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BELA
(BAY-luh)
1.
Bela Lugosi – actor 2. Bela Bartok – composer 3.
Bela Karolyi – gymnastics coach 4. Bela Fleck –
banjo player Common
clues: Gymnastics coach Karolyi; Dracula portrayer Lugosi; Lugosi
portrayed in "Ed Wood"; Composer Bartok; Bartok or
Lugosi; First name in horror; Mary Lou's coach; Banjoist
Fleck Crossword
puzzle frequency:
5 times a year Frequency
in English language:
66095 / 86800 Video: Sleeping
in a Haunted House
(Bela Lugosi) Audio: Kunstder
Fuge
(Bela Bartok) News: The
Banjo Man
“We
would walk over the names of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and
Bela Lugosi, never, ever thinking that our names would ever be on
the Walk of Fame, ... That is really quite a privilege to be
here.”
~ Alice Cooper
Béla
Lugosi was the stage name of actor Béla Ferenc Dezso
Blasko (October 20, 1882–August 16, 1956).
He was born in Lugos, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary (now Lugoj,
Romania), the youngest of four children of a banker. He is best
known for his portrayal of Dracula in the American Broadway stage
production, and subsequent film, of Bram Stoker's classic vampire
story.
On
arrival in America, Lugosi worked for some time as a laborer,
then returned to the theater within the Hungarian-American
community. He was spotted there and approached to star in a play
adapted by John Balderston from Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. The
production was very successful. Despite his excellent notices in
the title role, Lugosi had to campaign vigorously for the chance
to repeat his stage success in Tod Browning's movie version of
Dracula (1931), produced by Universal Pictures. (A persistent
rumor asserts that silent-film actor Lon Chaney, Sr. was
originally scheduled for this film role, and that Lugosi was
chosen only due to Chaney's death. This rumor has been etablished
as incorrect. Chaney was under long-term contract to
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and his home studio refused to release him
to Universal for this project. Further, although Chaney and
Browning had worked together on several projects, Browning was
only a last-minute choice to direct the movie version of Dracula:
this film was not a long-time pet project of Tod Browning,
despite some claims to the contrary.)
Following
the success of Dracula (1931), Lugosi received a studio contract
with Universal.
After
Universal changed management in 1936, he found himself consigned,
along with their entire approach to horror films, to Universal's
b-film unit, at times in small roles where he was obviously used
for "name value" only. In the early 1940s, Universal
did not renew its contract with Lugosi, and he ended up having to
contract with the poverty row company Monogram Pictures, where he
received star billing in a succession of horror, psycho and
mystery B-films produced by Sam Katzman.
Lugosi
died of a drug-related heart attack on August 16, 1956 while
sitting in a chair in his Los Angeles home. He was 73. The script
for Final Curtain, written by Ed Wood, was in his lap. (His role
in this film was later given to Kenne Duncan, and shots from that
production made their way into Wood's Night of the Ghouls, a
sequel of sorts to "Bride of the Monster".)
Truth
being sometimes stranger than fiction , Bela Lugosi was buried in
his full Dracula costume, as per the request in his will, in the
Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
One
of Lugosi's most infamous roles was in a movie released after he
was dead. Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space features footage of
Lugosi interspersed with a double who looks nothing like him.
Wood had taken a few minutes of silent footage of Lugosi, in his
Dracula cape, for a planned vampire picture but was unable to
find financing for the project. When he later conceived of Plan
9, Wood wrote the script to incorporate the Lugosi footage and
hired his wife's chiropractor to double for Lugosi in additional
shots. The "double" can easily be spotted by the fact
that he looks nothing like Lugosi and covers his face with his
cape in every shot.
The
pseudo-biographical film Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994) is a
sentimental interpretation of the relationship between Lugosi and
Wood. Lugosi is played by Martin Landau in a good-natured and
sometimes moving interpretation for which Landau received an
Academy Award for best supporting actor. Lugosi's son, Bela
Lugosi, Jr. has stated that Wood was more exploitative and
cynical than would appear from Burton's film.
Contrary
to Burton's film, Lugosi did not receive top billing for Plan 9.
Instead he was listed as a guest-star, below Tor Johnson, Vampira
and Kenne Duncan.
***
Béla
Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881 –
September 26, 1945) was a composer, pianist and collector of East
European folk music.
Bartók was one of the founders of the field of
ethnomusicology, the study of folk music and the music of
non-Western cultures.
Bartók
grew up in the Greater Hungary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
which was partitioned by the Treaty of Trianon after World War I.
His birthplace, Nagyszentmiklós (Great St Nicholas),
became Sânnicolau Mare, Romania. After his father died in
1888, Béla's mother, Paula, took her family to live in
Vinogradiv (Hungarian: Nagyszöllös, now in Ukraine),
and then to Prešporok (Hungarian: Pozsony, now Bratislava)
in her native Slovakia. When Czechoslovakia was created in 1918
Béla and his mother found themselves on opposite sides of
a border.
Upon
discovering Magyar peasant folk song, not the gypsy music of
Liszt, which Bartók regarded as true Hungarian folk music,
he began to incorporate folk songs into his own compositions and
write original folk-like tunes, as well as frequently using
folksy rhythmic figures.
It
was the music of Richard Strauss, whom he met at the Budapest
premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902, that had most
influence. This new style emerged over the next few years. Bartók
was building a career for himself as a pianist, when in 1907, he
landed a job as piano professor at the Royal Academy. This
allowed him to stay in Hungary rather than having to tour Europe
as a pianist, and also allowed him to collect more folk songs,
notably in Transylvania. Meanwhile his music was beginning to be
influenced by this activity and by the music of Claude Debussy
that Kodály had brought back from Paris. His large scale
orchestral works were still in the manner of Johannes Brahms or
Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces
which show his growing interest in folk music. Probably the first
piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String
Quartet No. 1 (1908), which has several folk-like elements in it.
In
1909, Bartók married Márta Ziegler. Their son, Béla
Jr., was born in 1910.
In
1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera,
Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to his wife, Márta. He
entered it for a prize awarded by the Hungarian Fine Arts
Commission, but they said it was unplayable, and rejected it out
of hand. The opera remained unperformed until 1918, when Bartók
was pressured by the government to remove the name of the
librettist, Béla Balázs, from the program on
account of his political views. Bartók refused, and
eventually withdrew the work. For the rest of his life, Bartók
did not feel greatly attached to the government or institutions
of Hungary, although his love affair with its folk music
continued.
After
his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission prize, Bartók
wrote very little for two or three years, preferring to
concentrate on folk music collecting and arranging (in Central
Europe, the Balkans, Algeria, and Turkey). However, the outbreak
of World War I forced him to stop these expeditions, and he
returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince in
1914–16 and the String Quartet No. 2 in 1915–17. It
was The Wooden Prince which gave him some degree of international
fame.
In
1940, after the outbreak of World War II, and the European
political situation worsened, Bartók was increasingly
tempted to flee Hungary.
Bartók
was strongly opposed to the Nazis. After they came into power in
Germany, he refused to concertize there and switched away from
his German publisher. His liberal views (as evident in the opera
Bluebeard's Castle and the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin) caused
him a great deal of trouble from right-wingers in Hungary.
Having
first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók
reluctantly moved to the USA with Ditta Pásztory. Péter
Bartók joined them in 1942 and later enlisted in the
United States Navy. Béla Bartók, Jr. remained in
Hungary.
Bartók
did not feel comfortable in the USA, and found it very difficult
to write. As well, he was not very well known in America and
there was little interest in his music. He and his wife Ditta
would give concerts; and for a while, they had a research grant
to work on a collection of Yugoslav folk songs, but their
finances were precarious, as was Bartók's health.
His
last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6, were it
not for Serge Koussevitsky commissioning him to write the
Concerto for Orchestra, which became Bartók's most popular
work and which was to ease his financial burdens. He was also
commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin to write Sonata for Solo Violin.
This seemed to reawaken his interest in composing, and he went on
to write his Piano Concerto No. 3, an airy and almost
neo-classical work, and begin work on his Viola Concerto.
Béla
Bartók died in New York City from leukemia. He left the
viola concerto unfinished at his death; it was later completed by
his pupil, Tibor Serly.
He
was interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York,
but after the fall of Hungarian communism in 1988, his remains
were transferred to Budapest, Hungary for a state funeral on July
7, 1988 with interment in Budapest's Farkasreti Cemetery.
***
Béla
Károlyi (born
September 13, 1942) is a Romanian gymnastics coach. Born in
Kolozsvár, Hungary (Cluj-Napoca, Romania since 1944), to
an ethnic Hungarian family, Károlyi and his wife, Márta,
also of Hungarian ancestry, emigrated to the United States in
1981 and both have dual citizenships for Romania and America. The
Károlyis have coached both United States and Romanian
Olympic teams to medal-winning success.
Among
the gymnasts Béla and Marta Károlyi have trained
are Nadia Comăneci (first 10), Mary Lou Retton, Betty Okino,
Kerri Strug, Teodora Ungureanu, Kim Zmeskal, Kristie Phillips and
Dominique Moceanu. In total, Károlyi has coached nine
Olympic champions, fifteen world champions, sixteen European
medalists and six U.S. national champions.
***
Béla
Anton Leoš Fleck (born July 10, 1958) is an American banjo
player. Widely acknowledged as one of the world's most innovative
and technically proficient banjo players, he is best known for
his work with the bands New Grass Revival and Béla Fleck
and the Flecktones.
Fleck
was born in New York City, and is named after Hungarian composer
Béla Bartók, and Czech composers Anton Dvorak and
Leoš Janáček. He was drawn to the banjo when
he first heard Earl Scruggs play the theme song for the
television show Beverly Hillbillies. He received his first banjo
at age fifteen from his grandfather in 1973. Later, Fleck
enrolled in New York City's High School of Music and Art where he
studied the French horn. He was a banjo student under Tony
Trischka.
Béla
Fleck and Victor Wooten formed Béla Fleck and the
Flecktones in 1988, along with keyboardist and harmonica player
Howard Levy and Wooten's percussionist brother Roy "Future
Man" Wooten, who played synthesizer-based percussion. They
recorded numerous albums, most notably Flight of the Cosmic
Hippo, their second album, which reached number one on the
Billboard Top Contemporary Jazz Albums chart, and found increased
popularity among jazz/rock/fusion fans. Levy left the group in
1992, making the band a trio until saxophonist Jeff Coffin joined
the group onstage in 1997. His first studio recording with the
band was their 1998 album Left of Cool. Coffin left the group in
2008 to replace Dave Matthews Band's saxophonist, LeRoi Moore.
Howard Levy rejoined the Flecktones in 2009. Béla Fleck
and the original Flecktones went on to record Rocket Science, and
tour in 2011.
In
August 2007 at Paladino's wedding, Fleck brought Abigail Washburn
as his "girlfriend," both playing in a scratch band
composed of wedding party members. In May 2009, the Bluegrass
Intelligencer satirized the upcoming "strategic marriage"
of Washburn and Fleck, joking that the couple promises to have a
"male heir" who will be the "Holy Banjo Emperor".
In February 2010, The Aspen Times reported that Washburn had
become Fleck's wife in the previous year. In a July 2010
interview, Washburn said she first met her husband in Nashville
at a square dance—she was dancing and he was playing.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bela
Lugosi",
“Bela
Karolyi”,
“Bela
Fleck”, and “Bela
Bartok”
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