In the biographical film Maestro, Leonard Bernstein’s dramatic 1943 Carnegie Hall debut conducting the New York Philharmonic, filling in at the last moment for Bruno Walter, receives a masterful cinematic treatment.

But the first time Bernstein wielded a baton in public took place on today’s date in 1939, when Lenny was still a student at Harvard and conducted his own incidental music for a student performance of the ancient Greek comedy, The Birds, by Aristophanes.

The play was performed in the original Greek, and since almost no one in the audience would understand what was being said, the production relied on visual, slapstick comedy and Bernstein’s electric music to bring the ancient text to life. Bernstein’s score referenced everything from sitar music to the blues to get the humor across. The student production was a surprise smash hit. Aaron Copland and Walter Piston were in the audience, and photos even appeared in Life magazine.

Bernstein recycled one of his bluesy songs from The Birds into his 1944 musical On the Town, but the rest of the 1939 score was never published, and only revived in 1999 for a performance by the EOS Orchestra in New York, and to date has never been recorded.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): On the Town: Three Dance Episodes; New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Sony 42263

On today’s date in 1862, an 18-year-old Russian named Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov graduated as midshipman from the Russian Naval Academy and prepared for a two-year’s training cruise around the world. His uncle was an admiral and a close friend of the Czar, and in his autobiography Rimsky-Korsakov admits he, too, at first thought it might be a good idea — he loved reading travel books, after all.

But then Rimsky-Korsakov was seduced by music. He’d made the acquaintance of eminent Russian composers of his day, lost interest in a naval career, and dreamed of composing music himself.

The young midshipman’s tour of duty did enable him to hear a lot of it and to sample opera performances in London and New York. But what made the biggest impression on the budding composer was the sky below the equator.

“Wonderful days and nights,” he wrote. “The marvelous dark-azure of the day would be replaced by a fantastic phosphorescent night. The tropical night sky over the ocean is the most amazing thing in the world.”

It’s perhaps not too fanciful to believe that such impressions helped Rimsky-Korsakov develop into one of the most inventive and masterful painters of symphonic colors and instrumental effects.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908): Prelude (A Hymn to Nature), from The Invisible City of Kitezh; Scottish National Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, conductor; Chandos 8327

A concerto, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “a piece for one or more soloists and orchestra with three contrasting movements.” And for most classical music fans, “concerto” means one of big romantic ones by Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, works in which there is a kind of dramatic struggle between soloist and orchestra.

But on today’s date in 2003, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and its concertmaster Stephen Copes premiered a Violin Concerto that didn’t quite fit that mold. For starters, it had four movements, and this Violin Concerto No. 2 by American composer George Tsontakis was more “democratic” than romantic — meaning the solo violinist seems to invite the other members of the orchestra to join in the fun, rather than hogging all the show. This concerto is more like a friendly, playful game than a life-and-death contest, and Tsontakis even titles his second movement “Gioco” or “Games.”

The new concerto proved a winner, being selected for the prestigious 2005 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Even so, George Tsontakis confesses to being a little shy when sitting in the audience as his music is played, knowing full well, he says, that most people came to hear the Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, and not him.

George Tsontakis (b. 1951): Violin Concerto No. 2; Stephen Copes, violin; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Douglas Boyd, conductor; Koch International 7592

It was on today’s date in 1944 that the ballet Fancy Free — with music Leonard Bernstein and choreography by Jerome Robbins — was first staged by the Ballet Theater at the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. It was a big hit. Bernstein himself conducted, and alongside Robbins took 20 curtain calls.

“The ballet is strictly wartime America, 1944,” Bernstein wrote. “The curtain rises on a street corner with a lamppost, a side-street bar, and New York skyscrapers making a dizzying backdrop. Three sailors explode onto the stage. They are on 24-hour shore leave in the city and on the prowl for girls. The tale of how they meet first one, then a second girl, and how they fight over them, lose them, and in the end take off after still a third, is the story of the ballet.”

In a curious parallel to the stage action described by Bernstein, the ballet had been first pitched to composer Morton Gould, who said he was too busy, then to Vincent Persichetti, who in turn suggested Bernstein as a third, and perhaps better choice to produce a more hip, jazzy, and danceable score.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Fancy Free Ballet; New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Sony 63085

On today’s date in 1887, readers of the Wiener Salonblatt, a fashionable Viennese weekly artspaper, could enjoy the latest critical skirmish in the Brahms-Wagner wars.

At the close of the 19th century, traditionalist partisans of the Symphonies, Sonatas, and String Quartets of Johannes Brahms rallied around the conservative Viennese music critic, Eduard Hanslick. In the opposing camp were equally passionate admirers of the music dramas of Richard Wagner and the symphonic tone poems of Frans Liszt, works this camp defined as “the music of the future.”

The April 17, 1887 edition of the Wiener Salonblatt contained a review of a chamber music program presented by the Rosé Quartet, Vienna’s premiere chamber ensemble in those days. Here’s what the critic had to say:

“What was provided on this occasion was not to our taste: Brahms — no small dose of sleeping powder for weak nerves. Such programming reeks of lethal intent and should really be forbidden by the police!”

That review was penned by Hugo Wolf, these days more famous as a composer than as a music critic, and regarded one of the greatest song composers of the 19th century after Schubert, Schumann — and Brahms!

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903): Italian Serenade (I Solisti Italiani); Denon 9150

A century before crowds of extras and gigantic sets first filled the silver screen of Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood extravaganzas, the Paris Opera brought similar resources to the stage for their historical operas—offering shipwrecks, explosions, massacres, and other crowd-pleasing spectacles.

For example, on today’s date in 1849, the premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera “The Prophet,” included a ballet sequence that made audiences gasp in surprise when the dancers—supposed skating on a frozen lake—glided across the stage on roller skates!

Roller skates had been invented in Paris in 1790 but were considered a useless curiosity—after Meyerbeer’s opera, however, there was a booming demand for what was marketed as "Prophet Skates." Meyerbeer’s opera also included an on-stage sunrise, employing , for the first time at the Paris Opera, state-of-the art electric lights.

And just to prove that there is nothing new under the sun—electric or otherwise–in 1984, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight express,” a rock musical about roller-ball competitors, had singers racing around the stage on roller-skates. The musical proved a big hit in London, New York and Las Vegas, and, reminiscent of Meyerbeer’s frozen pond ballet, there has even been a version of “Starlight Express—On Ice.”

Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) The Prophet: Ballet of the Skaters: Galop Barcelona Symphony Orchestra/Michal Nesterowicz Naxos 573076

At 2:20 a.m. on this date in 1912, the luxury liner S.S. Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Of the 2201 people of on board, only 711 reached their intended destination in New York. Eight British musicians, members of the ship’s band, stayed on board, reportedly playing a hymn tune as the ship went down.

In 1969, British composer Gavin Bryars prepared a multimedia musical work, The Sinking of the Titanic, which incorporated spoken interviews by Titanic survivors with a set of variations on the hymn tune played by the ship’s band. In 1985, the sunken wreck of the Titanic was rediscovered, and renewed interest led to a 1990 revival performance and recording of Gavin Bryars’s score.

A few years later, composer James Horner wrote an Oscar-winning film score for director James Cameron’s Titanic — an incredibly successful cinematic dramatization of the story.

Horner wrote other famous film scores like those for Aliens and Braveheart — but none quite as successful as Titanic. That film grossed more than $600 million at the domestic box office and more than $1.8 billion worldwide. Ironically, considering this “titanic” success, the first film for which Horner composed a score was The Drought.

Gavin Bryars (b. 1943): The Sinking of the Titanic; Gavin Bryars and ensemble;
Point Music 446 249

James Horner (1953-2015): Titanic sountrack; Studio Orchestra; James Horner, conductor;
Sony Classcial 63213

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Fiddler Jay Ungar wrote a melancholy tune in 1982 and titled it Ashokan Farewell. It reflected, he wrote, the wistful sadness he felt at the conclusion of a week-long, summer-time fiddle and dance program in the Catskill Mountains at Ashokan Field Campus of the State University of New York.

“I was embarrassed by the emotions that welled up whenever I played it,” Ungar recalled. It’s written in the style of a Scottish lament or Irish air, and Ungar says he sometimes introduced it as “a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from the Bronx.”

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns heard a recording of Ungar’s tune and asked if he could use it as the theme for his PBS documentary series, The Civil War. In that context, the sadness in Ashokan Farewell takes on a whole different meaning.

The Civil War has inspired a number of other American composers, among them Roy Harris, whose Symphony No. 6 (Gettysburg) was premiered on this date in 1944 by the Boston Symphony. It was written on commission from the Blue Network, the radio predecessor of the American Broadcasting Company. Each of the symphony’s movements is prefaced by a quotation from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Jay Ungar (b. 1946): Ashokan Farewell; Jay Ungar, fiddle; Newman-Oltman Guitar Duo; MusicMasters 67145

Roy Harris (1898-1979): Symphony No. 6 (Gettysburg); Pacific Symphony; Keith Clark, conductor; Varese-Sarabande 47245