This is St. Gall Cathedral which was founded originally as a monastery in the 8th century on the spot of a hermitage of St. Gall, who had been a disciple of St. Columba. Along with Einslieden, it was founded on the spot of a hermit. Einsiedeln means, one (eins) + hermit or wayfarer? (siedeln). It was St. Meinrad. These were part of the roaming band of Irish monks and bishops who came to the area at the time. Anyway, the Benedictines took over the monastery in 747 AD. We toured the library, but didn't get to see the actual famous St. Gall chant manuscript from the 9th century. It is locked away in a special room for scholars with credentials. We did get to see, among other things, an 11th century collection of tropes and sequences with the older notation (in campo aperto) in the margins of the text. Of course, St. Gall was a leading producer of the "sequence," one of the early composers being its monk Notker Balbulus ("Notker the Stammerer"). At one point there were over 5,000 sequences floating around Europe, but the Council of Trent reduced them to four, with a fifth one readded in the 18th century.
In the 16th century the city was allied with the Lutheran movement - the abbot/prince losing much of the land and buildings which had all been under his jurisdiction. However, two separate St. Gall's continued (a civil Lutheran one and a Catholic ecclesiastical one) until the early 1800's when Napolean's troops marched in and the monastery was dissolved with it becoming a cathedral instead. The area was turned into a secular Swiss canton. The current cathdedral - obviously Baroque/Roccoco was rebuilt in the 1760's while the monks still inhabited it.
(The second picture is of a side altar which is one of five within the sanctuary. You can see the carved wood choir stalls in the back.)
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