RETURN OF EASTERN STANDARD TIME – SET YOUR CLOCK BACK ONE HOUR
1587 Samuel Scheidt baptized – German composer, organist and teacher (d.1654); the first internationally significant German composer for the organ.
1801 Vincenzo Bellini – Italian opera composer (d.1835); the quintessential composer of bel canto opera; best known for La sonnambula (1831) and Norma (1831); died at the age of 33, nine months after the premiere of his last opera, I Puritani.
1888 first performance of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic suite Scheherazade in St. Petersburg; based on One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of West and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled during the Islamic Golden Age.
1899 premiere of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Tsar's Bride in Moscow; composer intended it as a reaction against the ideas of Richard Wagner, and to be in the style of ‘cantilena par excellence.’
1900 premiere of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan in Moscow, with Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov conducting; based on a fairy-tale poem by Alexander Pushkin.
1911 Vladimir Ussachevsky – Russian-American composer (d.1990); known for his work in electronic music.
1933 John Barry – English film composer and conductor (d.2011); wrote soundtracks for 11 of the James Bond films; arranged and performed Monty Norman's James Bond Theme for the first film in the series, Dr. No (1962); wrote the scores to such award-winning films as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Dances with Wolves (1990) and Out of Africa (1985).
1943 first performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8 at the Moscow Conservatory by the USSR State Symphony conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky, to whom the work is dedicated; composer's friend Isaak Glikman called this symphony "his most tragic work."
1945 first performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9 in Leningrad by the Leningrad Philharmonic, Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting; the composer predicted "musicians will like to play it, and critics will delight in blasting it" and, sure enough, Soviet critics soon censured the work for its "ideological weakness" and its failure to "reflect the true spirit of the people of the Soviet Union."
1946 premiere of Sergei Prokofiev's opera Betrothal in a Monastery in Leningrad; the Russian libretto by the composer and Mira Mendelson (his companion in later life) is based on Richard Sheridan's ballad opera libretto for Thomas Linley the younger's The Duenna (1775).
1950 first performance of David Diamond's Symphony No. 3 by the Boston Symphony, Charles Munch conducting; the work had been completed in 1945.