{"id":17750,"date":"2026-02-13T17:46:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T22:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=17750"},"modified":"2026-02-13T17:46:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T22:46:14","slug":"helmuth-rilling-1933-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/helmuth-rilling-1933-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Helmuth Rilling 1933-2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of conductor Helmuth Rilling<\/a>, a towering figure in the world of choral music and a lifelong advocate for the study, performance, and understanding of JS Bach. A soft-spoken, kind, and scholarly presence, he will be especially remembered in the United States as the co-founder and longtime Artistic Director of the Oregon Bach Festival, which he led for more than four decades and helped establish as one of North America\u2019s most prestigious summer festivals. We join the international music community in honoring his remarkable legacy and send our condolences to his family and those closest to him.<\/p>\n

From The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

Helmuth Rilling, Who Recorded Huge Swaths of Bach, Dies at 92<\/strong><\/p>\n

He was the first to record all of J.S. Bach\u2019s nearly 200 sacred cantatas, a project that stood out not only for its range but also for its steadfast style.<\/p>\n

Helmuth Rilling, an eloquent, widely esteemed German musician who evangelized for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and was the first conductor to record all of that composer\u2019s sacred cantatas, died on Wednesday in Warmbronn, Germany. He was 92.<\/p>\n

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Rahel Maria Rilling.<\/p>\n

Mr. Rilling, who worked mostly with the chorus and orchestra that he founded, the G\u00e4chinger Kantorei and Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, was initially \u201ca Bach lover, not a Bach scholar,\u201d he said. His cycle of the nearly 200 surviving sacred cantatas, which engaged him from 1969 to 1985 and employed singers of the stature of Arleen Auger and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, began as an act of devotion more than an effort at encyclopedism.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an active church musician, I\u2019d performed some of the cantatas liturgically and was struck by just how good they were, and yet there were perhaps only 15 or so discs available,\u201d he told BBC Music Magazine in 2010.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Passions and B minor Mass were well represented of course; I wanted to make the cantatas better known,\u201d he continued. \u201cHaving recorded 30 or 40 of them and becoming more and more excited that we were exploring really great music, one day I thought, well, why don\u2019t we do them all?\u201d<\/p>\n

His Bach came to stand out not just for its omnivorous range \u2014 he recorded the vocal, orchestral and other works, from the magisterial \u201cSt. Matthew Passion\u201d down to the merest chorale settings \u2014 but also for its steadfast, smooth and, to some, increasingly anachronistic style.<\/p>\n

Mr. Rilling also helped found the Oregon Bach Festival in 1970 and served as its artistic director until 2013. He emerged near the end of a line of musicians \u2014 exemplified by his near-contemporary, Karl Richter \u2014 who had once pursued an innovative, more consciously objective approach to Bach than their Romantically-inclined colleagues.<\/p>\n

But just months after Mr. Rilling started his cantata survey, the early-music pioneers Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt began a crusading set of their own \u2014 using period instruments, basing their work on the latest musicological research and laying the groundwork for the eventual triumph of the historically-informed performance movement in Baroque and other music.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe musical climate has shifted around the German Bach specialist Helmuth Rilling,\u201d the critic James R. Oestreich reflected in The New York Times in 1994, \u201cto the extent that his interpretations, at one time fairly advanced, are now considered stodgy and old-fashioned in doctrinaire circles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Confronted with this fresh radicalism, Mr. Rilling proved no reactionary; while remaining true to the Bach he had grown up with, he preached tolerance as musicians on both sides of the debate grew intransigent. Personally, he stuck with modern instruments, tinkering at the edges of traditions without abandoning them wholesale. If his synthesis of his inheritance and the newest trends could seem staid, at its best it struck many listeners as distinguished.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdeas about interpretation are constantly on the move,\u201d the critic Nicholas Anderson wrote in Gramophone in 1995, \u201cbut great artistry remains great artistry and in Rilling\u2019s cantata survey there are singers and players whose performances should certainly survive the passage of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as ideas about interpretation shifted, Mr. Rilling\u2019s performances were steady and stalwart.Credit…Reg Innell\/Toronto Star, via Getty Images
\nFor Mr. Rilling, in any case, finding authenticity through academic inquiry mattered less than expressing an authentic emotional message, whether religious or otherwise.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can we explain why we are so much touched by Bach\u2019s music?\u201d he wondered in a radio interview in 2004. \u201cI think very often this is because he is dealing with things, with themes, with problems, which existed at his time and still exist today. These are just general human situations like sadness or sorrow or having to deal with death \u2014 having to overcome things that are hard to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Helmuth Rilling was born on May 29, 1933, in Stuttgart, Germany. His mother, Hildegard (Plieninger) Rilling, died 10 days after giving birth to him. His father, Eugen, was a music teacher, and remarried in 1936. As the largest space in the family\u2019s apartment was reserved for music, Helmuth and his four younger stepsiblings bunked in a single room.<\/p>\n

Religious from childhood, Mr. Rilling learned to sing and play piano at a church boarding school in Bad Urach, and took lessons from the local seminary organist. He entered the Stuttgart Hochschule f\u00fcr Musik in 1952, studying organ and violin, and at the end of 1953 went with school friends to spend a week singing in the town of G\u00e4chingen.<\/p>\n

Just 20 or so strong, the students gave a small concert \u2014 featuring Buxtehude, Sch\u00fctz and new music, but no Bach \u2014 on Jan. 3, 1954, then performed back in Stuttgart a couple of weeks later. The G\u00e4chinger Kantorei choir was thus born; the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart was formed to accompany it in 1965. Mr. Rilling remained the conductor of both until 2013.<\/p>\n

It was as a liturgical musician that Mr. Rilling became an authority in Bach. After graduating from conservatory in 1955, he traveled to Italy, training with the organist Fernando Germani in Siena and at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, then returned to Stuttgart as cantor of the Ged\u00e4chtniskirche church in 1957. He held that post until 1998.<\/p>\n

The church had just been rebuilt, its tower alone having survived Allied bombs, and Mr. Rilling founded its choir. He programmed Bach\u2019s cantatas in special services from 1965, and ended up recording them in the same nave.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have performed, not all of the cantatas, but I believe over 100 of them, in church as a part of the service, with the congregation singing the chorales,\u201d Mr. Rilling told The Times in 1987. \u201cThe importance of this for the choir and for me is indescribable: to perform this music for, and with, people who are receiving it in its true context, understanding the words and the intent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Rilling, who also held conducting and teaching positions in Frankfurt, married Martina Greiner, a soprano, in 1967. She survives him, as do two daughters, Sara Maria Rilling, a violist, and Rahel Maria Rilling, a violinist, and three grandchildren.<\/p>\n

It was always slightly inaccurate to describe Mr. Rilling purely as a Bach specialist, even if he thought he had led \u201cat least 100, maybe 300\u201d performances of the \u201cSt. Matthew Passion,\u201d and held workshops on the composer in countries worldwide under the auspices of the International Bach Academy Stuttgart.<\/p>\n

He recorded other classical works and promoted contemporary composers, too. Liszt\u2019s \u201cChristus,\u201d Franck\u2019s \u201cLes B\u00e9atitudes\u201d and Honegger\u2019s \u201cJean d\u2019Arc au B\u00fbcher\u201d were among his more adventurous releases on the H\u00e4nssler label. For the 250th anniversary of Bach\u2019s death in 2000, he commissioned and premiered settings of the Passion story by the composers Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina, Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun.<\/p>\n

Mr. Rilling in 2012. \u201cHow can we explain why we are so much touched by Bach\u2019s music?\u201d he said. \u201cI think very often this is because he is dealing with things, with themes, with problems, which existed at his time and still exist today.\u201dCredit…Roberto Serra – Iguana Press\/Getty Images
\nHis Oregon Bach Festival recording of Krzysztof Penderecki\u2019s \u201cCredo\u201d (another of Mr. Rilling\u2019s commissions) won the Grammy for best choral performance in 2000. Among the other nominees was his account of Bach\u2019s \u201cChristmas Oratorio.\u201d<\/p>\n

No amount of advocacy for new music, however, could erode the central element of Mr. Rilling\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you like being a Bach specialist?\u201d the Chicago broadcaster Bruce Duffie asked in 2000.<\/p>\n

\u201cSure,\u201d Mr. Rilling replied. \u201cThis is an honor.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of conductor Helmuth Rilling, a towering figure in the world of choral music and a lifelong advocate for the study, performance, and understanding of JS Bach. A soft-spoken, kind, and scholarly presence, he will be especially remembered in the United States as the co-founder and longtime … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3613,7479,7301],"class_list":["post-17750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-conductor","tag-helmuth-rilling","tag-obituary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17750"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17751,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17750\/revisions\/17751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/1116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}