Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony received its premiere on this date in 1824 at Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna.

By now Beethoven was totally deaf, yet he continued to lead performances of his work as a sort of side conductor; he kept what he thought was the correct tempo and he followed along with the printed score. For this performance, the musicians respectfully ignored him and watched the chief conductor, Michael Umlauf. It was to be Beethoven’s first appearance on stage in a dozen years. (More after the jump …)
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Orson Welles was born on this date in 1915. If he had not been born, America would have needed to invent someone like him. He left a mark on radio, theater, and film history, and he helped push each one of those forms forward into the future; and his public persona—a charming rogue, self-serious yet self-deprecating—is still missed 30-plus years after he left.

To the day he died, at age 70 in October 1985, he was scrambling for support, for the finances to back his film projects. Hollywood’s powers decided in the late 1940s, as a group, that he had decided to go it alone as a filmmaker. So he decided to go it alone as a filmmaker. At this Hollywood’s powers decided, as a group, that Welles could not be trusted, because he had kept his word.
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Today is Cinco de Mayo.

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New York City’s “Music Hall founded by Andrew Carnegie,” now known as Carnegie Hall, had its opening night 125 years ago tonight. Music was conducted by Walter Damrosch and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who conducted his “Marche Solennelle” (below the fold):
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