St. Cecilia's Day, honoring the Patron Saint of Music; first record of a music festival in her honor was in Normandy in 1570.
1709 Frantisek Benda baptized – Bohemian violinist and composer (d.1786); worked for much of his life at the court of Frederick the Great; wrote an autobiography (1763) which is an important source of information on music and musicians of the period.
1710 Wilhelm Friedemann Bach – German composer, eldest son of Johann Sebastian (d.1784); despite careful supervision from his father, and his great skill as an organist and composer, his income and employment were unstable and he died in poverty.
1780 Conradin Kreutzer – German composer and conductor (d.1849); successful opera composer in his day who is now almost completely forgotten.
1862 premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny) in St. Petersburg, Russia; many old-school Italian singers felt the opera was cursed and brought bad luck and Luciano Pavarotti avoided the part of Alvaro for this reason; in 1960 during a performance of Forza at the Met, American baritone Leonard Warren died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage as his character Don Carlo was about to sing Morir, tremenda cosa (To die, a momentous thing).
1901 Joaquín Rodrigo – Spanish composer and virtuoso pianist (d.1999); lost almost all his sight at the age of three after contracting diphtheria; his most famous work, Concierto de Aranjuez (1939) contains a central adagio movement that is one of the most recognizable pieces in 20th-century classical music.
1913 Benjamin Britten – English composer, conductor and pianist (d.1976); best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945); his most frequent and important muse was his personal and professional partner, the tenor Peter Pears.
1925 Gunther Schuller – American composer, conductor, horn-player, historian and jazz musician (d. 2015); winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his composition Of Reminiscences and Reflections, written for the Louisville Orchestra.
1928 premiere of Maurice Ravel's Boléro danced by Ida Rubinstein, at the Paris Opéra; a sensational success with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska and designs by Alexandre Benois; the composer's most famous composition.
1930 Peter Hurford – English organist (died 3 March 2019); recorded the complete Bach organ works for Decca and BBC Radio 3.
1951 Kent Nagano – American conductor and opera administrator (72 years old); currently music director of the Montreal Symphony and the Bavarian State Opera.
1961 Stephen Hough – English/Australian pianist, composer and writer (62 years old); in 2008 he won the Sixth International Poetry Competition.
1962 Sumi Jo – Korean lyric coloratura soprano (60 years old); known for her interpretations of the bel canto repertoire.