Magdeburg

Magdeburg buried an emperor and proved the void. Otto the Great, first Holy Roman Emperor, made this Elbe stronghold his beloved residence and lies in its cathedral — the first Gothic cathedral on German soil, begun 1209, its soaring choir sheltering Otto's tomb and the enigmatic royal couple of its sculpture. Seven centuries later the city's mayor, Otto von Guericke, staged science's greatest theatre: the Magdeburg hemispheres, two copper bowls emptied of air that sixteen horses could not pull apart — the vacuum demonstrated before the astonished Reichstag, physics made spectacle.

The city's sufferings were as historic as its glories: the sack of 1631, the Thirty Years' War's darkest atrocity, gave Europe the verb "to magdeburgize"; the bombs of 1945 repeated the destruction. Between catastrophes Magdeburg kept creating — and one creation belongs to music's first rank: Georg Philipp Telemann, the most prolific composer who ever lived, was born here in 1681, and the city honours him with the Telemann Festival and a research centre that has made Magdeburg the world capital of his rediscovery.

The last building Friedensreich Hundertwasser designed, the pink, gold-globed Green Citadel, blooms among the rebuilt avenues; the theatre, puppet theatre of European rank and the Magdeburg Philharmonic fill the season. An emperor, a vacuum, a green citadel: Magdeburg specialises in the improbable.