Meistersingerhalle Nürnberg

Inaugurated on 7 September 1963 after three years' building, the Meistersingerhalle answered a competition Harald Loebermann had won in 1958, with Wunibald Puchner responsible for the interiors. Its great hall seats 2,100 and holds an organ installed at the opening; the small hall, of 500 seats, was conceived for chamber music. Two orchestras give their concert series in the building — the Nürnberger Symphoniker and the Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg — together with the city's three principal concert choirs. The name reaches back past Wagner to the guild singers of medieval Nuremberg themselves, a claim on civic memory that few post-war concert halls could make with such directness.