Max Richter
Max Richter (b. 1966) was born in Germany, raised in the UK, trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and spent his early career on the radical edge of the avant-garde — working with Luciano Berio, studying with Dennis Russell Davies, and co-founding the contemporary classical group Piano Circus in 1989. He released several albums of dense, rigorous post-minimalist music before reaching the conclusion that the concert hall was too small for what he wanted to say. After a period of crisis and depression — documented in interviews with devastating candor — he abandoned the academic world and pivoted toward film scoring, chamber music, and the kind of emotionally direct composition he had always been told was not serious enough.
The pivot produced a body of work of extraordinary breadth. His score for the Wachowskis' 'Waltz with Bashir' (2008) brought him international attention; his reinterpretation of Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons' (2015) became one of the most-streamed classical albums in history. 'Sleep' (2015), an eight-hour orchestral work designed to be listened to during sleep, was performed live over three nights at London's Barbican and streaming globally — a radical statement about music's relationship to time, consciousness, and attention. 'From Sleep' (2017) extracted a stand-alone suite for concert performance. His later scores — 'Arrival', 'The Leftovers', 'Hostiles', 'White Lines' — demonstrate a facility for extracting maximum emotional meaning from minimal musical means. His writing for ballet (Mary Skelton's 'infra') and his ongoing collaboration with soprano Anaïs Mitchell on 'Hadestown' add further dimensions to a career that refuses to sit still.
Richter's music is built on a tension between modernist structure and romantic accessibility. He uses extended harmony, slow harmonic rhythm, and repetitive figuration in the tradition of Glass and Adams, but adds a tonal vocabulary — memorable themes, functional harmony, emotional legibility — that keeps his work grounded in the human. His orchestral writing is lush without being saccharine; his piano writing is spare without being cold. The combination has made him one of the most-streamed and most-influential composers working today.
StylePost-minimalist harmony with tonal accessibility; slow harmonic rhythm; emotional directness; film and ballet scoring; extended-format works (Sleep, The Four Seasons recomposition); collaboration across genres (electronic, vocal, ballet); influences from Glass, Adams, Richter's own avant-garde background.
Listen: 'Sleep' (2015, Deutsche Grammophon) — an eight-hour orchestral and electronic work for nighttime listening; or 'The Leftovers' soundtrack (2014) for a condensed demonstration of his scoring voice.