[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Hamnet.”]
The rest was supposed to be silence. But do not blame composer Max Richter for the devastating deployment of “On the Nature of Daylight,” his one-time Iraq War protest piece, now a shortcut to heartbreak in seemingly every devastating film and television show, including “Hamnet.” Jessie Buckley sent the piece to director Chloé Zhao; her listening to it inspired a tweak to the film’s ending.
The piece itself and Buckley’s performance as Agnes Shakespeare are both epic and raw in their own rights. But at the end, Agnes is in a fury about the use of her now dead son Hamnet’s (Jacobi Jupe) name as the title in her absent husband Will’s (Paul Mescal) newest play. She comes to the great Globe Theater itself and heckles as well as any London groundling, at first. Then she, and we, slowly realize the way in which the play’s the thing that will allow both mother and father to see a sort of slanting rhyme version of their boy again, and find meaning in his life.
The very last shot of the film is of Agnes reaching out to the on-stage Hamlet (Noah Jupe) as he dies, and then the whole audience is reaching out to him, too. But it wasn’t the original plan, according to composer Max Richter. “They had four days [of shooting] to go. Jessie, who’s been sort of familiar with my work for years, sent Chloe ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ and it basically unlocked the ending of the film for her. She had this great, kind of cathartic realization in the car on the way to set and said, when she got there, ‘Forget about everything we’re supposed to be doing, we’re going to do something different. So the whole reaching out of the hands, that’s all new, and it comes directly from the music,” Richter told IndieWire.
Richter is not the first composer, nor will he be the last, who can’t quite shift a director off of the temp music, especially when a musical piece so completely informs the action of a sequence. Richter wrote “On the Nature of Daylight” twenty years ago now, and to him it still lives on his “The Blue Notebooks” album. But he does find it fascinating to see how the piece resurfaces in different contexts.
“Part of doing creative work is what people bring to it. They listen to a piece of music through their biography, through all the music they’ve heard, and then you get this composite experience, which is the listener and the work meeting. It’s not something I can control, and I’m actually really interested in seeing and hearing how it fits together with people’s lives,” Richter said. “And in this case, ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ is not simply a needle drop. It’s really architectural to the ending of the film, so it’s not a trivial thing.”
There is nothing trivial about any of the music in “Hamnet,” most of which — ”On the Nature of Daylight” aside — Richter composed thinking deeply about the kind of connection to nature and the quality of female voices and breath that would connect what we hear to Agnes experience of falling in love, becoming a mother, grieving, and being alive. As soon as he read the script, Richter heard the music.
“I wrote probably about half an hour of material just off the page,” Richter said. “That was, in a way, a research project for me to see how music could connect thematically with the work and to suggest some emotional textures to Chloe.”
Richter traded notes back and forth with Zhao in a process that he described as “conversational,” refining from the conceptual pillars that both composer and director responded to. “There’s a lot of choral material [with] women’s voices, exclusively, no male voices, and that’s because I see it as almost like a sort of background radiation to the score. It’s like this amniotic fluid that holds this imagined world of ours. There are more foreground strands, and those are more soloistic, some piano material, which is very much Agnes’s world.”
Richter also threw in a couple of Easter eggs in his choice of a kithara harp for the cue where Will tells Agnes the story of Orpheus, who is, of course, a harpist himself in Greek Mythology and whom the score almost gets to conjure and, in the bargain, portrays the power of Will Shakespeare as a storyteller. Richter also played around with electronic music as well, sampling Elizabethan-era instruments but recontextualizing them to create an awestruck, indistinct sense of the unseen world in which young Hamnet finds himself.
“ I did a lot of sampling to make a kind of, if you like, electronic toolkit, which felt organic,” Richter said. “The viol, the hurdy-gurdy, the nickel harp, all these renaissance folkloric instruments for their textures and grittiness. Then I turn those into electronic instruments, which I could then use in the school. It’s a kind of palette, a world-building process, and also a lot of vocal recordings — which were treated the same way, actually.”
All of the textures and all of the rich sense of natural connection that run throughout the score come together in the piece that is Richter’s answer to the final sequence in “Hamnet.” Called “On The Undiscovered Country,” it weaves the themes that emanate from around Agnes into something larger than her, as powerful as the crowd surrounding her in the Globe in its orchestral serenity, and which flows and ebbs with the constancy of an emotional tide.
“In my mind, it connects to Agnes, but it’s also, if you like, the soul of the forest, the soul of Agnes,” Richter said. “It’s kind of this Earth Magic texture. And it’s almost like, if that was a sculpture, the score just walks around that sculpture and looks at it from slightly different angles.”
“Hamnet” is now playing in theaters.