KomponistenQuartier (KQ)

Many world-class composers have a connection to Hamburg. They were either born here or spent part of their careers here. There is hardly another city in Germany with such a rich musical tradition.
We would like to cordially invite musically interested visitors from Hamburg and all over the world to Peterstraße. Discover there Georg Philipp Telemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Adolf Hasse, Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler in an attractive, lively and educational venue! With the Komponisten-Quartier, the musical city of Hamburg will at last have a place where it can foster the memory of its musical history.

The town houses of wealthy Hamburg burghers, rebuilt in historical style in the Peterstraße, are the ideal location to recreate the musical history of Hamburg. The Brahms Museum has already attracted visitors from all over the world to the Peterstraße since 1971. The opening of the Telemann Museum followed in 2011.

In march 2015, new museums dedicated to the “Hamburg Bach” and his contemporary Johann Adolf Hasse opened for the public. For the first time, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach will thus, in the year of the tricentenary of his birth, receive recognition befitting his rank, close to the places where he lived and worked and not far from his last resting place in the crypt of St. Michael’s Church. Museums for Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn and for Gustav Mahler had opened the door in June 2018.
The musical tradition of the Hanseatic city from the Baroque to modern times will be presented in a way which makes it come vividly to life!

Hamburg was once described by the composer Georg Philipp Telemann as a place “where music seems, as it were, to have its homeland”. The many-facetted Baroque composer was municipal Director of Music here for 46 years.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the “Hamburg Bach” and Telemann’s godson, succeeded him in 1768. He was celebrated by his contemporaries as an “original genius” and lived in the city up to his death in 1788.
The Bergedorf-born composer Johann Adolf Hasse also began his meteoric rise to international fame at the Hamburg Opera House on Gänsemarkt, going on to be the toast of such cities as Naples, Dresden and Venice.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the immensely musically gifted siblings Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn were born in Hamburg. Johannes Brahms, born in the Gängeviertel, made his debut as a pianist and composer here. Brahms achieved worldwide fame outside his home city, which awarded him honorary citizenship in 1889.
In 1891 Gustav Mahler came to Hamburg to take up a position as First Conductor at the Hamburg Stadt-Theater. He brought operatic and concert music here to new, unparalleled heights of excellence.