First Day of Fall
1869 premiere of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold) at the National Theater Munich; first of the four operas that constitute his Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung); originally written as a one-act introduction to the tripartite Ring, but the cycle is now generally regarded as consisting of four individual operas.
1875 Mikalojus Ciurlionis – Lithuanian composer and painter (d.1911); contributed to symbolism and art nouveau and is representative of the fin de siècle epoch; composed about 250 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings in his short life.
1933 Leonardo Balada – Catalan American composer (91years old); teaching and composing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1937 during the Spanish Civil War, Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas conducts the first Spanish performance of his Homage to Federico Garcia Lorca in Madrid while the city was under siege by Spanish fascist forces; Spanish poet Garcia Lorca had been killed by the Falangists in 1936.
1961 Michael Torke – American composer (63 years old); style influenced by jazz and minimalism; sometimes described as a post-minimalist; most well-known work is probably Javelin (1994), commissioned by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympics in celebration of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's 50th anniversary season.