• organ

Celebrate Music in 2018

Stories reaching into music history

Take an in-depth look at some of the events and people highlighted in the collection, Music Anniversaries in 2018. 

1968 - "Peace Songs of the 1960s"
1918 - "Women in World War I"
1868 - "William Steinway and Richard Wagner"
1818 - "Western Music in Meiji Japan"
1768 - "Mozart: In Search of the Roots of Genius"

Collections Sampler: 1818-1968

  • Broadwood & Son Grand Piano, 1794, National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center, Gift of Hugo Worch
    Broadwood & Son Grand Piano

    1818. Thomas Broadwood, of John Broadwood & Sons, gave Beethoven a six-octave Broadwood fortepiano. He shipped it from London to Vienna and it arrived midway through 1818. 

  • Study 140A, "The Magic Fire-Scene" from Die Walküre by Richard Wagner, 1956, John De Cesare, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Gift of the Estate of John De Cesare
    Study of "The Magic Fire-Scene" from Die Walküre by Wagner

    1868. Richard Wagner, known most popularly for his Ring Cycle, premiered his only comedic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, in Munich on June 21, 1868. 

    This image was created in 1956 by John de Cesare using his theory to transcribe music into a visualization. 

  • 2c Igor Stravinsky Single, 1982, National Postal Museum, Copyright United States Postal Service. All rights reserved.
    2c Igor Stravinsky Single

    1918. The first performance of Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat was performed on September 28, 1918 in Switzerland, just before the end of World War I. It tells the story of a deserting soldier who makes a deal with the Devil, and is based on a Russian folk tale.

  • Hammond B-3 Electric Organ owned by James Brown, 1968, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
    Hammond B-3 Electric Organ owned by James Brown

    1968. The night after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, James Brown performed live on television in Boston. The broadcast kept people at home, and Boston was one of the few cities that remained quiet that night. 

View More 2018 Music Anniversaries

In 1768, 250 years ago, Joseph Haydn was newly promoted to the position of music director for the court of Nikolaus I, Prince Esterhazy.  In this role, he wrote a three-act opera, Lo speziale (The Apothecary), which premiered as the inaugural opera of the Esterháza opera house in late 1768.

This spotlight was created by Kate Duffus Stein on behalf of Smithsonian Music.