On September 12, 1910, in the Neue Musik-Festhalle (a newly-built hall in Munich with 3,200 seats) an orchestra of 171 instruments and a choir of 852 singers performed Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony Number 8” for the first time. The organizers — including Mahler himself — had started recruiting choirs and musicians to join the performance. The symphony itself lasted 85 minutes, and it’s said the applause lasted for 20.
The symphony has since been performed many times, and you can even watch it on YouTube now — thanks to the integrated circuit that Jack Kilby first demonstrated on September 12, 1958. That was a year to the day before the Soviet Union launched “Lunik II” at the moon. At the time it was the largest lunar space probe yet launched, and it was part of the motivation for President Kennedy’s “we choose to go to the moon” speech on September 12, 1962.
A little-known bit of trivia about Kennedy’s speech is that he delivered it on his wedding anniversary — he and Jacqueline Bouvier had been married September 12, 1953, when he was a senator. The connection between marriage and space was repeated on September 12, 1992, when Mark Lee and Jan Davis, who were married to each other, were launched on Space Shuttle Endeavor — they were the first (and still the only) married couple in space.
Before photography, of course, weddings and and other events were commemorated with paintings. A long time before photography, by the way — September 12 is the day in 1940 that paintings were discovered in a cave in Lascaux, France; they turned out to be about 40,000 years old. Even though it’s traditionally dark in caves, the paintings were preserved in full color — something that wasn’t repeated in modern technology until September 12, 1959, when the first regularly-scheduled tv show broadcast in color debuted. It was “Bonanza” — a cowboy soap opera that sometimes featured a gang of bad guys trying to rob the Wells Fargo stagecoach.
As coincidence would have it, that’s exactly what happened in real life on September 12, 1983, when a gang stole $7 million from a Wells Fargo armored truck in West Hartford. But it actually wasn’t a coincidence that they picked September 12. The gang was Los Macheteros, a group fighting for Puerto Rican independence, and September 12 was the birthday of Dr. Pedro Campos, a prominent Puerto Rican nationalist.
Campos was born in 1891, and was by all reports pretty brilliant. He was fluent in six languages, went to Harvard Law School, and graduated with the highest grade point average. That would ordinarily mean he would have been the valedictorian, but because he wasn’t a white man, professors delayed two of his final exams to make sure he didn’t graduate on time. He was elected president of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico in 1930, and was locked up by the US government in 1936 and again in 1950 for organizing attempts to overthrow US rule over the island.
Prejudice against Puerto Rican heritage was something Antonio Paoli experienced as well. He was Puerto Rican, a world-famous tenor in the first part of the 20th century, and considered better than his contemporary Enrico Caruso. Caruso evidently thought so too; he was a shareholder in the Metropolitan Opera House (the old one, not the one that’s there today), and managed to get Paoli banned from performing there. Paoli performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music instead. But he didn’t perform much in the US — he toured the rest of the world, and at least once performed outside of an opera — as a soloist in Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number 8.
