On today’s date in 1733, Georg Friderich Handel paid a visit to Oxford to conduct the premiere performance of his new oratorio, “Athalia,” at the Sheldonian Theater.

Handel had been invited by the University to add some musical pizzazz to an elaborate ceremony know as “The Publick Act,” during which honorary degrees were bestowed on worthy individuals. It was apparently a terrific performance, with one visitor from London reporting: “Never has there been such applause and marks of admiration.” But not everyone in Oxford was happy. One crusty don, apparently not a fan of new music, complained of the presence of “Handel and his lousy crew—a great number of foreign fiddlers.“

Handel was offered an honorary degree by Oxford, but he did not accept, claiming he was “too busy,” but maybe he just balked at paying the University’s required fee of 100 pounds to receive the honor.

In the 19th century, Oxford and its rival Cambridge would bestow honorary degrees on other major composers like Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, and, in our own time, between 1949 and 1990, one American composer, William Schuman received no fewer than 28 honorary degrees. In fact, Schuman had so many that he had a quilt sewn together from pieces of his ceremonial gowns, so that, as he liked to quip, “He could take his naps by degrees.”

Today we note the birthday anniversaries of two composers, one Italian, and one American.

On today’s date in 1879, Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna, Italy. Respighi is one of the few Italian composers more famous for orchestral works than operas. In 1902, Respighi studied with the Russian master of orchestration, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and the result was a series of brilliantly scored instrumental works for large orchestra.

In 1913, Respighi settled permanently in Rome, and he immortalized that city in a famous trilogy of Roman tone poems: “The Pines of Rome,” “The Fountains of Rome,” and “Roman Festivals.” Respighi died in Rome in 1936.

July 9th is also the birthday of American composer Paul Chihara, who was born in Seattle in 1938. Chihara is of Japanese-American descent, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of WWII, his family, like that of many Japanese-Americans, was relocated to an internment camp. Chihara studied literature at the University of Washington, and composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.

Chihara has written a number of film scores, and his television credits include “China Beach” and “100 Centre Street.” For ten years Chihara was composer in residence with the San Francisco Ballet, and this music is from his ballet score titled “The Tempest,” after the play by Shakespeare.

It’s a book – it’s a YouTube video – it’s a concert hall work! It’s by Stookey and Snicket!

Now, “Stookey and Snicket” is not the name of a law firm in some obscure novel by Charles Dickens, but is in fact the collaborative team of American composer Nathaniel Stookey and American novelist Daniel Handler, who writes popular children’s books under the pen name of Lemony Snicket.

Stookey was the youngest composer ever commissioned for the San Francisco Symphony's New and Unusual Music Series when he collaborated with Handler on a piece for narrator and orchestra. Their collaboration, entitled “The Composer Is Dead,” premiered on this date in 2006.

This “new and usual” work with a macabre title is similar to Prokofiev's “Peter and the Wolf” and Britten's “The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra” in that it intends to introduce young audiences to the instruments of the orchestra. But anyone familiar with Lemony Snicket books can expect something a little quirky, and, in fact, “The Composer Is Dead” is a murder mystery, complete with a police inspector rounding up the usual suspects, and eventually pointing the finger…

And if you want to find out “whodunit”—well, you’ll have to buy the book!

On today’s date in 1956, one of the most successful of all American operas had its first performance at the Center Opera House in Colorado. “The Ballad of Baby Doe” was created by composer Douglas Moore and librettist John Latouche, and was based on a real-life tale of love and loss that had played out in that state.

Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, better known as “Baby Doe,” became the second wife of the Colorado prospector, businessman, and politician Horace Tabor in 1883. Tabor's messy divorce and remarriage to the young and beautiful Baby Doe was a major scandal at the time. Tabor was immensely wealthy, and had built an Opera House that bears his name and still stands in Leadville, Colorado, where he met Baby Doe. In 1899, Tabor had lost his entire fortune, and after his death, Baby Doe lived on in a poor miner’s shack near Leadville, where she was found frozen to death in 1935.

And it was on a cold winter’s day—a year before the premiere of their new opera—that Moore and Latouche paid a visit to Tabor’s Opera House in Leadville, and stood on its stage for inspiration. A witness of their visit recalled: “I was intensely aware of a great and eerie silence that suddenly came over the building. If ever there were ghosts of the past in the Tabor Opera House I could believe that they were there at that moment!”

It was on this day in 1913 that the French Academy of Fine Arts—for the first time in its history—presented its highest award, the Prix de Rome, to a woman. The honor was awarded to Lili Boulanger, who was just 19 years old at the time. She was born in Paris in 1893, the younger sister of Nadia Boulanger, who would become the most famous teacher of composition in the 20th century, numbering an amazing array of famous American composers among her students, ranging from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass.

Nadia’s sister Lili, however, suffered from poor health. Her tragically short career was interrupted by World War I, when she volunteered to nurse wounded soldiers. She died before the great conflict was over, on March 15th, 1918, at the age of 24.

Nearer to our own time, another woman, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, made history when she became the first woman composer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. That was in 1983, and the piece was her Symphony No. 1. Born in Miami, Florida, in 1939, Zwilich studied composition with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions at Juilliard, and accomplished another “first” by becoming the first woman to earn the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition at the famous school. Her Third Symphony was commissioned in 1992 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic.

For opera composers of the 19th century, Paris—not Vienna, Milan, or Berlin—was the center of the operatic universe. Money had a lot to do with that, since the Paris Opera paid better than anyone else, and boasted musical and visual resources far beyond other European theaters. All the great 19th century opera composers, including Verdi and Wagner, sought commissions from the Paris Opera.

On today’s date in 1823, a 33-year old German composer living in Venice appealed to one of the Paris Opera’s stars, the French bass Nicolas Levasseur, for help in securing just such a commission. “I assure you it would be a much greater honor for me to write for the French opera than for all the Italian theaters put together,” this composer wrote. “Where else but in Paris can one find the immense resources that French opera offers the composer who longs to write truly dramatic music?”

The flattery, honest or feigned, must have worked. The German composer, Jakob Meyerbeer by name, got his toe in the door, and in 1831 his opera “Robert the Devil” debuted in Paris to great acclaim. And Meyerbeer didn’t forget M. Levasseur’s help: in “Robert the Devil” he thanked the singer with a tailor-made lead role for the bass voice.

Today we celebrate three legendary figures in American popular music.

The first is Stephen Foster, the great American songwriter of the 19th century who composed 189 classic songs including “Beautiful Dreamer” and “Old Folks at Home.” Foster was born on this date in 1826 in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania.

The second figure we honor today is the incredibly influential 20th century jazz trumpeter, Louis Armstrong, who claimed to have been born on this date in New Orleans in the year 1900.

It seems too good to be true that Foster and Armstrong should both have been born on the Fourth of July—in fact, Armstrong’s real birthday occurred on August 4, 1901. Apparently, Armstrong wasn’t sure of the exact details, so he and his agent decided that it would be good publicity for Armstrong to be born on the Fourth of July and at the start of the new century.

The great Vaudeville and Broadway song and dance man, George M. Cohan, also believed he was born on the Fourth of July, in 1878—a public misconception reinforced by the famous 1942 biographical film of Cohan’s life, “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” starring James Cagney as George M.

The belated discovery of Cohan’s birth certificate, however, proved that a Yankee Doodle Dandy he may have been, but one actually born on the THIRD of July.

The piano became the dominant keyboard instrument in Mozart’s lifetime in the late 18th century. Before that, the harpsichord had ruled. But for more than a hundred years after Mozart’s day, the harpsichord seemed as dead as the dodo, and even the great harpsichord works of Bach and other early 18th century masters were always played on the piano—that is, until Wanda Landowska came on the scene.

This indomitable woman was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1879, and single-handedly brought the harpsichord back to life. It was on today’s date in 1927 that she inaugurated an historic series of harpsichord concerts at her summer home near Paris—and, two years later, in 1929, Landowska premiered the “Concert champêtre,” by Francis Poulenc, a brand new harpsichord concerto written specially for her.

Very much in the spirit of Wanda Landowska, the contemporary composer and performer Barbara Harbach is in the vanguard of today’s advocates for the harpsichord.

A passionate advocate for new music, she has recorded several compact discs of “20th Century Harpsichord Music” for the Gasparo label, featuring works by American composers from Samuel Adler to Ellen Taafe Zwillich.

On this date in 1723, church-goers in Leipzig were offered some festive music along with the gospel readings and sermon. The vocal and instrumental music was pulled together from various sources, some old, some newly-composed, and crafted into a fresh, unified work, a church cantata entitled “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben”—which in English would be “heart and voice and thought and action.” The idea was that text and music would complement and comment on that day’s scripture readings and sermon.

Now this sort of thing was not all that uncommon back then for the hard-working composer Johann Sebastian Bach. On average Bach would prepare and present around 50 church cantatas a year, and Bach’s cantata No. 147, presented on July 2, 1723, concluded with a catchy melody that would be revived to great effect some 200 years later.

In 1926, the concluding choral section of Bach’s cantata, “Jesus bleibet meine Freude” in the original German, was arranged by the British pianist Dame Myra Hess and given an English title, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” It became a popular piano recital selection, and, over time, a very popular piece to play at weddings—even though Bach’s original cantata text had nothing at all to do with tying the knot.

“Where to go for summer vacation?” That’s always been the question for any city-dweller fortunate enough to be able to escape to somewhere cool and green, with perhaps an ocean beach or at least a lake nearby.

In the summers of 1877 and 1878, Johannes Brahms abandoned urban Vienna for the rural Austrian district known as Carinthia and specifically the small town of Pörtschach on Wörthersee. Even today, this is prime vacation territory, with rolling green hills, dark pine trees, bright blue lakes, and the snow-capped Alps along the horizon. And the wildflowers have to be seen to be believed.

We can’t show you all that, but perhaps you can hear a sense of that landscape in the Second Symphony and Violin Concerto of Brahms —two works he composed during his summer holidays there.

In Carinthia, said Brahms, the melodies are so abundant that one had to be careful not to step on them. There just might be something in that, at least with respect to great Violin Concertos. In July of 1935, 57 years after Brahms wrote his Concerto in Pörtschach, the Viennese composer Alban Berg would finish his Violin Concerto in the same town, on the opposite shore of the Wörthersee from where Brahms stayed during his summer vacations. Berg’s Concerto even includes a quote from a risqué Carinthian folksong.