Also in April 1942
7th: The Royal Opera House in Valetta, Malta, is completely destroyed by the Luftwaffe during a sustained bombing raid on the Mediterranean island. Dating from 1866, the building was considered one of the country’s architectural gems and, while various plans are mooted to rebuild it in subsequent decades, none come to fruition. 14th: At a concert at Vienna’s Musikverein concert hall, Karl Böhm conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the first performance of Casella’s Paganiniana, a work specially commissioned to celebrate the orchestra’s centenary year. The piece’s four movements are all based on works by the Italian violinist and composer after whom it is named, while the first of them is also intended to convey ‘his satanic spirit’.
23rd: German planes bomb Exeter in the first raid of the ‘Baedecker Blitz’. This new wave of attacks targets cities of cultural and historical importance and, especially, buildings specifically mentioned in the popular Baedecker series of travel guides. York, Norwich, Bath and Canterbury are also attacked over the following month.
24th: The author LM Montgomery, best known for her 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, is found dead in her bed in Toronto, Canada. Her death is officially put down to coronary thrombosis, but a written note lying beside the bed – ‘My position is too awful to endure and nobody realises it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best’ – suggests she may have taken her own life. 27th: The German pianist and composer
Emil von Sauer dies in Vienna at the age of 79. A pupil of Liszt and Nikolai Rubinstein, Sauer made his name as a touring virtuoso in the first two decades of the 20th century. His best-known compositions, written largely for piano, include two concertos and a series of Concert Etudes.