
The St. Thomas Church () is a
Lutheran
Lutheranism is a major branch of Protestantism that emerged under the work of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German friar and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practices of the Catholic Church launched ...
church in
Leipzig
Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...
, Germany, located at the western part of the
inner city ring road in Leipzig's
central district.
Martin Luther
Martin Luther ( ; ; 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, Theology, theologian, author, hymnwriter, professor, and former Order of Saint Augustine, Augustinian friar. Luther was the seminal figure of the Reformation, Pr ...
preached in the church in 1539. It is associated with several well-known composers, especially
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (German: Help:IPA/Standard German, �joːhan zeˈbasti̯an baχ ( – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque music, Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety ...
, who was its
Thomaskantor
(Cantor at St. Thomas) is the common name for the musical director of the , now an internationally known boys' choir founded in Leipzig in 1212. The official historic title of the Thomaskantor in Latin, ', describes the two functions of Cantor ( ...
(music director) from 1723 until his death in 1750. The church holds his remains.
Although rebuilt over the centuries and damaged by Allied incendiary bombs in 1943, the church mainly retains the character of a late-Gothic
hall church
A hall church is a Church (building), church with a nave and aisles of approximately equal height. In England, Flanders and the Netherlands, it is covered by parallel roofs, typically, one for each vessel, whereas in Germany there is often one s ...
. The
Thomanerchor, the church choir, likely founded in 1212, is an internationally known
boys' choir.
History
The current property was the site of a church at least since the 12th century. Foundations of a
Romanesque building were discovered in the
choir
A choir ( ), also known as a chorale or chorus (from Latin ''chorus'', meaning 'a dance in a circle') is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform or in other words ...
and
crossing of the current church.
Between 1212 and 1222, the earlier structure became the church of the new St. Thomas college of
Augustinian canons founded by Markgraf Dietrich von Meissen. This college later became the core of the
University of Leipzig
Leipzig University (), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December 1409 by Frederick I, Electo ...
(founded in 1409).
In 1217, the
minnesinger
(; "love song") was a tradition of German lyric- and song-writing that flourished in the Middle High German period (12th to 14th centuries). The name derives from '' minne'', the Middle High German word for love, as that was ''Minnesangs m ...
Heinrich von Morungen bequeathed to the church a relic of
St. Thomas as he entered the order of canons after an apocryphal trip to India.
In 1355, the Romanesque choir was changed to
Gothic style. Following an inflow of wealth into Leipzig from the discovery of silver in the
Ore Mountains
The Ore Mountains (, or ; ) lie along the Czech–German border, separating the historical regions of Bohemia in the Czech Republic and Saxony in Germany. The highest peaks are the Klínovec in the Czech Republic (German: ''Keilberg'') at ab ...
(Erzgebirge), the Romanesque nave was demolished and replaced between 1482 and 1496 by the current late-Gothic
hall church
A hall church is a Church (building), church with a nave and aisles of approximately equal height. In England, Flanders and the Netherlands, it is covered by parallel roofs, typically, one for each vessel, whereas in Germany there is often one s ...
.
The current building was consecrated by Thilo of Trotha, the
Bishop of Merseburg, on 10 April 1496. During the
Reformation
The Reformation, also known as the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation, was a time of major Theology, theological movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the p ...
it was converted to
Lutheranism
Lutheranism is a major branch of Protestantism that emerged under the work of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German friar and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practices of the Catholic Church launched ...
. The reformer
Martin Luther
Martin Luther ( ; ; 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, Theology, theologian, author, hymnwriter, professor, and former Order of Saint Augustine, Augustinian friar. Luther was the seminal figure of the Reformation, Pr ...
preached here on
Pentecost Sunday in 1539. The collegiate buildings were demolished in 1541 following the college's dissolution.
The current church tower was first built in 1537 and rebuilt in 1702. Chapels added in the 17th century and an ante-building along the northern front of the nave with two stairways were removed at the end of the 19th century.

The composer
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (German: Help:IPA/Standard German, �joːhan zeˈbasti̯an baχ ( – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque music, Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety ...
was
Thomaskantor
(Cantor at St. Thomas) is the common name for the musical director of the , now an internationally known boys' choir founded in Leipzig in 1212. The official historic title of the Thomaskantor in Latin, ', describes the two functions of Cantor ( ...
, director of music, from 1723 until his death in 1750 and taught at its
affiliated school
An affiliated school (also affiliated college, federated school, federated college or federated university) is an educational institution that operates independently, but also has a formal collaborative agreement with another, usually larger instit ...
. A statue of Bach by the Leipzig sculptor
Carl Seffner that stands next to the church was dedicated in 1908.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition and proficiency from an early age ...
played the church organ on one of his European tours in 1789.
In 1806, the church served as a munitions depot for the French army. During the
Battle of Leipzig
The Battle of Leipzig, also known as the Battle of the Nations, was fought from 16 to 19 October 1813 at Leipzig, Saxony. The Coalition armies of Austria, Prussia, Sweden, and Russia, led by Tsar Alexander I, Karl von Schwarzenberg, and G ...
in 1813, it was used as a military hospital.
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, essayist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most o ...
was baptized here on 16 August 1813. In 1828, he studied piano and counterpoint with the then ''Thomaskantor'', Christian Th. Weinlig.
Most of the Baroque internal trappings of the church known to Bach were removed in a
Gothic revival
Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic or neo-Gothic) is an Architectural style, architectural movement that after a gradual build-up beginning in the second half of the 17th century became a widespread movement in the first half ...
renovation between 1884 and 1889. The pulpit and the main portal in the west facade also date from this period.
During the
Nazi
Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...
era, the church office worked with government officials to identify which congregants were of Sinti-Romani heritage, ultimately leading to the death of certain parishioners at concentration camps.
On 4 December 1943, the tower was damaged in an
Allied bombing raid on Leipzig, requiring repair. In 1949 the authorities demolished the
St. John Church, also damaged by bombs in 1943, and in 1950 the remains of Johann Sebastian Bach were moved from there to the St. Thomas church.
In the 20th century,
sulfur
Sulfur ( American spelling and the preferred IUPAC name) or sulphur ( Commonwealth spelling) is a chemical element; it has symbol S and atomic number 16. It is abundant, multivalent and nonmetallic. Under normal conditions, sulfur atoms ...
emitted from nearby
coal mines
Coal mining is the process of resource extraction, extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its Energy value of coal, energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to Electricity generation, generate electr ...
, and other
pollutants in the atmosphere caused the deterioration of exterior stonework and statuary, and even of interior
Gothic paintings. In addition, the roof structure suffered from damage due to insects and moisture. For these reasons, the church was listed in the
2000 World Monuments Watch by the
World Monuments Fund. Repairs were swiftly undertaken with financial support from the Fund and from
American Express
American Express Company or Amex is an American bank holding company and multinational financial services corporation that specializes in payment card industry, payment cards. It is headquartered at 200 Vesey Street, also known as American Expr ...
.
Repairs on the church from 1961 to 1964 also attempted to emphasize the Gothic hall church character of the building. Another renovation followed in 1991.
From 1993 to 2014, a 15th-century Gothic altar (originally in the
St. Paul Church, the church of the University of Leipzig, destroyed in 1968 by the Communist authorities) was located in the St. Thomas Church. It was moved to the new St. Paul Church in 2014 and replaced in 2016 with a Gothic-revival altar by Constantin Lipsius made in 1888, which had been removed in 1964.

A statue of
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who lived in Leipzig from 1835 until his death in 1847, was dedicated on 18 October 2008, when it was re-erected opposite the St. Thomas Church on the occasion of the year of his 200th birthday. The statue depicts the former
Gewandhaus Orchestra director and composer in bronze. Celebratory speeches were given by
Kurt Masur, also a former Gewandhaus Orchestra director, and Burkhard Jung, mayor of Leipzig. The original statue designed by Werner Stein was first dedicated on 26 May 1892. It had been located on the east side of the Gewandhaus until 9 November 1936, when it was taken down by the Nazis because of the composer's Jewish background.
Description
The church measures in length, of which the nave accounts for . The nave is wide and its walls reach a maximum height of . The church's roof is unusually steep, with a
roof pitch
Roof pitch is the steepness of a roof expressed as a ratio of inch(es) rise per horizontal foot (or their metric equivalent), or as the angle in degrees its surface deviates from the horizontal. A flat roof has a pitch of zero in either inst ...
of 63 degrees. It rises to a crown that is high. The tower is in height.
Works of art
The church features a number of works of art, including a baptismal font (1614–15) made by Franz Döteber and Portraits show the ''Stadtsuperintendent'' of Leipzig, the oldest dating from 1614. A crucifix made by Caspar Freidrich Löbel is one of the few remaining pieces from the times of Bach. The church also contains a number of notable epitaphs, such as the one for the knight Harras (d. 1451) and for councilor Daniel Leicher (1612). The colored windows in the choir were added after 1889. They show a number of historic motifs: a memorial to the fallen of World War I, King
, Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Luther with Elector ''
Friedrich der Weise'' and
Philip Melanchthon as well as Emperor
Wilhelm I
Wilhelm I (Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig; 22 March 1797 – 9 March 1888) was King of Prussia from 1861 and German Emperor from 1871 until his death in 1888. A member of the House of Hohenzollern, he was the first head of state of a united Germany. ...
.
Tomb of Johann Sebastian Bach
The remains of Johann Sebastian Bach have been buried in the Thomaskirche since 1950. After his death on 28 July 1750, Bach was laid to rest in the hospital cemetery of the Johanniskirche in Leipzig. With the start of the Bach renaissance in the 19th century, the public started to become interested in his remains and their whereabouts. In 1894, the anatomy professor
Wilhelm His was commissioned to identify the composer's remains amongst disinterred bones from the cemetery where Bach had been buried. He concluded that "the assumption that the bones of an elderly man, which had been found in an oak coffin near the Johanneskirche, were the remains of Johann Sebastian Bach" (translated from German) was very likely. On 16 July 1900, the bones were placed into a stone sarcophagus underneath the Johanniskirche.
During the bombardment of Leipzig on 4 December 1943 the Johanniskirche burned down. The bones from Bach and
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert were found without damages in 1949 in the crypt of the ruin. The bone from Bach was transferred to the Thomaskirche. The new grave with a bronze cover (sponsored by the Leipzig cultural officer of the Soviet Army) was inaugurated on 28 July 1950, two hundred years after the death of the composer, who is now buried in the sanctuary of the Thomaskirche.
Organs
Sauer-organ (since 1889)
Another notable feature of the Thomaskirche is that it contains two
pipe organ
The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurised air (called ''wind'') through the organ pipes selected from a Musical keyboard, keyboard. Because each pipe produces a single tone and pitch, the pipes are provide ...
s. The older one is a
Romantic organ by
Wilhelm Sauer, built from 1884 to 1889 with three manuals, 63 stops and mechanical key and pneumatic stop action. Thomasorganist Carl Piutti ordered in 1902 two new stops and a higher wind pressure from Sauer. To 1908 Sauer rebuilt and enlarged the organ after instructions from
Karl Straube, it contains now pneumatic key action and 88 stops.
Between 1934 and 1940, in the working time from
Günther Ramin, 16 romantic stops were changed against neo-baroque stops. The German organ builder Christian Scheffler reconstructed and repaired the Sauer-organ in two phases: 1988 to 1993 and in the years to 2005. He restored the organ in the situation in 1908.
[Booklet to CD: Die Sauer-Orgel der Thomaskirche zu Leipzig 1889 , 1908 / Thomasorganist Ullrich Böhme, Label: Rondeau ROP 6017, 2008]
Alexander-Schuke-organ (1967 to 1999)
Since the Sauer-Organ was considered unsuitable for Bach's music, a second organ with three manuals, 47 stops, a neo-baroque stoplist and mechanical key and stop action was built in 1966–67 (by the
Alexander Schuke Potsdam Orgelbau company). It was dismantled in May 1999 for the new Woehl-Organ. 42 stops and other parts from the Schuke-organ in St. Thomas was reused in the 68 stop-Schuke-organ, built in 2000 to 2005 in
Fürstenwalde Cathedral.
Woehl-organ (since 2000)
The Schuke-organ was later replaced by a new organ, built by
Gerald Woehl's organ-building company from 1999 to 2000. This "Bach organ" was designed to look similar to the Johann-Scheibe-organ, on which Bach had played in the Paulinerkirche, the stoplist is inspired by the Stertzing-organ, designed by
Johann Christoph Bach in
St. Georg's Church in
Eisenach
Eisenach () is a Town#Germany, town in Thuringia, Germany with 42,000 inhabitants, west of Erfurt, southeast of Kassel and northeast of Frankfurt. It is the main urban centre of western Thuringia, and bordering northeastern Hesse, Hessian re ...
during J. S. Bach's childhood.
Church bells
The two bell chambers of the tower hold eight bells with a total weight of . The largest and most precious bell is the Gloriosa, made in 1477 by Theodericus Reinhard; it is rung only on solemnities. Their weight is , the tone an a
0. Its famous incised drawings were created by Nikolaus Eisenberg. The second bell, Mittelglocke (midbell), was cast in 1574 by Wolf Hilliger, and the so-called Mönchs- oder Beichtglocke (monk's or confessional bell) founded in 1634 by Jakob König, which also strikes the hours. The smallest of the historical bells is the Gebetsglocke (prayer's bell), a work by the master Christophorus Gros from 1585. A clock bell in the lantern of the tower strikes the quarters. In 2020/21 the aforementioned bells were refurbished. Also four new bells were created in the Bachert bell foundry with inscriptions that reflect words from the motets by Johann Sebastian Bach. On Reformation Day 2021, all eight bells rang out together for the first time.
Choir
The
Thomanerchor, the choir of the Thomaskirche, was founded in 1212 and is one of the oldest and most famous
boys' choirs in Germany. It is headed by the
Thomaskantor
(Cantor at St. Thomas) is the common name for the musical director of the , now an internationally known boys' choir founded in Leipzig in 1212. The official historic title of the Thomaskantor in Latin, ', describes the two functions of Cantor ( ...
, an office that has been held by many well-known composers and musicians, including Johann Sebastian Bach from 1723 until his death in 1750.
Gallery
File:Leipzig-ChurchStThomas-Sauer-Organ.jpg, The Sauer organ
File:Leipzig-ChurchStThomas-Woehl-Organ.jpg, The Woehl organ
File:Leipzig Paulinerkirche Scheibe-Orgel um 1720.jpg, The Scheibe-organ from 1717 in Pauliner-/University-Church, certificated by Bach, was the inspiration for Woehl's organ case.
File:Vxla-thomaskirsche-exerior.jpg, Exterior of Thomaskirche from north-east
File:Thomaskirche Leipzig - 2014 12 30.webm, (video) Exterior of Church with people, 2014
File:StThomas Leipzig hb.JPG, Altar and Bach's tomb
File:Exterior of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, with Bach statue.jpg, Exterior with Bach monument
File:Bach Window Thomaskirche.jpg, Stained-glass Bach church window (detail)
File:Vxla-thomaskirsche.jpg, Interior of Thomaskirche, view to west
See also
*
Architecture of Leipzig - Romanesque and Gothic
*
St. Thomas Church Square
References
External links
Official parish page
*
Entry in the "Leipzig encyclopedia"*
''Thomaskirche'', in: Stadt Leipzig, Dezernat Stadtentwicklung und Bau (Hrsg.), ''Leipzig-Innenstadt. Städtebaulicher Denkmalschutz 1994–2017'', Beiträge zur Stadtentwicklung (Blaue Reihe), issue 61, o.J., p. 26 f.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Saint Thomas Church, Leipzig
Thomas
Buildings and structures completed in 1496
Leipzig
Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...
Leipzig Thomas Church
Leipzig Thomas Church
Leipzig Thomas Church
Leipzig Thomas Church
Johann Sebastian Bach
Leipzig Thomas
Leipzig Thomas Church
St. Thomas School, Leipzig
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra