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August 30, 1865 — Tchaikovsky’s Characteristic Dances is first performed in Pavlovsk

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Composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky when he was only 24, “Characteristic Dances” was the first of his pieces to be publicly performed. Tchaikovsky himself was not present for the performance, which was conducted by Johann Strauss (itself an honour to a neophyte composer). However, he was pleased with both the fact of the performance and its reception.

Amazingly, “Characteristic Dances” has never been published, and exists today only in a modified form, as Tchaikovsky reworked it as “Dances of the Chambermaids” in his 1867 opera, “The Voyevoda”, and this is the form that they were recorded and popularised in. However, despite its obscurity, the public performance of his works was a turning point in the career of Tchaikovsky, and marked the first step to his becoming one of the best known of all Russian composers.

A clean-shaven man in his teens wearing a dress shirt, tie and dark jacket.
By Unknown. Uploaded to the English language Wikipedia in February 2007 by Jonyungk (log). – Music 33: Tchaikovsky: Early Portrait at Dartmouth College. Image is in the Bettmann collection (BE040514 and BJ001276 on http://pro.corbis.com). First known publication: 1953 postcard in Russia.[1] No copyrights were registered for this postcard., Public Domain, Link

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Let There Be Rock — AC/DC

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May 3, 1865 — Abraham Lincoln is buried

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The remains of Abraham Lincoln and his son, William Wallace Lincoln, were placed on a funeral train which left Washington, D.C., on April 21, 1865 at 12:30 pm, and arrived in Springfield, Illinois, on May 3, 1865. The train retraced the route Lincoln had traveled to Washington as the president-elect on his way to his first inauguration, and millions of Americans viewed the train along the route (the reason the trip took so long was that several stops were made along the way, at each of which Lincoln’s body lay in state).

Lincoln was buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. The site of the Lincoln Tomb, now owned and managed as a state historic site, is marked by a 117-foot-tall granite obelisk surmounted with several bronze statues of Lincoln, constructed by 1874. Mary Todd Lincoln and three of his four sons are also buried there. Some historians have called this event “The Greatest Funeral in the History of the United States” on account of its length.