Thank you to all those who have contributed memories and stories of Helmuth.
“My experiences with Maestro Rilling at the OBF and in Germany eventually led to my involvement with the founding of the Arizona Bach Festival. It was such a privilege and life-changing experience to have studied with him in Germany for a year and participated in many performances around Europe and in some of the Bach Cantata recordings that were finalized in the early 1980s. He was not only an amazing musician and scholar, but also a wonderful human being. Thanks for this opportunity to share a few words in his honor.”
– David Topping
“Mr. Rilling was a dear man indeed. Sang under him in 2 all commers choirs in the early 90s and met him at several OBFs even when I used to volunteer there. It was an awesome season in my life. He surely will be missed.”
– Bonnie Krauss
“Helmuth was an incredible musician. I loved his work. He and our family were very good friends and when he was in Oregon, the Rillings often stayed with us.”
– MJ Frohnmayer
“I was privileged to serve on the Oregon Bach Festival Board for six years. During that time, my husband and I spent social time with Dr. Rilling and Martina Rilling and, sometimes, their daughters. Dr. Rilling had a great sense of humor, but he was always focused on education and performance. I remember him saying to the chorus, “I’m proud of you. You are a wonderful chorus.” Everyone in the chorus wriggled with pleasure. The he said, “And now you are going to SHOW me why I am proud of you!” That is, now you are going to perform!”
– Joanna Hoskins
“I heard of the passing of Helmuth Rilling this past week and feel compelled to add to the many accolades I’m seeing online. I had the incredible privilege of being tutored by Rilling in the summer of 2002, when I was in the conducting masterclass at the Oregon Bach Festival. Even though I only had direct contact with Maestro Rilling for about two and a half weeks, he (and Thomas Somerville) had a deep and lasting impact on me as a conductor in that short, intense time. A couple of quick anecdotes from that summer. I remember in the month leading up to the festival feverishly studying Rilling’s recordings of the works I was to conduct there, and making note of the tempos he had chosen, figuring they were the “correct” ones. In rehearsal one day, with Rilling looking over my shoulder, I confidently led the choir and instrumentalists in one of the movements I was assigned, and he made the comment that I was taking it either too fast or too slow (I don’t recall which). I wanted to blurt out, “but this is your tempo!” However, I held my tongue and asked him about it later. His response was something like, “Yes, but my more recent study has convinced me that it should be faster/slower than I believed when that recording was made.” This was a great lesson for me. Rilling was in his late-sixties at the time; mature, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest interpreters of Bach’s choral/orchestral works in the world, but he was not resting on his laurels. He continued to study and grow throughout his career.
My second anecdote. During the two and a half weeks of the OBF, I watched Helmuth Rilling conduct the Brahms Requiem, the Verdi Requiem, and the Messa per Rossini in performance. Together this was more than four and a half hours of music. In addition, while we masterclass conductors sweated over the one or two movements that we conducted in performance every other day, we watched Rilling give a lecture before each of our performances. During these daily lectures he interspersed musical examples where he would turn around to the orchestra and choir and conduct an example of a few measures. Here’s the part that astonished me – during all of this, he never had even a music stand in front of him. Everything, from the entire Verdi Requiem to the shortest example in one of his lectures was memorized! At the end of the festival, those of us in the masterclass had a question-and-answer session with him, and I asked the question that had been burning in my mind – what’s your method; how do you get all this music memorized? His answer was that no matter how many times he had conducted a piece of music, a year before the first rehearsal he would buy a brand-new score and begin to analyze it anew. He would begin with the largest elements of form (Is it a cantata? A symphony? How many movements?) and as he analyzed, he memorized each level until he got down to the individual measures, and then the individual notes. Then he said, “So if I forget the note, I have the measure; if I forget the measure, I have the phrase, and so on.” This incredible time commitment and work ethic is a big part of what made him great, and it’s served as a life-long example for me. Thank you, Maestro. Rest in peace.”
– David Gardner
“Helmuth was a great Musician and friend of ours. We were in constant communication and often he and family would stay at our place when he was in Oregon. In addition, several of us went to Germany to perform with him too. He was one of the finest musicians I have known. I was proud, as were other members of my family to enjoy and perform the wonderful music that he chose. He will be VERY missed. Sending love to the Rilling Family.”
– Mira Fohnmayer
“I had the multiple privileges of being a student at OBF in 1985, then serving as a chorus master for Mr. Rilling during the period 2005 – 2012 when he was a guest conductor for the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, and finally serving as the Director of the Master Class in Conducting for OBF from 2014 – 2018. All of my many encounters with him, as a student and as a colleague, made me into a better musician, a better teacher and mentor, and a better person. In rehearsal no effort was too large, no detail was too small. In performance, his intensity was completely captivating and inspiring. For me he transformed the work of learning, rehearsing, and performing the music of Bach; changing it from something fearsome into something to be embraced, celebrated, and shared. It was a tremendous gift and I am forever grateful. Any music student who has worked with me in the last 40 years is a student of Helmuth Rilling’s as well.”
– Ed Maclary
“Auf Wiedersehen, dear Helmuth! You were loved by my husband (Thomas Somerville) and me over many years. You shared with us your great insights in music-making, and gave us glorious, unbelievable moments during performances. Every year Tom’s own teaching was refreshed and enhanced after spending those few weeks with you each summer. I know that you and Tom shared many a late night beverage and cigar, as well; and it makes me smile to imagine you, Tom, and Johann Sebastian now sitting on a cloud, drink and cigar in hand, discussing articulations and performance practices in the B Minor! Ah, to be an eavesdropper to THAT conversation!”
– Virginia Somerville
“Many moments I witnessed the deep friendship between Maestro Rilling and his dear friend Royce Saltzman. They were simply a matched pair of musical giants. They posed for me to take their picture together on several occasions, usually over a celebratory beverage after a superb concert. This is a great gift they left me personally and I treasure the gift of OBF they gave us all from their mutual service to JSB❤️”
– Julie Gemmell
“I was a grad student during the early years of the OBF. We were all enriched by Helmuth’s conducting classes and rehearsals, but also by the informal time he spent with us. In the early days, there was time to occasionally have a beer with us in our grad-school apartments after rehearsals. Even though he never embraced the stylistic conventions of period-instrument, historically informed performances of 18th-century music, his understanding and communication of the spiritual depths of Bach and his music was and still is unmatched.”
– Richard Benedum
“Every person who knew Helmuth Rilling has their own treasured stories about him, and I am sure there are common threads in most of those stories. The first would be the Man and his Music, how the level of preparation, immersion, and understanding of the music he was going to conduct was profound. During his Discovery Series lectures, he often said he imagined looking over the shoulder of the composer as he worked, trying to determine what the composer was trying to portray and how he would accomplish that, and then brilliantly communicating that to his performing forces or the listening audience. Helmuth’s expectation of his performing forces–soloists, instrumentalists, or choristers–was high. Performances could be terrifying, but they were also incredibly exciting and moving.
Helmuth’s commitment to education was a major part of the Bach Festival, and one of the reasons it had such an impact on the musical world. In the conducting masterclasses or the Discovery Series, he led us through masterworks and shared his wisdom and knowledge.
He was also firmly committed to the involvement of youth in the Bach Festival. It was important to include the next generation of musicians, providing them with stellar education and experiences that would stay with them throughout their lives.
Helmuth was committed to commissioning new music, adding to the continuum of repertoire for future generations of performers. Eugene was introduced to the music of Arvo Pärt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sven-David Sandström, as well as being honored and delighted by their attendance at the Bach Festival.
Helmuth believed that music could be a bridge between countries, a common ground between various and sometimes opposing cultures. He epitomized this belief at the performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, where the choir was made up of singers from Japan, Germany, and the United States, all prior enemies and major powers in WWII.
Helmuth had a great sense of humor and enjoyed having fun. He loved his morning pastry, his coffee, and his cigars; a specially grilled steak on the 4th of July barbecue; and the closing night parties where musicians, staff, board members, and masterclass students celebrated and parodied the events of the preceding weeks.
Helmuth enriched the lives of members of this community, the audiences, the musicians, and the educational participants in ways that each of us hold dear and for which we will remain forever thankful. Ruht wohl, Helmuth.”
– Marla Lowen
“In 2013, Helmuth and his Bach-Collegium of Stuttgart were invited to Hanwha music festival in Seoul. It was to be the last overseas trip for Helmuth. I was his local manager coordinating with Seoul Motet Choir who had been to OBF in Eugene. Upon a long a non-stop flight from Germany, the group made their way to the city of 25 million, the main boulevards draped with orange colored banners and Helmuth’s portrait on all the billboards. We arrived at the hotel (owned by the sponsor) for a ceremonious welcome. The management decorated his room with pictures of his family and seasonal flowers! They also told us the property was air-tight and NO SMOKING!”
– Kyung Gregor
“I was a regular attendee to OBF starting in 1987. Being from out of area (Arizona), I had limited time each year I attended so I made sure to attend the big works as well as the great discovery series. I knew of Helmuth Rilling’s international reputation so every event was a real treat. We were blessed to have access to one of the greatest scholars of JS Bach’s music ever. He was truly one of a kind. Fortunately I will cherish through memories these extraordinary musical moments. He will truly be missed. Soli Deo Gloria.”
– Tim Stephenson
“I remember the RILLING IS THRILLING t-shirts we chorus members had printed during the 1971 workshops and surprised him when everyone wore them to a rehearsal. Priceless!”
– Diane Simmons
“All things shall perish from under the sky.
♫ Music alone shall live, never to die. ♫
Thank you for the music you put into our hearts. How fortunate we are to have shared time with someone that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
– Terri Benedict
“I love metaphors, they’re perfect when there’s some time or thing or person that you love, you want to tell stories about it.
“It was like…it was as if…”
The Oregon Bach Festival under Helmuth Rilling was as if a circus came to town, only instead of a circus tent a cathedral was built in Eugene, and instead of acrobats and lion tamers and clowns there was Allan and Boris and Ingeborg and Lothar and John and Owen (….come to think of it, there were truly clowns in the highest sense of the word.) (not to mention magicians, like George Evano)
Now, I do not travel – when I perform, I do it here, in Eugene/Springfield at the Hult or Beall Hall. So for someone like me, to stand next to musicians with managers and Grammys, to be permitted to share the St. Matthew Passion or B Minor Mass…this is profoundly fortunate. Breathtakingly lucky.
The first year I sang with OBF in 1988, I felt like I had qualified for a marathon, though the goal was to finish together. And all the other runners were older, fitter, faster and had medals round their necks. The prize was the race itself.
One of the things Helmuth graced our city with was the ability to tell stories about the work we were there to hear – the kind of storytelling that emerges out of such deep scholarship that he could fill the room with reverence. He was like a librarian – “Ja, sure” he knew when and why this cantata was written but also where Bach re-used this music (one time Helmuth literally turned his back and pantomimed Johann Sebastian Bach rummaging through his scores to recycle a movement from a motet.)
A storyteller in God’s library. Or a painter: once that thought occurred to me many years ago and it would make me smile in the summers – Helmuth dancing with his paintbrush, bringing the old stories to life on the canvas. Which of us was congregation, the apostles – the audience, the chorus….? Don’t miss your entrance, Adams.
In my beat-up scores are reminders to stay present, don’t get too lost in the beauty because there’s work to do. An exclamation mark would remind me. or a simple star, drawn by me the last time, to prepare myself for one of those sublime moments.
I can’t do justice with simple words. I can only thank him, endlessly, for letting me in, allowing me to stay so long with that company to witness and work on Bach’s music.”
– Amy Adams
“Cynthia and I were travelling when we learned of Maestro Helmuth Rilling’s passing last week at the age of 92. Our years and experiences with him were a significant part of our lives.
From 1976 to 1991 we sang with Helmuth, as we all called him, in the Festival Chorus and participated in conducting masterclasses for 9 seasons over 15 years at the Oregon Bach Festival. We were part of a contingent of CSUF singers led by David Thorsen when festival co-founders Royce Saltzman and Helmuth decided to “upgrade” the chorus in 1976 when it was known as the “Summer Festival of Music”. Cynthia and I are forever grateful to Dave and Royce for that opportunity and the invitations to return.
The festival developed into an international event, with acclaimed soloists, and an all-professional orchestra drawn primarily from the L.A. Chamber Orchestra. Over that span of time, as the photos show on my FB page, we also watched Helmuth, shall we say, “mature”?
From the beginning, there was a significant educational component of the festival —masterclasses in conducting Bach cantatas led by Rilling that drew both leading, experienced conductors and students throughout the United States, and other countries to study with him. Working with a professional orchestra and soloists, especially for choral directors, was also an invaluable opportunity.
Rehearsing, and studying nearly 50 Bach’s cantatas while observing the conducting masterclasses, performing his monumental B minor mass (3x), St. John and St. Mathew Passions and his 6 motets (2x), and major choral-orchestral works of Monteverdi, Brahms, Verdi, Handel, Haydn, and others, with Helmuth during those nine seasons was an enormous influence during my formative years of undergraduate, graduate school, and on my spiritual life and developing philosophy of music and leadership.
Singing under Helmuth, learning his systematic approach to score study, rehearsal technique, and conducting methodology, and performing with him at such a high level of excellence had a profound impact throughout my career and was a highlight of Cynthia’s and my musical journey, which we shared with many wonderful friends and colleagues.
As a dedicated, lifelong church musician himself, Helmuth had a passion for taking music “out of the museum” and relating it to our daily human existence, including worship and ministry. Sometime in the early 1980s, he shared with me that “a career in sacred music is a noble call that one must answer,” and so I did.
The depth of my gratitude to Helmuth is beyond words!
In rehearsals, he was a prodigious technician and strategist with impeccable timing, leading the ensembles to peak in performances.
In concert, with nothing standing between him and the orchestra and chorus (see FB picture), and three hours of music completely internalized, his entire being was transformed into a tour de force, a passionate embodiment of the music. He was mesmerizing, and thus the moniker “Rilling is thrilling” was born!
Helmuth’s philosophy of music-making and leadership, the respect he showed his musicians and students, and the way he spoke to and treated us were of the highest order and an inspiration. He was a role model for me and thousands of others.
I recall his closing remarks at the end of the season to the conductors and educators in the chorus and masterclasses. He encouraged us to lead our people to, “ . . . realize their own potential for excellence . . . . to discover the music within themselves . . . encouraging and reminding them of the joy of making music by never forgetting your own love of music, the love and passion that drew you to become a musician yourself.”
Vielen lieben Dank, Helmuth, for sharing your love and joy of making music, your inspiration, your passion for our art, devotion to teaching, for the goodness, truth, beauty, you gave us through the endless gift of song, which continues to live in our hearts!
I would be remiss without adding our thanks to the U of O, Dept of Music, countless volunteers and staff over the years that made OBF the life-changing experience for us and so many others.
In paradisum deducant angeli. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, aeternam habeas requiem.”
– Scott and Cynthia Dean
“I absolutely cherish each Rilling recording in my music collection, also the non-Bach ones, for example Schubert and Cherubini.”
– Jan-Willem
“Helmuth was an amazing individual. Both as a conductor and educator, he had the respected for his ability to clearly convey his interpretation of the material. During conductor master classes I frequently heard him conversing with students in one of several languages depending on the need of the student. If he had a score in front of him, it was only for rehearsals to facilitate giving reference instruction to either the orchestra or choir. For performance, he did not use or need the score. He had a sense of humor off stage that was great fun. I’m a retired technician, and I consider working in support of Helmuth to be among the most treasured memories of my career.”
– Jim Rusby