1859 - Music

Music

Opera: The Masked Ball (Un Ballo in Maschera) 2/17 at Rome's Teatro Apollo, with music by Giuseppe Verdi; Faust 3/19 at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, with music by French composer Charles Gounod, 41, to a libretto based on the Goethe tragedy. Spanish-born Italian soprano Adelina (née Adela Juana Maria) Patti, 16, makes her debut 11/24 at New York's Academy of Music singing the title role in Donizetti's 1835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor.

First performances: Serenade for Orchestra No. 1 in D major by Johannes Brahms 3/28 at Hamburg; Concerto No. 1 for Pianoforte and Orchestra by Brahms 7/22 at Hanover.

Hymns: "Ave Maria" ("Hail Mary") by Charles Gounod, who has based it on Johann Sebastian Bach's first prelude in The Well-Tempered Clavichord of 1722; "Nearer My God to Thee" by Boston musician Lowell Mason, 67, lyrics by the late Sarah Adams, who wrote them in 1840 or 1841.

Popular songs: "Dixie" ("I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land") by Ohio-born performer Daniel Decatur Emmet, 43, of the blackface troupe Bryant's Minstrels is performed for the first time 4/4 at Mechanics Hall, 472 Broadway. The song meets with immediate success among lower Manhattan's working-class audiences, most of whom support the Southern cause. Emmet may well have learned the song from Ben and Lew Snowden, the sons of freed slaves, who have been performing with their family in rural Ohio (see 1861); "La Paloma" by Spanish songwriter Sebastian Yradier, 50.

The Steinway piano developed by German-born New York piano maker Henry Steinway, Jr. is the first piano with a single cast-metal plate. Steinway is the son of Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, now 62 (see 1853). The men of the New York family apprenticed themselves to various piano makers, one of whom, Henry Pirsson, had produced a double-grand pianoforte with keyboards facing each other. The Steinways will take pride in their workmanship, shaping and fitting hundreds of pieces by hand for each instrument and following a precise and patient procedure which involves drying wood for a year and applying several coats of varnish to the case, with long intervals between each coat, but what will make Steinway & Sons world famous is the fuller, warmer tone of their pianos, made possible by the cast-metal plate, which is strong enough to withstand the pull of strings that have been combined with an overstrung scale both to save space and to produce a much larger tone than that of earlier grand pianos.