Max Richter

The Beginning

One of the most precious musical creatures of the last twenty-five years has been, at least for some, modern classical. Defining it is not simple, since it is difficult to establish precise rules or boundaries, but broadly speaking it may be described as music written by composers with a classical background — strongly influenced by post-minimalism — who, alongside traditional instrumentation (piano and strings), make use of electronic instruments, sound manipulations, and field recordings. Yet this still isn’t enough to fully define its essential traits: what is missing is the main aspect of modern classical — that chiefly melancholic and intimate mood which, on one hand, pushes the listener toward peaceful isolation and self-reflection, and on the other hand is also capable — particularly in orchestral moments — of reaching imperious and solemn flights of fancy.

The modern classical composer certainly writes minimal music, but without the compulsive use of repetition that characterises the entire American minimalist and post-minimalist school. Modern classical focuses primarily on emotional impact and, very often, on sonorities that can be exported into the world of cinema. Among the composers who paved the way for modern classical, the most famous and perhaps the most significant is Max Richter — by now a celebrity and a definitive point of reference for this generation of musicians.
German, born in 1966 and naturalized British, Max Richter finds a balance between the post-minimalism of Philip Glass, the ambient music of Brian Eno, and contemporary classical music from Erik Satie to John Cage. Richter’s modern classical diverges from the contemporary classical of composers like John Adams, David Lang or Arvo Pärt in the way it gradually erodes the gap between highbrow classical music and popular music. His carefully refined formula has been successful, and each of his releases now draws the interest of a very broad audience — from classical enthusiasts to fans of rock or electronic music.

Music as a Silent Protest

Richter has defined his music as a message of protest. One might wonder why, but the answer is simple: in a brutal age, where violence is widespread, silence and calm can themselves become revolutionary acts. This premise has led him over the years to engage with the wars in Europe (Memoryhouse), in Iraq (The Blue Notebooks), with human rights (Voices), and with the tragedies of migration (Exiles), always with that serene composure which positions him in stark contrast to the shouting and populism that dominate contemporary life.

Memoryhouse, a Debut Built on the Ruins of Europe

Richter began his solo discographic career in 2002 with Memoryhouse, an album that already contains many of the new ideas that would become pillars of post-classical. From the slow piano and string notes to the field recordings of “Europa, After The Rain,” from the sudden piano accelerations of “The Twins (Prague)” to the powerful, cinematic string concerto “November,” and on to the heartbreaking vocal lament of “Sarajevo,” a mournful requiem for the atrocities of the Balkan wars. With this work, the composer begins a career that will always remain tied to contemporary events: here a long requiem for a Europe devastated by the Yugoslav conflicts, later a gaze toward Iraq, and eventually a meditation on the importance of the now neglected “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”



The Blue Notebooks: A Modern Classical Milestone

Richter would develop all these ideas even further in the following years, particularly with The Blue Notebooks (2004) — an LP conceived both as an act of protest against the Iraq war and as a meditation on his troubled childhood — which today can be considered his masterpiece and the founding manifesto of modern classical.
Richter’s second LP immediately suggests the birth of a new musical scene capable of opening the way for an entire generation of artists. The album is divided into eleven often short tracks — some no more than one-minute sketches, others stretching to eight minutes — yet despite this fragmentation it feels like a single, cohesive, indivisible sonic flow. The Blue Notebooks are a long voyage into memory: extremely minimal pianos set the stage for days spent at the beach with an old typewriter, accompanied by the sound of waves and readings from Franz Kafka and Czesław Miłosz. Two recurring elements dominate the album: the typewriter’s rhythmic tapping, capturing free-flowing thoughts, and a female voice that whispers rather than declaims — together forming an intimate personal diary.

The Blue Notebooks sharpens all of Richter’s earlier intuitions, reaching absolute heights with the evocative and cinematic “On The Nature Of Daylight,” which earned him international recognition and appearances in various Hollywood films. The piano and strings, which two years earlier were still struggling to find synthesis, now merge perfectly in these six melancholic minutes hovering between sadness and ecstasy, as though daylight were piercing the fogs of a lost humanity.
In the brief tracks, delicate piano patterns blend with ambient overlays (“The Blue Notebooks,” “Horizon Variations”). Everything is perfectly balanced. Even when the piano stands alone, the small miracle of “Vladimir Blues” occurs: a composition barely a minute long, extremely simple, yet evocative of distant worlds through its quickening momentum.

In the longer pieces, such as “Shadow Journal,” readings from Kafka’s Octavo Notebooks by Tilda Swinton over synth loops and wide string textures create an intimate, disorienting effect. The synths and female choir of “Iconography” assume almost religious connotations, earning Richter the European Film Award for Best Soundtrack for the animated film *Waltz with Bashir*.
“Arboretum,” “Old Song,” and “Organum” can be seen as a triptych of modern-classical/ electronic miniatures, again conceived as soundtracks for solitary thinkers adrift in space and time. “Old Song” reflects on the decay of time and memory, “Arboretum” offers a small but effective blend of electronic beats and strings, and “Organum” finds a touching harmony for organ.
The third long piece is “The Trees,” which begins in line with the rest of the album (reading, piano, strings) and then builds into a moving and cinematic piano crescendo — one of those soaring moments Richter excels at.


Consolidation: from Songs From Before to Infra

Songs From Before (2006) takes up all the previous intuitions, becoming almost a clone, a template to follow without running risks. Enriched by readings from Robert Wyatt (“Flowers For Yulia,” “Harmonium,” “Time Passing,” “Lullaby,” “Verses”) of texts by the writer Haruki Murakami, the album once again reconciles classicism and modernity; pieces such as “Autumn Music,” “Fragment,” “Sunlight,” “From The Rue Vilin” display a style and emotional intensity that have by now become the German composer’s unmistakable hallmark.

Moving along a slightly different path, 24 Postcards In Full Colour (2008) presents twenty-four short sketches, with an average duration of about a minute each, sonic miniatures that explore the role of ringtones that have come to flood our everyday lives.

Infra (2010), inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” and commissioned by renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor for his ballet of the same name, emphasises the minimalist aspect; piano and silence coexist, while the string quintet, always present in previous works, becomes so faint as to verge on disappearance. This is, so far, Richter’s most experimental record, even though the classical influences remain recognisable, albeit increasingly scattered across the two main compositions (“Infra” and “Journey”).

From The Four Seasons to Sleep: Two of His Most Ambitious Works

The time then comes for his debut on the historic Deutsche Grammophon label, which, as an unmistakable sign of respect, commissions him to rework one of the great classics of eighteenth-century Baroque music: Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” A highly ambitious and risky project for Richter, who in 2012 releases Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, a grand historical reimagining of the Vivaldi masterpiece in a post-minimalist key. Richter’s version remains tightly linked to the original, yet the loops and occasional use of electronics firmly anchor it in modernity. The twelve reworked Vivaldian compositions are followed by “Shadow,” a work in five parts where electronics take centre stage over faint echoes of traditional Baroque strings.



Richter’s ambition, after having taken on Vivaldi, reaches new heights with the colossal Sleep (2015): eight hours of music divided into thirty-one compositions of roughly twenty minutes each, themselves split into multiple parts for a total of two hundred and two tracks. Conceived to be listened to while dreaming or asleep, the album is a vast cauldron that aptly represents what modern classical should mean today, where the link with nineteenth-century tradition dissolves into a sea of ambient and minimalist influences, vocal experiments such as “Non-Eternal,” and cosmic passages that stray far from Ligeti’s terrifying sonic landscapes or the dark claustrophobia of Klaus Schulze to become something else entirely — welcoming, and even humane (“Cassiopea,” “Space17,” “Sublunar”).



Music for Ballet on Texts by Virginia Woolf

In 2017, the German composer releases the ballet score Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works, built around readings from Virginia Woolf. Divided into three parts (“Mrs. Dalloway,” “Orlando,” and “The Waves”), this ballet music foreshadows his later works and consolidates Richter’s style with a mix of symphonic and electronic elements and repetitions that accelerate towards frenzied climaxes clearly inspired by Philip Glass, his main guiding light in these years.



In 2018, fifteen years after the original release of The Blue Notebooks, Deutsche Grammophon issues a double-CD reissue to celebrate the anniversary (The Blue Notebooks - 15 Years Edition). The release is enriched by extensive liner notes by the author, a new piano piece (“A Catalogue Of Afternoons”), some forgettable remixes, and above all a highly successful version of “On The Nature Of Daylight” featuring the overdubbed voice of jazz singer Dinah Washington and her 1960 song “This Bitter Earth,” whose lyrics perfectly match the track’s mood.



The Human Rights and Exiles Trilogy: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Becomes a Symphony Not to Forget

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status
(Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Max Richter has always seen his music as a search for a corner of peace and consolation, in contrast with a society perceived as a constant, fruitless clash of violent opinions. In these times, when those who shout always prevail over those who reason and human rights are increasingly seen as a bothersome burden, the German artist has composed one of his most powerful and evocative works, Voices (2020). His brilliant idea was to bring back to the forefront one of the great texts of the twentieth century, that hymn to humanity born from the ruins of the Second World War: the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which, when reread today, appears almost as a miracle of poetry and beauty, prompting reflection on how much the world has regressed from the enlightened principles enshrined in 1948.

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country
(Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Richter is keenly aware of this and places all his bets on the text’s beauty and depth, seeking to give a voice (as the title suggests) to the silent victims of human-rights violations past and present. Music becomes the vehicle for this project: not innovative, but powerful; not radically different from what Richter had already accustomed us to, yet capable of amplifying the emotional impact on the listener to entirely new levels. Piano and violin — in the composer’s signature style — create dilated, dreamlike worlds, minimalist and at times repetitive, but capable of soaring into imperious melodic crescendos that over the years have become a unique and recognisable stylistic trait.

Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution
(Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Various narrators take turns reading all thirty articles of the Declaration, starting with “All Human Beings,” which presents the first articles on the fundamental concepts of freedom and equality. At first the music silently accompanies the reading, then slowly comes to the fore, building to a searing string crescendo that touches the noblest emotions. A minimalist piano underpins “Origins,” with old recordings of long-forgotten voices in the background — voices of freedom of thought smothered by time.
“Journey Pieces” is the most ethereal track, and together with the following “Chorale” is dedicated to the individual freedoms that no state should ever curtail: what emerges is a kind of requiem in which the lyrical voice becomes the lament of countless victims of abuse and the narcissism of power; fittingly, the piece ends, like a circle closing, with the Declaration’s first and most fundamental article (“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”).



“Little Requiems” and “Mercy” close the album by emphasising its neoclassical features; in particular, the five minutes of “Mercy” no longer need any words, as piano and strings speak for themselves, moving the listener as though in a kind of thanksgiving to the authors of this text so crucial to human history.
One could say this is among Richter’s finest albums. It is certainly the one in which the German composer engages most deeply with contemporary society, probing its everyday contradictions and warning us that the path of hatred can only lead to new tragedies. Richter positions himself as an “alien” within a society increasingly shaped by demagogy and populism, reminding us of the importance of reflection, silence and, above all, empathy toward others. If the music on Voices reprises the typical stylistic features of the genre he helped found, its emotional power probably reaches the peak of his career.



Voices 2 (2021) is not exactly a new LP in the strict sense, but rather a thematic variation on the more evocative tracks from Voices. The readings of the text disappear, replaced by ten instrumental compositions that Richter describes as the ideal soundtrack for contemplating the meaning of the Declaration in full. Voices 2 thus ties even more tightly to the first album, as a meditative continuation on the deeper significance of an immortal text that is, sadly, rarely read and even more rarely given the attention it deserves.

Exiles (2021), performed in Tallinn by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, closes the trilogy on human rights and exiles of every corner of the world with typically post-minimalist compositions (“Flowers Of Herself”), several orchestral reworkings of older pieces, and the thirty-three-minute title track, which evolves with extreme slowness, beginning with two piano notes and gradually building to a full orchestra and a massed final tutti that perfectly captures the tragic epic of the exile.



The Return to Sleep

SLEEP: Tranquility Base, a thirty-minute EP, despite its brevity compared to the monumental original, is the natural continuation of the mother work Sleep: a single classical symphony divided into sixteen short pieces that once again reinterpret modern classical. Tranquility Base is the area of the Moon where American astronauts landed in 1969, an in some ways ambiguous place — one of absolute silence, yet at the same time a symbol of humankind’s utmost ambition.
In SLEEP: Tranquility Base, the electronic component in Richter’s music becomes more prominent minute by minute, starting from the opening organ, which signals a link to the now-classic sound of the German composer, father of modern classical, and introduces a brief female vocal line as the piece’s foundation, bridging both the operatic tradition and recent works such as Voices. As the minutes go by, the work proceeds through subtle yet constant changes, to the point of transforming — almost imperceptibly — into something else: from a typical modern-classical composition (the first seven tracks) to an electronic piece close to Terry Riley’s minimalist concept (from the eighth track onwards), and finally reuniting Richter’s two main influences into a single large cauldron from the eleventh track, as if to pay homage and give thanks to the two musical scenes without which he would likely not be the composer he is today.

In A Landscape, a Tribute to John Cage

The title of Max Richter’s ninth album is a clear reference to one of the masterpieces by John Cage. For those who love twentieth-century classical music — so often opposed and misunderstood — “In A Landscape” is a sort of iconic monolith, a watershed moment containing elements of both traditional classical music and minimalist avant-garde, to the point of being described, depending on your perspective, either as one of the last works of classical music or as the first piece of minimalist music.
Richter thus faces this twentieth-century milestone with a seventy-five-minute album consisting of nineteen tracks. On closer inspection, the actual compositions number ten, interspersed with nine brief “Life Study” pieces that are unlikely to interest even the most obsessive modern-classical devotee. In the ten main compositions, Richter reprises all the stylistic features that made him famous, with a capacity to involve the listener and, ultimately, with a classy touch still unmatched by the many epigones of a musical scene whose founding work was The Blue Notebooks (2004).
It is certainly hard to find real innovations in Richter’s music here, but tracks such as “And Some Will Fall,” almost as heartbreaking as one of his most celebrated pieces, “On The Nature Of Daylight,” or “They Will Shade Us With Their Wings,” eight minutes of strings with tremendous emotional impact, confirm the German artist as a composer capable of conjuring cinematic, affecting atmospheres with enviable ease.
In A Landscape is thus a good record for those approaching Richter’s music for the first time. Yet the impression remains that his last true masterpiece is still Voices (2020), the album that genuinely attempted — albeit with the same musical grammar — to broaden the horizons of modern classical, opening it up to the possibility of successfully conveying universal messages of peace.



Sleeping Again

If Sleep was conceived as music to be listened to while sleeping — or to evoke sleep (hence its eight-hour duration) — and the subsequent SLEEP: Tranquility Base (2023) aimed to be its hyper-minimal version, the new Sleep Circle represents a synthesis: a distillation compressed into the length of a REM cycle (about ninety minutes).
Less radical than its predecessor and more accessible to the increasingly large audience following the German composer, Sleep Circle reprises Richter’s highly recognisable style, and in some ways serves as a summary of a musical idea that is pure atmosphere, realised through slow repetitions that create the same hypnotic effect in each piece. This dreamlike post-minimalism is probably best experienced in the way the author suggests — that is, during sleep: explicitly and Eno-like, “music to not listen to.”
At this point, it seems pointless to expect innovative solutions or radical shifts in direction from Richter, especially on a record that is overtly intended as a streamlined continuation of his most radical and demanding work. Certainly, those who expect from music not only atmosphere but also a certain sense of evolution over time might wish for more from the German composer, after so many years spent in his comfort zone. The talent is still there; the willingness to take risks perhaps less so.

Soundtracks: A Quick Overview

Max Richter is also — and perhaps above all, given the sheer number of releases — a highly sought-after composer of film and television scores. His soundtracks are so widespread that his music has become almost omnipresent: it is hard to imagine never having heard it at least once, even unknowingly. His albums for films and TV productions are so numerous that it is practically impossible to mention them all in detail.
The most notable TV scores include those for “Black Mirror” (the first episode of the third series, Nosedive), Taboo, The Leftovers, My Brilliant Friend, and Invasion.
As for films, his best soundtracks might be those for Hostiles, Ad Astra, Perfect Sense and Spaceman.