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august 31

1834 Amilcare Ponchielli – Italian composer (d.1886); won a scholarship at age nine to study at the Milan Conservatory, writing his first symphony by the time he was ten; his best known opera is La Gioconda (1876), with its ballet Dance of the Hours, famously parodied in Walt Disney's Fantasia.

1928 premiere of Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) in Berlin at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, with libretto by German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht; by 1933, when Brecht and Weill were forced to leave Germany, the play had been translated into 18 languages and performed more than 10,000 times on European stages; songs include Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (The Ballad of Mack the Knife).

1945 Itzhak Perlman – Israeli-born American violinist, conductor, and instructor of master classes (79 years old); great ambassador of music despite contracting polio at the age of four; a distant cousin to Canadian comic/TV personality Howie Mandel.

1952 Kim Kashkashian – Armenian-American violist (72years old); teaches at the New England Conservatory; won a 2013 Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for the album Kurtág / Ligeti: Music for Viola.

1975 Daniel Harding – English conductor (49 years old); Principal Conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony; the 9th principal conductor of the Orchestra of Paris since 2016.

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