A Class By Himself

Helmuth Rilling on what we learn from Bach.

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.

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