Hiller Memorial

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The memorial plaque for Johann Adam Hiller at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig

The Hiller Memorial in Leipzig is a memorial plaque on the northwest side of the St. Thomas Church for the Gewandhauskapellmeister , St. Thomas Cantor , composer and singing teacher Johann Adam Hiller . It is the relic of a former memorial (1832) west of the St. Thomas Church, which was the first memorial for a musician in Leipzig.

The plaque

The 1.57 meter high relief sandstone panel is vaulted by a three-pass-like copper roof. The upper part of the panel shows his portrait in a wreath of stars under Hiller's name in large Fraktur letters. The main scene is made up of four female figures looking upwards. The one on the right is playing the harp, her neighbor has sunk on her knees. The one on the left wears a religious costume. They surround a stump of a pillar covered by organ pipes, on which wreaths of ivy, olive branches and flowers are laid. This musical homage scene refers to four sisters who were taught singing by Hiller.

history

In 1776 a widow Podleska and four daughters from Beraun in Bohemia came to the fair in Leipzig. Johann Adam Hiller became aware of the girls through the singing of his twelve-year-old daughter Thekla and taught them in his singing school, which had been in operation in Leipzig since 1771. All four became singers, one of them later a nun. The most successful was Thekla, a temporary fiancée of Johann Christian Reinhart . In 1783 she went to the court theater of Mitau in Courland and was last a teacher in Prague .

  • The first draft of a monument

  • The Hiller memorial around 1840

  • The location of the monument

The sisters had not forgotten their Leipzig sponsor, who had died in 1804. The Leipzig painter Veit Hanns Schnorr von Carolsfeld received a letter with the request to erect a memorial for her teacher Hiller in Leipzig. The funds of 500 thalers followed. Schnorr von Carolsfeld made two design drawings. The first is preserved in the Leipzig City History Museum , after the second (in the Dresden Kupferstichkabinett ) the monument was made in 1831/1832. The executing sculptors were the Schnorr students Friedrich Funk and Johann Christoph Wingrich.

The monument was erected on a flat hill west of the St. Thomas Church and the old St. Thomas School. On a three-level substructure stood a cuboid with a protruding cover plate and a flat, hipped roof. To the west he showed the still preserved relief plate, to the south and north the dates of birth and death of Hiller. To the east was an inscription: "To your immortalized teacher and paternal benefactor, the four sisters Mariana, Franziska, Aloysia, Thekla Podlesky, June 19, 1832"

In connection with the redesign of the west facade of the St. Thomas Church, it was decided in 1888 to redesign the promenade area. The Hiller memorial disappeared. At the beginning of the 20th century, the relief plate of the monument was attached to the St. Thomas Church.

literature

  • Markus Cottin, Gina Klank, Karl-Heinz Kretzschmar, Dieter Kürschner, Ilona Petzold: Leipzig monuments . Sax-Verlag Beucha 1998, ISBN 3-930076-71-3 , Volume 1, pp. 33/34
  • Horst Riedel: Stadtlexikon Leipzig from A to Z . PRO LEIPZIG, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-936508-03-8 , p. 238

Web links

Commons : Hiller Memorial  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Batka, Thekla (nee Podleska). City of Leipzig, accessed on July 20, 2020 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 20 ′ 22 ″  N , 12 ° 22 ′ 20 ″  E