EW’S GUIDE TO THE OREGON BACH FESTIVAL 2011
SARA RILLING WITH HER FATHER
A Maestro’s Life Story
SARA RILLING FINDS PURPOSE WRITING ABOUT HER FAMOUS FATHER
By Suzi Steffen
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to believe like he does. He’s very humble in believing.”
She also writes about, and talks about, her father’s
ability to discuss the music he conducts. “He always speaks
without paper, and it seems like he just says what comes
to his mind — but he prepared it in his head,” she says.
Though he’s conducted Bach’s B Minor Mass hundreds of
times, Sara Rilling says admiringly that every time he does
a “lecture concert” about the Mass, he revises his talk. “He
always fi nds new things in the music,” she says.
Those in Eugene may fi nd particular interest more
than halfway through the book, when the author addresses
the Bach Festival and how Helmuth Rilling and Royce
Saltzman met and created this thing that started out small
but grew to international acclaim.
Sara Rilling, of course, grew up partly in Eugene, and
she has memories to spare about everything from the
Oregon Country Fair (she calls it one of her favorite things
about Eugene) to Hendricks Park, which is close to the
house where the Rillings stay during the festival. “I like
the deer which come to our garden, and I like all of the
great animals,” she says.
One of the funnier times she remembers happened
during an extra-festival experience. The family decided to
go camping, and Helmuth was driving in a forested area.
Not surprisingly, he was speeding, and a police car made a
quick U-turn and put on the sirens. When Helmuth stopped,
the offi cer asked for his name and driver’s license. “Helmuth
pretended that he did not understand what the man said,”
Sara Rilling says. And he didn’t have a driver’s license with
him. But quick thinking saved the day: “He had a license
for his glasses. The policeman said oh, he had never seen a
German driver’s license. And then we drove on.”
Sara Rilling laughs about that, but some of Helmuth’s
memories brought her to tears as well as laughter.
The process of interviewing her father deepened her
relationship with him. “It became much more strong and
more connected,” she says.
Sara Rilling works as a freelance musician, but she also
wants to write more. “I don’t have a project yet,” she says.
“I could write something about Venezuela, or about my
mother’s family.” But for now, she says, “I write my diary.”◆
s Sara Rilling — musician, writer, daughter of OBF
co-founder Helmuth Rilling — entered her mid-
30s, she started thinking about her life. Every day
since she was a young girl, she’d written in her diary about
what happened, what she was thinking, what was going on.
At the same time, Maestro Helmuth, via the German
version of Wikipedia, realized that people in his home country
knew about his accomplishments — the Internationale
Bachakademie Stuttgart, the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, the
Gächlinger Kantorei and much more — but little about his
work in Eugene. People in Eugene, and the rest of the U.S.,
might know about his Bach Festival and Carnegie Hall (and
Grammy-winning) exploits, but little about his work in
Japan. Etcetera. No one place listed everything or brought
it all together.
So, one day, the man himself asked his older daughter
if she would be willing to write the biography. “I thought
always that I wanted to write a book about my father,”
Rilling says by phone from Germany. “But then it was him
who asked me!”
They were in Eugene in 2005 when Helmuth made the
request, and Sara Rilling immediately got to work.
Her daily diaries might have helped with a little of the
research, she says, but she was born when he was 50 and
had already established many of the events and groups for
Helmuth Rilling in May 2008, in Europe, and translated by
Gordon Paine into English in time for the middle of last
year’s festival.
Some of the translation sounds charmingly literal or
direct, and infelicitous turns of phrase show up here and
there. The early parts of the book clunk along a bit as Sara
Rilling attempts to weave in the stories of Helmuth’s father
and mother, the sounds of a concert Helmuth conducted in
Israel and information about WWII, but the prose quickly
evens out as the story of Helmuth’s career begins to unfold.
For Bach Fest enthusiasts, Sara Rilling’s biography does
indeed illuminate Helmuth’s background and life in music.
Those who read lives of composers could easily draw
parallels between Helmuth’s life and that of Haydn, perhaps,
or even Bach himself. Helmuth Rilling’s mother died just
after he was born, and the family had little money. His
musical talent meant that he moved away from his family
when he was teenager, and as a young adult he became
the cantor at a church in Stuttgart (among his many other
appointments).
Though Sara Rilling limns a scene familiar to anyone
who’s experienced church politics — that is, a more
conservative pastor butting heads with a young, fl exible,
energetic music director — she also shows how her father
overcame restrictions to emerge as an organ player and
‘I thought always that I wanted to write a book about my father.’
which he became famous. So she had to interview Helmuth
— “many times, many times,” she says — along with a
variety of other people to help reconstruct the life of a man
who was a young child during WWII and who grew up
trying to fi gure out how to bridge cultural gaps between his
West Germany and Bach fans across the Iron Curtain in East
Germany.
The book straightforwardly recounts the chronology of
Helmuth Rilling’s life. Of course, Sara Rilling wrote the
original in German. The book was published as Mein Vater,
4 | OBF’11
conductor of skill.
“Life was very different when my father was young,”
she says. “It was more strict.”
Anyone watching Helmuth Rilling in the OBF’s
marvelous Discovery Series — Gesprächskonzert, German
for “discussion” or “lecture” concert, and Sara writes that
Helmuth invented both the term and the practice — over
several years understands that part of his interest in Bach
comes from a heartfelt religious practice. “He has it deep
inside,” Sara Rilling says, “but he never forces somebody
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