Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Vernon Duke (1903-1969)
Paul Creston (1906-1985)
Thelonious Monk (1917-1982)
Gloria Coates (1938)
Sir Willard White (1946)
John Prine (1946)
Steve Martland (1959)
Evgeny Kissin (1971)
and
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721)
Harold Pinter (1930-2008)
And from The Writer's Almanac:
It’s the birthday of the composer Vernon Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky,
in Parafianovo, Belarus (1903). He was a talented classical musician,
educated at an elite conservatory, but his family fled Russia after the
revolution and he wound up playing piano in cafés in Constantinople (now
Istanbul). From there, his family rode steerage class on a ship to
America, went through Ellis Island, and ended up in New York in 1921.
There the teenage Dukelsky met George Gershwin, who was only a few years
older, and the two became good friends. Dukelsky played Gershwin what
he described as “an extremely cerebral piano sonata,” and Gershwin, who
was also trained in classical music, suggested this: “There’s no money
in that kind of stuff, and no heart in it, either. Try to write some
real popular tunes — and don’t be scared about going low-brow. They will
open you up.” He also suggested that Dukelsky shorten his name, as he
himself had done — Gershowitz to Gershwin. So Vladimir Dukelsky came up
with the name Vernon Duke, but he didn’t use it for a while.
First, he went to Paris. There, he met and impressed the great ballet
impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Dukelsky wrote later about their first
meeting — that Diaghilev had drawled: “‘Ah, a good-looking boy. That in
itself is most unusual. Composers are seldom good-looking; neither
Stravinsky nor Prokofiev ever won any beauty prizes. How old are you?’ I
told him I was 20. ‘That’s encouraging, too. I don’t like young men
over 25.’” And so Diaghilev commissioned him to write a ballet, and he
wrote Zephire et Flore, with sets by Georges Braque, choreography by
Léonide Massine, and costumes by Coco Chanel. It got a great reception,
and Dukelsky was taken in by the not-quite-as-good-looking Stravinsky
and Prokofiev. For a few years he divided his time between Paris, where
he continued to write classical music, and London, where he wrote show
tunes and used the name Vernon Duke. Then in 1929, he decided to go back
to America, and he wrote some of the biggest hits of the 1930s — “April
in Paris” (1932), “Autumn in New York” (1934), “I Can’t Get Started”
(1936), and “Taking a Chance on Love” (1940). And he wrote the music for
the Broadway show and film Cabin in the Sky (1940). By that time, he
had become an American citizen and officially changed his name to Vernon
Duke.
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