Composers Datebook

Synopsis On today’s date in 1964, the musical Anyone Can Whistle opened at Broadway’s Majestic Theater. The book was by Arthur Laurents, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The show told the story of a town that's gone bankrupt because its only industry manufactured so ...  عرض المزيد

Synopsis On today’s date in 2003, a new orchestral work by American composer Elliott Carter had its premiere in Boston. Carter was then 94 — he would live to be a month shy of 104, and, even more remarkable, he was composing new works almost to the end of his days. When you live ...  عرض المزيد

Synopsis On today’s date in 1800, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 had its first performance in Vienna, at a benefit concert for the 29-year-old composer. It would be several years before any of Beethoven’s orchestral music reached American shores, but it did occur during Beethoven’s l ...  عرض المزيد

Synopsis For many years, the BBC celebrated April Fools’ Day by trying to pull radio listeners’ legs with outrageously fabricated news stories. One year, for example, BBC TV aired footage of an Italian spaghetti farm where happy peasants harvested that year’s crop from bushes tha ...  عرض المزيد

Synopsis We tend to think of the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák as a 19th century composer — but he lived a few years into the 20th and one of his major works, his opera Rusalka, had its premiere in Prague on today’s date in 1901. We also think of Dvořák as primarily a composer of ...  عرض المزيد