The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra is one the great ensembles of the world, known to millions through its recordings, broadcasts, and concerts. When an orchestra of this stature makes one of its rare trips to the United States from East Germany, in a week-long celebration of Brahms, the musical world has to sit up and take notice--or rather, queue up and take tickets. For it is rarely that one would find such an ideal combination, a marriage made--if not in Heaven--at least somewhere in the neighborhood.
Leipzig has always been a musical city, and the city fathers from the Renaissance on were generous patrons of the arts; don't forget that J.S. Bach lived out his days as a civil servant employed by the Leipzig city council, and to the present day the government supports a rich musical life. In the Middle Ages there were Stadtpfeifer and Kunstgeiger (city wind and string players). In 1599, Turmer (brass players) were hired to play daily from the tower of the city hall. After the Thirty Years' War, the city musicians became more organized and were called upon for festivals, weddings, and funerals, as supervised by the town council or the Thomaskantor (director of music at St. Thomas' Church--Bach's position).
Ensemble music-making often brought together professionals, townspeople, and students from the city's prestigious university in an institution known as the collegium musicum. The earliest recorded groups date from 1688, and in later years they were led by such notables as Telemann and Bach. They continued through the eighteenth century, until the building of a new "Gewandhaus" (cloth-merchants' hall) provided a worthy concert hall for the city's musical life. The original Gewandhaus was completed in 1781, although the musicians' organizations--the antecedents of the present Gewandhaus Orchestra--go back much farther.
The Gewandhaus Orchestra was already established as a leading ensemble by the time Mozart came there to conduct several of his symphonies and concertos in 1789; Beethoven's symphonies were heard soon after their composition, and the choir of St. Thomas' Church joined the Gewandhaus Orchestra for Haydn's The Creation in 1800, and The Seasons the next year.
Mendelssohn was conductor from 1835 until his death in 1847, and under his unrelenting zeal the Gewandhaus became one of the finest orchestras in Europe; he was also the first of the orchestra's conductors to use a baton (Kurt Masur, the present director, reverts to an earlier tradition by not using one). Under Mendelssohn, the Gewandhaus played numerous premieres, notably works of Schumann and Schubert. Historical concerts--including an all-important revival of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1841--were also prominent. Mendelssohn also established the Musikhochschule (High School for Music), a conservatory which still supplies the majority of Gewandhaus musicians.
A new building--no longer a "cloth merchants' hall" but still called by the old name--was completed in 1884, and all the great conductors and composers of the day performed there. That hall was destroyed during World War II and a new one, seating 2,000 and ideally designed to accommodate both chamber and symphonic music, was opened a few years ago.
Brahms came to Leipzig on several occasions: in 1853 the twenty-year-old composer came as a piano recitalist, and in 1895, only two years
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