Max Richter on the Music That Made Him

Max Richter spent his early years living in a cramped apartment near Hamelin, Germany, where his parents would play Bach and Beatles LPs on a cheap record player that popped out of a suitcase. When he was three, they moved to the English market town of Bedford and he quickly shed any evidence of his remote past life. “It wasn’t that easy being a German kid at an English school,” the composer, 58, recalls. “I was bullied a lot. It was ‘Sieg Heil’ and all of that. So I basically ditched the whole German identity, on the outside.” In himself, however, Richter naturally reconciled that dual identity, just as he has the allegiances to classical, ambient, pop, and folk music that make him the musical polyglot he is today.

Off a country road in the leafy English county of Oxfordshire, Richter and his visual artist partner, Yulia Mahr, live in a sort of paradise. They operate in an eco-friendly arts hub, Studio Richter Mahr, purpose-built in the minimalist style of a specialist European coffee shop. It feels less like a workplace than a luxury commune. An assistant shows me around the 30-acre grounds, where squirrels dart in and out of multi-story feeders beside the solar-powered huts that accommodate resident artists. Down a rightward path is a herd of alpacas. Instead, we turn left to a vegetable farm bountiful enough to feed the Richter-Mahr payroll, which includes an assemblage of managers and assistants, a groundskeeper, occasional chefs and engineers, and a gardener, Wendy, who greets us with ripe green apples from the orchard. Upon our return, two black Labradors named Haku and Evie bound forth under the pretense of guardianship, but soon resume the business of cataloging our imported smells.

Studio Richter Mahr, 20 years in the making, was a glint in Richter’s eye when he made his surprise breakthrough, in 2004, with The Blue Notebooks. Something was in the air—bands like Sigur Rós, Múm, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor had been re-landscaping post-rock to make room for string sections—but Richter’s universal laments, in which yearning piano and string figures twirled atop electronic murmurs, illuminated an untrodden path for solo composers. Released on indie label FatCat, The Blue Notebooks sparked a new wave of contemporary classical, since advanced by Erased Tapes and Bedroom Community, that Richter reappraises, with a hint of nostalgia, on new album In a Landscape.

In the Richter tradition, In a Landscape is elegiac and resigned yet quietly triumphant. He tends to describe his music as hopeful, though it is the kind of hope that follows crisis—hope for emotional relief, political reconciliation, ecological repair. The record again combines electronics, instruments, and found sounds to create what he calls “fruitful new relationships” between concepts we see as polarized, an extension of the instinct for synthesizing genres and sensibilities that has fueled his unlikely success. His 2015 record Sleep—an eight-and-a-half-hour composition designed to appeal to the nocturnal subconscious—is among the most streamed classical albums ever.