Born Today! 16.09.2024

Giuseppe Saverio Raffaele Mercadante (baptised 17 September 1795 – 17 December 1870) was an Italian composer, particularly of operas. While Mercadante may not have retained the international celebrity of Gaetano Donizetti or Gioachino Rossini beyond his own lifetime, he composed as prolifically as either and his development of operatic structures, melodic styles and orchestration contributed significantly to the foundations upon which Giuseppe Verdi built his dramatic technique.

Ernest Henri Alexandre Boulanger (16 September 1815 – 14 April 1900) was a French composer of comic operas and a conductor. He was more known, however, for being a choral music composer, choral group director, voice teacher, and vocal contest jury member.

Claude-Paul Taffanel (16 September 1844 – 22 November 1908) was a French flautist, conductor and instructor, regarded as the founder of the French Flute School that dominated much of flute composition and performance during the mid-20th century.

Juliette Nadia Boulanger (French: [ʒyljɛt nadja bulɑ̃ʒe] ; 16 September 1887 – 22 October 1979) was a French music teacher, conductor and composer. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist. From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Conservatoire de Paris but, believing that she had no particular talent as a composer, she gave up writing music and became a teacher. In that capacity, she influenced generations of young composers, especially those from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Among her students were many important composers, soloists, arrangers, and conductors, including Grażyna Bacewicz, Daniel Barenboim, Lennox Berkeley, İdil Biret, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Quincy Jones, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Julia Perry, Astor Piazzolla, Laurence Rosenthal, Virgil Thomson, and George Walker. Boulanger taught in the U.S. and England, working with music academies including the Juilliard School, the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Longy School, the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, but her principal base for most of her life was her family's flat in Paris, where she taught for most of the seven decades from the start of her career until her death at the age of 92. Boulanger was the first woman to conduct many major orchestras in America and Europe, including the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, Hallé, and Philadelphia orchestras. She conducted several world premieres, including works by Copland and Stravinsky.

Karol Rathaus (Karl Leonhard Bruno Rathaus; also Leonhard Bruno; 16 September 1895 — 21 November 1954) was a German-Austrian Jewish composer who immigrated to the United States via Berlin, Paris, and London, escaping the rise of Nazism in Germany.

Władysław Kędra (16 September 1918 – 26 September 1968) was a Polish pianist. Kędra was born in Łódź. He made his debut in 1933, performing Haydn's 11th Concerto and Camille Saint-Saëns's Rapsodie d'Auvergne. He graduated from the Łódź Conservatory in 1937. He took part in the 3rd International Chopin Piano Competition, attracting juror Magda Tagliaferro's attention. He finished his studies in Paris. During World War II he secretly performed banned Polish music in Warsaw. The precarious circumstances affected Kędra's hands, but he overcame this. Settling back in Łódź after the German capitulation, he took part in the 1946 Concours de Geneve and the IV International Chopin Piano Competition, where he was awarded a 5th prize, which launched his concert career. In 1957 he settled in Vienna. He made many recordings, and died in Warsaw from cancer. He was 50 years old.

Milan Harašta (September 16, 1919 – August 29, 1946) was a Czechoslovak opera and classical composer.

Sven-Erik Bäck (16 September 1919 – 10 January 1994) was a Swedish composer of classical music. He was born in Stockholm. Bäck studied from 1939 until 1943 in the King's Music-Academy and from 1940 until 1945, was a composition student of Hilding Rosenberg. He travelled in 1951 to have further studies with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome. As of 1953 he was the leader of the chamber orchestra of the Swedish Radio Orchestra. He was also a member of string quartets - the Kyndel Quartet from 1940 to 1944 and the Barkel Quartet from 1944 to 1953. Bäck composed three operas, five works for ballet, many concertos, a number of works for chamber ensemble including at least four string quartets, an oratorio, cantatas, choral works, lieder and music for plays and film. He died in Stockholm in 1994. He was 74

Fritz Geißler (or Geissler) (16 September 1921 in Wurzen, Saxony – 11 January 1984 in Bad Saarow, Brandenburg) was one of the most important composers of the German Democratic Republic. The son of Elsa and Walther Geißler, he was raised in modest circumstances. His first violin lessons came from the leader of a local tenants' association's mandolin-band, himself a pipe-fitter. Following graduation from public school, Geissler went into training with the town-pipers band of Naunhof. After the conclusion of this most inauspicious education he earned the means to continue private lessons in violin, piano, and music theory as a bar and coffee house fiddler in Leipzig. Later, in 1979, he used his experiences from this time in his opera Die Stadtpfeifer ("The Town Pipers"). In 1940 he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht as a musician, and ordered to Guernsey in 1942, where he served in the Luftwaffe's musical corps. In 1945 he became a prisoner of war of the English, where he was offered the opportunity to play second violin in a string quartet, and to compose or arrange choral settings for the prison choir. After his release in 1948 he studied composition and viola at the music college in Leipzig under Max Dehnert, Arnold Matz and Wilhelm Weismann. Subsequently, due to a hand injury he had to give up his job as violist with the State Symphony Orchestra of Gotha. From 1953 to 1954 he studied composition again, at the College of Music at Berlin-Charlottenburg under Hermann Wunsch and Boris Blacher. Beginning in 1954, Geissler taught theory of music and composition at the Institute for Musical Education, at the University of Leipzig; later he became docent and professor of composition at the musical colleges in Leipzig and Dresden. His pupils included Wilfried Krätzschmar, Peter Hermann, Reinhard Pfundt, Karl Ottomar Treibmann, Friedrich Schenker and Lothar Voigtländer. From 1956 to 1968 he was president of the Leipzig Composers Society; from 1971 he was a member of the East German Arts Academy, the same year that he received a national award; and from 1972 he was vice-president of the East German Composers Society. He died on 11 January 1984 at the age of 62.

Eric Gross AM (16 September 1926 – 17 April 2011) was an Austrian-Australian pianist, composer and teacher.

Francesco Tristano Schlimé, stage name Francesco Tristano, born 1981, is a Luxembourgish classical and experimental pianist and composer who also plays the clarinet. He composes both classical and electronic music.

Olena Oleksiyivna Karpenko (born September 16, 1981 in Kyiv, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian singer, composer, and poet with the stage-name Solomia. Olena composes in Ukrainian, English and Russian. She writes and performs jazz, blues, rock, pop, classics and world in Ukraine and abroad.