LEIPZIG — Music-lovers have long flocked to Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, renowned throughout the world as the place where Johann Sebastian Bach was at his most prolific. As cantor of the church’s school, theschola thomana, from 1723 until his death in 1750, Bach produced an immense quantity and variety of compositions for organ, piano, and voice, recognized as among the greatest in the history of music.
Even today, Bach’s 27-year Kantorat remains the church’s most famous epoch. That Bach was drawn there in the first place, however, attests to the excellent reputation of the church, school, and associated boys choir—a trinity known as Thomana—developed in the preceding centuries. As a leading city of the Reformation (Luther debated Catholic theologian Johannes Eck here in 1519), Leipzig became known far and wide as a center of music and culture, attracting top composers and organists such as Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), considered by many to be the greatest German composer before Bach.
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