Hagen Kunze (1) (1973–)

Leipzig is the city where Johann Sebastian Bach worked in the first half of the eighteenth century and Mendelssohn and the Schumanns in the first half of the nineteenth. Richard Wagner was born there, and foreigners like Edvard Grieg and Arthur Sullivan came there to learn their trades. It was an important centre of music publishing and instrument manufacture, it has been the home of one of the world's leading orchestras since the 1780s, as well as the first proper conservatorium, and in the twentieth century it saw the creation of one of the first dedicated radio orchestras. And the university owns one of the world's most important musical instrument collections, now housed in the Grassi Museum.

Hagen Kunze has a go at unpacking this rich musical tradition and working out why a trading city like Leipzig should become such a focus of musical activity, something that is historically more usually associated with court cities. Of course, it's not really difficult to spot the elephant in the room, the choir school of the St Thomas church, established as an Augustinian cloister in the early 13th century and taken over by the city council after the Reformation, and still at the heart of musical life (Kunze reminds us that both the post-Wende boyband Die Prinzen and the trendy a cappella ensemble amarcord were founded by former choristers of St Thomas's). Both at the most difficult times in the city's history and during the driest seasons of civic conservatism, the continuity of that musical tradition seems to have provided a centre of gravity that brought in talented and motivated people.

Kunze doesn't try to pretend that everything was always for the best in the best of all possible cities: we're also talking about the city that heaved a collective sigh of relief after the death of the quarrelsome Kapellmeister Bach and forgot all about his music until Mendelssohn came along to tell them how important it was, the city that allowed the Nazis to demolish the Mendelssohn memorial without a murmur (the only objection on record came from the mayor, Carl Goerdeler, who resigned in protest and was later executed for his part in the 20th of July plot), and the city that blew up the University Church in 1968, apparently because Honecker had said he didn't like it. There seem to have been numerous other, less spectacular occasions where petty quarrels with the city authorities or confrontations with philistine audiences led to artists of genius walking out to take their skills elsewhere: even Gustav Mahler only lasted two years of his three-year appointment to the opera house. But somehow, enough stuck to make it a really interesting place.… (mehr)