Karl Richter’s youth was permeated with ecclesiastical influence: his father was a priest in the Evangelical church and as a boy Karl was a member of the choir of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden. Following the end of World War II, he studied with Rudolf Mauersberger, Karl Straube and Gunther Ramin in Leipzig, all of whom were closely associated with the performance and interpretation of the music of J. S. Bach; and having been appointed choirmaster of the Christuskirche, Leipzig, in 1946, he became organist at the Thomaskirche (a position previously held by Bach himself ) in 1949, the year in which he graduated. Subsequently, in 1951, Richter moved to Munich; here he taught at the Munich Academy of Music, where he was made a professor in 1956, and took up the position of cantor and organist at the Markuskirche.

Soon Richter was appointed as the conductor of the amateur Heinrich Schutz Choir, renaming it the Munich Bach Choir in 1954. To perform with the choir he formed the Munich Bach Orchestra, which drew its players from the principal musicians of the city. Leading these forces, Richter quickly established a distinguished reputation as a conductor both in Munich and throughout Germany: together they appeared at the Ansbach Bach Days regularly until 1964. The Archiv label, developed after World War II by Deutsche Grammophon and devoted to the recording of scholarly editions of music composed prior to the nineteenth century, proved to be a natural home for Richter and the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra and they recorded extensively for it. These recordings helped to develop their international reputation: from the early 1960s onwards they began to tour widely, visiting the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan and South America. In addition Richter’s great skill as a keyboard player was also recognised through concerts, broadcasts and recordings. However, just as interest in the period performance movement began to grow during the 1970s, Richter’s health began to decline, and he died of a heart attack at the early age of fifty-four.

Richter’s approach to the interpretation of the music of Bach marked a radical shift from that of conductors who personified the nineteenth-century tradition of Baroque performance. He favoured smaller forces, swifter tempi, lighter if vigorous rhythms, and a more expressive approach to the music. In terms of repertoire, although the works of J. S. Bach were his principal interest, he also led the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra in works by Schutz, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Reger. Together they performed Bach’s Mass in B minor ninety times and the St John Passion fortyfive times. Of Richter’s numerous recordings, his first account for Archiv of the St Matthew Passion is particularly notable; recorded in 1958, it is one of the most outstanding accounts of this work committed to disc. In a comparison between this recording and that of Otto Klemperer, Renate Freyser noted that the latter’s calmer interpretative approach resulted in a performance that was forty minutes longer than Richter’s, exemplifying the difference between Richter’s musical position and that of his predecessors. Richter adopted a far more intense and dramatic view of the work, with a degree of expression that earlier audiences might have found disrespectful. This approach was also present in his televised account of the same work for Bavarian Rundfunk, which contained some extraordinarily powerful visual imagery that matched the intensity of Richter’s musical vision. Richter’s account of the six Brandenburg Concertos, also recorded for Archiv, reflected his innate understanding of both the musical architecture and the vocabulary of Bach’s music. Among his other recordings of note were the B minor Mass, the St John Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, Handel’s Concerti Grossi Op. 3 and 6, and his complete organ concertos, recorded for Decca.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).