German-born, U.K.-based Max Richter is one of the most successful composers in modern classical music, a gifted post-minimalist whose signature work, “On the Nature of Daylight” from his classic 2004 album “The Blue Notebooks,” has been heard in more than 20 films and TV shows since it was first recorded. It has most notably appeared in “Arrival,” “Shutter Island” (in a version intercut with Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”) and the first season of “The Last of Us.”
But when Richter began to write music for Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” he had no idea that the climactic scene of that film — Jessie Buckley’s Agnes Shakespeare in the Globe Theatre watching the first performance of her husband’s “Hamlet,” with its ties to the death of their young son a few years earlier — would be set not to his new music but rather to his greatest hit.
“When I heard it (used as temporary music) in the cut, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. I’ll replace that,’” he said. “So I wrote a cue for it, and I fully expected ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ to be replaced.”
Zhao, though, said she wanted to keep the song in that scene, to which Richter admitted that his initial reaction was “Are you sure?” She responded with a story: Late in the film’s production, when the director was racked with doubt and recovering from a breakup, Buckley had given her the composition, and she had listened to it incessantly on her way to work.
“She had a kind of epiphany,” Richter said. “They played it on the set continuously for four days while they shot the last sequence, and it got embedded in the architecture of the film.”
He shrugged. “And when she told me that story, I was like, ‘Sure. It’s your movie.’ I’d seen her make good decision after good decision, and when somebody is that good, you have to trust them,” he added. (The music he wrote to replace “On the Nature of Daylight” now appears over the end credits.)
Besides, it’s not as if Richter didn’t already have a lot of new music to write for “Hamnet.” (Plus, his latest album, “In a Landscape,” consciously harks back to the feel of “The Blue Notebooks,” so he was used to revisiting that era.) He loved the screenplay when Zhao sent it to him, and started composing right away.
“I try to avoid reading scripts unless I have time to write music,” said Richter, whose film compositions (“Waltz With Bashir,” “Never Look Away,” “Ad Astra”) run alongside his original albums and ballet and concert works. “After I read a script, I’ll immediately have a bunch of ideas.”
In the case of “Hamnet,” one of those ideas was to use choral music as a framing device for the film. “It’s sort of the amniotic fluid that holds the baby,” he said. “You can evoke an awful lot with very little by using the voice. And because it’s only women’s voices, it connects with the overarching theme of motherhood.”
“For me, it also became Mother Nature, the bigger world that the characters all inhabit.”
Richter, whose most celebrated works include a “recomposed” version of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” also developed a musical vocabulary based on instruments from the late 1500s, when the film is set. “I used the nyckelharpa (a keyed string instrument that originated in Sweden), the hurdy-gurdy — folk, period instruments. And I also used the musical grammar from that period, especially the kind of choral writing you get in that period, but not in a doctrinaire kind of way.”
Along the way, he even threw in some musical Easter eggs. When young William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is courting Agnes, he tells her the story of Orpheus. In that scene, Richter’s score is led by the harp, the instrument that Orpheus played in Greek mythology.
But in the second hour, when the prevailing mood in “Hamnet” turns to grief, Richter’s music morphs as well. “As the film progresses, you get more abstract electronic materials starting to populate the film,” he said. “The story moves more into the unknown—the undiscovered country, in that beautiful line of Shakespeare’s. It’s more of an abstracted place, a place where we don’t have fixed reference points.
“So therefore, I reached into more abstract electronic colors. The electronic materials are derived from the period acoustic instruments I used at the beginning of the score, but instead of thinking ‘That’s a violin,’ you just respond to the texture of the thing emotionally.”
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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