Composers Datebook®

Two concert overtures – one very famous and one not so famous – had their premiere performances on today's date.

If you were in Washington, D.C. on today's date in 1957, and wanted to escape the summer heat, tickets for a new musical at the air-conditioned National Theater would run you between $1.10 and $5.50 – and you could boast for years afterwards that you attended the world premiere performance of Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story."

Today is the birthday of Antonio Salieri, one of the most unjustly maligned composers in history.

On today's date in 1928, the Columbia Phonograph Company of New York announced that the Symphony No. 6 by the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg was the winner of its $10,000 Schubert Memorial Prize.

American composer Michael Daughtery’s bassoon concerto titled "Dead Elvis" is inspired by Elvis Presley – born on this date in 1977.

In our day, Guillaume de Machaut's Notre Dame Mass is his most famous work, but in his own time, the age of Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, he was far better known as a secular poet of Courtly Love.

Richard Wagner's "Die Walküre" had its first performance as part of his "Ring Cycle" on today's date in 1876, at Wagner's own theater in Bayreuth, a small town in Southern Germany.

On today's date in 1950, the orchestra of the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, California gave the premiere performance of the "Sinfonietta La Jolla" by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu.

On today’s date in 2013, Ravinia was the venue for world-premiere performances of several new art songs, including “Twilight Butterfly,” by the American composer Augusta Read Thomas.

The first performance of Bernstein’s concert suite from "On the Waterfront"took place at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood on today's date in 1954.