0301|1810|Frederic Ahem Chopin was born, in Warsaw. Chopin's love life was romantic but not especially successful. He composed some of his best music in honor of a young lady in Warsaw whom he was too shy to approach. Tuberculosis killed him at the age of 39.
0301|1993|The Cleveland Quartet played Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet at Carnegie Hall. That was the first half of the program; the second half was one of the late Beethoven quartets, the Opus 131 in C-sharp minor.
0302|1713|Johann Sebastian Bach was promoted to Concert Master at Weimar. Bach composed his "Toccatas" and some of his other best organ music here.
0302|1924|Sibelius more or less wrapped up his composing career when he wrote down the last double-bar on his Seventh Symphony. For the next 33 years he would compose almost nothing else.
0303|1854|Harriet Smithson, the actress who inspired Symphonie fantastique and then became Hector Berlioz's wife, died more than a decade after their separation but was still officially Mrs. Berlioz.
0303|1993|A Short Symphony by George Perle, which is the title of the work as well as a description of it was performed by the Boston Symphony. Seiji Ozawa conducted a concert that also included the Faure Requiem and Mozart's Ninth Piano Concerto with soloist Maria Joao Pires.
0304|1678|Vivaldi was born seven years before the birth of the other great Baroque composers, Bach, Handel and Scarlatti (all born in 1685). Vivaldi became a priest. Gradually Vivaldi eased his way back to private life, though he was friendly with the Pope.
0304|1993|The Milwaukee Symphony and Chorus performed the Verdi "Requiem" scrapping the original plans to do his "Stabat Mater." The concert was a homage to the Milwaukee Chorus's late director Margaret Hawkins.
0305|1766|Werner, the senior Kapellmeister in the Esterhazy court, died leaving Haydn the sole artistic director. This meant he had control over a fairly good chamber orchestra, which would play whatever he wrote for it.
0305|1854|The music critic Philip Hale was born in Vermont.
0305|1953|Serge Prokofiev died just a couple weeks before his 62nd birthday. Prokofiev lived long enough to see Soviet authorities, the same authorities who had reprimanded him for being too modern, hail him as a hero of the Soviet people.
0306|1825|This may qualify as the date of the birth of what music writers like to call "Late Beethoven." On this day Beethoven's E-flat Quartet, Opus 127, was first performed.
0306|1932|John Philip Sousa died. Sousa was en route to a concert in Reading, Pennsylvania. Sousa was one of the few composers to become rich. The amount of money he earned from "The Stars and Stripes Forever" alone was equivalent to someone making Millions today.
0307|1786|Franz Benda died. He was the leader of the private orchestra of Frederick the Great, who is remembered by classical music fans today as a pretty good flute player who composed some music himself that isn't bad.
0307|1993|Beethoven's last piano concerto and Schumann's last symphony were played by the Montreal Symphony. Carlo Rizzi conducted the Schumann Fourth while Olli Mustonen soloed in the "Emperor" Concerto. The concert opened with a piece called "Orion" by the composer Vivier.
0308|1714|Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was born. CPE Bach wasn't as great a composer as his father. But he was a more popular composer by far during the last years of the Baroque era and for decades after his death.
0308|1858|Ruggiero Leoncavallo, the composer of "Pagliacci," was born in Naples.
0308|1993|The Metropolitan Opera sang the music of Francis Poulenc, his "Dialogues of the Carmelites." Kent Nagano conducted and the cast was headed by Dawn Upshaw.
0309|1842|Verdi's opera "Nabucco" was a hit at its premiere at La Scala. The slaves chorus "Va pensiero" was interpreted as really being a proclamation of liberty by the Milanese. Verdi was then 28.
0309|1849|"The Merry Wives of Windsor," the Otto Nicolai opus that failed in Vienna, was premiered in Berlin and was a huge success.
0309|1993|"The Postman Always Rings Twice," not the movie, the opera by Stephen Paulus, played in Boston. The opera premiered 10 years ago; the original novel was published in 1934 and was actually banned in Boston because it was so sexy and violent.
0310|1832|Muzio Clementi died at the age of 80. Clementi's piano pieces are seldom played in professional recitals but every piano student knows his work.
0310|1870|Ignaz Moscheles, a famous piano teacher during the early Romantic era, died, he was 75.
0310|1936|Oedipus, an opera by Georges Enescu, was sung in Paris. Enescu scarcely noticed. He was so upset at failing to hold a woman's attention that he destroyed his fiddle a Guarneri.
0311|1829|The Bach revival began. At that time, when people said "Bach" they meant one of the sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. The performance in Berlin on March 11th, 1829, of "St. Matthew Passion"conducted by the 20-year-old Mendelssohn himself, was a sensation.
0311|1851|"Rigoletto" premiered in Venice producing a tremendous success for Verdi.
0311|1903|New York's Metropolitan Opera took a great social step forward by performing an opera composed by a woman, "Der Wald" by Ethel Smyth.
0312| 604|Saint Gregory died. Saint Gregory's significance in music: the Gregorian chant!
0312|1888|Hans Knappertsbusch, a conductor famous for his big climaxes, was born.
0312|1993|The music of Busoni experienced something of a comeback. First there were two recordings of the Busoni Piano Concerto. Now the Chicago Symphony has programmed the Busoni Violin Concerto. Ruben Gonzalez performed it under Daniel Barenboim's baton in May.
0313|1702|Handel won his first non-assistant musical post when he became chief organist of the Domkirche in Halle, the town of his birth.
0313|1833|Mendelssohn completed his "Italian" Symphony, commissioned by the London Philharmonic.
0314|1941|Virgil Thomson wrote, "Gustav Mahler is to Richard Strauss as Bach is to Handel, or Debussy to Ravel...."
0314|1993|The "Music for Life" concert was held at New York's Carnegie Hall. Proceeds went to AIDS research.
0315|1842|Cherubini died, he was 82. Cherubini was the leading arbiter of Parisian musical taste for decades. He was the establishment figure against whom Berlioz was the great rebel.
0315|1918|Lili Boulanger died. She was 24 years old and suffering from tuberculosis. We often speak of the teacher Nadia Boulanger, but it was her sister who was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome. What might she have composed had she lived?
0315|1990|A judge ruled that 2 Live Crews Nasty As They Wanna Be was obscene and a record store employee was arrested for selling it to an 11 year-old girl
0316|1736|Pergolesi died at the age of 26. It was Pergolesi's music which Stravinsky used as the basis of his ballet "Pulcinella."
0316|1907|WJ Henderson wrote in the New York Sun of March 16, 1907, after a performance of the "Divine Poem," quote: "When it was over, the audience called out Mister Scriabin and took a good look at him."
0316|1937|The composer David Del Tredici was born.
0317|1830|Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor premiered in Warsaw with the composer in the solo role. He reported later, quote, "the potpourri on Polish themes missed fire completely," drawing only enough applause to reassure him that the audience wasn't bored.
0317|1866|Erik Satie was born. To this day, people argue about whether he was a genius or just a quirky guy with faulty technique.
0317|1976|Bob Dylan's song Hurricane get boxer Reuben "Hurricane" Carter another murder trial
0318|1902|Enrico Caruso became the first classical singer to produce a decent record. Only he could sing loudly and piercingly enough to be clearly heard over the surface noise of the primitive gramophone. Caruso made his recordings in a hotel room in Milan. He was then 29.
0318|1927|The "Radio Times" magazine published an article by George Bernard Shaw in which Shaw declared that "jazz... is the old dance band Beethovenized."
0318|1982|R&B great Teddy Pendergrass was paralyzed after his Rolls Royce hit a tree.
0319|1823|Beethoven gave Archduke Rudolph his "Missa Solemnis".
0319|1910|The first all-Bartok concert was given in Budapest.
0319|1958|Tom & Jerry release their first single: "Our Song". They later changed their name to Simon & Garfunkel
0319|1993|Two composers famous mainly for movie music re-entered the recorded repertory with their "longhair" stuff. Koch released a recording of James Sedares and the New Zealand Symphony doing works of Miklos Rozsa, including a Hungarian Nocturne and Three Hungarian Sketches.
0320|1212|The Thomasschule of Leipzig was founded. Bach was to work there, 500 years later.
0320|1768|Boccherini played a cello sonata in Paris. The 25-year-old composer's debut concert was not a success.
0320|1914|Butterworth's "The Banks of Green Willow" premiered.
0321|1604|Orlando Gibbons became organist of Kings College, Cambridge... a position he would hold for the rest of his life.
0321|1839|Franz Schubert's "Great" Symphony in C major was premiered in Leipzig. Schumann discovered it and Mendelssohn conducted it. Schubert had been dead 11 years.
0321|1936|Alexander Glazunov died in exile in Paris. Glazunov was born almost 71 years earlier, so he grew up in the world of Brahms, Wagner and Tchaikovsky, and lived long enough to hear Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
0321|1952|Allan Freed's first Moondog Coronation Ball takes place at the Cleveland Arena. The event, which ended in a riot, is often considered the beginning of the Rock Era
0321|1989|Dick Clark ended his reign as host of American Bandstand
0322|1951|William Mengelberg died in Switzerland, he was 79. Mengelberg led the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam for generations, but died in exile from his orchestra after collaborating with the Nazis.
0322|1962|Barbra Streisand made her broadway debut at the age of 19 in I Can Get It For You Wholesale
0322|1993|The Montreal Symphony performed one of the week's most eclectic concerts: "O Java," a new work by Evangelista; Debussy's "Iberia"; The Beethoven First Piano Concerto with Martha Argerich; and "The Peacock" by Zoltan Kodaly.
0323|1703|Vivaldi entered the priesthood. He had asthma attacks, or faked them, when he said Mass. But he never had the same problem while conducting a church orchestra or choir.
0323|1839|H-F Chorley, a London reviewer reported on Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique": "A Babel, and not a Babylon of music."
0323|1993|Alex Ross of the New York Times gave a favorable review to a recent Lincoln Center performance by the Prism Quartet, a foursome not of strings but of saxophones. They premiered Michael Ruszczynski's "Fantasy Quartet," which Ross liked very much.
0325|1867|Arturo Toscanini was born in the Italian town of Parma. Toscanini was considered for years to be the world's greatest conductor. He was famous for his fidelity to scores. His concerts exposed millions of Americans to classical music.
0325|1946|Stravinsky's "Ebony Concerto" was premiered in New York. Playing the clarinet solo role was bandleader Woody Herman. But it would be Woody Herman's rival Benny Goodman who made the first popular recording of it.
0326|1778|Seven-year-old Beethoven gave his first public concert.
0326|1827|Beethoven died in Vienna at the age of 56. He had been in bed for weeks with pneumonia and edema. Within a few hours of his death, all of his hair had been cut off by visitors. Beethoven lived long enough to see his music become internationally famous.
0326|1973|Noel Coward died.
0326|1995|Eazy-E, gangsta rap pioneer, died at 31.
0328|1842|Some musicians from the Imperial Court Orchestra of Austria gave a concert. Otto Nicolai conducted this new ensemble. It was the first concert of the Vienna Philharmonic.
0328|1993|Montreal: Charles Dutoit conducted a full evening of works not heard live very often: Stravinsky's "Jeu de cartes," Bizet's "Symphony in C," and the complete ballet music for "Bacchus et Ariane" by Albert Roussel.
0329|1827|"He withdrew after he had given everything to his fellow man and received nothing in return." A friend of Beethoven said that, in the eulogy at the composer's grave.
0329|1828|Robert Schumann graduated from college with a degree in law.
0329|1937|The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski died in Switzerland. Szymanowski never achieved the kind of fame Rachmaninoff or even Moussorgsky knew in their lifetimes, but his music is still recorded today. It sounds something like Richard Strauss.