In 1891 the new Philharmonic Society building was opened in the lower part of the Congress Square in Ljubljana.
The building, designed by Wilhelm Trea, was built in the place of an old theatre, which had burnt down several years earlier.
The opening ceremony of the Philharmonic Society’s “own house, the asylum of the musical art, the decoration of the city and the witness of the citizens’ refined artistic sense” was accompanied by large celebrations, with artists from all sides joining the orchestra, which numbered more than eighty members, and the choir consisting of more than a hundred opera singers. They played Wagner, Beethoven and Liszt, while there was no shortage of ceremonial speeches as well.
All the important people of Ljubljana were there, and so was the provincial chief Andrej Baron Winkler, who in the name of the Emperor Franz Joseph I solemnly decorated the Philharmonic Society with a golden medal.
Visitors to Congress Square will see 1701 on the front of the Philharmonic building, but this refers to the year in which the Music Academy was established. The building itself replaced the Provincial Theatre, which burned down in 1887, as shown in the painting below.
