1810 Ferenc Erkel – Hungarian composer, conductor and pianist (d.1893); the father of Hungarian opera, he also composed the music of Himnusz, adopted as the national anthem of Hungary in 1844.
1857 premiere of Franz Liszt's Dante Symphony (‘A Symphony to Dante's Divine Comedy’) in Dresden with the composer conducting; dedicated to the composer's friend and future son-in-law Richard Wagner.
1877 Henry Balfour Gardiner – English musician, composer, and teacher (d.1950); best-known work is Evening Hymn (1908), a setting of Te lucis ante terminum; the great-uncle of conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
1905 William Alwyn – English composer, conductor, and music teacher (d.1985); wrote more than 70 film scores from 1941 to 1962 for such films as Odd Man Out, Desert Victory and The Crimson Pirate.
1934 first performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini at the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore, by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski, with the composer as soloist; the last variation of the Rhapsody is quite difficult, and just before the first performance, the composer questioned his own ability to play it; after taking his friend Benno Moiseiwitsch's advice to down a glass of crème de menthe to steady his nerves, his performance was a spectacular success, and prior to every subsequent performance of the Rhapsody, Rachmaninoff downed a bit of the sweet liqueur; he nicknamed the finale the ‘Crème de Menthe Variation.’
1940 first performance of Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in C by the Chicago Symphony, with the composer conducting; commissioned in honor of the Chicago Symphony's 50th Anniversary.
1949 Steven Stucky – American composer (d.2016); resident composer of the LA Philharmonic from 1988 to 2009, the longest such affiliation in American orchestral history; won Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Second Concerto for Orchestra (2005).
1969 Hélène Grimaud – French pianist (55 years old); she divides her time between her musical career and the Wolf Conservation Center, which she co-founded, an expression of her passion for wolves.
1991 premiere of Christopher Rouse's Karolju for chorus and orchestra with the Baltimore Symphony and Chorus, David Zinman conducting; a collection of Christmas carols which, as the composer says, is "couched in an overall form similar to that of [Carl Orff's] Carmina burana."