The real story behind Richard Strauss’ decision to use a chamber orchestra for his opera “Ariadne on Naxos” is rather complicated and frankly mundane. We prefer a much more “colorful” version, even though it may be as imaginary as the Greek myth of poor Ariadne herself.

In any case, here’s how some fanciful Germans claim it all came about when Strauss’s opera was premiered in Stuttgart on today’s date in 1912:

Back when a new opera house was being planned for that city, Strauss was asked how large the orchestral pit should be. “Oh, it should hold about 100 players,” he suggested. So, to determine the size required for the new theater’s pit, the architects rather naively asked the local military band to assemble 100 players, have them stand at attention, and measured the amount of space they occupied.

Now, as you might expect, soldiers standing at attention take up a lot less space than an equal number of seated string players, not to mention trombonists and timpanists. And so, the resulting space in the new theater could only accommodate a chamber orchestra.

And as luck would have it, the Stuttgart Opera was also eager to launch the brand-new opera by Strauss. When he learned what had happened, Strauss had a good laugh, but, being the eminently practical sort he was, simply wrote his new opera for chamber ensemble of about 40 players.

Fact or fantasy, that’s how they like to tell it in Stuttgart.

On a number of occasions, the American composer Steve Reich has suggested that his intensely personal brand of music-making works best in small-ensemble situations. But on today’s date in 2001, at the urging of conductor David Robertson, the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered a “big-band” string orchestra version of Reich’s “Different Trains.”

In its original form, “Different Trains” was scored for a string quartet and tape. As in many of his pieces, Reich based its musical themes on the rhythms and cadences of taped recorded speech patterns and pitches. “The basic idea is that speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments,” says Reich.

“The concept of this piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently from 1930 to 1942, accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.”

Reich’s musical meditation combined purely instrumental sounds with interviews—clips from his governess, a Pullman porter, and Holocaust survivors—mixed with ambience sounds of American and European trains. In 1988, Reich wrote: “The piece presents both a documentary and a musical reality, and a new musical direction for me.”

On today's date in 1959, the Detroit Symphony under the eminent French conductor Paul Paray gave the first performance of some music by the eminent American composer Walter Piston.

Piston had studied in Paris with the famous French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and the great French composer Paul Dukas, so perhaps this was a very astute and stylish paring of composer and conductor.

In any case, to help celebrate the 100th Worcester Festival, Paray and the Detroit orchestra were on hand in Massachusetts for the premiere of Piston's "Three New England Sketches," an orchestral suite whose movements were entitled: "Seaside," "Summer Evening," and "Mountains."

Piston didn't intend for listeners to take these titles too literally: "The programmatic titles serve in a broad sense to tell the source of the inspirations, reminiscences, even dreams that pervaded the otherwise musical thoughts of one New England composer," he noted.

Piston was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1894, taught for many years at Harvard, had a summer vacation home in Vermont, and died in Belmont, Massachusetts in 1976, so he certainly qualified as a bone-fide "New England" composer.

"Is the Dust Bowl more American than, say, a corner in the Boston Athenaeum?" he once asked, arguing: "Would not a Vermont village furnish as American a background for a composition as the Great Plains?"

Even so, the most striking hallmark of Piston's music remains its quite cosmopolitan style and neo-classical form—the lasting influence, perhaps, of his two famous French teachers.

George Frideric Handel is the composer credited with “inventing” the organ concerto back in the 18th century.

Handel was a virtuoso performer on the organ, and, as a special added attraction during the London performances of some of his Biblical oratorios, one of Handel’s concertos would be featured as a kind of intermission feature. This served to showcase the Handel’s skill as an organist—and perhaps to give his singers a chance to catch their breath between sections of the full-length oratorio.

Since then, a number of composers have added to the organ concerto repertory started by Handel.

On today’s date in 1990, on a CBC radio broadcast from the Calgary Organ Festival Competition, a brand-new organ concerto by the American composer Michael Colgrass had its premiere performance. Colgrass’ concerto was entitled “Snow Walker,” and is cast as an impressionistic musical picture of the Far North and the fortitude, humor, and spirituality of Canada’s native Inuit peoples.

The work is dedicated to Farley Mowat, the author of a true-life story of life in the Far North, “Never Cry Wolf,” familiar from a popular Disney movie. Howling wolf cries from a trombone do appear in Colgrass’ score, along with surging winds of a polar landscape and evocations of Inuit throat singing, culminated in a rambunctious dance-finale.

It’s all a very far cry from 18th century London, but recognizably in the tradition of Handel’s virtuoso showpieces for a master organist.

Let’s face it. Brevity and wit are not always qualities one associates with new music.

But today we offer a sample: this comic overture is less than 5 minutes long, and opens, as you just heard, with a Fellini-esque duet for piccolo and contrabassoon.

The overture is entitled “Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quark,” and is purportedly a rather burlesque celebration of modern theoretical physics. Its alliterative title evokes those subatomic particles known as “quarks” that, we’re told, make up our universe. And, since this music changes its changes time signature so often, perhaps Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” is thrown in for good measure.

Its composer is an American, Marga Richter, who was born on this date in 1926 in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. Richter received her early music training in Minneapolis, and then moved to New York’s Juilliard School for further composition study with two distinguished American composers, Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma.

Marga Richter has written over 75 works including an opera and two ballets, as well as two piano concertos and a variety of solo, chamber and symphonic works, including the 1991 overture “Quantum Quirks of a Quick, Quaint Quark.”

"Composing,” says Richter,” is my response to a constant desire to transform my perceptions and emotions into music. Everything that touches me, everything beautiful, or mysterious, or painful, or joyful, or unknowable becomes an immediate or eventual source of inspiration. Music is the way I speak to the silence of the universe."

On today’s date in 1950, the famous oboist Marcel Tabuteau gave the premiere performance of this “Pastorale” for solo oboe, harp, and strings, with his colleagues from the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy conducting.

The music was by Howard Hanson, who dedicated the piece to his wife Peggy.

Hanson was born in Wahoo, Nebraska in 1896. As a talented teenager, Hanson recalls a German-born musician in New York asking him: “Well, now, Hanson, why do you waste your time at futile efforts in composition when you could became a great concert pianist?” This, said Hanson, from someone who had never heard one note he had written. “In the true German tradition,” Hanson recalled, “he figured that nobody from Nebraska could possibly write good music. It took 40 years to get rid of that kind of thinking in the U.S.,—and we’re not over it yet.”

Hanson was in his early 80s when he made those comments, with a 40 year career as a successful composer, conductor and educator behind him. Hanson had just completed his seventh and final symphony, and was commonly referred to as “The Dean of American Music.”

Despite all that, Hanson retained his sense of humor, as evidence by this comment from the octogenarian: “Peggy will say to me, ‘What are you going to do now? ’ and I’ll say, ‘I’m going upstairs to waste my time in futile efforts at composition.’”

Every composer who enters a competition hopes to get a letter like this one, which showed up in the Boston mailbox of George Whitefield Chadwick in 1894:

“I take pleasure in announcing that your symphony offered for the second annual competition of the National Conservatory of Music has obtained the prize. In view of your desire to produce it without delay, we have decided to waive our right [to the symphony’s first performance].” Signed: Antonin Dvorak, Director.

And so it was the Boston Symphony, not the Conservatory’s orchestra or the New York Philharmonic, who gave the premiere performance of Chadwick’s prize-winning Symphony No. 3 on today’s date in 1894.

Chadwick dedicated his symphony to Theodore Thomas, the preeminent American conductor and new music advocate of his day. In a letter to Thomas, Chadwick commented: “My symphony was very well received here, and condemned by some of the newspaper men as a ‘dry and uninspired work’—by which you may guess that it had some features which were not altogether trivial!”

In the decades that followed his death in 1931, Chadwick’s unashamedly Romantic scores fell out of favor and were rarely heard. Some dismissed these as pale imitations of Brahms and Wagner, forgetting that same criticism could have been applied as well to many prominent European composers in the 1890s. In the context of an American musical scene dominated by German music and musicians, Chadwick himself would probably have taken such comparisons as a compliment.

In 1958, the state of Minnesota was celebrating its centennial, and decided to commission a symphony in honor of the occasion.

Now, thanks to Garrison Keillor, just about everyone these days knows there are a lot of Norwegians in Minnesota, but even back in 1958, that was still fairly obvious, and so it seemed a good idea to ask a Norwegian composer to write a “Minnesota Symphony.”

And who better than Harald Saeverud, one of the most distinguished composers of that day, and a composer who had just been granted Norwegian knighthood in the order of Saint Olaf, first-class.

Nor was Saeverud new to the symphony-writing game. His “Minnesota Symphony” was his Symphony No. 8. Its premiere performance occurred at Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis on today’s date in 1958, with the Minneapolis Symphony led by Antal Dorati. The capacity audience of 4000 gave Saeverud and his symphony a warm welcome.

For his part, Saeverud was equally gracious, and suggested his “Minnesota Symphony” was meant to be not only an occasional piece, celebrating the settlement and growth of a Midwestern American state, but music intended to have more universal significance:

“My whole life has been a preparation for writing this work,” he stated. “With the map of Minnesota above my desk and with all my thoughts and feelings concentrated on Minnesota’s history, I dived into the work, which proved increasingly fascinating as I became aware that it was simultaneously growing into a history of mankind.”

By the mid-1940s, the famous American bandleader Paul Whiteman was not as popular as he once was during the 20s and 30s. Even so, his name and orchestra were still a draw, and Whiteman was ever hopeful of introducing new pieces that might prove as popular as Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite,” both commissioned by Whiteman in those earlier decades.

In 1944, Whiteman commissioned a number of short chamber orchestra works, or “symphonettes” as he dubbed them, for his new radio show called “Music out of the Blue.” The show aired at midnight. “So if the pieces are too bad,” explained Whiteman to his radio bosses, “few people will know it.”

And so it was on today’s date in 1944 that one of these new pieces, commissioned from Aaron Copland, had its radio premiere. Its title was “A Letter from Home.”

In the context of an America still at war in Europe, this title had a special resonance for those with loved ones serving abroad. Copland himself had a brother in the army, and wrote the work while living in Mexico, where he, too, received letters from home from his sister, Laurine.

It was from her letters that Copland learned his mother had died and that his father’s senility was getting worse. As a recent Copland biographer puts it, “One cannot help but suppose that some of his feelings about her death and other family matters made their way into this score.”

There are some operas which are rarely—if ever—staged, but whose music becomes famous—even wildly popular—in the concert hall. Everyone has heard the overture to Rossini’s “William Tell,” for example, but only a few fortunate (or very determined) opera fans ever get to see the whole opera staged.

Zoltán Kodály’s opera “Háry János” falls into this strange class of works both popular and obscure. This comic opera debuted at the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest on today’s date in 1926, and recounts the adventures of an old veteran named “Háry János.”

In the village tavern, Háry boasts of his heroic military exploits: how he singlehandedly won a battle against the Emperor Napoleon, for example. Why, the Emperor’s Wife even fell in love with him, and he could have ran off with her if he’d wanted, but he chose to remained true to his Hungarian sweetheart back home.

You get the idea…

Kodály’s opera was a tremendous hit in Budapest, but was not taken up elsewhere. Perhaps some of the humor was lost in translation, and even today, performances outside of Hungary are quite rare. But a concert suite of excerpts from Kodály’s brilliant score depicting Háry János’s imaginary adventures was taken up eagerly by orchestras worldwide.

Kodály’s “Háry János” Suite quickly became a popular showpieces for virtuoso orchestras, with performances and audiences alike enthusiastic over its unbeatable combination of great tunes, colorful orchestration, and smile-inducing wit.