Born Today! 22.12.2024

Giovanni Bottesini (22 December 1821 – 7 July 1889) was an Italian Romantic composer, conductor, and a double bass virtuoso.

Julius Andreas Bechgaard (19 December 1843 [different 22 December] – 4 March 1917) was a Danish composer of piano pieces, songs, and operas. Bechgaard was born in Copenhagen. His best known opera, Frode, shows the influence of Wagner. He died aged 73 in Frederiksberg.

Johan Andreas Hallén (22 December 1846 – 11 March 1925) was a Swedish Romantic composer, conductor and music teacher, primarily known for his operas, which were heavily influenced by Richard Wagner’s music dramas. Hallén was born in Gothenburg and died in Stockholm, but the early years of his career and most of his education were in Germany. Like his Norwegian contemporary Edvard Grieg and many other composers the same generation, Hallén frequently evokes the folk music and folk stories of his home country in his compositions. According to the musicologist Axel Helmer, however, "The salient feature of his style [...], and the one which strongly affected contemporary reaction, is its close, almost derivative relationship to German music," especially Wagner. Around 1885, Hallén returned to Sweden and continued to conduct and compose, and in later years taught composition at the Stockholm Conservatory.

María Teresa Gertrudis de Jesús Carreño García (December 22, 1853 – June 12, 1917) was a Venezuelan pianist, soprano, composer, and conductor. Over the course of her 54-year concert career, she became an internationally renowned virtuoso pianist and was often referred to as the "Valkyrie of the Piano". Carreño was an early adopter of the works of one of her students, American composer and pianist Edward MacDowell (1860–1908) and premiered several of his compositions across the globe. She also frequently performed the works of Norwegian composer and pianist Edvard Grieg (1843–1907). Carreño composed approximately 75 works for solo piano, voice and piano, choir and orchestra, and instrumental ensemble. Several composers dedicated their compositions to Carreño, including Amy Beach (Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor) and Edward MacDowell (Piano Concerto No. 2).

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924) was an Italian composer known primarily for his operas. Regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi, he was descended from a long line of composers, stemming from the late Baroque era. Though his early work was firmly rooted in traditional late-nineteenth-century Romantic Italian opera, it later developed in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents. His most renowned works are La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (1924)—a work which lay unfinished by his death, all of which are among the most frequently performed and recorded in the entirety of the operatic repertoire.

Franz Schmidt, also Ferenc Schmidt (Hungarian: [ˈʃmitː ˈfɛrɛnt͡s], 22 December 1874 – 11 February 1939) was an Austro-Hungarian composer, cellist and pianist.

Antoine Mariotte (22 December 1875 – 30 November 1944) was a French composer, conductor and music administrator.

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (French: [ɛdɡaʁ viktɔʁ aʃil ʃaʁl vaʁɛz]; also spelled Edgar; December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French and American composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?" Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognised as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. Varèse saw potential in using electronic media for sound production, and his use of new instruments and electronic resources led to his being known as the "Father of Electronic Music" whilst Henry Miller described him as "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound". Varèse actively promoted performances of works by other 20th-century composers and founded the International Composers' Guild in 1921 and the Pan-American Association of Composers in 1926.

Joseph Deems Taylor (December 22, 1885 – July 3, 1966) was an American composer, radio commentator, music critic and author. Nat Benchley, co-editor of The Lost Algonquin Roundtable, referred to him as "the dean of American music." He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1934.

Mihail Andricu (22 December 1894, Bucharest – 4 February 1974, Bucharest ) was a Romanian composer, violinist, and pianist. He studied with Alfonso Castaldi, Robert Klenck and Dumitru Kiriac. Andricu graduated from the National University of Music Bucharest (1903 to 1912), after which he studied with Gabriel Fauré (1913–1914) and Vincent d'Indy in Paris (1919–1922). From 1926 to 1948 he was a professor of chamber music and from 1948 to 1959 he was a professor of composition. Some of his students were Sergiu Natra, Ștefan Niculescu, Doru Popovici, and Aurel Stroe. A co-founder of the Society of Romanian Composers, he was elected as a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1948, member of the Société française de musicologie, and twice winner of the Enescu Prize, though his work was later suppressed by the government. Censor Leonte Răutu castigated Andricu for admitting or showing an appreciation for contemporary Western classical music. Andricu was expelled from the composers' union in 1959 and his mention was prohibited. Highly prolific, Andricu composed eleven symphonies, thirteen sinfoniettas, and three chamber symphonies. Specific pieces include a symphonic suite: Cinderella.

Borys Mykolaiovych Lyatoshynsky, also known as Boris Nikolayevich Lyatoshinsky, (3 January 1895 – 15 April 1968) was a Ukrainian composer, conductor, and teacher. A leading member of the new generation of 20th century Ukrainian composers, he was awarded a number of accolades, including the honorary title of People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR and two Stalin Prizes. He received his primary education at home, where Polish literature and history was held in high esteem. After completing school in 1913, he entered the Faculty of Law at Kyiv University, and as a graduate was employed to teach music at the Kyiv Conservatory. During the 1910s, Lyatoshynsky wrote 31 works of various musical genres. During the 1930s he travelled to Tajikistan to study folk music and compose a ballet about the life of local people. From 1935 to 1938, and from 1941 to 1944, he taught orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory. During the war, Lyatoshynsky was evacuated and taught at the Conservatory's branch in Saratov, where he worked on arrangements of Ukrainian songs, and organised the transportation of Ukrainian musical manuscripts away to safety. Lyatoshynsky's main works are his operas The Golden Ring (1929) and Shchors (1937), the five symphonies, the Overture on Four Ukrainian Folk Themes (1926), the suites Taras Shevchenko (1952) and Romeo and Juliet (1955), the symphonic poem Grazhyna (1955), his "Slavic" piano concerto (1953), and the completion and orchestration of Reinhold Glière's violin concerto (1956). Many of his compositions were rarely or never performed during his lifetime. A 1993 recording of his symphonies first brought his music to worldwide audiences. Despite his music being criticised by the Soviet authorities, who officially banned such compositions as his Second Symphony, Lyatoshynsky never adhered to a style of socialist realism. His music was written with a modern European style, and skilfully includes Ukrainian themes. His early musical style was influenced by his family, his teachers (including Glière), and by Margarita Tsarevich. The existence of a Polish side to Lyatoshynsky's family resulted in Polish themes being central for many of his works. He also drew inspiration for his early compositions from Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, and Scriabin. His musical style later developed in a direction favoured by Shostakovich. Soviet and Ukrainian composers who studied under Lyatoshynsky, and were influenced by him, include Myroslav Skoryk and Valentyn Sylvestrov.

Alan Dudley Bush (22 December 1900 – 31 October 1995) was a British composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and political activist. A committed communist, his uncompromising political beliefs were often reflected in his music. He composed prolifically across a range of genres, but struggled through his lifetime for recognition from the British musical establishment, which largely ignored his works. Bush, from a prosperous middle-class background, enjoyed considerable success as a student at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in the early 1920s, and spent much of that decade furthering his compositional and piano-playing skills under distinguished tutors. A two-year period in Berlin in 1929 to 1931, early in the Nazi Party's rise to power, cemented Bush's political convictions and moved him from the mainstream Labour Party to the Communist Party of Great Britain which he joined in 1935. He wrote several large-scale works in the 1930s, and was heavily involved with workers' choirs for whom he composed pageants, choruses and songs. His pro-Soviet stance led to a temporary ban on his music by the BBC in the early years of the Second World War, and his refusal to modify his position in the postwar Cold War era led to a more prolonged semi-ostracism of his music. As a result, the four major operas he wrote between 1950 and 1970 were all premiered in East Germany. In his prewar works, Bush's style retained what commentators have described as an essential Englishness, but was also influenced by the avant-garde European idioms of the inter-war years. During and after the war he began to simplify this style, in line with his Marxism-inspired belief that music should be accessible to the mass of the people. Despite the difficulties he encountered in getting his works performed in the West he continued to compose until well into his eighties. He taught composition at the RAM for more than 50 years, published two books, was the founder and long-time president of the Workers' Music Association, and served as chairman and later vice-president of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain. His contribution to musical life was slowly recognised, in the form of doctorates from two universities and numerous tribute concerts towards the end of his life. Since his death aged 94 in 1995, his musical legacy has been nurtured by the Alan Bush Music Trust, established in 1997.

Marc Lavry (Hebrew: מרק לברי) (December 22, 1903, Riga – March 24, 1967, Haifa) was an Israeli composer and conductor. Born in Latvia and trained in Germany, Lavry immigrated to Palestine in 1936, where he was instrumental in developing the "Mediterranean School" of composition, that merged elements of oriental Jewish and Arab music with modern European classical music.

Robert Frank Kurka (December 22, 1921 – December 12, 1957) was an American composer, who also taught and conducted his own works.