Born Today! 11.06.2024

Francesco Antonio Bonporti (11 June 1672 – 19 December 1749) was an Italian priest and amateur composer. Born in Trento, he was admitted in 1691 to the Collegium Germanicum in Rome, where he studied theology. While in Rome, he also studied composition under the guidance of Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni and possibly (since this is unconfirmed) violin with Arcangelo Corelli. Moving back to Trento, he was ordained in 1695. Bonporti's musical work consists of twelve opera, published between 1696 and 1736. He influenced Johann Sebastian Bach in the development of the invention, and several of his works were mistakenly included in a set of Bach's inventions. In reality, Bach had transcribed for harpsichord four violin pieces from Bonporti's op. X (1712). He lived in Padua from 1740 until his death in 1749.

Giovanni Antonio Giay (sometimes spelled Giaj; 11 June 1690 – 10 September 1764) was an Italian composer. His compositional output includes 15 operas, 5 symphonies, and a significant amount of sacred music.

Luigi Gatti (October 7, 1740 – March 1, 1817) was a classical composer. He was born in Lazise in 1740, the son of an organist, Francesco della Gatta. He was ordained a priest in Mantua. In the 1780s he became Hofkapellmeister in Salzburg and Leopold Mozart showed his irritation at not receiving it himself. Between 1801 and 1804 Gatti helped Mozart's sister, Nannerl to locate unknown pieces by Mozart. He died in Salzburg in 1817. He is famous for writing oratorios, cantatas, sextets and septets.

Samuel-Alexandre Rousseau (Neuve-Maison, 11 June 1853 - Paris, 1 October 1904) was a French composer.

Hubertus Christiaan (Hubert) de Blanck (June 14, 1856 – November 28, 1932) was a Dutch-born professor, pianist, and composer who spent the better part of his life in Cuba.

Richard Georg Strauss (German: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈʃtʁaʊs]; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer and conductor best known for his tone poems and operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Along with Gustav Mahler, he represents the late flowering of German Romanticism, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style. Strauss's compositional output began in 1870 when he was just six years old and lasted until his death nearly eighty years later. His first tone poem to achieve wide acclaim was Don Juan, and this was followed by other lauded works of this kind, including Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, Symphonia Domestica, and An Alpine Symphony. His first opera to achieve international fame was Salome, which used a libretto by Hedwig Lachmann that was a German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. This was followed by several critically acclaimed operas with librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena, and Arabella. His last operas, Daphne, Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio used libretti written by Joseph Gregor, the Viennese theatre historian. Other well-known works by Strauss include two symphonies, lieder (especially the Four Last Songs), the Violin Concerto in D minor, the Horn Concerto No. 1, Horn Concerto No. 2, his Oboe Concerto and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen. A prominent conductor in Western Europe and the Americas, Strauss enjoyed quasi-celebrity status as his compositions became standards of orchestral and operatic repertoire. He was chiefly admired for his interpretations of the works of Liszt, Mozart, and Wagner in addition to his own works. A conducting disciple of Hans von Bülow, Strauss began his conducting career as Bülow's assistant with the Meiningen Court Orchestra in 1883. After Bülow resigned in 1885, Strauss served as that orchestra's primary conductor for five months before being appointed to the conducting staff of the Bavarian State Opera where he worked as third conductor from 1886 to 1889. He then served as principal conductor of the Deutsches Nationaltheater und Staatskapelle Weimar from 1889 to 1894. In 1894 he made his conducting debut at the Bayreuth Festival, conducting Wagner's Tannhäuser with his wife, soprano Pauline de Ahna, singing Elisabeth. He then returned to the Bavarian State Opera, this time as principal conductor, from 1894 to 1898, after which he was principal conductor of the Berlin State Opera from 1898 to 1913. From 1919 to 1924 he was principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera, and in 1920 he co-founded the Salzburg Festival. In addition to these posts, Strauss was a frequent guest conductor in opera houses and with orchestras internationally. In 1933 Strauss was appointed to two important positions in the musical life of Nazi Germany: head of the Reichsmusikkammer and principal conductor of the Bayreuth Festival. The latter role he accepted after conductor Arturo Toscanini had resigned from the position in protest against the Nazi Party. These positions have led some to criticize Strauss for his seeming collaboration with the Nazis. However, Strauss's daughter-in-law, Alice Grab Strauss [née von Hermannswörth], was Jewish and much of his apparent acquiescence to the Nazi Party was done to save her life and the lives of her children (his Jewish grandchildren). He was also apolitical, and took the Reichsmusikkammer post to advance copyright protections for composers, attempting as well to preserve performances of works by banned composers such as Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn. Further, Strauss insisted on using a Jewish librettist, Stefan Zweig, for his opera Die schweigsame Frau which ultimately led to his firing from the Reichsmusikkammer and Bayreuth. His opera Friedenstag, which premiered just before the outbreak of World War II, was a thinly veiled criticism of the Nazi Party that attempted to persuade Germans to abandon violence for peace. Thanks to his influence, his daughter-in-law was placed under protected house arrest during the war, but despite extensive efforts he was unable to save dozens of his in-laws from being killed in Nazi concentration camps. In 1948, a year before his death, he was cleared of any wrongdoing by a denazification tribunal in Munich.

Ferdinand Rebay (11 June 1880 – 6 November 1953) was an Austrian composer, music teacher, choir director, and pianist.

Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin (Russian: Виссарион Яковлевич Шебалин; 11 June [O.S. 29 May] 1902 – 29 May 1963) was a Soviet composer.

Emil František Burian (11 June 1904 – 9 August 1959) was a Czech poet, journalist, singer, actor, musician, composer, dramatic adviser, playwright and director. He was also a longtime activist in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

Alice Samter (11 June 1908 – 19 March 2004) was a German music educator and composer.

Chiang Wen-yeh or Jiang Wenye (Chinese: 江文也; pinyin: Jiāng Wényě, June 11, 1910 – October 24, 1983) was a Taiwanese composer, active mainly in Japan and later in China. While often known in the West by renditions of his Chinese name, the three Chinese characters that form his name are pronounced Kō Bunya (こう ぶんや) in Japanese, and thus he is also known as Koh Bunya in the West. In his compositions, which range from for piano to choral and orchestral works, he merged elements of traditional Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese music with modernist influences. Due to the political turmoil surrounding his life, he came to be largely forgotten during the latter part of his life. After his death, however, his work has started to gain new recognition in East Asia as well as in the West.

Mukhtar Ashrafi (Russian: Мухтар Ашрафович Ашрафи, Uzbek: Muxtor Ashrafiy; 11 June [O.S. 29 May] 1912 in Bukhara – 10 December 1975 in Tashkent) was a Soviet Uzbek composer. He was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1951. He became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1941 was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1943 and 1952. He is known as the author of the first Uzbek opera “Buran” (together with Sergei Vasilenko) and the first Uzbek symphony. His daughter Muqadamma was a noted medievalist.

Helen Tobias-Duesberg (11 June 1919 – 4 February 2010) was an Estonian-American composer.

Carlisle Sessions Floyd (June 11, 1926 – September 30, 2021) was an American composer primarily known for his operas. These stage works, for which he wrote not only the music but also the librettos, typically engage with themes from the American South, particularly the Post-civil war South, the Great Depression and rural life. His best known opera, Susannah, is based on a story from the Biblical Apocrypha, transferred to contemporary rural Tennessee, and written for a Southern dialect. It was premiered at Florida State University in 1955, with Phyllis Curtin in the title role. When it was staged at the New York City Opera the following year, the reception was initially mixed; some considered it a masterpiece, while others degraded it as a 'folk opera'. Subsequent performances led to an increase in Susannah's reputation and the opera quickly became among the most performed of American operas. In 1976, he became M. D. Anderson professor at the University of Houston. He co-founded the Houston Opera Studio for the training of young singers. Floyd is regarded as the "Father of American opera".