12-year-old Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt wins a reputation as a virtuoso performer

Austrian composer Franz Schubert writes the song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin ('The beautiful miller's wife')

Beethoven's ninth symphony (the Choral, because of its finale, setting Schiller's Ode to Joy) has its first performance in Vienna

Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini moves to Paris, where he becomes director of the Théatre Italien

Franz Schubert composes his 'Great' C major symphony (previously often attributed to 1828)

17-year-old Felix Mendelssohn composes an overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, amplifed with huge success eighteen years later

Carl Maria von Weber's opera Oberon has its premiere (in London, at Covent Garden)

After a century of neglect, the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducts an influential revival in Berlin of J.S. Bach's St Matthew Passion

Gioacchino Rossini's opera William Tell has its premiere in Paris

German composer Felix Mendelssohn visits the Hebrides and see's Fingal's Cave, later the theme of his Hebrides Overture

The Symphonie fantastique by French composer Hector Berlioz has its premiere in Paris

Samuel Francis Smith's patriotic hymn America is sung for the first time on July 4 in Boston

Gaetano Donizetti's opera L'elisir d'amore has its premiere in Milan

Robert Schumann's first published composition is Papillons ('Butterflies'), twelve short dance pieces for piano

Mendelssohn's concert overture The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave) has its premiere in London's Covent Garden

Hector Berlioz marries an Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, with whom he has been obsessed since seeing her play Ophelia and Juliet in 1827

Gaetano Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor has its premiere in Naples

Hector Berlioz's requiem mass, the Grande messe des morts, has its first performance in Paris

Polish composer Frédéric Chopin completes his Preludes under difficult conditions in Majorca

Robert Schumann composes the song cycle Frauenliebe und -Leben ('Woman's Love and Life')

Robert Schumann marries the pianist Clara Wieck, daughter of his first teacher

The success of the opera Nabucco, premiered in Milan, is a turning point in the fortunes of Giuseppe Verdi

Edwin Pearce Christy launches the Virginia Minstrels, later to become America's most popular minstrel show under the name Christy's Minstrels

The Flying Dutchman is the first of Richard Wagner's major operas to be staged, with its premiere in Dresden

Mendelssohn's overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, amplified now with incidental music, is greeted as a masterpiece at a performance of the play in Potsdam