13 - Decision Point

Summary

The cantorate of the Thomasschule enjoys a distinguished history, reaching back to the first recorded holder of the post around 1295. Not a few figures important to the history of music and the church had acceded to its office: Rhau and Herrmann, Calvisius and Schein, Schelle and Kuhnau. It hardly need be said that Johann Sebastian Bach's twenty-seven-year tenure would redefine the cantorate fundamentally for later generations, when the post continued now and again to host distinguished composing musicians. Last in that line had been Straube's colleague Schreck, if not a model of great musical inspiration, certainly one of undisputed universal competence.

Straube had used the last fifteen years to embed himself indelibly in the fabric of Leipzig's musical life. He had built an international reputation on the back of the associations afforded him in this booming, tradition-laden city of music. He was possessed of an audacious musicality, politically shrewd and cool-headed when it counted most, and willing to apply an iron work ethic to any project that struck him as worthy. What he absolutely was not, however, was a composer. Implicit in the office of Thomaskantor was the assumption that the holder would enrich school and parish with original music. But for reasons that transcended the immediate strengths and weaknesses Straube brought to the table, that precedent was about to change.

The position of the Thomasschule and Thomaskirche in the life of the city had sustained a number of seismic shifts over the previous century. The institution was subject like everything else to the currents of the time and thus forced to reimagine its role. Once Mendelssohn's Conservatory opened in 1843, the Thomaskantor had assumed teaching duties there, a development that abetted a new disbursement of his commitments within the network of the Leipzig cultural institutions. And it was not as if the Thomanerchor was the only choral act in town. The Bach-Verein eventually led by Straube was but one of these, vying for public support on a crowded stage shared with the Arion Chorus (1849), the Riedel-Verein (1854), and others. By 1877 the Thomasschule itself no longer made its home in the city center, having decamped west into the Hillerstraße.