As part of the event series “HörMal! Monument and music in the UNESCO City of Music Hannover” Dr. Birte Rogacki-Thiemann and Christina Achhammer (Lower Saxony State Office for the Preservation of Monuments) will guide you through the Villa Seligmann.
The Villa Seligmann is a palatial two-storey sandstone ashlar building in neo-baroque style, free-standing in a large garden, with a high mansard roof above the projecting cornice and curved dwarf gables, louvres and batwing dormers. The façades are sculpturally structured and decorated with sandstone ornamentation. The first floor consists of large representative rooms, of which the Great Hall, which extends over two levels, occupies the central space. Most of the elaborate wall-fixed interior decoration (marble entrée, wooden wall paneling, textile wall coverings, wall and ceiling paintings, etc.) from the time of construction has been preserved.
Villa Seligmann is one of the few well-preserved examples of the Jewish bourgeoisie before the Shoah and is therefore of great importance for Hanover’s local and social history. At the end of 2006, the Siegmund Seligmann Foundation acquired the building and made it accessible to the public. After extensive restoration work, the Villa Seligmann has since been a place for the performance, mediation, research and documentation of Jewish music, including rare synagogue organs, including the Sauer organ from Berlin and the console of the Rieger organ from the Dohány Synagogue in Budapest.
HörMal! Monument and music in the UNESCO City of Music Hannover is a series of 13 events in very different monuments related to music in Hanover, where participants can get to know old and comparatively young monuments. They range from explicit places of music history to places of music production and dissemination to places of musical training and general musical education.
