Events
- January 1 – The copyright on Wagner's Parsifal expires allowing it to be staged outside of Bayreuth. Performances take place in Barcelona, Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Bologna, Rome and Wrocław. In the next few weeks it is staged in St. Petersburg, Paris, Brussels, Vienna and London's Covent Garden.
- January 21 – Edward Elgar makes the first recordings of his music, including the miniature "Carissima" prior to its public premiere. [1]
- January 24 – First public performance of Leoš Janáček's piano cycle In the Mists at the third concert of the Organ School in Brno by pianist Marie Dvořáková, teacher of the school.
- January – First Finnish performance of Jean Sibelius's tone poem Luonnotar , with soprano Aino Ackté and conductor Georg Schnéevoigt. [2]
- c. June – First publication of Orchestration, the classic book by Cecil Forsyth.
- August 26 – Rutland Boughton's fairy opera The Immortal Hour is first performed in the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms at the inaugural Glastonbury Festival co-founded by the English socialist composer. [3] On August 5, the first concert concluded with the choral song "The Last Post" by Charles Villiers Stanford in lieu of the Grail Dance from Parsifal "owing to the outbreak of war." [4]
- October – Adelina Patti gives her last public performance, in a Red Cross concert at London's Royal Albert Hall.
- October 15 – In Rovigo, Beniamino Gigli makes his operatic debut in Amilcare Ponchielli's La Gioconda .
- December 31 – English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, aged 42, volunteers for war service, initially as a private with the Royal Army Medical Corps. [5]
- The first recording of calypso music is made in Trinidad and Tobago.[ citation needed ]
