Richter's activities away from Vienna during the 1890s were, at the beginning of the decade, largely confined to the familiar areas of London and Bayreuth, together with the festivals at Birmingham and on the Lower Rhine. As the new century approached, and with it his growing unease at working with his new director Mahler, Richter spread his wings and made guest appearances elsewhere in Europe. His schedule for 1889 in London began with the regular spring series of Richter Concerts, which programmed much of the familiar repertoire with which these concerts were now associated. It was becoming his practice to repeat his programmes in London and Vienna, though his championing of works by Austrian and British composers was left to performances in their respective capitals. After negative critical reaction in Vienna to the music of Cowen and Stanford and in London to new works by Fuchs and Grädener, it was Brahms and Bruckner who provided the novelties for London. Unfortunately it was a one-way traffic for Richter could take nothing of similar musical worth back to Vienna; his association with Elgar began too late to benefit the Austrian capital.

Richter's London season in 1889 began in May with five concerts of regular fare. What followed in June was, however, something new. A friend for many years was the painter and amateur composer Professor Hubert Herkomer who lived at Bushey in Hertfordshire. There, in the garden of his house Dyreham, he built himself a small theatre with the help of local workmen and students from his school of painting. In December 1888, after successfully staging his fragment The Sorceress that summer, he wrote to the conductor with a proposal, suggested to him at table by his twelve-year-old daughter:

After the 1904 Covent Garden season Richter travelled to Bayreuth to conduct one cycle of the Ring. Correspondence between him and Cosima in 1903 had been largely devoted to the American performances of Parsifal, although Richter also reported very favourably on his new annual association with the Royal Opera House. His letters revealed that he had been given twenty-five orchestral rehearsals for the Ring and gave a detailed assessment of the principal singers should they be considered for Bayreuth. His letters describing the opera season of 1904 are similar, with Destinn and Ternina singled out for the highest praise. Richter did not get much pleasure out of conducting the Italian singers in the two Mozart operas:

Richter shared the 1904 Bayreuth Ring with Cosima's son-in-law (Isolde's husband) Franz Beidler. Muck shared Parsifal with another newcomer to the podium, Michael Balling, a viola player at Bayreuth since 1886, who assisted Richter over the years and would take over the Hallé after his mentor's retirement in 1911 until the First World War intervened. Richter approved highly of Balling, not just because of his innate musicianship but also because, like Richter himself, he had emerged as a conductor after years in the orchestra. The last time Richter played the viola in public (rather than chamber music at home) was on 25 February 1884 when he played in Liszt's Hungarian Coronation Mass in Pressburg Cathedral under the composer. He still maintained a great fondness for the instrument (Berlioz's Harold in Italy was often in his programmes), although Archie Camden recalled his outburst ‘Violas, what are they? Horn players who have lost their teeth.’ The young Lionel Tertis recalled Richter:

Hermann Franke and the impresario brothers Schultz-Curtius were the organisers of the Orchestral Festival Concerts, as they were known. Franke, a violinist, pupil of Joachim and well connected in London's musical circles, had shared the first desk of the first violins with the leader August Wilhelmj in Wagner's London Festival orchestra. Hermann Klein takes up the story:

Richter made notes in his diary on his fortnight in London. He arrived on 1 May and stayed with Franke at 11 Bentinck Street off Cavendish Square, the home of Hermann Klein's parents. At ten o'clock the following morning he met his orchestra for the first time. ‘For the most part it consisted of acquaintances (1877) who greeted me heartily.’ His soloists included George Henschel and Clementine Schuch-Proska, wife of the Dresden-based conductor Ernst von Schuch. The preponderance of the works of Wagner and Beethoven was symbolised by the presence on the platform in front of the orchestra of the busts of both composers.

After the London Wagner Festival of 1877, Hans Richter concentrated his musical activities in Vienna, adding London after 1879 and Bayreuth after 1888 with occasional forays to such places as Birmingham and the German venues of the Lower Rhine Music Festival. Vienna was his domicile, where his family was based and his children born and educated. It was here that his living had to be earned and the mouths of six children (all born between 1875 and 1882) filled. His post of Hofopernkapellmeister at the opera was not well paid and in order to increase his income, he gradually acquired other posts in the city. The first of these was Vize-Hofkapellmeister (or Deputy Conductor to the Court Chapel) at the end of 1877, when a vacancy occurred upon the death of Johann Herbeck.

Here was another example of Richter returning to his musical roots. Already he was conductor (Hofopernkapellmeister) of the opera orchestra in which he had begun his musical career as a horn player at the Kärntnertortheater. Now he was rejoining the Hofkapelle, where he had been a choirboy twenty-three years earlier. Herbeck had also held a multitude of posts in Vienna, among them Vize-Hofkapellmeister from 1863 and Kapellmeister upon his promotion three years later. The domino effect of his death on 28 October 1877 was that Josef Hellmesberger senior succeeded him as Kapellmeister, thus vacating his own post of Vize-Kapellmeister, for which written applications were received from the court organists Anton Bruckner and Rudolf Bibl, from the director of the Singakademie Rudolf Weinwurm and from Ludwig von Brenner, a native of Vienna but currently music director in Berlin. Verbal applications (made after discreet soundings had been taken by court officials) were received from Hans Richter, Pius Richter and Josef Hellmesberger junior for the two posts. A letter of recommendation from Prince Constantine zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst was sent to Emperor Franz Josef, as a result of which Hellmesberger senior's promotion was formally ratified on 11 November 1877 and Hans Richter's appointment followed on the 19th. Pius Richter, a court organist and no relation of Hans, was awarded an honorary Vize-Kapellmeistership.

Richter's despondent mood resulted in his complete withdrawal from musicmaking in the summer of 1909. He did not go to Bayreuth for the Ring, which was conducted by Michael Balling in his place, indeed Richter never conducted the Ring at Bayreuth again. He spent the summer months holidaying in Hungary and Lower Austria, returning to England on 10 September. For the rest of the month he was in London or Birmingham for rehearsals for the 1909 Birmingham Musical Festival, which proved to be his last. During the four-day event (5 to 8 October) he conducted Elijah, The Dream of Gerontius, Dvořák's Stabat Mater, Handel's Judas Maccabeus, Cherubini's Mass in C and Berlioz's Faust as well as some smaller choral pieces. The orchestral works included Elgar's First Symphony, Parry's Symphonic Variations, Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. The performances all drew critical praise, particularly the Elgar works in which Richter now excelled. It was fitting that his last festival included a broad and noble performance of the First Symphony followed by a superb rendition of Gerontius, the first festival performance since its disappointing premiere nine years earlier. Elgar attended both the London rehearsals and the concerts which included his works. He asked Richter:

His orchestra was essentially a mixture of the Hallé and London Symphony orchestras, the players’ names alone confirm how good the musical results must have been. There were the string players Schiever (the leader), Speelman (one of three of the same name) and Fuchs, the wind players Needham, Malsch, Schieder and a galaxy of horn players, Paersch, Borsdorf, Aubrey Brain (father of Dennis), Thomas Busby and van der Meerschen. Most of the rank and file names were now British, a tribute to his goal of establishing indigenous talent amidst the profession, and further illustrated by the fourteen vocalists, most of them British, who took solo parts in the festival.

The reason for Richter's trip to London at the beginning of 1882 was to conduct another charity concert whose receipts would be donated to the survivors and families of victims of the Ringtheater fire. It took place on the morning of 7 January at the Royal Albert Hall and was devoted to works by Beethoven and Wagner. According to Richter's diary, it was a very solemn occasion, the full house standing for the Austrian national anthem. Besides conducting the six orchestral items, he also accompanied Marie Roze at the piano in Agathe's aria from Weber's Der Freischütz. D'Albert reported to Mrs Joshua what he had heard from Richter after a rehearsal for the concert:

The gap of fifteen months (between December 1872 and March 1874) in the Wagner–Richter correspondence is only partly explained by Richter's new post in Budapest, his preoccupation with his duties there and the Liszt celebrations throughout 1873. When Wagner wrote in March 1874, his letter, together with the following five to May 1874, was of great significance. Matters concerning the Ring were rapidly developing. In March that year, Wagner told him that King Ludwig had finally committed himself financially to aiding the Bayreuth Festival project (the sovereign having abandoned any idea of hosting Wagner's festivals in Munich) and that contracts were now being signed by Carl Brandt as stage director and the Viennese artist Josef Hoffmann as designer. Richter himself would now have to agree to conduct the festival which Wagner intended to stage in 1876 after various stages of planning, selection, preparation and rehearsal had been worked out. In the light of many rash forecasts made hitherto by Wagner, this letter proved near to the eventual truth:

The concert on 19 December 1886, with its programme drawn appropriately from the Vienna-based composers Beethoven, Heuberger and Fuchs, was Hans Richter's one hundredth Philharmonic concert. Just before it took place, he wrote a letter to the orchestra which shows the excellent relationship between the conductor and his men. He referred to the famous Viennese brothers Johann and Josef Schrammel, who by 1886 had a tavern quartet of two violins, guitar and clarinet and had added the word Schrammelmusik to Vienna's musical language. They had begun as a trio in 1878 and in 1884 wrote a Hans Richter March. They mainly played old Austrian folk music at beer gardens, wine festivals and inns; among their keenest admirers were Richter, Brahms, Johann Strauss and Emperor Franz Josef. Although these groups dated back to the Middle Ages, when they were used to spread music and news up and down the banks of the Danube, by the late nineteenth century they were called Schrammel quartets. The clarinet was replaced in 1893 by the accordion.

During the summer of 1866, having completed Act I of Die Meistersinger, Richard Wagner wrote to his publisher Schott to complain about the dirty, ink-stained condition in which the manuscript of the orchestral Prelude was returned to him by the engravers. On completion, the full score of the opera was destined to be donated to his patron King Ludwig of Bavaria, and so Wagner decided he needed a copyist to make a fair copy of what he had written and to keep pace with him as he composed and scored the remaining two acts. Schott could not help, but Wagner sent a letter on 16 August 1866 to Hofkapellmeister Heinrich Esser in Vienna which produced a different result. He specifically asked for:

Esser recommended Hans Richter, but, as he told Schott, he ‘hoped in so doing for no retribution from heaven and prayed for forgiveness from God for sending such a young and unblemished soul to Wagner.’ Towards the end of October, Wagner wrote a letter to King Ludwig in which he informed him of the impending arrival from Vienna of

Hans Richter described himself as a Hungarian by birth, an Austrian citizen and a musician of the German race. As far as England was concerned, he was always the visitor even in his Manchester days, albeit a highly popular one in most quarters. He never accepted English ideals nor sought to identify himself with the English nation. Some thought his inability to master the English language a deliberate attempt to extend his reputation beyond the concert platform and there were plenty of anecdotes among the obituaries. ‘Once he told his cellists to play on the C side’, wrote the Daily News. Another was his remark to a brass player named Booth, who lingered too long over a certain passage. ‘Mr Booze’, he cried, ‘do not lean over that bar so long.’ On a more serious note, two contrasting obituaries appeared, one by Samuel Langford in the Manchester Guardian, the other by Ernest Newman in the Birmingham Daily Post. Having charted the course of Richter's life, each wrote his own appraisal of the conductor's contribution towards England's musical life. Langford called Richter ‘one of the few men who possess a real genius for penetrating the spirit of great music and for communicating his will to those over whom he stood’.

Having concluded his epic English Ring, Richter returned north to Manchester, where he found the mood of the orchestra, its administrators and his public disgruntled at his prolonged absence during the jubilee season and because of the inferior capabilities of his substitute Beidler. He finished the concert season with Bruckner's Te Deum and Beethoven's Choral Symphony on 12 March 1908. After a single concert with the London Symphony Orchestra (23 March), he was supposed to fulfil a long-standing engagement to conduct two concerts (on 26 March and 9 April) for the Philharmonic Society, of which he had been an honorary member since 1905. He had accepted them on 4 July 1907 but wrote to Francesco Berger, the society's secretary, at the beginning of March 1908 withdrawing from the engagements for family reasons, which would take him to Austria-Hungary at the beginning of April. A flurry of correspondence took place between a tired Richter and the panic-stricken and annoyed committee. They tried to get him to conduct at least the first of the two concerts, but Richter was adamant in his refusal. They were given instead to Henry Wood and another rising young English conductor, Landon Ronald. Richter had been offered £60 per concert (Nikisch was offered £50 for a single one) and Wood and Ronald each received thirty guineas for stepping into the breach. Surprisingly, negotiations began immediately to include Richter in the list of conductors engaged for the 1908–09 season but all the dates were Thursdays, Hallé concert days. Richter did not dare to absent himself more than his plans for another winter series of operas in English at Covent Garden would allow and so discussions were abandoned. Back in 1887 he had been invited to conduct for the society but declined out of loyalty to his manager Vert. As a result Hans Richter never conducted for the Philharmonic Society.

The German opera season at Covent Garden in the summer of 1908 consisted of Die Walküre, Götterdämmerung, Tannhäuser, Tristan, Die Meistersinger, Der fliegende Holländer and two performances of Gluck's Armida with Destinn in the title role. Herbert Thompson described the Ring operas as:

Despite all six children contracting measles one after another from the end of November 1883, Hans and Marie spent Christmas en famille. There were Hofkapelle duties on Christmas Day and a midday concert the following day but the couple went alone to Hans’ home town of Raab for a short break before Don Giovanni on 29 December. Concerts in Vienna between the New Year of 1884 and the end of the season celebrated or featured musicians of lowlier rank than Brahms. The Second Serenade by Robert Fuchs formed the centrepiece of the concert on 6 January and was followed by a new symphony by Giovanni Sgambati, the eminent Italian pianist and pupil of Liszt. Ignaz Brüll was the soloist in his Second Piano Concerto on 20 January. Robert Volkmann had died in October 1883 and Rosa Papier sang ‘An die Nacht’ on 16 December in his memory, but a more substantial tribute was paid to the composer when his Second Symphony was played on 9 March. Stanford's Serenade ended the same concert, whilst the one on 23 March began with Mendelssohn's rarely played overture to his opera Camacho's Wedding. The final concert of the season (6 April) contained two other comparatively rare overtures, Spohr's Jessonda and Volkmann's Richard III. Volkmann was not the only colleague who died at that time; another was Gustav Hölzl, the first Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger at Munich in 1868. In February 1884 Gustav Weber also died; it was he who had bedecked the podium in Pest for Richter's final appearances there:

Another friend whose death he mourned was Louis Brassin (at St Petersburg on 17 May), to whom Richter was grateful for securing the Brussels Lohengrin engagement of 1870, when the young conductor's fortunes were low after the Rheingold affair.

Nothing of importance happened in the musical life of Pest without the knowledge and influence of Liszt and it was he who played a prominent role in securing Hans Richter his post as Kapellmeister at the city's opera house. At the end of August 1871 he told Viktor Langer that:

Liszt's first point needs to be qualified, however, in the context of ‘musical progress’. As far as Richter was concerned, this was embodied by only one composer, Wagner. The second point was equally vital. Richter may have been a born Hungarian but his life from the age of eleven had been spent elsewhere, in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Above all it was centred on German culture, German music and the German language, not the sort of background that achieved instant popularity in Hungary. Liszt had already succumbed to Germanisation and in due course Richter and his younger colleague Arthur Nikisch would follow the same path. Nationalism and a certain degree of independence was the legacy of the 1848–49 War of Independence and of the disastrous defeats of the Habsburg Empire in 1859 by Italy and 1866 by Prussia. Opera at the National Theatre was having to contend with the Vienna Opera which lured young Hungarians away from their homeland with more lucrative contracts. The repertoire of Pest's opera house consisted mainly of German, Italian and French composers (respectively Beethoven, Weber, Wagner and Meyerbeer; Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi; Auber, Gounod and Halévy), although Hungarians were beginning to come forward with their own works, Erkel leading the way. Ferenc Erkel was also the music director of the Pest Opera and had maintained high musical standards over many years despite the poor remuneration paid to its orchestral players. He was aided in the pit by his talented sons Gyula and Sándor.

Seventy-five miles south-east of Vienna, and about halfway to Budapest, lies the town of Györ. In Roman days the town was named Arabona; more recently, when part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and as a town with a modest manufacturing industry centred chiefly on tobacco and cutlery, it was called Raab. It lies where the rivers Rába and Rábcza flow into the Little Danube. Here, by the Bishop's Palace, with its fifteenth-century Dóczi Chapel, stands the Cathedral, founded in the twelfth century and rebuilt between 1639 and 1645. Its Héderváry Chapel has stained-glass windows and contains a fifteenth-century silver bust of St Ladislaus. It was in Raab, on 4 April 1843, that Hans Richter was born. His family came from former Austria-Silesia, in the area of Freudenthal, the earliest recorded ancestors being Georg and Anna Richter, parents of Melzer (Melchior) Richter (1656–1720). Melzer's son Melchior (1692–1742) was, like his father, a farmer, but his grandson Josephus Richter (1726–1787) was first a labourer then a tailor in Breitenau and Markersdorf. Josephus’ son, Anton Franciscus Richter (1762–1819, grandfather of Hans) became a schoolmaster in Probstdorf, in the district of Vienna and from his first marriage with Theresia Knöbel he had a son Anton born in 1802.

Anton spent the last twenty-two years of his life in Raab but for ten years from 1822 he sang bass in the service of Count Nikolaus Esterházy, whose family in Eisenstadt was famous for its patronage of Haydn. Anton Richter was a gifted organist, singer, string player and composer and on 22 June 1832, from among eleven short-listed candidates, he was appointed Succentor or Subcantor (effectively the choirmaster) at Raab Cathedral but was soon elevated to the top musical post of Kapellmeister. He threw himself whole-heartedly into his duties, composing prolifically, and there are 118 extant compositions (64 sacred, 54 secular) in the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of the Friends of Music) in Vienna and thirty in Györ Cathedral. He was also very conscientious in recording, over a twenty-year period from the start of his appointment in 1832, details of the musical life of the cathedral and its choir, all of which give an invaluable insight into the workings of such institutions.

Richter's first encounter with any anti-Wagner sentiment in Munich occurred soon after his arrival in December 1867. In spite of his appointment at the Court Opera he had to pass an audition as repetiteur set for him by Franz Lachner, General Music Director of the city and an opponent of Wagner. Lachner had met Richter on a visit to Vienna in February 1866 when he was pleased to give him a glowing reference as a potential Kapellmeister. Now Lachner was to test him again, but with Richter's colours firmly fixed to the Wagnerian mast, the young man no longer found a friend in the General Music Director. A message was sent to Richter to appear at ten o'clock the next morning at the opera house and accompany a production rehearsal of Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor. He was ordered not to bring a vocal score but to play from the full score provided. Fortunately he knew the work from his horn-playing days at the Vienna Opera and he duly came through the test with flying colours. He played the work with astonishing facility and earned the admiration and respect of both singers and observers, of whom there were many because word had got about of a possible public humiliation. Lachner's plan had misfired but he grudgingly conceded that in Hans Richter ‘a Wagnerian had been found who also knew other music.’

Richter was lodging in Munich with a repetiteur named Ludwig Eberle, who told him of a small town in Bavaria with a charming eighteenth-century opera house in which he had worked with a visiting company from Bamberg. The house had a particularly large and fine stage and Eberle recommended it to Richter. The town's name was Bayreuth. When the idea of building a festival opera house in Munich specifically to stage Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen was thwarted by the politics surrounding the scandal of the Wagner–Cosima–von Bülow affair and the impossible position in which it placed his patron King Ludwig, Richter suggested Bayreuth to Wagner as a possible alternative venue because it was still on land belonging to the king. Wagner remembered the town from his youth and warmed to the idea immediately, and although the opera house which was already in the town proved unsuitable for his needs, Bayreuth was chosen as the site for his own purpose-built house.