IN: Robert James Fischer (March 9, 1943 - January 17, 2008) was an American chess grandmaster and the eleventh World Chess Champion. Many consider him to be the greatest chess player of all time. Bobby Fischer showed great skill in chess from an early age; at 13, he won a brilliancy known as "The Game of the Century". At age 14, he became the US Chess Champion, and at 15, he became both the youngest grandmaster up to that time and the youngest candidate for the World Championship.

Bobby Fischer was born at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, on March 9, 1943. His birth certificate listed his father as Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, also known as Gerardo Liebscher, a German biophysicist. His mother, Regina Wender Fischer, was a US citizen, born in Switzerland; her parents were Polish Jews. Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Regina became a teacher, registered nurse, and later a physician.  After graduating from college in her teens, Regina traveled to Germany to visit her brother. It was there she met geneticist and future Nobel Prize winner Hermann Joseph Muller, who persuaded her to move to Moscow to study medicine. She enrolled at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, where she met Hans-Gerhardt, whom she married in November 1933. In 1938, Hans-Gerhardt and Regina had a daughter, Joan Fischer. The reemergence of anti-Semitism under Stalin prompted Regina to go with Joan to Paris, where Regina became an English teacher. The threat of a German invasion led her and Joan to go to the United States in 1939. Hans-Gerhardt attempted to follow the pair but, at that time, his German citizenship barred him from entering the United States. Regina and Hans-Gerhardt had separated in Moscow, although they did not officially divorce until 1945.  At the time of her son's birth, Regina was "homeless" and shuttled to different jobs and schools around the country to support her family. She engaged in political activism, and raised both Bobby and Joan as a single parent.  In 1949, the family moved to Brooklyn, New York City, where she studied for her master's degree in nursing and subsequently began working in that field.
QUESTION: Did she get her degree?
IN: Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (Italian: [dZu'zeppe 'verdi]; 9 or 10 October 1813 - 27 January 1901) was an Italian opera composer. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, and developed a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Gioachino Rossini, whose works significantly influenced him. By his 30s, he had become one of the pre-eminent opera composers in history.

The writer Friedrich Schiller (four of whose plays were adapted as operas by Verdi) distinguished two types of artist in his 1795 essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin ranked Verdi in the 'naive' category--"They are not...self-conscious. They do not...stand aside to contemplate their creations and express their own feelings....They are able...if they have genius, to embody their vision fully." (The 'sentimentals' seek to recreate nature and natural feelings on their own terms--Berlin instances Wagner--"offering not peace, but a sword.") Verdi's operas are not written according to an aesthetic theory, or with a purpose to change the tastes of their audiences. In conversation with a German visitor in 1887 he is recorded as saying that, whilst "there was much to be admired in [Wagner's operas] Tannhauser and Lohengrin...in his recent operas [Wagner] seemed to be overstepping the bounds of what can be expressed in music. For him "philosophical" music was incomprehensible." Although Verdi's works belong, as Rosselli admits "to the most artificial of genres...[they] ring emotionally true: truth and directness make them exciting, often hugely so."  That is not to say his operas did not come as great innovations. What sounds to a modern listener as derivative of the bel canto, his first major success, Nabucco, came as a something entirely new. Never before had opera been so harmonically complex and direct. No longer was there the empty vocal display of the bel canto period composers. Granted, there is a significant amount of vocal fireworks, but they exist for the purpose of drama, not to show off singers. Aside from this, his use of the chorus was entirely new. Before Nabucco, an opera's chorus was limited to be only a background voice, another instrument. In Nabucco, this is abolished; he uses the chorus as character, to show the suffering and consensus of the people. The famous "Va, pensiero" is an example of this.  The first of his "big three" operas, Rigoletto, followed by La Traviata, and ending with Il Trovatore, also was revolutionary. In a letter to Rigoletto's librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, he says, "I conceived Rigoletto almost without arias, without finales but only an unending string of duets." And that it is. Rigoletto is one of, if not the earliest operas to abandon the traditional distinction between the sung aria, and the more speech-like recitative.  After these three operas, his works took an increasing amount of time to finish, were significantly longer, and more masterfully orchestrated.
QUESTION:
What were some other things he wrote?