1842 premiere of Richard Wagner's Rienzi [complete title: Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes)] in Dresden; the composer's first successful opera.
1860 first performance of Johannes Brahms's String Sextet No. 1 in Hanover, by violinist Joseph Joachim and his ensemble; after Boccherini’s time, the composition of string sextets was rare, but within three decades after Brahms, composers like Dvorák, Tchaikovsky, Raff, Reger, Schoenberg, and Korngold, had all written string sextets.
1874 Charles Ives – American modernist composer and insurance executive (d.1954); one of the first American composers of international renown, though his music was largely ignored during his life; over time, has come to be regarded as an ‘American original’; he combined the popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, including the use of polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.
1896 first performance of Antonín Dvorák’s String Quartet No. 14 in Prague by the Rosé Quartet of Vienna; the composer’s last completed quartet.
1923 Robert Craft – American conductor, writer (died November 10, 2015); best known for his working friendship with Igor Stravinsky, a relationship which resulted in several recordings and books.
1944 William Albright – American composer, pianist, and organist (d.1998); his music combined elements of tonal and non-tonal classical music with American popular music and non-Western music; had a great enthusiasm for ragtime.
1955 Thomas Newman – American film composer (69 years old); he has scored numerous classics including The Player, The Shawshank Redemption, Cinderella Man, American Beauty, The Green Mile, Angels in America, Finding Nemo, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, WALL-E, the James Bond films Skyfall and Spectre, and the war film 1917. He is the son of legendary Hollywood composer Alfred Newman.
1958 Ivo Pogorelich – Croatian pianist (66 years old); entered the 1980 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw and was eliminated in the third round; one of the adjudicators, Martha Argerich, proclaimed him a "genius" and resigned from the jury in protest.
1964 Frederic Chiu – American pianist (60 years old); created a series of workshops entitled Deeper Performance Studies that approach piano playing through non-traditional methods uniting different philosophies of music, performance, and learning.
1977 Leila Josefowicz – American Canadian violinist (47 years old); for her advocacy of new works for the violin, was named a 2008 MacArthur Fellow; has a strong interest in jazz and improvisation.