Bach’s city, still making music

Leipzig has always lived from trade and ideas rather than from a court. Merchants built the covered arcades that still thread through the centre, publishers made it the heart of the German book trade, and Johann Sebastian Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life here as cantor of St Thomas. The Gewandhaus Orchestra, the opera and the boys’ choir he once directed give the city a concert calendar far larger than its size suggests.

It is also the city where East Germany began to end. In the autumn of 1989 the Monday prayers for peace in the Nikolaikirche spilled out onto the ring road, and on 9 October some 70,000 people walked it with candles. That history is told without fuss, in the church itself and in the former Stasi offices at the Runde Ecke, now a museum.

West of the centre, Plagwitz shows a different Leipzig: brick mills and factories along the Karl-Heine-Kanal, converted into studios, galleries and waterside cafés. South of the city, flooded open-cast mines have become a chain of swimming lakes, with Cospudener See within reach by bicycle. On the way back, try a Leipziger Lerche, a shortcrust tart filled with marzipan, and a glass of Gose, the local sour wheat beer brewed with salt and coriander.