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.