Le Monde has deciced that as Monteverdi's Orfeo was the first opera still regularly performed today, and because it was written in 1607, we should celebrate 400 years of opera. Ok.
2. A more plausible birthday: yesterday was the 157th joyeux anniversaire of the French composer Ernest Chausson, author of the wonderful Poème for violin and orchestra. Am rather saddened to find out that Chausson died at the age of only 44 when he cycled into a brick wall.
p.s. I was going to have another birthday in this list, but it turned out to be even less plausi
ble than the first one. According to a French music magazine I'm reading, Babar the Elephant is sixty five y
ears old. Thought I'd do some investigating, and it turns out that actually he's 66 years old, which isn't really a special birthday at all, and it's not really his birthday his month either. Shame. Instead, let's say Happy Birthday (for yesterday of course, this post is a day late) to the American composer Walter Piston, who wrote that favoured classic of music students round the world: Harmony.
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