There was no grand scheme to launch the Bach Festival as one of America's most enduring classical music institutions. There was just a chapel, a choir, and so many people who showed up on a March evening in 1935 that the programs ran out before everyone could grab one.
That night, March 22nd, 1935, a Vesper Service of Bach's music packed Knowles Memorial Chapel at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Organizers Christopher Honaas and Herman F. Siewert had picked the date on purpose: the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's birth. What they didn't account for was the crowd, or the near-riotous enthusiasm that followed.
Ninety-one years later, that chaotic, program-less evening has compounded into something extraordinary: a festival that ranks third in the nation for longevity among Bach festivals, and holds the title of Central Florida's longest-running performing arts organization, and isn't remotely done yet.
It has outlasted a world war, the spectacular financial collapse of an entire symphony orchestra, and the deaths of the visionaries who built it from scratch. It is still, stubbornly, joyfully, gloriously, going.
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A Chapel Built for Music, a Festival Built by Happy Accident
Knowles Memorial Chapel was practically begging to host a Bach festival. Completed in 1932 and designed by architect Ralph Adams Cram, whose fingerprints are on some of the most jaw-dropping ecclesiastical buildings in America, the chapel was a gift from Frances Knowles Warren in memory of her father, Francis Bangs Knowles, one of Winter Park's founders.
Cram built a room that holds sound the way good hands hold water: carefully, completely. When Honaas and Siewert chose it for their Bach observance, they were working with an instrument as much as a venue.
The crowd's response pushed the college to think bigger. The following year, on March 29, 1936, Rollins mounted three separate events in a single Sunday, a Morning Meditation, a Vesper Hour, and a Choral Concert. They puffed up the Chapel Choir's 49 voices with 23 community singers and brought in six instrumentalists.
The mix of college students and local townspeople wasn't just practical; it became the ensemble's whole identity, one it proudly carries to this day.
By December 1936, Rollins president Hamilton Holt had gathered the founding committee: Honaas, Siewert, Dean Charles Atwood Campbell, Frances Knowles Warren, and a New York-based artist and philanthropist named Isabelle Sprague-Smith. Sprague-Smith was the one who looked at this scrappy little concert series and saw what it could become.
She locked down 96 sponsors for the 1937 festival and turned a handful of Sunday concerts into something with real institutional ambition, a proper Bach Festival, capitalized, funded, and built to last.
The Women Who Actually Built This Thing
History has a bad habit of glossing over the people who did the real work. The early Bach Festival is a refreshing exception, if you look closely enough.
Frances Knowles Warren didn't just donate a beautiful building and wave goodbye. She sat on the festival committee and remained a shaping force in its early years. Isabelle Sprague-Smith handled fundraising, sharpened the programming, and constructed the financial scaffolding that kept everything upright. Rollins archival research has made the point emphatically: women weren't lurking in the background of the festival's founding. They were running it, at a time when women's leadership roles in classical music institutions were, to put it charitably, not exactly encouraged.
When Sprague-Smith died in 1950, the loss hit hard. She had been, in every practical sense, irreplaceable. Which meant the Society had to figure out how to replace her anyway.
How the Bach Festival Survived a World War (and Everything Else)
The 1940s threw everything at the festival and the festival refused to flinch. In 1940, the choir had swelled to roughly 140 singers and delivered the first complete performance of Bach's Mass in B minor ever heard in the southern United States. Poet Carl Sandburg was in the audience.
So was novelist Rex Beach and Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, not a bad Tuesday night for a college town in Florida. On April 23, 1940, the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park was formally incorporated as an independent nonprofit.
Then the war came. Singers and instrumentalists shipped off to military service. The festival performed anyway, every single year, a point of pride the Society still brings up, and honestly should keep bringing up forever.
By 1949, NBC Radio was broadcasting festival excerpts nationally, pulling in letters from Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. Somehow, a Bach festival in a small Florida college town had become a national conversation.
The back-to-back losses of 1949 and 1950, founding conductor Honaas retired due to ill health, then Sprague-Smith died the following year, could have finished the whole enterprise.
Instead, conductor Harvey L. Woodruff steadied the ship artistically while Rollins president Hugh McKean persuaded a sugar-industry entrepreneur named John M. Tiedtke to step into the leadership void. Tiedtke proceeded to serve as president for over 50 years, casually covering budget deficits out of his own pocket when needed.
He was, in practice, the festival's patron saint, general manager, and safety net all at once. When he transitioned to board chair in 2003 and passed away in 2004, he left behind a real institution, not just a concert series that happened to keep going.
Big Stages, Bigger Ambitions
Robert Hufstader took the baton in 1952, and under Hufstader and Tiedtke the festival grew to four performances, brought back serious attention to Bach's instrumental music in 1954, and kicked off a lecture series in 1957 with heavyweights like scholar Paul Henry Lang.
The 25th anniversary season in 1960 snuck in the first major non-Bach work, Haydn's Coronation Mass, which turned out to be less of a detour and more of a preview. The repertoire was going to keep growing.
Ward Woodbury took over as music director in 1966 and spent two decades gleefully expanding the programming to include Handel, Beethoven, Monteverdi, Schütz, and Gabrieli. The festival was becoming something richer and stranger and more interesting than a single-composer celebration, a full-blown choral and orchestral institution with Bach as its beating heart.
Then, in 1991, the Florida Symphony Orchestra went broke and folded. The Society's response? Build their own professional Bach Festival Orchestra from the region's impressive depth of working musicians and music educators. Problem identified, problem solved.
From Winter Park to the Vatican (No Big Deal)
In 1990, Dr. John V. Sinclair became Artistic Director and Conductor, and things got genuinely exciting. Under his leadership, the Bach Festival Choir has performed at London's Royal Albert Hall, Leipzig's Nikolaikirche, one of Bach's own churches, which has a certain poetry to it, and St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.
In 2007 and again in 2009, the choir shared the stage with the London Symphony Orchestra during its Florida residencies, taking on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Orff's Carmina Burana. Not bad for a volunteer choir from Central Florida.
Sinclair also pushed the organization deep into the community in ways that matter. The Fresh StARTs, Musicians Go to School program, launched in 1993, has brought live, curriculum-connected music performances to as many as 30,000 Central Florida K–12 students in a single year.
The Fred Rogers Family Series, started in 2003 and named for Rollins alumnus Fred Rogers, makes classical music welcoming for kids and families. A Young Artist Competition, run in partnership with the Morse Museum, spots and supports outstanding young Florida musicians.
A Youth Choir, developed with Lake Highland Preparatory School, now performs both on its own and alongside the main ensemble.
Today, the Bach Festival runs multiple concert series throughout the year: the main annual festival across February weekends, a Visiting Artists Series, a Choral Masterworks Series, and family programming designed to keep pulling new audiences into Knowles Chapel season after season.
Still Here. Still Loud. Still Running.
The Bach Festival Choir is now one of the oldest performing arts ensembles in Florida. Its roughly 160 auditioned volunteer singers, many of them commuting impressive distances across Central Florida, perform at a level that has landed them on stages across three countries.
The annual festival stays rooted at Knowles Memorial Chapel and Tiedtke Concert Hall on the Rollins campus, and a hard-won endowment, built through community fundraising, choir member contributions, and a landmark gift from Tiedtke himself, gives the organization the structural stability that keeps it from depending on any single hero to survive.
This year, the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park marks its 91st year. The programs don't run out anymore. But the room still fills up, and when you trace it all the way back to one packed, program-less chapel on a March night in 1935, that's the whole story right there.
The Bach Festival runs annually in Winter Park, Florida, at Rollins College's Knowles Memorial Chapel and Tiedtke Concert Hall. For tickets, schedule, and education programs, visit https://bachfestivalflorida.org.
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Sources:
https://www.bachfestivalflorida.org/history-of-the-bach-festival https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5de6cc395719bc36391bcdcc/t/5e1731df5c0f5f1d47cb5b5a/1578578411232/75th-Anniversary-Book-Vol.-1.pdf https://winterparkmag.com/2024/12/27/thanks-mr-tiedtke-for-the-music/
https://www.bachfestivalflorida.org/john-sinclair-bio https://blogs.rollins.edu/libraryarchives/2021/04/02/founders-administrators-musicians-womens-roles-in-the-founding-of-the-bach-festival-society/
