IN autumn 1778, Johann Adam Hiller, music director (Kapellmeister) of Leipzig's leading subscription concert series since 1763, published a booklet to accompany the forthcoming Concerts Spirituels – the biannual set of sacred music programmes performed during the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent – that were to be presented by his Musikübende Gesellschaft (Music- Practising Society). The booklet is part of a very small group of documents that describe the city's public, commercial concert programming before the construction of the Gewandhaus concert hall and the founding of the Gewandhauskonzerte (Gewandhaus Concerts) in 1781. What makes it stand out, however, is Hiller's introductory essay on the texts of the works to be performed – mostly traditional Latin liturgical texts such as the mass ordinarium, Magnificat and Te Deum – in which he reflected on the role of sacred music in the concert season. These remarks were structured around an exegesis of the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca's twenty-third epistle to Lucilius, in which he comments, ‘res severa est verum gaudium’ (‘a serious thing is a true joy’). Hiller printed the maxim on the cover of the booklet and used a slight variant (‘Res severa verum gaudium’; ‘Serious thing – True joy’) as the motto for the Gewandhaus, one that was emblazoned over its stage immediately after the hall's construction and has appeared in eponymous halls ever since.

Although Hiller's booklet is recognized as the moment this adage first became associated with the Gewandhaus, less notice has been taken of Hiller's essay itself, and particularly of Hiller's choice to discuss Seneca's words in connection to sacred, rather than secular, music. And while a spectator in the Gewandhaus might interpret the motto as a declaration that the music performed in the space is – and should be – something more than mere entertainment, Hiller's original intent was more closely related to sacred music's role in public concert life: