Happy Halloween!
1806 Louise Talma – American composer (d.1896); first woman to receive two Guggenheim Fellowships and to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; also the first American woman to have a full-scale opera performed in Germany and the first American to teach at Fontainebleau.
1866 premiere of Jacques Offenbach's operetta La vie parisienne (Parisian life) at the Théâtre du Palais Royal; the composer's first full-length piece to portray contemporary Parisian life, unlike his earlier period pieces and mythological subjects, and became one of his most popular operettas.
1875 premiere of Camille Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 4 in Paris at a concert with the composer as soloist and the orchestra led by Edouard Colonne; it’s the composer's most structurally innovative piano concerto and second in popularity to the Piano Concerto No. 2.
1887 first performance of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio espagnole in St. Petersburg with Richard Strauss conducting; the composer wrote, "The opinion formed by both critics and the public, that the Capriccio is a magnificently orchestrated piece — is wrong. The Capriccio is a brilliant composition for the orchestra. The change of timbres, the felicitous choice of melodic designs and figuration patterns, exactly suiting each kind of instrument, brief virtuoso cadenzas for instruments solo, the rhythm of the percussion instruments, etc., constitute here the very essence of the composition and not its garb or orchestration."
1891 premiere of Pietro Mascagni's opera L'amico Fritz at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome; enjoyed some success in its day but is not staged nearly as often as Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana.
1932 first performance of Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 5 by the Berlin Philharmonic, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting and the composer as soloist; original title was Music for Piano and Orchestra.
1949 Odaline de la Martinez – Cuban-American composer and conductor (74 years old); artistic director of Lontano, a London-based contemporary music ensemble which she co-founded in 1976.
1955 first performance of Alan Hovhaness's Symphony No. 2 'Mysterious Mountain' by Leopold Stokowski in his debut with the Houston Symphony; the work is notable for a pervasive sense of spiritual serenity and it is the composer's best-known work.