In his commentary appended to his and Fabian Dellemann’s new German translation of Maurice Guest, Stefan Welz describes Leipzig as an aspiring free city with rich traditions in the newly created German Empire, whose reputation as a musical mecca had spread as far as Australia.
Leipzig’s musical culture goes back at least to the foundation of The Collegium Musicum at the beginning of the 18th century by the composer Georg Phillip Telemann. Then from 1723 until his death in 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach was employed by the city council as cantor and director musices and from 1729 was director of the Collegium Musicum.
The program note by Paula Rösner for the Musico-Literary Evening: Eine Australierin in Leipzig, held in the Gewandhaus on October 19th 2025 explain the attraction of Leipzig to HHR and the 14 other Australian music students, including Alfred Hill, who had preceded her:
With the foundation of the Conservatorium of Music, Leipzig grew almost overnight into a place of international significance for musical education. Inspired by the prototype of the Paris Conservatoire, in 1843 Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy founded the first musical university in the territory of modern Germany and thereby attracted a young audience into the city. At the same time, he succeeded in bringing onto the educational staff famous teachers like the Thomas Church cantor Moritz Hauptmann, the organist Carl Ferdinand Becker, the pianist Ignaz Moscheles and the Concert Master of the Gewandhaus Orchestra Ferdinand David. Mendelssohn’s charisma and broad network of connections, formed through his many concert tours and relationships, especially in the English speaking world, enabled a close connection with England, the USA and also Scandinavia. Even from beyond those regions, young male and female students soon streamed to Leipzig from all corners of the world, in order to experience a musical education. The originally limited educational offering of piano, violin, organ, singing and musical theory expanded during the 19th century into a broad spectrum of faculties, embracing the whole range of orchestral instruments as well as dedicated schools for opera and organists.
Just as the world came to Leipzig, so Leipzig spread out into the world. Textbooks, some published and some in copied manuscripts were distributed globally, the composition techniques and styles influenced compositions and the success of the institution inspired the foundation of other music universities after the Leipzig model, like the Kongelige Danske Musik-Konservatorium in Copenhagen by Niels Wilhelm Gude or the Conservatory of Berklee in Boston.
In the 1880s shortly after approval was given by the Kingdom of Saxony for the title Royal Conservatorium of Music in Leipzig, construction commenced on the new building in the Grassistrasse, which has housed the rooms of the music university up to the present day. Following the design of Hugo Licht, the building was erected in immediate proximity to the second Gewandhaus, which had been built only a few years before as the core of a new suburb and thus began the development of Leipzig’s musical quarter.
From 1835 until his death in 1847 Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus. During that time he not only reformed the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Europe’s concert culture but also revived interest in Bach and his music and erected the statue of Bach, which the Richardsons would have seen on their arrival and which still stands today.
Initially Mrs, Richardson and her two daughters rented rooms in two Pensions (B’n’B’s), first briefly in number 4 Gottschedstrasse near the famous St. Thomas Church, where Bach had been organist for years, and then in apartment 3, 13 Mozartstrasse, in a recently established suburb, close to what was then the new Gewandhaus and the High Court. Although considerably transformed, number 4 Gottschedstrasse stills stands, but 13 Mozartstrasse has disappeared under a large office building. The appropriate site for a commemorative plaque, projected for 2028, is therefore still under consideration.
The Gewandhaus which was new in Richardson’s day was destroyed during the Second World War and has been replaced by the new “new Gewandhaus” on the other side of the city, in which the Concert Eine Australierin in Leipzig was held on 19 October. The Royal Conservatorium still stands and on the following day we were privileged to attend a Liederabend with songs written by HHR in the very auditorium in which she passed her final piano exam on 25 March 1892. In her final concert she performed Bach’s French Suites and his Italian Concerto, Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat major and his Sonata in E minor and Mendelssohn’s Three Caprices Opus 33 and his B-flat major Sonata Opus 45 for cello and piano.
But Leipzig’s importance for Richardson went beyond its status as a musical city. It was also a city of literature, a city of publishing, a city of trade fairs and manufacturing and a city of progressive politics.
Leipzig had hosted Germany’s two greatest literary figures, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller.
While living in Leipzig in 1785, Schiller wrote his Ode to Joy, which was put to music by Beethoven in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony and is now the anthem of the European Union.
Goethe studied law at the University of Leipzig from 1765 to 1768. Although Goethe is best known in the English speaking world today for his play Faust (the basis for Gounod’s opera), his first work was the novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther). It tells the story of a tragic love triangle, was quickly translated into many languages and became an overnight sensation, especially among young readers. There was even a suicide cult, with young males dressed like Werther, found dead beside a copy of the book. In 1880 the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen published the novel Niels Lyhne, which the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig described as the Werther of our generation. That was Richardson’s generation and she was familiar with both Werther and Niels Lyhne. There are obvious parallels between both those novels and Maurice Guest, which she began writing only months after the publication of her English translation of Niels Lyhne.
Following Leipzig’s decline after its support for the defeated Napoleon in the Battle of the Nations in 1813, it began to rise again with the beginning of industrialisation around 1830. In 1839, Germany’ first railway was built between Leipzig and Dresden, Saxony’s capital.
In 1825 the German Booksellers Exchange was founded in Leipzig.
In 1832 a new City Constitution was proclaimed in the Kingdom of Saxony and Leipzig was ruled by a city council and mayor elected by the citizens.
In the last third of the 19th century Leipzig was in the vanguard of the German Workers’ Movement, having hosted the birth of German Social Democracy with the foundation of the General German Workers Organisation (ADAV) 1863. This was the first democratic political party in Germany and the forerunner of the modern SPD (Social Democratic Party). It was also the birthplace of the German women’s movement, with the foundation of the General German Women’s Union by Louise Otto Peters. This proud social tradition was maintained right up to the Monday demonstrations for several months in 1989, culminating in the demonstration by 70,000 people on October 9, which precipitated the opening of the Berlin Wall later.
To quote again from Paula Rösner’s program note:
Maurice Guest is not only the story of a tragic love affair and of characters wrestling with their artistic ambitions, their cultural identities and the emotional demands of life in a foreign city, it is also a declaration of love to the blooming Leipzig of the late 19th century: to the quaint pub on the Brühl, to the dignified but gloomy Gewandhaus, to the ever present musical sounds which mingled and overlaid each other in the streets, to the rough, proud Saxons, to the romantic Auwald forest, the magnificent old residential buildings and the cobbled streets. Even the air, thickened by coal smoke and the dirty streets of Connewitz form part of a poetic backdrop.
Finally, there is another aspect of Leipzig which must have been important to Richardson and has only recently been re-discovered. This was the alternative music scene of the private salons. In the words of Paula Rösner:
Outside the demanding public Leipzig concert scene, a rich private musical tradition developed in Leipzig in the 19th century. In gardens, restaurants, clubs and house concerts was played music which characterised the cultural life of the city and contributed significantly to making Leipzig a city of international standing. The bourgeois salons in particular created new spaces for creative development and social mixing. The drivers of these social networks were mainly women:
In Leipzig salonières like Livia Frege, Henriette Voigt, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg and Anna Brodsky made their mark on the culture. Here personalities like Edvard Grieg, Ethel Smyth and Peter Tschaikowsky met each other. For the English composer Ethel Smyth in particular, it was the salons which gave her that artistic and spiritual freedom which she so urgently sought. … Although she had earlier viewed rather critically the prudish Leipzig bourgeoisie, she found in the strong, independent women whom she met in these circles, personalities who showed her that artistic self-assertion and female independence were possible. She was especially impressed by Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, a pianist, composer and close confidante of Clara Schumann, who became to her a an intellectual and emotional role model. Between the two of them developed a close and even erotic relationship, which Smyth describes in her memoirs.
The combined impact of these musical, literary and feminist influences help to explain why Richardson wrote in her memoir Myself When Young that her three years in Leipzig were the happiest she had yet known.
(Translations from the Program for Eine Australierin in Leipzig by Richard O’Sullivan).