On today’s date in 1949, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Boston Symphony in the first complete performance of Olivier Messiaen’s ten-movement, 75-minute long “Turangalila” Symphony.

“Turangalila” is the Sanskrit word for love, and Messiaen’s score is meant to be a voluptuous evocation of the emotion at its most exalted state. In addition to a huge percussion battery, Messiaen’s score calls for an electronic keyboard instrument known as the “Ondes Martenot,” whose tones fans describe as “haunting,” but foes liken to the sound of a musical saw.

Messiaen had spent the summer of 1949 as composer-in-residence at Tanglewood at the invitation of the great Russian conductor and new music impresario, Serge Koussevitzky, who was also Bernstein’s mentor. Before arriving in Tanglewood, Messiaen had written to Bernstein as follows: “I am 41 years old and I have put into my symphony all of my strengths of love, of hope and of musical research. But I know you are a man of genius and that you will conduct it the way I feel it.”

The exotic French score was a modest success in Massachusetts. At least it provoked no riot, but then, as the Christian Science Monitor noted: “If Bostonians suffer, they suffer in silence.” When Bernstein and the Boston Symphony took the new score to New York’s Carnegie Hall, however, critical reaction ranged from “a really rousing experience” to “the trashiest Hollywood composers have met their match.”

On today’s date in 1957, the New York City Ballet staged a new collaboration between the great Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky and the great Russian-born choreographer Georges Balanchine.

The New York City company had been asking Stravinsky for nearly a decade to write a third ballet on a classical subject to make up a trilogy of works that would include his two earlier dance works on Greek mythology, “Apollo” from 1928 and “Orpheus” from 1948.

Just as they were about to despair that Stravinsky would ever write another big ballet, he unexpectedly obliged—if not with a Greek myth, at least with a Greek WORD: He titled his new ballet for Balanchine “Agon,” the Greek word for contest or struggle.

A 17th century French dance manual provided Stravinsky with a visual image of two trumpeters accompanying a dance, and that prompted one of the Ballet’s movements, entitled “bransle simple,” which prominently features those instruments. On a more modern note, by the 1950s, as Stravinsky’s assistant Robert Craft recalled, “Something called twelve-tone music was in the air, and ‘Agon’ is about 12 dancers and 12 tones.”

“Agon” is also set in 12 scenes, and some of its movements were consciously laid out in multiples of 12 bars. Balanchine himself said in working on the ballet, “Stravinsky and I constructed every possibility of dividing 12”—which in dance terms, meant abstract solos, duets, trios and quartets to match the abstract, if eminently danceable, nature of Stravinsky’s score.

Ever wonder how composers choose a story for an opera? Here’s one answer, courtesy of the American composer Tobias Picker:

“My sister was dusting her bookshelf in 1998, and a copy of Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin fell off. She picked it up, read it and then recommended it to me for my next opera.”

And so it came about, some three years later, that on today’s date in 2001, that the Dallas Opera premiered a new opera entitled Thérèse Raquin, with music by Tobias Picker.

Zola’s novel is a rather clinical examination of adultery, murder, and a double suicide. “The novel,” said Picker, “exudes ‘opera’ from every page. Everything about it is operatic.” In Picker’s musical setting, traditional harmonies spiral off into atonality, just as the ordered world of the opera’s characters gradually falls apart.

Picker has written successfully in both styles, so combining the two in his new opera was a natural process. “That tension has always been there in my music,” says Picker.

“I think the opera made some people uncomfortable,” said Picker following the Dallas premiere. “There’s so much negative wish fulfillment and guilt. It affected people strongly and in different ways. One woman came up to me at the third and final Dallas performance and said: ‘I just love this. It’s the third time I’ve seen it.’ Perhaps she had experienced the same catharsis that I had when I composed it!”

On today’s date in 1719, the Papal ambassador in Lisbon noted the arrival of a fellow Italian, a composer named Domenico Scarlatti. Domenico was in his early 30s, and the son of Alessandro Scarlatti, a very famous and influential composer of Baroque operas in Naples.

At the time, Domenico was nowhere near as famous as his father, and had come to Lisbon to serve as the music teacher for an 8-year old Portuguese princess named Maria Magdalena Barbara. Well, this teaching gig turned out to be the most important event in the life of Domenico Scarlatti for two reasons.

First, the little princess was mad about music, and became a very talented performer on the harpsichord. Second, in 1733, when the princess was 22, she married into the Spanish royal house, becoming the Queen of Spain. Scarlatti remained in her service for the next 25 years, composing for her amusement over 500 harpsichord sonatas.

These sonatas include the rhythms and colors of Spanish and Portuguese folk music, with the plucked sound of the harpsichord often mimicking a Spanish guitar. Only a small number of Scarlatti’s sonatas were published during his lifetime, but long after his death they attracted the attention and admiration of composers ranging from Chopin to Brahms to Bartok, and eventually all the sonatas that survived in manuscript were published, attracting the attention and admiration of modern performers on both the harpsichord and piano.

On today’s date in 1919, the eminent French conductor Pierre Monteux, led the Boston Symphony in the premiere performance of “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,” a new orchestral score written by the American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes.

This music was inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous Romantic poem of that name, but owes its exotic orchestral coloring to Griffes’ interest in the music of Asia and the Pacific Rim. Although Griffes himself never traveled there, he knew someone who had: the influential Canadian soprano Eva Gauthier, famous for her avant-garde song recitals that included music by Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and her later association with Gershwin and Ravel. It was the well-traveled Gauthier who introduced Griffes to the musical traditions of Japan and Java.

In describing an earlier ballet score inspired by Asian themes, Griffes wrote: “It is developed Japanese music – I purposely do not use the term idealized. Modern music tends more and more toward the archaic, especially the archaisms of the East.”

The 1919 Boston premiere of “Kubla Khan” was the highpoint of Griffes’ career, and all the critics agreed a major new talent had arrived on the American music scene.

Unfortunately, one month later, Griffes took ill and in a few months died from a severe lung infection. He was just 35 years old. How his music would have developed had Griffes lived remains one of the most intriguing “what might have beens” of American music.

On today’s date in 1972, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp received its first successful concert performance by the Munich Philharmonic led by Rudolf Kempe. A recording was made of the work following their performance, supervised and produced by the composer’s son, George Korngold.

The composer himself had died in 1959, so was not able to enjoy the eventual success of this major work. He completed his Symphony in 1950, and its premiere performance in 1954 as part of an Austrian Radio broadcast had been a disaster. As the composer himself put it: “The performance, which was an execution in every sense of the term, took place under the most unfavorable conditions imaginable, with inadequate rehearsals and an exhausted and overworked orchestra.”

“Nonetheless,” Korngold added hopefully, “there was genuine enthusiasm on the part of those listeners who like a good tune and others rather more progressively inclined.”

Korngold had become an American citizen during the 1940s, and dedicated his Symphony to the memory of America’s wartime President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The postwar European premiere of his Symphony came at a time when shifting tastes in music made such lush late-Romantic music seem hopelessly old-fashioned to many of the “progressively inclined” Korngold mentions. “More corn than gold” was one dismissive appraisal of his style.

With the passage of time, however, Korngold’s “good tunes” seem more and more appealing, and belatedly, his big Symphony in F-sharp has found a place in the concert repertory.

On today’s date in 1937, a gala concert in Berlin presented the premiere performance of Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D-minor, a work composed in the fall of 1853, shortly before Schumann’s tragic mental collapse.

The Concerto was never given a public performance during Schumann’s lifetime, although the great 19th century violinist Joseph Joachim read through the score during an orchestral rehearsal early in 1854, and played the work privately in 1855, with piano accompaniment provided by Schumann’s wife, Clara. Schumann died in 1856, and for the next 80 years, the Concerto was forgotten. Clara, Joachim and their mutual friend Johannes Brahms all judged it sub-par and perhaps embarrassing evidence of Schumann’s declining mental state.

Oddly enough, the 1937 premiere in Berlin, attended by none other than Adolf Hitler, was presented as part of the Nazi’s “Strength Through Joy” cultural program. German commentators touted Schumann’s ties to the German “folk,” while American critics bemoaned that most of the great German violinists of the day were unavailable for this important premiere, having all left Germany for racial or political reasons.

That honor fell to the acceptably Aryan, if hardly world-class violinist Georg Kullenkampf, supported by the Berlin Philharmonic under the Austrian conductor Karl Bőhm. The premiere was broadcast on short-wave, so American audiences could compare Kullenkampf’s reading with that of Yehudi Menuhin, who gave the American premiere of Schumann’s long-neglected Concerto on December 6th, first with piano accompaniment at Carnegie Hall, then later that month with the St. Louis Symphony.

In the course of his life as a church musician, Johann Sebastian Bach probably wrote 300 sacred cantatas. That seems like a high number to us, but consider that his contemporaries Telemann and Graupner composed well over a thousand cantatas each!

In what surviving documents we have, Bach himself rarely uses the Italian term “cantata” to describe these pieces, preferring “concertos,” “pieces” or simply “the music” to describe these works for Lutheran church services. It was only in the 19th century, as Bach’s music was being collected and catalogued, that the term “cantata” would become the official label for this sizeable chunk of Bach’s output.

Most of Bach’s cantatas were written for performance in Leipzig, where Bach was expected to provide sacred music for not one, but TWO churches, each Sunday.

On today’s date in 1731, the 27th Sunday after Trinity that year, Bach presented what would become one of his most popular cantatas: “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”, or “Awake, the Voice calls to us.” In the catalog of Bach’s work compiled long after his death, this is his Cantata No. 140.

The text is based on a parable from the Gospel of St. Matthew recounting the story of the wise and foolish virgins, who are called, ready or not, to participate in a wedding feast. The opening choral melody may have been already familiar to Bach’s performers and congregation, but his dramatic setting of it is downright ingenious.

In 1944, while the Second World War ground on in Europe and Asia, the American composer David Diamond received a commission from Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was then the conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony.

“Write me a happy work,” asked Mitropolous. “These are distressing times, most of the difficult music I play is distressing. Make me happy.”

The resulting work was entitled “Rounds for String Orchestra.” To some, it sounded as if Diamond had turned to traditional American folk music, but, as Diamond put it, “the tunes are original. They sound like folk tunes, but they are really the essence of a style that must have been absorbed by osmosis.”

Diamond’s “Rounds” received its premiere performance by Mitropolous and the Minneapolis Symphony on today’s date in 1944. Even the stodgy conservative music critic of the St. Paul Pioneer Press expressed her grudging admiration: “it reveals a good deal of talent and resourcefulness” was her verdict. Reviewing a subsequent Boston Symphony performance under Koussevitzky, New York Times critic Olin Downes was much more enthusiastic. He wrote: “It is admirably fashioned, joyous and vernal. There is laughter in the music.”

“Rounds” has gone on to become one of Diamond’s most frequently performed works. Perhaps joy and laughter in music remains as rare and precious a commodity now as it was back in those distressed days of 1944.

On today’s date in 1934, after 10 intense rehearsals, the Orquestra Sinfonica de Mexico, conducted by the Mexican Carlos Chávez, gave the premiere performance of the Symphony No. 2 of the American composer Aaron Copland.

Copland’s Second was titled ‘The Short Symphony,” but there was a lot packed into its 15-minute duration. “The Short Symphony’s preoccupation is with complex rhythms, combined with clear textures,” said Copland. “Sonority-wise, the most rhythmically complex moments have a certain lightness and clarity.”

“I had briefly considered naming the piece (at Chavez’s suggestion) ‘The Bounding Line,’” said Copland, “until another friend wisely advised me against it, pointing out that ‘bounding’ seemed more like ‘boundary’ than the ‘bounce’ I had in mind.”

“Shortly after its Mexican introduction,” recalled Copland, “the piece was announced for an American premiere by Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra, but was never given. A similarly announced performance by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzsky was also cancelled. Both told me subsequently that they had announced performances because they had admired the work, but that the composition was so intricate from a rhythmic standpoint that they dared not attempt a performance within the allotted period.”

In 1937, Copland recast his “Short Symphony” as a chamber sextet, leaving the music fundamentally unchanged, but re-barring the score to make it less challenging for performers. It wasn’t until the 1980s, some four decades after its Mexican premiere, that Copland’s 15-minute Symphony became increasingly performed by American orchestras in its original form.