Curated playlist
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
- VoltaireFrench writer, historian, and philosopher (1694–1778)
- Giuseppe VerdiGiuseppe Verdi was an intensely private man who liked to claim he had risen from illiterate peasants. The truth was tidier and less romantic. Both his parents came from families of small landowners and traders. His father, listed in the…
- James ChadwickIn February 1932, after only about two weeks at the laboratory bench, James Chadwick sent a letter to the journal Nature with a deliberately tentative title: "Possible Existence of a Neutron." Three months later, the hedging was gone. His…
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Under the case for marriage he wrote that a wife would be a "constant companion and a friend in old…
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table". Critics called the image shocking and offensive. Georgian…
- Eugène IonescoEugène Ionesco sat down at age 40 to learn English from a textbook, and what came out of that exercise was not a language skill but a theatrical revolution. The Assimil method asked him to copy whole sentences and memorize them. When he…
- Gioachino RossiniGioachino Rossini wrote his last opera while still in his thirties, then stopped composing operas for the remaining 40 years of his life. He was born on the 29th of February 1792, a leap day, in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast that…
- Johannes BrahmsJohannes Brahms once interrupted a friend's toast in Berlin with five blunt words: "Quite right; here's Mozart's health." It was January 1896, near the end of a life spent measuring himself against the dead. He had been called the heir to…
- Eugène BurnoufEugène Burnouf died on the 28th of May 1852, the same year his translation of the Lotus Sutra finally appeared in print. He had spent his final years working on a text central to Buddhist tradition, and the book arrived just as he did not.…
- Robert KochRobert Koch announced the cause of tuberculosis before the German Physiological Society in Berlin on the 24th of March 1882. There was no particular reaction. Eminent scientists like Rudolf Virchow stayed skeptical, clinging to the idea…
- Felix MendelssohnFelix Mendelssohn was born on the 3rd of February 1809 in Hamburg, in the same house where, exactly one year later, the violinist Ferdinand David would be born. That coincidence would prove fitting: David would one day give the world…
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow published his first poem at age 13 in the Portland Gazette on the 17th of November, 1820. It was a patriotic four-stanza piece called "The Battle of Lovell's Pond", and almost nobody noticed. What followed across…
- Richard StraussRichard Strauss died on the 8th of September 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen with the words "dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung" on his lips. He was speaking to Alice, his Jewish daughter-in-law, the woman he had spent…
- Hermann HesseHermann Hesse died on the 9th of August 1962, aged 85, in Montagnola, Switzerland, and a memorial in The New York Times called his works largely inaccessible to American readers. Within a few years that judgment collapsed completely. By…
- Thomas CarlyleThomas Carlyle arrived at the University of Edinburgh in November 1809 by walking one hundred miles from his home village in Dumfriesshire. He was not yet fourteen years old. That solitary march set the tone for everything that followed: a…
- Erwin SchrödingerErwin Schrödinger was born on the 12th of August 1887 in Vienna, and by the time he died on the 4th of January 1961, he had left behind an equation that altered how humanity understands the fabric of reality. He had also coined a phrase -…
- Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem. At the stroke of noon, the entire State telegraph and telephone network of the Netherlands fell silent…
- Friedrich HayekFriedrich Hayek wrote on the 26th of October 1929, three days before the Wall Street crash, that there was no reason to expect a sudden collapse of the New York stock exchange. Decades later, the Nobel committee would praise him as one of…
- August Wilhelm SchlegelAugust Wilhelm Schlegel died in Bonn in 1845, just three months before the unveiling of a monument he had personally organized in honour of Ludwig van Beethoven. That small gap tells you something essential about the man. He was always…
- Max PlanckMax Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on the 23rd of April 1858 in Kiel, and he would go on to crack open one of the most stubborn problems in all of physics by proposing an idea that, at the time, he himself could barely believe. That…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years. He proved that a regular seventeen-sided polygon, the heptadecagon, could be drawn with nothing…
- Jacob GrimmJacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most wide-ranging scholarly legacy in the history of the German language. His father Philipp,…
- Rudolf BultmannRudolf Bultmann once told his students that it did not matter what happened throughout Jesus's life. To Bultmann, only that Jesus existed, preached, and died by crucifixion mattered. He called this the difference between the "thatness" and…
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt stood at the top of the volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador in 1802 at 19,286 feet above sea level, higher than any Westerner had ever climbed. He was gasping for air, bleeding from his gums, and still taking measurements.…
- Sofia GubaidulinaSofia Gubaidulina was born on the 24th of October 1931 in Chistopol, a small town in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. She was five years old when she discovered music, and from that first encounter she never separated it…
- Walter BurkertWalter Burkert was born on the 2nd of February 1931 in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and over the course of a long career he changed how the modern world thinks about Greek religion. By the time he died in Zurich on the 11th of March 2015, he…
- Jan AssmannJan Assmann spent decades working through one of the most charged questions in the study of religion: whether the birth of monotheism was not a triumph of spiritual insight but an act of violence against an older, more tolerant way of…
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned his findings into equations, called him a mathematician of a very high order, one…
- Elias LönnrotElias Lönnrot was born on the 9th of April 1802 in Sammatti, a small village in the province of Uusimaa, in what was then the Swedish-controlled territory of Finland. He would go on to become a physician, linguist, poet, philosopher,…
- Karl JaspersKarl Jaspers died on the 26th of February 1969 -- his wife Gertrud's 90th birthday. That detail is small, but it says something. The two of them had survived the Nazi years together, hiding in Heidelberg while friends quietly kept them…
- George F. KennanGeorge Frost Kennan sent a telegram from Moscow on the 22nd of February, 1946, that would reshape American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. It ran to 5,363 words. The Treasury Department had asked the State Department…
- Horace VernetHorace Vernet was born on the 30th of June 1789 inside the Paris Louvre itself, while his parents sheltered there during the French Revolution. That detail alone tells you something about the world he entered. He came from a dynasty of…
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique IngresJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres died at eighty-six on the 14th of January 1867, in his apartment on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, and his studio held more than four thousand drawings. He left them all to the city of Montauban, the southern…
- Pieter GeylPieter Geyl spent thirteen months inside Buchenwald concentration camp with a half-finished argument in his pocket. The Dutch historian had written an article about Napoleon just before the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940.…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth. It was a conflict he never entirely resolved, and it drove him to build an entirely new picture of…
- Vasily ZhukovskyVasily Zhukovsky composed the words that Russians sang as their national anthem for decades, yet he spent much of his career translating other people's poems. Born in 1783 in the village of Mishenskoe in the Tula Governorate, he was the…
- Theodor MommsenTheodor Mommsen stood up at a formal banquet at the University of Berlin in 1892, and the entire room rose with him. Mark Twain was there, seated at the head table among roughly twenty eminent professors, and he watched as the guards'…
- Ronald SymeRonald Syme published The Roman Revolution in 1939, just as fascism was tightening its grip on Europe, and the book hit the scholarly world like nothing before it. It argued that Augustus, Rome's first emperor, was not a restorer of…
- Lawrence Alma-TademaLawrence Alma-Tadema was born on the 8th of January 1836 in Dronryp, a village in the Dutch province of Friesland, and died one of the most celebrated and wealthy painters in the Victorian world. By the time he was knighted in 1899, his…
- Max MüllerMax Müller was born on the 6th of December 1823 in Dessau, the son of Wilhelm Müller, a lyric poet whose verse Franz Schubert had set to music in those celebrated song-cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. His godfather was Carl…
- John C. FrémontJohn Charles Frémont was born on the 21st of January 1813, the illegitimate son of a French-Canadian schoolteacher and a Virginia planter's daughter who had fled her elderly husband. He died destitute in New York City in 1890. Between…
- Paul HindemithPaul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on the 16th of November 1895, and within two decades he would be playing concertmaster at the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. He was a composer, yes, but also a theorist, a teacher, a violist, a…
- Paul DelarochePaul Delaroche painted a man being led to his death while an archbishop stretched his arms from a prison window to bless him. No heroic light bathed the scene. No flattering angle softened the horror. Delaroche wanted you to feel the…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…
- Santiago Ramón y CajalSantiago Ramón y Cajal was once imprisoned at the age of eleven for destroying a neighbor's yard gate with a homemade cannon. That was 1863, in the small Spanish town of Petilla de Aragón, Navarre. His father responded by apprenticing the…
- Walther NernstWalther Nernst drove a car with a cylinder of nitrous oxide bolted to it, injected directly into the carburetor for extra power. This was not a stunt. It was the natural behavior of a man who sold a lightbulb patent for one million marks…
- Anton RubinsteinAnton Rubinstein once told a young Josef Hofmann, "When you are as old as I am, you may do as I do. If you can." That final dare captures the man entirely. Rubinstein was a Russian pianist who moved audiences to go home limp, who played…