Max Richter

Hamelin, Bedford, Florence

Max Richter was born in Hamelin, in Lower Saxony, on 22 March 1966, and grew up in Bedford, England, where he went to Bedford Modern School. As a child he heard Kraftwerk's Autobahn on a BBC documentary; later came Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Vangelis, and it was his milkman who introduced him to minimalism. He studied composition and piano at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Academy of Music, then went to Florence to study with Luciano Berio.

He co-founded the piano ensemble Piano Circus and stayed for ten years, making five albums with the group for Decca and Argo. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1988 he met the visual artist and filmmaker Yulia Mahr, who became his wife in 2003 and his collaborator.

Collaborations and Memoryhouse

In 1996 he worked with The Future Sound of London on Dead Cities, co-writing a track called Max, and also on The Isness. In 2000 he worked with Roni Size and Reprazent on In the Mode. His solo debut, Memoryhouse, followed in 2002, recorded with the BBC Philharmonic.

The Blue Notebooks

He wrote The Blue Notebooks in 2003, as the invasion of Iraq approached, and recorded it in a rush with little money. The strings were taped in a single three-hour session at Eastcote Studios in London, and Tilda Swinton read passages from Kafka and Czesław Miłosz between the pieces. Richter has called it a protest album about Iraq and a meditation on violence. Released on 130701, an imprint of FatCat, on 26 February 2004. Its second track, On the Nature of Daylight, a short elegy for string quintet, has done more than any other piece, in uDiscover's view, to make his name around the world.

Deutsche Grammophon reissued it in 2014, it went Silver in Britain, and The Guardian later placed it 21st among the best art-music works since 2000. Anniversary editions followed in 2018 and 2025.

Records for stage, screen and sleep

In 2005 he produced Vashti Bunyan's Lookaftering, and in 2006 he released Songs from Before, with Robert Wyatt reading Murakami. 24 Postcards in Full Colour came in 2008, the year his score for Waltz with Bashir won the European Film Award for Best Composer and he wrote Infra for a Wayne McGregor ballet, released as an album in 2010. Recomposed, his reworking of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, premiered at the Barbican in 2012 with Daniel Hope. He scored The Leftovers for HBO in 2014.

Sleep, a work of about eight and a half hours, was broadcast overnight on BBC Radio 3 on 27 September 2015, and Jarvis Cocker named it BBC 6 Music's album of the year. Richter has since performed it through the night in Los Angeles, Antwerp, Helsinki and Vienna. In 2016 he launched StudioRichter, his own imprint with Deutsche Grammophon. Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works, Voices, Voices 2, Exiles and The New Four Seasons followed, then In a Landscape on Decca in 2024, taken on a world tour alongside The Blue Notebooks, and Sleep Circle in 2025.

Daylight and Hamnet

On the Nature of Daylight took on a life of its own in film. Stranger than Fiction used it in 2006, Shutter Island in 2010, and Arrival in 2016, whose use of it led the Academy to rule Jóhann Jóhannsson's score ineligible for an Oscar. Television dramas from The Handmaid's Tale to The Last of Us followed, and by the 2020s critics were writing about its overuse.

In 2022 Richter and Mahr founded Studio Richter Mahr on a former alpaca farm in Oxfordshire. In June 2023 he played The Blue Notebooks complete at Glastonbury, with Swinton reading. Chloé Zhao's Hamnet (2025) uses On the Nature of Daylight for its climax, and his score for the film brought Richter his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Original Score, in 2026.