Max Richter - A Protest in Silence

The beginning

One of the most precious musical creations of the last twenty-five years has been, at least for some, modern classical. It's not easy to define, since its rules or boundaries are hard to pin down, but broadly speaking it could be described as music written by composers with a classical background – strongly influenced by post-minimalism – who use, alongside traditional instrumentation (piano and strings), electronic instruments, sound manipulation and field recordings. But that still isn't enough to capture all its essential traits: what's missing is the main feature of modern classical, that predominantly melancholic and intimate mood, which on one hand pushes the listener toward peaceful isolation and solitary reflection on their own existence, and on the other is also capable – particularly in its orchestral passages – of reaching imperious, solemn flights of fancy. 

The modern classical composer certainly writes minimal music, but without that compulsive use of repetition that characterizes the whole American minimalist and post-minimalist school. Modern classical focuses above all on emotion and, very often, on sounds that are exportable to the world of cinema. Among the composers who paved the way for modern classical, the most famous and probably the most significant is Max Richter, by now a celebrity as well as a point of reference for this generation of musicians.

German, born in 1966, naturalized British, Max Richter finds a point of 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 sets itself apart from the contemporary classical music of composers like John Adams, David Lang or Arvo Part by increasingly eroding the divide between highbrow classical music and popular music. The formula Richter arrived at after much effort has proven successful, and today every one of his releases draws interest from a remarkably broad audience, ranging comfortably from classical music lovers to fans of rock or electronic music.

Music as a silent message of protest

Richter has described his music as a message of protest. One might wonder why, but the answer is simple: in a brutal age, where violence is widespread everywhere, his silence and his calmness could represent a revolutionary act. This starting point will lead him, over the years, to take an interest in the wars in Europe (Memoryhouse), in Iraq (The Blue Notebooks), in human rights (Voices), and in the tragedies of emigration (Exiles), always with that same calmness that makes his stance a complete alternative to the shouting and populism that dominate our times.

Memoryhouse, a debut on the rubble of Europe

Richter began his solo recording career in 2002 with Memoryhouse, an album that already contains in embryonic form many of the new ideas that would go on to become the pillars of post-classical. From the slow piano notes and strings and the field recordings of "Europa, After The Rain," to the sudden piano accelerations of "The Twins (Prague)" and the powerful, cinematic string concerto of "November," all the way to the anguished lyrical singing of "Sarajevo," a heart-rending requiem in memory of the atrocious events in the Balkans of those years. The composer paves the way for a career that will always remain tied to current events: in this case with a long requiem for a Europe torn apart by the war in the former Yugoslavia, later turning his gaze to Iraq, and then trying to remind us of the importance of the now-forgotten "Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

The Blue Notebooks: a modern classical milestone

These are all ideas that Richter would go on to develop even further in the years that followed, particularly with the subsequent The Blue Notebooks (2004) – an LP conceived both as an act of protest against the war in Iraq and as a meditation on his own troubled childhood – which today can be considered his masterpiece as well as the founding manifesto of modern classical.

Richter's second LP immediately suggests the birth of a new musical scene that could pave the way for an entire generation of artists. An album split into eleven tracks, often brief - some mere one-minute sketches, others stretching up to eight minutes - which, despite this fragmentation, comes across as a single, compact and indivisible sonic flow. The Blue Notebooks is a long journey into memory, with extremely minimal pianos acting as a backdrop to days spent on the beach with an old typewriter, framed by the sound of sea waves and readings from Franz Kafka and Czesław Miłosz. The album's two fascinating common threads are the clatter of the typewriter gathering free-flowing ideas and thoughts, and the female voice that whispers rather than declaims: together they form an intimate, personal diary.

The Blue Notebooks definitively sharpens all of Richter's earlier intuitions, reaching an absolute apex with the evocative, cinematic "On The Nature Of Daylight", which earned him international fame and placement in various Hollywood films. The piano and strings, which two years earlier had been struggling to find a synthesis, finally achieve it perfectly in these six melancholy minutes - close to ecstasy, sad and cathartic, as if daylight were tearing through the fog of a now-lost humanity.

In the shorter tracks, small, harmonious piano patterns coexist with ambient overdubs (the title track and "Horizon Variations"). Everything is perfect and balanced. Even when the piano alone takes center stage, the small miracle of "Vladimir Blues" occurs - a composition barely a minute long, extremely simple, yet in its acceleration able to conjure distant worlds.

In the longer pieces, such as "Shadow Journal", readings from Franz Kafka's "The Blue Octavo Notebooks", performed by actress Tilda Swinton over synth loops and sweeping strings, create an intimate, disorienting effect. The synthesizers with female choirs on "Iconography" take on almost religious overtones, and earned Richter the European Film Awards prize for best soundtrack for the animated film "Waltz with Bashir".

"Arboretum", "Old Song" and "Organum" could be described as a triptych of brief sketches in succession, blending modern classical and electronica, once again to be understood as a soundtrack for solitary thinkers adrift in space and time. "Old Song" plays on the passage of time and the decay of memories and musical formats, "Arboretum" is a small, highly successful sketch of electronic beats and strings, and "Organum" finds a poignant harmony of organ.

The third long track is "The Trees", which, after an opening in line with the rest of the album (reading, piano and strings), continues into a sustained, moving, cinematic piano crescendo - one of those flights of fancy that Richter is so capable of giving us.

Consolidation, from Songs From Before to Infra

Songs From Before (2006) picks up all of his previous intuitions, becoming almost a clone of itself, a template to follow without taking any risks. Enriched by readings by Robert Wyatt ("Flowers For Yulia", "Harmonium", "Time Passing", "Lullaby", "Verses") from the writer Haruki Murakami, the album once again reconciles classicism and modernity; tracks like "Autumn Music", "Fragment", "Sunlight" and "From The Rue Vilin" now bear a style and emotional quality that have become the German composer's recognizable signature.

24 Postcards In Full Colour (2008) takes a slightly different path, with Richter offering no fewer than twenty-four brief sketches averaging around a minute each - sonic miniatures that explore the role of the ringtones that now flood our daily 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, pushes the minimalism further; piano playing and silence coexist, while the string quintet, a constant presence in his earlier works, fades to the point of near-nonexistence. This is, so far, Richter's most experimental record, even though classical influences remain recognizable, if increasingly scattered, across its two compositions ("Infra" and "Journey").

From The Four Seasons to Sleep, the two most ambitious works

The moment thus arrives for his signing to the legendary Deutsche Grammophon label, which commissions him - an unmistakable mark of esteem - to rework one of the great classics of 18th-century Baroque music, Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons". An ambitious and extremely risky project for Richter, who in 2012 released Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons, a grand historical reworking of Vivaldi's masterpiece in post-minimalist form. Richter's version stays closely tied to the original, but the loops and occasional use of electronics constantly anchor it in modernity. The twelve reworked Vivaldi compositions are followed by "Shadow", a piece divided into five parts in which electronics instead dominate over faint traces of traditional Baroque strings.

Richter's ambition, having already taken on Vivaldi, outdoes itself with the colossal Sleep (2015), a staggering eight hours of music split into thirty-one compositions of about twenty minutes each, themselves broken down further into multiple parts for a total of two hundred and two tracks. Conceived to be listened to as if in a dream, or while actually asleep, the album is an immense melting pot that captures how modern classical should be understood today - where the link to the 19th-century tradition dissolves into a sea of ambient and minimalist influences, into the vocal experiments of "Non-Eternal", into cosmic moments that move away from the hideous sonic worlds of Ligeti or the claustrophobic darkness of Klaus Schulze, becoming instead something else entirely: welcoming, even human ("Cassiopea", "Space17", "Sublunar").

Ballet music on texts by Virginia Woolf

In 2017, the German composer released the ballet score Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works featuring readings of Virginia Woolf's texts. Divided into three parts (“Mrs. Dalloway”, “Orlando” and “The Waves”), this ballet music anticipates his later work and cements Richter's style, blending symphonic and electronic elements with repetitions that accelerate toward convulsive finales clearly inspired by Philip Glass, the principal mentor of this period.

In 2018, fifteen years after the release of The Blue Notebooks, Deutsche Grammophon issued a double-CD reissue to mark the anniversary (The Blue Notebooks – 15 Years Edition). The release is enriched with lengthy liner notes by the composer, a new piano piece (“A Catalogue Of Afternoons”), a handful of forgettable remixes, and above all a wonderfully successful version of “On The Nature Of Daylight”, overdubbed with the voice of jazz singer Dinah Washington from her 1960 track “This Bitter Earth”, whose lyrics fit the mood of the piece perfectly.

The trilogy on human rights and exile: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights becomes a symphony of remembrance.

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 quest for a pocket of peace and comfort, set against a society that he views as a constant, futile clash of opinions. In an age when those who shout tend to win out over those who reason, and human rights are increasingly perceived as a tiresome burden, the German artist composed one of his most powerful and evocative works, Voices (2020). He then had the brilliant idea of dusting off one of the masterpiece texts of the twentieth century, that hymn to humanity born from the rubble of the Second World War, the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, which, read today, seems almost a miracle of poetry and beauty, forcing us to reflect on just how far the world has regressed from those enlightened principles laid down in 1948.

Ogni individuo ha diritto di lasciare qualsiasi paese, incluso il proprio, e di ritornare nel proprio paese

(Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Richter is well aware of this, and stakes everything on the beauty and depth of the text, seeking to give voice (as the title suggests) to the silent victims of the denial of human rights, both past and present. Music becomes the vehicle for this operation: not innovative, but powerful, not too far removed from what Richter had already accustomed us to, yet able to amplify the emotional impact on the listener to entirely new levels. Piano and violin – in the German musician's familiar style – conjure sprawling, dreamlike worlds, minimalist and (at times) repetitive, yet capable of opening up into sweeping melodic crescendos that have for years defined a style now utterly unique and recognizable.

Ogni individuo ha il diritto di cercare e di godere in altri paesi asilo dalle persecuzioni

(Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Various readers take turns reciting all thirty articles of the Declaration, starting with the opening "All Human Beings," which lays out the first articles on the basic concepts of freedom and equality. The music first accompanies the reading in silence, then slowly emerges into a heartrending crescendo of strings that touches the noblest of feelings. A minimalist piano underpins "Origins," with old recordings of now-forgotten voices in the background, thoughts of freedom 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 limit: the result is a kind of requiem in which the lyrical singing becomes the suffering voice of the countless victims of abuse and the narcissism of power; the piece can only end, in a circle closing upon itself, with the first and most fundamental article of the Declaration ("All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights").

"Little Requiems" and "Mercy" close the album by foregrounding its neoclassical side; in particular, the five minutes of "Mercy" need no words at all, since piano and strings manage to speak for themselves, moving the listener as if in a kind of tribute to the authors of these texts, so significant to human history.

One could say this is one of Richter's finest albums. It's certainly the one in which the German composer delves most deeply into today's society, trying to capture its everyday contradictions and to warn that the path of hatred can only lead to new tragedies. Richter positions himself as an "alien" with respect to this new society manipulated by demagoguery and populism, underscoring the importance of reflection, silence and, above all, empathy for others. While the music on Voices revisits the stylistic hallmarks of the genre he pioneered, its emotional power probably reaches the peak of his career.

Voices 2 (2021) isn't exactly a new LP in the strict sense, but a variation on the themes of the most evocative pieces from Voices. The reading of the texts disappears in favor of ten instrumental compositions that Richter describes as the fitting soundtrack for fully reflecting on the meaning of the Declaration. So Voices 2 ties even more closely to the first album, as a meditative continuation on the deeper meaning of an immortal text that, alas, is read too little or without the attention it deserves.

Exiles (2021), performed in Tallinn by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, closes the trilogy on human rights and exiles from every corner of the world, with typically post-minimalist compositions ("Flowers Of Herself"), a few orchestral reworkings of older pieces, and the long, thirty-three-minute title track, which unfolds with extreme slowness, starting from two piano notes before being enriched by a full orchestra and a final tutti that fully captures the tragic epic of the exile.

The Return to Sleep

SLEEP: Tranquility Base, a thirty-minute EP, despite its brevity compared to its colossal starting point, represents the natural continuation of the parent work Sleep, a single classical symphony split into sixteen short compositions that once again interpret modern classical music. Tranquility Base is the spot on the Moon where American astronauts landed in 1969, a place that is in some ways ambiguous, a point of absolute silence but at the same time a symbol of humanity's greatest ambition.

The electronic component in the music of SLEEP: Tranquility Base grows ever more prominent minute by minute, starting from the opening organ, which betrays a link to the now-classic sound of the German composer, the father of modern classical, and which opens onto a brief female vocal line as the foundation of the entire composition, marking a closeness both to the lyrical tradition and to recent works like Voices. As the minutes pass, the piece proceeds through minimal but constant changes, transforming almost imperceptibly into something else entirely: from a typical modern classical composition (the first seven tracks) to an electronic work close to the minimalist ideas of Terry Riley (from the eighth track onward), before the two sides of Richter's work merge into one great melting pot starting with the eleventh piece, as if to pay tribute to and thank the two musical scenes without which the German composer probably wouldn't be who he is today.

In A Landscape, a tribute to John Cage

The title of Max Richter's ninth album is a clear nod to one of the masterpieces of John Cage. "In A Landscape," for anyone who loves 20th-century classical music — so often dismissed and misunderstood — is a kind of iconic monolith, a watershed moment containing elements of both traditional classical music and minimalist avant-garde music, so much so that it could be described, depending on one's point of view, as either one of the last compositions of classical music or the first composition of minimalist music.

Richter thus approaches this landmark of 20th-century music with a seventy-five-minute album containing nineteen tracks. Looking closer, though, there are actually only ten real compositions, interspersed with nine brief "Life Study" interludes that would struggle to engage even the most fanatical admirer of modern classical. In the ten compositions that actually count, Richter revisits all the stylistic traits that made him famous, with an ability to draw in the listener and, ultimately, a class that remains unmatched by any of the countless imitators spawned by the scene that found its founding father in The Blue Notebooks (2004).

Granted, it's hard to find anything new in Richter's music, but tracks like "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 an extremely high emotional impact, confirm the German artist as a composer capable of conjuring moving, cinematic atmospheres with enviable ease.

In A Landscape is therefore a good album for anyone approaching Richter's music for the first time. But the impression remains that Richter's last true masterpiece is still Voices (2020), an album that genuinely tried to broaden the horizons of modern classical - albeit using the same grammar - by opening up the possibility of successfully conveying universal messages of peace.

Still Sleeping

If Sleep was conceived as music to be listened to while asleep or to induce sleep (hence its eight-hour length), and the subsequent SLEEP: Tranquility Base (2023) aimed to be a hyper-minimal version of it, the new Sleep Circle represents a synthesis: a distillation contained within the span of one REM cycle (roughly ninety minutes). A less radical experiment than its predecessor and more accessible to the ever-growing audience following the German composer, Sleep Circle picks up Richter's instantly recognizable style, coming across in some ways as a synthesis of an idea of music as pure atmosphere, built from slow repetitions that create the same hypnotic effect in every piece. This dreamlike post-minimalism should probably be experienced the way the author intends it, namely while asleep: explicitly, and in true Eno-esque fashion, "music not to be listened to."

By now it seems pointless to expect innovative solutions or particular shifts in direction from Richter, especially on an album explicitly conceived as a simplified continuation of his most radical and most difficult-to-listen-to record. Certainly, anyone who expects music to offer, beyond atmosphere, a certain evolution over time might want something more from the German composer after years spent in his comfort zone. The talent is still there; the willingness to take risks, perhaps, no longer is.

Soundtracks: a quick overview

Max Richter is also, and perhaps above all given the sheer volume of his output, a highly sought-after composer of soundtracks for films and TV series. His soundtracks are so widespread that his music has become almost omnipresent, to the point that it's hard to imagine not having heard it at least once without realizing it. His albums for films and television productions are countless, and it's practically impossible to list them all in detail.

Among the TV series soundtracks worth highlighting are those for "Black Mirror" (the first episode of the third series, Nosedive), Taboo, The Leftovers, L'amica geniale, Invasion.

As for films, the best soundtracks are arguably those for Hostiles, Ad Astra, Perfect Sense and Spaceman.

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