Today's the Day

[Richard Tarleton]

Christian IV of Denmark (1577)

John Dowland's employer from 1598 to 1606 (Dowland having failed to get the top job at Elizabeth's court). Here is Dowland's King of Denmark's Galliard, played by Nigel North. Christian's sister Anne was the wife of King James VI of Scotland and I of England.

Rose Tremain's marvellous novel Music and Silence recreates the strange world of Christian's court.

[gurnemanz]

Our son is 35 today and I shall be 70 in a few weeks. Some nice symmetry going on there. He is very pleased to have avoided having his birthday forever associated with UK leaving Europe.

[Boilk]

Our son is 35 today and I shall be 70 in a few weeks. Some nice symmetry going on there. He is very pleased to have avoided having his birthday forever associated with UK leaving Europe.

The "symmetry" looks more like this, blue curve is a stretched version of the orange one ... with both curves tending towards 100%. So if you both live for eternity you will end up being the same age, effectively

[gurnemanz]

The "symmetry" looks more like this, blue curve is a stretched version of the orange one ... with both curves tending towards 100%. So if you both live for eternity you will end up being the same age, effectively

Thanks very much for that. Most impressed. I will show it to my son who is a surveyor and somewhat more of a mathematician than me (not a difficult achievement). My maths education stopped at O Level but I can remember the teacher one day telling us about a line on a graph going to infinity and coming back again - which intrigued me at the time.

Presumably, if we live to eternity Brexit will be have been sorted out by then.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 13th

A collection of national celebrations today, with Jefferson's Birthday in the US, Katyn Memorial Day in Poland, Teachers' Day in Ecuador, and Unfairly Prosecuted Persons' Day in Slovakia.

Also on this Date: the Short Parliament begins its three-week-long sitting (1640); John Dryden is appointed as the first Poet Laureate (1668); Handel's Messiah is premiered in the Great Music Hall in Fishamble Street, Dublin (1742 - with soloists Christina Maria Avoglio, Susannah Cibber, and Male soloists from the 32-strong choir, assembled from St Patrick's and Christ Church Cathedrals, orchestra of Strings, Timps and Trumpets with Handel's own Organ shipped to the venue for the occasion); the Roman Catholic Relief Act, giving Catholics the right to vote and to be voted as Members of Parliament, is given Royal Assent by George IV [much against his will - he does so only when Wellington threatens to resign as Prime Minister if he does not] (1829); Lajos Kossuth presents the Hungarian Declaration of Independence from the Hapsburg monarchy to the Hungarian National Assembly in a closed session (1849 - it is made public the next day, and passed unanimously by the Assembly the day after that); the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is established (1870 - it doesn't open for another 2 years); around 150 freed slaves are murdered by resentful white paramilitaries in Colfax, Louisiana (1873); John Philip Sousa's operetta El Capitan is premiered at the Tremont Theatre in Boston (1896); battleship Petropavlovsk of the Russian Imperial Navy hits a mine and sinks after taking part in the Battle of Port Arthur in the Russo-japanese War, resulting in the deaths of all 679 people on board and huge loss of morale in Russia (1904); Busoni's Die Brautwahl is premiered in Hamburg (1912); British troops under the command of Colonel Reginald Dyer open fire on a crowd of unarmed Indians assembled to protest against the arrest and deportation of Nationalists - in this "Amritsar Massacre", between 379 and 1,000 people are killed, and over 1,000 injured (1919: Dyer is sent back to England in disgrace; not that he himself feels any such shame - at least, not in public: two years later he writes an article published in The Globe in which he states "It is only to an enlightened people that free speech and a free press can be extended. The Indian people want no such enlightenment" and "Gandhi will not lead India to capable self-government. The British Raj must continue, firm and unshaken in its administration of justice to all men."); Joseph Goebbels announces the discovery of mass graves in the Polish Forest of Katyn, the scene of the mass murder of around 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentia by the Soviet Secret Police (1943 - Stalin claims that they were victims of the Nazis; a claim clung to until 1990, when responsibility is finally admitted); Roy Harris' 6th Symphony, the "Gettysburg", is premiered in Boston (1944); 1,016 slave labourers from Concentration Camps are crammed into a barn and burnt alive by German civilians and firefighters under the supervision of SS officers at the Isenschnibbte Estate near the town of Gardelegen (1945 - on the same day, Vienna falls to Soviet and Bulgarian forces); Palestinian Nationalists attack a convoy of Jewish doctors and nurses, and their military escort as they bring medical and military supplies to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem - 79 people are killed (1948); CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles orders Project MKUltra - a research project into developing mind-altering drugs, including a perfect "Truth Drug"; the most "successful" product of this project was LSD (1953 - the various drugs are trialed on servicemen, the poor, and the institutionalised, often without their full knowledge or informed consent, against international law); a four-week-long closed-session hearing begins to investigate charges that Robert Oppenheimer has Communist sympathies and is a security threat (1954); 23-year-old American pianist Van Cliburn wins the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (1958); Nono's Intollerenza 1960 is premiered at Teatro La Fenice, conducted by Maderna (1961); Sidney Poitier becomes the first black actor to win the Best Actor Award at the Oscars (1964); Mission Control in Houston is informed that the crew of Apollo 13 "have a problem": an Oxygen tank has exploded, causing severe damage to the Service Module, necessitating the abandonment of the lunar mission, requiring hurried emergency makeshift repairs, and creative use of the lunar module to power the crippled command module safely back to Earth (1970 - on this same day, Greek composer and Member of the Greek Parliament, Miikis Theodorakis, who has been imprisoned in a Concentration Camp after the right wing military coup, is released after an international outcry and allowed to go into exile); the 15-year-long Lebanese Civil War begins with an attack by the Lebanese Christian Phalange resistance which kills 26 members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (1975); an explosion at a munitions factory in Lapua, Finland results in the deaths of 40 workers, the biggest industrial accident in Finnish history (1976); Yusuf Lule replaces Idi Amin as President of Uganda, and the world's longest Table Tennis match [so far] comes to an end after 101 hours (1979); Tom Stoppard's Arcadia premieres at the Lyttleton Theatre on the South Bank Centre (1993); and 21-year-old Tiger Woods becomes the youngest winner [so far] of the Masters Golf Tournament (1997).

Birthdays Today include: Guy Fawkes (1570); Thomas Percy (1729); Thomas Jefferson (1743); Richard Trevithick (1771); Alexander Mitchell (1780); William Sterndale Bennett (1816); Josephine Butler (1928); Frank Winfield Woolworth (1852); Butch Cassidy (1866); John Blackwood McEwen (1868); György Lukács (1885); Herbert Yardley (1889); Jacques Lacan (1901); Samuel Beckett (1906); Phyllis Fraser (1916); Howard Keel (1919); John Braine (1922); Don Adams (1920); Edward Fox (1937); Frederic Rzewski (1938); Seamus Heaney (1939); JMG Le Clézio (1940); Margaret Price (1941); Peter Davison (1951); and Garry Kasparov (1963).

Final Days for: Guillaume de Machaut (1377); Boris Godunov (1605); Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1756); Franz Danzi (1826); Cecile Chaminade (1944); Edward van Beinum (1959); Georges Duhamel (1966); Larry Parks (1975); Ralph Kirkpatrick (1984); Caron Keating (2004); Muriel Spark (2006); Stephen Dodgson (2013); and Gunther Grass (2015).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Good Friday, 13th April, 1979 were:

Overture: Wolf-Ferrari, Ovt, "Susanna's Secret"; Grieg Cello Sonata in A minor; Debussy (orch Biisser) Printemps.
Morning Concert: Vivaldi Sinfonia in B minor ("al Santo Sepolcro"); Bach Toccata in f# minor (BWV 910); Lotti Crucifixus in 8 parts; Pachelbel Canon; Caldara Crucifixus in 16 parts; Haydn Symphony No 26 in D minor, "Lamentatione"
This Week's Composer: Beethoven (Quintet for piano and wind; Canon: "Es muss sein"; String Quartet in F, Op 135.)
Schubert Piano Sonatas D566; D784.
Bach: St Matthew Passion (a simultaneous broadcast with BBC2).

[teamsaint]

Our son is 35 today and I shall be 70 in a few weeks. Some nice symmetry going on there. He is very pleased to have avoided having his birthday forever associated with UK leaving Europe.

Oh I wouldn't worry about coincidental dates , 30 odd years on, nobody remembers things like getting married on Hitlers Birthday.......

[johncorrigan]

Birthdays Today: Garry Kasparov (1963).

I need to check that, mate.

[cloughie]

Our son is 35 today and I shall be 70 in a few weeks. Some nice symmetry going on there. He is very pleased to have avoided having his birthday forever associated with UK leaving Europe.

I likevabit of symmetry! 2017 I celebrated 70th Birthday and 35th wedding anniversary!

[cloughie]

Oh I wouldn't worry about coincidental dates , 30 odd years on, nobody remembers things like getting married on Hitlers Birthday.......

Never mind you’ll no doubt get reminders!

[french frank]

I need to check that, mate.

Oh, enough of these stale puns, mate.

[johncorrigan]

Oh, enough of these stale puns, mate.

[LMcD]

2 programmes marking the centenary of the Amritsar Massacre:
'The Massacre That Shook The Empire' on Channel 4 at 2100 tonight
'Amritsar 1919: Remembering a British Massacre' on Radio 4 at 2100 on 15th April (already available on BBC iPlayer/Sounds).

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 14th

Black Day in South Korea - a day to celebrate being single: in South Korea, couples can celebrate both Valentine's Day (on Feb 14th - men give women presents) and White Day (March 14th - women give men presents ) - anyone who didn't receive a gift on either of those two days can gather together with similar others, wearing black clothes to enjoy Jajangmyeon, a dish consisting of noodles in a black squid ink sauce - during the meal they can freely complain about the absence of intimate relationships in their lives - and, with perhaps greater annoyance, the absence of chocolate. Variants of the day include a combination of speed-dating with a Jajangmyeon-eating race.

Also on this Date: the beginning of the Siege of Jerusalem in the First Jewish-Roman War; a four-month campaign, in which Roman forces, led by future Emperor Titus, besiege the city which is held by Jewish rebels (70); Septimus Severus becomes Roman Emperor (193); the Battle of Barnet, in which Edward IV regains the English throne, defeating the forces of Henry VI, who dies five weeks later (1471); unusual lights in the sky are reported in Nuremberg, interpreted by some later UFOlogists as evidence of a battle between alien spacecraft, and by intelligent people as probably a parhelion (1561); Guru Gobind Singh formalises aspects of Sikhism with the founding of the Khalsa tradition (1699); Benjamins Franklin and Rush found the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in Philadelphia – the first American Abolitionist movement (1775); Bussa’s Rebellion – in which Bussa [an African-born slave] leads a failed rebellion against his British rulers (1816); the first edition of Noah Webster’s Dictionary goes on sale (1828); Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue is published in Graham’s Magazine (1841 – Poe is one of the magazine’s editors, and earns an extra $56 [about £1200 in today’s money] for the story); the first Pony Express delivery arrives in Sacramento, ten days after setting off on the 1,900 mile journey (1860); William Bullock receives a patent for his invention of the continuous roll printing press (1863 – so continuous he cannot stop it three years later when he attempts to kick a loose component back into place; his leg is caught up in the machinery and he dies from gangrene infection a few days later); Abraham Lincoln is fatally wounded when John Wilkes Booth shoots him at Ford’s Theatre in Washington (1865 – on the same day, and at almost exactly the same time, US Secretary of State, William H Seward, is also attacked by another of Booth’s co-conspiritors: Seward is stabbed five times in the face and neck, but recovers completely; unlike his wife, who dies from the shock a few weeks later ); Delibes' opera Lakmé is premiered in Paris (1883); the 1900 Paris Exhibition opens (19 … oh, go figure!); an estimated 20,000-30,000 Armenian Christians are massacred by Ottoman Muslims in the Turkish city of Adana (1909); RMS Titanic collides with an iceberg (1912); the first Volvo cars go on sale in Gothenberg, Sweden (1927); Berg's Drei Orchesterstücke Op 6 is given its first complete performance in Oldenburg (1930); the Spanish parliament diposes the country’s king, beginning the Second Spanish Republic (1931); one of the worst Dust Storms in American history devastates Oklahoma and Texas (1935 – the resulting social chaos inspires John Steinbeck to write The Grapes of Wrath, which is published on this date exactly four years later); Field Marshall Erwin Rommel attacks the Libyan port city of Tobruk (1941); Malta is awarded the George Cross (1942); Major General Christopher Vokes, Commander of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada infantry regiment, channels his inner Nazi and orders the Razing of Friesoythe, a town in North Western Germany, in retaliation for the shooting of one of his troops (1945); the first edition of The Eagle comic goes on sale (1950 – it costs 3d [worth about 35p today] and features the first installment of Dan Dare’s adventures on the cover); Sputnik 2 (the spacecraft carrying spacedog Laika) falls to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere, after nearly six months in orbit (1958 – Laika has probably been dead since a few hours after launch); Georges Pompidou becomes Prime Minister of France (1962); following a military coup, Gnassingbé Eyadéma begins his 38-year-long dictatorship of Togo (1967); thousands of Georgian citizens protest in Tbilisi against Soviet proposals to change the constitutional changes to the status of languages in Georgia (1978 – exactly 13 years later to the day, Zviad Gamsakhurdia is announced as the first democratically-elected President of the newly-declared Republic of Georgia ); the largest hailstones ever recorded [so far] fall in Bangladesh – weighing a kilogram, they cause the deaths of 92 people (1986 – exactly thirteen years later to the day, a hailstorm shower in Sydney causes over a billion pounds in insured damages ); the Soviet Union signs an agreement to withdraw all their troops from Afghanistan (1988); a convoy of Albanian refugees is bombed by NATO forces, killing 75 people (1999); the Human Genome Project is completed (2003 – on the same day, American forces in Baghdad capture Muhammad Zaidan [aka Abu Abbas], leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, which had been responsible for the hijacking of the Achille Lauro and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer 18 years earlier); 276 schoolgirls are abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria (2014); and at a meeting of the Paleoanthropolgy Society, Sonia Hammond announces the discovery of stone-age tools dating back 3.3million years in Lomekwi, Kenya – the oldest so far found (2015)

Birthdays Today include: Christiaan Huygens (1629); Augustus Pitt Rivers (1827); John Gielgud (1904); Denis ApIvor (1916); Mary Warnock (1924); Rod Steiger (1925); Loretta Lynn (1932); Morton Subotnik (1933); Frank Serpico (196); Julie Christie (1940); John Sergeant (1944); Julian Lloyd Webber (1951); Mikhail Pletnev (1957); Peter Capaldi (1958); Robert Carlisle (1961); Gina McKee (1964); and Sarah Michelle Gellar (1977).

Final Days for: George Frederic Handel (1759); Joseph Lanner (1843 - two days after his 42nd birthday); John Singer Sargent (1925); Vladimir Mayakovsky (1930); Rachel Carson (1964); Fredric March (1975); FR Leavis (1978); Elisabeth Lutyens (1983); Simone de Beauvoir (1986); Burl Ives (1995); Anthony Newley (1999); Hiroshi Teshigahara (2001); Alice Miller (2010); and Colin Davis (2013).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Friday, 14th April, 1989 were:

Morning Concert: Litolff Scherzo (Concerto symphonique #4); Mozart Symphony #28 in C (K 200); Tchaikovsky Marche slave; Brahms Hungarian Dances Nos 1 and 2; Enesco Romanian Rhapsody #2; Haydn Symphony No 83 (Hen).
Composers of the Week: Glazunov (Saxophone Concerto) & Taneyev (Pno5tet)
Morning Serenade (???): Weber The Ruler of the Spirits Ovt; Rachmaninov The Heart's Secret, Op 26 #1; The Ring, Op 26 #14; Tchaikovsky Piano Sonata in G, Op 37 ; Rachmaninov As Fair as Day in Blaze of Noon, Op 14 #9; O Do Not Grieve, Op 14 #8; Moeran Sinfonietta; Leighton Five Studies, Op 22; Britten Serenade for tenor, horn and strings; Purcell Pavan in Bb; RVW Floss Campi.
Haydn & Nielsen: Haydn Symphony #102; Nielsen Symphony #5

[french frank]

the first edition of The Eagle comic goes on sale (1950 – it costs 3d [worth about 35p today] and features the first installment of Dan Dare’s adventures on the cover)

My brother tore off pages 1 & 2 - the pages with the Dan Dare stories - and he still has them

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 15th

St Padarn's Day, the early 6th Century Britonnic Saint who founded the church with his name in Llanbadarn Fawr, near Aberystwyth and a monastry in Vannes, Brittany - he is one of the Seven Founding Saints of Brittany (five of whom were Welshmen). He is one of the few saints whose name is associated with the myth of King Arthur (who, in these earliest tales, is a much nastier and realistic character than the post-Mallorian one) who tried to steal the Saint's tunic - Padarn prevented the theft by calling on God to make the earth swallow Arthur, which it did, and kept him there until he acknowledged his guilt and begged forgiveness from the Saint (which he granted; after which he became Arthur's patron, guiding him towards a better way of living). There is also another church dedicated to Padarn in Llanberis - and, indeed, an entire Lake - near Snowdonia.
And it's Universal Day of Culture under the Banner of Peace, initiated by Russian Artist Nicolas Roerich (whose paintings of ancient Russian scenes inspired Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, for the premiere of which he designed the sets), and dedicated to celerating peace and cooperation amongst the peoples of the world through shared Artistic and cultural activities. And, for Artists not that keen on Universal Peace, it's also World Art Day, initiated in 2012 to promote awareness of creative activity worldwide - with not always unequivocal success; in 2013, a cake was baked in the shape of a naked woman, the genitals of which the Swedish Minister of Culture cut into, to symbolise Female Genital Mutilation, but which many people misunderstood. Both initiatives decided on this date as it is the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci.

Also on this Date: the Lateran Council is opened by the Pope - setting out the power of the Pope, reforming electoral abuses, and anathemising Iconoclasm (769); the last remaining English Army remaining in Normandy is routed by the French Army at the Battle of Formigny (1450); a delegation sent by the British colonial administration in North Carolina to negotiate with Native American chieftains are slaughtered as they sleep, triggering the two-year-long Yamasee War (17115); Bach's "St Matthew Passion" recieves its second "performance" (1729); Handel's Xerxes is premiered at the Theatre Royal in the Hay-Market, London (1738); Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language: in which the Words are deduced from their Originals and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the beſt Writers.To which are prefixed, A History of the Language, and an English Grammar is first published (1755); William and Dorothy Wordsworth visit Glencoyne Park near Ullswater and see "a long belt of daffodils", inspiring William's poem Lines Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (1806); the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Dr Mason Fitch Cogswell, and Louis Laurent Marie Clerc co-found the American School for the Deaf, in West Hartford, Connecticut (1817 - still going strong, it is the oldest permanent school for the deaf in the United States); frustrated at their failure to win official approval at the Salon de Paris, the Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers mount their own Exhibition of works at the studio of photographer Nadar: a critic derisively refers to it as "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", giving the new aesthetic a name (1874); the General Electric Company is founded (1892); the first modern Olympiad comes to a close in Athens (1896); the fate-temptingly reputed "unsinkable" RMS Titanic sinks at 2:20 am, less than three hours after its collision with an iceberg - less than a third of its 2227 passengers and crew survive (1912); the original version of Falla's El Amor Brujo, using chamber forces, is premiered at the Teatro Lara in Madrid (1915); leaders of Transport and Rail Unions announce that they will not call for industrial action to support striking miners - a decision received with dismay by Labour leaders (1921); a three-year-long revolt by Arab Palestinians against British rule and demanding a halt to open-ended Jewish immigration, begins with the Tulkarm Shooting, when a convoy of 20 vehicles is ambushed, and money and arms from the drivers - two Jewish drivers and a Jewish passenger are separated and shot, two of them fatally (1936); 200 German bombers blitz Belfast, killing 900 people and injuring 1500 injured - the greatest loss of life in any Blitz attack outside London (1941); British troops from the 11th Armoured Division liberate Bergen-Belsen extermination camp - discovering around 60,000 starving prisoners, and the corpses of 13,000 others [including that of Anne Frank and her older sister, Morgot] (1945); newly-appointed Prime Minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro, visits the United States (1959 - President Eisenhower refuses to meet him, instead sending Vice-President Richard Nixon, to whom Castro takes an instant dislike, in order to save time); a North Korean jet fighter shoots down a US surveillance aircraft, killing all 32 aboard - the largest single loss of US aircrew since World War 2 (1969 - Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sends ships to help the recovery effort to signal disapproval of the event); Cambodian citizens massacre their Vietnamese-ethnic neighbours - over 800 bodies are retrieved from the Mekong River (1970); Alfred Uhry's play Driving Miss Daisy premieres at the Playwrights Horizons Studio on 42nd Street, in New York (1987); 96 Liverpool supporters are killed in a huuman crush at Hillsborough Stadium owing to a failure of control by the South Yorkshire Police (1989 - and, on exactly the same day, democratic protests begin in Tianenmen Square in Beijing); two bombs, exploding at the Finish Line of the Boston Marathon in Massachussetts, kill three people and injure 264 others (2013); and more than 200 civilians are gunned down by members of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in-Opposition in the town of Bentiu, South Sudan, as they try seek sanctuary in hospitals, the local Catholic church, and the local Mosque (2014 - their bodies are left in the streets for over a week).

Birthdays Today include: Henry Bollingbroke [later, after a spot of cognaticide, Henry IV] (1367); Leonardo da Vinci (1452); Guru Nanak (1469); Pietro Cataldi (1552); Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688); Leonhard Euler (1707); Hermann Grassmann (1809); Wilhelm Busch (1832); Henry James (1843); Emile Durkheim (1858); Johannes Stark (1874); Percy Shaw (1890); Nikita Khrushchev and Bessie Smith (both 1894); John Williams (1903 - not him - or him - or even him, but the actor who played the police inspector in Hitchcock's Dial "M" for Murder); Helene Hanff (1916); Neville Marriner and Rikki Fulton (both 1924); Elizabeth Montgomery (1933); Michael Kamen (1948); Benjamin Zephaniah (1958); Emma Thompson (1950); Samantha Fox (1966); and Maisie Williams (1997).

Final Days for: Abraham Lincoln (1865); Matthew Arnold (1888); Wallace Hartley and the 8 members of his band (1912 - reputedly as they played Nearer, My God, to Thee); Gaston Leroux (1927); Robert Musil (1942); Jean-Paul Satre (1980); Arthur Lowe (1982); Tommy Cooper (1984); Jean Genet (1986); Kenneth Williams (1988); Greta Garbo (1990); Leslie Charteris (1993); Joey Ramone (2001); Clement Freud (2009); Jean-Francois Paillard (2013 - 3 days after his 85th birthday); Guy Woolfenden (2016); and Emma Morano (2017 - aged 117).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Tuesday, 15th April, 1969 were:

Overture (gramophone records)
Morning Concert (including Chabrier's "Fete polonaise" from Le roi malgré lui.)
This Week's Composer: Haydn (Rosemary Wright played Variations in f minor, H.XVII.6; Sonata in F major; Theme and Variations in C major H.XVII.5; Sonata in c minor.)
Concerto: ('cellist Radu Adulescu with the BBCSSO/Loughran - programme lasted 75minutes, no details of works recorded)
Music Making: lieder performed by Jennifer Eddy & Richard Nunn; chamber Music from the English String Quartet.