1550 Orazio Vecchi baptized – Italian composer of the late Renaissance (d.1605); most famous for his madrigal comedies, particularly L'Amfiparnaso.
1842 first performance of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet Op 44, at a private concert in Leipzig; the composer’s wife, Clara, was to perform, but took ill, and Felix Mendelssohn stepped in for the informal performance, reading the work at sight; Mendelssohn’s criticism of the work’s original second movement led Schumann to write a livelier replacement.
1846 premiere of Hector Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at the Opéra-Comique in Paris; the work did not meet with critical acclaim, perhaps due to its halfway status between opera and cantata and the public was apathetic; said the composer: "Nothing in my career as an artist wounded me more deeply than this unexpected indifference."
1920 Dave Brubeck – American jazz pianist and composer (d.2012); one of the foremost exponents of cool jazz, but also a respected composer of orchestral and sacred music.
1933 Henryk Górecki – Polish composer (d.2010); leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during the post-Stalin cultural thaw; in 1992, a recording of his Symphony No. 3 ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ with soprano Dawn Upshaw was released to commemorate the memory of those lost during the Holocaust and it became a worldwide commercial and critical success, selling more than a million copies; as surprised as anyone at its popularity, Górecki said, "Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music...somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed."
1955 Bright Sheng – Chinese American composer, conductor, and pianist (69 years old); received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001; the New York City Ballet's first composer-in-residence.