(b Raab [now Győr], 4 April 1843; d Bayreuth, 5 Dec 1916). Austro-Hungarian conductor. He was the son of Anton Richter (1802–54), an organist and choirmaster, and Josefine Czasensky (1822–92), an opera singer and singing teacher. On the death of his father, Richter was sent to Vienna as a choirboy in the Hofkapelle, after which he studied at the conservatory of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. He graduated in 1862, joined the Kärntnertortheater as a horn player, and in 1866 was sent to the exiled Wagner at Tribschen to copy the score of Die Meistersinger as it was being orchestrated. In 1868 Richter assisted at the opera's premičre; such was his musical versatility that he replaced an indisposed singer at one performance. For a year he conducted in Munich, but in August 1869 he was sacked by King Ludwig for refusing to conduct the royal command premičre of Wagner's Das Rheingold (he considered the staging inadequate). Instead he went to Brussels to conduct the premičre there of Lohengrin, returning to Tribschen to copy Siegfried and to play the trumpet and second viola in the surprise performance of the new Siegfried Idyll for Cosima Wagner on Christmas Day 1870. In 1871 Wagner and Liszt secured him the post of music director at the National Theatre in Pest, to which he brought a new musical discipline and where he raised standards. He remained there until 1875 when he joined the Vienna Hofoper. In January 1875 he married Mariska von Szitanyi, a singing pupil, and by 1882 they had six children.
Meanwhile Wagner's plans for a festival theatre at Bayreuth and the first staging of the Ring cycle were well advanced and Richter's involvement considerable. He travelled throughout Germany hearing singers and assembling an orchestra for stage rehearsals in 1875 and for the festival itself in 1876, both of which he conducted under the composer's supervision. In an effort to recoup the festival's financial losses Wagner's London supporters organized a festival in May 1877 and Richter had to take over most of the concerts from Wagner, whose conducting of his own music proved incomprehensible to the orchestra. Richter returned to London in 1879 for an annual series, called the Richter Concerts, which lasted for 23 years. From 1875 to 1900 he dominated the musical life of Vienna as music director of the Vienna PO (until 1898), first Kapellmeister at the Hofoper, vice-Kapellmeister at the Hofkapelle (full Kapellmeister from 1893) and conductor of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde from 1884. His influence there was enormous, his interpretations of the Beethoven symphonies revered. He conducted the first performances of Brahms's Second and Third symphonies and Tragic Overture, Bruckner's Te Deum and the revised Fourth and new Eighth symphonies, and Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. He also promoted the career of Dvořák, who dedicated his Sixth Symphony to him. In London he gave first performances of works by Parry, Stanford, Mackenzie, Cowen and Elgar, whose Enigma variations he introduced in June 1899. From 1885 to 1909 he conducted the Birmingham Triennial Festival including, in 1900, the premičre of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. In 1904 he mounted a London Elgar Festival – an unprecedented tribute to a living composer, who, in 1908, returned the compliment by dedicating his First Symphony to this ‘true artist and true friend’. After the Richter Concerts came to an end in 1902 he conducted the first concert of the new London Symphony Orchestra (9 June 1904), with which he worked regularly until his last orchestral concert (Eastbourne, 22 April 1911). The universities of Oxford and Manchester conferred honorary DMus degrees on him and, in 1907, he was made an honorary CVO.
Richter's first love was the music of Wagner: he conducted Wagner's operas from Rienzi to the Ring (but never Parsifal) in Vienna and London, and either Die Meistersinger or the Ring at every Bayreuth Festival from 1888 to 1912. From 1903 he appeared regularly at Covent Garden in the annual German Opera season, and in 1908 and 1909 conducted the Ring in English there. He deeply regretted that an English National Opera did not develop as a result. After Sir Charles Hallé's death in 1895 he was invited to take over the orchestra bearing its founder's name, but it was 1899 before he exchanged his Vienna Hofoper post for Manchester, where he included new works by Strauss, Sibelius, Bartók, Debussy and Glazunov in his programmes; he toured extensively with the orchestra throughout the British Isles. He retired to Bayreuth in 1911. In a career lasting 44 years he gave 2263 opera performances (899 of these Wagner operas) and 2088 concerts. 19th-century conductors were generally also composers or performers, but Richter, with his prodigious memory, and his ability to play every musical instrument except the harp and to make his players give of their best, concentrated solely on conducting and, although he left no recordings, built for himself an enduring international reputation.
F.G. Edwards: ‘Hans Richter’, MT, xl (1899), 441–7
L. Karpath, ed.: Richard Wagner: Briefe an Hans Richter (Berlin, 1924)
R. Newmarch: ‘The Letters of Dvořák to Hans Richter’, MT, lxxiii (1932), 605–7, 698–701, 795–7
L. Karpath: ‘Von Hans Richter’, Begegnung mit dem Genius (Vienna, 1934), 273–305
M. Kennedy: The Hallé Tradition (Manchester, 1960)
E. Voss: Die Dirigenten der Bayreuther Festspiele (Regensburg, 1976)
M. Eger: Hans Richter, des Meisters lieber Gesell (Bayreuth, 1990)
M. Eger: Hans Richter: Bayreuth, Wien, London und zurück (Bayreuth, 1991)
C. Hellsberg: Demokratie der Könige (Mainz, 1992)
C. Fifield: True Artist and True Friend: a Biography of Hans Richter (Oxford, 1993)
CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD