In 1212 – Leipzig had only held city and market rights for a short time – a monastery of regulated Augustinian canons was founded by decree of Margrave Dietrich of Meissen. A school was built at the same time as the church dedicated to St. Thomas the Apostle. As a “schola exterior”, it was open to Leipzig’s middle-class children from the very beginning and is therefore regarded as Germany’s oldest public school. In return for free board and lodging, the boys and young men had to perform liturgical singing and religious duties. Music, especially “musica sacra”, was very important in the medieval educational canon. It was seen as a reflection of the divine order. In addition to their worship duties in Leipzig’s city churches, the choristers also had the privilege and obligation from the very beginning to sing at numerous ceremonies such as baptisms, weddings, funerals and council and university celebrations. And they could rely on a good education at the Thomasschule, which could lead to university entrance.

On March 20, 1212, Otto IV sealed the deed of foundation of the Augustinian Canons’ Monastery of St. Thomas.

The most significant evidence of the choirboys’ musical output before the Reformation is probably the Sankt-Thomas-Graduale (around 1300). This is a codex of medieval choral manuscripts containing a compilation of 88 sequences and all the chants for the high masses. The manuscript, which probably originated in St. Thomas’ Monastery, was demonstrably in use for at least two hundred years. A compendium of musical doctrine was added in 1533 with a new binding. It provides information about the demands placed on choir students.

From the middle of the 14th century, foundation deeds for masses and altars, which explicitly demand the participation of choir students, attest to the fact that the Thomanerchor not only sang in St. Thomas’, but also performed services in St. Nicholas’ Church. In addition to singing Gregorian chant in everyday life, as well as for festive processions and church services, figural music also became increasingly important. From 1479, the city council maintained an ensemble of town pipers who played music together with the Thomanerchor at festive church services.

Under the direction of the Thomaskantor Georg Rhau, who was in office from 1519 to 1520, the Thomaners opened the Leipzig Disputation, the academic debate between the Ingolstadt theology professor Johannes Eck as the challenger and the Wittenberg theology professors Andreas Bodenstein (known as Karlstadt) and Martin Luther as the defenders, with a service in St. Thomas Church on June 27, 1519. The twelve-part “Missa de sancto spiritu” was performed, which was probably written by Rhaus. The disputation was held in Pleißenburg Castle after the choir there sang the motet “Veni, sancte spiritus”. At the closing ceremony of the discussions on July 15, Rhau had the boys (with the participation of the Leipzig town pipers) perform a “Te Deum laudamus”. None of the works have survived.

After Duke George’s death, his brother Henry took over the reins of government and initiated the introduction of the Reformation in the duchy in 1539. On this occasion, Martin Luther preached from the pulpit of St. Thomas Church on Whit Sunday. With the spread of the new doctrine, the secularization of the monasteries began. All the properties of St. Thomas’ Abbey were transferred to the city. The canons who had not yet fled the city were compensated by the council with a pension and left the monastery in 1543. The demolition of the monastery buildings began in this year. With secularization, the school and the boarding school also passed into the administration of the city council. This makes the Thomanerchor the oldest cultural institution in the city of Leipzig.

After the Reformation, the field of activity for the choir students did not change. As before, they sang at regular church services as well as at religious services (weddings, baptisms and funerals). The repertoire grew through the Thomaskantors’ own compositions as well as through copies and purchases of printed music and is relatively well documented. Ulrich Lange (Thomaskantor from 1540 to 1549), for example, bought anthologies of works by Josquin Desprez, Jacob Obrecht, Heinrich Isaac and Adrian Willaert, among others. His successors supplemented the holdings with works by Orlando di Lasso. A composite manuscript written between 1553 and 1560 is noteworthy. It contains numerous masses, motets and hymns by various composers, most of whom are not named. Musicologists have identified some of the works as the creations of musicians such as Ludwig Senfl, Josquin Desprez, Johann Walter, Heinrich Isaac, Thomas Stoltzer and others.

Parts of a collapsing tower of the city fortifications damaged St. Thomas’ School in 1546. The city council and church leaders had the old building demolished in 1553 and a new one erected. This was done with the great help of the citizens of Leipzig, who contributed donations or labor. In addition to the classrooms, this new building also provided space for the alumni’s rooms and the rector’s and cantor’s apartments.

In 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the German composer Heinrich Schütz compiled a collection of 29 motets, his “Geistliche Chor-Music”, which contains both earlier and new compositions. It was printed in Dresden in 1648 as his Opus 11 and contains movements for five to seven voices, which are assigned the numbers 369 to 397 in the Schütz-Werke-Verzeichnis.

Schütz dedicated the collection to Leipzig, whereby in the dedication letter, dated “Dreßden, am 21. April 1648”, he addressed the mayor and council and highlighted the choir, which is known today as the Thomanerchor. It is the first work that he did not dedicate to the court or nobility.

Title page of the collection of motets “Geistliche Chor-Music”

Johann Kuhnau’s death on June 5, 1722 left the position of Thomaskantor vacant. After an initial audition on July 14, Georg Philipp Telemann was chosen as Kuhnau’s successor. As Telemann remained in Hamburg due to a salary increase, a second cantorship audition was held, at which Johann Sebastian Bach was joined by Georg Friedrich Kauffmann from Merseburg, who voluntarily resigned, Christoph Graupner (Kapellmeister in Darmstadt) and Georg Balthasar Schott (organist at the Neue Kirche in Leipzig). On February 7, 1723, Bach performed the cantatas “Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe”, BWV 22, and “Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn”, BWV 23, as rehearsal pieces. Graupner was chosen, but had to decline because the Hessian Landgrave refused to dismiss him. As a result, Bach was appointed St. Thomaskantor “as the third choice” by the Leipzig Council on April 22, 1723.

In 1723, Bach moved to Leipzig with his wife and four of his children. With his inauguration on May 30, 1723 in St. Nicholas Church, Bach began his service in Leipzig as Thomaskantor; he was to hold this position until his death in 1750. As cantor and music director, he was responsible for the music in four churches in the city, the two main churches of St. Thomas and St. Nikolai as well as St. Peter’s Church and the New Church. This included preparing a cantata performance on all Sundays and public holidays, alternating between the two main churches. He was also responsible for teaching music at St. Thomas’ School. The boarding school pupils were obliged to participate in the church services as choir singers. He transferred his position as Latin teacher, which was traditionally associated with his post, to Siegmund Friedrich Dresig, the school’s dean, in return for a monetary payment.

Immediately after his arrival, Bach began to compose or revise the necessary cantatas. In this systematic work, Bach must have produced an average of around one work per week in the first two years, after which he slowed down the pace. A total of two complete volumes have survived, and the necrology reports three more. There were also commissions for cantatas for weddings, baptisms and funerals.

Bach wrote the second version of the Magnificat in E flat major with the Christmas interludes for Christmas 1723, his most comprehensive work to date, the St. John Passion, for Good Friday 1724 and a Sanctus for Christmas 1724. It was probably in early 1725 that Bach met the librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici, alias Picander, who ultimately provided the text for the St. Matthew Passion, which was premiered in 1727 or 1729. Performance conditions had generally deteriorated during these first years in Leipzig. Bach therefore felt compelled to document his ideas for the vocal and instrumental equipment of a “well-equipped church music” in a petition to the Leipzig City Council on August 23, 1730. Today, this “highly necessary draft” is an important source for the historical performance practice of his works. At this time, Bach tried to obtain the title of court composer in Dresden, as he was dissatisfied with his pay, the high cost of living and the Leipzig authorities, from whom he wanted more support.

Bach reworked several of his homage cantatas into sacred works shortly after they were composed. The Christmas Oratorio of 1734/1735, the Ascension Oratorio of 1735 and the Easter Oratorio can be attributed to this parody process. The so-called Lutheran Masses were created by parodying sacred cantatas, as was the original two-movement version of the Mass in B minor in 1733. After submitting this work to the electoral court in Dresden, Bach received the longed-for news on November 19, 1736 that he was allowed to call himself a “royal Polish and electoral Saxon composer at the court chapel”. Bach expressed his gratitude for the appointment with a two-hour concert on the Silbermann organ in the Frauenkirche in Dresden, which was completed in 1736.

Many outstanding musicians have influenced the development of the choir as Thomaskantor in the past and provided decisive impulses for Protestant church music. However, Johann Sebastian Bach’s 27-year tenure as Thomaskantor undoubtedly made the most lasting impression on the Thomanerchor Leipzig in its history.

During Bach’s lifetime, the choir consisted of around 55 students, divided into four choirs together with the city pipers and a few violinists. In Bach’s time, the age structure of the Thomaner was more akin to a youth choir. When they applied for an alumni position, the boys were usually 13 to 14 years old. In addition to the vocal parts, the pupils also took part as string players. According to Bach’s written submission to the council, “the 2nd violin was mostly played by pupils, but the viola, violoncello and violon were always played by pupils”. According to recent research by Joshua Rifkin and Andrew Parrott, the choral parts in concertante works were usually played by one or two players.

Bach’s own works were primarily performed by the first choir. The repertoire of the other choirs, which were under the direction of prefects, consisted of lighter cantatas and motets by other composers. The fourth choir group limited itself to simple song movements. On weekdays, the pupils were divided into 6 weekly choirs of 8 singers each, which sang motets in solo vocal ensembles alternately in St. Thomas’ and St. Nicholas’ Church during the morning services. These choirs were conducted by choir prefects from the harpsichord. A double bass was brought in to support the bass. The program usually included choral works from the Florilegium Portense by Erhard Bodenschatz. This consisted mainly of eight-part Latin motets and was published in nine part books (with basso continuo part).

Two and a half years before his death, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came to Leipzig at the end of April 1789. During his stay, he also paid a visit to St. Thomas Church, where he spontaneously played the organ. Johann Friedrich Doles, cantor of St. Thomas’ Church at the time and Mozart’s registrant that evening, even compared the artist to his teacher Johann Sebastian Bach and invited him to the St. Thomas’ School, where the Thomaners sang Bach’s motet “Singet dem Herrn” BWV 225 for Mozart. The music writer Friedrich Rochlitz reported on this event: “Mozart knew this Albrecht Dürer of German music more from hearsay than from his rare works”. Mozart then had copies of the motets made, noting in his handwriting that “a whole orchestra would have to be set to it.” The guest also praised the Thomaners in the highest terms: “You don’t have a choir like this in Vienna, Berlin or Prague.”

Towards the end of the 19th century, the St. Thomas School next to St. Thomas Church was demolished and the Thomanerchor and St. Thomas School moved to Hillerstrasse in what is now Leipzig’s Bach Quarter in 1881.

For the 60 singers at the time, the new boarding school in Hillerstraße still offered far better living and working conditions than the old boarding school at Thomaskirchhof, despite several cuts to the plans. The living and sleeping quarters were much more spacious. A hall was available visavis in the school building for practice sessions. In 1881, the kitchen facilities met the most modern requirements. Even a playground had been thought of. Motets by Johann Sebastian Bach and Moritz Hauptmann were played to celebrate the opening of the new domicile.

The move was accompanied by a reorganization of the educational services. New positions were created for three inspectors – unmarried teachers who lived in the boarding school for a week at a time. For more than 100 years, such a trio was responsible for the pedagogical supervision of the Thomaners.

Since the secularization of the Thomanerchor in 1543, the now municipal choirboys wore tricorn hats, wigs and coats. However, after the then five-year-old Prince of Wales was portrayed in a naval uniform in 1846, this led to the first Europe-wide fashion trend for children’s clothing. By 1930, the sailor’s jacket had become a kind of standard school uniform throughout Europe – including for the Thomaner in the form of the “Kiel blouse”. Kaiser Wilhelm II also dressed his children in naval uniforms.

From the 1920s onwards, the Thomanerchor undertook successful tours abroad, which were mainly initiated by the then Thomaskantor Karl Straube. The first foreign tour took the Thomanerchor to Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

In September 1924, the Astronomical Society held its annual conference in Leipzig – the program included a performance by the Thomanerchor. The members of the Astronomical Society were so impressed by the Thomaners’ musical performance that they decided to christen a recently discovered asteroid “Thomana”. The scientists chose the asteroid with the identifier 1023, as it was worthy of the “songs, which were glowing with spiritual fire and performed with unprecedented astronomical precision”.

The rock, which orbits in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in honor of the Thomanerchor, is around 58 kilometers in size. It takes more than five and a half years to orbit the sun. The last time “Thomana” caused an astronomical sensation was in 2009, when it was responsible for a brief eclipse in Aquarius.

The “Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft” records a record with the Thomanerchor as the first boys’ choir in German recording history with short pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach in the Thomaskirche. Two further records with pieces by Johann Hermann Schein and Johannes Brahms under the direction of Thomaskantor Karl Straube are made in a Berlin recording studio in 1930.

Thomaskantor Karl Straube began a series of radio recordings of all Bach cantatas in 1931. The project was planned to last four years. However, technical and organizational difficulties meant that it took another two years before the ambitious undertaking was actually completed. The cantatas were broadcast weekly on Sunday mornings and made the Thomanerchor famous throughout Europe.

In 1937, the Thomanerchor was incorporated into the Hitler Youth. However, Karl Straube and his successor Günther Ramin succeeded in keeping National Socialist ideas as far away from the choir as possible, especially from the choir’s repertoire, with Ramin in particular focusing on the choir’s sacred program early on after taking office in 1939. The attempt made in 1941 to merge the Thomanerchor into the Musisches Gymnasium Leipzig failed for various reasons. The attempts to stop the Thomaners from performing in church services and motets were also largely averted. However, the weekly services in the Nikolaikirche fell victim to a compromise between Ramin and the city authorities and the choir only sang in church services in the Thomaskirche. Towards the end of the war, Ramin tried to delay the forced conscription of the Thomaners into the Wehrmacht for as long as possible, arguing that otherwise they would not be able to sing. Another of the achievements of these two cantors was the major reworking of the Bach repertoire, which was begun by Straube and continued by Ramin. Several research projects are currently looking into the complex history of the Thomanerchor during the National Socialist era. The choir is supporting this important reappraisal of its own history with its own archive materials and is accompanying the projects.

The Thomanerchor with Thomaskantor Karl Straube in front of the Bach memorial, 1939

During the Allied bombing raids on Leipzig on December 4, 1943, the boarding school of the Thomanerchor in Hillerstrasse was also severely damaged; a bomb hit made it impossible to live there. The very next day – on Sunday, December 5, 1943 – Cantor Günther Ramin and the St. Thomas Choir found shelter in Grimma: The alumni of the Fürstenschule in Grimma became their temporary quarters – ultimately for 18 months. From Grimma, the Thomaners regularly traveled to Leipzig for their motets and numerous performances throughout Germany.

The work of the Thomanerchor during the GDR era has yet to be investigated, partly because many of those involved in and around the choir are still part of Leipzig’s cultural life. As a municipal institution, the choir had a closeness to the state that should be viewed critically. Choral life was characterized by the surveillance and political influence that prevailed in all institutions. On an artistic level, a number of important recordings were made, most notably the recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas under Hans-Joachim Rotzsch in the 1970s. Touring activities abroad were manifested, e.g. the first South American tour in 1955 and the first Japanese tour in 1975, which were followed by regular invitations. Thomaskantor Rotzsch resigned in 1991 after it became known that he had been an informant for the State Security.

The Trias Thomana has united the three culturally and historically outstanding institutions of St. Thomas Church, the THOMANERCHOR Leipzig and St. Thomas School for over 800 years. Despite many social upheavals and changes, this triumvirate is still held together and supported by its original tasks to this day, true to the motto “Faith – Singing – Learning”.

With the relocation of St. Thomas School to Hillerstrasse in 2000, two institutions were reunited that had formed a unit for centuries in the old St. Thomas School (today’s St. Thomas House as part of the old school). This gave rise to the idea of creating a “forum thomanum” campus in the immediate vicinity in Leipzig’s Bachviertel between Hiller-, Schreber-, Käthe-Kollwitz- and Ferdinand-Lassalle-Straße. The “forum thomanum e.V.” was founded. The idea of the campus was inaugurated on the 800th anniversary of St. Thomas Church, St. Thomas School and St. Thomas Choir in 2012 and brings together various facilities and buildings from different sponsors. In addition to the boarding school of the St. Thomas Choir and the St. Thomas School, the campus now includes the forum thomanum Bbw day nursery, the forum thomanum elementary school with after-school care, which was opened in 2016, the villa thomana, the forum thomanum music school and the Luther Church.

You can find detailed information on the origins of forum thomanum e.V. at: https://www.forum-thomanum.de/forum-thomanum-e-v/chronik

At the beginning of 2003, the remake of the Erich Kästner classic “The Flying Classroom”, in which the Thomanerchor played an important role, was released in German cinemas. Director Tomy Wiegand had set the story at Leipzig’s St. Thomas School and so, in addition to child actors, several Thomaners also appeared in front of the camera.

In the film, the boy Jonathan Trotz becomes a Thomaner in fast-forward after a considerable collection of expulsions from school, and together with his friends he waged his legendary school war not against secondary school students, but against “externals” – in other words, those St. Thomas’ students who are not members of the boys’ choir. Which, as the 800-year history of St. Thomas’ School shows, is by no means unrealistic.

Although the “St. Thomas’ Classroom” was received ambivalently by critics, the film found plenty of viewers: in the first six weeks alone, more than 1.5 million people saw the film. They were just as enthusiastic as the visitors to the famous film festival in Cannes in the south of France, where the unconventional Kästner adaptation was also shown in 2003.

In 2012, the THOMANERCHOR Leipzig celebrated the 800th anniversary of the “Thomana” with a week of festivities together with St. Thomas Church and St. Thomas School. The big anniversary was celebrated in a variety of ways: a ceremony with a parade, a public festival, an exhibition in the City History Museum and various formats in the Bach Archive as well as a documentary film lasting almost two hours by directors Paul Smaczny and Günter Atteln, which was also shown in cinemas across Germany, are some of the highlights. Other boys’ choirs, such as the Dresdner Kreuzchor, the Regensburger Domspatzen and the Choir of King’s College Cambridge, were also among the well-wishers for the anniversary.

When the decision was made on March 16, 2020 to close all facilities due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Thomanerchor had just returned from a tour abroad in Sweden. The boarding school was closed in analogy to St. Thomas’ School. A few days after the closure, the first inspection took place with the City of Leipzig’s health department to discuss the possibility of a partial reopening for the school leavers, who were already able to return to school. In cooperation with experts from various medical clinics, the Thomanerchor quickly developed a test system that enabled the first performances with a small number of Thomanerchor members in the Thomaskirche via PCR testing as early as mid-May 2020. In the following months, the choir’s operations were regularly adapted to the current regulations. Modern conference technology was used to maintain a rehearsal culture and a sense of community for daily rehearsals. The cancellation of participation in the Easter services in 2020 was a deep cut and unique in the choir’s long history. The St. Thomas Choir was also unable to perform in presence during the 2020 Christmas season.

With a great deal of creativity and a willingness to adopt unusual models for everyday choral life – and with the support of various offices and authorities – the Thomanerchor found a way to survive beyond the coronavirus period and continue its long tradition.

In autumn 2021, Andreas Reize was appointed musical director of the THOMANERCHOR Leipzig by the Leipzig City Council as the 18th Thomaskantor after Johann Sebastian Bach. Andreas Reize performs a Bach cantata every week with the Thomanerchor and the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the motets and church services in St. Thomas Church. In doing so, he experiments with different line-ups and instrumentations based on historical models. Reize is also responsible for the Thomanerchor’s concerts and oratorio performances and performs with the choir at St. Thomas Church Leipzig as well as at music venues worldwide and at festivals in Germany and abroad. In November 2022, Andreas Reize conducted the Thomanerchor’s first tour abroad after the coronavirus pandemic with concerts in Helsinki and Tampere in Finland. In addition, there are regular television, radio and CD productions with the THOMANERCHOR Leipzig, such as the B minor Mass BWV 232 and the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 by Johann Sebastian Bach in 2022.