Udo Jürgens

Born Jürgen Udo Bockelmann in 1934, he grew up in Austria and started writing songs in the 1950s, a decade when German-language pop meant cheap sentiment and smaller ambitions. He took the Eurovision Song Contest for Austria in 1966, then spent the next fifty years doing something quietly radical: composing close to a thousand songs that borrowed from French chanson, dressed schlager in modern pop clothes, and filled venues in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with crowds of all ages. He kept performing until he died at 80 in December 2014, and by then he'd moved to Switzerland and taken citizenship there too.