1831 premiere of Vincenzo Bellini's Norma at Milan’s La Scala Opera House; annotator David Kimbell says, “...Bellini's most astonishing achievement in Norma is, amid all the more obvious excitements of musical Romanticism, to have asserted his belief that the true magic of opera depended on a kind of incantation in which dramatic poetry and song are perfectly fused.”
1880 first performance of Johannes Brahms's Tragic Overture, Vienna; the title is the composer’s, emphasizing the overture’s turbulent, tormented character of the piece; that’s in contrast to the mirthful ebullience of the companion piece he wrote the same year, the Academic Festival Overture; the composer said, "one laughs while the other cries."
1926 first performance of Jean Sibelius's Tapiola with the New York Symphony (now, the Philharmonic) conducted by Walter Damrosch, who had commissioned the piece; the music portrays Tapio, the animating forest spirit mentioned throughout the Kalevala.
1926 premiere (in Chicago) of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ masque On Christmas Night, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.