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Anna Haag
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
There is also version.
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Harriet Straub
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Lilian Harvey
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born January 22, 1897, Meriden, Connecticut
died May 25, 1981, Baltimore, Maryland
US-American singer, artistic director of Baltimore Opera Company
120th birthday January 22, 2017
“Che peccato...che peccato non ho sentito questa voce primo!” (What a pity I’ve never heard this voice before) Puccini uttered these words upon hearing soprano Rosa Ponselle sing near the end of his life in 1924. The American singer who inspired these words of praise experienced a most remarkable “rags-to-riches” career.
Born Rosa Ponzillo, the daughter of Italian immigrants, she spent her childhood in Meriden, Connecticut where her family owned a bakery and grocery. She hated school, but soon found joy in music, first by imitating her older sister Carmela’s piano playing and singing. Young Rosa’s voice soon attracted local attention and her first jobs, demonstrating sheet music at a dime store, then singing between features in local movie theaters, and finally at age 16 moving to New Haven to entertain at a popular restaurant. In 1915 Rosa joined Carmela in New York for a popular sister act in vaudeville. While on strike for more pay, Rosa auditioned for the New York…read more
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Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Born 21 October 1884 in Gelsenkirchen
Died 22 January 1957 in Bad Reichenhall
German cabaret performer and singer
60th anniversary of death on 22 January 2017
Berlin, 1913, in the Linden Cabaret: Head of flaming red hair tipped slightly back, one eyebrow mockingly raised, wearing perhaps a favored gentleman’s tie with her simple blouse – Claire Waldoff sings the song that will become her best-known song, her trademark. Kurt Tucholsky describes her appearance: “Smoothly, mewlingly and innocently she first sings a bunch of things, “if and how and where” – and then suddenly her voice bellows out andante above the heads of the laughing audience and through the cigar smoke and the noise: ‘Hermann heest a ….’ (His name is Hermann …) And once again, softer: ‘Hermann-heest-a…’ And dying away: ‘Hermann-heest-a…’ And on it goes, how he dances and snores and ‘selbst noch im Traume nach mir quäst er… Hermann heest a…!’ (how even in his dream he whines for me). And this piano is so comically studied, so inadequate to the bawling voice that one is stunned. How does she get that piano, that soprano out of herself? A soprano that’s so high that…read more
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Maria Leitner
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born on December 8, 1941 in Berlin
died on January 20, 1992 in Hannover
German art historian, critic and curator of exhibitions; director of the Kunstverein Hannover from 1976–1989
Katrin Sello, a committed and unconventional curator of art exhibitions, set new standards in art and had in her 13 years as the director of the Kunstverein Hannover a formative influence on Lower Saxony's art scene. Those who knew her were impressed not only by her personality, her brilliant intellect, and her sound knowledge of art history, theater and literature, but also by her ability to present the most difficult topics with utmost precision.
For the daughter of the photographer and journalist Ingeborg Sello and the well-known art critic Gottfried Sello, encounters with art and artists were commonplace from childhood onward. Katrin Sello wrote that she was "born into the light of a Prussian winter" in Berlin in 1941. After World War II she and her family moved to Hamburg. She attended university in Munich and Hamburg, transferring in 1964 to Berlin to continue her study of art history, German, theater and philosophy.
Here she became an ardent political activist, and by…read more
