1562 death of Flemish composer Adrian Willaert (age c.72); in force of personality and with his central position as maestro di cappella at St. Mark's in Venice, he became the most influential musician in Europe between the death of Josquin and the time of Palestrina.
1637 Bernardo Pasquini – Italian composer (d.1710); renowned virtuoso keyboard player and one of the most important Italian composers for harpsichord between Girolamo Frescobaldi and Domenico Scarlatti; one of his harpsichord pieces (The Cuckoo) was transcribed for orchestra by Ottorino Respighi for his suite The Birds.
1840 Hermann Goetz – German composer (d.1876); died of tuberculosis at age 35; George Bernard Shaw thought Goetz’s Symphony in F Major was better than anything in the genre by Mendelssohn, Schumann, or Brahms.
1842 first concert by the New York Philharmonic; home is David Geffen Hall (formerly, Avery Fisher Hall) in New York's Lincoln Center; current music director is Jaap van Zweden.
1861 first performance of Johannes Brahms's Variations & Fugue on a Theme by Handel in Hamburg, by pianist Clara Schumann; a set of 25 variations and a concluding fugue, all based on a theme from George Frideric Handel's Harpsichord Suite No. 1 in B-Flat HWV 434.
1863 Pietro Mascagni – Italian composer (d.1945); his masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana (1890) caused one of the greatest sensations in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the verismo movement.
1879 Rudolf Friml – Czech-born American composer and pianist (d.1972); best-known works are Rose-Marie and The Vagabond King, each of which enjoyed success on Broadway and in London and were adapted for film.
1887 Ernst Toch – Austrian-born American composer of concert and film scores (d.1964); professor at the University of Southern California, where he taught both music and philosophy; in 1930 invented Gesprochene Musik, the idiom of the ‘spoken chorus’ and his most performed work is the Geographical Fugue, which he himself regarded as an unimportant diversion.