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November 17

1866 premiere of Ambroise Thomas' opera Mignon in Paris at the Opéra-Comique; libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré is based on Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

1876 first performance of Peter Tchaikovsky's Marche slave in Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein; composer referred to it as his ‘Serbo-Russian March’, since it was commissioned for a concert to benefit wounded veterans of the Serbo-Turkish War.

1888 first performance of Peter Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in St. Petersburg with the composer conducting; possibly for its spirit of ultimate victory through strife, the work was very popular during World War II; one notable performance was by the Leningrad Radio Symphony during the Siege of Leningrad on the October 20, 1941 broadcast relayed to London: as the second movement began, bombs started to fall nearby, but the orchestra continued playing until the final note.

1919 Hershy Kay – American composer, arranger, and orchestrator (d.1981); famous for orchestrations of Broadway shows, and for the ballets he arranged for George Balanchine's New York City Ballet.

1930 David Amram – American composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist, and author (93 years old); wrote more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works and scores for Broadway theater and film, including the scores for the films Splendor in the Grass (1961) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

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