Biography of Ludwig Van Beethoven… Sigmund Freud… Salvador Dali… Johann Sebastian Bach…

Biography of Ludwig Van Beethoven

(1770/12/16 - 1827/03/26)

Ludwig Van Beethoven
German composer

He was born on December 16, 1770 in Bonn, Germany.
Son of Johann van Beethoven and María Magdalena Keverich.
It received the name of Ludwig in honor of his grandfather, master of Chapel and Godfather at her christening.
For a long time believed that he was born in 1772, two years after his birth, probably because his father wanted to present it more young than other children geniuses.
His father, after discovering their potential forced him to practice hard pretending that you becoming a Mozart -like genius.
At the age of 12 was Assistant to the organist Christian Gottlob Neefe, with who studied. At that age he composed his first work, 9 variations for piano, written in c minor. In 1787 he travelled to Vienna, but her mother fell ill, and returned to Bonn almost immediately. Her mother died in 1787 because of tuberculosis and the lack of adequate food. Johann, her husband, after the death of his father, began to drink and spent little money getting alcohol leaving his family literally in misery.
He travels to Vienna for the second time in November 1792 to study with Joseph Haydn. His father died a month later and in 1795 his two brothers met with him. He earned his living giving concerts, teaching piano and with the sales of his compositions. The members of the Viennese aristocracy were employers and in 1809, Prince Kinsky and Prince Lobkowitz, the Archduke Rodolfo, guaranteed annual income on the sole condition that they resided in Vienna.
Works of Beethoven are traditionally grouped into "Tempranos, media and later" periods. His first works date back approximately until 1802. His studies in counterpoint (with Johann Albrectsbergerand Haydhn), beginning in 1792, and his study deprived of the best music of the time, particularly the symphonies of Haydn, improved its treatment of both forms and texture. During this period the first wrote for piano and for piano dominating chamber ensembles. It became the less familiar genres of Quartet, Symphony, oratorio, and opera with great subtlety preventing a comparison with Haydn and Mozart in these areas.
His first quartets of six strings, op.18, dating from 1798-1800, the first Symphony in 1800 and 1801 and an oratorio, Christ on the Mount of olives, en1802-1803. A general growth in the proportions of rhetorical power in the works of Beethoven in the period 1798-1802 culminates with highly dramatic compositions that mark the beginning of the medium in 1803. The first of these -The Third Symphony (Eroica, 1803), the opera Fidelio (1803-05), and the Waldstein (1804) and the sonatas Appassionata (1804) - have a heroic touch that seems to respond to the emotions caused by the deafness of Beethoven. In the works composed from about 1806 until 1812, this heroic character is alternated with an Olympic serenity. The features symphonies and works of Chamber of this period are the symphonies fourth (1806), fifth (1805-07), and sixth (1807-08); the fourth (1805-06) number piano concertos and the fifth (Emperor, 1809); Violin concertos (1806); the Rasumovs; the Overture Coroliana (1807); and the incidental music to the drama by Goethe called Egmont (1810). This monumental style of the middle period began to lose its appeal for Beethoven after 1812, the year's seventh and eighthsymphonies. The years 1813 and 1814 are not rich in new jobs and at the beginning of 1815 his music became generally less dramatic and introspective. The first group of works in this new style of the period includes the song cycle "An die ferne Geliebte, op." 98 "(to the distant beloved); piano sonata, op. 101 (1816); and the two sonatas for cello and piano op. 102 (1815). In these works (1820-22), and the string quartets, op. 127,130,131,132, and 135 (1824-26), Beethoven is less fast in the classic tree - or four movements-format, dominated by a dramatic first movement in the way sonata, and more in the juxtaposition of a widely different style and character movements (from two to seven). In particular, he favored the procedures of variation and Fugue in which the hidden implications of these themes emerge gradually. Occasionally reverted the elements of the heroic style of the middle period, as, for example, in the Hammerklavier Sonata, op. 106 (1817-18); Missa Solemnis (1812-23); and the Ninth Symphony (Coral) (completed in 1823).
The music of Beethoven has never lost its central place in the concert Repertory. Some works had an immediate and specific impact on the next generation of composers. The influence of the popular Seventh Symphony, for example, can be heard in the "Grand Symphony in C major", by Schubert, or Mendelssohn"Italian Symphony", Berlioz's"Harold in Italy", and "Symphony in C" of Wagner. The influence of the Ninth Symphony was even deeper; its special character had a profound effect on Bruckner and Brahms, and the combination of instrumental and choral forces began a series of symphonic hybrid works, from Berlioz to Mahler. The expressive quality of all the music of Beethoven inspired by poetic interpretations and encouraged in a century of romantic instrumental works with programmatic overtones. Same Beethoven became a powerful symbol, the prototype of the modern heroe-artista as opposed to the artista-artesano of the pre-revolutionary Europe. His fierce independence and its success over personal adversity, especially in works dramatically conceived the middle period made it a model for those later composers such as Wagner, who taught or showed through art.
His 30 years of life were marked by a series of personal crises, the first of them was his deafness. The first symptoms, notable for the composer already before 1800, had affected him socially than musically. Desperation appears in letters to two friends in 1801 and a document addressed to his brethren towards the end of 1802 and now known as the "Heiligenstadt Testament". A second crisis a decade later was the breakup with a woman (probably Antonie Brentano, the wife of a friend). Loves of Beethoven including were several Giulietta Giucciardi, Countess of sixteen years, student of Beethoven, it was a stormy love, she dedicated the immortal "Moonlight" sonata. However, it was rejected in all proposals of marriage that did. Never married and left descendants.
The list of diseases that it is believed that he suffered is considerable: inflammation of the intestine, deterioration of the bones, syphilis, hepatitis, cirrhosis, kidney condition... His deafness advanced to such a degree that he could no longer executed publicly, and required a table or small notebooks (now known as "conversation books) to communicate with visitors. Upon the death of his brother Carl Caspar in 1815 resulted is a lawsuit over the custody of his nephew, Karl.
Ludwig Van Beethoven died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna. Many years later, it is argued that the cause of his death was a medical lead-based treatment, concluded Christian Reiter, of the Institute of forensic medicine of the Medical University of Vienna. This doctor looked at remains of his hair to be able to have a medical view of the last 400 days of his life. During the investigation, it was detected that 111 days before the death, the composer suffered already from an overload of lead. At that time, Beethoven was treated in Vienna of a pneumonia. Dr. Andreas Wawruch attacked the disease with lead salts, usually employed at the time against excess mucus.

Biography of Sigmund Freud

(1856/05/06 - 21/09/1939)

Sigmund Freud
Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Physician and Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis

He was born on May 6, 1856 in Freiberg (now Pribor, Czech Republic).
He was one of eight children of Jakob Freud (1815-1896), dealer of wool, which had two children, Emanuel and Philipp, in his first marriage. Jacob's family were Jewish Hasidic (a branch of Orthodox Judaism), and he became known for his study of the Torah. He married the mother of Freud, Amalia Nathansohn, 20 years younger, making it his third wife on July 29, 1855. Passed economic hardship living in a rented room when his son Sigmund was born. In 1859, the failure of his father's business forced the family to abandon their home in Freiberg. They resided in Leipzig and, in 1860, in Vienna finally.
In 1865, at the age of nine, Freud entered in Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, where proved to be an outstanding student and graduated in 1873 with honors. He was an avid reader of lover of literature in German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, latin and Greek. Read William Shakespeare in English throughout his life, suggesting that much of his knowledge of human psychology may have been derived from the works of Shakespeare.
He entered the University of Vienna with 17 years to study law, but he entered the Faculty of Medicine of the University after listening to a lecture about the trial on the nature (attributed to Goethe). Carl Claus studied philosophy as a student of Franz Brentano, Physiology with Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, and zoology with the Darwinist Professor. In the third year, started research on the central nervous system of invertebrates in the laboratory of Physiology directed by Brücke. He graduated as doctor of medicine in 1881, after having served also a year of compulsory military service. He remained at the University as an Assistant in the Physiology Laboratory.
In 1883, and under pressure from Brücke, he abandoned the theoretical research. He spent three years at the General Hospital of Vienna, dedicated to Psychiatry, Dermatology , and nervous disorders. In 1885, was associate Professor of neuropathology at the University of Vienna. At the end of that year he got a grant from the Government to study in Paris with the neurologist Jean Martin Charcot, who worked in the treatment of mental disorders through hypnosis in the Salpetriere hospital asylum. Their studies together with Charcot, focusing on hysteria, addressed the psychopathology.
On September 14, 1886, he married Martha Bernays, granddaughter of Isaac Bernays, a Rabbi in Hamburg. The couple had six children: Mathilde, born in 1887; Jean-Martin in 1889; Oliver, in 1891; Ernst, in 1892; Sophie, in 1893; and Anna, in 1895. In 1896, Minna Bernays, sister of Martha, became member of the family after the death of her fiancé. The close relationship that Freud had led to rumors, initiated by Carl Jung, an adventure. The discovery of a register of Swiss hotel on August 13, 1898, signed by Freud as he travels with his sister-in-law, was brought as evidence.
He settled as a physician in Vienna, specializing in nervous disorders. His initial work on psychopathology was on aphasia (1891); where I developed a study about this neurological disorder in which the ability to pronounce a word or name common objects is lost. His latest work on Neurology, was an article, 'children's cerebral paralysis', written in 1897. His following works are entered in what he had baptized as psychoanalysis in 1896.
This new orientation was unveiled in his work studies on hysteria (1893), made in collaboration with the Viennese physician Josef Breuer. Freud considered the symptoms of hysteria as manifestations of emotional energy not discharged, associated with forgotten psychic traumas. Therapeutic procedure is to add to the patient in a hypnotic state to force him to remember and relive the traumatic experience origin of the disorder, with what is downloaded by catharsis the emotions that cause symptoms.
From 1895 to 1900, developed many of the concepts embodied both the practice and doctrine psychoanalytic. Soon after he abandoned the use of hypnosis as a cathartic process, replacing it with the research of the course of spontaneous thoughts of the patient - called free association- as a method for understanding of unconscious mental processes that are at the root of the neurotic disorders. He found evidence of the mental mechanisms of repression and resistance, describing the first as an unconscious mechanism which makes it inaccessible to the conscious mind the memory of traumatic events; and the second as unconscious defense against accessibility to consciousness repressed experiences, to avoid the anxiety that is derived from it. It continued the course of unconscious processes, using the free associations as a guide for interpreting dreams and the slip in the language. "The interpretation of dreams" was initially a commercial failure following its publication in 1899. Which is regarded as his most important work, sold only 351 copies in its first six years; the second edition was not published until 1909.
Through the analysis of dreams developed theories of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. He worked in addition transfer theory, process by which emotional attitudes, established originally to the figures of the parents during childhood, are transferred in adult life to other characters. Then appearance makes his most important work, the interpretation of dreams (1900), where he analyzes (in addition to some dreams of his patients) many of their own dreams, recorded during three years of self initiated in 1897.
In 1902 he was appointed Professor of the University of Vienna through the efforts of a patient with influences. His following writings, psychopathology of everyday life (1904) and three trials for a sexual theory (1905), did more to increase antagonism with his colleagues. As a result, Freud continued working virtually alone, in what he called "a splendid solitude". His other works are Totem and taboo (1913), further than the pleasure principle (1920), mass psychology (1920), the I and the (1923), the unrest in the culture (1930), the future of an illusion (1927), Introduction to psychoanalysis (1933), and Moses and monotheism (1939).
Toward 1906, there was a small number of students and supporters highlighting Austrian psychiatrists William Stekel and Alfred Adler, Austrian psychologist Otto Rank, the American psychiatrist Abraham Brill, and the Swiss psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung, in addition to the Hungarian Sándor Ferenczi, who joined the group in 1908.
A global organization called the International Psychoanalytical Associationwas created in 1910. After the beginning of World War I, he left almost clinical observation and focused on the application of his theories to the psychoanalytic interpretation of social phenomenasuch as religion, mythology, art, literature, the social order or the war itself.
It was detected cancer in the jaw that needed constant and painful treatment that had to undergo several surgical operations in 1923. When the nazis occupied Austria, in 1938, he moved to London. Freud and his daughter Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo before his friend and patient Marie Bonaparte was able to assure passage to England. Bonaparte tried unsuccessfully to get visas? output also for four of her sisters, who finally stayed in Vienna before being sent to Nazi concentration camps that killed.
On September 21, 1939, Freud recalled the promise that made him his friend and doctor, Max Schur, help you to die when the jaw cancer became unbearable. The next day you received morphine and he died at midnight of September 23, 1939 in the British capital. His last words were: Das ist absurd! Das ist absurd! (It's absurd!... This is absurd!) ...
Three days after his death his remains were cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium in North London, still kept his ashes in an ancient Greek URN that had received as a gift from the Bonaparte Princess and had in his studio in Vienna.
When his wife Martha died in 195, his ashes were added to the ballot box. In January 2014, they tried to steal the ashes of the Freud, and although the theft was avoided, thieves severely damaged more than 2,300 years old URN.
His head had a circumference of 55 cm and 18 in diameter.

Biography of Salvador Dali

(1904/05/11 - 1989/01/23)

Salvador Dalí domènech
Spanish sculptor and painter

He was born on May 11, 1904 at 8.45 in the morning in the town of Figueres, Girona.
Baptized as Savior, Domingo, Felipe, Jacinto Dalí, son of Salvador Dalí i Cusí, notary, and Felipa Doménech.
He was born nine months and ten days exact after buried a first Salvador Dali, his brother, who wrote that they seemed "like two drops of water". His eldest brother was killed by meningitis when he was only seven years. The name you put on him, Salvador, is the same as her dead brother had.
It was a whimsical, pampered and spoiled child in whom his parents poured affection and attentions of a somewhat compulsively due to the early death of his brother. His childhood is characterized by attacks of rage against his parents and cruel acts against their classmates.
During a long convalescence in The MOLÍ de la Torre, a farm near Figueres last owned by the remarkable Pichot, Dalí family discovered the painting. There was, with an absolute lack of technical knowledge, his first paintings (watercolors and oil paintings) of which not is trace some, but which impressed those who had the opportunity to see them. The Pichot were who advised to Dalí to follow training courses. The sick child is the title of his first self-portrait, made at the age of ten. Shortly after he began his first drawing course with Juan Núñez who learned the use of chiaroscuro and introduced him also in engraving techniques. Dalí's works are known for a significant deal of details, which gives plenty of light and color.
His mother died in 1921 of breast cancer. Dalí was only 16 years old and was badly affected by the death of his mother.
He was admitted to the School of fine arts of San Fernando (Madrid) in 1921, which was expelled, accused of subversion-anarchist; He was arrested and spent a short period in jail, in Girona (1923). His first solo exhibition in Barcelona was held in November 1925. After being reinstated, he was definitively expelled in 1926 by his eccentricity. It is said when a test was asked to speak about Rafael, Dalí responded to the Court: "I cannot talk about that subject in front of three teachers, because I know much more about Rafael all of you assembled.
The following year he met Picasso in Paris, and joined the surrealist group in the Montparnasse district of Paris. Despite being one of the most famous surrealist artists of all time, he was expelled from the official surrealist society in 1934. In London, Stefan Zweig introduced him to Sigmund Freud. Friend of Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca who met in Madrid in 1923. José Bello said speaking of when Dali came to the Residencia de Estudiantes, at age 18, "was a person sick with shyness". Buñuel he made the staging of "Un Chien Andalou" and collaborated, in a second stage, in L' âge d'or. On the other hand, with García Lorca had a very close friendship, as tight correspondence between 1925 and 1936. Until that time, Dali had not loved anyone this way.
During his military service (1927) Dali makes Cenicitas, his first work "Dalí" in which emerge its recuerdos-fantasmas. During his years in Paris, he acquired the characteristics of surrealism in 1930. His works in this period are inspired by Freud's theories. In 1929, Dalí met Gala, daughter of a Russian lawyer and partner of the surrealist poet Paul Éluard. He saw her for the first time on the terrace of the hotel Miramar, in Cadaqués, along with her husband. They were found the next morning, at the beach. Dali decided to prepare for the meeting in a completely symbolic way. Clothing is scrunched to make highlight your Tan. Went to the neck a necklace with pearls and ear a red geranium. He smote the shaving of armpit and will name the body with his own blood, which added a mixture of fish, oil and goat dung. Marriage to Gala an insult to his family, who disapproves of it being 10 years older than Dali, who was disowned by his father and a mother. Eluard was one of the witnesses at their wedding.
A few months later, deeply in love, they are going to live together. Since that time. Gala will be for Dali lover, friend and muse and model (first appears in profile, in "the great masturbator", in 1929). In 1932 Dali presents his work the persistence of memory, in the first surrealist exhibition held in New York: is the principle of its spectacular success. From 1936, along with Gala, abandons his residence in Catalonia. From 1940 until 1948, Dalí lived in the United States. There was his last works, most of them religious, such as The Crucifixion and the last supper aspect (1955, National Gallery, Washington )).
Dali was the most popular representative of surrealism and is recognized worldwide for its work replete with dreamlike images. The artist left mark in the world of illustration and engraving, performed a remarkable number of sculptures and jewelry, also left his work on the world stage through the creation of ballets, stage sets and costumes for operas; not to mention their contributions, of decisive importance in the world of design, advertising and film. For the film "Remember" by Alfred Hitchcock, the artist designed the decorated.
On April 1, 1970 announces the creation of a Museum in Figueres, which opened four years later. In December 1979, a first major anthological exhibition was opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The few. days were public disagreements with Gala and beginning the conflict of rights of copyright and counterfeiting. In the artistic community, he was known for his love for making money. Because of this is called derogatorily "Avida Dollars" by their greed.
He wrote some autobiographical book like Salvador Dali's secret life.
On January 23, 1989, dies in the hospital of Figueres the 84 year-old as a result of a cardiac arrest after suffering a long agony. His body is embalmed and buried in a tomb under the geodesic dome that dominates its Museum in the same locality.

Biography of Johann Sebastian Bach

(1685/03/21 - 1750/07/28)

Johann Sebastian Bach
Organist and German composer of the Baroque period

He was born March 21, 1685 in the bosom of a family that for seven generations gave 52 musicians of importance, in Eisenach, Thuringia (Germany).
He received his first music lessons from his father, Johann Ambrosius. When it died, went to live and study with his older brother, Johann Christoph, then organist of Ohrdruff. In 1700 he began to work as a member of the choir of the Church of San Miguel, in Lüneburg.
In 1703 he spent to be a violinist in the Orchestra of camera of the Prince Johann Ernst of Weimar, to pass that same year at Arnstadt, where he became organist of Church. At the end of 1705 he got a permit to study with Dietrich Buxtehude, organist and Danish composer based in Germany. Among both musicians established a relationship so positive that their stay Lübeck lasted one month more than what was agreed. This raised criticisms by the ecclesiastical authorities, who also complained of the frills and harmonies that accompanying the Congregation in their religious chants.
In 1707 he married Maria Barbara Bach, prima his second, and moved to Mulhose, where he worked as an organist in the Church of San Blas. A year later he returned to Weimar as organist and violinist of the Court of the Duke Wilhelm Ernst. There he remained for the next seven years and became concertmaster of the Orchestra of the Court in 1714.
In Weimar he composed some 30 cantatas, including the famous cantata of funeral Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (c. 1707), also composed works for organ and harpsichord. Between 1717 and 1723, he served as choirmaster and director of Chamber music at the Court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. During this period he wrote mainly secular music for instrumental ensembles and solo instruments. He also composed books of music for his wife and children to study the keyboard technique and the art of music in general. These books include the well-tempered Clavier (I, 1712;) II, 1742), inventions (1722-1723) and the Orgelbuchlein (little book for organ, 1713-1717).
After a year of the death of his wife in 1720, he married Anna Magdalena Wilcken, singer and daughter of a court musician who bore him thirteen children, in addition to the seven who had had with his former wife. In 1723 he settled in Leipzig, a city where already lived until his death.
His position as musical director and head of the choir in the Church of Santo Tomás and the ecclesiastical school did not satisfy him by continuing disputes with members of the City Council. 202 cantatas that have left us of the 295 he wrote, include the Cantata of the Ascension and the Christmas Oratorio, the latter consisting of six cantatas. The passion according to St. John and The St Matthew passion is also wrote during his stay in Leipzig, as well as its mass in b minor. Keyboard works composed during this period include the famous Goldberg Variations, the second book of the well-tempered Clavier and the art of Fugue, formed by 16 leaks and four cannons, all based on the same theme.
Johann Sebastian Bach began to become blind in the last year of his life, dying in Leipzig July 28, 1750, after undergoing a failed eye operation. He left his influence on musicians as Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Chopin.