Gewandhaus

Subscription concerts began in Leipzig in 1743, when sixteen merchants of the city put up the money for an orchestra. From 1781 it played in the cloth hall — the Gewandhaus — and carried the building's name with it ever after. The second hall, opened in 1884, was destroyed in the bombing of 1944. The third, pressed for by Kurt Masur and built to Rudolf Skoda's design, opened in 1981 on Augustusplatz: the only concert hall newly built in the German Democratic Republic, with Seneca's motto above the stage — res severa verum gaudium, true joy is a serious matter — and Sighard Gille's enormous painted ceiling spread across the foyer. The Gewandhausorchester still divides itself between this hall, the opera house across the square and the Sunday services at the Thomaskirche, a triple duty that binds Leipzig's musical institutions to one another as in no other city.