# Notable premieres



## Aurelian (Sep 9, 2011)

Music for the Royal Fireworks

From Wikipedia: "The display was not as successful as the music itself: the weather was rainy causing many misfires and in the middle of the show the right pavilion caught fire. Also, a woman's clothes were set on fire by a stray rocket and other fireworks burned two soldiers and blinded a third. Yet another soldier had his hand blown off during an earlier rehearsal for the 101 cannons which were used during the event."

Beethoven's 9th: Well-known already

Carmen: A flop that upset Bizet so much he died soon afterwards.

Rite of Spring: Riot, as everybody knows.

Shostakovich's 5th: A 45-minute standing ovation. The audience understood what the music said.

Which other works had eventful or notable premieres?


----------



## EvaBaron (Jan 3, 2022)

I would say the premiere of Beethoven’s 5th and 6th symphonies as well as the 4th piano concerto. The program alone is noteworthy but it was extremely cold, very long, not well rehearsed and Beethoven’s improvisation on the piano went wrong so he had to start over again


----------



## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

I believe the "riot" story for the Rite was a bit overblown per historians, though there was certainly some unrest between factions in the audience. 

Dvorak's 9th had a standing ovation after each movement in Carnegie Hall.


----------



## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

Mahler's 8th apparently had quite the premiere performances with at least one critic tentatively proposing it may be the greatest musical work ever written.


----------



## Georgieva (7 mo ago)

The premiere of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in 1897 was disastrous and the piece was poorly received. He walked out of the first performance early and ware crushed by the overwhelmingly negative response. It is well known that Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov told him, ‘Forgive me, but I do not find this music at all agreeable’. And then....


----------



## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

George Antheil's avant-garde signature piece, the _Ballet Méchanique_, created riots in Paris at the Theatre Champs Elysees in June of 1926, and the following April in New York's Carnegie Hall. Under-rehearsed and over-hyped, the New York premiere was a complete disaster. The press hated it, the public walked out. The fiasco was total—the airplane propellers blew people’s hats off in the front row, and one quick-witted audience member raised a white handkerchief on the end of his cane, to widespread laughter.


----------



## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

Not a notable one, but a funny story -

One of electronic/avant-garde pioneer Morton Subotnik's premiers in Aspen went poorly, with audience members jeering and heckling the work, and one attempting to run on stage and stop the music. After the performance, a dejected Subotnik saw an old Darius Milhaud (of Le Six fame) in the audience, who said something like "Thank you, that brought me back to my old days".


----------

