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The founder of the Tölz Boys' Choir, Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden, turns 85

2022-06-19T06:16:35.329Z


The founder of the Tölz Boys' Choir, Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden, turns 85 Created: 06/19/2022, 08:00 By: Christiane Mühlbauer Away from everyday concert life: Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden (85) with his family, daughter Barbara and wife Helga. Special friendship with Carl Orff © Private In 1958 Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden founded the now world-famous Tölz Boys' Choir. On Sunday he celebrates his 85th birthday.


The founder of the Tölz Boys' Choir, Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden, turns 85

Created: 06/19/2022, 08:00

By: Christiane Mühlbauer

Away from everyday concert life: Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden (85) with his family, daughter Barbara and wife Helga.

Special friendship with Carl Orff © Private

In 1958 Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden founded the now world-famous Tölz Boys' Choir.

On Sunday he celebrates his 85th birthday.

Bad Tölz/Benediktbeuern –

150 boys will start a powerful birthday song this Sunday – and it will be of first-class quality: Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden, the founder of the Tölz Boys' Choir, will be 85 years old on June 19th.

In the afternoon, the music will be heard in the town hall in Germering, because the boys' choir invites you to a parents' concert there - in a closed event.

The boys and the team also want to surprise their founder with something special.

Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden only rarely appears in public.

At the end of May, however, he still followed every concert at the boys' choir festival in Bad Tölz, reports his daughter Barbara.

"Even if it was exhausting for him: Music is something that fills him with life." Every day her father still plays the piano for two hours and sings.

"It also helps him a lot to deal with Parkinson's disease." It is admirable how positively her father accepts aging.

Sing and play the piano every day

“He does come to rehearsals from time to time,” reports the daughter, who has been running the choir for several years.

In addition, her father likes to travel in South Tyrol or in Tuscany.

Smiling, she says, "He's a sun person."

Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden was born in 1937 in Karlsbad in Egerland, today the Czech Republic.

As a refugee child, he came to Lake Starnberg with his parents.

"That's when I saw mountains for the first time and just cried all day.

I was afraid the mountains would fall down on me," he told our newspaper five years ago at a birthday talk.

Because his father found a job in Bad Tölz two years later, the family moved to the spa town.

Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden met his wife Helga in 1965 at the Orff Institute in Salzburg.

They got married three years later, and then their daughter Barbara was born.

The family has lived in Benediktbeuern for decades.

Schmidt-Gaden founded the Tölzer Boys' Choir in 1956 with the boy scouts.

The group first called itself "Singkreis Bad Tölz im Kreisjugendring", and it was not until 1958 that the current name was created.

And there were many happy coincidences.

For example, that shortly after the foundation, a German-German meeting of choirmasters took place in Bad Tölz, to which the Leipzig Thomaskantor Kurt Thomas also traveled.

He invited the "nice choir" from Schmidt-Gaden to sing something for the guests - and then he said to the young conductor: "You are very gifted and have talent.

If you come to Leipzig, I have a grant for you.”

Special friendship with Carl Orff

Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden didn't need to be told twice.

In Leipzig he studied Bach's original sheet music and then trained the Tölz soloists to become specialists in historical performance practice.

This is how the choir achieved world fame.

For decades, Schmidt-Gaden worked with the greatest conductors of his time.

Schmidt-Gaden maintained a special friendship with Carl Orff: from 1963 to 1974, Orff came to Bad Tölz every two weeks to teach the boys' choir.

Schmidt-Gaden also wrote the chapter on voice training in Orff's "Schulwerk", which is today regarded as his great pedagogical legacy.

You can find more current news from the region around Bad Tölz at Merkur.de/Bad Tölz.

Concert tours have taken the choir to all the major stages of the world.

Schmidt-Gaden has received numerous awards over the course of his career.

He retired from day-to-day business around six years ago.

To this day he is the “grey eminence” with whom most students and alumni have a good relationship.

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At home in Benediktbeuern, the 85-year-old loves nature and the garden.

Schmidt-Gaden finds not only native plants fascinating, but also Japanese ornamental gardens and their design options.

Even the music from the Far East appeals to him – to be more precise, playing the meditation flute.

Because of the special breathing technique, even he reached his limits here, he said in 2017. Today, however, he is only allowed to listen when 150 boys offer their long-standing choirmaster, also known as "da Schmidä", a top-class musical concert on his special day.

By the way: Everything from the region is now also available in our regular Bad Tölz newsletter.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-06-19

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