Wikipedia:Main Page history/2016 August 23

George Frideric Handel

Of the four operas written by the youthful composer George Frideric Handel (pictured) between 1703 and 1706 when he lived and worked in Hamburg, only the first, Almira, has survived complete. The music for the others is lost apart from a few orchestral fragments. Handel learned the rudiments of opera composition while employed as a violinist at the Oper am Gänsemarkt, Hamburg's famous opera house, and was able to get Almira and a second opera, Nero, performed there during the temporary absence of the theatre's director, Reinhard Keiser. Almira was successful, Nero less so. Handel's last two Hamburg operas, Florindo and Daphne, were not produced at the Gänsemarkt before Handel left Hamburg. No music that can be definitively traced to Nero has been identified, although scholars have speculated that some of it may have been used in later works, particularly Agrippina, which has a similar plot and characters. Fragments of music from Florindo and Daphne have been preserved, although without the vocal parts, and some of these elements have been incorporated into an orchestral suite first recorded in 2012. (Full article...)

Taylor Swift

• ... that
  opening-week sales
  of one million copies in the United States?
• ... that the historic district of
  Southern Song Dynasty
  map Pingjiang Tu, produced in the year 1229?
• ... that Jorge Estefan Chidiac has served on the Finances and Public Credit Commission in each of his three terms in the Chamber of Deputies?
• ...that awards for The Danish Girl included the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Alicia Vikander's portrayal of Danish painter Gerda Wegener?
• ... that Red Army Major General Pyotr Georgyevich Novikov died in the Flossenbürg concentration camp?
• ... that Qal'eh Hasan Ali, originally considered a group of impact craters, is instead a group of maars that may have formed within the last 50,000 years?
• ... that, after visiting
  Herbert Schneider wrote to John Dewey
  that "a whole new world of the imagination has been created"?

Summer Olympics closing ceremony

• The Summer Olympics conclude (ceremony pictured) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• At least 54 people are killed when a wedding is attacked by a suicide bomber in Gaziantep, southern Turkey.
• The
  Airlander 10
  hybrid airship – the largest aircraft flying today – completes its maiden civilian voyage.
• A wildfire in the U.S. state of California displaces more than 82,000 residents, burns more than 30,000 acres (120 sq. km) and threatens at least 34,500 structures.
• The China National Space Administration successfully launches Quantum Experiments at Space Scale, the first spacecraft capable of quantum key distribution.

Cesar Chavez

• 1514 – Ottoman forces defeated the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, gaining control of eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq.
• 1896 – Andrés Bonifacio and his Katipunan comrades in modern-day Quezon City rose up in revolt against Spanish rule, marking the beginning of the Philippine Revolution.
• 1929 – Palestine riots: Arabs began attacking Jews in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, killing over sixty people in two days.
• 1970 – The United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez (pictured), began the Salad Bowl strike, the largest farmworker strike in U.S. history.
• Wolfgang Přiklopil
  after eight years in captivity.