1712 Frederick the Great – German patron, composer, flutist and monarch (d.1786).
1776 E. T. A. Hoffmann – German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, composer, music critic, jurist and caricaturist (d.1822); full name: Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann.
1835 premiere of Bellini’s opera I Puritani (The Puritans) in Paris at the Théatre-Italien.
1875 first performance of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre for orchestra, in Paris.
1885 first performance of Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, in St. Petersburg.
1913 Norman Dello Joio – American composer (d.2008); won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Meditations on Ecclesiastes.
1906 premiere of two Rachmaninoff one-act operas The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theater with the composer conducting; libretto for Francesca by Peter Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest.
1918 Gottfried von Einem – Austrian composer (d.1996); best known for his operas; influenced by the music of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, as well as by jazz.
1919 Leon Kirchner – American composer (d.2009); won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for his String Quartet No. 3.
1922 first performance of Sir William Walton’s ‘entertainment’ Façade with Edith Sitwell reciting her poetry at a private performance in the Sitwells’ drawing room at 2 Carlyle Square, London.
1922 first performance of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5, in Copenhagen, with the composer conducting.
1953 Yuri Bashmet - Russian violist (71 years old).
1957 first performance of Walter Piston’s Wind Quintet, at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, by the Boston Woodwind Quintet.
1959 premiere of the Shostakovich operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki at the Moscow Operetta Theater; it is sometimes referred to as simply Cheryomushki, which is a district in Moscow full of cheap subsidized housing built in 1956; the word is also used for such housing projects in general.