If you were like Dr. Who with his Tardis, and a piano fan to boot, you might set your time machine for Paris, April 25th, 1841. That's when an all-Beethoven concert was given at the Salle Erard to raise funds for the proposed Beethoven monument in Bonn, the late composer's birthplace. Franz Liszt was the soloist in Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto, conducted by Hector Berlioz.

About a month earlier, Liszt had dazzled Paris with the premiere of his new piano fantasia on themes from the popular opera "Robert the Devil," by Giacomo Meyerbeer. So, as Liszt walked on stage—with the entire orchestra in place, all ready for Beethoven's Concerto—the audience clamored loudly for a repeat performance. They made such a racket that Berlioz and the orchestra had no choice but to sit idly by until Liszt first encored his Fantasia.

In the audience was a 27-year old German named Richard Wagner, reviewing the concert for a Dresden newspaper. Wagner was outraged that the Beethoven was put on hold for Liszt's flashy solo. "Some day," fumed Wagner, "Liszt in heaven will be summoned to play his Fantasy on 'The Devil' before the assembled company of angels!"

We're not sure if Wagner attended a concert the following day at the Salle Pleyel, but any modern-day time traveler would probably want to stick around to hear Frederic Chopin give one of HIS rare Parisian recitals, performing, among other works, his own F-Major Ballade.

During the last 20 years of his life, the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen concentrated on completing an ambitious cycle of seven operas, collectively titled “Licht” or, in English “Light.” Each opera was named for a day of the week, and inspired by familiar and obscure world mythologies associated with each day.

The opera titled “Montag” (or “Monday”), for example, is devoted to the Moon and the feminine architype of Eve as the mother of all creation. Two additional main characters that appear in the operas are Michael the Archangel, representing the creative force, and Lucifer, representing the destructive force.

Each opera begins with a “Greeting,” or overture, often an electronic piece designed to be heard in the theater lobby while the audience gathers, and ends with a “Farewell,” sometimes intended for performance outside the theater proper, to be heard as the audience disperses.

Story lines in Stockhausen’s operas draw on many sources, including the composer’s own childhood, and have more in common with symbolic Renaissance courtly masques and pageants than works by Verdi or Puccini, but might be considered a 21th century response to Wagner’s 19th-century cycle of four mythological “Ring” operas.

Portions of Stockhausen’s operas were premiered piecemeal starting in 1977, and only on rare occasions staged in their entirety. The last to be completed, “Sontag” (or “Sunday”) was performed complete for the first time in Cologne, Germany, on today’s date in 2011, more than three years after Stockhausen’s death.

During his stay in America, the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák became convinced that distinctive American music could be based on two, uniquely American sources: the plantation songs and spirituals of African-Americans and the chants and dances of the indigenous Native American tribes. By the early years of the 20th century, a number of American composers had taken his suggestions to heart.

One of them, an American composer, publisher, music editor and critic named Arthur Farwell, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on today's date in 1872. Farwell went to MIT intending to become an electrical engineer, and did, in fact, get his engineering degree in 1893, the same year Dvořák's views began appearing in the press, and Farwell eventually came to the conclusion that a musical career might be more interesting than engineering. Frustrated at his inability to find a publisher for his set of solo piano transcriptions entitled "American Indian Melodies," he formed his own publishing house.

In addition to pioneering work in arranging Native American themes, Farwell set Emily Dickinson poems to music, experimented with polytonality, and, in 1916, arranged for the first "light show" in New York's Central Park, decades before the psychedelic 1960s. His teaching career included stints at Cornell, UC Berkley and Michigan State, but Farwell never felt completely at home in academia, preferring to organize community-based musical pageants with audience participation. He died at the age of 79 in New York in 1953.

At London’s St. James’s Hall on today’s date in 1885, the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak conducted the London Philharmonic Society’s orchestra in the premiere of his Seventh Symphony, a work they had commissioned.

The Society had also commissioned Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony decades earlier, a fact of which Dvorak was quite aware, and just before starting work Dvorak heard and was bowled over by the brand-new Third Symphony by his friend and mentor Johannes Brahms. In other words… “No pressure!”

Dvorak felt he MUST do his very best, and, judging by the warm reception at its London premiere, the new work was a success, with one reviewer calling it “one of the greatest works of its class produced in the present generation.”

But not all reviews were glowing. Another wrote, “the entire work is painted grey on grey: it lacks sweetness of melody and lightness of style.” And Dvorak’s German publisher complained that big symphonies were not profitable and advised Dvorak write only shorter piano pieces that had a ready market.

But subsequent performances helped establish the new symphony as the masterwork it is, and although not as often-played as his “New World” Symphony, today Dvorak’s Seventh ranks among his finest creations.

In 1863, the price of The New York Times was three cents, and many plunked down their pennies to read front-page news about "the rebellion"—what we now call the Civil War.

But if you were a new music aficionado back in 1863, you probably turned to the concert listings on the "Amusements" page. One of Verdi's newest operas, "Un Ballo in Maschera," had just closed at the Academy of Music, and the contemporary composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk had given a concert of his latest works the day before, too.

After all that "modern" music, maybe you were in the mood for some really OLD music. The enterprising duo of William Mason and Theodore Thomas was offering a "Soiree of Chamber Music" at Dodworth's Hall on April 21, 1863, and the program included the first public performance in America of the Concerto in C Major for Two Keyboards and Strings by J.S. Bach. Now this was REALLY old stuff—a work that predated the birth of America in 1776 by a good 50 years!

The Times did not review this Bach premiere, but the next documented American performance in Boston in 1877 was described in Dwight's Journal as a "cheerful, lightsome, everyday sort of composition," with the reviewer adding that (quote) "Bach's everyday is something finer than the common mortal's… the work [was] full of vigor and life, the best of tonics…"

Today in 1928, a French musician and inventor named Maurice Martenot gave the first public demonstration of a strange, new electronic instrument he had created. It was a gadget that had pull-wires, pointers and a keyboard diagram which produced eerie-sounding tones reminiscent of the human voice, but without the human limitations of voice range or lung power.

In addition to being a clever inventor, Martenot was also a savvy promoter of his new electronic instrument, which he took on a world tour, with his sister serving as its first virtuoso performer. The instrument came to be called the "Ondes Martenot"—which translates into English as "Martenot Waves."

A number of 20th century composers were quite enthusiastic. Arthur Honegger even thought the Ondes Martenot might replace the contra-bassoon in symphony orchestras, writing: "The Ondes Martenot has power and a speed of utterance which is not to be compared with those gloomy stove-pipes looming up in orchestras."

Well, contra-bassoonists needn't worry: their analog, breath-powered stove-pipes still provide the low blows in most modern orchestras, but the Ondes Martenot does figure prominently in several major 20th century scores, including the monumental "Turangalila Symphony" of the French composer, Oliver Messiaen.

In 1947, Martenot established classes in the Ondes Martenot at the Paris Conservatory, and, following Martenot's death in 1981, the French even formed an official society with the grand title of "L'Association pour la Diffusion et le Développement des Ondes Martenot."

Alban Berg's Violin Concerto had its first performance in Barcelona, Spain, on today's date in 1936, at the opening concert of that year's International Society for Contemporary Music Festival. Berg had died the previous winter, and the premiere was supposed to be conducted by his close friend and fellow composer, Anton Webern, but Webern withdrew at the last minute, reportedly upset with the quality of the Spanish orchestra. And so Hermann Scherchen conducted the first performance, with the violinist who had commissioned the work, Louis Krasner, as the soloist. Krasner was born in the Ukraine, but raised in America, and, in addition to commissioning Violin Concertos and premiering them, served for a time as the concertmaster of the Minneapolis Symphony under Dimitri Mitropoulos. He later taught at Syracuse University and the New England Conservatory of Music. In the spring of 1976, Louis Krasner was cleaning out his attic, and discovered he still had some private acetate discs he had made of the SECOND performance of the Berg Violin Concerto. The old discs documented a May 1st, 1936 radio broadcast of the new work by the BBC Symphony, with Krasner once again the soloist. This time the conductor WAS Anton Webern. The 40-year old discs were transcribed to tape, and eventually were released on CD in 1991, allowing posterity a chance to listen in as music history was being made.

The month of April in the year 1800 was an especially busy one for Ludwig van Beethoven. On the second of April at his first big orchestral concert in Vienna, Beethoven had premiered his First Symphony, a new Piano Concerto, and his Septet for winds. He had been planning for this concert all winter, and there was a lot of music to be worked up and written down for that occasion.

On today's date that same month, Beethoven appeared in Vienna once again, this time as piano accompanist for the popular Bohemian horn virtuoso, Johann Wenzel Stich, who went by the more marketable Italian "stage name" of Giovanni Punto.

The pre-concert announcements for the Punto recital promised that Beethoven would contribute a new work for the occasion—but, apparently preoccupied by his OWN concert, Beethoven didn't get around to writing the promised piece until the day before the recital!

Beethoven and Punto took the new Horn Sonata with them for a concert in Budapest the following month. The press in Hungary had heard of Punto, but not Beethoven, whose name they didn't even get right: "Who is this Bethover (sic)." One press notice read: "The history of German music is not acquainted with such a name. Punto, of course, is VERY well known…"

Early in April in the year 1845, a 15-year old American pianist named Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. On the program was Chopin's Piano Concerto in E minor, and Chopin happened to be in the audience that day. Although already quite weak from the consumption that would eventually kill him, Chopin went backstage to congratulate the young American on his performance. What exactly Chopin said depends on whom you asked. Gottschalk's first biographer claims it was, "Very good, my child, let me shake your hand," while Gottschalk's sister insists it was, "I predict you will become the king of pianists!" In 1845, Parisian society was curious about anything American after experiencing other exotic specimens from the New World, including P.T. Barnum's circus and George Catlin's paintings of Native American life. The New World was definitely "in." Four years later, on today's date in 1849, Gottschalk returned to the Salle Pleyel, this time performing some of his own original compositions, including a work, entitled "Bamboula," after the name of a deep-voiced Afro-Caribbean drum. Gottschalk had been born in New Orleans, and was exposed from childhood to Cuban and Haitian rhythms and music. The Parisian audiences had never heard anything like it, and gave Gottschalk a standing ovation. Responding to demands for more of the same, Gottschalk wrote and performed a "Louisiana Quartet" of four original Creole-inspired piano pieces, works which anticipate by many decades both the rhythms and colors of American jazz.

For the 1958-59 season of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, the orchestra's new music director, was eager to program as much new American music as he dared. As luck would have it, early in 1958, the 35-year old American composer Ned Rorem had just returned from Europe with a new symphonic score.

"I wrote most of my Third Symphony in France," recalled Rorem. "It's a big piece but not a commission—I was still writing for the love of it in those days… So I showed it to Lenny and he said 'OK, do it, but I wish you would re-orchestrate the slow movement entirely for strings.' I replied 'Sure,' but didn't, because he was always saying things like that, and then he'd forget about it."

The premiere of Ned Rorem's Third Symphony—as written—occurred at Carnegie Hall on today's date in 1959. The thrill of the premiere was tempered by some harsher realities for the composer, however.

Rorem recalls, "I remember coming late to the first rehearsal because in those days I was living off unemployment insurance. I had written music for a Tennessee Williams play that had closed, so technically I was on unemployment, and I had to go down and stand in line to pick up my check. I guess they managed without me because Lenny conducted four wonderful performances."