When Richter returned to Vienna from his summer break in 1897, it was to a very different musical landscape. With Jahn's departure on health grounds in October he lost a true friend and, after the deaths of Brahms and Bruckner within six months of each other, the unsettled years of 1898 and 1899 began. Everything about him was changing fast and he appeared undecided whether to stay or to go. Having decided to stay for reasons concerning his pension until he had served twenty-five years in post in 1900, Richter then showed signs of wanting to go by touring as much as he could. Gustav Mahler had arrived at the Vienna Opera and put down his marker with a revelatory performance of Lohengrin on 11 May 1897. By then Jahn was ill, overworked and artistically drained. Of his three conductors Fuchs also directed the Vienna Conservatoire while Richter was frequently absent. Another man was needed, so Mahler was appointed Kapellmeister. It then became only a matter of months before Jahn withdrew, leaving the way for Mahler to be appointed Director of the Vienna Hofoper. Richter's behaviour over the next two and a half years is fascinating. He saw Mahler leapfrog over him to the position of director but this was the post Richter twice refused, never wanted and still did not covet despite outrage from some quarters of the press that he had been overlooked. Now he found a man appointed who was younger, brilliant and temperamentally as different from him as chalk from cheese. Jahn was a personal friend of a similar age, eight years older than Richter, who was 54 when the 37-year-old Mahler took over in Vienna. Richter saw out his next season as director of the Philharmonic concerts but he was uneasy as claques in the audiences formed in favour of Mahler.

On 10 May 1898, at the annual meeting of the eighty-five players to select the conductor for the forthcoming season, there was a unanimous vote in favour of Richter. The conductor took the chair at committee meetings but at the next one, on 22 September, he announced his resignation as soon as proceedings began. A letter dated the next day states that he did so for health reasons; he was, he wrote, suffering from muscular pains in his right arm and feared a recurrence, through stress and overwork, of facial shingles.