News archive – Musical anniversaries
Giovanni (Battista) Bononcini’s 350th Birthday
Giovanni Bononcini (born 18 July 1670 in Modena - died 9 July 1744 in Vienna) was from a musical family and probably received his first lessons from his father, who died early. Beginning in 1678, he took cello lessons from Giovanni Paolo Colonna. After several stations in Italy, Vienna became...
16 July 2020
Music and Dance for the Recovery of King Philip III of Spain
Around exactly 400 years ago, the printed music anthology Breve Racconto della Festa a Ballo was published in Naples by Costantino Vitale, of which only one copy is known today, held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (F-Pn). The Festa a Ballo is one of the few examples of Italian...
9 July 2020
James Hewitt at 250
James Hewitt was born on this day—June 4—in 1770 in England and died in 1827 in Boston. Two things stand out right away: first, he is a near exact contemporary of Ludwig van Beethoven, and second, he was in the United States when the United States was itself in its...
4 June 2020
300 Years of "Radamisto" by George Frideric Handel
On 27 April 1720, in the presence of King George I, the opera Radamisto by George Frideric Handel with a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym received its premiere at the King’s Theatre in London. Radamisto was Handel’s first opera for the Royal Academy of Music, a private opera company that...
13 May 2020
500 Years of the “Liber selectarum cantionum”
In RISM’s catalog of anthologies from the 16th century (Series B/I), we find a total of six entries from the year 1520. Four of these are motet collections, and the other two are a collection of frottolas and one of chansons. Over twenty copies from the anthology Liber selectarum cantionum...
27 April 2020
The 475th Anniversary of the Death of Costanzo Festa
The Italian composer Costanzo Festa (born between 1480 and 1490 in Piedmont, died 10 April 1545 in Rome) was a member of the papal choir beginning in 1517 and later directed and composed for the Cappella Sistina. Not much is known for certain about his life. His oeuvre spans numerous...
16 April 2020
Farewell Charles de Bériot!
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Belgian composer and violinist Charles de Bériot. We bring you an excerpt from a piece by Richard Sutcliffe (Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel) and invite you to read the post in its entirety at his 19c Belgian Music Blog. Charles de Bériot,...
9 April 2020
Friedrich Hölderlin at 250
The German writer Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (20 March 1770, Lauffen am Neckar – 7 June 1843, Tübingen) was one of the most important lyric poets of his era. Rousseau, Klopstock, and Schiller, and the ideals of the French Revolution and Greek civilization were impressed upon him as a youth....
20 March 2020
RISM and Beethoven and the 19th Century
Ludwig van Beethoven is certainly the most prominent of the 2020 musician anniversaries. But his birth year of 1770 was unlucky for him in the early days of RISM. As many in the RISM community know, many RISM projects traditionally stopped at the year 1800, excluding much of Beethoven’s oeuvre....
12 March 2020
Henry Vieuxtemps at 200
We have received the following from Marie Cornaz (Bibliothèque royale de Belgique - Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België/RISM Belgium): In 2020, Belgium celebrates the 200thbirthday of one of its main musical figures: violinist and composer Henry Vieuxtemps (1820-1881). Vieuxtemps was a child prodigy from Verviers, a small town near Liège. He...
17 February 2020
