And, of course, the performance of "Candle in the Wind", the only time it has ever been performed, by Elton John, to a throng of weeping onlookers.
When the Ch?let staged "A Little Night Music" in February 2010, the theater said it was the first time a Stephen Sondheim musical had ever been performed in France.
Among the many things we don't know about Bach's six cello suites is whether they were performed during the composer's lifetime, or whether they were intended to ever be performed at all.
It's hard to decide whether this is the most brilliant or the most ridiculous literary trick that has ever been performed around the fraught, often pretentious task of rendering musical sublimity in words.
The anonymous charges, first reported in the British tabloids, were the "result of jealousy," said Mr. Easdon, who denied that anything more surgically invasive than a procedure resembling a tonsillectomy had ever been performed on the dog.
Devotional songs and statements, however, persistently deny all mechanical views of divine exchanges, insisting that humans have nothing to give, that everything belongs to God, and that no truly religious action should ever be performed instrumentally.
In 2004, Mr. Oser — himself a violinist — founded New Paths in Music, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan that presents the work of foreign composers whose music has rarely if ever been performed in this country.
As with most rituals, there is a sacrificial element, and this show is extreme: a performance lasting from noon on Saturday until the same time on Sunday, the first time A 24-Decade History of Popular Music has ever been performed this way.
The yearlong Complete Works of Shakespeare Festival, also involving international companies and other British professional and amateur groups, "is the first time that Shakespeare's entire canon has ever been performed together at the same event," the company's announcement said.
