Leipzig sits at the south end of the North German Plain, about 150 kilometers south of Berlin and nearly 500 kilometers east of Wesel. Few German cities have cultivated a relationship to their pasts as consistently and self-consciously as this one, whose history extends to about 800 CE. In the era of industrialization and urbanization, Leipzig had begun to absorb the villages around its medieval walls, which already in the late eighteenth century were being removed. A massive infrastructure expansion ensued to accommodate a burgeoning citizenry. Between 1850 and 1870 the population ballooned from 63,000 to 107,000. By 1910 679,000 people lived in Leipzig, a staggering surge in excess of 600% over just four decades that made it the Reich's third-most-populous city, behind only Berlin and Hamburg. The civic response was everywhere in evidence in countless ongoing construction projects. The rail network metastasized, grand factories and business complexes arose, and the ambitious South Cemetery opened on the southeast perimeter.

The city proudly maintained a lively musical culture, stretching back over Wagner (whose hometown it was), the Schumanns, Mendelssohn, Bach, Telemann, and beyond. Felix Mendelssohn had served as Gewandhaus Kapellmeister from 1835, and in 1843 he had founded the Leipzig Conservatory on the model of Paris, the first such institution on German soil. Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf had opened his music publishing firm here in 1719, Carl Friedrich Peters his Bureau de Musique in 1814. Alongside Gewandhaus, Opera, and Conservatory stood a pair of august institutions with a pedigree older than all of these: the Church and School of St. Thomas, stemming from the Augustinian monastery established on the same site in 1212. Johann Sebastian Bach had served as cantor of the Thomasschule between 1723 and 1750, commonly regarded as the high point in its long musical history. The Gothic hall church, modest by the standards of the great European cathedral churches like St. Willibrord, had undergone extensive renovations completed at Pentecost 1889, transforming the baroque interior of Bach's time into a modish neo-Gothic guise, with a new three-manual organ in the west gallery by Wilhelm Sauer, op. 501.

When Karl Straube relocated to Leipzig late in 1902, he surely was struck by this city's amalgam of tradition and innovation, the old and hallowed standing alongside the new and progressive.