The "Radetzky March" is undoubtedly Johann Strauss Senior's most famous work. Its performance has become obligatory at the annual New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic—it's the piece that involves audience participation in the form of a "clap along."

The premiere performance of this familiar music took place on today's date in the year 1848. Few people outside of Vienna know that this music had a distinct political subtext in Strauss's day, and not everyone back then was clapping along.

Field Marshall Radetzky was the commander of the Austrian forces that put down "insurgent democrats" in Italy during the revolutions of 1848, and, as such, became a counter-revolutionary hero in Europe. The premiere of the "Radetzky March" occurred at a concert attended chiefly by monarchists and the Austrian military, and the tune quickly became the unofficial anthem of the Austrian military and ultra-conservatives—the "far right" of that time.

Curiously enough, Johann Strauss Junior held diametrically opposite political sympathies from his father. The younger Strauss even wrote a "Revolution" March and in 1848 his Viennese orchestra once dared play the "far left" French anthem, the "Marseillaise," which got him into trouble with the authorities.

By the end of the 19th century, however, the bloody political troubles of 1848 were diplomatically swept under the collective Austrian carpet, and Johann Strauss Junior's "Blue Danube" Waltz became the unofficial anthem for ALL Austrians, right, left and center.

On today's date in 1933, the Philadelphia Orchestra was performing at its summer home at Robin Hood Dell. Conductor Alexander Smallens led the world premiere performance of a new work by a 23-year-old composer named Samuel Barber. It was his first orchestral composition to have a major public hearing, but oddly enough, young Mr. Barber himself was not in attendance. Barber was in Europe that summer, and so missed the premiere of his Overture to "The School for Scandal," a musical romp inspired by the 18th century English Restoration comedy of the same name by Richard Sheridan. Even before he had left the Curtis Institute of Music, where he pursued a triple major in piano, composition, and voice, Barber had begun winning prizes that enabled him to study abroad. Until the outbreak of the Second World War, Barber's musical career was quite Euro-centric. His "School for Scandal" Overture, in fact, was written in Italy in 1931. Barber's First Symphony premiered in Rome in 1936, and the following year was played by the Vienna Philharmonic at the 1937 Salzburg Music Festival. That led to stateside performances and commissions from conductors like Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini. Barber's international career, like that of many other American composers, was temporarily put on hold by the War and by a three-year stint in the U.S. Army.

Say the phrase "BBC Proms Concert" to most music lovers, and they'll probably conjure up a mental image of the rowdy "Last Night of the Proms"—an event at which normally staid and reserved Britons don funny hats and make rude noises during Sir Henry Wood's arrangement of British sailor songs.

But the raucous "Last Night of the Proms" is only the festive finale of several weeks of fairly serious music making: dozens of concerts covering a wide range of old and new music

From the very beginning of the Proms in 1895, Sir Henry, who started the whole thing, had this specific agenda: "I am going to run nightly concerts to train the public in easy stages," he explained. "Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical AND modern music."

On today's date in 1996, for example, violinist Gidon Kremer premiered this

brand-new violin concerto by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho at a BBC Proms concert. The new concerto had an unusual title—"Grail Theater."

"I like the unusual combination of these two words," explained Saariaho, "because it represents two such different things. One is the search for the Grail, and the other side is the theatrical aspect. I feel that the concerto situation is very much comparable to a theater, and the main person in this theater piece is the violin."

The life story of George Gershwin usually runs something like this: an incredible string of successes is cut short by Gershwin's tragically early death.

On today's date in 1922, George Gershwin suffered one of his rare flops when his one-act opera "Blue Monday" opened and closed on the same day. For five years, beginning in 1920, Gershwin had provided the music for an annual Broadway review entitled "The George White Scandals." The impresario Mr. White provided the money and the leggy showgirls, Mr. Gershwin the catchy tunes and light-hearted dances.

But in 1922, Gershwin was eager to try something different: a modern, jazz-age version of an Italian verismo opera. The plot was simple: he does her wrong, and then she shoots him. Since it was a jazz opera, the characters were supposedly all blacks, but for the 1922 premiere, the cast was all white, made up in blackface. The reviews were devastatingly bad—one critic suggesting the soprano with the pistol should have shot all the rest of the cast before ANYONE had a chance to sing.

Mr. White read the reviews the next day, and pulled "Blue Monday" from his revue before it could have a second performance. A concert revival by the Paul Whiteman band at Carnegie Hall in 1925, and a 1953 CBS-TV production with an all-black cast didn't fare all that much better, and "Blue Monday" is rarely mounted today.

Around this time in 1956, the hot ticket on Broadway was for a musical based on the old Greek legend of Pygmalion, a sculptor so good that he fell in love with one of his beautiful female statues. The playwright, George Bernard Shaw, had updated the legend to modern-day London, with Pygmalion transformed into Professor Henry Higgins, and the beautiful female statue, a Cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle. In 1956, the Broadway team of Lerner and Loewe had in turn transformed Shaw's play into the smash Broadway musical, "My Fair Lady." But 208 years before all that, on today's date in the year 1748, another very successful musical adaptation of the Pygmalion legend opened in Paris. This "Pygmalion" was an opera-ballet by the great French Baroque composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau was born in 1683, two years earlier than Bach and Handel, but unlike them, was something of a late bloomer. Rameau was 50 before he became famous, and his opera-ballet "Pygmalion" opened shortly before his 65th birthday. In this work and many others, Rameau prefigured Wagner's desire to integrate myth, music and dance into a theatrical whole. Rameau was also famous for imitating natural sounds and noises in his music. One of Rameau's contemporaries, in praising the overture to "Pygmalion," even suggested the repeated notes of Rameau's theme represented the chipping of Pygmalion's chisel as he worked on his lovely creation.

Piero della Francesca was a 15th century Renaissance painter, whose series of frescoes entitled "Legend of the True Cross" inspired one of the best orchestral works of a 20th-century Czech composer named Bohuslav Martinu.

In 1952, Martinu made a trip to the Tuscan hill town of Arezzo, where he saw the frescoes and got the idea for a new symphonic work that would attempt to capture in music what Piero had captured in painting.

"If a composer tries to represent a picture in music," said Martinu, "his work is often considered merely descriptive, and somehow outside the range of pure music." What Martinu sought to capture was, as he put it, "a kind of solemn, frozen silence and opaque, colored atmosphere… a strange, peaceful, and moving poetry."

Even so, Martinu did link the first movement of his 3-part score to one Tuscan fresco showing the Queen of Sheba and some women kneeling by a river; and the second to another depicting the dream of the Emperor Constantine. The third and final movement was intended, in Martinu's words, as "a kind of general view of the frescoes, calling attention to some battle scenes and many other fascinating details."

Martinu's orchestral triptych, entitled "The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca," received its premiere performance on today's date at the 1956 Salzburg Festival in Austria, with the Vienna Philharmonic led by the eminent Czech conductor, Rafael Kubelik.

On today's date in 1959, Leonard Bernstein celebrated his 41st birthday in Moscow. The New York Philharmonic was embarked on an extensive world tour, which included three weeks in the Soviet Union. Their August 25th concert proved controversial, offering two works of Igor Stravinsky, a composer still condemned in the Soviet Union as "bourgeois" and "decadent." Even more daring, Bernstein opened his concert with "The Unanswered Question," a short piece by the American composer, Charles Ives. Even worse, Bernstein broke traditional Soviet protocol by talking directly to the audience through an interpreter, explaining Ives' philosophy of allowing several components of his score their own separate tempos and rhythms, which, in performance, came together in a kind of planned unpredictability. The enthusiastic audience response after the Ives led to it being encored. This really upset the Soviet authorities, and the music critic of the Ministry of Culture wrote, "Before this four-minute piece Bernstein spoke for six minutes. Only the good manners of the hospitable public resulted in a ripple of cool applause. Nevertheless, the conductor, setting modesty aside, himself suggested that the piece be repeated." Now, even the Tass news agency had reported that the enthusiastic audience had insisted on the encore. Even though furious at what he called "an unforgivable lie," Bernstein was persuaded to respect the local customs and to forgo any further controversial lectures from the podium for the remainder of the Soviet tour.

We tend to think OUR time has had a monopoly on political assassinations and bitter religious conflicts, but all that flourished as well in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Catholic and Protestant nobility often used religion to justify their turf wars and power struggles. On today's date in 1572, which happened to be St. Bartholomew's Day, the Catholic queen dowager of France, Catherine de Medici, and her son, King Charles IX, decided that the best way to rid their kingdom of troublesome Protestants would be simply to kill them off. A few days earlier, Catholic and Protestant nobles from across France had come to Paris to attend a noble wedding which, ironically, was intended to bring the rival religious factions closer together. Things quickly turned ugly, and on the 24th of August the infamous "Massacre of St. Bartholomew" began and quickly spread across the entire country. Among those who perished was the composer of this music, a French Protestant named Claude Goudimel, who was killed when the massacre reached Lyons. Fortunately for posterity, not ALL Reformation era rulers were so bloodthirsty. The English Catholic composer Thomas Tallis managed to keep his head through the reigns of alternating Catholic and Protestant monarchs, and the Protestant Queen Elizabeth the First admired and supported the music of William Byrd, despite his openly Catholic sympathies.

Tanglewood is one of America's most famous summer-time classical music festivals, and can boast a long and impressive list of premieres and performances by famous American composers and conductors. It takes place each year around this time in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Tanglewood has been the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home for more than 60 years, but it wasn't the symphony's first location in the Berkshires. In August of 1936, the first in a three-concert series was performed at Holmwood, a former Vanderbilt estate. And, in fact, the origins of this annual Festival actually began not with the Boston Symphony, but with the New York Philharmonic, which, on today's date in 1934 inaugurated the Berkshire Symphonic Festival in Stockbridge. That summer-time concert series was led by the American composer and conductor, Henry Hadley. When the New York Philharmonic dropped the series two years later, the Boston Symphony picked up on the idea. In short order, the great Russian-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky, moved the festival to Tanglewood and expanded the concert series into a kind of intensive summer camp for young musicians and composers. Among those who particularly benefited were two young composer-conductors named Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss. In 1940, the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center) opened, and to mark the occasion, American composer Randall Thompson's famous choral work titled Alleluia received its premiere performance.

Opera-goers today often lament the rise of intrusive stage directors who feel the need to reinterpret a composer's work in startling and often deliberately provocative ways. One recent staging of Wagner's "Lohengrin" at the Bayreuth Festival, for example, featured the chorus dressed up as laboratory rats.

But contemporary directors would have to go pretty far to top a ballet staging that took place at the Venice Festival on today's date in 1961.

In this case, music by the Italian Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti was specially arranged into a short ballet score for which sets, story, and choreography were provided by two leading avant-garde artists of the day: the surrealist Spanish painter Salvador Dali and the Belgian choreography Maurice Bejart, with an important contribution by La Maison Guerlain, a pricey French perfume manufacturer.

The result was described as "total theater" and titled simply "Gala"—which happened to be the name of Dali's wife. The ballet's surreal scenario is perhaps best—and somewhat discretely—described as a Jungian dream vision of one woman being courted by several men.

And when we said French perfume played an important role in the staging, we meant it—since big barrels of the stuff were placed on stage to mask the odor of a rotting cattle carcass that was a feature of Bejart's scenario.

To paraphrase the late Walter Cronkite, "And that's the way it was—and smelled—August 22, 1961."