Leipzig Gewandhaus History: A Landmark Behind Our Magnet

Leipzig Gewandhaus History: A Landmark Behind Our Magnet

Leipzig's concert hall has changed address twice, and changed shape with it. The name Gewandhaus has belonged to three buildings, and the magnet in this collection shows the one standing today at Augustusplatz. Anyone looking for leipzig gewandhaus history usually wants the story of a single building, but the useful version is the story of three, because most of the works premiered under this name were first heard in halls that are gone.

What the Leipzig Gewandhaus Building Is

The Gewandhaus is a concert hall in Leipzig. Today's building stands at Augustusplatz 8, on the eastern edge of the inner city, and it is the third hall to carry the name. It is the home of the Gewandhausorchester, an orchestra that traces its origins to 1743, when sixteen Leipzig nobles, citizens and merchants founded the concert society known as the Großes Concert and gave their first concert on 11 March 1743.

The name is older than any of the three halls. A building on the corner of Universitätsstraße and Gewandgäßchen, erected in 1498 as the city armoury, was later used by cloth and wool merchants, whose market hall occupied its upper floors. From that trade the whole building took the name Gewandhaus, the cloth house. When a concert hall was fitted into it in 1781, the orchestra that played there took the building's name.

Leipzig Gewandhaus History: Three Buildings, One Name

The first Gewandhaus (1781)

A concert hall was built inside the cloth merchants' building in 1780 and 1781 to a design by Johann Carl Friedrich Dauthe, and the first concert was given there on 25 November 1781. The hall measured roughly 11 by 23 metres and seated up to 500 people, rising to around 1,000 after a rebuild in 1842. It is the hall that carries most of the musical history: Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, Schubert's Great C major Symphony, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and the first complete performance of Brahms's A German Requiem all had their premieres there. Felix Mendelssohn conducted the orchestra from 1835 and founded the Leipzig Conservatory in the building's courtyard in 1843. After 1884 the building was known as the Altes Gewandhaus, and between 1893 and 1896 it was partly demolished and absorbed into the Städtisches Kaufhaus.

The second Gewandhaus (1884)

By the 1860s the old hall was too small, and the city wanted a new concert house on the edge of the centre to encourage the growth of a music quarter. The result was the Neues Concerthaus at Grassistraße 5 in the Musikviertel, opened on 11 December 1884. The plans were drawn by Martin Gropius and carried out under Heino Schmieden, and the build was financed by a loan from the estate of Franz Dominic Grassi. Its great hall held about 1,700 people and its chamber hall 650, and the architectural sculpture was by the Berlin sculptor Otto Lessing. The opening concert was conducted by Carl Reinecke, not by Arthur Nikisch, who took over the orchestra only in 1895.

The second hall earned a reputation that outlived it: its shoebox auditorium was the model for Symphony Hall in Boston, completed in 1900. It was hit in the air raids of 4 December 1943 and 20 February 1944 and burned out, organ and all. After the war the shell was shored up and rebuilding was considered, but the decision went the other way. The ruins were demolished on 29 March 1968, and the orchestra played for over thirty years in the Kongreßhalle am Zoo.

The third Gewandhaus (1981)

The present hall opened on 8 October 1981, two hundred years after the orchestra first played under the Gewandhaus name. Kurt Masur, then chief conductor, laid the foundation stone on 8 November 1977. The design came from Rudolf Skoda together with Eberhard Göschel, Volker Sieg and Winfried Sziegoleit, and it was built on the site of the Museum der bildenden Künste, which had been destroyed in the war.

The Great Hall seats 1,900. Its acoustics are the point of the building, with a reverberation time of about two seconds in a full house; during construction the hall was filled with soldiers of the East German Nationale Volksarmee so that the designers could hear it at capacity. Above the organ console stands the orchestra's motto, Res severa verum gaudium, true joy is a serious matter. The Schuke organ behind it has 6,845 pipes.

The foyers hold Sighard Gille's ceiling painting Gesang vom Leben, made in 1980 and 1981 across 714 square metres and rising 31.8 metres, the largest ceiling painting in Europe. In the autumn of 1989 Masur opened the hall for the Gewandhaus Talks, public discussions on the future of the GDR, which made the building a platform for political opposition.

What the Magnet Shows

The drawing follows the facade the Gewandhaus turns towards Augustusplatz. It is an orthographic elevation, which is to say it is drawn flat, without perspective, so that the proportions of the building stay true instead of tapering away from the viewer.

The line work sets out the roof first: a deep, overhanging slab with a coffered underside that projects well past the wall beneath it. Underneath sits the full-height glazed foyer, divided into six bays by vertical mullions, and the flanking walls lean inward as they rise. Behind the glass the staircases and gallery levels remain readable, and two small figures at street level give the scale.

This is the 1981 building, not the 1884 one. The Mendebrunnen, the fountain that stands in front of the Gewandhaus on Augustusplatz, is not part of the drawing; the elevation shows the building on its own.

The magnet itself is 5 × 7 cm, built on a bookbinder greyboard core with a recycled kraft paper face, and finished by hand in small batches in our workshop.

Where to Find Strichwerke Products in Leipzig

The Leipzig collection is available at https://strichwerke.eu/collections/leipzig. The collection includes magnets for the following Leipzig landmarks:

• Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations)
• Stadthaus Leipzig (Leipzig Town Hall)
• Gewandhaus (Concert Hall)
• Thomaskirche (St. Thomas Church)
• Neues Rathaus (New Town Hall)

Our magnets are also on the shelves in Leipzig. Four stockists carry the range:

• Gewandhaus-Shop, Augustusplatz 8, D-04109 Leipzig — gewandhaus-shop.de
• Teehaus Leipzig, Im Alten Rathaus, Markt 1 — teehaus-leipzig.de
• Buchhandlung Südvorstadt, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 124/26 — buchhandlung-suedvorstadt.de
• KulturShop Leipzig — kulturshop-leipzig.de

Stock moves between shops, so it is worth calling ahead before a special trip. The partners page lists every current stockist.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Gewandhaus buildings have there been?

Three. The first was a concert hall fitted into the cloth merchants' building in 1781, the second opened in the Musikviertel in 1884, and the third, the one standing today, opened at Augustusplatz in 1981.

What is the difference between the Gewandhaus and the Gewandhausorchester?

The Gewandhaus is the building; the Gewandhausorchester is the orchestra. The orchestra was founded in 1743 as the Großes Concert and has played under the Gewandhaus name since it moved into the first hall in 1781. It is the building's name that the orchestra borrowed, not the other way round.

When was the current Gewandhaus opened?

On 8 October 1981. Kurt Masur conducted the opening concert, whose programme included Siegfried Thiele's Gesänge an die Sonne and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

How many people does the Gewandhaus Great Hall seat?

1,900, with a reverberation time of about two seconds when the hall is full.

What happened to the 1884 Gewandhaus?

It was badly damaged in the air raids of 4 December 1943 and 20 February 1944 and burned out. The ruins were demolished on 29 March 1968.

Does the magnet show the old or the current Gewandhaus?

The current one, the 1981 hall at Augustusplatz. The 1884 building had a stone facade with a columned portico and a sculpted pediment, which is not what the drawing shows.

Sources and Further Reading

The building history summarised here follows the Gewandhaus's own account at https://www.gewandhausorchester.de/haus/historie/ and the detailed German Wikipedia article at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewandhaus_(Leipzig). The English Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewandhaus gives a shorter overview of the same three buildings. The square and the site the 1981 hall was built on are documented at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustusplatz, and the Gewandhaus's address is confirmed in its own imprint at https://www.gewandhausorchester.de/impressum/. Licensed photographs of all three halls are collected at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gewandhaus_(Leipzig).