Musikviertel
Musikviertel is a neighbourhood in Leipzig, Germany. The Musikviertel is part of the locality Zentrum-Süd in the borough of Leipzig-Mitte.The name goes back to the first music institutions built in the neighbourhood, the second Gewandhaus and the new building of the Royal Conservatory of Music. Several streets in the neighbourhood are named after composers, which is why the term musicians' quarter is used – incorrectly. Characteristic of the Musikviertel is the large number of buildings of historicism; numerous buildings are listed as Kulturdenkmal. Since 1991, an ensemble monument and preservation statute has been in force for the entire neigbourhood. It has an area of around and about 5,000 inhabitants.
Location and location typology
The Musikviertel adjoins the city centre of Leipzig in a south-westerly direction. It is bordered to the east and southeast by the Pleißemühlgraben, and to the southwest, west and north by the Karl-Tauchnitz-Strasse, which runs in an arc. To the west and north of the neighbourhood are the Clara-Zetkin-Park and the Johannapark; to the east is the Innere Südvorstadt. According to the municipal structure of Leipzig, which has been in force since 1992, the Musikviertel is the western part of the Zentrum-Süd locality.The northern part of the Musikviertel is characterised by representative public buildings: the Federal Administrative Court building, the University Library, the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig as well as a branch of the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, the German Institute for Literature, the Humanities Centre of the Leipzig University and the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig. The neighbourhood has many magnificent villas and bourgeois residences, which made the Musikviertel one of the most elegant neighbourhoods in the city. The gaps torn during the Second World War were partly filled with prefabricated buildings. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a number of new villas, residential and office buildings were added from the mid-1990s onwards. Nevertheless, some gaps in the original building fabric have not been closed to this day. The Musikviertel is crossed by the Pleißemühlgraben, which has been partially restored since 1990 after being covered in the 1950s; a complete opening of the ditch is planned.
History
Until 1880
Until the first half of the 19th century, Leipzig's southwestern vorstadt area was a barely developed floodplain and garden landscape. Marshy meadows, ponds, alluvial forest and gardens characterised the terrain.In the Middle Ages, the Cistercian nuns of the Georgenkloster had settled in the southwest in front of the city wall near the Pleissenburg until 1543 and built, among other things, a mill on the Pleißemühlgraben, the Nonnenmühle, which existed until 1890. They also ran a brickyard, for which they used the clay of the floodplain. The remaining holes of the clay pits remained as ponds. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were gardens and ponds west of the Pleißemühlgraben, first Schwägrichen's Garden followed by the Trier Garden with two large ponds, which served the university as a botanical garden from 1806.
It was joined by the Schimmelsche Gut, which bordered on the raft site, on which the timber rafted to Leipzig from the Vogtland and the Altenburger Land was stacked. The Schimmel estate had three ponds, the largest of which had an island. The farmer Johann Friedrich Schimmel had acquired the estate in 1823 and set up a restaurant on the island, which was very popular with the people of Leipzig, which could be reached via a wooden footbridge or by boat. He called the island "Buen Retiro".
In 1861, the Johannapark was completed on the former meadow site by Peter Joseph Lenné on behalf of Wilhelm Theodor Seyfferth. The efficiency of the railway made it possible to discontinue raft operations in 1864, so that the raft site could be transformed into a decorative place. A year later, the regulation of the Pleiße and Elster was started and new building land was gained by draining the area and backfilling the Alte Pleiße. In 1876, the botanical garden was relocated to today's Linnéstrasse.
1880–1945
In 1880, the city acquired, among other things, the area of the Schimmelsche Gut, and extensive land development and redesign began, including housing subdivision. The remaining holes of the drained ponds were filled in and the entire building site of the neighbourhood was leveled in an elaborate way, whereby the earth fills had immense dimensions. For flood protection, the ground level of the built-up terrain was raised by about compared to the meadows of the later King Albert Park. In 1882, the foundation stone was laid for the construction of the New Concert House, marking the beginning of the development of the Musikviertel. In 1884, this building – soon to be called the New Gewandhaus – was inaugurated. In 1887, the Royal Conservatory of Music was inaugurated. From 1888 to 1895, the Imperial Court building was built. In 1890 the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Trade was completed and in 1891 the university library Bibliotheca Albertina. In 1891, the new building of the Municipal Trade School was also handed over to its purpose, but its west wing was not completed until 1903. With the completion of the Imperial Court in 1895, the construction of the large public buildings in the Musikviertel was almost complete. From 1896, the electric tram ran through the Musikviertel. In 1897, the Saxon-Thuringian Industrial and Commercial Exhibition took place on the edge of the new neighbourhood.From the mid-1880s, housing construction also began in the Musikviertel. Villas and multi-storey apartment buildings were built in closed and open building styles. Most of the buildings built first can be assigned to one of the so-called neo-styles of historicism in terms of architectural history. The stylistic model for the private builders was the large public buildings in the neighbourhood. An example of this is the striking Roßbach corner house in the Renaissance Revival style, which was designed by the architect of the Bibliotheca Albertina and completed in 1893. After 1900, echoes of Art Nouveau can be found on some buildings, which can be seen in particular in the ornamentation and decoration of the façade design of some houses.
For the development of the area, there were detailed regulations such as building height, building distances, number of storeys and degree of development of the plots. The approval of the façade view was also reserved for the city council. Thus, with the Musikviertel, Leipzig received a particularly valuable area in terms of urban development, clearly structured by closed urban structures, which is now a listed ensemble as a cultural property ensemble.
The sides facing or close to the park were decorated with a ring of villas. The villa plots were quite generously sized and ranged from, so that there was enough space for outbuildings, meter-high fenced front gardens and elaborately designed gardens. This was especially true of the villas on Karl-Tauchnitz-Strasse, of which a good third are still preserved. Of the total of 71 villas in the district, 21 alone were designed by Max Pommer. He is followed by Peter Dybwad and Arwed Roßbach.
Around 1900, the development of the Musikviertel could in principle be considered complete. For decades, the new neighbourhood became the preferred address of Leipzig's Bildungsbürgertum. On 20 February 1944, an air raid was carried out on Leipzig and its southern district. In the Musikviertel, more than 50 percent of the buildings, including the Gewandhaus, the hall of the Conservatory, the Imperial Court, the University Library, many villas and residential buildings, were completely destroyed or severely damaged. Further attacks hit the Musikviertel on 27 February and 6 April 1945. In the latter, the central wing and the eastern part of the building of the Bibliotheca Albertina were destroyed.
1945–1990
The rubble clearance, which had already begun in 1945/46, was intensified from 1947 onwards by the operation of a light railway across the Musikviertel, which transported the rubble along Karl-Tauchnitz-, Ferdinand-Rhode- and Wundtstrasse to the Bauernwiesen, where the Fockeberg was built.On 1 October 1946, the former conservatory was reopened as the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik – Mendelssohn Akademie and on 26 April 1947 the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, short: HGB. The Georgi Dimitroff Museum was opened in the former Imperial Court on 18 June 1952, and the Museum der bildenden Künste also found a new home in the former Imperial Court. In 1953, the Theaterhochschule Leipzig was founded after the relocation of the German Theatre Institute, which had been founded in Weimar in 1947, to the Leipzig Musikviertel.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1990-0226-315, Leipzig, Frühjahrsmesse, Strauß, Honecker.jpg|thumb|Franz Josef Strauss and Erich Honecker at the Leipzig Trade Fair of spring 1987 in the guest house in Schwägrichenstrasse
In 1955, the vaulting of the Pleißemühlgraben, which had begun in 1951, was completed. In 1968, the ruins of the second Gewandhaus, which could be rebuilt, were demolished, as were some partly well-preserved residential buildings in Ferdinand-Rhode-Strasse. By 1969, a guest house of the Council of Ministers of East Germany had been built in Schwägrichenstrasse, which was used especially during Leipzig Trade Fairs and where the billion-euro loan for East Germany was negotiated between Franz Josef Strauss and Erich Honecker in 1983.
From 1969 onwards, five 11-storey apartment blocks were built in prefabricated construction in the middle of the Musikviertel, which contradicted its former character. In each of these cases, 4 to 5 of the original plots from the time of origin were built over with monotonous large-panel-system buildings by the architect Wolfgang Scheibe. In order to make room for this, some of the old buildings that were still relatively well preserved and partly inhabited were demolished. In Pestalozzistrasse, a Polytechnic Secondary School named Polytechnische Oberschule Clara Zetkin was built in 1972 and an Extended Secondary School in 1973, which were also attended by the St. Thomas students.
In 1978, three 16-storey high-rise buildings of the PH 16 type, popularly known as "the three equals", were erected in the north-west corner of the Musikviertel on Karl-Tauchnitz-Strasse and Wächterstrasse. Regardless of the typical location, a total of six large plots of war-damaged villas were built over. Originally, the urban planning in the 1960s under the direction of Leipzig's chief architect Horst Siegel for the entire neighbourhood was even more profound. Four 28-storey high-rise buildings and a "socialist" Musikviertel with large-panel and high-rise buildings were to be built on this site. A drawing of this development concept by Hans-Dietrich Wellner from 1969 has been preserved.