1826 at his parent's mansion outside Berlin, the 17-year-old German composer Felix Mendelssohn completes his overture to Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream after reading the play the previous month; the composer intended his piece to represent the whole of the drama in miniature: “At the end,” he wrote, “after everything has been satisfactorily settled and the principal players have joyously left the stage, the elves and fairies bless the house, and disappear with the dawn. So the play ends, and my overture, too”.
1876 Mary Louise Curtis Bok – American music patron (d.1970); founder of Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where tuition is free and students are accepted based on merit alone.