Cologne Cologne Cologne (; , , ) is the largest city of Germany's most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and its 1,075,935 (2016) inhabitants make it the fourth most populous city in Germany after Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. The largest city on the Rhine, it is also the most populous city both of the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region, which is Germany's largest and one of Europe's major metropolitan areas, and of the Rhineland. Centred on the left bank of the Rhine, Cologne is about southeast of North Rhine-Westphalia's capital of Düsseldorf and northwest of Bonn. It is the largest city in
Cologne leading galleries for postwar and contemporary art. Several orchestras are active in the city, among them the Gürzenich Orchestra, which is also the orchestra of the Cologne Opera and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne ("German State Radio Orchestra"), both based at the Cologne Philharmonic Orchestra Building (Kölner Philharmonie). Other orchestras are the Musica Antiqua Köln and the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln, and several choirs, including the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln. Cologne was also an important hotbed for electronic music in the 1950s (Studio für elektronische Musik, Karlheinz Stockhausen) and again from the 1990s onward. The public radio and TV station WDR was