Although he is best known as a choral conductor, Roland Bader has also been active in front of voiceless orchestras, recording the music of Weill, Paderewski, Joachim, and some lesser-known composers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Yet Bader's primary interest has been choral music, a fact borne out by his recordings of mainstream and offbeat eighteenth and nineteenth century masses and other liturgical works by the likes of Mozart, Bruch, Beethoven, Bruckner, Weber, and even Nicolai, Suppé, and Donizetti. Bader studied at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule. His career was rather slow to develop until he became chief conductor at Oberhausen, where he served 1970 - 1974. He was also director of the Folkwang Hochschule at Essen and choral director of St. Hedvig's Cathedral in Berlin starting in 1974. His profile became much higher in the 1980s; he served as chief guest conductor with the Krakow Philharmonic and choral director at NDR, Hamburg, from 1983. He also began making regular choral appearances at the Salzburg Festival in 1984.