Born Today! 19.02.2024

Charles-Hubert Gervais (19 February 1671 – 14 January 1744) was a French composer of the Baroque era. The son of a valet to King Louis XIV's brother, Monsieur, Gervais was born at the Palais Royal in Paris and probably educated by Monsieur's musical intendants, Jean Granouillet de Sablières and Charles Lalouette. He worked as a musician for the Duc de Chartres, the future regent of France. In 1701, he married Françoise du Vivier (she died in 1723). In 1721 he was named sous-maître de musique at the Chapelle royale along with André Campra, Nicolas Bernier and Michel Richard Delalande (who had previously held the post alone). Gervais composed sacred music, 42 grand motets, 7 petits motets, cantatas, and operas, including two tragédies en musique.

Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini (, also US: , Italian: [riˈdɔlfo luˈiːdʒi bokkeˈriːni] ; 19 February 1743 – 28 May 1805) was an Italian composer and cellist of the Classical era whose music retained a courtly and galante style even while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. He is best known for a minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 (G 275), and the Cello Concerto in B flat major (G 482). The latter work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version. Boccherini's output also includes several guitar quintets. The final movement of the Guitar Quintet No. 4 in D (G 448) is a fandango, a lively Spanish dance.

Vojtěch Matyáš Jírovec (Adalbert Gyrowetz) (20 February 1763 – 19 March 1850) was a Bohemian composer. He mainly wrote instrumental works, with a great production of string quartets and symphonies; his operas and singspiele numbered more than 30, including Semiramide (1791), Der Augenarzt (1811), and Robert, oder Die Prüfung (1815).

Lauro Rossi (born in Macerata, 19 February 1810; died in Cremona, 5 May 1885), was an Italian composer, particularly of operas. There is no known connection with Luigi Rossi (1597–1653).

Felip Pedrell Sabaté (Spanish: Felipe) (19 February 1841 – 19 August 1922) was a Catalan composer, guitarist and musicologist.

Elfrida Andrée (19 February 1841 – 11 January 1929), was a Swedish organist, composer, and conductor. She was the sister of Swedish opera singer-soprano Fredrika Stenhammar.

Adelina Patti (19 February 1843 – 27 September 1919) was an Italian opera singer. At the height of her career, she was earning huge fees performing in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with her near contemporaries Jenny Lind and Thérèse Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history, owing to the purity and beauty of her lyrical voice and the unmatched quality of her bel canto technique. The composer Giuseppe Verdi, writing in 1877, described her as being perhaps the finest singer who had ever lived and a "stupendous artist". Verdi's admiration for Patti's talent was shared by numerous music critics and social commentators of her era.

Tobias Augustus Matthay (19 February 1858 – 15 December 1945) was an English pianist, teacher, and composer.

Tobias Augustus Matthay (19 February 1858 – 15 December 1945) was an English pianist, teacher, and composer.

Emánuel Moór (Hungarian pronunciation: [moːr]; 19 February 1863 – 20 October 1931) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and inventor of musical instruments. Moór was born in Kecskemét, Hungary, and studied in Prague, Vienna and Budapest. Between 1885 and 1897 he toured Europe as a soloist and ventured as far afield as the United States. His output amounted to 151 works including five operas, eight symphonies, four concertos for piano, four for violin, two for cello, a viola concerto and a harp concerto. Included in his works were also a triple concerto for violin, cello, and piano; chamber music; a requiem; and numerous lieder. He died, aged 68, in Chardonne, Switzerland. His best-known invention was the Emánuel Moór Pianoforte, which consisted of two keyboards lying one above each other and allowed, by means of a tracking device, one hand to play a spread of two octaves. The double keyboard pianoforte was promoted extensively in concerts throughout Europe and the United States by Moór's second wife, the British pianist Winifred Christie. In 1921, Marie de Jarowslawska-Tutundjian [de Vartavan] (18 May1887-20 November 1963) took a large part in the experiments with the Duplex-Coupler piano imagined by Emánuel Moór. Marie was a very talented pianist who had been playing in public since the age of eight in Brazil and had even had the privilege of playing in a duo with Paderewski Ignacy Jan Paderewski. She was married to the Armenian WWI hero and writer Levon Tutundjian [de Vartavan] and lived in Lausanne with him in Cornette de Bise. She taught at the Ribeaupierre Institute, a higher music school in Lausanne founded in 1915 by Mathilde and Émile de Ribeaupierre. The same year Emánuel Moór sparked a lively controversy in the world of music by presenting two revolutionary inventions in quick succession. First, "a giant violin, one and a half meters long, with five to six strings to reach the length of the cello, the bow being moved by a pedal". The possibility of his employment in the orchestra prompted ironic comments from a critic of the Lausanne Gazette. Marie, for her part, worked with Moor's wife, Winifred Christie, to operate the second invention, a piano with two keyboards, the lower keyboard of which has its raised white keys to allow chromatic glissando and a pedal intermediate coupling the two keyboards - not to mention an ingenious system which made it possible to imitate a harpsichord. Marie Tutundjian played with it on 3 November 1921 at the Palace of Montreux and at least once again on 16 November 1921 [La Musique dans le Canton de Vaud (1904-1938), p. 146. See pages 251, 252 on Marie Tutundjian/de Jarowslawska], but these trials, if they left a trace in music history were not repeated [Encyclopédie de la musique, 2e partie, vol. 3, p. 2080-2081]. On a scholarship from Winifred Christie Moór Timothy Baxter, then a student (later a professor) at The Royal Academy of Music, in 1964 wrote Six bagatelles for double Keyboard. The work was performed by Jeffery Harris on 24 August 1976 in the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford plus BBC broadcast about the same time. Jeffery Harris held the Winifred Christie Moór Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music before Timothy Baxter. The scholarship stopped, when Winifred Christie died after an accident in her home. Timothy Baxter has also written some arrangements for the instrument because of its interesting possibilities. The Six Bagatelles were later arranged for two pianos with a first performance in Arcueille during the Festival Erik Satie on 17 May 2013, the birthday of Erik Satie, played by Elsa Sorvari and Viktor Bogino. They also in 2013 played the work twice more, one of them in Paris. The Bagatelles have since been played a number of times in Denmark. They are published by Edition-S.dk and can be found on Timothy Baxter's CD from 2015 played by the pianists Anne Mette Stæhr and Ulrich Stærk. Maurice Ravel said that the Emánuel Moór Pianoforte produced the sounds he had really intended in some of his own works, if only it had been possible to write them for two hands playing on a standard piano. Anatoly Brandukov, dedicatee of Moór's Cello Sonata No. 2 in G major, Op. 55, introduced the composer to Pablo Casals. Casal's first meeting is recorded in nearly every biography about Casals. In his own words Casals said, "His music was overwhelming….and the more he played, the more convinced I became that he was a composer of the highest order. When he stopped, I said simply, ‘You are a genius.’" This meeting was the beginning of a long friendship between the two with Casals performing and premiering Moór's compositions, several of which were dedicated to Casals. For example, Casals gave four performances of the Cello Sonata No. 2 in G Major in December 1905 alone following his initial meeting with the composer earlier in the year. Casals's first noted performance of this sonata came during a Russian tour (pianist not noted) followed by two performances with Marie Panthès in Geneva and Lausanne and one performance in Paris with Alfred Cortot at the piano. Casals also championed other works by Moór, performing multiple sonatas, a concerto that Moór dedicated to him, a double cello concerto, and a triple concerto for piano trio with orchestra. Moór and Christie also collaborated on a book of technical exercises for the instrument.

Ferdinand Löwe (19 February 1865 – 6 January 1925) was an Austrian conductor.

Louis François Marie Aubert (19 February 1877 – 9 January 1968) was a French composer.

Donald Heins (19 February 1878 – 1 January 1949) was a Canadian violinist, violist, conductor, organist, composer, and music educator of English birth. He notably founded the first professional orchestra in Ottawa, the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra (no relation to the current orchestra of that name), in 1902, serving as its director until 1927. He also served in a variety of positions with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1927–1949, including concertmaster, principal violist, and assistant conductor. He was highly active as an educator, notably founding the instrumental music program at Ottawa's public school system and teaching on the faculties of the Canadian Conservatory of Music (1902–1927) and the Toronto Conservatory of Music (1927–1948). His compositions include several motets and anthems, some chamber music for string instruments, a small amount of orchestral music, the Saint Ursula Mass for female choir and small orchestra, and two short operettas, An Old Tortugas (1936) and Yellow Back (1939), both of which were commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Grace Mary Williams (19 February 1906 – 10 February 1977) was a Welsh composer, generally regarded as Wales's most notable female composer, and the first British woman to score a feature film.

Claude Pascal (Paris, February 19, 1921 – Paris, February 28, 2017) was a French composer.After studying at the Conservatoire de Paris, he obtained the 1945 Premier Prix de Rome for the cantata, La farce du contre Bandier. After a brief period as conductor of the Opéra-Comique, Pascal became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1952, a position he held until his retirement in 1987. From 1969 to 1979 he worked as a music critic for Le Figaro, and from 1983 to 1991 he was an expert on copyright issues at the Paris Court of Appeals.Pascal's extensive work as a composer includes practically every musical genre. The discography of his works consists of more than thirty CDs. The musical estate of Claude Pascal is archived at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

György Kurtág (Hungarian: [ˈɟørɟ ˈkurtaːɡ]; born 19 February 1926) is a Hungarian composer of contemporary classical music and pianist. According to Grove Music Online, with a style that draws on "Bartók, Webern and, to a lesser extent, Stravinsky, his work is characterized by compression in scale and forces, and by a particular immediacy of expression". In 2023 he was described as "one of the last living links to the defining postwar composers of the European avant-garde".He was an academic teacher of piano at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music from 1967, later also of chamber music, and taught until 1993.

Fabio Vacchi (pronounced [ˈfaːbjo ˈvakki]; born 19 February 1949) is an Italian composer.

Steve Nieve ( "naïve"; born Stephen John Nason, 21 February 1958) is an English musician and composer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, Nieve has been a member of Elvis Costello's backing bands the Attractions and the Imposters, as well as Madness. He has also experienced success as a prolific session musician, featured on a wide array of other artists' recordings. In 2003, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Elvis Costello and the Attractions.

Vitaliy Vladasovich Grachev or Vitaliy Vladasovych Grachov, known professionally as Vitas (Russian: Витас, IPA: [ˈvʲitəs]; stylised as VITAS), is a Russian singer. Vitas is known for his unique falsetto and his eclectic musical style, which incorporates elements of operatic pop, techno, dance, classical, jazz, and folk. Having achieved prominence through Russian television in the early 2000s, Vitas crossed into Asian markets in 2005. Much of his recognition outside Russia and Asia came in the 2010s, when songs such as "Opera #2" and "The 7th Element" (both from his 2001 debut album Philosophy of Miracle) and "Smile!" (from his 2002 album of the same name) achieved viral success; the unusual music videos for "Opera #2" and "The 7th Element" have been cited as the most prominent examples of this.Vitas has performed with entertainment labels such as Universal Music Group, and has toured extensively in several countries. He designs his own stage costumes, and employs a backing band named DIVA during live performances.