On today’s date in the year 2001, during the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter premiered a new chamber work for violin and piano entitled “Tango, Song and Dance.” She had commissioned the work from Andre Previn several years earlier, but its premiere was delayed as Mutter embarked on a project to perform and record all Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas.

“After doing all those stern recitals,” said Mutter, “I wanted to play pieces which reflected the basis of musical history, the folksongs and dances which has inspired composers through so many centuries. Tango, Song and Dance is both modern and old-fashioned, and it touches the heart, especially the slow movement, which is really a ‘Song Without Words.’”

And that wasn’t the only thing to touch her heart… it was around this time that Previn and Mutter became husband and wife. For his part, Andre offered these comments on composing a piece for Anne-Sophie: “I had written a violin sonata before I did Tango, Song and Dance, and I gave it to Anne-Sophie, who came back with the request that I make it much more difficult—otherwise she didn’t want to touch it. I have one piece of advice to composers for the violin—make sure Anne-Sophie premieres your piece. Then you’re home and dry, and everything works!”

Other composers seem to agree, and Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutoslawski, Henri Dutilleux, and Wolfgang Rihm have all dedicated violin works to her.

Many operatic works have been described as “revolutionary,” but on today’s date in 1830, a performance of an opera helped to spark a real, take-to-the-streets kind of revolution.

The opera in question was by the French composer Daniel Auber, and entitled La Muette di Portici, or “The Mute Girl of Portici.” The opera’s story concerns a 17th century uprising by some patriots in Naples against their Spanish rulers, and is regarded today as one of the first examples of a genre known as “GRAND opera,” which means it included some stage spectacles worthy of Cecil B. DeMille. For example Auber’s opera ends with the title heroine casting herself into an erupting volcano.

The opera had premiered in Paris in 1828, but on today’s date in 1830 it was being staged at the Theatre La Monnaie in Brussels, a country then under the control of the Dutch. The opera’s story of evil occupiers and patriotic rebels must have touched a raw nerve in many in the Belgian audience.

Upon hearing the line in the opera: "a slave knows no danger, as death is better than living in chains," some in the audiences began a demonstration against the hated Dutch authorities.

The demonstration grew more and more heated, and then, just like the volcano in Auber’s opera, erupted out of the theater and into the streets. Symbols of Dutch authority were attacked, a new provisional government was formed, and by November that same year Belgium had declared its independence.

Looking back on a famous person’s life and career, one often notes quirky patterns of coincidences. Take the American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, for instance.

On today’s date in 1943, Leonard Bernstein was exactly one day short of his 25th birthday, and, at the Public Library in Lenox, Massachusetts, accompanied the singer Jennie Tourel in the premiere of a new song cycle for which he had just composed both the words and the music.

The song cycle was entitled “I Hate Music!” and offered, from a child’s perspective, some devastatingly direct observations on art and life.

The following day, on his 25th birthday, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, Artur Rodzinski, invited Bernstein to be Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic… Now, fast forward to November that same year.

On November 13, 1943, Jennie Tourel and Bernstein were at Town Hall, giving the New York premiere of “I Hate Music!” The very next day, Leonard Bernstein stepped in at short notice for the indisposed Bruno Walter, and made his debut conducting the orchestra during the Philharmonic’s live Sunday afternoon national radio broadcast from Carnegie Hall.

The 25-year old Bernstein’s surprise—and successful—conducting debut made the front page of the New York Times, and his career was launched with a splash. Just a coincidence, of course, but we suspect Bernstein had a special soft spot for his little song cycle with the “tongue-in-cheeky” title.

The first railway line in Russia opened in 1837 and ran from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk. In the summers, tourists from St. Petersburg would travel to Pavlovsk to visit the site of an 18th century royal palace, to dine at the elegant Vauxhall restaurant, or take in an orchestral concert.

The Russian railroad had enticed Johann Strauss’s orchestra to perform there in the 1850s, and Pavlovsk remained a popular summertime concert venue for several decades.

In 1913, the young Sergei Prokofiev traveled to Pavlovsk to appear as the soloist in the first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 2. The premiere occurred on today’s date that year, and the music of young firebrand composer-performer proved to be far from the standard light classical fare normally offered in Pavlovsk.

One reviewer wrote: “Prokofiev’s music left listeners frozen with fright, their hair standing on end.” Another critic wrote: “One couple stood up and ran for the exit, commenting, ‘Such music is enough to drive you crazy! What is he doing, making fun of us? We came here to enjoy ourselves. The cats at home can make music like this!’”

Even so, one calmer review concluded: “This means nothing. Ten years from now the public will atone for the catcalls by applauding unanimously a new composer with a European reputation.”

On today’s date in 1980, at a Proms concert at Royal Albert Hall in London, the British conductor Colin Davis led the London Symphony in the premiere of a new work by the British composer Michael Tippett. This was a Triple Concerto for violin, viola and cello with orchestra, showcasing the talents of three virtuoso string players: violinist Gyorgy Pauk, violist Nobuko Imai, and cellist Ralph Kirshbaum.

The central slow movement of the new Triple Concerto, marked “very slow—calmer still,” proved to be one of Tippett's most lyrical and colorful moments, and with it, Tippett joined a long line of Western composers, including Claude Debussy, Benjamin Britten, and Lou Harrison, who have been inspired by Asian music: specifically the traditional bronze gong orchestras of the islands of Indonesia, known as “gamelan.”

Shortly before he composed his Triple Concerto, Tippet had visited Java and Bali, and had experienced first-hand performances of gamelan music in the palaces, temples and gardens of Indonesia.

In describing the role of the artist as he saw it, Tippett suggested that it was, “the creation of images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too violent, images of reconciliation for a world torn by divisions, and in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty.”

Today’s date marks the birthday anniversary of the French composer Lili Boulanger. She was born in Paris on August 21, 1893.

In 1913, Lili Boulanger became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for her cantata “Faust and Helen,” an achievement which was headline news in those days. Lili’s father, Ernst, had he lived to see it, would have been especially proud, since he, too, was a composer and had won the Prix de Rome himself back in 1835.

The Boulangers were a remarkably talented family, it seems, and it’s one of music history’s saddest “what-might-have-beens” to consider what Lili might have accomplished if she had lived as long as her gifted older sister, Nadia Boulanger, who died at 92 after a long career as the world’s most famous composition teacher. Nadia could count among her pupils several generations of famous American composers, ranging from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass.

Lili Boulanger suffered from Crohn’s disease, and died at just 24 years of age, in 1918. Despite her frail health and tragically short life, Lili Boulanger left behind a small body of vocal and instrumental works that are still performed. Her Psalm settings in particular are admired for their solemnity and deep spirit.

Details on the lives and careers of composers born before 1700 tend to be a bit skimpy, at best. For example, we know that the Italian Baroque composer Jacopo Peri was born on today’s date in 1561, but we’re not sure if that was in Rome or Florence.

As a point of reference, remember that William Shakespeare was born in 1564, just three years after Peri. And by the 1580s, around the same time Shakespeare was learning to be a playwright, Peri and some of his Italian colleagues were experimenting with a new art form that we call “opera.”

There was much discussion at the time about what the music of the ancient Greeks must have been like, and how a complete dramatic story might be told from beginning to end in music, utilizing some of the same techniques that composers employed to accompany the much shorter songs and madrigals popular at the time.

Peri was active as a musician and singer at the Medici court in Florence, where early attempts to come up with some answers took place. He was instrumental in the production of two of the earliest operas for which the complete music survives: Dafne, which premiered around 1597 and Euridice from 1600.

Peri outlived his English contemporary Shakespeare by some 17 years. Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of 52, while Peri died sometime in August of 1633, at 72, a ripe old age for the 17th century.

Most of us—if we’re lucky—chug along more or less contentedly in an uneventful day-by-day routine... a little like the opening of this chamber work by the American composer John Howell Morrison.

But sometimes, in some lives, something happens that suddenly disrupts the uneventful, comfortable routine, something that knocks all routine and normality straight out of the ballpark: perhaps it’s the loss of a job, or the loss of a loved one, and suddenly routine physical or mental health is so shaken that the soundtrack of life shifts to something uncomfortably similar to that of a bad horror film... But most of us—if we’re lucky—somehow survive, and are perhaps even grow a bit stronger from the experience.

As the old saying goes: “Hard Weather Makes Good Wood”—and that’s the title Morrison gave this piece, scored for string quartet and electronic tape, recorded on today’s date in 2002 as the title track on a CD collection of his chamber works.

And, yes, Morrison confesses that “Hard Weather Makes Good Wood,” was, in fact, composed during a period of intense personal struggle in his own life.

We’re not sure if he feels stronger for surviving that experience, but at least it resulted in striking new piece of chamber music.

The 1985 Salzburg Festival boasted a quite unusual premiere: a 17th century Venetian opera by the Italian Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi entitled “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria,” or “The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland,” as arranged and orchestrated by the contemporary German composer Hans Werner Henze.

The surviving music for Monteverdi’s opera does not exist in what we now call “full score.” Monteverdi wrote down a bare 5-part accompaniment to the vocal lines of his opera, without indicating what specific instruments he meant to play those notes—and when. This means for any modern performance, someone needs to make those decisions.

For their 1985 summer season, the Salzburg Festival commissioned Henze to prepare a new orchestration of Monteverdi’s “Return of Ulysses” 245 years after its first performance in Venice back in 1640. As luck would have it, Henze’s version appeared around the same time as another modern attempt to reconstruct Monteverdi’s score by the noted Baroque specialist Nicholas Harnoncourt.

Even so, the music critics, in the main, were complimentary after the Henze’s version premiered in Sazlburg, noting that his scoring somehow managed to sound both ancient and modern at the same time.

Even though we’ll never know EXACTLY how the opera sounded when Monteverdi heard it back in 1640, thanks to modern technology, the audio and video of that 1985 Salzburg performance can be sampled in both CD and DVD versions.

When asked to name some important musical works associated with World War II, music lovers are apt to think of the sonatas and symphonies Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote during those years. But three symphonies by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger form another very compelling war triptych.

Honegger spent the war years in occupied France, and his Symphony No. 2, which premiered in 1942, might be considered a symphony of the grim wartime resistance. It is scored for strings alone, but at the very end includes an optional trumpet solo, a dramatic gesture that seems an emotional call to action.

Honegger’s Symphony No. 3, which premiered on August 17, 1946, is entitled “A Liturgical Symphony,” with the titles of each of its movements taken from the Latin Mass for the Dead. Considering the great loss of life on all sides of the conflict just ended, this work, too, packs an emotional wallop.

And to round out the triptych, Honegger’s Symphony No. 4, from 1947, is subtitled “The Delights of Basel.” This music captures the elusive and bittersweet mood of a Europe tentatively groping its way back to normal life, closing with a decidedly wistful evocation of carnival time in the Swiss city of Basel.