18 | BIGISSUE.COM 30 APRIL-06 MAY 2020
t the age of 16 I stopped going to school because I
hated it. I learned piano when I was a tiny child at
the beginning of primary school, but I had a piano
teacher who was very old school and she would
whackmyhand with a ruler when I played a wrong note. And
afterawhileIjust thought, hang on, I hate this. This is a horrible
experience.So I stopped going to lessons. And all through
schoolI wascripplingly shy. It was slightly unfortunate; I
havegingerhair and I was German, a double target [Richter
grewupinEngland]. So I really retreated into a world of
fantasythrough music and books. And as soon as I could I
leftschoolaltogether.Musichasbeen crucial to me as long as I can remember. When
I wasaboutfour years old I had this experience of hearing Bach,
probablytheDouble Violin Concerto, and being really struck by
thebeautifulsounds and melodies, but also realising that there
was a sort of governing logic going on behind those sounds.
That the sounds meant something, and that they spoke to one
another in their own language. And that really floored me, that
was one of the things that really lit the fuse for me to be deeply
involved with music.By the time I was 16 I was furious with
the world. My teen years coincided
with the apex of Thatcherism, which
was a kind of anti-civilisation project –
anti-culture, anti-society, just a horrible
neoliberal individualistic concept. And
there I was as a kid, in some ways a pawn
in that game. So I became obsessed with
music and books. I was playing the piano,
and trying to compose in a very simple
way. I was very into classical music, but
punk was huge in my life at that time as
well. As was reading – the 20th century
modernists, TS Eliot and Joyce and Beckett
and Virginia Woolf. So I spent most of my
time reading, playing music and hanging
out in cafes and just basically trying to
find my own way, trying to educate myself,
trying to understand and connect to the
thingsthatmatteredtome.My parents divorced, and I was very close to my mother.
My father was a kind of distant figure. My mother is a very
thoughtful, warm, very idealistic person. Quite impractical, not
very worldly. She raised a family of boys who are all a bit like
that as well. Both my parents were German and we were living
in the UK so there was a slight feeling of being an outsider in the
culture, not born and bred. My brothers and I did share a feeling
of being in it together, but it was a challenging and stressful
situation. None of us were particularly happy in school. It
was difficult.I didn’t know what kind of career I could have. I just knew I
loved music with a kind of obsessive passion and I didn’t think
I’d be able to hold down any other kind of job. But if I went
back and told my teenage self about having some success as a
composer he’d be amazed because I never expected anything in
terms of a career or even anyone even noticing what I was doing,
It took me years and years to get used to the idea that people
would actually listen to my music. I released Memoryhouse in
2002 but one cared. It wasn’t advertised, it wasn’t reviewed.
They shut the record company down and deleted the record
a year later. So that was my life’s work up to that moment. I
guess the first inkling I got that something might work out
was when I released The Blue Notebooks in 2004. I just felt good,
comfortable with that project in a way I hadn’t with anything
else. I don’t ever listen to The Blue Notebooks now, I haven’t
listened to it properly since I made it. But I’m very grateful
to it.A
Cinematicsleepdoctor
Max
Richter
letter to my
younger self.
2016
Amy Adams and Jeremy
Renner in Arrival, to the
iconic sound of Richter’s
On the Nature of Daylight2015
Pulling an all-nighter with
eight-hour epic ‘lullaby’ SleepPhoto: Mike Terry