Laeiszhalle

This guide to the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg opens with the 1943 firestorm that leveled the streets around it, and the concert hall's facade that came through without a single scorch mark. It traces the hall's origins in a shipowner's dying wish, Carl Heinrich Laeisz's 1901 bequest, doubled by his widow Sophie Christine to nearly two million marks, through its 1908 opening as Germany's largest concert hall and the performers, from Strauss to a young Yehudi Menuhin, who played inside it. Listen for how British occupying forces once broadcast radio from these same walls.