A Class By Himself

Helmuth Rilling on what we learn from Bach.

Interview by Caitriona Bolster

Helmuth Rilling, Artistic Director and Conductor of the Oregon Bach Festival, is one of the world’s foremost interpreters of the music of Bach, and founded the Festival with Royce Saltzman in 1970. Rilling spoke with Caitriona Bolster of KWAX-FM about Bach and his influence and legacy as they have been realized over the past 300 years.

Caitriona Bolster. Today, Bach’s music, like the works of Michelangelo and Shakespeare, is regarded as one of the great pillars of Western art. And yet for several generations after his death, Bach was essentially a forgotten composer. Why was his music regarded as obsolete and of little interest until Mendelssohn began the great Bach revival in the early nineteenth century?

Helmuth Rilling. I think the reason is that Bach composed in the style of his predecessors, the composers of the Early Baroque and the High Baroque era. Around 1730 or 1735, a new wave of music emerged and this was the beginning of the Viennese Classical style, what we call the Mannheim School, and people looked for other directions in music. In fact, Bach’s sons, already as young composers, became more famous than their father. He was regarded as sort of old fashioned, and this is why his music was not very well known.

Very little of Bach’s music was printed, so when he died in 1750, only specialists knew about him, and in the second half of the eighteenth century, he was not known at all. But it’s well known, for example, that Mozart once traveled to Leipzig in the late 1780s and looked at Bach’s motets and was enthusiastic about them. And there is a lot of Bach’s influence in Mozart’s music after that visit.

Also Haydn showed some influence, but Bach was virtually forgotten, and it’s only Mendelssohn who in 1829 performed for the first time the St. Matthew Passion again, and then the Bach Society started to edit his works after this.

CB. Given the fact that composers do go in and out of fashion over time, it’s useful, it seems to me, to evaluate periodically the significance of even a composer as established as Bach. Let’s take Bach the musician first. What accounts for his greatness and significance?

HR. In some ways Bach brings together in his music the styles of the preceding centuries. He combines influences from the traditional church music such as the works of Palestrina, the music of the Northern German Baroque, of the French, and of contemporary Italian music, and he molds them together and finds one very personal style in which he can include everything that came before. So he becomes a sort of cornerstone for music history. Of course, it’s not only what he took from others, but his ability to create with it works of large architectural dimensions, something which had not been done that often before, and which we can compare perhaps only with the oratorios and operas of Handel, that counts towards his greatness.

CB. Bach has been called the “fifth Evangelist” (after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Was Bach first and foremost a church musician? Is that the starting point for viewing him?

HR. Well, of course he was not only a church musician. Let’s speak about the four famous K’s: at the end of his life (that is, during his time in Leipzig) he was a kantor (cantor). But before, when he was in Cöthen, he was konzertmeister (concertmaster), the second K; and before that he was also kapellmeister-leader of an orchestra, not just of church groups (this was partly in Leipzig, partly in Cöthen, partly also in Weimar). And you could add to these, maybe the most important K, that he was a komponist (composer) all his lifetime. By this I mean, he composed so many works which were not for the church. Take all his chamber music, The Well-Tempered Clavier, take his Brandenburg Concertos, take his many secular cantatas. Take also, and I did not mention this before, what he has done as an organist and what he has composed for the organ. So he’s a very broad musician.

CB. But if we do look at his church music, what is the cultural and spiritual contribution of Bach the theologian?

HR. You see, it was Bach’s job, especially in Leipzig where he was cantor at the St. Thomas and St. Nicolai churches from 1723 up to the end of his life, to do with his music what the minister or the pastor had to do with his sermons. He had to explain the thoughts contained in the liturgical texts, every Sunday and every feast day of the church year; he had to explain and communicate them to the congregation. So he had to think through virtually all of the components of the Christian faith. We see these components reflected in his cantatas and in his oratorios.

CB. We live today in a predominantly secular, nuclear, and high-tech age. Why should we still care about Bach? In what way can he enrich our lives?

HR. I think culture in a very general way enriches our lives, and has done so in the past. Maybe we need it even more in our time, when things have become so rational, so high-tech, as you say. Bach’s music has perhaps something which is very special for us. See, there is music, including classical music, which you can hear just with your feelings. If you sit down and listen to the piano music of Chopin, for example, you get transported by beautiful and enchanting emotions. With Bach it’s different. Bach never excludes the spirit, the rational thinking, but makes it part of his music. And I think this combination of both feeling, of emotion, together with the rationality and the construction, the architecture — this is the special quality of Bach’s music, and maybe that is what we need so much today.

CB. Does one need to have a Christian or Eurocentric background in order to understand Bach fully? And I’m wondering what has been your experience in performing Bach in, let’s say, Japan?

HR. Certainly you do not need to have that background. Let’s take his instrumental works, his Well-Tempered Clavier or his concertos — everybody who is interested and educated in this kind of music can understand it. It is, of course, a different case with the text-related music in his cantatas and oratorios. There, to know something about the context of these texts-about the Christian faith-is a great help in understanding the music. But I have had experiences which show me that this is not at all a problem in countries which have a different culture, because I think in many ways Bach’s sacred works deal with very general human problems. For example, in the St. Matthew Passion, we hear about love, hate, suffering, death, and many other things. Bach teaches us to look at these very human problems from a very special viewpoint, his viewpoint, which is that you can solve these problems only by looking to a higher authority.

CB. There are different ways of performing Bach today. One of these is the “authentic performance practice” approach. What path have you chosen and why do you regard it as the best way to convey Bach’s meaning and message?

HR. I have just one general comment. If you were able to reconstruct completely a performance situation-say, a cantata performance in the Thomas Church in Bach’s lifetime and under his own direction-you would have the same type of choir, the same type of instruments, the same type of dynamics, the same type of articulation and tempos, etc. And if you were able to do that (which is impossible), then you would only have half of the reconstruction of the music, because you could not reconstruct the other half of this situation, which is the audience or the congregation. The people of that time were — in every respect, not just in musical respects — completely different from us today. So, I think if we were to perform today in the fashion in which they performed in their day, then this would reach us in a completely different way.

Therefore, I say it is important to reproduce the idea, the background, and the spiritual background of Bach’s music. This must be the goal, not just to reproduce a sound; and in this regard, of course, every conductor working in that field has his or her own opinion. I think for today’s conductor and every musician of our time who performs this kind of music, it is essential to know everything that one can know about the performance practice of Bach’s period. Then, we have to translate it into a sound and a way of music-making which reaches the ears of our time. And that’s why I personally prefer to do this on the instruments we normally use.

CB. Perhaps this next question is also about translating Bach to our present circumstances. Does Bach really belong in the concert hall-which is where we hear him in Eugene at the Festival?

HR. Most of our concerts, not only in Eugene but all over the world, are being done in concert halls. Of course, it would be wonderful to do it in a beautiful old church. But I think that in the last analysis it should not be important in which surroundings, in which hall or whatever, this music is played. Music itself has to create the atmosphere in which we hear it.

CB. In this country, there is some difficulty in attracting young audiences to classical music. What is the best way to attract new and/or young audiences to Bach?

HR. This is not easy for me to answer. Of course you know that we have tried in many ways to introduce Bach to new audiences with our lecture/demonstrations, which we call gesprachskonzerts. And when I do this-for example, in Stuttgart-then we have many, many young people who are very interested in hearing about the background, about the architecture, about the thoughts, about the very ideas behind Bach’s music.

CB. One year, the Oregon Bach Festival had as its theme, “Bach and the Americas” What did you hope Festival participants derived from looking at this very large picture?

HR. First, to see what Bach’s reception in this hemisphere has been over the centuries. And indeed, there has been a tremendous interest in Bach’s music, especially in this century. I think we have more than fifty Bach festivals at completely different places, where obviously there exist people who are so interested that they dedicate a complete festival to Bach.

Second, it is certainty worthwhile to look at the composers in the past and also in our time: What do they get from Bach? What do they think about Bach?

You see, among all composers, I regard Bach as the teacher par excellence. There is virtually no one in music history, performers or composers, who has not come under the influence of Bach in some way. I remember, for example, when I conducted the Cleveland Orchestra (I think it was Dvorák), and before the concert I went to greet the concertmaster in his room. And he warms up with what? With a violin sonata of Bach before playing Dvorák. This is just one small example of how deep that influence is. I think many composers in this hemisphere somehow had to develop their own view of Bach’s music and decide if they would include some of his techniques, his thinking, in their music-or see if they could offer a contrast to that and not follow the structural approach which Bach used so much.

CB. I’m reminded that there is a Glenn Gould recording of the C Major Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier on board the Voyager spacecraft. The spacecraft left our solar system a few years ago and was designed to last nearly a billion years as it traveled to the outer edges of the universe. What are your thoughts on this gesture?

HR. Well, I think it’s a gesture of someone who loved Bach very much and thought this was the best he could send to the universe, and I agree totally with it.

Caitriona Bolster is the Music Director of KWAX-FM, a 24-hour all-classical radio station affiliated with the University of Oregon. She holds a degree in musicology from Yale University, and is the former assistant director of Yale’s Oral History project in American music.