1733 premiere of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's one-act opera La serva padrona (The Maid as Mistress), in Naples, as a comic interlude during the presentation of his serious opera Il Prigionier superbo; the comic interlude became his most famous work, while the serious opera has been long forgotten.
1735 Johann Christian Bach – German composer (d.1782); 11th child and youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach; sometimes referred to as the ‘London Bach’, due to his time spent living in the British capital, where he came to be known as ‘John Bach’; noted for influencing the concerto style of Mozart.
1791 Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jacob Liebmann Beer) – German composer (d.1864); perhaps the most successful stage composer of the 19th century; with Robert le diable (1831) and its successors, gave the genre of grand opera 'decisive character,' merging German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition, employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti and enhanced by the up-to-date theater technology of the Paris Opéra.
1867 Amy Beach (born Amy Marcy Cheney) – American composer and pianist (d.1944); child prodigy and the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music; most of her compositions and performances were under the name Mrs. H.H.A. Beach.
1912 John Cage – American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist (d.1992); one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde, a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments; among the most influential American composers of the 20th century; also helped revive the New York Mycological Society.
1913 first performance of Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2, at Pavlovsk, with the composer as soloist; original orchestral score was destroyed in a fire following the Russian Revolution, and Prokofiev reconstructed and considerably revised the concerto in 1923; premiere of revised version in Paris on May 8, 1924 with Serge Koussevitzky conducting and the composer again as soloist.
1939 Kenneth Klein – American conductor (85 years old); Music Director of the New York Virtuosi Chamber Symphony which he founded in 1982.
1960 Karita Mattila – Finnish soprano (64years old); in 2007, BBC Music Magazine named her as one of the top 20 sopranos of the recorded era.
1961 Marc-André Hamelin – French-Canadian pianist and composer (63 years old); champion of lesser-known composers especially of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Leo Ornstein, Nikolai Roslavets, Georgy Catoire) and fellow pianist-composers like Leopold Godowsky, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Kaikhosru Sorabji, Nikolai Kapustin, Franz Liszt, Nikolai Medtner and Frederic Rzewski.