It is associated with several well-known composers such as Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and especially Johann Sebastian Bach, who worked here as a Kapellmeister (music director) from 1723 until his death in 1750. Today, the church also holds his remains. Martin Luther preached here in 1539.

Although rebuilt over the centuries and damaged by Allied incendiary bombs in 1943, the church today mainly retains the character of a late-Gothic hall church.

The Thomanerchor, the choir of the Thomaskirche, likely founded in 1212, retains a well-known boys’ choir.

Tomb of Johann Sebastian Bach
The remains of Johann Sebastian Bach have been buried in the Thomaskirche since 1950. After his death on 28 July 1750, Bach was laid to rest in the hospital cemetery of the Johanniskirche in Leipzig. With the start of the Bach renaissance in the 19th century, the public started to become interested in his remains and their whereabouts.

In 1894, the anatomy professor Wilhelm His was commissioned to identify the composer’s remains amongst disinterred bones from the cemetery where Bach had been buried. He concluded that “the assumption that the bones of an elderly man, which had been found in an oak coffin near the Johanneskirche, were the remains of Johann Sebastian Bach” was very likely. On 16 July 1900 the bones were placed into a stone sarcophagus underneath the Johanniskirche.

Following the bombardment of the Johanniskirche on 4 December 1943, the bones were transferred to the Thomaskirche. The new grave with a bronze cover was inaugurated on 28 July 1950, 200 years after the death of the composer, who is now buried in the sanctuary of the Thomaskirche.