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FAMOUS CATALANS |
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Architecture
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Antonio Gaudi
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The most famous Catalan master builder and architect.
Architectural style is described as Modernisme, the Spanish version of the Art Nouveau.
Gaudí was noted for his unconventional style of forms which are round and seeming organic.
The typical features are curved lines, irregular ground plans, sloping supports built with mortar, soft forms close to nature with subjects of the flora and fauna.
Broader preferences were roughs and colored ceramic tiles which he let flow as a design element into his buildings.
Gaudi declined the Gothic flying buttresses contemptuously as "crutches" and used sloping making pillars instead.
Gaudi developed his buildings during the making with outlines.
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Domenech de Montaner
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Architect of the Modernisme
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Painting
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Jaime Huguet
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Jaime Huguet (at 1414 to 1492) belongs to the most important painters of the 15th century in Catalonia. Several altar panels belong, such as Beweinung Christi (1450, Louvre, Paris) to his major works.
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Pablo Picasso
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A word to lose about him is well superfluous. If you are a fan, go to the Picasso museum in Barcelona.
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Salvador Dali
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One becomes seen the most important Surrealisten, he as one of the bigest masters of the 20th century. His painting shows him as one of the most creative artists of his century. His most frequent topic is the world of the room, the high, the fever and the religion; one often finds his wife again in his paintings.
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Joan Miro
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Juan Miró (1893-1983) born in Barcelona belongs to the most popular artists of the 20th century.
He found an inspiration source in the Catalan folk art. Miró then received further decisive suggestions in 1919 in Paris where he got to know Picasso and approached the cubism.
He went over, however, to the dissolution of the concrete already soon. His imaginary representations brought him into the proximity of the surrealism. His name also stood under the first surrealistic manifesto André Bretons in 1924. With inexhaustible formal imagination let Miró result from this time on in his mostly carefreely cheerful pictures a teeming world more abstractly and more surreally for forms. Miró is regarded as one of the classics of the modern age today. He died in Palma de Mallorca on December 25th, 1983.
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Francisco Ribalta
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The Catalan Francisco Ribalta (1565-1628) let himself be trained in the Escorial and founded an influential school in Valencia. To his trainees and employees his son belonged to Juan Ribalta (at 1596 to 1628). At first Francisco Ribalta still characterized an independent Spanish painting with his realism and chiaroscuro technology trained to Caravaggio, influenced by Fernández de Navarrete (at 1526 to 1579) and El Greco.
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Writer
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Josep Pla
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Writer and newsman who has written exclusively in Catalan. Among other things a biography over Salvador Dali.
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Manuel Vázquez Montelbán
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Manuel Vazquez Montalban was born in Barcelona in 1939. After the studies of the literature, philosophy and journalism, at first he worked as an editor for different magazines. Vazquez Montalban was lyricists, novel author, essayist, columnist, gourmet and inventor of the private detective Carvalho in crime thrillers as famous as "the birds in Bangkok". For his work he was honored with numerous international awards for literature. Manuel Vazquez Montalban died of a heart attack at the airport of Bangkok in 2003.
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Quim Monzó
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Well-known contemporary writer (the best of all worlds)
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Musician
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Jose Carreras
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At first chemistry studied Carreras, 1963 changed, however, to the song studies with Jaime Francisco Puigi and at the conservatory of Barcelona. He debuts 1970 at the Lieco, the opera house of his hometown in Verdis Nabucco. He won the Verdi competition in Busseto in 1971. He was then engaged at the Madrid opera and debuted with Montserrat Caballé in London in Donizettis Maria Stuart .
Numerous guest performances led him away to the New York city center Opera, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the opera of Chicago, the mead, Covent guards and to the Viennese State Opera as well as the Scala (1972). After his international breakthrough as a lyrical tenor further invitations result from Salzburg, Hamburg, Munich, Brussels, San Francisco, London and others.
In the middle of the eighties Carreras, increasing start to suffer from the consequences of a leukemia illness, return, however, to the opera stage in 1988 and also sing dramatic games.
In the context of the soccer world championship in 1990 the song trio forms the three tenors up together with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo.
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Enrique Granados y Campiña
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(1867-1916), Spanish composer and pianist, one of the most important representatives of the newer Spanish music. He was born in Catalonia in Lérida and studied in Barcelona with Felipe Pedrell. Granados lived in Barcelona as of 1889 and was working as concert pianist and teacher. For his most important works belong the twelve to the piano suite Goyescas (2 vols., 1912, 1914) which is inspired by works of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya Danzas españolas for the piano as well as the stage entertainments María Del Carmen (1898) and Goyescas (1916). The last-named work could not realize Granados because of the outbreak of the 1st World War in Paris any more. But the Metropolitan Opera asked at to put on the work. The composer was invited to New York and was present at the premiere in January 1916 which became a great success. Granados and his wife died on the return journey to Europe on board of the SS Sussex on March 24th, 1916 when the ship was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine.
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Montserrat Caballé
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She studied song in Barcelona and Milan and La bohemian world debuted 1956 in Basel as Mimi in Puccinis. From 1959 to 1962 she was engaged at the municipal theater Bremen and 1965 debuted as Margarethe in Gounods fist at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as through which she was confessed internationally. She has frequently also regularly appeared as a guest at festival (among others in Glyndebourne) and since 1971 at the Hamburg State Opera. Moreover, she is an esteemed concert singer.
Main emphases of her extensive repertoire form primarily the operas of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini, but also of Verdi and Puccini. Outstanding features of her lyrical voice are sensory beauty and an extraordinary piano.
She has discovered and promoted the tenor José Carreras.
She has been confessed by the song Barcelona the audience interested in rock music for the Olympic Games of Barcelona 1992. It is a piece out, taken from the album 1987 of the same name together with Freddie Mercury. The album was made due to an initiative of Freddie Mercury who was an admirer of hers. She asked Mercury to write a piece over her hometown Barcelona which was listed for the first time on May 29th, 1987 in Ibiza.
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Pablo Casals
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Pablo Casals (December 29th, 1876 in Vendrell, Catalonia (Spain); † 22. October 1973 in San Juan de Puerto Rico) got primarily world-famous as a cellist, however, worked as composer and conductor also.
Casals did worldwide concert tours as a cello virtuoso and played at times with Alfred Cortot (the piano) and Jacqueses Thibaud (violin) in a trio. After the end of the Spanish civil war Casals set up in Prades in the French Pyrenees and 1950 justified the festival there.
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Antonio Soler
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Soler, Antonio (1729-1783), Spanish composer and important successor of Domenico Scarlatti within the Spanish music for button instruments. Born in Olot (Catalonia), he became 1752 priests and at the same time an organist and choirmasters of the royal cloister of El Escorial. There he studied at Scarlatti (at that time composer at the Spanish court) and taught members of the Spanish royal family. Solers music shows influences both of Scarlatti and of the Spanish folk music. More than 400 works contains spiritual music (masses, motets, cantatas etc.), accompaniment for plays as well as organ and cembalo plants.
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Sport
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Juan Antonio Samaranch
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Real Juan Antonio Samaranch Torello, (*1920), Spanish sports functionary and diplomat. As a president of the international Olympic committee (IOC) he determined in his more than twenty years period of office from 1980 to 2001, the destiny of the Olympic movement.
Samaranch was born in Barcelona on July 17th, 1920
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Country, People, Travel-Infos
