1717 Johann Stamitz baptized – Bohemian-born German composer and violinist (d.1757); built the court orchestra in Mannheim into the finest in Europe; helped establish the four-movement form as the standard for symphonies, of which he wrote some 75.
1842 Carl Zeller – Austrian operetta composer (d.1898); as a boy, had a fine soprano voice and sang in the Vienna Boys' Choir; worked as a civil servant at the Imperial Ministry of Education while composing operettas, the best-known of which is Der Vogelhändler (The Bird Seller); legal troubles, including a perjury conviction, ended his career at the ministry and led to prison and public disgrace in the mid-1890s.
1854 Alfredo Catalani – Italian opera composer (d.1893); best remembered for Loreley (1890) and La Wally (1892).
1899 premiere of Sir Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations in Queen's Hall in London by the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Hans Richter; a set of 14 variations on a hidden theme that is—in Elgar's words—"not played"; his best-known large-scale composition, for both the music itself and the enigma behind it.
1915 in San Francisco, the first performance of Camille Saint-Saëns’s grandiose Hail California, scored for orchestra, band & organ, with the composer himself conducting; written for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
1926 concert premiere of George Antheil's Ballet mécanique in Paris, originally conceived as the score for a Dadaist post-Cubist art film of the same name; the work enraged some of the concertgoers, whose objections were drowned out by the cacophonous music, while others vocally supported the work, and the concert ended with a riot in the streets.