Your report on the embarrassingly delayed and over-budget Elbphilharmonie (2 November) says Hamburg and its port have traditionally enjoyed a reputation for “music of a more raucous kind”. Hamburg has had an opera house continuously in the Dammtor since 1678; only Venice can lay claim to an older opera tradition. Its directors have included Gustav Mahler and more recently Rolf Liebermann and Christoph von Dohnányi. Many opera-lovers consider it to consistently maintain the highest standards of any German house: a 1944 recording of Strauss’s Elektra is astonishing witness to how these were maintained even during the wartime destruction of Hamburg.

By comparison, the Beatles’ legendary youthful experiences at Star-Club at the Große Freiheit and the Hamburg school of rock are very recent. It is typical of the discreet charm of the wealthy Hanseatic city-state, with its top ranking in many quality of life surveys, that it prefers its opera house to remain one of the best-kept secrets in Europe.

Tom Brown

London

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