Buch

Buch (neuter), is the German word for book, but in the names of cities, villages or places it is usually a modification of the German word Buche (feminine; = beech). Many cities and villages carrying Buch, Puch, Pouch or Buoch in their name have a beech tree or beech leaves in their coat of arms.

The Buch (as in book) also goes back to the tree's name, originating from the Old High German buoh which refers to writing tablets made from beech wood.

Buch may refer to:

People

Geography

Buch (crater)

Buch is an old, worn crater that is located in the rugged southern highlands of the Moon. It lies to the northeast of the large crater Maurolycus, and the comparably sized crater Büsching is attached to the northeast rim.

The crater rim is slightly elongated in the northeastern direction, and forms an egg-shaped depression in the surface. The rim has been eroded by many lesser impacts so that the edge is rounded and worn down, and the crater forms only a low depression in the ground. Within the crater the floor is relatively flat and featureless, with no central peak at the midpoint. There is only a small craterlet near the northwest rim.

It has been noted (by Shoemaker and others) that the satellite crater Buch B is unusual in that it possesses both a dark halo of material around the rim and appears to have formed some dark rays. Early speculation was that this may be volcanic in nature, but it was later demonstrated to be a typical impact crater that was formed over a pocket of darker material.

Buch, Rhein-Hunsrück

Buch is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis (district) in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kastellaun, whose seat is in the like-named town.

Geography

Location

The municipality lies on a ridge in the Hunsrück between the deeply cut valleys of two local streams, the Wohnrother Bach and the Dünnbach at an elevation of some 400 m above sea level. The municipality’s centres (Ortsteile) of Buch and Mörz lie some 45 km southsouthwest of Koblenz and 4 km west of Kastellaun.

History

In 1052, Buch had its first documentary mention. In 1332, Louis the Bavarian acknowledged to Archbishop Baldwin of Trier all the holdings of the Archiepiscopal Foundation of Trier, among which were Balduinseck (castle) and Buch. Buch belonged to the Beltheim court. Until the late 15th century, it is known that there was a knightly family named “von Buch”. Beginning in 1794, Buch lay under French rule. In 1815 it was assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia at the Congress of Vienna. Since 1946, it has been part of the then newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The municipality in its current form came into being on 17 March 1974 through the amalgamation of the municipality of Buch with what was until then the self-administering municipality of Mörz.

Étienne Méhul

Étienne Nicolas Méhul (French: [meyl]; 22 June 1763 – 18 October 1817) was a French composer, "the most important opera composer in France during the Revolution." He was also the first composer to be called a "Romantic".

Life

Méhul was born at Givet in Ardennes to Jean-François Méhul, a wine merchant, and his wife Marie-Cécile (née Keuly). His first music lessons came from a blind local organist, but he had innate aptitude and was sent to study with a German musician and organist, Wilhelm Hanser, at the monastery of Lavaldieu, a few miles from Givet. Here Méhul developed his lifelong love of flowers.

In 1778 or 1779 he went to Paris and began to study with Jean-Frédéric Edelmann, a harpsichord player and friend of Méhul's idol Christoph Willibald von Gluck. Méhul's first published composition was a book of piano pieces in 1783. He also arranged airs from popular operas and by the late 1780s he had begun to think about an operatic career for himself.

In 1787, the writer Valadier offered Méhul one of his libretti, Cora, which had been rejected by Gluck in 1785. The Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra) put Méhul's work, under the title Alonzo et Cora, into rehearsal in June 1789. However, the rehearsals were abandoned on 8 August, probably because the Opéra had been suffering severe financial difficulties throughout the 1780s, and the opera was not premiered until 1791. In the meantime, Méhul found an ideal collaborator in the librettist François-Benoît Hoffman, who provided the words to the first of Méhul's operas to be performed, Euphrosine. Its premiere in 1790 was an immense success and marked the composer out as a new talent. It was also the start of his long relationship with the Comédie Italienne theatre (soon to be renamed the Opéra-Comique).