How Max Richter, the billion-stream man, topped the charts
A decade ago, composer Max Richter was nearly broke; now he’s the most-streamed classical artist in the world. What changed?
Toward the end of the 2000s, Max Richter read something deeply concerning that made him question whether the world had gone wrong in a new and drastic way. His response was to write a piece of music, which he created for himself as a way to try to process what had come to light in redacted CIA documents relating to black sites at Guantanamo Bay, the military prison in Cuba where inmates were held in indefinite detention without trial by the United States government.
Named Mercy, the five-minute piece was designed as “a space to think”, as Richter is fond of framing such matters. This artistic response to troubling stimuli was not new for the German-born, British-raised composer, whose 2004 release The Blue Notebooks was a protest album of sorts, given that it was written in the lead-up to the costly Iraq War – a time in history where, to his mind, politics and fiction started to become one and the same.
Built on plaintive piano chords and a mournful violin melody, Mercy is a striking and emotive piece that is instantly identifiable as coming from Richter’s pen, for in the last decade he has become one of the most popular composers working today.
Through his ruminative blend of minimalism, electronica, traditional classical and occasional use of spoken word, he has the ability to tap into deep-seated, universal human emotions in a hyper-connected era where carving out time and space for self-reflection can sometimes seem like an impossible luxury.
Given those rare and desirable qualities, it is unsurprising that his parent record label, Universal, claims he is the most-streamed classical artist in the world, with more than one billion streams to his name.
Back then, Richter sensed that Mercy was a pencil sketch for something that could become much bigger, but its true form had yet to reveal itself. No matter, for the 54 year-old is nothing if not patient and willing to let his artistic instincts loose in his subconscious, as he trusts that worthy ideas will present themselves when the time is right.
“It’s just been bubbling away in the background,” he says of the larger idea that Mercy hinted at. “Once you start a piece, you never really stop writing it; it’s always writing itself somewhere in the back of your head.”
In the meantime, there have been plenty of other projects to sink his molars into, especially once a choice placement in the 2010 Martin Scorsese film Shutter Island paired his song On the Nature of Daylight with a vocal by US R&B singer Dinah Washington, who died in 1963.
“At the time I’d made The Blue Notebooks and a few other records, but I was broke,” Richter tells Review from his home near Oxford in early July. “I was just nowhere. So to get a call from [music supervisor] Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese for their movie – that was kind of a big deal for me. It was thrilling.”
Despite the significance of that use of his music in a popular film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Richter shrugs off the suggestion that his life could be viewed in terms of before and after Shutter Island. “Things don’t really work that way – or at least not in my life,” he replies. “When you’re a kid, you always think, ‘One phone call and then you’re going to be [successful] – that’s it!’ But it’s really not like that at all. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I just sort of keep doing it.”
Given he was broke prior to that phone call, though, surely it made a material difference to his personal wealth – and then he got more of those calls as a result? “Yeah, people noticed the material, and noticed the music …” He pauses, then chuckles. “’Career’ is a grand word. I mean, music is not like that, is it? It’s a thing you do because you love doing it, and you can’t not do it. That’s what music is.”
What would it mean to the mental health of our species if two per cent of the world’s population – about 140 million people – suddenly disappeared without warning, and without explanation? That is the unsettling question at the centre of The Leftovers, a US television series based on Tom Perrotta’s book that began screening in 2014. Cast alongside a stellar group of actors was Richter, whose distinctive score – heavily reliant on piano, strings, horns and electronics – was essentially a starring character in itself.
Across three seasons, The Leftovers grappled with themes of grief, faith, love and family identity, while its sprawling narrative also made an unexpected detour to Australia in its final season, which aired in 2017. Although it never quite attracted the mega audience of HBO stable mates such as Game of Thrones, it was still an award-winning cult hit. Once seen, it is the sort of show that sticks with you – and so does Richter’s score.
“I wasn’t really interested in doing TV, to be honest, before I read the script for The Leftovers, and I just thought it was the best thing I’d read for years,” he recalls. “It was just so good, so I couldn’t say no. From a musical standpoint, it really played very much into the kinds of things I like to explore musically, which are the biggest emotional questions which we all face. That’s what The Leftovers is all about; it lives there. It was a very intense and very involving experience, but incredibly satisfying creatively, just because it was a fantastic team.”
On a handful of occasions Richter has assembled a group of musicians to perform the score live for an audience – often on October 14, the date of the sudden departure where millions of people vanished – with the most recent being in 2018 at the New York Town Hall. Many in attendance at these concerts choose to wear all-white clothing in tribute to the “guilty remnant”, the series’ silent and nihilistic cult who act as living reminders for what everyone has lost.
His work on The Leftovers can be viewed as the midpoint in an extraordinary – and extraordinarily diverse – decade of work comprising many distinct recordings, both for screen and for the German classical record label Deutsche Grammophon. In 2013, for instance, he approached Vivaldi’s 18th century violin concertos The Four Seasons with fresh ears, under the title Recomposed.
“That was a very personal salvage operation for me; that was me reconnecting to a piece that I loved when I was a little child, and then had grown to kind of hate, because I kept hearing it on advertising for insurance and things,” he says. “So I just wanted to try and reconnect with the basics of that piece, and explore them in a musical way, and see if I could find something in there to love.”
He did, and he wasn’t alone in finding that love: on its release, The Four Seasons Recomposed was awarded five stars in these pages by classical music critic Graham Strahle, who deemed it “one of the cleverest pieces of musical postmodernism”.
Richter says he was “expecting to get destroyed” by classical purists for having the gall to attempt to reconfigure such a revered work, which was perhaps part of the attraction. “I’m interested in the notes on the page, and the music; that’s what I can control,” he says. “I can’t control anything else. I did kind of assume I was going to get fried, but I wanted to do it for musical reasons – so I just went ahead anyway.”
Clearly, Richter is fond of a challenge, and of stretching the boundaries of convention. “Music is a historical form: as well as being about your feelings or your ideas in the present moment, it’s also about other music,” he says. “All guitar bands are about previous guitar bands; Beethoven was about Mozart; Mahler was about Beethoven, and it’s just how it is. We fall in love with music because of the music we hear. So actually, this process of recontextualising, reimagining and finding an accommodation with previous music is happening all the time in music, and it has [been] since the beginning, really.”
His 2015 release Sleep, meanwhile, was an eight-hour lullaby designed to accompany that very act, and on the few occasions he has performed it live – such as at the Sydney Opera House in 2016 – attendees bought a bed for a night, rather than a seat for a few hours, with the final stages of the performance timed to coincide with sunrise.
At each Sleep concert, Richter was on stage playing piano and electronics for seven hours while seven musicians and a soprano came and went, like a relay race, as its 31 structured sections repeated a small number of harmonic and melodic themes. “Aesthetically, psychologically, it’s a very demanding project – which is paradoxical,” he told The Monthly ahead of the Sydney premiere.
Through each of these challenging compositions and performances – and many more besides, for Richter’s output is a pool of remarkable depth and breadth – that pencil sketch of Mercy written toward the end of the 2000s worked away on his subconscious, and when the opportunity presented itself between commissions, he would devote himself to experimenting and puzzling over what the broader canvas might look like.
“Over the intervening years, the music has taken a lot of different forms, from a quite brutalist, almost [heavy] metal-type approach, to the current version, which is really quite different,” he says. “A huge amount of material has been thrown away, because it’s changed direction quite a bit over the years.”
“But I’ve tried to make a record which feels hopeful, actually,” he continues. “And that was quite deliberate, because I felt really that, in recent years, the world has got a lot more shouty, and there’s not a lot of listening. I didn’t really want to add to that. I didn’t want to make a shouty piece which was protest music, in the traditional sense. I didn’t want to focus on the problem; I wanted to focus on something more positive.”
After being deeply troubled by the reports of extraordinary rendition to CIA black sites at Guantanamo Bay, followed by torture resulting in death to some inmates – all of which was obscured from public knowledge by the US government for as long as possible – Richter eventually realised that a framing device for this project had been hidden in plain sight all along, which allowed him to use it as an orientation for the material.
On an album named Voices, the very first voice we hear belongs to a former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who begins reading the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document she helped draft while chairing a United Nations committee. Created and ratified in 1948, Richter sees the declaration as being “about potential; it’s about the future,” he says. “It’s about human problems having human solutions, which is very inspiring: we made this mess, but we can choose not to.”
After Roosevelt’s introduction, a female voice – belonging to 28 year-old American actor Kiki Layne – reads excerpts from the articles affirming an individual’s rights on this planet. Layne isn’t the only other voice, however. “I also invited, over social media, for people to send in their own readings, and we got hundreds of submissions, in all kinds of languages,” says Richter. “I use those as a kind of landscape for the music to inhabit, so you get this conversational structure between the readings, and the music is a space to think about what you’ve just heard.”
For a composer whose name has become synonymous with reflection, rumination and humanist goodwill, this 54-minute work feels like both a logical artistic progression and perhaps his most ambitious work yet. That sensation is only reinforced by a pair of extraordinary music videos – produced by Richter’s partner of 25 years, Yulia Mahr – released ahead of the album, which are built around a series of intimate images of faces and bodies in motion, filmed across the world. Through this remarkable combination of music, vision and voices, it feels as though Richter is attempting to put his arms around humankind.
“In a sense, the project is very much our baby,” he says with a smile. “And there will be a visual album, in the end; Yulia is making more films. Like a lot of my work, it’s really informed by all those conversations over the kitchen table. It’s just us chatting, and Voices – and the films that accompany it – are us chatting. I’m very lucky to have such an amazing creative partner. Our creative work and our ordinary life, if you like, are pretty much one and the same.”
Set at the very end of Voices is Mercy, the five-minute piece for piano and violin that he penned more than a decade ago to give himself space to think, then kept bubbling away in his formidable mind until the project’s final form presented itself. At once mournful and hopeful, Mercy is a perfect note on which to end the latest offering from a composer whose command of musical expression is second to none.
Voices is released on Friday, July 31 via Decca/Universal.