On today’s date in 1778, Italy’s most famous opera house opened with a performance of “L’Europa riconosciuta,” or “Europa revealed,” a work written specially for the occasion by Antonio Salieri. The new theater took its name from its location, previously occupied by the church of Santa Maria della Scala, which in turn was named after a Milanese nobelman’s wife, Beatrice della Scala.

These days Milan’s Teatro alla Scala—or “La Scala” for short—is still in operation, although today performances of Salieri operas are not as common as those of his 18th century rival, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

In the 19th century, La Scala was at the center of the golden age of Italian opera, which boasted the greatest works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi.

In August of 1943, 165 years after it opened, La Scala was damaged by Allied bombers as World War II drew to a close. The theater was repaired and reopened in 1946 with a series of gala concerts conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

Some sixty years later, the theater was newly refurbished and re-opened in December of 2004 with a gala production of the same Salieri opera written for its original opening some 226 years earlier.

The American composer John Harbison was born in 1938, and so, as a young lad, grew up at the tail end of the Golden Age of radio and the big band Era of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, the Dorsey Brothers, and Benny Goodman.

“Over the radio,” writes Harbison, “came sounds played by bands in hotels and ballrooms, now distant memories that seemed to a seventh-grade, small town, late-night listener like the pulse of giant imagined cities.”

Decades later, John Harbison translated those early musical memories into a three-movement composition for a big band orchestra. “These sounds,” he recalled, “layered with real experience of some of their places of origin, magnified, distorted, idealized, and destabilized, came into contact with other sounds, some of recent origin, and resulted in a celebratory, menacing suite I titled ‘Three City Blocks.’”

The U.S. Air Force Band gave the premiere performance of “Three City Blocks” on today’s date in 1993. And, keeping in the spirit of the old days when every major hotel could boast its own dance band, Harbison’s “Three City Blocks” premiered at the Hilton Hotel in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

At 6:05 p.m. on today’s date in 2007, the Interstate 35W Bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, plunging dozens of cars and trucks into the Mississippi River. Thirteen people died. Investigators said a design flaw was to blame, and the event served as a wake-up call about America’s crumbling infrastructure.

It also inspired a new piece of music.

In 2007 Minnesota composer Linda Tutas Haugen had been commissioned to write a piece for solo instrument and organ for performance at the next American Guild of Organists’ national convention. Haugen had been looking at various hymn tunes for inspiration when the I-35 bridge collapsed.

As she recalled, “I had family members who’d been over the bridge a day before. Many were feeling, ‘It could have been me.’ I reread texts of the hymns I had been considering, and there was one that talks about ‘God of hill and plain, o’er which our traffic runs’ and ‘wherever God your people go, protect them by your guarding hand.’ That inspired my writing.”

Haugen scored her new piece for trumpet and organ and titled it “Invocation and Remembrance.” “For me,” said Haugen, “it’s a prayer, an invocation for protection, and also a remembrance of what happened.”

On today's date in 1892, the Washington Post's headlines included one that read: "Sousa's Farewell Toot—Last Appearance of the Marine Band Under His Baton—Admirers of the Popular Conductor Crowd Forward for a Farewell Shake of the Hand at the Close of His Final Concert on the White House Grounds."

In his 12-year tenure with the Marine Band, Sousa had made it one of the finest touring ensembles in his day. Sousa was famous coast-to-coast—but not all that well paid. While on tour early in 1892, Sousa had been approached in Chicago by an impresario with a business proposition: "Why not form your OWN band, Mr. Sousa? I can offer you four times your Marine Corps salary, plus a percentage of the new band's profits." Sousa thought it over, and upon his return to Washington, D.C., submitted his resignation effective July 31, 1892. His final concerts with the Marine Band took place on July 29th and 30th that year.

The first was given indoors at the National Theater, with then-Vice President Levi P. Morton in attendance. The following day, on the White House grounds, an open-air concert attracted a huge audience that included President Benjamin Harrison. With that, one important chapter of Sousa's musical career had ended, but another was just beginning. Over the next four decades, the Sousa Band would go on to become famous worldwide.

On today's date in 1950, at the Interlochen Summer Music Camp, the Michigan All-Star Band, under the direction of Dale Harris, gave the premiere performance of a new work entitled "George Washington Bridge." This music was written by the American composer William Schuman, who was experiencing an especially creative period in the early 1950's. Schuman was living in New Rochelle, New York, but as president of the Juilliard School, spent much of his time in Manhattan, and, as Schuman explained:

"There are few days in the year when I do not see the George Washington Bridge. I pass it on my way to work as I drive along the Henry Hudson Parkway on the New York shore. Ever since my student days when I watched the progress of its construction, this bridge has had for me an almost human personality, and this personality is astonishingly varied, assuming different moods, depending on the time of day or night, the weather, and, of course, my own mood as I pass by… I have walked across it late at night when it was shrouded in fog, and during the brilliant sunshine hours of midday… It is difficult to imagine a more gracious welcome or dramatic entry to the great metropolis."

The piece itself is in ABCBA form—a little like the rising and falling arch of a suspension bridge, in fact, and, since its 1950 premiere at Interlochen, Schuman's "George Washington Bridge" has won a secure place as a classic of the wind band repertory.

On today's date in 1962, the Symphony No. 5 for strings, by the German-born American composer Gene Gutchë, received its premiere performance at Chatauqua, New York.

Romeo Maximilian Eugene Ludwig Gutchë was born in Berlin in 1907. His father, a well-to-do European businessman, was not amused by the notion of his son "wasting" his time on music, even though the famous Berlin-based composer-pianist Ferrucio Busoni confirmed the young man's talent. So "Gene" Gutchë ran away from home, abandoning any hope of a sizeable inheritance in the process, and came to America.

He studied at the Universities of Minnesota and Iowa, and, in 1950, at age 43 produced his first symphony. Gutchë would go on to compose six symphonies in all, plus an hour-long symphonic work for chorus and orchestra titled "Akhenaten," premiered by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony in 1983. For most of his life, despite fellowships and commissions, Gutchë lived modestly with his wife, Marion, in a cottage in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.

"I like to think in each of us a greatness resides," wrote Gutchë. "Music is a reflection of what we are. Every artist is compelled to egomania—a delusion of grandeur—which hypnotizes him to express his ideas in the grand manner."

Gutchë died in the fall of 2001—one year after this Cincinnati Symphony recording of his Fifth Symphony was reissued on compact disc.

On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, effectively beginning the First World War.

Early in the course of that war, a French composer named Albéric Magnard became a national hero when he died defending his home against invading German troops. Maurice Ravel tried to enlist as a French pilot, but was refused because of his poor health. Instead, he became a truck driver stationed at the Verdun front. British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was too old to be drafted, but he enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Another British composer, George Butterworth, would be killed by a sniper during the Battle of the Somme.

The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I is estimated at 37 million. Empires fell. National borders were redefined. Old systems of values seemed shattered forever.

The Austrian violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler served briefly in the Austrian Army in 1914 before being wounded and honorably discharged. He arrived in then-neutral New York on November of 1914, and remained in America through the war years.

In 1915, Kreisler made a recording of Bach's Double Violin Concerto, performing with the Russian violinist Efrem Zimbalist. Austria and Russian may have been at war in Europe, but in a cramped New Jersey recording studio, at least, the music of Bach provided a brief island of peace and harmony.

When Alfred Hitchcock's 53rd feature film, a cold war spy thriller entitled "Torn Curtain," opened in New York Theaters on today's date in 1966, audiences did NOT hear this music over the title credits.

It was the swinging 60s, and Hitchcock had asked his long-time collaborator, composer Bernard Hermann, for a pop score that would be "with it." For the main title, Hitch wanted a pop song that might be successful as a hit radio single. What Hitch did NOT want was, as he put it, "more Richard Strauss." Hermann assured Hitch he knew exactly what was required—and then ignored him completely.

Herrmann thought "Torn Curtain" was a dangerously weak film, and one that needed a strong orchestral score to make it effective. Herrmann's huge symphonic score featured an eerie choir of massed flutes and ominous, oppressive brass. When Hitch heard a Hollywood studio orchestra rehearsing Herrmann's main title music, he fired the composer on the spot and called in someone else to score the film.

Herrmann was crushed. He had thought his score would rescue a weak film, and that Hitch should have been grateful. "You call in the doctor to make you healthy," he later quipped—"Not to make you rich!"

Hermann may well have right. "Torn Curtain" is regarded as one of Hitchcock's lamest efforts, while Herrmann's rejected score has gone on to be recorded and admired on its own.

On today's date in 1882, the first performance of Richard Wagner's new opera "Parsifal" took place at the Bayreuth Festival in Bavaria. In the audience was a 25-year old American named Gustav Kobbé, an ardent opera fan who would go on to write "Kobbé's Complete Opera Book," a standard reference work on the subject still in print today.

But back in 1882, as Kobbé watched the opening scene of "Parsifal," his gaze became fixed on one spot of the painted scenery, depicting a pile of rocks. Was that Wagner's face painted on one of the rocks? Or was that Wagner himself, staring out at the singers on stage?

During the intermission, Kobbé asked others if they had seen what he had, but they just looked at him as if he were crazy. Perhaps the heat of the Bavarian summer had affected the young American's brain, they suggested.

"I was beginning to think that the appearance of Wagner's face was a mirage, resulting from lights behind the scenes," wrote Kobbé. "I mentioned the matter to one of the singers in the cast. He manifested surprise, not at what I had discovered, but at my having discovered it."

The singer told Kobbé that to insure that singers followed his specific directions where to stand and when to move, Wagner had, in fact, been standing on stage amid the painted rocks. To all eyes but Kobbé's, Wagner's craggy, sun-tanned face had blended in perfectly with the painted scenery.

On today's date in 1976, an opera premiered at the Théatre Municipale in Avignon, France, that had very little in common with the operas of Mozart or Puccini. For starters, it ran for five hours with no breaks between acts. The audience was invited to wander in and out as it pleased. The libretto consisted of numbers, solfege syllables and some cryptic poems written by a neurologically impaired pupil from a New York School for Disturbed Children. Even the title of this new opera was unusual, suggesting something at once serious and surreal.

The opera in question was called "Einstein on the Beach." As part of the action on stage, a violinist dressed up like Albert Einstein wandered in and out of its surreal scenes, a reference to the fact that, in real life, the famous physicist was also a talented amateur violinist.

"Einstein on the Beach" was collaboration between two Americans: composer Philip Glass and set designer Robert Wilson. It made the rounds in Europe, attracted a great deal of attention, and came to America in November of 1976 for two sold-out performances in New York staged at the Metropolitan Opera by Glass and his ensemble.

"Einstein on the Beach" has been something of a cult classic ever since. Its music was even referenced as a kind of "in joke" during a popular TV commercial in which Einstein debates the merits of Coke vs. Pepsi. For the record, in the TV commercial, Albert chooses Pepsi.