The Arts on Stamps of the World — December 11

An Arts Fuse regular feature: the arts on stamps of the world.

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By Doug Briscoe

It’s Hector Berlioz’s birthday today. He came into the world on December 11, 1804 and left it on March 8, 1869. The first stamp to honor Berlioz was issued by France in 1936 (upper left). The two adjacent ones were printed by Monaco and Belgium for the bicentenary in 2003. In case you missed them, we just last week displayed stamps for the anniversaries of the Requiem and The Damnation of Faust.

Two great 20th-century writers—both of whom lived into the 21st, both of whom were courageous champions of democracy, and both of whom were awarded the Nobel Prize—also share this December 11 birthday, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) and Naguib Mahfouz. Solzhenitsyn’s story, I think, is well enough known (his Nobel Prize dates from 1970). The Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz (December 11, 1911 – August 30, 2006) was a few years older and a good bit more prolific: there are 34 novels, five plays, over 350 short stories, and dozens of screenplays. He was born into a family of devout Muslims, an unlikely breeding ground, as Mahfouz himself commented, for an artist. He studied philosophy for a couple of years before turning to journalism. Much of his professional life was spent as a civil servant. Mahfouz was at one and the same time an Egyptian nationalist, a socialist, a democrat, and a firm opponent of Islamic extremism. He supported Anwar Sadat’s 1978 peace treaty with Israel, as a result of which his books were banned in Arab countries (until he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, the only Arab to have done so), and came to Salman Rushdie’s defense, calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a terrorist and signing a public document condemning murder. A fanatic assaulted him outside his home in 1994, stabbing him in the neck and causing extensive nerve damage. Interestingly, Mahfouz avoided marriage in his younger years because he was apprehensive that married life would prove an obstacle to his creative life. He did marry (a Coptic Orthodox woman) in 1954, when he was 43. They had two daughters. Mahfouz’s most famous work, which I still haven’t read, though it’s been on the shelf for years—you know how it is—is the trilogy (the Cairo Trilogy) consisting of the novels Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, names reflecting the neighborhoods where the author grew up. Naguib Mahfouz was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.

The Carniolan (Slovenian) playwright and historian Anton Linhart (11 December 1756 – 14/15 July 1795) was a pioneer of Slovene literature, author of the first play, a comedy, in the language. Like Mahfouz, he worked in the civil service, in his case as an archivist, school commissioner, and secretary. His first book was actually a poetry collection, which, like his second literary outing, a tragic play, was written in German. He also adapted Beaumarchais’s famous comedy The Marriage of Figaro into Slovenian. Moreover, he wrote a two-volume Essay on the History of Carniola and Other Austrian South Slavs (1788, 1791), an early effort to recognize the Slovenes as a distinct body of people.

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The German intellectual Carl Friedrich Zelter (11 December 1758 – 15 May 1832) is probably best known for having been the teacher of the boy Mendelssohn and instilling into him his own love of the music of Bach, which had historic consequences. Zelter also taught Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny along with Meyerbeer and Otto Nicolai and was himself a composer of a viola concerto, a number of cantatas, and about 200 songs (an album of these was recorded by Fischer-Dieskau). A good friend of Goethe, Zelter wrote a biography of the composer Johann Friedrich Fasch and was also a master bricklayer!

We remain in the German-speaking world for Joseph Mohr (December 11, 1792 – December 4, 1848), the Catholic priest who wrote the words to “Silent Night” (“Stille Nacht“) in 1816. Two years later his friend Franz Gruber added the music. In Austria, it is a tradition that the carol should not be publicly performed before Christmas Eve. (Good idea.) Quite recently, in 2006, it was found that Mohr and Gruber had collaborated on another piece, a Te Deum. If you visit the Waggerl Museum in Wagrain (south of Salzburg, Mohr’s birthplace), you can hear it.

Today is also the birthday of the French poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset (1810 – 2 May 1857). He was a lover of George Sand before Chopin was, and two recent French movies, both based on Musset’s autobiography, have been made about the affair: Children of the Century (1999) and Confession of a Child of the Century (2012, with Juliette Binoche). Quite a number of musical works owe their existence to Musset’s writings, including operas by Bizet (Djamileh), Ethel Smyth, Daniel-Lesur, and Sylvano Bussotti. The short-lived Belgian composer Guillaume Lekeu planned to make an opera of Musset’s 1835 play La Quenouille de Barberine. Musset’s poems were made into songs by (among many others) Berlioz and Franck (whose birthdays we celebrated today and yesterday), Debussy, Gounod, Massenet, Delibes, Dukas, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, and Delius!

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Italian composer Juan Aberle was born Giovanni Enrico Aberle Sforza in Naples in 1846. He entered the Neapolitan Conservatory at the age of 11 and, on graduation, went to New York as an opera director. During a tour of Latin America he took up residence in Guatemala City, where he established a philharmonic society and a music conservatory, which he directed from 1873 to 1879. He then moved on to El Salvador, where he founded another music school and wrote the Himno Nacional de El Salvador, officially adopted as the national anthem in 1953. Aberle’s preferred instrument was the piano, and he wrote many opera transcriptions and an abundance of chamber music. He died on February 28, 1930.

Mieczysław Karłowicz (m’yeh-CHEE-swahf kar-WO-vitch, 1876 – 8 February 1909) was a gifted Polish composer. His small output includes a “Rebirth” Symphony, a fine Violin Concerto, and several tone poems, along with a number of songs. Some of his music was lost in World War II. He studied conducting with Arthur Nikisch and was an enthusiastic amateur photographer. He was killed in an avalanche while skiing in the Tatra mountains in 1909, aged 32.

The Indian (Tamil) writer Subramania Bharati (11 December 1882 – 11 September 1921) also died before he was 40. He is said to have learned 32 languages (29 Indian and three others). Bharati was a master of modern Tamil poetry who started out as a journalist for a variety of newspapers. A member of the Indian National Congress, he was sought for arrest by the British in 1908 and fled to Pondicherry, remaining there until 1918. It was there that he wrote three of his most highly regarded works, “Kuyil Pattu” (“Song of Kuyil”?), “Panchali Sapatham” (“Panchali’s Pledge”), and “Kannan Pattu” (“Song of Kannan”?). Bharati also translated many works, including the Vedic hymns and the Bhagavat Gita, to Tamil. As soon as he reentered India in November 1918 he was arrested, and although he served only a few weeks (Annie Besant helped get him out), the incarceration affected his health. After being struck by an elephant two years later, he was unable to recover fully and died after a few months.

Swedish poet and lyricist Nils Ferlin (December 11, 1898 – October 21, 1961) was the son of a man who started his own newspaper but died the next year, when Nils was eleven. He acted with an itinerant theater company in his teens. Ferlin, like Birger Sjöberg, began his literary career writing the lyrics for songs in revues. Some of these became very popular, such that a number of statues of Nils Ferlin exist around the country. This one in Filipstad was chosen to illustrate the stamp.

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While Ferlin’s popularity rang throughout Sweden, that of Carlos Gardel (11 December 1890 – 24 June 1935) was broadly international. To begin with he was born in France (as Charles Romuald Gardès) to an unwed mother. When he was two, she took him by ship to Buenos Aires. He sang in bars and at private parties until achieving a hit with “Mi noche triste” in 1917. He toured extensively, first through Latin America, then in Paris, New York, Barcelona, and Madrid to great acclaim. He appeared in a few French and American films, but he is best remembered as a composer and singer of tangos. Gardel was killed in a airplane crash in Medellín with his lyricist partner Alfredo Le Pera and a number of other members of his circle. Three of the five Gardel stamps come from Argentina, one from the US (a 2011 issue from a set devoted to “Latin Music Legends”), and one from Uruguay. (At one point Gardel claimed to have been born in Uruguay.)

Let’s turn next to another Latin American musician and composer, Dámaso Pérez Prado (December 11, 1916 – September 14, 1989), a Cuban bandleader, singer, and keyboard artist. (He, too, made some appearances in movies.) Just as Carlos Gardel is so closely associated with the tango, Pérez Prado has been called the King of the Mambo. He was a student of classical piano in childhood, playing in local clubs in his youth. He moved to Mexico in 1949 (he would become a citizen in 1980) and established his own band. The next year one of his tunes was brought by arranger Sonny Burke to the United States as “Mambo Jambo”. This became a hit and led to a US tour. Another international hit was “Patricia” (1958).

Born in Cherbourg, Jean Marais (11 December 1913 – 8 November 1998) was best known as a film actor, but he also wrote and directed and worked as a sculptor. (Just Google “Jean Marais sculpture” for a sampling.) At 19 his striking good looks were noticed by the filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier, who bought one of his paintings and cast him in two films. Marais subsequently became the lover and a lifelong friend of Jean Cocteau, notably appearing in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orphée (1949). In the 1950s, Marais became a swashbuckling movie hero who did his own stunts and earned great popularity in France. Marais’s story, as told in his autobiography, L’Histoire de ma vie (1975), was a major inspiration for François Truffaut’s film The Last Metro (1980).

Greek folk singer and songwriter Grigoris Bithikotsis (December 11, 1922 – April 7, 2005) was born in Athens to a poor family. He was interested in music from early childhood and managed to get his hands on a bouzouki as soon as he could afford one, but he had to practice in secret on account of his father’s distaste for the style of music, rembetiko, that Grigoris favored. He met Mikis Theodorakis in 1959 and collaborated on producing folk songs. Bithikotsis composed over 80 songs of his own.

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We return to Cuba for filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (December 11, 1928 – April 16, 1996). By contrast with Bithikotsis, his birth in Havana was into a well-to-do family of progressives. He earned a law degree before studying film in Rome, his graduation in 1953 coinciding with the appearance of Italian Neorealism. Back in Havana he co-founded the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in 1959. He was a strong supporter of the Revolution but not an uncritical one. The first Cuban film to be shown in the US after the Revolution was Gutiérrez’s Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) (1968). He wrote and directed features, documentaries, and shorts.

Time to salute another chess Grandmaster, Viswanathan Anand (born 11 December 1969). He was India’s first grandmaster in 1988 and was World Champion from 2000 to 2002 and again from 2007 to 2013, when he lost to current champion Magnus Carlsen.

Australian painter Brian Dunlop was born at some point in 1938—I wasn’t able to find out exactly when—and died on 11 December 2009. Born in Sydney, he painted there and around the world: Italy, Greece, Morocco, and India. Dunlop specialized in still life and portraits of public figures, including Queen Elizabeth II, whom he painted in 1984 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the founding of Victoria. That portrait is reproduced on the stamp.

The first Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig was constructed within an existing cloth merchants’ structure in 1781. The hall was replaced by a new building that opened on this date in 1884. It is that building, designed by Walter Gropius’s great-uncle Martin, that is depicted on this East German stamp honoring Mendelssohn from 1959. The house had been destroyed in the fire bombings of World War II. The current Gewandhaus dates from 1981.

Others born on this date include one of the titans of American music, Elliott Carter (1908 – November 5, 2012) and two major American literary figures, Grace Paley (1922 – August 22, 2007), and Thomas McGuane (born 1939).


A graduate of the University of Massachusetts with a B.A. in English, Doug Briscoe worked in Boston classical music radio, at WCRB, WGBH, and WBUR, for about 25 years, beginning in 1977. He has the curious distinction of having succeeded Robert J. Lurtsema twice, first as host of WGBH’s weekday morning classical music program in 1993, then as host of the weekend program when Robert J.’s health failed in 2000. Doug also wrote liner notes for several of the late Gunther Schuller’s GM Recordings releases as well as program notes for the Boston Classical Orchestra. For the past few years he’s been posting a Facebook “blog” of classical music on stamps of the world, which has now been expanded to encompass all the arts for The Arts Fuse.

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