Max Richter
Max Richter (/ˈrɪxtər/; German: [ˈʁɪçtɐ]; born 22 March 1966) is a German-born British composer and pianist. He works within postminimalist and contemporary classical styles.[1][2][3][4] Richter is classically trained, having graduated in composition from the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and studied with Luciano Berio in Italy.[5][6]
Max Richter
22 March 1966
Hamelin, Lower Saxony, West Germany
London, England
- Composer
- pianist
- producer
- Piano
- organ
- synthesizer
1994–present
- Studio Richter-Mahr
- Deutsche Grammophon
- 130701
- FatCat
- Universal
- Universal Classics and Jazz
- Late Junction
- Mute
- Delabel
- Milan
- CAM
- Colosseum
- JADE
- Fontana
- Silva Screen
- 7hings
Richter arranges, performs, and composes music for stage, opera, ballet and screen. He has collaborated with other musicians, as well as with performance, installation and media artists. He has recorded eight solo albums, and his music is widely used in cinema, such as the score of Ari Folman's animated war film Waltz with Bashir (2008).[7][8]
As of December 2019, Richter has passed one billion streams and one million album sales.[9]
Early life and career[edit]
Richter was born in Hamelin, Lower Saxony, West Germany. He grew up in Bedford, England, United Kingdom, and his education was at Bedford Modern School and Mander College of Further Education.[10] He studied composition and piano at the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Music, and with Luciano Berio in Florence.[11][12] After finishing his studies, Richter co-founded the contemporary classical ensemble Piano Circus.[13] He stayed with the group for ten years, commissioning and performing works by minimalist musicians such as Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, and Steve Reich. The ensemble was signed to Decca/Argo, producing five albums.
In 1996, Richter collaborated with Future Sound of London on their album Dead Cities, beginning as a pianist, but ultimately working on several tracks, as well as co-writing one track (titled Max). Richter worked with the band for two years, also contributing to the albums The Isness and The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness. In 2000, Richter worked with Mercury Prize winner Roni Size on the Reprazent album In the Møde. Richter produced Vashti Bunyan's 2005 album Lookaftering[14] and Kelli Ali's 2008 album Rocking Horse.[15][16][10]
Film and television work[edit]
Richter has created numerous film and television soundtracks over the years. He rose to prominence with his score to Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir in 2007,[68] in which he supplanted a standard orchestral soundtrack with synth-based sounds and winning him the European Film Award for Best Composer. He also scored the independent feature film Henry May Long, starring Randy Sharp and Brian Barnhart, in 2008, and wrote the music for Feo Aladag's film Die Fremde (with additional music by Stéphane Moucha).[69]
In 2010, Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth" was remixed with Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" for the Martin Scorsese film Shutter Island.[70] In July 2010, "On the Nature of Daylight" and "Vladimir's Blues" were featured throughout the BBC Two two-part drama Dive, which was co-written by BAFTA-winning Dominic Savage and Simon Stevens. "On the Nature of Daylight" was also featured in an episode of HBO's television series Luck.[71] Four tracks—"Europe, After the Rain", "The Twins (Prague)", "Fragment", and "Embers"—were used in the six-part 2005 BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution produced by Laurence Rees.[72] Richter also wrote the soundtrack to Peter Richardson's documentary, How to Die in Oregon,[73] and the score to Impardonnables (2011) directed by André Téchiné.[74]
An excerpt of the song "Sarajevo" from his 2002 album Memoryhouse was used in the international trailer for the Ridley Scott film Prometheus. The track "November", from the same album, was featured in the international trailer for Terrence Malick's 2012 film, To the Wonder, and in the trailer for Clint Eastwood's 2011 film, J. Edgar. Films featuring Richter's music released in 2011 include French drama Sarah's Key by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and David MacKenzie's romantic thriller Perfect Sense. In 2012 he composed the scores for Henry Alex Rubin's Disconnect and Cate Shortland's Australian-German war thriller Lore. Richter again collaborated with Folman on The Congress, which was released in 2013.
Richter composed the original soundtrack for the HBO series The Leftovers, created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, which was premiered in June 2014. Some of these compositions are included in the albums Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks.[75] He also composed the score for the WW1 feature film Testament of Youth in 2014.
In 2016, Richter composed the score to "Nosedive", an episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. Also that year, he scored Luke Scott's debut feature Morgan and the political thriller Miss Sloane, while his piece "On the Nature of Daylight" opened and closed Denis Villeneuve's film Arrival. "On the Nature Of Daylight" also closes episode 7 of Castle Rock, "The Queen". He composed all the music in BBC One's drama Taboo which was broadcast in January and February 2017.[76]
In 2017, The Current War used Richter's "Spring 1".[77]
In 2017, documentary film maker Nancy Buirski used the track combining Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth" with Richter's "On The Nature of Daylight", first heard in Shutter Island, in her film The Rape of Recy Taylor.[78]
In December 2017, an excerpt of Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons was used in The Crown season 2 as the theme for Princess Margaret's (Vanessa Kirby) turbulent courtship with photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode).
In 2018, Richter composed music for the films Hostiles by Scott Cooper starring Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike, White Boy Rick starring Matthew McConaughey, the German film Never Look Away, and Mary Queen of Scots starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie. He also composed music for the mini-series My Brilliant Friend on HBO.
In 2019, Richter scored the film Ad Astra starring Brad Pitt with additional music by Nils Frahm and Lorne Balfe. An excerpt of his rendition of Dona nobis pacem was used for the fifth season of the BBC series Peaky Blinders created by Steven Knight.[79]
In 2021, his piece "On The Nature of Daylight" was, yet again, used in a TV show The Handmaid's Tale for a scene in season 4, episode 9. Interestingly, three years earlier Elisabeth Moss, the lead actress of the show, starred in Richter's music video of the same piece. As a director of the episode, as well as the star, Moss specifically chose the piece.[80][81]
In October 2021, Richter composed the original score for the Apple TV series Invasion.[82]
In 2023 the track "On The Nature of Daylight" was featured in the third episode of the HBO series The Last of Us.[83]
Ballet, opera and stage works[edit]
Richter wrote the score to Infra as part of a Royal Ballet-commissioned collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor and artist Julian Opie. The production was staged at the Royal Opera House in London in 2008. In 2011, Richter composed a chamber opera based on neuroscientist David Eagleman's book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. The opera was choreographed by Wayne McGregor and premiered at the Royal Opera House Linbury Studio Theatre in 2012. The piece received positive reviews, with London's Evening Standard saying "[it] fits together rather beautifully".[84] Their collaboration continued in April 2014 with Wayne McGregor's 'Kairos'; a ballet set to Richter's recomposition of the Four Seasons and part of a collaborative program involving three different choreographers titled 'Notations' with Ballett Zürich.[85] In 2015 Richter and McGregor collaborated again on a new full-length ballet, Woolf Works, inspired by three novels by Virginia Woolf.[86]
Crystal Pite has also choreographed a ballet to Richter's Vivaldi Recomposed, titled The Seasons' Canon, which premiered at the Opera National de Paris in 2016.[87] Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot choreographed a piece to Richter's "Exiles" for the Nederlands Dans Theater.[88]
In 2012/13, Richter contributed music to The National Theatre of Scotland's production of Macbeth, starring Alan Cumming. The play opened at New York's Lincoln Centre and subsequently moved to Broadway.[89] The company had previously used Richter's "Last Days" in their acclaimed production of Black Watch.
Richter worked on a project based on Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons and made a ballet with artist Idris Khan.[90]
Richter was called upon again[91] by past collaborator Wayne McGregor to score and produce an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada and The Royal Ballet in 2022, wherein his orchestral and electronically produced compositions, both alone and together, help to realize Atwood's dystopian vision.
Other collaborations[edit]
In 2010, Richter's soundscape The Anthropocene formed part of Darren Almond's film installation at the White Cube gallery in London. The composer has also collaborated with digital art collective Random International on two projects, contributing scores to the installations Future Self (2012),[92] staged at the MADE space in Berlin, and Rain Room (2012/13) at London's Barbican Centre[93] and MOMA, in New York.[94]
Personal life[edit]
Richter met visual artist Yulia Mahr at the Edinburgh Festival in 1988. They began living together, in Islington, London, in 1993 and went on to have three children, born in 1998, 1999 and 2008. They married in 2003 and celebrated with a garden party.[95]
The couple lives in Oxfordshire[96][97][98] and their three children, two black Labradors and a cat.[99] They have previously also lived in Edinburgh and Berlin.[99]
