Around the Music Festival

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Karl Richter—the conductor and organist who played a pivotal role in establishing the performance of Bach’s music in the 20th century—a “Bach Memorial Week” will be held at St. Mark’s Church in Munich, a venue that once served as the base of his activities.

The event will feature a commemorative concert with the Tölz Boys’ Choir, among other programs, and a commemorative plaque will be installed at the console of the church’s restored Steinmeyer organ.

Richter was born in Plauen, Saxony. The fourth child of an Evangelical pastor, he entered the Dresden Kreuzschule at the age of eleven in 1937, where he received his initial musical training as a member of the choir. After his father’s death, the family moved to Freiberg, where he practiced on a Baroque Silbermann organ; however, during the final two years of World War II, he was conscripted into the Reich Labour Service.

After the war, he enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory and became the organist at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig in 1949, though he was dismissed from the position after his probationary period ended.

In 1951, he left East Germany—initially moving to Switzerland with the woman who would later become his wife—and secured the position of cantor at St. Mark’s Church in Munich, while also being appointed as a lecturer in organ and Lutheran church music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich.

Subsequently, he was appointed conductor of the “Heinrich-Schütz-Kreis”—a choir established after the war—and renamed it the Munich Bach Choir. In 1953, he founded the Munich Bach Orchestra. Leading both the orchestra and the choir, he went on to achieve immense renown as a leading authority on the performance of Bach’s music.

By the time of his sudden death from heart failure in February 1981 at the age of 54, he had released recordings of approximately 60 major works by Bach. Many of these became bestsellers, aided by the fact that the post-war reconstruction era was a time when people were hungry for music. A recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 featuring his performance has been traveling through space aboard the U.S. Voyager spacecraft since 1977.

PHOTO：Hansjörg Albrecht