oișteanu. Tzara's legacy in literature also covers specific episodes of his biography, beginning with Gertrude Stein's controversial memoir. One of his performances is enthusiastically recorded by Malcolm Cowley in his autobiographical book of 1934, Exile's Return, and he is also mentioned in Harold Loeb's memoir The Way It Was. Among his biographers is the French author François Buot, who records some of the lesser-known aspects of Tzara's life.
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist Peter Weiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). His role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.
Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists. Max Ernst depicts him as the only mobile character in the Dadaists' group portrait Au Rendez-vous des Amis ("A Friends' Reunion", 1922), while, in one of Man Ray's photographs, he is shown kneeling to kiss the hand of an androgynous Nancy Cunard. Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tzara's calligraphed name in Moléculaire ("Molecular"), a composition printed on the cover of 391. The same artist also completed his schematic portrait, which showed a series of circles connected by two perpendicular arrows. In 1949, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made Tzara the subject of one of his first experiments with lithography. Portraits of Tzara were also made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M. H. Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi. As an homage to Tzara the performer, art rocker David Bowie adopted his accessories and mannerisms during a number of public appearances. In 1996, he was depicted on a series of Romanian stamps, and, the same year, a concrete and steel monument dedicated to the writer was erected in Moinești.
Several of Tzara's Dadaist editions had illustrations by Picabia, Janco and Hans Arp. In its 1925 edition, Handkerchief of Clouds featured etchings by Juan Gris, while his late writings Parler seul, Le Signe de vie, De mémoire d'homme, Le Temps naissant, and Le Fruit permis were illustrated with works by, respectively, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Nejad Devrim and Sonia Delaunay. Tzara was the subject of a 1949 eponymous documentary film directed by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Roos, and footage of him featured prominently in the 1953 production Les statues meurent aussi ("Statues Also Die"), jointly directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Posthumous controversies
The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).
A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a "Lumpenproletarian". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion [...] which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, [together] with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.
From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to "protochronism", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.
Notes
References
Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in Justin Wintle (ed.), Makers of Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2002.
Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1988.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 2007.
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet, C. Hurst & Co., London, 1999.
Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
Irina Livezeanu, " 'From Dada to Gaga': The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism", in Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Lucia Dragomir (eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique. Colloque tenu à Bucarest (Roumanie), 30 et 31 mai 2003, Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Editura Paralela 45, Paris, 2005.
Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 1999.
Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005.
Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde, Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, Bucharest & Paris, 1999.
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art (with a postscript by Werner Haftmann), Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
External links
From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition, Europeana database
Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb
1896 births
1963 deaths
People from Moinești
Moldavian Jews
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20th-century French poets
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French male poets
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Symbolist poets
Surrealist poets
Dada
Romanian surrealist writers
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"Přírodní park Třebíčsko (before Oblast klidu Třebíčsko) is a natural park near Třebíč in the Czech Republic. There are many interesting plants. The park was founded in 1983.\n\nKobylinec and Ptáčovský kopeček\n\nKobylinec is a natural monument situated ca 0,5 km from the village of Trnava.\nThe area of this monument is 0,44 ha. Pulsatilla grandis can be found here and in the Ptáčovský kopeček park near Ptáčov near Třebíč. Both monuments are very popular for tourists.\n\nPonds\n\nIn the natural park there are some interesting ponds such as Velký Bor, Malý Bor, Buršík near Přeckov and a brook Březinka. Dams on the brook are examples of European beaver activity.\n\nSyenitové skály near Pocoucov\n\nSyenitové skály (rocks of syenit) near Pocoucov is one of famed locations. There are interesting granite boulders. The area of the reservation is 0,77 ha.\n\nExternal links\nParts of this article or all article was translated from Czech. The original article is :cs:Přírodní park Třebíčsko.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNature near the village Trnava which is there\n\nTřebíč\nParks in the Czech Republic\nTourist attractions in the Vysočina Region",
"Damn Interesting is an independent website founded by Alan Bellows in 2005. The website presents true stories from science, history, and psychology, primarily as long-form articles, often illustrated with original artwork. Works are written by various authors, and published at irregular intervals. The website openly rejects advertising, relying on reader and listener donations to cover operating costs.\n\nAs of October 2012, each article is also published as a podcast under the same name. In November 2019, a second podcast was launched under the title Damn Interesting Week, featuring unscripted commentary on an assortment of news articles featured on the website's \"Curated Links\" section that week. In mid-2020, a third podcast called Damn Interesting Curio Cabinet began highlighting the website's periodic short-form articles in the same radioplay format as the original podcast.\n\nIn July 2009, Damn Interesting published the print book Alien Hand Syndrome through Workman Publishing. It contains some favorites from the site and some exclusive content.\n\nAwards and recognition \nIn August 2007, PC Magazine named Damn Interesting one of the \"Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites\".\nThe article \"The Zero-Armed Bandit\" by Alan Bellows won a 2015 Sidney Award from David Brooks in The New York Times.\nThe article \"Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds\" by Alan Bellows was cited as \"nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time\" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.\nThe article \"Dupes and Duplicity\" by Jennifer Lee Noonan won a 2020 Sidney Award from David Brooks in the New York Times.\n\nAccusing The Dollop of plagiarism \n\nOn July 9, 2015, Bellows posted an open letter accusing The Dollop, a comedy podcast about history, of plagiarism due to their repeated use of verbatim text from Damn Interesting articles without permission or attribution. Dave Anthony, the writer of The Dollop, responded on reddit, admitting to using Damn Interesting content, but claiming that the use was protected by fair use, and that \"historical facts are not copyrightable.\" In an article about the controversy on Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey concluded, \"Any way one looks at it, The Dollop failed its ethical obligations to all of the people, not just those writing for Damn Interesting, who put in the time, energy and expertise into writing the original content upon which their show is based.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Official website\n\n2005 podcast debuts"
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"Tristan Tzara",
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"When did Tristan change his name?",
"in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.",
"Why did he change his name?",
"Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the \"infamous pun\" Triste Ane Tzara (French for \"Sad Donkey Tzara\")."
] |
C_e27fa2123565461580f1ec274da842df_1
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Did he have any other names?
| 4 |
Did Tristan Tzara have any other names other than Triste Ane Tzara?
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Tristan Tzara
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S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan. In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper). In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbiere or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara ("the land", Romanian pronunciation: ['tsara]). CANNOTANSWER
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the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (
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Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man.
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
Name
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as țara ("the land", ).
Biography
Early life and Simbolul years
Tzara was born in Moinești, Bacău County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis. Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors, active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Rașcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as the journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski. Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages. Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment." During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret." According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.
Birth of Dada
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]." Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists. Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in the German Empire—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason. In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." The same commentator, however, dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists." According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada. When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage. In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"). Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation
By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.
Evening of the Bearded Heart
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity". In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.
In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."
In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray. During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art. Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds"). This period saw the publication of The Approximate Man (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935). By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas's magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care. In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces. Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism, his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.
World War II and Resistance
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime. On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse. His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see Romania during World War II), the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen. During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly. According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]." In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).
International leftism
Over the following decade, Tzara lent his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization. Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet. He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The speeches he and Sașa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe). In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).
In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila József. In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership), and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years
In October 1956, Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin). Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary". However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion". The statement he issued, widely quoted in the Hungarian and international press, forced a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's reply, the party deplored the fact that one of its members was being used in support of "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."
His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did. Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."
He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet François Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. In early 1957, Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him. In August 1960, one year after the Fifth Republic had been established by President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (see Algerian War). Together with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jérôme Lindon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned French Broadcasting Service.
In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize. One of his final public activities took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, organized by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Literary contributions
Identity issues
Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers." Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular, while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."
Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with Maja Kruscek at Zuntfhaus zür Waag featured samples of African literature, to which Tzara added Romanian-language fragments. He is also known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moară la Hârța ("At the Mill in Hârța") during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire. Addressing the Romanian public in 1947, he claimed to have been captivated by "the sweet language of Moldavian peasants".
Tzara nonetheless rebelled against his birthplace and upbringing. His earliest poems depict provincial Moldavia as a desolate and unsettling place. In Cernat's view, this imagery was in common use among Moldavian-born writers who also belonged to the avant-garde trend, notably Benjamin Fondane and George Bacovia. Like in the cases of Eugène Ionesco and Fondane, Cernat proposes, Samyro sought self-exile to Western Europe as a "modern, voluntarist" means of breaking with "the peripheral condition", which may also serve to explain the pun he selected for a pseudonym. According to the same author, two important elements in this process were "a maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", an "Oedipus complex" which he also argued was evident in the biographies of other Symbolist and avant-garde Romanian authors, from Urmuz to Mateiu Caragiale. Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would also help explain their impossibility to communicate. In particular, Cernat argues, the writer sought to emancipate himself from competing nationalisms, and addressed himself directly to the center of European culture, with Zürich serving as a stage on his way to Paris. The 1916 Monsieur's Antipyrine's Manifesto featured a cosmopolitan appeal: "DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates."
With time, Tristan Tzara came to be regarded by his Dada associates as an exotic character, whose attitudes were intrinsically linked with Eastern Europe. Early on, Ball referred to him and the Janco brothers as "Orientals". Hans Richter believed him to be a fiery and impulsive figure, having little in common with his German collaborators. According to Cernat, Richter's perspective seems to indicate a vision of Tzara having a "Latin" temperament. This type of perception also had negative implications for Tzara, particularly after the 1922 split within Dada. In the 1940s, Richard Huelsenbeck alleged that his former colleague had always been separated from other Dadaists by his failure to appreciate the legacy of "German humanism", and that, compared to his German colleagues, he was "a barbarian". In his polemic with Tzara, Breton also repeatedly placed stress on his rival's foreign origin.
At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism". Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage. This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius. Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".
Symbolist poetry
Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.
During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).
Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."
Collaboration with Vinea
The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).
In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject. However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic". Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free. His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:
In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:
Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:
Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation. Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse, Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style". In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness." In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."
Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage", Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes". It opens with the lyrics:
The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.
Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"
Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire. Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group. In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire and Marinetti. Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.
For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language. Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism", and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.
With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to Hans Arp, the first instance of Surrealist automatism. Ball stated that the subject of such pieces was "the value of the human voice." Together with Arp, Tzara and Walter Serner produced the German-language Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock ("The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's Hairdresser and the Walking-Stick"), in which, Arp stated, "the poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star." Another noted simultaneist poem was L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer ("The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent"), co-authored by Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbach.
Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence". Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.
Dada and anti-art
The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry, and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage". Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel", and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly." Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs. His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth." Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none." In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false", probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution". According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."
Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art." He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:
La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves. This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language." Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois". Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.
The Dada series makes ample use of contrast, ellipses, ridiculous imagery and nonsensical verdicts. Tzara was aware that the public could find it difficult to follow his intentions, and, in a piece titled Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage ("The White Leprous Giant in the Landscape") even alluded to the "skinny, idiotic, dirty" reader who "does not understand my poetry." He called some of his own poems lampisteries, from a French word designating storage areas for light fixtures. The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing". According to American literary historian Mary Ann Caws, Tzara's poems may be seen as having an "internal order", and read as "a simple spectacle, as creation complete in itself and completely obvious."
Plays of the 1920s
Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words. Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".
In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet. Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names, and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name. Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events." Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields. Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater." The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.
The Approximate Man and later works
After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition. According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom." The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision." In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.
This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature. While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape. Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty", while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects. The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure. One of the appeals in the text reads:
The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a humanist vision with communist theses. The 1935 Grains et issues, described by Beitchman as "fascinating", was a prose poem of social criticism connected with The Approximate Man, expanding on the vision of a possible society, in which haste has been abandoned in favor of oblivion. The world imagined by Tzara abandons symbols of the past, from literature to public transportation and currency, while, like psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the poet depicts violence as a natural means of human expression. People of the future live in a state which combines waking life and the realm of dreams, and life itself turns into revery. Grains et issues was accompanied by Personage d'insomnie ("Personage of Insomnia"), which went unpublished.
Cardinal notes: "In retrospect, harmony and contact had been Tzara's goals all along." The post-World War II volumes in the series focus on political subjects related to the conflict. In his last writings, Tzara toned down experimentation, exercising more control over the lyrical aspects. He was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and François Villon, whom he deeply admired.
Legacy
Influence
Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers. This was the case in his homeland during 1928, when the first avant-garde manifesto issued by unu magazine, written by Sașa Pană and Moldov, cited as its mentors Tzara, writers Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vinea, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Tudor Arghezi, as well as artists Constantin Brâncuși and Theo van Doesburg. One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G. Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man. The Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, also appears to have been directly inspired by Tzara's views on art. Other authors from that generation to have been inspired by Tzara were Polish Futurist writer Bruno Jasieński, Japanese poet and Zen thinker Takahashi Shinkichi, and Chilean poet and Dadaist sympathizer Vicente Huidobro, who cited him as a precursor for his own Creacionismo.
An immediate precursor of Absurdism, he was acknowledged as a mentor by Eugène Ionesco, who developed on his principles for his early essays of literary and social criticism, as well as in tragic farces such as The Bald Soprano. Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett (who translated some of it into English); the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart. In the United States, the Romanian author is cited as an influence on Beat Generation members. Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, who made his acquaintance in Paris, cites him among the Europeans who influenced him and William S. Burroughs. The latter also mentioned Tzara's use of chance in writing poetry as an early example of what became the cut-up technique, adopted by Brion Gysin and Burroughs himself. Gysin, who conversed with Tzara in the late 1950s, records the latter's indignation that Beat poets were "going back over the ground we [Dadaists] covered in 1920", and accuses Tzara of having consumed his creative energies into becoming a "Communist Party bureaucrat".
Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada, declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote." For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara. He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."
In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s. Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk. Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science. Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period. Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.
Tributes and portrayals
In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975, and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.
According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara. Vinea's fragment speaks of "the Wandering Jew", a character whom people notice because he sings La moară la Hârța, "a suspicious song from Greater Romania." The poet is a character in Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand's Thieves of Fire, part four of his The Bubble (1984), as well as in The Prince of West End Avenue, a 1994 book by the American Alan Isler. Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oișteanu. Tzara's legacy in literature also covers specific episodes of his biography, beginning with Gertrude Stein's controversial memoir. One of his performances is enthusiastically recorded by Malcolm Cowley in his autobiographical book of 1934, Exile's Return, and he is also mentioned in Harold Loeb's memoir The Way It Was. Among his biographers is the French author François Buot, who records some of the lesser-known aspects of Tzara's life.
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist Peter Weiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). His role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.
Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists. Max Ernst depicts him as the only mobile character in the Dadaists' group portrait Au Rendez-vous des Amis ("A Friends' Reunion", 1922), while, in one of Man Ray's photographs, he is shown kneeling to kiss the hand of an androgynous Nancy Cunard. Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tzara's calligraphed name in Moléculaire ("Molecular"), a composition printed on the cover of 391. The same artist also completed his schematic portrait, which showed a series of circles connected by two perpendicular arrows. In 1949, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made Tzara the subject of one of his first experiments with lithography. Portraits of Tzara were also made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M. H. Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi. As an homage to Tzara the performer, art rocker David Bowie adopted his accessories and mannerisms during a number of public appearances. In 1996, he was depicted on a series of Romanian stamps, and, the same year, a concrete and steel monument dedicated to the writer was erected in Moinești.
Several of Tzara's Dadaist editions had illustrations by Picabia, Janco and Hans Arp. In its 1925 edition, Handkerchief of Clouds featured etchings by Juan Gris, while his late writings Parler seul, Le Signe de vie, De mémoire d'homme, Le Temps naissant, and Le Fruit permis were illustrated with works by, respectively, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Nejad Devrim and Sonia Delaunay. Tzara was the subject of a 1949 eponymous documentary film directed by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Roos, and footage of him featured prominently in the 1953 production Les statues meurent aussi ("Statues Also Die"), jointly directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Posthumous controversies
The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).
A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a "Lumpenproletarian". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion [...] which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, [together] with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.
From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to "protochronism", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.
Notes
References
Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in Justin Wintle (ed.), Makers of Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2002.
Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1988.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 2007.
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet, C. Hurst & Co., London, 1999.
Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
Irina Livezeanu, " 'From Dada to Gaga': The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism", in Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Lucia Dragomir (eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique. Colloque tenu à Bucarest (Roumanie), 30 et 31 mai 2003, Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Editura Paralela 45, Paris, 2005.
Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 1999.
Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005.
Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde, Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, Bucharest & Paris, 1999.
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art (with a postscript by Werner Haftmann), Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
External links
From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition, Europeana database
Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb
1896 births
1963 deaths
People from Moinești
Moldavian Jews
Romanian Jews
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French people of Romanian-Jewish descent
20th-century French poets
20th-century Romanian poets
French male poets
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Romanian-language poets
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Surrealist poets
Dada
Romanian surrealist writers
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"All or almost all rivers in Europe have alternative names in different languages. Some rivers have also undergone name changes for political or other reasons. This article provides known alternative names for all major European rivers. It also includes alternative names of some lesser rivers that are important because of their location or history.\n\nThis article does not offer any opinion about what the \"original\", \"official\", \"real\", or \"correct\" name of any river is or was. Rivers are listed alphabetically by their current best-known name in English. The English version is followed by variants in other languages, in alphabetical order by name, and then by any historical variants and former names.\n\nForeign names that are the same as their English equivalents may be listed, to provide an answer to the question \"What is that name in...?\".\n\n\n\nA\n\nB\n\nC\n\nD\n\nE\n\nF\n\nG\n\nH\n\nI\n\nJ\n\nK\n\nL\n\nM\n\nN\n\nO\n\nP\n\nR\n\nS\n\nT\n\nU\n\nV\n\nW\n\nY\n\nZ\n\nSee also\n Exonym and endonym\n List of rivers of Europe\n Latin names of European rivers\n List of alternative country names\n List of country names in various languages\n List of European regions with alternative names\n List of European cities with alternative names\n List of Latin place names in Europe\n List of places\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Place names of Europe\n\nRivers\nRivers\nEurope\nList of European rivers with alternative names\n\nМалхъ",
"Many regions and provinces of Asia have alternative names in different languages. Some regions have also undergone name changes for political or other reasons. This article attempts to give all known alternative names for all major Asian regions, provinces, and territories. It also includes some lesser regions that are important because of their location or history.\n\nThis article does not offer any opinion about what the \"original\", \"official\", \"real\", or \"correct\" name of any region is or was. Regions are listed alphabetically by their current best-known name in English, which does not necessarily match the title of the corresponding article. The English version is followed by variants in other languages, in alphabetical order by name, and then by any historical variants and former names.\n\nForeign names that are the same as their English equivalents may be listed, to provide an answer to the question \"What is that name in...\"?\n\nA\n\nB\n\nC\n\nD\n\nJ\n\nK\n\nM\n\nS\n\nT\n\nReferences\n\nSee also\n List of European regions with alternative names\n Endonym and exonym\n List of alternative country names\n List of country names in various languages\n Latin names of regions\n List of places\n\nToponymy\nLists of place names"
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"in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.",
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"Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the \"infamous pun\" Triste Ane Tzara (French for \"Sad Donkey Tzara\").",
"Did he have any other names?",
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Did he ever have any issues because of his name?
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Did Tristan Tzara ever have any issues because of his name?
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Tristan Tzara
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S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan. In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper). In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbiere or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara ("the land", Romanian pronunciation: ['tsara]). CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man.
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
Name
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as țara ("the land", ).
Biography
Early life and Simbolul years
Tzara was born in Moinești, Bacău County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis. Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors, active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Rașcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as the journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski. Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages. Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment." During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret." According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.
Birth of Dada
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]." Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists. Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in the German Empire—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason. In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." The same commentator, however, dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists." According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada. When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage. In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"). Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation
By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.
Evening of the Bearded Heart
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity". In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.
In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."
In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray. During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art. Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds"). This period saw the publication of The Approximate Man (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935). By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas's magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care. In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces. Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism, his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.
World War II and Resistance
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime. On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse. His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see Romania during World War II), the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen. During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly. According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]." In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).
International leftism
Over the following decade, Tzara lent his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization. Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet. He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The speeches he and Sașa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe). In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).
In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila József. In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership), and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years
In October 1956, Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin). Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary". However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion". The statement he issued, widely quoted in the Hungarian and international press, forced a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's reply, the party deplored the fact that one of its members was being used in support of "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."
His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did. Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."
He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet François Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. In early 1957, Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him. In August 1960, one year after the Fifth Republic had been established by President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (see Algerian War). Together with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jérôme Lindon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned French Broadcasting Service.
In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize. One of his final public activities took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, organized by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Literary contributions
Identity issues
Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers." Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular, while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."
Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with Maja Kruscek at Zuntfhaus zür Waag featured samples of African literature, to which Tzara added Romanian-language fragments. He is also known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moară la Hârța ("At the Mill in Hârța") during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire. Addressing the Romanian public in 1947, he claimed to have been captivated by "the sweet language of Moldavian peasants".
Tzara nonetheless rebelled against his birthplace and upbringing. His earliest poems depict provincial Moldavia as a desolate and unsettling place. In Cernat's view, this imagery was in common use among Moldavian-born writers who also belonged to the avant-garde trend, notably Benjamin Fondane and George Bacovia. Like in the cases of Eugène Ionesco and Fondane, Cernat proposes, Samyro sought self-exile to Western Europe as a "modern, voluntarist" means of breaking with "the peripheral condition", which may also serve to explain the pun he selected for a pseudonym. According to the same author, two important elements in this process were "a maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", an "Oedipus complex" which he also argued was evident in the biographies of other Symbolist and avant-garde Romanian authors, from Urmuz to Mateiu Caragiale. Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would also help explain their impossibility to communicate. In particular, Cernat argues, the writer sought to emancipate himself from competing nationalisms, and addressed himself directly to the center of European culture, with Zürich serving as a stage on his way to Paris. The 1916 Monsieur's Antipyrine's Manifesto featured a cosmopolitan appeal: "DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates."
With time, Tristan Tzara came to be regarded by his Dada associates as an exotic character, whose attitudes were intrinsically linked with Eastern Europe. Early on, Ball referred to him and the Janco brothers as "Orientals". Hans Richter believed him to be a fiery and impulsive figure, having little in common with his German collaborators. According to Cernat, Richter's perspective seems to indicate a vision of Tzara having a "Latin" temperament. This type of perception also had negative implications for Tzara, particularly after the 1922 split within Dada. In the 1940s, Richard Huelsenbeck alleged that his former colleague had always been separated from other Dadaists by his failure to appreciate the legacy of "German humanism", and that, compared to his German colleagues, he was "a barbarian". In his polemic with Tzara, Breton also repeatedly placed stress on his rival's foreign origin.
At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism". Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage. This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius. Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".
Symbolist poetry
Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.
During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).
Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."
Collaboration with Vinea
The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).
In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject. However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic". Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free. His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:
In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:
Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:
Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation. Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse, Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style". In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness." In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."
Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage", Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes". It opens with the lyrics:
The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.
Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"
Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire. Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group. In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire and Marinetti. Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.
For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language. Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism", and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.
With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to Hans Arp, the first instance of Surrealist automatism. Ball stated that the subject of such pieces was "the value of the human voice." Together with Arp, Tzara and Walter Serner produced the German-language Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock ("The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's Hairdresser and the Walking-Stick"), in which, Arp stated, "the poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star." Another noted simultaneist poem was L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer ("The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent"), co-authored by Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbach.
Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence". Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.
Dada and anti-art
The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry, and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage". Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel", and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly." Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs. His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth." Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none." In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false", probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution". According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."
Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art." He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:
La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves. This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language." Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois". Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.
The Dada series makes ample use of contrast, ellipses, ridiculous imagery and nonsensical verdicts. Tzara was aware that the public could find it difficult to follow his intentions, and, in a piece titled Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage ("The White Leprous Giant in the Landscape") even alluded to the "skinny, idiotic, dirty" reader who "does not understand my poetry." He called some of his own poems lampisteries, from a French word designating storage areas for light fixtures. The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing". According to American literary historian Mary Ann Caws, Tzara's poems may be seen as having an "internal order", and read as "a simple spectacle, as creation complete in itself and completely obvious."
Plays of the 1920s
Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words. Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".
In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet. Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names, and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name. Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events." Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields. Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater." The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.
The Approximate Man and later works
After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition. According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom." The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision." In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.
This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature. While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape. Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty", while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects. The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure. One of the appeals in the text reads:
The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a humanist vision with communist theses. The 1935 Grains et issues, described by Beitchman as "fascinating", was a prose poem of social criticism connected with The Approximate Man, expanding on the vision of a possible society, in which haste has been abandoned in favor of oblivion. The world imagined by Tzara abandons symbols of the past, from literature to public transportation and currency, while, like psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the poet depicts violence as a natural means of human expression. People of the future live in a state which combines waking life and the realm of dreams, and life itself turns into revery. Grains et issues was accompanied by Personage d'insomnie ("Personage of Insomnia"), which went unpublished.
Cardinal notes: "In retrospect, harmony and contact had been Tzara's goals all along." The post-World War II volumes in the series focus on political subjects related to the conflict. In his last writings, Tzara toned down experimentation, exercising more control over the lyrical aspects. He was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and François Villon, whom he deeply admired.
Legacy
Influence
Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers. This was the case in his homeland during 1928, when the first avant-garde manifesto issued by unu magazine, written by Sașa Pană and Moldov, cited as its mentors Tzara, writers Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vinea, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Tudor Arghezi, as well as artists Constantin Brâncuși and Theo van Doesburg. One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G. Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man. The Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, also appears to have been directly inspired by Tzara's views on art. Other authors from that generation to have been inspired by Tzara were Polish Futurist writer Bruno Jasieński, Japanese poet and Zen thinker Takahashi Shinkichi, and Chilean poet and Dadaist sympathizer Vicente Huidobro, who cited him as a precursor for his own Creacionismo.
An immediate precursor of Absurdism, he was acknowledged as a mentor by Eugène Ionesco, who developed on his principles for his early essays of literary and social criticism, as well as in tragic farces such as The Bald Soprano. Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett (who translated some of it into English); the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart. In the United States, the Romanian author is cited as an influence on Beat Generation members. Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, who made his acquaintance in Paris, cites him among the Europeans who influenced him and William S. Burroughs. The latter also mentioned Tzara's use of chance in writing poetry as an early example of what became the cut-up technique, adopted by Brion Gysin and Burroughs himself. Gysin, who conversed with Tzara in the late 1950s, records the latter's indignation that Beat poets were "going back over the ground we [Dadaists] covered in 1920", and accuses Tzara of having consumed his creative energies into becoming a "Communist Party bureaucrat".
Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada, declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote." For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara. He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."
In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s. Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk. Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science. Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period. Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.
Tributes and portrayals
In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975, and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.
According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara. Vinea's fragment speaks of "the Wandering Jew", a character whom people notice because he sings La moară la Hârța, "a suspicious song from Greater Romania." The poet is a character in Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand's Thieves of Fire, part four of his The Bubble (1984), as well as in The Prince of West End Avenue, a 1994 book by the American Alan Isler. Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oișteanu. Tzara's legacy in literature also covers specific episodes of his biography, beginning with Gertrude Stein's controversial memoir. One of his performances is enthusiastically recorded by Malcolm Cowley in his autobiographical book of 1934, Exile's Return, and he is also mentioned in Harold Loeb's memoir The Way It Was. Among his biographers is the French author François Buot, who records some of the lesser-known aspects of Tzara's life.
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist Peter Weiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). His role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.
Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists. Max Ernst depicts him as the only mobile character in the Dadaists' group portrait Au Rendez-vous des Amis ("A Friends' Reunion", 1922), while, in one of Man Ray's photographs, he is shown kneeling to kiss the hand of an androgynous Nancy Cunard. Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tzara's calligraphed name in Moléculaire ("Molecular"), a composition printed on the cover of 391. The same artist also completed his schematic portrait, which showed a series of circles connected by two perpendicular arrows. In 1949, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made Tzara the subject of one of his first experiments with lithography. Portraits of Tzara were also made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M. H. Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi. As an homage to Tzara the performer, art rocker David Bowie adopted his accessories and mannerisms during a number of public appearances. In 1996, he was depicted on a series of Romanian stamps, and, the same year, a concrete and steel monument dedicated to the writer was erected in Moinești.
Several of Tzara's Dadaist editions had illustrations by Picabia, Janco and Hans Arp. In its 1925 edition, Handkerchief of Clouds featured etchings by Juan Gris, while his late writings Parler seul, Le Signe de vie, De mémoire d'homme, Le Temps naissant, and Le Fruit permis were illustrated with works by, respectively, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Nejad Devrim and Sonia Delaunay. Tzara was the subject of a 1949 eponymous documentary film directed by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Roos, and footage of him featured prominently in the 1953 production Les statues meurent aussi ("Statues Also Die"), jointly directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Posthumous controversies
The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).
A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a "Lumpenproletarian". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion [...] which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, [together] with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.
From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to "protochronism", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.
Notes
References
Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in Justin Wintle (ed.), Makers of Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2002.
Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1988.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 2007.
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet, C. Hurst & Co., London, 1999.
Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
Irina Livezeanu, " 'From Dada to Gaga': The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism", in Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Lucia Dragomir (eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique. Colloque tenu à Bucarest (Roumanie), 30 et 31 mai 2003, Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Editura Paralela 45, Paris, 2005.
Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 1999.
Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005.
Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde, Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, Bucharest & Paris, 1999.
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art (with a postscript by Werner Haftmann), Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
External links
From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition, Europeana database
Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb
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[
"George Maber (2 November 1869 – 17 December 1894) was a New Zealand rugby union player who represented the All Blacks in 1894. His position of choice was forward. Maber did not play in any test matches as New Zealand did not play their first until 1903.\n\nCareer \nMaber was described as \"wiry built\".\n\nHe played only two seasons of 1st-class rugby.\n\nAlthough born in Kaiapoi, Maber played all of his club rugby for the Petone club in Wellington.\n\nHe was in the Wellington provincial side between 1893 and 1894.\n\nAfter playing for his province against the touring New South Wales side in 1894, Maber was selected for the All Blacks to play in the unofficial \"test\" match which was also played on the tour. The match was lost 8-6.\n\nThis would be his only All Black appearance.\n\nBecause of his excellent showing in 1894 Maber received a trophy from the Petone club.\n\nPersonal and death \nSurprisingly Maber left for Australia. He then became severely ill after developing typhoid. He died in Coolgardie, Western Australia at the age of just 25.\n\nCoolgardie, at the time was a major mining site for gold. Although it was more than likely he left because of the gold digging no evidence has ever been found to indicate this was the reason for the sudden move, which ultimately ended his promising career.\n\nHe was buried at Coolgardie Cemetery, in the Wesleyan section.\n\nMaber may have changed his name to John, and is suggested to have died on 18 December.\n\nReferences \n\nNew Zealand international rugby union players\nNew Zealand rugby union players\nPeople from Kaiapoi\nNew Zealand expatriates in Australia\n1869 births\n1894 deaths\nInfectious disease deaths in Western Australia",
"Gasparo Duiffopruggar (1514 – ) was an instrument maker. His originally German family name was also spelled Tieffenbrucker, Tiefenbrugger, Tiefenbrucker, Teufenbrugger, Tuiffenbrugger, Deuffenbrugger, Dieffopruchar, Dieffoprughar, Duyfautbrocard, Duiffopruggar, Duiffoprugcar, Dubrocard, Dieffoprukhar, Diafopruchar, Thiphobrucar, Fraburgadi, his first name also Kaspar, Caspar or Gaspard. Duiffopruggar is believed to have been born near Füssen in Bavaria, Germany, and had moved to Lyon, France, where he did most of his work, by 1553. He was one of the first to produce the violin in its modern form.\n\nDuiffopruggar instruments are rare and tend to be of the viol family. Most instruments bearing his labels are imagined reproductions of his instruments. The best examples come from the workshop of the Parisian violin-maker, Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. They were made for Vuillaume by Honoré Derazey (1794–1883) and sold to the public to supply the demand for older instruments. These instruments can be distinguished from the originals, however, by discrepancies in the labels of the violin, and more importantly, the workmanship and type of the instrument.\n\nBecause no violin has ever been actually discovered to have been made by Tieffenbrucker, the current belief is that \"Duiffopruggar\" never actually made any violins, but rather that he made almost only lutes and sold different instruments of other makers, and his name was used to sell a brand of commercial instruments made for Vuillaume.\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography\n Farga, Franz, Violins & Violinists. Trans. Egon Larson with Bruno Raikin. New York: Frederick A. Prager, 1969.\n \"The Tieffenbrucker family and its collaborators\", ch. XVI in Viol and Lute Makers of Venice 1490–1630 by Stefano Pio (2012), Ed. Venice Research, . Abstract and index\n\nExternal links\nEncyclopedia Smithsonian, Gaspard Duiffopruggar\n\nGerman luthiers\n1514 births\n1570s deaths\nGerman emigrants to France"
] |
[
"Tristan Tzara",
"Name",
"When did Tristan change his name?",
"in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.",
"Why did he change his name?",
"Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the \"infamous pun\" Triste Ane Tzara (French for \"Sad Donkey Tzara\").",
"Did he have any other names?",
"the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (",
"Did he ever have any issues because of his name?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_e27fa2123565461580f1ec274da842df_1
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Did anyone else use his name after he used it?
| 6 |
Did anyone else use Tristan Tzara's name other than him?
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Tristan Tzara
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S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan. In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper). In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbiere or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara ("the land", Romanian pronunciation: ['tsara]). CANNOTANSWER
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Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925,
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Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man.
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
Name
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as țara ("the land", ).
Biography
Early life and Simbolul years
Tzara was born in Moinești, Bacău County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis. Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors, active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Rașcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as the journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski. Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages. Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment." During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret." According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.
Birth of Dada
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]." Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists. Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in the German Empire—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason. In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." The same commentator, however, dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists." According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada. When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage. In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"). Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation
By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.
Evening of the Bearded Heart
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity". In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.
In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."
In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray. During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art. Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds"). This period saw the publication of The Approximate Man (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935). By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas's magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care. In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces. Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism, his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.
World War II and Resistance
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime. On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse. His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see Romania during World War II), the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen. During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly. According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]." In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).
International leftism
Over the following decade, Tzara lent his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization. Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet. He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The speeches he and Sașa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe). In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).
In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila József. In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership), and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years
In October 1956, Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin). Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary". However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion". The statement he issued, widely quoted in the Hungarian and international press, forced a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's reply, the party deplored the fact that one of its members was being used in support of "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."
His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did. Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."
He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet François Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. In early 1957, Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him. In August 1960, one year after the Fifth Republic had been established by President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (see Algerian War). Together with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jérôme Lindon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned French Broadcasting Service.
In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize. One of his final public activities took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, organized by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Literary contributions
Identity issues
Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers." Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular, while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."
Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with Maja Kruscek at Zuntfhaus zür Waag featured samples of African literature, to which Tzara added Romanian-language fragments. He is also known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moară la Hârța ("At the Mill in Hârța") during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire. Addressing the Romanian public in 1947, he claimed to have been captivated by "the sweet language of Moldavian peasants".
Tzara nonetheless rebelled against his birthplace and upbringing. His earliest poems depict provincial Moldavia as a desolate and unsettling place. In Cernat's view, this imagery was in common use among Moldavian-born writers who also belonged to the avant-garde trend, notably Benjamin Fondane and George Bacovia. Like in the cases of Eugène Ionesco and Fondane, Cernat proposes, Samyro sought self-exile to Western Europe as a "modern, voluntarist" means of breaking with "the peripheral condition", which may also serve to explain the pun he selected for a pseudonym. According to the same author, two important elements in this process were "a maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", an "Oedipus complex" which he also argued was evident in the biographies of other Symbolist and avant-garde Romanian authors, from Urmuz to Mateiu Caragiale. Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would also help explain their impossibility to communicate. In particular, Cernat argues, the writer sought to emancipate himself from competing nationalisms, and addressed himself directly to the center of European culture, with Zürich serving as a stage on his way to Paris. The 1916 Monsieur's Antipyrine's Manifesto featured a cosmopolitan appeal: "DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates."
With time, Tristan Tzara came to be regarded by his Dada associates as an exotic character, whose attitudes were intrinsically linked with Eastern Europe. Early on, Ball referred to him and the Janco brothers as "Orientals". Hans Richter believed him to be a fiery and impulsive figure, having little in common with his German collaborators. According to Cernat, Richter's perspective seems to indicate a vision of Tzara having a "Latin" temperament. This type of perception also had negative implications for Tzara, particularly after the 1922 split within Dada. In the 1940s, Richard Huelsenbeck alleged that his former colleague had always been separated from other Dadaists by his failure to appreciate the legacy of "German humanism", and that, compared to his German colleagues, he was "a barbarian". In his polemic with Tzara, Breton also repeatedly placed stress on his rival's foreign origin.
At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism". Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage. This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius. Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".
Symbolist poetry
Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.
During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).
Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."
Collaboration with Vinea
The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).
In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject. However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic". Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free. His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:
In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:
Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:
Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation. Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse, Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style". In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness." In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."
Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage", Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes". It opens with the lyrics:
The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.
Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"
Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire. Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group. In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire and Marinetti. Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.
For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language. Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism", and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.
With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to Hans Arp, the first instance of Surrealist automatism. Ball stated that the subject of such pieces was "the value of the human voice." Together with Arp, Tzara and Walter Serner produced the German-language Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock ("The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's Hairdresser and the Walking-Stick"), in which, Arp stated, "the poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star." Another noted simultaneist poem was L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer ("The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent"), co-authored by Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbach.
Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence". Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.
Dada and anti-art
The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry, and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage". Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel", and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly." Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs. His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth." Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none." In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false", probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution". According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."
Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art." He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:
La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves. This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language." Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois". Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.
The Dada series makes ample use of contrast, ellipses, ridiculous imagery and nonsensical verdicts. Tzara was aware that the public could find it difficult to follow his intentions, and, in a piece titled Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage ("The White Leprous Giant in the Landscape") even alluded to the "skinny, idiotic, dirty" reader who "does not understand my poetry." He called some of his own poems lampisteries, from a French word designating storage areas for light fixtures. The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing". According to American literary historian Mary Ann Caws, Tzara's poems may be seen as having an "internal order", and read as "a simple spectacle, as creation complete in itself and completely obvious."
Plays of the 1920s
Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words. Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".
In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet. Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names, and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name. Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events." Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields. Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater." The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.
The Approximate Man and later works
After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition. According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom." The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision." In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.
This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature. While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape. Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty", while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects. The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure. One of the appeals in the text reads:
The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a humanist vision with communist theses. The 1935 Grains et issues, described by Beitchman as "fascinating", was a prose poem of social criticism connected with The Approximate Man, expanding on the vision of a possible society, in which haste has been abandoned in favor of oblivion. The world imagined by Tzara abandons symbols of the past, from literature to public transportation and currency, while, like psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the poet depicts violence as a natural means of human expression. People of the future live in a state which combines waking life and the realm of dreams, and life itself turns into revery. Grains et issues was accompanied by Personage d'insomnie ("Personage of Insomnia"), which went unpublished.
Cardinal notes: "In retrospect, harmony and contact had been Tzara's goals all along." The post-World War II volumes in the series focus on political subjects related to the conflict. In his last writings, Tzara toned down experimentation, exercising more control over the lyrical aspects. He was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and François Villon, whom he deeply admired.
Legacy
Influence
Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers. This was the case in his homeland during 1928, when the first avant-garde manifesto issued by unu magazine, written by Sașa Pană and Moldov, cited as its mentors Tzara, writers Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vinea, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Tudor Arghezi, as well as artists Constantin Brâncuși and Theo van Doesburg. One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G. Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man. The Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, also appears to have been directly inspired by Tzara's views on art. Other authors from that generation to have been inspired by Tzara were Polish Futurist writer Bruno Jasieński, Japanese poet and Zen thinker Takahashi Shinkichi, and Chilean poet and Dadaist sympathizer Vicente Huidobro, who cited him as a precursor for his own Creacionismo.
An immediate precursor of Absurdism, he was acknowledged as a mentor by Eugène Ionesco, who developed on his principles for his early essays of literary and social criticism, as well as in tragic farces such as The Bald Soprano. Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett (who translated some of it into English); the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart. In the United States, the Romanian author is cited as an influence on Beat Generation members. Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, who made his acquaintance in Paris, cites him among the Europeans who influenced him and William S. Burroughs. The latter also mentioned Tzara's use of chance in writing poetry as an early example of what became the cut-up technique, adopted by Brion Gysin and Burroughs himself. Gysin, who conversed with Tzara in the late 1950s, records the latter's indignation that Beat poets were "going back over the ground we [Dadaists] covered in 1920", and accuses Tzara of having consumed his creative energies into becoming a "Communist Party bureaucrat".
Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada, declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote." For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara. He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."
In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s. Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk. Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science. Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period. Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.
Tributes and portrayals
In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975, and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.
According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara. Vinea's fragment speaks of "the Wandering Jew", a character whom people notice because he sings La moară la Hârța, "a suspicious song from Greater Romania." The poet is a character in Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand's Thieves of Fire, part four of his The Bubble (1984), as well as in The Prince of West End Avenue, a 1994 book by the American Alan Isler. Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oișteanu. Tzara's legacy in literature also covers specific episodes of his biography, beginning with Gertrude Stein's controversial memoir. One of his performances is enthusiastically recorded by Malcolm Cowley in his autobiographical book of 1934, Exile's Return, and he is also mentioned in Harold Loeb's memoir The Way It Was. Among his biographers is the French author François Buot, who records some of the lesser-known aspects of Tzara's life.
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist Peter Weiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). His role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.
Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists. Max Ernst depicts him as the only mobile character in the Dadaists' group portrait Au Rendez-vous des Amis ("A Friends' Reunion", 1922), while, in one of Man Ray's photographs, he is shown kneeling to kiss the hand of an androgynous Nancy Cunard. Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tzara's calligraphed name in Moléculaire ("Molecular"), a composition printed on the cover of 391. The same artist also completed his schematic portrait, which showed a series of circles connected by two perpendicular arrows. In 1949, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made Tzara the subject of one of his first experiments with lithography. Portraits of Tzara were also made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M. H. Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi. As an homage to Tzara the performer, art rocker David Bowie adopted his accessories and mannerisms during a number of public appearances. In 1996, he was depicted on a series of Romanian stamps, and, the same year, a concrete and steel monument dedicated to the writer was erected in Moinești.
Several of Tzara's Dadaist editions had illustrations by Picabia, Janco and Hans Arp. In its 1925 edition, Handkerchief of Clouds featured etchings by Juan Gris, while his late writings Parler seul, Le Signe de vie, De mémoire d'homme, Le Temps naissant, and Le Fruit permis were illustrated with works by, respectively, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Nejad Devrim and Sonia Delaunay. Tzara was the subject of a 1949 eponymous documentary film directed by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Roos, and footage of him featured prominently in the 1953 production Les statues meurent aussi ("Statues Also Die"), jointly directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Posthumous controversies
The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).
A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a "Lumpenproletarian". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion [...] which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, [together] with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.
From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to "protochronism", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.
Notes
References
Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in Justin Wintle (ed.), Makers of Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2002.
Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1988.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 2007.
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet, C. Hurst & Co., London, 1999.
Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
Irina Livezeanu, " 'From Dada to Gaga': The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism", in Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Lucia Dragomir (eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique. Colloque tenu à Bucarest (Roumanie), 30 et 31 mai 2003, Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Editura Paralela 45, Paris, 2005.
Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 1999.
Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005.
Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde, Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, Bucharest & Paris, 1999.
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art (with a postscript by Werner Haftmann), Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
External links
From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition, Europeana database
Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb
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| true |
[
"Anyone Else may refer to:\n \"Anyone Else\" (Collin Raye song), 1999\n \"Anyone Else\" (Matt Cardle song), 2012",
"The Moldy Peaches were an American indie group founded by Adam Green and Kimya Dawson. Leading proponents of the anti-folk scene, the band has been on hiatus since 2004. The appearance of their song \"Anyone Else but You\" in the film Juno significantly raised their profile; Dawson and Green made a handful of reunion appearances together in December 2007.\n\nHistory\nGreen and Dawson met at Exile on Main Street Records in Mount Kisco, New York, and began working together. Green put out a 7\" Ep called \"X-Ray Vision\" under the name The Moldy Peaches, featuring recordings he made from 1994–96 with Dawson and various other friends, notably Jules Sheridan, a songwriter based in Scotland. Green and Dawson recorded a CDR album in 1998 under the name Moldy Peaches 2000 called FER THE KIDS before Dawson moved to Port Townsend, Washington. In early 1999 Green joined her there, and more home and live recordings transpired. The band returned to NYC as a 4 piece later in the year (including Jest Commons, guitar, and Justin Campbell, drums). They became active on the NYC anti-folk scene, playing at the SideWalk Cafe before the band broke up. Dawson and Green both recorded solo albums. The band reformed in August 2000 with Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors on lead guitar, Brian Piltin on bass guitar, and Strictly Beats (Brent Cole) on drums. (The \"2000\" was dropped from their name around this time). A new 11 song album was recorded, which led to a deal with Rough Trade in the UK. They gained recognition after their initial 7\" 'Who's Got the Crack\" was named 'Single of the Week' in NME. Rough Trade released the album The Moldy Peaches in 2001. Released in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, it contained the song \"NYC Is Like a Graveyard\". The band expanded to a six-piece, with guitarists Jack Dishel and Aaron Wilkinson, bass player Steven Mertens, and drummer Strictly Beats, augmenting the original duo of Dawson and Green. They toured internationally with The Strokes with whom they shared record label and management.\n\nAaron Wilkinson left the band and was replaced by Toby Goodshank. Wilkinson died from an overdose in July 2003. The Strokes dedicated their album Room on Fire to his memory.\n\nIn 2003 a second album Moldy Peaches 2000 was released, a double-CD compilation of various scraps and live recordings.\n\nAfter an extensive US headlining tour in the winter of 2003, the band went into hiatus in early 2004. However, the band reunited in late 2004 for a one-off show to benefit Accidental CDs, Records and Tapes, a hole-in-the-wall record store on Ave A in NYC. That store was an early supporter of the band and helped hook them up with the gig that ultimately got them their record deal. Both central members embarked on solo careers.\n\nOn December 2, 2007, Dawson and Green played an impromptu set together at Los Angeles' The Smell to end a show where Dawson was headlining. They changed the lyrics of the song \"Who's Got The Crack\" to \"Who's Got The Blues\". On December 3, 2007, the Moldy Peaches played at the Juno film premiere.\n\nThe band was booked to appear on the Conan O'Brien television show on January 14, 2008, but they canceled because of the writer's strike. Dawson has said that she is not keen to reform the band at present. However, Dawson and Green did appear together on the NPR radio show Bryant Park Project on January 16, 2008. and appeared on television show The View on January 21, 2008.\n\nSubsequent to the success of the Juno soundtrack, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 on its third week of physical release, the song \"Anyone Else but You\" was released as a UK single on February 25, 2008.\n\nOn November 13, 2011, The Moldy Peaches played a short set at the Knitting Factory in New York.\n\nSolo projects\nGreen released his seventh solo album and accompanying film, Aladdin, in 2016 via Fat Possum. His initial band included a 3-piece string section.\n\nDawson has continued to tour playing small clubs and house parties. Her album Remember That I Love You on K Records has been well received. Dawson collaborated with Aesop Rock on the album Hokey Fright under the name The Uncluded.\n\nDishel's former outfit Stipplicon having broken up, he formed a new band, Only Son, who have toured with Regina Spektor. Dishel also plays in Spektor's band.\n\nMertens has his own group SpaceCamp and plays in Green's backing band.\n\nCole is in the boyband Candy Boys and has performed with numerous acts including Dufus, Jeffrey Lewis, Only Son, Sandra Bernhard, and Toby Goodshank.\n\nGoodshank plays solo shows and is also in a duo, Double Deuce, with his sister Angela.\n\nNotable appearances\n The song \"Anyone Else but You\" was used in the Academy Award-nominated documentary film Murderball (film).\n The song \"Anyone Else but You\" was used in a mobile phone TV-ad in France during World Cup 2006, featuring French star Zinedine Zidane.\n The song \"Anyone Else but You\" is central to the 2007 Academy Award-winning film Juno and a version is also performed by the two main characters (Elliot Page and Michael Cera).\n A re-written version of \"Anyone Else but You\" was featured in a commercial for Atlantis Resorts in the Bahamas.\n The song \"Jorge Regula\" was used in a Pepsodent commercial in Hispanic America, without the group's permission.\n A version of the song \"Jorge Regula\" also appears in the 2006 indie film The Guatemalan Handshake.\n\nPersonnel\nKimya Dawson – vocals, guitars (1994–2004, 2007–2008)\nAdam Green – vocals, guitars (1994–2004, 2007–2008)\nJustice Campbell – drums (1999)\nJest Commons – guitars (1999)\nBrent Cole – drums (2000–2004)\nChris Barron – guitars (2000–2001)\nBrian Piltin – bass (2000–2001)\nJack Dishel – guitars (2001–2004)\nSteven Mertens – bass (2001–2004)\nAaron Wilkinson – guitars (2001–2002; died 2003)\nToby Goodshank – guitars (2002–2004)\n\nTimeline\n\nDiscography\nAfter releasing their first few records themselves, The Moldy Peaches have released music internationally through Rough Trade. In the United States records were originally released under the Sanctuary Records banner but, since the demise of Sanctuary and the takeover of Rough Trade by the Beggars Group, U.S. releases are now also on Rough Trade.\n\n X-Ray Vision (EP) – Average Cabbage Records – 1996\n Moldy Peaches 2000: Fer the Kids/ Live 1999 (Cassette/CD) – Average Cabbage Records – 1999\n\"The Love Boat\" - Live!!! (Cassette) – Average Cabbage Records – 1999\n The Moldy Peaches (CD-R) – Pro-Anti Records – 2000 (11-song CD, similar cover to next release, all songs included on later albums or singles).\n The Moldy Peaches (CD/LP) – Sanctuary Records/Rough Trade – 2001 (compilation from previous self-releases plus 1 re-recording of \"Nothing Came Out\")\n \"County Fair/Rainbows\" (CD single) – Sanctuary Records/Rough Trade – 2002\n Moldy Peaches 2000: Unreleased Cutz and Live Jamz 1994-2002 (CD) – Sanctuary Records/Rough Trade – 2003\n \"Anyone Else but You\" (single) – Rough Trade – 2008\n Origin Story: 1994–1999 (CD/LP/Cassette) – Org Music – 2022\n\nCompilation appearances\n Music from the Film Garage Days (\"Lucky Number Nine\") – Festival Mushroom Records 2002\nMusic from the Film Murderball (\"Anyone Else but You\") – Commotion 2005\nMusic from the Motion Picture Juno (\"Anyone Else but You\") – Rhino Records 2007\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n www.moldypeaches.com Official site.\n MP2K The original official site (archive.org)\nThe Moldy Peaches Beggars Group USA page\n\nAnti-folk groups\nMusical groups established in 1994\nMusical groups disestablished in 2008\nIndie rock musical groups from New York (state)\nPsychedelic folk groups\nRough Trade Records artists\nMusical groups from Washington (state)"
] |
[
"Tristan Tzara",
"Name",
"When did Tristan change his name?",
"in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.",
"Why did he change his name?",
"Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the \"infamous pun\" Triste Ane Tzara (French for \"Sad Donkey Tzara\").",
"Did he have any other names?",
"the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (",
"Did he ever have any issues because of his name?",
"I don't know.",
"Did anyone else use his name after he used it?",
"Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925,"
] |
C_e27fa2123565461580f1ec274da842df_1
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What else is important about his name?
| 7 |
What else is important about Tristan Tzara's name other than the variations?
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Tristan Tzara
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S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan. In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper). In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbiere or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara ("the land", Romanian pronunciation: ['tsara]). CANNOTANSWER
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Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country";
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Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man.
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
Name
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as țara ("the land", ).
Biography
Early life and Simbolul years
Tzara was born in Moinești, Bacău County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis. Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors, active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Rașcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as the journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski. Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages. Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment." During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret." According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.
Birth of Dada
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]." Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists. Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in the German Empire—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason. In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." The same commentator, however, dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists." According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada. When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage. In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"). Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation
By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.
Evening of the Bearded Heart
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity". In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.
In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."
In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray. During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art. Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds"). This period saw the publication of The Approximate Man (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935). By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas's magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care. In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces. Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism, his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.
World War II and Resistance
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime. On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse. His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see Romania during World War II), the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen. During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly. According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]." In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).
International leftism
Over the following decade, Tzara lent his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization. Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet. He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The speeches he and Sașa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe). In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).
In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila József. In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership), and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years
In October 1956, Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin). Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary". However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion". The statement he issued, widely quoted in the Hungarian and international press, forced a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's reply, the party deplored the fact that one of its members was being used in support of "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."
His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did. Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."
He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet François Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. In early 1957, Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him. In August 1960, one year after the Fifth Republic had been established by President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (see Algerian War). Together with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jérôme Lindon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned French Broadcasting Service.
In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize. One of his final public activities took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, organized by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Literary contributions
Identity issues
Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers." Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular, while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."
Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with Maja Kruscek at Zuntfhaus zür Waag featured samples of African literature, to which Tzara added Romanian-language fragments. He is also known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moară la Hârța ("At the Mill in Hârța") during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire. Addressing the Romanian public in 1947, he claimed to have been captivated by "the sweet language of Moldavian peasants".
Tzara nonetheless rebelled against his birthplace and upbringing. His earliest poems depict provincial Moldavia as a desolate and unsettling place. In Cernat's view, this imagery was in common use among Moldavian-born writers who also belonged to the avant-garde trend, notably Benjamin Fondane and George Bacovia. Like in the cases of Eugène Ionesco and Fondane, Cernat proposes, Samyro sought self-exile to Western Europe as a "modern, voluntarist" means of breaking with "the peripheral condition", which may also serve to explain the pun he selected for a pseudonym. According to the same author, two important elements in this process were "a maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", an "Oedipus complex" which he also argued was evident in the biographies of other Symbolist and avant-garde Romanian authors, from Urmuz to Mateiu Caragiale. Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would also help explain their impossibility to communicate. In particular, Cernat argues, the writer sought to emancipate himself from competing nationalisms, and addressed himself directly to the center of European culture, with Zürich serving as a stage on his way to Paris. The 1916 Monsieur's Antipyrine's Manifesto featured a cosmopolitan appeal: "DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates."
With time, Tristan Tzara came to be regarded by his Dada associates as an exotic character, whose attitudes were intrinsically linked with Eastern Europe. Early on, Ball referred to him and the Janco brothers as "Orientals". Hans Richter believed him to be a fiery and impulsive figure, having little in common with his German collaborators. According to Cernat, Richter's perspective seems to indicate a vision of Tzara having a "Latin" temperament. This type of perception also had negative implications for Tzara, particularly after the 1922 split within Dada. In the 1940s, Richard Huelsenbeck alleged that his former colleague had always been separated from other Dadaists by his failure to appreciate the legacy of "German humanism", and that, compared to his German colleagues, he was "a barbarian". In his polemic with Tzara, Breton also repeatedly placed stress on his rival's foreign origin.
At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism". Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage. This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius. Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".
Symbolist poetry
Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.
During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).
Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."
Collaboration with Vinea
The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).
In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject. However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic". Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free. His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:
In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:
Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:
Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation. Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse, Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style". In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness." In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."
Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage", Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes". It opens with the lyrics:
The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.
Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"
Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire. Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group. In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire and Marinetti. Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.
For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language. Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism", and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.
With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to Hans Arp, the first instance of Surrealist automatism. Ball stated that the subject of such pieces was "the value of the human voice." Together with Arp, Tzara and Walter Serner produced the German-language Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock ("The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's Hairdresser and the Walking-Stick"), in which, Arp stated, "the poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star." Another noted simultaneist poem was L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer ("The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent"), co-authored by Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbach.
Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence". Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.
Dada and anti-art
The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry, and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage". Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel", and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly." Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs. His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth." Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none." In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false", probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution". According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."
Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art." He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:
La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves. This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language." Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois". Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.
The Dada series makes ample use of contrast, ellipses, ridiculous imagery and nonsensical verdicts. Tzara was aware that the public could find it difficult to follow his intentions, and, in a piece titled Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage ("The White Leprous Giant in the Landscape") even alluded to the "skinny, idiotic, dirty" reader who "does not understand my poetry." He called some of his own poems lampisteries, from a French word designating storage areas for light fixtures. The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing". According to American literary historian Mary Ann Caws, Tzara's poems may be seen as having an "internal order", and read as "a simple spectacle, as creation complete in itself and completely obvious."
Plays of the 1920s
Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words. Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".
In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet. Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names, and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name. Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events." Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields. Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater." The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.
The Approximate Man and later works
After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition. According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom." The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision." In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.
This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature. While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape. Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty", while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects. The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure. One of the appeals in the text reads:
The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a humanist vision with communist theses. The 1935 Grains et issues, described by Beitchman as "fascinating", was a prose poem of social criticism connected with The Approximate Man, expanding on the vision of a possible society, in which haste has been abandoned in favor of oblivion. The world imagined by Tzara abandons symbols of the past, from literature to public transportation and currency, while, like psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the poet depicts violence as a natural means of human expression. People of the future live in a state which combines waking life and the realm of dreams, and life itself turns into revery. Grains et issues was accompanied by Personage d'insomnie ("Personage of Insomnia"), which went unpublished.
Cardinal notes: "In retrospect, harmony and contact had been Tzara's goals all along." The post-World War II volumes in the series focus on political subjects related to the conflict. In his last writings, Tzara toned down experimentation, exercising more control over the lyrical aspects. He was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and François Villon, whom he deeply admired.
Legacy
Influence
Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers. This was the case in his homeland during 1928, when the first avant-garde manifesto issued by unu magazine, written by Sașa Pană and Moldov, cited as its mentors Tzara, writers Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vinea, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Tudor Arghezi, as well as artists Constantin Brâncuși and Theo van Doesburg. One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G. Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man. The Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, also appears to have been directly inspired by Tzara's views on art. Other authors from that generation to have been inspired by Tzara were Polish Futurist writer Bruno Jasieński, Japanese poet and Zen thinker Takahashi Shinkichi, and Chilean poet and Dadaist sympathizer Vicente Huidobro, who cited him as a precursor for his own Creacionismo.
An immediate precursor of Absurdism, he was acknowledged as a mentor by Eugène Ionesco, who developed on his principles for his early essays of literary and social criticism, as well as in tragic farces such as The Bald Soprano. Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett (who translated some of it into English); the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart. In the United States, the Romanian author is cited as an influence on Beat Generation members. Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, who made his acquaintance in Paris, cites him among the Europeans who influenced him and William S. Burroughs. The latter also mentioned Tzara's use of chance in writing poetry as an early example of what became the cut-up technique, adopted by Brion Gysin and Burroughs himself. Gysin, who conversed with Tzara in the late 1950s, records the latter's indignation that Beat poets were "going back over the ground we [Dadaists] covered in 1920", and accuses Tzara of having consumed his creative energies into becoming a "Communist Party bureaucrat".
Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada, declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote." For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara. He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."
In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s. Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk. Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science. Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period. Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.
Tributes and portrayals
In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975, and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.
According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara. Vinea's fragment speaks of "the Wandering Jew", a character whom people notice because he sings La moară la Hârța, "a suspicious song from Greater Romania." The poet is a character in Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand's Thieves of Fire, part four of his The Bubble (1984), as well as in The Prince of West End Avenue, a 1994 book by the American Alan Isler. Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oișteanu. Tzara's legacy in literature also covers specific episodes of his biography, beginning with Gertrude Stein's controversial memoir. One of his performances is enthusiastically recorded by Malcolm Cowley in his autobiographical book of 1934, Exile's Return, and he is also mentioned in Harold Loeb's memoir The Way It Was. Among his biographers is the French author François Buot, who records some of the lesser-known aspects of Tzara's life.
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist Peter Weiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). His role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.
Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists. Max Ernst depicts him as the only mobile character in the Dadaists' group portrait Au Rendez-vous des Amis ("A Friends' Reunion", 1922), while, in one of Man Ray's photographs, he is shown kneeling to kiss the hand of an androgynous Nancy Cunard. Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tzara's calligraphed name in Moléculaire ("Molecular"), a composition printed on the cover of 391. The same artist also completed his schematic portrait, which showed a series of circles connected by two perpendicular arrows. In 1949, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made Tzara the subject of one of his first experiments with lithography. Portraits of Tzara were also made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M. H. Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi. As an homage to Tzara the performer, art rocker David Bowie adopted his accessories and mannerisms during a number of public appearances. In 1996, he was depicted on a series of Romanian stamps, and, the same year, a concrete and steel monument dedicated to the writer was erected in Moinești.
Several of Tzara's Dadaist editions had illustrations by Picabia, Janco and Hans Arp. In its 1925 edition, Handkerchief of Clouds featured etchings by Juan Gris, while his late writings Parler seul, Le Signe de vie, De mémoire d'homme, Le Temps naissant, and Le Fruit permis were illustrated with works by, respectively, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Nejad Devrim and Sonia Delaunay. Tzara was the subject of a 1949 eponymous documentary film directed by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Roos, and footage of him featured prominently in the 1953 production Les statues meurent aussi ("Statues Also Die"), jointly directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Posthumous controversies
The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).
A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a "Lumpenproletarian". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion [...] which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, [together] with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.
From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to "protochronism", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.
Notes
References
Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in Justin Wintle (ed.), Makers of Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2002.
Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1988.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 2007.
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet, C. Hurst & Co., London, 1999.
Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
Irina Livezeanu, " 'From Dada to Gaga': The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism", in Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Lucia Dragomir (eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique. Colloque tenu à Bucarest (Roumanie), 30 et 31 mai 2003, Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Editura Paralela 45, Paris, 2005.
Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 1999.
Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005.
Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde, Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, Bucharest & Paris, 1999.
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art (with a postscript by Werner Haftmann), Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
External links
From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition, Europeana database
Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb
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"\"What Else Is There?\" is the third single from the Norwegian duo Röyksopp's second album The Understanding. It features the vocals of Karin Dreijer from the Swedish electronica duo The Knife. The album was released in the UK with the help of Astralwerks.\n\nThe single was used in an O2 television advertisement in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia during 2008. It was also used in the 2006 film Cashback and the 2007 film, Meet Bill. Trentemøller's remix of \"What Else is There?\" was featured in an episode of the HBO show Entourage.\n\nThe song was covered by extreme metal band Enslaved as a bonus track for their album E.\n\nThe song was listed as the 375th best song of the 2000s by Pitchfork Media.\n\nOfficial versions\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Album Version) – 5:17\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Radio Edit) – 3:38\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Jacques Lu Cont Radio Mix) – 3:46\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Vocal Version) – 8:03\n\"What Else Is There?\" (The Emperor Machine Dub Version) – 7:51\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Mix) – 8:25\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Edit) – 4:50\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Thin White Duke Remix) (Radio Edit) – 3:06\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Trentemøller Remix) – 7:42\n\"What Else Is There?\" (Vitalic Remix) – 5:14\n\nResponse\nThe single was officially released on 5 December 2005 in the UK. The single had a limited release on 21 November 2005 to promote the upcoming album. On the UK Singles Chart, it peaked at number 32, while on the UK Dance Chart, it reached number one.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was directed by Martin de Thurah. It features Norwegian model Marianne Schröder who is shown lip-syncing Dreijer's voice. Schröder is depicted as a floating woman traveling across stormy landscapes and within empty houses. Dreijer makes a cameo appearance as a woman wearing an Elizabethan ruff while dining alone at a festive table.\n\nMovie spots\n\nThe song is also featured in the movie Meet Bill as characters played by Jessica Alba and Aaron Eckhart smoke marijuana while listening to it. It is also part of the end credits music of the film Cashback.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n2005 singles\nRöyksopp songs\nAstralwerks singles\nSongs written by Svein Berge\nSongs written by Torbjørn Brundtland\n2004 songs\nSongs written by Roger Greenaway\nSongs written by Olof Dreijer\nSongs written by Karin Dreijer",
"Nowhere Else is a rural locality in the local government area (LGA) of Kentish in the North-west and west LGA region of Tasmania. The locality is about west of the town of Sheffield. The 2016 census provides a population of 40 for the state suburb of Nowhere Else.\nIt is a bounded rural locality on the island of Tasmania. It is located at latitude -41.366 and longitude 146.276. Located on Lake Barrington (Tasmania), Nowhere Else is 190km from Hobart, and 72km west of Launceston. The postcode is 7306.\n\nHistory \nNowhere Else was gazetted as a locality in 1957. The name is believed to originate from a road that led to a place with no name.\n\nGeography\nLake Barrington forms the north-western boundary.\n\nRoad infrastructure\nRoute C143 (Nowhere Else Road) runs through from north-east to south-east.\n\nReferences\n\nLocalities of Kentish Council"
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[
"Tristan Tzara",
"Name",
"When did Tristan change his name?",
"in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.",
"Why did he change his name?",
"Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name,",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the \"infamous pun\" Triste Ane Tzara (French for \"Sad Donkey Tzara\").",
"Did he have any other names?",
"the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (",
"Did he ever have any issues because of his name?",
"I don't know.",
"Did anyone else use his name after he used it?",
"Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925,",
"What else is important about his name?",
"Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning \"sad in the country\";"
] |
C_e27fa2123565461580f1ec274da842df_1
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Did his name have any other meanings?
| 8 |
Did Tristan Tzara's name have any other meanings other than "sad in the country"?
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Tristan Tzara
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S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan. In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Ane Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Tara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913-1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper). In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara himself had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist in tara, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbiere or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara ("the land", Romanian pronunciation: ['tsara]). CANNOTANSWER
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The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as tara
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Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem The Approximate Man.
During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War.
Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.
Name
S. Samyro, a partial anagram of Samy Rosenstock, was used by Tzara from his debut and throughout the early 1910s. A number of undated writings, which he probably authored as early as 1913, bear the signature Tristan Ruia, and, in summer of 1915, he was signing his pieces with the name Tristan.
In the 1960s, Rosenstock's collaborator and later rival Ion Vinea claimed that he was responsible for coining the Tzara part of his pseudonym in 1915. Vinea also stated that Tzara wanted to keep Tristan as his adopted first name, and that this choice had later attracted him the "infamous pun" Triste Âne Tzara (French for "Sad Donkey Tzara"). This version of events is uncertain, as manuscripts show that the writer may have already been using the full name, as well as the variations Tristan Țara and Tr. Tzara, in 1913–1914 (although there is a possibility that he was signing his texts long after committing them to paper).
In 1972, art historian Serge Fauchereau, based on information received from Colomba, the wife of avant-garde poet Ilarie Voronca, recounted that Tzara had explained his chosen name was a pun in Romanian, trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country"; Colomba Voronca was also dismissing rumors that Tzara had selected Tristan as a tribute to poet Tristan Corbière or to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde opera. Samy Rosenstock legally adopted his new name in 1925, after filing a request with Romania's Ministry of the Interior. The French pronunciation of his name has become commonplace in Romania, where it replaces its more natural reading as țara ("the land", ).
Biography
Early life and Simbolul years
Tzara was born in Moinești, Bacău County, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. His parents were Jewish Romanians who reportedly spoke Yiddish as their first language; his father Filip and grandfather Ilie were entrepreneurs in the forestry business. Tzara's mother was Emilia Rosenstock, née Zibalis. Owing to the Romanian Kingdom's discrimination laws, the Rosenstocks were not emancipated, and thus Tzara was not a full citizen of the country until after 1918.
He moved to Bucharest at the age of eleven, and attended the Schemitz-Tierin boarding school. It is believed that the young Tzara completed his secondary education at a state-run high school, which is identified as the Saint Sava National College or as the Sfântul Gheorghe High School. In October 1912, when Tzara was aged sixteen, he joined his friends Vinea and Marcel Janco in editing Simbolul. Reputedly, Janco and Vinea provided the funds. Like Vinea, Tzara was also close to their young colleague Jacques G. Costin, who was later his self-declared promoter and admirer.
Despite their young age, the three editors were able to attract collaborations from established Symbolist authors, active within Romania's own Symbolist movement. Alongside their close friend and mentor Adrian Maniu (an Imagist who had been Vinea's tutor), they included N. Davidescu, Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo, Emil Isac, Claudia Millian, Ion Minulescu, I. M. Rașcu, Eugeniu Sperantia, Al. T. Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est, Constantin T. Stoika, as well as the journalist and lawyer Poldi Chapier. In its inaugural issue, the journal even printed a poem by one of the leading figures in Romanian Symbolism, Alexandru Macedonski. Simbolul also featured illustrations by Maniu, Millian and Iosif Iser.
Although the magazine ceased print in December 1912, it played an important part in shaping Romanian literature of the period. Literary historian Paul Cernat sees Simbolul as a main stage in Romania's modernism, and credits it with having brought about the first changes from Symbolism to the radical avant-garde. Also according to Cernat, the collaboration between Samyro, Vinea and Janco was an early instance of literature becoming "an interface between arts", which had for its contemporary equivalent the collaboration between Iser and writers such as Ion Minulescu and Tudor Arghezi. Although Maniu parted with the group and sought a change in style which brought him closer to traditionalist tenets, Tzara, Janco and Vinea continued their collaboration. Between 1913 and 1915, they were frequently vacationing together, either on the Black Sea coast or at the Rosenstock family property in Gârceni, Vaslui County; during this time, Vinea and Samyro wrote poems with similar themes and alluding to one another.
Chemarea and 1915 departure
Tzara's career changed course between 1914 and 1916, during a period when the Romanian Kingdom kept out of World War I. In autumn 1915, as founder and editor of the short-lived journal Chemarea, Vinea published two poems by his friend, the first printed works to bear the signature Tristan Tzara. At the time, the young poet and many of his friends were adherents of an anti-war and anti-nationalist current, which progressively accommodated anti-establishment messages. Chemarea, which was a platform for this agenda and again attracted collaborations from Chapier, may also have been financed by Tzara and Vinea. According to Romanian avant-garde writer Claude Sernet, the journal was "totally different from everything that had been printed in Romania before that moment." During the period, Tzara's works were sporadically published in Hefter-Hidalgo's Versuri și Proză, and, in June 1915, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru's Noua Revistă Română published Samyro's known poem Verișoară, fată de pension ("Little Cousin, Boarding School Girl").
Tzara had enrolled at the University of Bucharest in 1914, studying mathematics and philosophy, but did not graduate. In autumn 1915, he left Romania for Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Janco, together with his brother Jules Janco, had settled there a few months before, and was later joined by his other brother Georges Janco. Tzara, who may have applied to the Faculty of Philosophy at the local university, shared lodging with Marcel Janco, who was a student at the Technische Hochschule, in the Altinger Guest House (by 1918, Tzara had moved to the Limmatquai Hotel). His departure from Romania, like that of the Janco brothers, may have been in part a pacifist political statement. After settling in Switzerland, the young poet almost completely discarded Romanian as his language of expression, writing most of his subsequent works in French. The poems he had written before, which were the result of poetic dialogues between him and his friend, were left in Vinea's care. Most of these pieces were first printed only in the interwar period.
It was in Zürich that the Romanian group met with the German Hugo Ball, an anarchist poet and pianist, and his young wife Emmy Hennings, a music hall performer. In February 1916, Ball had rented the Cabaret Voltaire from its owner, Jan Ephraim, and intended to use the venue for performance art and exhibits. Hugo Ball recorded this period, noting that Tzara and Marcel Janco, like Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Otto van Rees, Max Oppenheimer, and Marcel Słodki, "readily agreed to take part in the cabaret." According to Ball, among the performances of songs mimicking or taking inspiration from various national folklores, "Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry." In late March, Ball recounted, the group was joined by German writer and drummer Richard Huelsenbeck. He was soon after involved in Tzara's "simultaneist verse" performance, "the first in Zürich and in the world", also including renditions of poems by two promoters of Cubism, Fernand Divoire and Henri Barzun.
Birth of Dada
It was in this milieu that Dada was born, at some point before May 1916, when a publication of the same name first saw print. The story of its establishment was the subject of a disagreement between Tzara and his fellow writers. Cernat believes that the first Dadaist performance took place as early as February, when the nineteen-year-old Tzara, wearing a monocle, entered the Cabaret Voltaire stage singing sentimental melodies and handing paper wads to his "scandalized spectators", leaving the stage to allow room for masked actors on stilts, and returning in clown attire. The same type of performances took place at the Zunfthaus zur Waag beginning in summer 1916, after the Cabaret Voltaire was forced to close down. According to music historian Bernard Gendron, for as long as it lasted, "the Cabaret Voltaire was dada. There was no alternative institution or site that could disentangle 'pure' dada from its mere accompaniment [...] nor was any such site desired." Other opinions link Dada's beginnings with much earlier events, including the experiments of Alfred Jarry, André Gide, Christian Morgenstern, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Vaché, Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
In the first of the movement's manifestos, Ball wrote: "[The booklet] is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is to publish a revue internationale [French for "international magazine"]." Ball completed his message in French, and the paragraph translates as: "The magazine shall be published in Zürich and shall carry the name 'Dada' ('Dada'). Dada Dada Dada Dada." The view according to which Ball had created the movement was notably supported by writer Walter Serner, who directly accused Tzara of having abused Ball's initiative.
A secondary point of contention between the founders of Dada regarded the paternity for the movement's name, which, according to visual artist and essayist Hans Richter, was first adopted in print in June 1916. Ball, who claimed authorship and stated that he picked the word randomly from a dictionary, indicated that it stood for both the French-language equivalent of "hobby horse" and a German-language term reflecting the joy of children being rocked to sleep. Tzara himself declined interest in the matter, but Marcel Janco credited him with having coined the term. Dada manifestos, written or co-authored by Tzara, record that the name shares its form with various other terms, including a word used in the Kru languages of West Africa to designate the tail of a sacred cow; a toy and the name for "mother" in an unspecified Italian dialect; and the double affirmative in Romanian and in various Slavic languages.
Dadaist promoter
Before the end of the war, Tzara had assumed a position as Dada's main promoter and manager, helping the Swiss group establish branches in other European countries. This period also saw the first conflict within the group: citing irreconcilable differences with Tzara, Ball left the group. With his departure, Gendron argues, Tzara was able to move Dada vaudeville-like performances into more of "an incendiary and yet jocularly provocative theater."
He is often credited with having inspired many young modernist authors from outside Switzerland to affiliate with the group, in particular the Frenchmen Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Philippe Soupault. Richter, who also came into contact with Dada at this stage in its history, notes that these intellectuals often had a "very cool and distant attitude to this new movement" before being approached by the Romanian author. In June 1916, he began editing and managing the periodical Dada as a successor of the short-lived magazine Cabaret Voltaire—Richter describes his "energy, passion and talent for the job", which he claims satisfied all Dadaists. He was at the time the lover of Maja Kruscek, who was a student of Rudolf Laban; in Richter's account, their relationship was always tottering.
As early as 1916, Tristan Tzara took distance from the Italian Futurists, rejecting the militarist and proto-fascist stance of their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Richter notes that, by then, Dada had replaced Futurism as the leader of modernism, while continuing to build on its influence: "we had swallowed Futurism—bones, feathers and all. It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated." Despite this and the fact that Dada did not make any gains in Italy, Tzara could count poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Alberto Savinio, painters Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi, as well as a few other Italian Futurists, among the Dadaists. Among the Italian authors supporting Dadaist manifestos and rallying with the Dada group was the poet, painter and in the future a fascist racial theorist Julius Evola, who became a personal friend of Tzara.
The next year, Tzara and Ball opened the Galerie Dada permanent exhibit, through which they set contacts with the independent Italian visual artist Giorgio de Chirico and with the German Expressionist journal Der Sturm, all of whom were described as "fathers of Dada". During the same months, and probably owing to Tzara's intervention, the Dada group organized a performance of Sphinx and Strawman, a puppet play by the Austro-Hungarian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, whom he advertised as an example of "Dada theater". He was also in touch with Nord-Sud, the magazine of French poet Pierre Reverdy (who sought to unify all avant-garde trends), and contributed articles on African art to both Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot's SIC magazine. In early 1918, through Huelsenbeck, Zürich Dadaists established contacts with their more explicitly left-wing disciples in the German Empire—George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Mehring, Raoul Hausmann, Carl Einstein, Franz Jung, and Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. With Breton, Soupault and Aragon, Tzara traveled Cologne, where he became familiarized with the elaborate collage works of Schwitters and Max Ernst, which he showed to his colleagues in Switzerland. Huelsenbeck nonetheless declined to Schwitters membership in Berlin Dada.
As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called "Dada presidents", who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara, figures ranging from Ernst, Arp, Baader, Breton and Aragon to Kruscek, Evola, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Igor Stravinsky, Vicente Huidobro, Francesco Meriano and Théodore Fraenkel. Richter notes: "I'm not sure if all the names who appear here would agree with the description."
End of World War I
The shows Tzara staged in Zürich often turned into scandals or riots, and he was in permanent conflict with the Swiss law enforcers. Hans Richter speaks of a "pleasure of letting fly at the bourgeois, which in Tristan Tzara took the form of coldly (or hotly) calculated insolence" (see Épater la bourgeoisie). In one instance, as part of a series of events in which Dadaists mocked established authors, Tzara and Arp falsely publicized that they were going to fight a duel in Rehalp, near Zürich, and that they were going to have the popular novelist Jakob Christoph Heer for their witness. Richter also reports that his Romanian colleague profited from Swiss neutrality to play the Allies and Central Powers against each other, obtaining art works and funds from both, making use of their need to stimulate their respective propaganda efforts. While active as a promoter, Tzara also published his first volume of collected poetry, the 1918 Vingt-cinq poèmes ("Twenty-five Poems").
A major event took place in autumn 1918, when Francis Picabia, who was then publisher of 391 magazine and a distant Dada affiliate, visited Zürich and introduced his colleagues there to his nihilistic views on art and reason. In the United States, Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp had earlier set up their own version of Dada. This circle, based in New York City, sought affiliation with Tzara's only in 1921, when they jokingly asked him to grant them permission to use "Dada" as their own name (to which Tzara replied: "Dada belongs to everybody"). The visit was credited by Richter with boosting the Romanian author's status, but also with making Tzara himself "switch suddenly from a position of balance between art and anti-art into the stratospheric regions of pure and joyful nothingness." The movement subsequently organized its last major Swiss show, held at the Saal zur Kaufleutern, with choreography by Susanne Perrottet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and with the participation of Käthe Wulff, Hans Heusser, Tzara, Hans Richter and Walter Serner. It was there that Serner read from his 1918 essay, whose very title advocated Letzte Lockerung ("Final Dissolution"): this part is believed to have caused the subsequent mêlée, during which the public attacked the performers and succeeded in interrupting, but not canceling, the show.
Following the November 1918 Armistice with Germany, Dada's evolution was marked by political developments. In October 1919, Tzara, Arp and Otto Flake began publishing Der Zeltweg, a journal aimed at further popularizing Dada in a post-war world were the borders were again accessible. Richter, who admits that the magazine was "rather tame", also notes that Tzara and his colleagues were dealing with the impact of communist revolutions, in particular the October Revolution and the German revolts of 1918, which "had stirred men's minds, divided men's interests and diverted energies in the direction of political change." The same commentator, however, dismisses those accounts which, he believes, led readers to believe that Der Zeltweg was "an association of revolutionary artists." According to one account rendered by historian Robert Levy, Tzara shared company with a group of Romanian communist students, and, as such, may have met with Ana Pauker, who was later one of the Romanian Communist Party's most prominent activists.
Arp and Janco drifted away from the movement ca. 1919, when they created the Constructivist-inspired workshop Das Neue Leben. In Romania, Dada was awarded an ambiguous reception from Tzara's former associate Vinea. Although he was sympathetic to its goals, treasured Hugo Ball and Hennings and promised to adapt his own writings to its requirements, Vinea cautioned Tzara and the Jancos in favor of lucidity. When Vinea submitted his poem Doleanțe ("Grievances") to be published by Tzara and his associates, he was turned down, an incident which critics attribute to a contrast between the reserved tone of the piece and the revolutionary tenets of Dada.
Paris Dada
In late 1919, Tristan Tzara left Switzerland to join Breton, Soupault and Claude Rivière in editing the Paris-based magazine Littérature. Already a mentor for the French avant-garde, he was, according to Hans Richter, perceived as an "Anti-Messiah" and a "prophet". Reportedly, Dada mythology had it that he entered the French capital in a snow-white or lilac-colored car, passing down Boulevard Raspail through a triumphal arch made from his own pamphlets, being greeted by cheering crowds and a fireworks display. Richter dismisses this account, indicating that Tzara actually walked from Gare de l'Est to Picabia's home, without anyone expecting him to arrive.
He is often described as the main figure in the Littérature circle, and credited with having more firmly set its artistic principles in the line of Dada. When Picabia began publishing a new series of 391 in Paris, Tzara seconded him and, Richter says, produced issues of the magazine "decked out [...] in all the colors of Dada." He was also issuing his Dada magazine, printed in Paris but using the same format, renaming it Bulletin Dada and later Dadaphone. At around that time, he met American author Gertrude Stein, who wrote about him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay (with whom he worked in tandem for "poem-dresses" and other simultaneist literary pieces).
Tzara became involved in a number of Dada experiments, on which he collaborated with Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Picabia or Paul Éluard. Other authors who came into contact with Dada at that stage were Jean Cocteau, Paul Dermée and Raymond Radiguet. The performances staged by Dada were often meant to popularize its principles, and Dada continued to draw attention on itself by hoaxes and false advertising, announcing that the Hollywood film star Charlie Chaplin was going to appear on stage at its show, or that its members were going to have their heads shaved or their hair cut off on stage. In another instance, Tzara and his associates lectured at the Université populaire in front of industrial workers, who were reportedly less than impressed. Richter believes that, ideologically, Tzara was still in tribute to Picabia's nihilistic and anarchic views (which made the Dadaists attack all political and cultural ideologies), but that this also implied a measure of sympathy for the working class.
Dada activities in Paris culminated in the March 1920 variety show at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which featured readings from Breton, Picabia, Dermée and Tzara's earlier work, La Première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine ("The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine"). Tzara's melody, Vaseline symphonique ("Symphonic Vaseline"), which required ten or twenty people to shout "cra" and "cri" on a rising scale, was also performed. A scandal erupted when Breton read Picabia's Manifeste cannibale ("Cannibal Manifesto"), lashing out at the audience and mocking them, to which they answered by aiming rotten fruit at the stage.
The Dada phenomenon was only noticed in Romania beginning in 1920, and its overall reception was negative. Traditionalist historian Nicolae Iorga, Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu, the more reserved modernists Camil Petrescu and Benjamin Fondane all refused to accept it as a valid artistic manifestation. Although he rallied with tradition, Vinea defended the subversive current in front of more serious criticism, and rejected the widespread rumor that Tzara had acted as an agent of influence for the Central Powers during the war. Eugen Lovinescu, editor of Sburătorul and one of Vinea's rivals on the modernist scene, acknowledged the influence exercised by Tzara on the younger avant-garde authors, but analyzed his work only briefly, using as an example one of his pre-Dada poems, and depicting him as an advocate of literary "extremism".
Dada stagnation
By 1921, Tzara had become involved in conflicts with other figures in the movement, whom he claimed had parted with the spirit of Dada. He was targeted by the Berlin-based Dadaists, in particular by Huelsenbeck and Serner, the former of whom was also involved in a conflict with Raoul Hausmann over leadership status. According to Richter, tensions between Breton and Tzara had surfaced in 1920, when Breton first made known his wish to do away with musical performances altogether and alleged that the Romanian was merely repeating himself. The Dada shows themselves were by then such common occurrences that audiences expected to be insulted by the performers.
A more serious crisis occurred in May, when Dada organized a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, whose early affiliation with the Symbolists had been shadowed by his antisemitism and reactionary stance: Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes was the prosecutor, Aragon and Soupault the defense attorneys, with Tzara, Ungaretti, Benjamin Péret and others as witnesses (a mannequin stood in for Barrès). Péret immediately upset Picabia and Tzara by refusing to make the trial an absurd one, and by introducing a political subtext with which Breton nevertheless agreed. In June, Tzara and Picabia clashed with each other, after Tzara expressed an opinion that his former mentor was becoming too radical. During the same season, Breton, Arp, Ernst, Maja Kruschek and Tzara were in Austria, at Imst, where they published their last manifesto as a group, Dada au grand air ("Dada in the Open Air") or Der Sängerkrieg in Tirol ("The Battle of the Singers in Tyrol"). Tzara also visited Czechoslovakia, where he reportedly hoped to gain adherents to his cause.
Also in 1921, Ion Vinea wrote an article for the Romanian newspaper Adevărul, arguing that the movement had exhausted itself (although, in his letters to Tzara, he continued to ask his friend to return home and spread his message there). After July 1922, Marcel Janco rallied with Vinea in editing Contimporanul, which published some of Tzara's earliest poems but never offered space to any Dadaist manifesto. Reportedly, the conflict between Tzara and Janco had a personal note: Janco later mentioned "some dramatic quarrels" between his colleague and him. They avoided each other for the rest of their lives and Tzara even struck out the dedications to Janco from his early poems. Julius Evola also grew disappointed by the movement's total rejection of tradition and began his personal search for an alternative, pursuing a path which later led him to esotericism and fascism.
Evening of the Bearded Heart
Tzara was openly attacked by Breton in a February 1922 article for Le Journal de Peuple, where the Romanian writer was denounced as "an impostor" avid for "publicity". In March, Breton initiated the Congress for the Determination and Defense of the Modern Spirit. The French writer used the occasion to strike out Tzara's name from among the Dadaists, citing in his support Dada's Huelsenbeck, Serner, and Christian Schad. Basing his statement on a note supposedly authored by Huelsenbeck, Breton also accused Tzara of opportunism, claiming that he had planned wartime editions of Dada works in such a manner as not to upset actors on the political stage, making sure that German Dadaists were not made available to the public in countries subject to the Supreme War Council. Tzara, who attended the Congress only as a means to subvert it, responded to the accusations the same month, arguing that Huelsenbeck's note was fabricated and that Schad had not been one of the original Dadaists. Rumors reported much later by American writer Brion Gysin had it that Breton's claims also depicted Tzara as an informer for the Prefecture of Police.
In May 1922, Dada staged its own funeral. According to Hans Richter, the main part of this took place in Weimar, where the Dadaists attended a festival of the Bauhaus art school, during which Tzara proclaimed the elusive nature of his art: "Dada is useless, like everything else in life. [...] Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions."
In "The Bearded Heart" manifesto a number of artists backed the marginalization of Breton in support of Tzara. Alongside Cocteau, Arp, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Éluard, the pro-Tzara faction included Erik Satie, Theo van Doesburg, Serge Charchoune, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Duchamp, Ossip Zadkine, Jean Metzinger, Ilia Zdanevich, and Man Ray. During an associated soirée, Evening of the Bearded Heart, which began on 6 July 1923, Tzara presented a re-staging of his play The Gas Heart (which had been first performed two years earlier to howls of derision from its audience), for which Sonia Delaunay designed the costumes. Breton interrupted its performance and reportedly fought with several of his former associates and broke furniture, prompting a theatre riot that only the intervention of the police halted. Dada's vaudeville declined in importance and disappeared altogether after that date.
Picabia took Breton's side against Tzara, and replaced the staff of his 391, enlisting collaborations from Clément Pansaers and Ezra Pound. Breton marked the end of Dada in 1924, when he issued the first Surrealist Manifesto. Richter suggests that "Surrealism devoured and digested Dada." Tzara distanced himself from the new trend, disagreeing with its methods and, increasingly, with its politics. In 1923, he and a few other former Dadaists collaborated with Richter and the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the magazine G, and, the following year, he wrote pieces for the Yugoslav-Slovenian magazine Tank (edited by Ferdinand Delak).
Transition to Surrealism
Tzara continued to write, becoming more seriously interested in the theater. In 1924, he published and staged the play Handkerchief of Clouds, which was soon included in the repertoire of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. He also collected his earlier Dada texts as the Seven Dada Manifestos. Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre reviewed them enthusiastically; he later became one of the author's friends.
In Romania, Tzara's work was partly recuperated by Contimporanul, which notably staged public readings of his works during the international art exhibit it organized in 1924, and again during the "new art demonstration" of 1925. In parallel, the short-lived magazine Integral, where Ilarie Voronca and Ion Călugăru were the main animators, took significant interest in Tzara's work. In a 1927 interview with the publication, he voiced his opposition to the Surrealist group's adoption of communism, indicating that such politics could only result in a "new bourgeoisie" being created, and explaining that he had opted for a personal "permanent revolution", which would preserve "the holiness of the ego".
In 1925, Tristan Tzara was in Stockholm, where he married Greta Knutson, with whom he had a son, Christophe (born 1927). A former student of painter André Lhote, she was known for her interest in phenomenology and abstract art. Around the same period, with funds from Knutson's inheritance, Tzara commissioned Austrian architect Adolf Loos, a former representative of the Vienna Secession whom he had met in Zürich, to build him a house in Paris. The rigidly functionalist Maison Tristan Tzara, built in Montmartre, was designed following Tzara's specific requirements and decorated with samples of African art. It was Loos' only major contribution in his Parisian years.
In 1929, he reconciled with Breton, and sporadically attended the Surrealists' meetings in Paris. The same year, he issued the poetry book De nos oiseaux ("Of Our Birds"). This period saw the publication of The Approximate Man (1931), alongside the volumes L'Arbre des voyageurs ("The Travelers' Tree", 1930), Où boivent les loups ("Where Wolves Drink", 1932), L'Antitête ("The Antihead", 1933) and Grains et issues ("Seed and Bran", 1935). By then, it was also announced that Tzara had started work on a screenplay. In 1930, he directed and produced a cinematic version of Le Cœur à barbe, starring Breton and other leading Surrealists. Five years later, he signed his name to The Testimony against Gertrude Stein, published by Eugene Jolas's magazine transition in reply to Stein's memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which he accused his former friend of being a megalomaniac.
The poet became involved in further developing Surrealist techniques, and, together with Breton and Valentine Hugo, drew one of the better-known examples of "exquisite corpses". Tzara also prefaced a 1934 collection of Surrealist poems by his friend René Char, and the following year he and Greta Knutson visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Tzara's wife was also affiliated with the Surrealist group at around the same time. This association ended when she parted with Tzara late in the 1930s.
At home, Tzara's works were collected and edited by the Surrealist promoter Sașa Pană, who corresponded with him over several years. The first such edition saw print in 1934, and featured the 1913–1915 poems Tzara had left in Vinea's care. In 1928–1929, Tzara exchanged letters with his friend Jacques G. Costin, a Contimporanul affiliate who did not share all of Vinea's views on literature, who offered to organize his visit to Romania and asked him to translate his work into French.
Affiliation with communism and Spanish Civil War
Alarmed by the establishment of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which also signified the end of Berlin's avant-garde, he merged his activities as an art promoter with the cause of anti-fascism, and was close to the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1936, Richter recalled, he published a series of photographs secretly taken by Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, works which documented the destruction of Nazi propaganda by the locals, ration stamp with reduced quantities of food, and other hidden aspects of Hitler's rule. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he briefly left France and joined the Republican forces. Alongside Soviet reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, Tzara visited Madrid, which was besieged by the Nationalists (see Siege of Madrid). Upon his return, he published the collection of poems Midis gagnés ("Conquered Southern Regions"). Some of them had previously been printed in the brochure Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol ("The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People", 1937), which was edited by two prominent authors and activists, Nancy Cunard and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Tzara had also signed Cunard's June 1937 call to intervention against Francisco Franco. Reportedly, he and Nancy Cunard were romantically involved.
Although the poet was moving away from Surrealism, his adherence to strict Marxism-Leninism was reportedly questioned by both the PCF and the Soviet Union. Semiotician Philip Beitchman places their attitude in connection with Tzara's own vision of Utopia, which combined communist messages with Freudo-Marxist psychoanalysis and made use of particularly violent imagery. Reportedly, Tzara refused to be enlisted in supporting the party line, maintaining his independence and refusing to take the forefront at public rallies.
However, others note that the former Dadaist leader would often show himself a follower of political guidelines. As early as 1934, Tzara, together with Breton, Éluard and communist writer René Crevel, organized an informal trial of independent-minded Surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was at the time a confessed admirer of Hitler, and whose portrait of William Tell had alarmed them because it shared likeness with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Historian Irina Livezeanu notes that Tzara, who agreed with Stalinism and shunned Trotskyism, submitted to the PCF cultural demands during the writers' congress of 1935, even when his friend Crevel committed suicide to protest the adoption of socialist realism. At a later stage, Livezeanu remarks, Tzara reinterpreted Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public. This stance she contrasts with that of Breton, who was more reserved in his attitudes.
World War II and Resistance
During World War II, Tzara took refuge from the German occupation forces, moving to the southern areas, controlled by the Vichy regime. On one occasion, the antisemitic and collaborationist publication Je Suis Partout made his whereabouts known to the Gestapo.
He was in Marseille in late 1940-early 1941, joining the group of anti-fascist and Jewish refugees who, protected by American diplomat Varian Fry, were seeking to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the people present there were the anti-totalitarian socialist Victor Serge, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, playwright Arthur Adamov, philosopher and poet René Daumal, and several prominent Surrealists: Breton, Char, and Benjamin Péret, as well as artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner and Óscar Domínguez. During the months spent together, and before some of them received permission to leave for America, they invented a new card game, on which traditional card imagery was replaced with Surrealist symbols.
Some time after his stay in Marseille, Tzara joined the French Resistance, rallying with the Maquis. A contributor to magazines published by the Resistance, Tzara also took charge of the cultural broadcast for the Free French Forces clandestine radio station. He lived in Aix-en-Provence, then in Souillac, and ultimately in Toulouse. His son Cristophe was at the time a Resistant in northern France, having joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. In Axis-allied and antisemitic Romania (see Romania during World War II), the regime of Ion Antonescu ordered bookstores not to sell works by Tzara and 44 other Jewish-Romanian authors. In 1942, with the generalization of antisemitic measures, Tzara was also stripped of his Romanian citizenship rights.
In December 1944, five months after the Liberation of Paris, he was contributing to L'Éternelle Revue, a pro-communist newspaper edited by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, through which Sartre was publicizing the heroic image of a France united in resistance, as opposed to the perception that it had passively accepted German control. Other contributors included writers Aragon, Char, Éluard, Elsa Triolet, Eugène Guillevic, Raymond Queneau, Francis Ponge, Jacques Prévert and painter Pablo Picasso.
Upon the end of the war and the restoration of French independence, Tzara was naturalized a French citizen. During 1945, under the Provisional Government of the French Republic, he was a representative of the Sud-Ouest region to the National Assembly. According to Livezeanu, he "helped reclaim the South from the cultural figures who had associated themselves to Vichy [France]." In April 1946, his early poems, alongside similar pieces by Breton, Éluard, Aragon and Dalí, were the subject of a midnight broadcast on Parisian Radio. In 1947, he became a full member of the PCF (according to some sources, he had been one since 1934).
International leftism
Over the following decade, Tzara lent his support to political causes. Pursuing his interest in primitivism, he became a critic of the Fourth Republic's colonial policy, and joined his voice to those who supported decolonization. Nevertheless, he was appointed cultural ambassador of the Republic by the Paul Ramadier cabinet. He also participated in the PCF-organized Congress of Writers, but, unlike Éluard and Aragon, again avoided adapting his style to socialist realism.
He returned to Romania on an official visit in late 1946-early 1947, as part of a tour of the emerging Eastern Bloc during which he also stopped in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The speeches he and Sașa Pană gave on the occasion, published by Orizont journal, were noted for condoning official positions of the PCF and the Romanian Communist Party, and are credited by Irina Livezeanu with causing a rift between Tzara and young Romanian avant-gardists such as Victor Brauner and Gherasim Luca (who rejected communism and were alarmed by the Iron Curtain having fallen over Europe). In September of the same year, he was present at the conference of the pro-communist International Union of Students (where he was a guest of the French-based Union of Communist Students, and met with similar organizations from Romania and other countries).
In 1949–1950, Tzara answered Aragon's call and become active in the international campaign to liberate Nazım Hikmet, a Turkish poet whose 1938 arrest for communist activities had created a cause célèbre for the pro-Soviet public opinion. Tzara chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Nazım Hikmet, which issued petitions to national governments and commissioned works in honor of Hikmet (including musical pieces by Louis Durey and Serge Nigg). Hikmet was eventually released in July 1950, and publicly thanked Tzara during his subsequent visit to Paris.
His works of the period include, among others: Le Signe de vie ("Sign of Life", 1946), Terre sur terre ("Earth on Earth", 1946), Sans coup férir ("Without a Need to Fight", 1949), De mémoire d'homme ("From a Man's Memory", 1950), Parler seul ("Speaking Alone", 1950), and La Face intérieure ("The Inner Face", 1953), followed in 1955 by À haute flamme ("Flame out Loud") and Le Temps naissant ("The Nascent Time"), and the 1956 Le Fruit permis ("The Permitted Fruit"). Tzara continued to be an active promoter of modernist culture. Around 1949, having read Irish author Samuel Beckett's manuscript of Waiting for Godot, Tzara facilitated the play's staging by approaching producer Roger Blin. He also translated into French some poems by Hikmet and the Hungarian author Attila József. In 1949, he introduced Picasso to art dealer Heinz Berggruen (thus helping start their lifelong partnership), and, in 1951, wrote the catalog for an exhibit of works by his friend Max Ernst; the text celebrated the artist's "free use of stimuli" and "his discovery of a new kind of humor."
1956 protest and final years
In October 1956, Tzara visited the People's Republic of Hungary, where the government of Imre Nagy was coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. This followed an invitation on the part of Hungarian writer Gyula Illyés, who wanted his colleague to be present at ceremonies marking the rehabilitation of László Rajk (a local communist leader whose prosecution had been ordered by Joseph Stalin). Tzara was receptive of the Hungarians' demand for liberalization, contacted the anti-Stalinist and former Dadaist Lajos Kassák, and deemed the anti-Soviet movement "revolutionary". However, unlike much of Hungarian public opinion, the poet did not recommend emancipation from Soviet control, and described the independence demanded by local writers as "an abstract notion". The statement he issued, widely quoted in the Hungarian and international press, forced a reaction from the PCF: through Aragon's reply, the party deplored the fact that one of its members was being used in support of "anti-communist and anti-Soviet campaigns."
His return to France coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, which ended with a Soviet military intervention. On 24 October, Tzara was ordered to a PCF meeting, where activist Laurent Casanova reportedly ordered him to keep silent, which Tzara did. Tzara's apparent dissidence and the crisis he helped provoke within the Communist Party were celebrated by Breton, who had adopted a pro-Hungarian stance, and who defined his friend and rival as "the first spokesman of the Hungarian demand."
He was thereafter mostly withdrawn from public life, dedicating himself to researching the work of 15th-century poet François Villon, and, like his fellow Surrealist Michel Leiris, to promoting primitive and African art, which he had been collecting for years. In early 1957, Tzara attended a Dada retrospective on the Rive Gauche, which ended in a riot caused by the rival avant-garde Mouvement Jariviste, an outcome which reportedly pleased him. In August 1960, one year after the Fifth Republic had been established by President Charles de Gaulle, French forces were confronting the Algerian rebels (see Algerian War). Together with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jérôme Lindon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other intellectuals, he addressed Premier Michel Debré a letter of protest, concerning France's refusal to grant Algeria its independence. As a result, Minister of Culture André Malraux announced that his cabinet would not subsidize any films to which Tzara and the others might contribute, and the signatories could no longer appear on stations managed by the state-owned French Broadcasting Service.
In 1961, as recognition for his work as a poet, Tzara was awarded the prestigious Taormina Prize. One of his final public activities took place in 1962, when he attended the International Congress on African Culture, organized by English curator Frank McEwen and held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He died one year later in his Paris home, and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Literary contributions
Identity issues
Much critical commentary about Tzara surrounds the measure to which the poet identified with the national cultures which he represented. Paul Cernat notes that the association between Samyro and the Jancos, who were Jews, and their ethnic Romanian colleagues, was one sign of a cultural dialogue, in which "the openness of Romanian environments toward artistic modernity" was stimulated by "young emancipated Jewish writers." Salomon Schulman, a Swedish researcher of Yiddish literature, argues that the combined influence of Yiddish folklore and Hasidic philosophy shaped European modernism in general and Tzara's style in particular, while American poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Tzara as one in a Balkan line of "absurdist writing", which also includes the Romanians Urmuz, Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. According to literary historian George Călinescu, Samyro's early poems deal with "the voluptuousness over the strong scents of rural life, which is typical among Jews compressed into ghettos."
Tzara himself used elements alluding to his homeland in his early Dadaist performances. His collaboration with Maja Kruscek at Zuntfhaus zür Waag featured samples of African literature, to which Tzara added Romanian-language fragments. He is also known to have mixed elements of Romanian folklore, and to have sung the native suburban romanza La moară la Hârța ("At the Mill in Hârța") during at least one staging for Cabaret Voltaire. Addressing the Romanian public in 1947, he claimed to have been captivated by "the sweet language of Moldavian peasants".
Tzara nonetheless rebelled against his birthplace and upbringing. His earliest poems depict provincial Moldavia as a desolate and unsettling place. In Cernat's view, this imagery was in common use among Moldavian-born writers who also belonged to the avant-garde trend, notably Benjamin Fondane and George Bacovia. Like in the cases of Eugène Ionesco and Fondane, Cernat proposes, Samyro sought self-exile to Western Europe as a "modern, voluntarist" means of breaking with "the peripheral condition", which may also serve to explain the pun he selected for a pseudonym. According to the same author, two important elements in this process were "a maternal attachment and a break with paternal authority", an "Oedipus complex" which he also argued was evident in the biographies of other Symbolist and avant-garde Romanian authors, from Urmuz to Mateiu Caragiale. Unlike Vinea and the Contimporanul group, Cernat proposes, Tzara stood for radicalism and insurgency, which would also help explain their impossibility to communicate. In particular, Cernat argues, the writer sought to emancipate himself from competing nationalisms, and addressed himself directly to the center of European culture, with Zürich serving as a stage on his way to Paris. The 1916 Monsieur's Antipyrine's Manifesto featured a cosmopolitan appeal: "DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates."
With time, Tristan Tzara came to be regarded by his Dada associates as an exotic character, whose attitudes were intrinsically linked with Eastern Europe. Early on, Ball referred to him and the Janco brothers as "Orientals". Hans Richter believed him to be a fiery and impulsive figure, having little in common with his German collaborators. According to Cernat, Richter's perspective seems to indicate a vision of Tzara having a "Latin" temperament. This type of perception also had negative implications for Tzara, particularly after the 1922 split within Dada. In the 1940s, Richard Huelsenbeck alleged that his former colleague had always been separated from other Dadaists by his failure to appreciate the legacy of "German humanism", and that, compared to his German colleagues, he was "a barbarian". In his polemic with Tzara, Breton also repeatedly placed stress on his rival's foreign origin.
At home, Tzara was occasionally targeted for his Jewishness, culminating in the ban enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime. In 1931, Const. I. Emilian, the first Romanian to write an academic study on the avant-garde, attacked him from a conservative and antisemitic position. He depicted Dadaists as "Judaeo-Bolsheviks" who corrupted Romanian culture, and included Tzara among the main proponents of "literary anarchism". Alleging that Tzara's only merit was to establish a literary fashion, while recognizing his "formal virtuosity and artistic intelligence", he claimed to prefer Tzara in his Simbolul stage. This perspective was deplored early on by the modernist critic Perpessicius. Nine years after Emilian's polemic text, fascist poet and journalist Radu Gyr published an article in Convorbiri Literare, in which he attacked Tzara as a representative of the "Judaic spirit", of the "foreign plague" and of "materialist-historical dialectics".
Symbolist poetry
Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.
During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).
Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during [the 1910s], the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety [...] in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright [of humans] has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."
Collaboration with Vinea
The transition to a more radical form of poetry seems to have taken place in 1913–1915, during the periods when Tzara and Vinea were vacationing together. The pieces share a number of characteristics and subjects, and the two poets even use them to allude to one another (or, in one case, to Tzara's sister).
In addition to the lyrics were they both speak of provincial holidays and love affairs with local girls, both friends intended to reinterpret William Shakespeare's Hamlet from a modernist perspective, and wrote incomplete texts with this as their subject. However, Paul Cernat notes, the texts also evidence a difference in approach, with Vinea's work being "meditative and melancholic", while Tzara's is "hedonistic". Tzara often appealed to revolutionary and ironic images, portraying provincial and middle class environments as places of artificiality and decay, demystifying pastoral themes and evidencing a will to break free. His literature took a more radical perspective on life, and featured lyrics with subversive intent:
In his Înserează (roughly, "Night Falling"), probably authored in Mangalia, Tzara writes:
Vinea's similar poem, written in Tuzla and named after that village, reads:
Cernat notes that Nocturnă ("Nocturne") and Înserează were the pieces originally performed at Cabaret Voltaire, identified by Hugo Ball as "Rumanian poetry", and that they were recited in Tzara's own spontaneous French translation. Although they are noted for their radical break with the traditional form of Romanian verse, Ball's diary entry of 5 February 1916, indicates that Tzara's works were still "conservative in style". In Călinescu's view, they announce Dadaism, given that "bypassing the relations which lead to a realistic vision, the poet associates unimaginably dissipated images that will surprise consciousness." In 1922, Tzara himself wrote: "As early as 1914, I tried to strip the words of their proper meaning and use them in such a way as to give the verse a completely new, general, meaning [...]."
Alongside pieces depicting a Jewish cemetery in which graves "crawl like worms" on the edge of a town, chestnut trees "heavy-laden like people returning from hospitals", or wind wailing "with all the hopelessness of an orphanage", Samyro's poetry includes Verișoară, fată de pension, which, Cernat argues, displays "playful detachment [for] the musicality of internal rhymes". It opens with the lyrics:
The Gârceni pieces were treasured by the moderate wing of the Romanian avant-garde movement. In contrast to his previous rejection of Dada, Contimporanul collaborator Benjamin Fondane used them as an example of "pure poetry", and compared them to the elaborate writings of French poet Paul Valéry, thus recuperating them in line with the magazine's ideology.
Dada synthesis and "simultaneism"
Tzara the Dadaist was inspired by the contributions of his experimental modernist predecessors. Among them were the literary promoters of Cubism: in addition to Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, Tzara cherished the works of Guillaume Apollinaire. Despite Dada's condemnation of Futurism, various authors note the influence Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his circle exercised on Tzara's group. In 1917, he was in correspondence with both Apollinaire and Marinetti. Traditionally, Tzara is also seen as indebted to the early avant-garde and black comedy writings of Romania's Urmuz.
For a large part, Dada focused on performances and satire, with shows that often had Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbeck for their main protagonists. Often dressed up as Tyrolian peasants or wearing dark robes, they improvised poetry sessions at the Cabaret Voltaire, reciting the works of others or their spontaneous creations, which were or pretended to be in Esperanto or Māori language. Bernard Gendron describes these soirées as marked by "heterogeneity and eclecticism", and Richter notes that the songs, often punctuated by loud shrieks or other unsettling sounds, built on the legacy of noise music and Futurist compositions.
With time, Tristan Tzara merged his performances and his literature, taking part in developing Dada's "simultaneist poetry", which was meant to be read out loud and involved a collaborative effort, being, according to Hans Arp, the first instance of Surrealist automatism. Ball stated that the subject of such pieces was "the value of the human voice." Together with Arp, Tzara and Walter Serner produced the German-language Die Hyperbel vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock ("The Hyperbole of the Crocodile's Hairdresser and the Walking-Stick"), in which, Arp stated, "the poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels, as he pleases. His poems are like Nature [where] a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star." Another noted simultaneist poem was L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer ("The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent"), co-authored by Tzara, Marcel Janco and Huelsenbach.
Art historian Roger Cardinal describes Tristan Tzara's Dada poetry as marked by "extreme semantic and syntactic incoherence". Tzara, who recommended destroying just as it is created, had devised a personal system for writing poetry, which implied a seemingly chaotic reassembling of words that had been randomly cut out of newspapers.
Dada and anti-art
The Romanian writer also spent the Dada period issuing a long series of manifestos, which were often authored as prose poetry, and, according to Cardinal, were characterized by "rumbustious tomfoolery and astringent wit", which reflected "the language of a sophisticated savage". Huelsenbeck credited Tzara with having discovered in them the format for "compress[ing] what we think and feel", and, according to Hans Richter, the genre "suited Tzara perfectly." Despite its production of seemingly theoretical works, Richter indicates, Dada lacked any form of program, and Tzara tried to perpetuate this state of affairs. His Dada manifesto of 1918 stated: "Dada means nothing", adding "Thought is produced in the mouth." Tzara indicated: "I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none." In addition, Tzara, who once stated that "logic is always false", probably approved of Serner's vision of a "final dissolution". According to Philip Beitchman, a core concept in Tzara's thought was that "as long as we do things the way we think we once did them we will be unable to achieve any kind of livable society."
Despite adopting such anti-artistic principles, Richter argues, Tzara, like many of his fellow Dadaists, did not initially discard the mission of "furthening the cause of art." He saw this evident in La Revue Dada 2, a poem "as exquisite as freshly-picked flowers", which included the lyrics:
La Revue Dada 2, which also includes the onomatopoeic line tralalalalalalalalalalala, is one example where Tzara applies his principles of chance to sounds themselves. This sort of arrangement, treasured by many Dadaists, was probably connected with Apollinaire's calligrams, and with his announcement that "Man is in search of a new language." Călinescu proposed that Tzara willingly limited the impact of chance: taking as his example a short parody piece which depicts the love affair between cyclist and a Dadaist, which ends with their decapitation by a jealous husband, the critic notes that Tzara transparently intended to "shock the bourgeois". Late in his career, Huelsenbeck alleged that Tzara never actually applied the experimental methods he had devised.
The Dada series makes ample use of contrast, ellipses, ridiculous imagery and nonsensical verdicts. Tzara was aware that the public could find it difficult to follow his intentions, and, in a piece titled Le géant blanc lépreux du paysage ("The White Leprous Giant in the Landscape") even alluded to the "skinny, idiotic, dirty" reader who "does not understand my poetry." He called some of his own poems lampisteries, from a French word designating storage areas for light fixtures. The Lettrist poet Isidore Isou included such pieces in a succession of experiments inaugurated by Charles Baudelaire with the "destruction of the anecdote for the form of the poem", a process which, with Tzara, became "destruction of the word for nothing". According to American literary historian Mary Ann Caws, Tzara's poems may be seen as having an "internal order", and read as "a simple spectacle, as creation complete in itself and completely obvious."
Plays of the 1920s
Tristan Tzara's first play, The Gas Heart, dates from the final period of Paris Dada. Created with what Enoch Brater calls a "peculiar verbal strategy", it is a dialogue between characters called Ear, Mouth, Eye, Nose, Neck, and Eyebrow. They seem unwilling to actually communicate to each other and their reliance on proverbs and idiotisms willingly creates confusion between metaphorical and literal speech. The play ends with a dance performance that recalls similar devices used by the proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry. The text culminates in a series of doodles and illegible words. Brater describes The Gas Heart as a "parod[y] of theatrical conventions".
In his 1924 play Handkerchief of Clouds, Tzara explores the relation between perception, the subconscious and memory. Largely through exchanges between commentators who act as third parties, the text presents the tribulations of a love triangle (a poet, a bored woman, and her banker husband, whose character traits borrow the clichés of conventional drama), and in part reproduces settings and lines from Hamlet. Tzara mocks classical theater, which demands from characters to be inspiring, believable, and to function as a whole: Handkerchief of Clouds requires actors in the role of commentators to address each other by their real names, and their lines include dismissive comments on the play itself, while the protagonist, who in the end dies, is not assigned any name. Writing for Integral, Tzara defined his play as a note on "the relativity of things, sentiments and events." Among the conventions ridiculed by the dramatist, Philip Beitchman notes, is that of a "privileged position for art": in what Beitchman sees as a comment on Marxism, poet and banker are interchangeable capitalists who invest in different fields. Writing in 1925, Fondane rendered a pronouncement by Jean Cocteau, who, while commenting that Tzara was one of his "most beloved" writers and a "great poet", argued: "Handkerchief of Clouds was poetry, and great poetry for that matter—but not theater." The work was nonetheless praised by Ion Călugăru at Integral, who saw in it one example that modernist performance could rely not just on props, but also on a solid text.
The Approximate Man and later works
After 1929, with the adoption of Surrealism, Tzara's literary works discard much of their satirical purpose, and begin to explore universal themes relating to the human condition. According to Cardinal, the period also signified the definitive move from "a studied inconsequentiality" and "unreadable gibberish" to "a seductive and fertile surrealist idiom." The critic also remarks: "Tzara arrived at a mature style of transparent simplicity, in which disparate entities could be held together in a unifying vision." In a 1930 essay, Fondane had given a similar verdict: arguing that Tzara had infused his work with "suffering", had discovered humanity, and had become a "clairvoyant" among poets.
This period in Tzara's creative activity centers on The Approximate Man, an epic poem which is reportedly recognized as his most accomplished contribution to French literature. While maintaining some of Tzara's preoccupation with language experimentation, it is mainly a study in social alienation and the search for an escape. Cardinal calls the piece "an extended meditation on mental and elemental impulses [...] with images of stunning beauty", while Breitchman, who notes Tzara's rebellion against the "excess baggage of [man's] past and the notions [...] with which he has hitherto tried to control his life", remarks his portrayal of poets as voices who can prevent human beings from destroying themselves with their own intellects. The goal is a new man who lets intuition and spontaneity guide him through life, and who rejects measure. One of the appeals in the text reads:
The next stage in Tzara's career saw a merger of his literary and political views. His poems of the period blend a humanist vision with communist theses. The 1935 Grains et issues, described by Beitchman as "fascinating", was a prose poem of social criticism connected with The Approximate Man, expanding on the vision of a possible society, in which haste has been abandoned in favor of oblivion. The world imagined by Tzara abandons symbols of the past, from literature to public transportation and currency, while, like psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the poet depicts violence as a natural means of human expression. People of the future live in a state which combines waking life and the realm of dreams, and life itself turns into revery. Grains et issues was accompanied by Personage d'insomnie ("Personage of Insomnia"), which went unpublished.
Cardinal notes: "In retrospect, harmony and contact had been Tzara's goals all along." The post-World War II volumes in the series focus on political subjects related to the conflict. In his last writings, Tzara toned down experimentation, exercising more control over the lyrical aspects. He was by then undertaking a hermeutic research into the work of Goliards and François Villon, whom he deeply admired.
Legacy
Influence
Beside the many authors who were attracted into Dada through his promotional activities, Tzara was able to influence successive generations of writers. This was the case in his homeland during 1928, when the first avant-garde manifesto issued by unu magazine, written by Sașa Pană and Moldov, cited as its mentors Tzara, writers Breton, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vinea, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Tudor Arghezi, as well as artists Constantin Brâncuși and Theo van Doesburg. One of the Romanian writers to claim inspiration from Tzara was Jacques G. Costin, who nevertheless offered an equally good reception to both Dadaism and Futurism, while Ilarie Voronca's Zodiac cycle, first published in France, is traditionally seen as indebted to The Approximate Man. The Kabbalist and Surrealist author Marcel Avramescu, who wrote during the 1930s, also appears to have been directly inspired by Tzara's views on art. Other authors from that generation to have been inspired by Tzara were Polish Futurist writer Bruno Jasieński, Japanese poet and Zen thinker Takahashi Shinkichi, and Chilean poet and Dadaist sympathizer Vicente Huidobro, who cited him as a precursor for his own Creacionismo.
An immediate precursor of Absurdism, he was acknowledged as a mentor by Eugène Ionesco, who developed on his principles for his early essays of literary and social criticism, as well as in tragic farces such as The Bald Soprano. Tzara's poetry influenced Samuel Beckett (who translated some of it into English); the Irish author's 1972 play Not I shares some elements with The Gas Heart. In the United States, the Romanian author is cited as an influence on Beat Generation members. Beat writer Allen Ginsberg, who made his acquaintance in Paris, cites him among the Europeans who influenced him and William S. Burroughs. The latter also mentioned Tzara's use of chance in writing poetry as an early example of what became the cut-up technique, adopted by Brion Gysin and Burroughs himself. Gysin, who conversed with Tzara in the late 1950s, records the latter's indignation that Beat poets were "going back over the ground we [Dadaists] covered in 1920", and accuses Tzara of having consumed his creative energies into becoming a "Communist Party bureaucrat".
Among the late 20th-century writers who acknowledged Tzara as an inspiration are Jerome Rothenberg, Isidore Isou and Andrei Codrescu. The former Situationist Isou, whose experiments with sounds and poetry come in succession to Apollinaire and Dada, declared his Lettrism to be the last connection in the Charles Baudelaire-Tzara cycle, with the goal of arranging "a nothing [...] for the creation of the anecdote." For a short period, Codrescu even adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara. He recalled the impact of having discovered Tzara's work in his youth, and credited him with being "the most important French poet after Rimbaud."
In retrospect, various authors describe Tzara's Dadaist shows and street performances as "happenings", with a word employed by post-Dadaists and Situationists, which was coined in the 1950s. Some also credit Tzara with having provided an ideological source for the development of rock music, including punk rock, punk subculture and post-punk. Tristan Tzara has inspired the songwriting technique of Radiohead, and is one of the avant-garde authors whose voices were mixed by DJ Spooky on his trip hop album Rhythm Science. Romanian contemporary classical musician Cornel Țăranu set to music five of Tzara's poems, all of which date from the post-Dada period. Țăranu, Anatol Vieru and ten other composers contributed to the album La Clé de l'horizon, inspired by Tzara's work.
Tributes and portrayals
In France, Tzara's work was collected as Oeuvres complètes ("Complete Works"), of which the first volume saw print in 1975, and an international poetry award is named after him (Prix International de Poésie Tristan Tzara). An international periodical titled Caietele Tristan Tzara, edited by the Tristan Tzara Cultural-Literary Foundation, has been published in Moinești since 1998.
According to Paul Cernat, Aliluia, one of the few avant-garde texts authored by Ion Vinea features a "transparent allusion" to Tristan Tzara. Vinea's fragment speaks of "the Wandering Jew", a character whom people notice because he sings La moară la Hârța, "a suspicious song from Greater Romania." The poet is a character in Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand's Thieves of Fire, part four of his The Bubble (1984), as well as in The Prince of West End Avenue, a 1994 book by the American Alan Isler. Rothenberg dedicated several of his poems to Tzara, as did the Neo-Dadaist Valery Oișteanu. Tzara's legacy in literature also covers specific episodes of his biography, beginning with Gertrude Stein's controversial memoir. One of his performances is enthusiastically recorded by Malcolm Cowley in his autobiographical book of 1934, Exile's Return, and he is also mentioned in Harold Loeb's memoir The Way It Was. Among his biographers is the French author François Buot, who records some of the lesser-known aspects of Tzara's life.
At some point between 1915 and 1917, Tzara is believed to have played chess in a coffeehouse that was also frequented by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. While Richter himself recorded the incidental proximity of Lenin's lodging to the Dadaist milieu, no record exists of an actual conversation between the two figures. Andrei Codrescu believes that Lenin and Tzara did play against each other, noting that an image of their encounter would be "the proper icon of the beginning of [modern] times." This meeting is mentioned as a fact in Harlequin at the Chessboard, a poem by Tzara's acquaintance Kurt Schwitters. German playwright and novelist Peter Weiss, who has introduced Tzara as a character in his 1969 play about Leon Trotsky (Trotzki im Exil), recreated the scene in his 1975–1981 cycle The Aesthetics of Resistance. The imagined episode also inspired much of Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties, which also depicts conversations between Tzara, Lenin, and the Irish modernist author James Joyce (who is also known to have resided in Zürich after 1915). His role was notably played by David Westhead in the 1993 British production, and by Tom Hewitt in the 2005 American version.
Alongside his collaborations with Dada artists on various pieces, Tzara himself was a subject for visual artists. Max Ernst depicts him as the only mobile character in the Dadaists' group portrait Au Rendez-vous des Amis ("A Friends' Reunion", 1922), while, in one of Man Ray's photographs, he is shown kneeling to kiss the hand of an androgynous Nancy Cunard. Years before their split, Francis Picabia used Tzara's calligraphed name in Moléculaire ("Molecular"), a composition printed on the cover of 391. The same artist also completed his schematic portrait, which showed a series of circles connected by two perpendicular arrows. In 1949, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti made Tzara the subject of one of his first experiments with lithography. Portraits of Tzara were also made by Greta Knutson, Robert Delaunay, and the Cubist painters M. H. Maxy and Lajos Tihanyi. As an homage to Tzara the performer, art rocker David Bowie adopted his accessories and mannerisms during a number of public appearances. In 1996, he was depicted on a series of Romanian stamps, and, the same year, a concrete and steel monument dedicated to the writer was erected in Moinești.
Several of Tzara's Dadaist editions had illustrations by Picabia, Janco and Hans Arp. In its 1925 edition, Handkerchief of Clouds featured etchings by Juan Gris, while his late writings Parler seul, Le Signe de vie, De mémoire d'homme, Le Temps naissant, and Le Fruit permis were illustrated with works by, respectively, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Nejad Devrim and Sonia Delaunay. Tzara was the subject of a 1949 eponymous documentary film directed by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Roos, and footage of him featured prominently in the 1953 production Les statues meurent aussi ("Statues Also Die"), jointly directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.
Posthumous controversies
The many polemics which surrounded Tzara in his lifetime left traces after his death, and determine contemporary perceptions of his work. The controversy regarding Tzara's role as a founder of Dada extended into several milieus, and continued long after the writer died. Richter, who discusses the lengthy conflict between Huelsenbeck and Tzara over the issue of Dada foundation, speaks of the movement as being torn apart by "petty jealousies". In Romania, similar debates often involved the supposed founding role of Urmuz, who wrote his avant-garde texts before World War I, and Tzara's status as a communicator between Romania and the rest of Europe. Vinea, who claimed that Dada had been invented by Tzara in Gârceni ca. 1915 and thus sought to legitimize his own modernist vision, also saw Urmuz as the ignored precursor of radical modernism, from Dada to Surrealism. In 1931 the young, modernist literary critic Lucian Boz evidenced that he partly shared Vinea's perspective on the matter, crediting Tzara and Constantin Brâncuși with having, each on his own, invented the avant-garde. Eugène Ionesco argued that "before Dadaism there was Urmuzianism", and, after World War II, sought to popularize Urmuz's work among aficionados of Dada. Rumors in the literary community had it that Tzara successfully sabotaged Ionesco's initiative to publish a French edition of Urmuz's texts, allegedly because the public could then question his claim to have initiated the avant-garde experiment in Romania and the world (the edition saw print in 1965, two years after Tzara's death).
A more radical questioning of Tzara's influence came from Romanian essayist Petre Pandrea. In his personal diary, published long after he and Tzara had died, Pandrea depicted the poet as an opportunist, accusing him of adapting his style to political requirements, of dodging military service during World War I, and of being a "Lumpenproletarian". Pandrea's text, completed just after Tzara's visit to Romania, claimed that his founding role within the avant-garde was an "illusion [...] which has swelled up like a multicolored balloon", and denounced him as "the Balkan provider of interlope odalisques, [together] with narcotics and a sort of scandalous literature." Himself an adherent to communism, Pandrea grew disillusioned with the ideology, and later became a political prisoner in Communist Romania. Vinea's own grudge probably shows up in his 1964 novel Lunatecii, where Tzara is identifiable as "Dr. Barbu", a thick-hided charlatan.
From the 1960s to 1989, after a period when it ignored or attacked the avant-garde movement, the Romanian communist regime sought to recuperate Tzara, in order to validate its newly adopted emphasis on nationalist and national communist tenets. In 1977, literary historian Edgar Papu, whose controversial theories were linked to "protochronism", which presumes that Romanians took precedence in various areas of world culture, mentioned Tzara, Urmuz, Ionesco and Isou as representatives of "Romanian initiatives" and "road openers at a universal level." Elements of protochronism in this area, Paul Cernat argues, could be traced back to Vinea's claim that his friend had single-handedly created the worldwide avant-garde movement on the basis of models already present at home.
Notes
References
Alice Armstrong, "Stein, Gertrude" and Roger Cardinal, "Tzara, Tristan", in Justin Wintle (ed.), Makers of Modern Culture, Routledge, London, 2002.
Philip Beitchman, "Symbolism in the Streets", in I Am a Process with No Subject, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 1988.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
Paul Cernat, Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, Cartea Românească, Bucharest, 2007.
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002.
Saime Göksu, Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet, C. Hurst & Co., London, 1999.
Dan Grigorescu, Istoria unei generații pierdute: expresioniștii, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1980.
Marius Hentea, TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014.
Irene E. Hofman, Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, 2001
Irina Livezeanu, " 'From Dada to Gaga': The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism", in Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu, Lucia Dragomir (eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique. Colloque tenu à Bucarest (Roumanie), 30 et 31 mai 2003, Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Editura Paralela 45, Paris, 2005.
Felicia Hardison Londré, The History of World Theatre: From the English Restoration to the Present, Continuum International Publishing Group, London & New York, 1999.
Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2005.
Petre Răileanu, Michel Carassou, Fundoianu/Fondane et l'avant-garde, Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, Éditions Paris-Méditerranée, Bucharest & Paris, 1999.
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art (with a postscript by Werner Haftmann), Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
External links
From Dada to Surrealism, Judaica Europeana virtual exhibition, Europeana database
Tristan Tzara: The Art History Archive at The Lilith Gallery of Toronto
Recordings of Tzara, Dada Magazine, A Note On Negro Poetry and Tzara's renditions of African poetry, at UbuWeb
1896 births
1963 deaths
People from Moinești
Moldavian Jews
Romanian Jews
Romanian emigrants to France
French people of Romanian-Jewish descent
20th-century French poets
20th-century Romanian poets
French male poets
Romanian male poets
Jewish poets
Romanian-language poets
Symbolist poets
Surrealist poets
Dada
Romanian surrealist writers
Romanian writers in French
20th-century French dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Romanian dramatists and playwrights
French male dramatists and playwrights
Jewish dramatists and playwrights
Modernist theatre
20th-century French essayists
Romanian essayists
French male essayists
French art critics
Romanian art critics
French literary critics
Romanian literary critics
Philosophers of nihilism
Pranksters
French humorists
Jewish humorists
Romanian humorists
French magazine editors
French magazine founders
Romanian magazine editors
Romanian magazine founders
Romanian propagandists
20th-century French translators
Romanian translators
20th-century French composers
French male composers
Romanian composers
Jewish composers
French musicians
Romanian musicians
Jewish musicians
Noise musicians
Romanian cabaret performers
French performance artists
Romanian performance artists
Romanian film directors
20th-century French diplomats
French film directors
French art collectors
Romanian art collectors
Jewish art collectors
Romanian expatriates in Switzerland
Romanian World War I poets
Romanian anti–World War I activists
French pacifists
Jewish pacifists
Jewish artists
Romanian people of the Spanish Civil War
Jewish Romanian writers banned by the Antonescu regime
Jews in the French resistance
Romanian participants in the French Resistance
Communist members of the French Resistance
French Communist Party politicians
Romanian communists
Communist writers
Jewish socialists
Naturalized citizens of France
People of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956
People of the Algerian War
Burials at Montparnasse Cemetery
People of Montmartre
20th-century French male musicians
| false |
[
"The French surname la Barré has several quite distinct meanings. The name is originally derived from the old French word “barre”; this had two meanings in the ancient language. Firstly, “barre” signified “a pole” and may have been applied to an individual who made or sold such objects; on the other hand, the word also meant “the bar at a toll-house” and contemporaries of men who worked in such places may have referred to them in this manner. Thus it is clear that the name has an occupational origin, that is, it is based on the type of work the original bearer once did.\n\nIt was not until the early Middle Ages that surnames were first used to distinguish between numbers of people bearing the same personal name. With the growth of documentation in the later Middle Ages, such names became essential, and a person, whose distinguishing name described his trade, his place of residence, his father’s name, or some personal characteristic, passed that name on to his children, and the surname became hereditary.\n\nVariants of the name in modern France include Barre, Delabarre and Desbarres.\nNotable bearers of the name have included Pierre la Barre, also called Barriere. Born in Orleans, the son of a sailor, he was responsible for the plan to assassinate Henri IV. Michel de la Barre was a French composer and renowned flautist. Weston La Barré was an American ethnologist.\n\nCrecent\nArmoiries: D’azur a la bande d’or, accompagne de deux croissants du meme.\nBlazon of Arms: Azure between two crescents a bend all, or all.\nTranslation: The crescent is associated with Faith and Hope. As this was also the symbol of the Turks or Saracens it was used by the Crusaders to show defeat of the former.\nCrest: A crescent, or all.\nOrigin: France\n\nSee also\n La Barre (disambiguation)\n\nSurnames",
"This is a list of minor planets which have been officially named by the Working Group Small Body Nomenclature (WGSBN) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The list consists of partial pages, each covering a number range of 1000 bodies citing the source after each minor planet was named for. An overview of all existing partial pages is given in section .\n\nAmong the hundreds of thousands of numbered minor planets only a small fraction have received a name so far. , there are 23,081 named minor planets out of a total of more than 600,000 numbered ones . Most of these bodies are named for people, in particular astronomers, as well as figures from mythology and fiction. Many minor planets are also named after places such cities, towns and villages, mountains and volcanoes; after rivers, observatories, as well as organizations, clubs and astronomical societies. Some are named after animals and plants. A few minor planets are named after exotic entities such as supercomputers or have an unknown origin .\n\nThe first few thousand minor planets have all been named, with the near-Earth asteroid (4596) 1981 QB currently being the lowest-numbered unnamed minor planet. The first 3 pages in the below table contain 1,000 named entries each. The first 13 and 33 pages contain at least 500 and 100 named entries each, respectively. The first range to contain no entries is 258001–259000. There are also several name conflicts with other astronomical objects, mostly with planetary satellites and among themselves. \n\nFollowing a proposal of the discovering astronomer, new minor planet names are approved and published by IAU's WGSBN several times a year. The WGSBN applies a set of rules for naming minor planets. These range from syntax restrictions to non-offensive meanings. Over the years the rules have changed several times. In the beginning, for example, most minor planets were named after female characters from Greek and Roman mythology.\n\nIndex \n\nThis is an overview of all existing partial lists on the meanings of minor planets (MoMP). Each table covers 100,000 minor planets, with each cell representing a specific partial list of 1,000 sequentially numbered bodies. Grayed out cells do not yet contain any citations for the corresponding number range. For an introduction, see .\n\nMeanings from 1 to 100,000\n\nMeanings from 100,001 to 200,000\n\nMeanings from 200,001 to 300,000\n\nMeanings from 300,001 to 400,000\n\nMeanings from 400,001 to 500,000\n\nMeanings from 500,001 to 600,000\n\nMeanings from 600,001 to 700,000\n\nSee also \n List of minor planets\n List of named minor planets (alphabetical)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Asteroids discovered at the observatory of San Marcello Pistoiese in Italy\n Asteroids discovered by Uppsala astronomers\n Asteroids honoring people associated with Cornell Department of astronomy\n Asteroids named after members of staff and graduates of the Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland\n Asteroids with Canadian Connections\n Asteroids with a Hamburg connection\n Hungarian asteroids\n In Our Skies journalistic article on asteroid nomenclature\n Institute of Applied Astronomy's list of (accented) names\n Kleť Numbered Minor Planets\n List of \"Dutch\" asteroids (in Dutch)\n Planetary Society asteroids\n The Ceres Connection (asteroids named after students)\n\nSome systematic sources of citations are:\n The database of the Minor Planet Center can be searched: http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/\n The JPL Small-Body Database Browser: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi\n The Minor Planet Center has lists of discovery circumstances for numbered minor planets which link to a script at the Harvard University Center for Astronomy MPES (Minor Planet Ephemeris Service) that displays citations.\n The Minor Planet Center also provides a search engine allowing a search of its database from your browser.\nIn the first two cases you need only modify the last argument of the address to the name or number of the minor planet. The lists of discovery circumstances are split into groups of 5000 minor planets, each containing links for individual named minor planets that access the script displaying citations.\n\n *\nmeanings"
] |
[
"Lilyan Tashman",
"Death"
] |
C_b3aea6e5f540492e99765ed1cb7494c5_0
|
What year did she die?
| 1 |
What year did Lilyan Tashman die?
|
Lilyan Tashman
|
In 1932, Tashman entered the hospital in New York City for an appendectomy that is now considered a concealment for abdominal cancer. She left the hospital thin and weak. Although she made five films in her last years, performing with her usual artistry and professionalism, she weakened significantly in the months following her hospitalization and her role in Riptide was trimmed because of her ever-worsening health. In February 1934, she flew to New York City to film Frankie and Johnny for All Star Productions (released by Republic Pictures) but her condition necessitated a week of rest in Connecticut with Lowe. She resumed work in March, completing her film role on March 8 and then appearing at the Israel Orphan's Home benefit on March 10. When she entered the hospital for surgery on March 16, it was too late for the doctors to help her. Tashman died of cancer at Doctor's Hospital in New York City on March 21, 1934 at the age of 37. Her funeral was held on March 22 in New York City synagogue Temple Emanu-El with Sophie Tucker, Mary Pickford, Fanny Brice, Cecil Beaton, Jack Benny, and other distinguished celebrities in attendance. Eddie Cantor delivered the eulogy. The burial in Brooklyn's Washington Cemetery attracted 10,000 fans, mourners, and curious onlookers; it became a near riot when people were injured and a gravestone was toppled. Tashman left no will, but the distribution of her $31,000 in cash and $121,000 in furs and jewels provoked contentious discussion among her husband and sisters, Hattie and Jennie. Her last film, Frankie and Johnny, was released posthumously in May 1936 with her role as Nellie Bly cut to a cameo. CANNOTANSWER
|
1934
|
Lilyan Tashman (October 23, 1896 – March 21, 1934) was an American actress. Tashman was best known for her supporting roles as tongue-in-cheek villainesses or playing the vindictive "other woman". She made 66 films over the course of her Hollywood career and although she never obtained superstar status, her cinematic performances are described as "sharp, clever and have aged little over the decades."
Tall, blonde, and slender with fox-like features and a throaty voice, Tashman freelanced as a fashion and artist's model in New York City. By 1914, she was an experienced vaudevillian, appearing in Ziegfeld Follies between 1916 and 1918. In 1921 Tashman made her film debut in Experience, and over the next decade and a half she appeared in numerous silent films. With her husky contralto singing voice she easily navigated the transition to sound film.
Tashman married vaudevillian Al Lee in 1914, but they divorced in 1921. She married actor Edmund Lowe in 1925 and her wardrobe and lavish parties became the talk of the town.
She died of cancer in New York City on March 21, 1934, at the age of 37. Her last film, Frankie and Johnny, was released posthumously in 1936.
Family
Lilyan Tashman was born the tenth and youngest child of a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Rose (née Cook), who was born in Germany, and Maurice Tashman, a clothing manufacturer from
Białystok, Poland. She freelanced as a fashion and artist's model while attending Girl's High School in Brooklyn and eventually entered vaudeville. In 1914, aged 17, she married fellow-vaudevillian Al Lee, but the two separated in 1920 and divorced in 1921.
Professional life
Lilyan Tashman's entertainment career began in vaudeville. By 1914, aged 17, she was an experienced performer, appearing in Song Revue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with rising stars Eddie Cantor and Al Lee. In 1916, she played Viola in a Shakespeare-inspired number for the Ziegfeld Follies and remained with the Follies for the 1917 and 1918 seasons. In 1919, producer David Belasco gave her a supporting role in Avery Hopwood's comedy The Gold Diggers. The show ran two years with Tashman acting as an understudy, and occasionally filling in, for star Ina Claire.
In 1921, Tashman made her film debut playing Pleasure in an allegorical segment of Experience, and when The Gold Diggers closed she appeared in the plays The Garden of Weeds and Madame Pierre. In 1922, she had a small role in the Mabel Normand film Head Over Heels. Her personal and professional lives in 1922 were not entirely satisfactory (best friend Edmund Lowe moved to Hollywood, for example, and she was fired from Madame Pierre) so she relocated to California and quickly found work in films. In 1924, she appeared in five films (including a cinematic adaptation of The Garden of Weeds) and received good reviews for Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model and Winner Take All. She freelanced, moving from studio to studio, but signed a long-term contract in 1931 with Paramount. She made nine films for the studio.
In 1925, she appeared in 10 films, including Pretty Ladies with Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy. From 1926 to 1929, she appeared in numerous films, became a valued supporting player, and starred in the independent Rocking Moon (1926) and The Woman Who Did Not Care (1927). She played supporting roles in Ernst Lubitsch's farce So This Is Paris (1926), Camille with Norma Talmadge (1926), A Texas Steer with Will Rogers (1927), director Dorothy Arzner's Manhattan Cocktail (1928), and Hardboiled (1929). Her Variety reviews were good.
She easily managed the transition to sound films, making a total of 28, and appeared in some of the very first, including United Artists's Bulldog Drummond (1929), The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), the now-lost color musical Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), and New York Nights (1930) with Norma Talmadge. She starred as a murderess in the melodrama Murder by the Clock, as a self-sacrificing mother in The Road to Reno (1931), and as a chorus girl in Wine, Women and Song (1933). In 1932, her health began to fail but she appeared in The Wiser Sex, Those We Love, the film on the Russian Revolution, Scarlet Dawn, Mama Loves Papa with Charlie Ruggles (1933), and the musical Too Much Harmony (1933). In early 1934, she appeared in Riptide with Norma Shearer. Her last film, Frankie and Johnny, was released posthumously in 1936. Director George Cukor described Tashman as "a very diverting creature [...] outrageous and cheerful and goodhearted."
Personal life
On September 21, 1925, Tashman married her longtime friend, actor Edmund Lowe. The two became the darlings of Hollywood reporters and were touted in fan magazines as having "the ideal marriage". Tashman was described by reporter Gladys Hall as "the most gleaming, glittering, moderne, hard-surfaced, and distingué woman in all of Hollywood". The couple entertained lavishly at "Lilowe", their Beverly Hills home, and their weekly party invitations were highly sought after. Her wardrobe cost $1 million, and women around the world clamored for copies of her hats, gowns, and jewelry. Servants were ordered to serve her cats afternoon tea, and for Easter brunch she had her dining room painted dark blue to provide a contrast to her blonde hair. She once painted her Malibu home red and white, asked her guests to wear red and white, and even dyed the toilet paper red and white.
Seventy years after her death, a book author named E.J. Fleming claimed that Edmund Lowe was a homosexual and that Tashman was a lesbian. If the claims were true, fan magazine writers and newspaper columnists made no mention of them during Tashman's lifetime or for seventy years after her death.
Death
In 1932, Tashman entered the hospital in New York City for an appendectomy that is now considered a concealment for abdominal cancer. She left the hospital thin and weak. Although she made five films in her last years, performing with her usual artistry and professionalism, she weakened significantly in the months following her hospitalization and her role in Riptide was trimmed because of her ever-worsening health.
In February 1934, she flew to New York City to film Frankie and Johnny for All Star Productions (released by Republic Pictures) but her condition necessitated a week of rest in Connecticut with Lowe. She resumed work in March, completing her film role on March 8 and then appearing at the Israel Orphan's Home benefit on March 10. When she entered the hospital for surgery on March 16, it was too late for the doctors to help her.
Tashman died of cancer at Doctor's Hospital in New York City on March 21, 1934 at the age of 37. Her funeral was held on March 22 in New York City synagogue Temple Emanu-El with Sophie Tucker, Mary Pickford, Fanny Brice, Cecil Beaton, Jack Benny, and other distinguished celebrities in attendance. Eddie Cantor delivered the eulogy. The burial in Brooklyn's Washington Cemetery attracted 10,000 fans, mourners, and curious onlookers; it became a near riot when people were injured and a gravestone was toppled. Tashman left no will, but the distribution of her $31,000 in cash and $121,000 in furs and jewels provoked contentious discussion among her husband and sisters, Hattie and Jennie. Her last film, Frankie and Johnny, was released posthumously in May 1936 with her role as Nellie Bly cut to a cameo.
Filmography
References
External links
Lilyan Tashman Photo Gallery
Photographs and literature
1896 births
1934 deaths
American film actresses
American musical theatre actresses
American silent film actresses
Jewish American actresses
Musicians from Brooklyn
Vaudeville performers
Ziegfeld girls
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American singers
20th-century American women singers
Girls' High School alumni
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
20th-century American Jews
| true |
[
"The 2008 North Korean Census was the second North Korea national census. The reference day used for the census was October 1, 2008. The census was taken by house-to-house interviews by enumerators using a census questionnaire. Roughly 35,000 enumerators were trained to help with the census. The population of North Korea was counted as 24,052,231 a 13.38% increase from the 1993 Census.\n\nThe results of the census are thought of as plausible by foreign observers.\n\nThe census was widely advertised in propaganda. This resulted in a detailed survey.\n\nThe 2008 census is the latest census of North Korea. The next census was scheduled for 2018.\n\nIntroduction \nNorth Korea completed its first census in 1993. In October 2006, a declaration was enacted to complete a second census in 2008. In order to test procedures, in October 2007, there was a pilot census completed across each of the provinces where roughly 50,000 households were counted. The actual census took place from October 1 – October 15, 2008 using October 1, 2008 at 1:00 AM as a reference point.\n\nQuestionnaire \nThere were several questions asked on the census broken into three modules:\n\nThe first module was titled Household and dwelling unit information. There were 14 questions in this module pertaining to the persons' housing unit. If the respondent lived in an institutional living quarter, then the rest of the section was skipped. All of the questions are listed below:\n\n How many are the members of this household?\n Type of Household\n What is the class of labor of head of this household?\n What is the previous class of labor of head of this household?\n What type of dwelling does this household occupy?\n Does this household have the first right to occupancy of this dwelling unit?\n What is the total floor area of this dwelling unit?\n How many rooms are there in this dwelling unit? (Exclude sitting room, Kitchen)\n Is there a water tap in this dwelling unit?\n What is the source of water supply for your household? \n What kind of toilet facility does your household have access to?\n What heating system is established in your household?\n What heating system is used by your household?\n Which fuel is used for cooking?\n\nThe second module was titled personal information and had the most questions of any of the modules. There was a total of 29 questions to be asked including sex, nationality, school level, marital status, and employment.\n\nThe third module was titled mortality. The first question was \"Did any member of this household die during the period 1 Oct. 2007 to 30 Sept. 2008?\" If the answer was no, the rest of this section was skipped. If the answer was yes, then five additional questions were asked. If the deceased person was a female between 15 and 49, five more additional questions were asked. All ten additional questions are listed below.\n\n What was/were the name(s) of the household member(s) who died?\n Sex\n When was _ born?\n When did _die?\n How old was __ when he/she died?\n Was pregnant at the time of her death?\n Did ___ die while having abortion or miscarriage or within 42 days of having abortion/miscarriage?\n Did _ die while giving birth or within 42 days of giving birth?\n Where did _die? (Home, Hospital, or Other)\n Did she have a live birth anytime between 1 0ct. 2007 and the time of death? If \"Yes\", How many male and female children did she give birth at that time?\n\nRankings\n\nSee also\n\n Demographics of North Korea\n\nNotes\n\nReferences \n \n\nCensuses in North Korea\nNorth Korea\nCensus",
"Molly Nyman has composed numerous film scores. She is the elder daughter of composer Michael Nyman, and appeared in Peter Greenaway's The Falls, as did her mother, Aet Nyman. Nyman was awarded the Women's International Film & Television Showcase 2014 Sound Award in recognition of her work as a composer.\n\nShe studied music at Sussex University and went on to specialise in composition at City University, London.\n\nFilmography\nThe Falls (1980) (actor only)\nWe Built This City: New York (2003) (with Harry Escott)\nHard Candy (2005) (with Harry Escott)\nWhat's Your Name 41? (2005) \nDie Österreichische Methode (The Austrian Method) (2006) (with Harry Escott)\nThe Road to Guantanamo (2006) (with Harry Escott)\nDeep Water (2006) (with Harry Escott)\nI Am Slave (2010) (with Harry Escott)\n\nExternal links\n https://web.archive.org/web/20110822093019/http://mollynyman.com/\n\nReferences\n\nLiving people\nAlumni of the University of Sussex\nYear of birth missing (living people)"
] |
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