memories

The Carnival of the Animals, composed in 1886, was originally written as a joke and Saint-Saëns worried that it might damage his reputation. He banned complete performances and only allowed one movement, The Swan, to be published while he was alive. The piece became acclaimed worldwide as The Dying Swan after 1905 when it was choreographed for legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova. She performed the piece about 4,000 times. Towards the end of his life, Saint-Saëns undertook a triumphant tour of America but gradually found that his style of composition was no longer regarded as being fashionable by the Parisian chattering classes. He died in Algiers in 1921. He is buried in the same Paris cemetery as his fellow composers Chabrier and Auric, as well as Cesar Franck. But today, Saint-Saëns' music is performed and loved the world over. cr: classicfm

Saint-Saëns was 51 when he produced two of his most famous works, The Carnival of the Animals and the Symphony No. 3 ‘Organ’, which was dedicated to Liszt, who died later that year. The Organ Symphony was famously used as the main theme in the 1995 film Babe and its sequel, Babe: Pig in the City Saint- Saëns was said to be "unequalled on the organ", and almost without competition on the piano. However his performance style was described as ‘restrained, subtle and cool’. He was one of the first pianists to experiment with recordings, and was in fact the earliest-born pianist to ever make a recording of his work. cr: classicfm

Born in Paris in 1835, Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was raised by his widowed mother and her aunt who introduced the young Camille to the piano and gave him his first lessons. The boy was a true prodigy, demonstrating perfect pitch at the age of two. He gave his first public concert at five, accompanying a Beethoven violin sonata on the piano. The composer’s formidable intellect was not limited to music. He had a profound interest in - and knowledge of - geology, botany, butterflies, and maths. He enjoyed discussions with Europe's finest scientists and wrote numerous academic articles about acoustics. cr: classicfm

Johan Barthold Jongkind Jongkind was born in the town of Lattrop in the Overijssel province of the Netherlands near the border with Germany. Trained at the art academy in The Hague under Andreas Schelfhout, in 1846 he moved to Montparnasse in Paris, France where he studied under Eugène Isabey and François-Édouard Picot. Two years later, the Paris Salon accepted his work for its exhibition, and he received acclaim from critic Charles Baudelaire and later on from Émile Zola. He was to experience little success, however, and he suffered bouts of depression complicated by alcoholism.

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was a 20th-century French composer and one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music. Life and Music Claude Debussy was born on the 22nd August 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France. In 1880, Tchaikovsky commented on one of Debussy's early pieces: "It is a very pretty piece, but it is much too short. Not a single idea is expressed fully, the form is terribly shriveled, and it lacks unity." It was not until 1894, aged 32, that Debussy completed the first piece to truly declare his independence of thought: Prelude a l'Apres-midi d'un Faune, a highly innovative piece inspired by a poem of Stephane Mallarmé. After his first successes, Debussy began serious work on his opera Pelleas et Melisande (completed in 1902) and the three orchestral Nocturnes (completed in 1899). Debussy entered a new creative phase in 1903 with La Mer, completed while staying in Eastbourne, where he observed that "the sea behaves with British politeness". cr: classicfm

Vincent Willem van Gogh Art

𝓐t the beginning of World War II, 𝓛amarr and composer 𝓖eorge Antheil developed a radio guidance system using frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology for Allied torpedoes, intended to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers.[11] She also helped improve aircraft aerodynamics for Howard Hughes, while they dated during the war.[12] Although the US Navy did not adopt 𝓛amarr and Antheil's invention until 1957,[4][13] various spread-spectrum techniques are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of Wi-Fi.