1640 burial date of Giles Farnaby – English composer (age c.77), in London; considered one of the great English virginal players, with William Byrd, John Bull, Orlando Gibbons, Peter Philips and Thomas Tomkins among others; the only one who was not a professional musician.
1856 Sergei Taneyev – Russian composer, pianist, composition teacher, music theorist and author (d. 1915); specialized field of study was counterpoint, engrossing himself in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Giovanni Palestrina and Flemish masters; was a trusted friend of Peter Tchaikovsky.
1882 premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Iolanthe (or, The Peer and the Peri) at the Savoy Theater in London; story concerns a band of immortal fairies who find themselves at odds with the House of Peers and satirizes many aspects of British government and law.
1896 Virgil Thomson – American composer and critic (d.1989); instrumental in the development of the ‘American Sound’ in classical music; won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1949 with his film score for Louisiana Story.
1900 Tibor Serly – Hungarian violist, violinist and composer (d.1978); one of the students of Zoltán Kodály and a young apprentice of Béla Bartók, whom he greatly admired; Serly completed Bartók's Viola Concerto which is now widely performed.
1901 first performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4 by the Kaim Orchestra (now the Munich Philharmonic) with the composer conducting; built around a single song, Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life), from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
1945 Hakan Hagegard – Swedish baritone (79 years old); played the role of Papageno in Ingmar Bergman's film version of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1975).
1951 first performance of Lou Harrison's Seven Pastorales in New York by the Collegium Musicum, conducted by Fritz Rikko, to whom one of the pastorales is dedicated; other dedicatees are John Cage, Remy Charlip and the composer’s mother and brother.