1860 Edward MacDowell – American composer and pianist (d.1908); one of the first seven Americans honored by membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1904; the MacDowell Colony is an art colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, founded in 1907 by the composer’s wife, Marian.
1892 first performance of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in Vienna with Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic; some of the more conservative members of the audience left at the end of each movement, but many of Bruckner's supporters were also present, including Hugo Wolf who said that the symphony was "the work of a giant" that "surpasses the other symphonies of the master in intellectual scope, awesomeness, and greatness"; Vienna’s arch-conservative critic, Eduard Hanslick, described the symphony as "interesting in detail, but strange as a whole, indeed repellent. The peculiarity of this work consists, to put it briefly, in importing Wagner's dramatic style into the symphony."
1892 premiere of Peter Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker on a double-bill with his one-act opera Iolanta at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg; public reception of the opera was favorable, and while the original Nutcracker production was not a success, the suite the composer extracted from it was; the ballet’s enormous popularity dates from the 1960s.
1948 William Boughton – English conductor (75 years old); founder, artistic and music director of the English Symphony Orchestra, Music Director of the New Haven Symphony and interim director of the Yale Symphony.
1962 first performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 ‘Babi Yar’ for baritone soloist and men's chorus by the Moscow Philharmonic under Kirill Kondrashin; variously called a song cycle and a choral symphony as the composer included settings of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that concerned the World War II Babi Yar massacre and other topics.