1734 Johann Ernst Altenburg – German composer, organist and trumpeter (d.1801); wrote the oldest printed German trumpet studies, an important resource to musicologists of old trumpet technique.
1763 Franz Danzi baptized – German composer, conductor and cellist (d.1826); knew Mozart, whom he revered, was a contemporary of Beethoven and was a mentor for the young Carl Maria von Weber; Francesca Lebrun (1756-1791), a singer and composer, was his sister.
1810 first performance of Beethoven’s incidental music for Goethe's play Egmont, in Vienna at the Hofburg Theater.
1843 Edvard Grieg – Norwegian composer and pianist (d.1907); his use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvorák did in Finland and Bohemia.
1864 Guy Ropartz – French composer, conductor and poet (d.1955); his style was influenced by Debussy and César Franck, but he self-identified as a Celtic Breton, writing that he was the son of a country "where the goblins populate the moor and dance by the moony nights..."
1865 Paul Gilson – Belgian composer (d.1942); his orchestral suite La mer, first performed in Brussels in 1892, established him as a national musical figure in Belgium.
1889 first performance of Sousa's Washington Post March in Washington, D.C. outside the Smithsonian Institution, with the composer conducting the U.S. Marine Band.
1894 Robert Russell Bennett – American composer and arranger (d.1981); best known for his orchestration of many well-known Broadway and Hollywood musicals by other composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers.
1900 Otto Luening – German/American composer (d.1996); an early pioneer of tape music and electronic music.
1953 Raphael Wallfisch – English cellist (71 years old); his wife is the Australian Baroque violinist Elizabeth Wallfisch.
1983 Julia Fischer – German violinist (41 years old); her active repertoire ranges from Bach to Penderecki; it contains more than 40 works with orchestra and about 60 works of chamber music; on 1 January 2008 in Frankfurt, she appeared as violinist and pianist in the same concert, performing the Grieg Piano Concerto and then the Violin Concerto No. 3 by Saint-Saëns.