1847 Sir Alexander Mackenzie – Scottish composer, conductor and teacher (d.1935); with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, regarded as one of the fathers of the British musical renaissance in the late nineteenth century; head of the Royal Academy of Music, 1888-1924.
1862 Claude Debussy – French composer (d.1918); his works were a seminal force in the music of the 20th century; opposed the term impressionism when applied to his music and wrote in 1908, “I am trying to do ‘something different’—an effect of reality ... what the imbeciles call ‘impressionism’, a term which is as poorly-used as possible, particularly by the critics, since they do not hesitate to apply it to [J.M.W.] Turner, the finest creator of mysterious effects in all the world of art”; signed his final three works ‘Claude Debussy, musicien Français.’
1928 Karlheinz Stockhausen – German composer (d.2007); acknowledged as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries; called "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music," known for ground-breaking work in electronic music, aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition, and musical spatialization.
2002 premiere of the opera Rostam and Sohrab by the Iranian-Armenian composer Loris Tjeknavorian to mark the 1000th anniversary of the birth of poet Abol-Qasem Ferdowsi, on whose epic the opera was based; the performance at Teheran's Milad Hall featured 125 Austrian musicians and singers and marked the first occasion that a Western-style opera was staged in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.