1836 premiere of Mikhail Glinka's ‘patriotic-heroic tragic opera’ A Life for the Tsar; originally titled Ivan Susanin after its lead character, but as a tribute to the Tsar was retitled; after the Russian Revolution, it was staged under its original title.
1837 Émile Waldteufel – French composer of dance music (d.1915); best known for the waltz Les Patineurs (The Skaters), composed in 1882.
1842 premiere of Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Ludmilla at the Main Theater in St. Petersburg; based on the 1820 poem of the same name by Alexander Pushkin; today, the best-known music from the opera is its overture.
1882 Joaquín Turina - Spanish composer (d.1949); works include the opera Margot (1914), Danzas Fantàsticas (1919), La oración del torero (Toreador’s Prayer, written first for a lute quartet, then strings), chamber music, piano works, guitar pieces and songs.
1905 premiere of Richard Strauss's opera Salome in Dresden at the Hofoper; the German libretto is by the composer, based on Hedwig Lachmann's translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde; the title role is almost impossible to cast: a singer with Brünnhilde’s heft but who has the physical agility and grace to perform the famous ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’.
1967 Joshua Bell – American violinist and conductor (57 years old); since 2011, Music Director of the Academy of St. Martin- in-the-Fields; in a 2007 experiment initiated by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, Bell played as an incognito busker at a Washington, D.C. subway station; as a hidden camera rolled, 1,097 people passed by, only seven stopped to listen to him, and only one recognized him; in 45 minutes, Bell collected $32.17 from 27 passersby (excluding $20 from the passerby who recognized him); Weingarten won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his article on the experiment.
1974 first performance of Lou Harrison’s Suite for Violin with American Gamelan at Lone Mountain College, San Francisco.