In the 1920s, the German composer Paul Hindemith wrote a set of seven concertos, which he collectively titled: “Kammermusik” or “Chamber Music.” This generic title was part of Hindemith’s goal to foster a more “objective” musical style, modeled on 18th century composers like J.S. Bach. Some have even called Hindemith’s “Kammermusik” the 20th century equivalent of Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos.”

Hindemith’s “Kammermusik” No. 4, a work for solo violin and chamber orchestra, had its first performance in Dessau on today’s date in 1925. The soloist was Licco Amar, the first violinist of the Amar String Quartet, an ensemble in which Hindemith played viola.

Hindemith’s father had been killed in the First World War, and Hindemith himself had been called up, but avoided being sent to the front by forming a string quartet that played nightly to ease the nerves of his commanding officer. Despite being one of the leading “Aryan” composers of his day, Hindemith fell out of favor with the Nazi regime and eventually immigrated to America, where he became a very influential teacher.

To address the role of music in society, Hindemith suggested composers should revive the idea of domestic music-making by writing “Gebrauchsmusik,” or “utility music” that amateur musicians could play at home with family and friends.

“People who make music together cannot be enemies,” he observed, “at least while the music lasts.”

On today’s date in 1947, the German composer Hans Eisler, who had been living in the United States since 1938, was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

This was some years before Joseph McCarthy headed such investigations, but one member of the committee was a first-term Californian congressman by the name of Richard M. Nixon. Nixon and other committee members were eager to expose Communist agents, who they believed were undermining American values by infiltrating and influencing the film industry.

Hans Eisler, who had been working in Hollywood since 1942, was a prime suspect. After all, his brother Gerhard was an ardent Communist, and Hanns himself a close artistic collaborator of the Marxist poet, Bertolt Brecht. As one newspaper reported, Hans Eisler was “the commissar of the West Coast Party activities on the movie front.”

While Hans Eilser did have leftist sympathies, there was absolutely no evidence of his being a Soviet agent, and as a film music composer, Eisler had no ideological influence on the scripts or even the topics of the films on which he worked. Celebrities like Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland all rallied to his defense, but to no avail. The mood of the country in the early days of the Red Scare was such that Eisler was banned from working his Hollywood, and eventually forced out of the country.

Like his old friend Bertold Brecht, Eisler eventually settled in Communist East Germany, where he died in 1962.

It was on today’s date in 1835, that the great Romantic opera composer Vincenzo Bellini died at a country home near Paris. He was only 34 years old, but had achieved great fame in his brief lifetime.

The long, elegant melodic lines Bellini spun out in his greatest operas were imitated by many composers, and proved to be a major influence on the solo piano works of his contemporary, Frederic Chopin.

Bellini’s first successful opera was “Il Pirata” or “The Pirate” from 1827, and just three years later, he could truthfully report, “My style is now heard in the most important theatres in the world… and with the greatest enthusiasm.” He settled in Paris, where he was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. It was there that his final opera, “I Puritani di Scozia” or “The Puritans of Scotland,” premiered early in 1835.

If Bellini’s real life had followed the Romantic story-lines of his operas, he would have been a dispossessed outcast who dies for love. In fact, Bellini was financially successful and moved in the highest social circles. Rather than die for love, it seems he was planning to marry for money at the time he fell ill, a victim of chronic gastro-enteritis.

At his requiem mass, four of the leading composers of his day, Paer, Cherubini, Carafa and Rossini, each held a corner of the coffin shroud. He was buried in Paris, but in 1876 his remains were moved to the cathedral of Catania, the Italian town where he was born.

Today we celebrate the birthday of Leonardo Balada, an American composer born in Barcelona, Spain, on Sept. 22nd, 1933.

After studying at the Barcelona conservatory, the 20-something composer came to New York on a musical scholarship.

Balada recalls his arrival as both a cultural and climatic shock: “When I landed in New York—on a freezing day in 1956—little did I know of the mental turmoil I would experience in the next few years. That city had become the focal point for the latest music and arts. New York shook my musically conservative upbringing to its roots.”

Like many composers of his generation, Balada felt he had to decide whether to follow the path of the abstract serialists who dominated music at that time, or find his own way and voice.

“I felt a strong necessity to become up to date aesthetically,” recalls Balada, “to look to the future and not be criticized as a reactionary. How could it be otherwise for a liberal young fellow brought up in Spain, opposed to Franco’s conservatism? On the other hand the music I was listening to in New York was not for me.”

Encouraged by the great Spanish guitarist Narciso Yepes, Balada began to draw on his own imagination and cultural heritage, eventually blending contemporary techniques with the elements of a more traditional language, often infused with Spanish themes.

“Are people still writing concertos for harpsichord?” you ask. Well, even if it’s not the most pressing question that has sprung into your mind today, we do have an answer, which is “Yes!”

On today’s date in 2002, for example, this new Concerto for Harpsichord and Chamber Orchestra by Philip Glass had its premiere performance at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

Glass was asked to write a new Harpsichord Concerto for the Northwest Chamber Orchestra, and found the commission intriguing.

“For one,” wrote Glass, “I have always been an admirer of the literature for harpsichord and studied some of the music from the Baroque period quite thoroughly, and have played a bit of that music myself. Secondly, I knew that the modern day harpsichord was capable of a fuller, more robust sound than was available in ‘period’ instruments and might make a handsome partner to a modern chamber orchestra.”

Glass’s modern day concerto is in the traditional three movements of a Baroque era concerto, with a slower, more lyrical middle movement flanked by speedier, flashier outer movements. And perhaps surprisingly for a “minimalist” composer famous—or infamous—for his loping, seemingly endless repeated patterns, this Harpsichord Concerto, despite being recognizably a work by Philip Glass, is more varied and mercurial than usual, with a final movement in which the harpsichord soloist really needs to “go for Baroque!”

When we think of Russian music in Paris, the name Sergei Diaghilev comes first to mind. In the early years of the 20th century, that famous Russian impresario saw to it that not only the new music of Stravinsky was performed in the French capital, but also a historical panorama of earlier Russian works, including Mussorgsky’s opera, “Boris Godounov.”

But Russian music and musicians had been coming to Paris for decades, and for their part, notable French composers like Adolphe Adam, Hector Berlioz, and even the young Claude Debussy had all visited Russia.

Russian music also figured prominently at famous Universal Expositions held in Paris in the latter 19th century. On today’s date in 1878, for example, Tchaikovsky’s “Valse-Scherzo” for violin and orchestra received its premiere in Paris, at a Russian concert conducted by the composer’s colleague and compatriot Nicolai Rubinstein. In addition to this brand-new work, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and symphonic fantasia “The Tempest” were also performed during Russian concerts at the 1878 Exposition.

Tchaikovsky was back home in Russia, curious to know how his works fared in Paris. He wrote to a friend: “Have you been to any of the Russian concerts in Paris? According to some newspapers my compositions were a great success, to others a failure. I cannot get at the truth.” Fortunately, when Rubinstein returned to Russia, he was able to report first-hand that Tchaikovsky’s music had, indeed, been very well received.

During his later years, the German composer Johannes Brahms was a frequent visitor to the town of Meiningen, where the Grand Duke had a fine orchestra that gave stellar performances of Brahms’ music.

Early in 1891, Brahms heard one member of that orchestra, the clarinetist Richard Mülhfeld, perform chamber works by Mozart and Weber. Brahms was so impressed that they became fast friends. Listening to Mülhfeld play, Brahms became so enthusiastic about the clarinet’s possibilities that began writing chamber works for his new friend. Brahms was always particularly fond of the female alto voice, whose timbre is similar to the clarinet’s, and so Brahms promptly nicknamed Mülhfeld “Fraeulein Clarinet” or the “new primadonna.”

For Mülhfeld, Brahms first wrote a clarinet trio, which was followed by a clarinet quintet, and finally, a pair of clarinet sonatas, both composed in the summer of 1894.

These two sonatas were first played by Mülhfeld with Brahms at a private performance in the home of the sister of the Duke of Meiningen on today’s date that year. In November, the pair also gave private performances in Frankfurt for Clara Schumann and at Castle Altenstein for the Duke of Meiningen. The first public performances occurred in Vienna in January of 1895.

The American composer Virgil Thomson was fond of writing what he called “portraits”—musical sketches of people he knew. When asked how he did this, Thomson replied: “I just look at you and I write down what I hear.”

This music by Thomson was a portrait in disguise. It premiered on today’s date in 1954 at the Venice Festival in Italy, identified simply as his Concerto for Flute, Strings, Harp, and Percussion. Thomson later confessed it was in fact a musical portrait of Roger Baker, a handsome young painter he had recently befriended.

Born in Kansas City in 1896, Thomson studied music at Harvard, and lived in Paris through much of the 1920s and 30s. In 1940, he became the music critic of The New York Herald-Tribune, and held that post until 1954. Thomson once defined the role of music critic as one who “seldom kisses, but always tells.”

But in 1954, Thomson decided fourteen years as a music critic was enough, and it was time to concentrate on his own music for a change. Perhaps not by coincidence, one of the friends who encouraged him to do so was Roger Baker, the artist “portrayed” by Thomson in his 1954 concerto.

Ironically, Thomson’s successor at the Herald-Tribune, music critic Paul Henry Lang, dismissed the New York premiere of Thomson’s new concerto as (quote): “mortally fatigued music” and “not one of Mr. Thomson’s good pieces.”

In 1871, one year after the premiere in Munich of Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” a German-born American conductor named Theodore Thomas wrote to Wagner asking if he might perform some excerpts of this new work in the United States. Wagner turned him down, probably worried that loose American copyright laws might not be able to protect his new music.

Undeterred, Thomas turned for advice to the famous German conductor Hans von Bulow, who suggested Thomas try to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Wagner to plead his case. After all, Bulow told Thomas, Wagner was actually quite interested in America. That meeting never took place, but somehow Thomas secured a manuscript of what would become the most popular orchestral excerpt from “Die Walküre,” its famous “Ride of the Valkyries.”

To this day, no one knows for sure how Thomas managed this. Some speculate von Bulow himself provided the music, others suggest the American conductor got his copy from Franz Liszt.

In any case, on today’s date in 1872, this music was performed for the first time in America at one of Theodore Thomas’s concerts in Central Park, an all-Wagner evening, in fact.

The “Ride of the Valkyries” proved to be a smash hit with Manhattanites. As Thomas recounted in his memoirs, “the people jumped on the chairs and shouted.”

There’s a fun little book entitled “Great Operatic Disasters,” which chronicles some of the humorous—and some of the harrowing—mishaps that have befallen opera singers and productions over the last few centuries… and September 16th seems to have been a particularly unlucky day in the history of opera:

Consider that on today’s date in 1782, one of the most celebrated opera stars of the 18th century, the Italian castrato Farinelli, died in Bologna after his dismissal from the Spanish court; on September 16th in 1920, the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso made his last records in Camden, New Jersey; and in 1977, opera diva Maria Callas dropped dead of a heart attack in Paris.

And it was on today’s date in 1966 that the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center opened with a gala production of a brand-new opera specially commissioned from the American composer Samuel Barber. Despite an all-star cast headed by Leontyne Price and a lavish stage production designed by Franco Zefferelli—you guessed it—the opera was a flop.

Maybe everyone expected too much, or perhaps the lavish sets were too distracting. Whatever the reason, despite its gorgeous music, even today Barber’s “Anthony and Cleopatra” has never found a lasting place in the repertory of popular American works.

Maybe it was just the operatic jinx of September 16th?