For eight summers starting in 1868, the German-born American conductor Theodore Thomas lead his orchestra in a concert series at New York City’s Central Park Garden.

As usual with Thomas’s programs, there was a calculated mix of old and new music, and more than a few premieres.

On today’s date in 1871, for example, Thomas conducted the first American performance of “Kaiser March,” a work by the German opera composer Richard Wagner completed earlier that year to honor Wilhelm of Prussia who became Emperor of a United German Reich earlier that year.

It went over very well back in Germany, and, considering that: a) everybody likes a good march, especially at a summertime pops concert and, b) a sizeable percentage of New York’s symphonic musicians in Thomas’s day were either German-born or German-trained, we can assume Wagner’s “Kaiser March” was well-played and well-received at its American debut as well.

Five years later, in 1876, Thomas would also conduct the world premiere of another celebratory march by Wagner, this one commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution. Wagner was paid $5000, an enormous sum of money in those days, to compose an “American Centennial March” for national festivities in Philadelphia.

Both of these marches are seldom performed today, and are generally regarded as pretty thin stuff, musically speaking. Wagner himself quipped that the best thing about his ”American Centennial March” was the fee he received for writing it, and poor Theodore Thomas, who had hoped in vain for a major work worthy of the occasion, was frankly disappointed.