Musical Anniversaries in 2016

Monday, January 4, 2016

Happy New Year!

Once again, the new year brings us many opportunities to celebrate musicians who have big (sometimes very big) birthdays and remember those who have died. We’ve found over 800 people in the RISM database who will have their semicentennials, centennials, and various combinations thereof in 2016. These include not only composers but also librettists, performers, dedicatees, and people who are in other ways related to a source.

A person in this last category is Walt Disney, who died 50 years ago this year. Disney is represented in the database through Frank Churchill’s music from the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in an arrangement by Francis Salabert (held by the Koninklijke Harmonie Strijd voor Vrijheid in Belgium, B-TOeksv B.019, RISM ID no. 702012744).

The big winner this year in terms of quantity is Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816), who has nearly 4,000 sources in the database.

Other anniversaries worth noting are:

• Agnes, Princess of Bentheim-Tecklenburg (1804-1866), German music collector and patron
• Christina von Brühl (1756-1816), German composer and author
• Carlos III (1716-1788), King of Spain
• Anna Lucia De Amicis Buonsollazzi (1733-1816), Italian singer
• Pauline von Erdmannsdörfer (1847-1916), German composer and pianist
• Johann Andreas Herbst (1588-1666), music director in Frankfurt am Main
• Isabelle Kaiser (1866-1925), Swiss author
• Henriette Kriete (1816-1892), German soprano
• Sophie Loewe (1812-1866), German soprano
• Louis Massonneau (1766-1848), German-French violinist, conductor, and composer
• Arthur Meulemans (1884-1966), Belgian conductor and composer
• Caroline von Mikulicz (1846-1866), composer
• Johann Josef Wenzel Radetzky von Radetz (1766-1858), namesake of Johann Strauß’s Radetzky March
• Francesco Scarlatti (1666-ca. 1741), Alessandro Scarlatti’s younger brother
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English poet and playwright
• Elisabeth Teyber (1744-1816), Austrian soprano
• František Břetislav Trojan (1816-1889), Czech poet
• Matvej Jur’evič Viel’gorskij (1794-1866), Russian cellist
• Marie Wieck (1832-1916), German composer and pianist
• Cordula Wöhler (1845-1916), German poet

We trawled the database for people who were born or died in a year ending in 16 or 66. Below (and on this Google spreadsheet) we present names from Luigi Abbiate (1866-1933) to Zygmunt III Waza (ahem, Sigismund III of Poland; 1566-1632). Chronologically speaking, this covers the 800th anniversary of Pope Innocent III’s death (ca. 1160-1216), whose words were used in the hymn Eia Phoebe nunc serena, to the 50th anniversary of tenor Fritz Wunderlich’s death (1930-1966), whose waltz Abends unterm Sternenzelt is in RISM.

c = circa
a = before
p = after
m = male
w / f = female

Image from pixabay.com.

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Category: Musical anniversaries

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