You’re probably already familiar with “On the Nature of Daylight.” Composed for the 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, Max Richter’s stirring piece for a small strings ensemble has made its way into the saddest scenes in several films and television shows in the 20-odd years since its release. Its first cinematic appearance was in Stranger Than Fiction, but it has since been used again and again to soundtrack a specific type of thudding tragedy onscreen — often, the loss of a spouse (Shutter Island, The Last of Us) or a child (Arrival). The track makes its most recent cameo at the end of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet during a staging of Hamlet, in which the film’s meditations on birth and death arrive at a wordless, music-driven catharsis.
Hamnet is not a retelling of Hamlet, but rather an exploration of the domestic life of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), the latter of whom is possessed by a kind of otherworldly romanticism. She is a witch, or maybe just a little strange, but Will loves her regardless. They have three children, but Agnes knows — in her heart, at least — that only two will live. When their son, Hamnet (whose name is functionally the same as “Hamlet” in middle English), dies, their marriage fractures. William goes off to London to work on his plays while Agnes tries and fails to raise their living daughters with the same energy and urgency as before. A spontaneous trip to London takes Agnes and her brother, Bartholemew (Joe Alwyn), to the Globe Theatre, where she sees her first-ever play — Hamlet. The experience is altogether strange: She can’t figure out why these characters bear resemblance to her own life. It’s as though she’s seeing something she’s only ever internalized, and the overall effect is both dazzling and horrifying to her.
There is a fitting quality to Zhao’s use of “On the Nature of Daylight” at the end of both Hamnet (the film) and Hamlet (the play within the film) wherein Agnes breaks through the fourth wall of the performance to grasp the hand of a dying Hamlet (Noah Jupe, the brother of Hamnet actor Jacobi Jupe). Part of the enduring appeal of a play like Hamlet is its versatility: To each audience member, it is a new and different opus. It’s a play about madness, power, and grief. Zhao’s film and the Maggie O’Farrell novel it’s adapted from recontextualize Hamlet to be about parents mourning a child, rather than a child mourning a father. As Agnes reaches through to a dying Hamlet, it is like saying good-bye to her son all over again. Richter’s piece floods in, the strings mounting to something freeing but unchangeable. That the ending, however, would be set to “On the Nature of Daylight” was not initially in the cards for either Zhao or Richter.
Richter had composed original music for the ending of the film that was a reprisal of the choral music that plays earlier. (That piece now plays over the end credits.) “In the script, it says, ‘Hamlet dies. The rest is silence.’ That’s the end,” Richter explains. “So that whole last sequence where they’re all reaching out was not in the script. They were getting towards the end of the shoot, three or four days left in the Globe, and Chloé was talking with Jessie, who sent her ‘On the Nature of Daylight,’ which is a piece Chloé didn’t know.” The director played it on set, on a loop over and over, throughout the three days they shot the final sequence of the film, building it into the foundation of Agnes’s reach through time and the veil of death. By the time Richter approached Zhao with the piece he’d composed for the ending, she’d already committed to “On the Nature of Daylight.” As Richter says, the song’s role in the film “isn’t just a needle drop. The use of the piece is architectural,” built into the very bones of the scene.
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For a certain classical-music-aware audience member, the use of “On the Nature of Daylight” at the end of Hamnet may feel like something of a cheat code — speedrunning how fast an audience can start crying after so much emotional turmoil. It has a reputation onscreen, for better and worse, as a ubiquitous aural gesture toward death and mourning. But Richter still sees his work existing in its original context. When he composed the song, its intent was as a protest against the Iraq War. “For me, the piece is always just a part of The Blue Notebooks — a response to geopolitics at that time,” he says. “One of the things that’s so lovely about doing creative work and putting these things out into the world is that you discover how people make their own connections to them, and they find new facets to the work. It’s a privilege when anyone listens to anything you do, honestly.”
Richter was as surprised as anyone when “On the Nature of Daylight” first popped up in Stranger Than Fiction as Will Ferrell’s Harold Crick reckons with the inevitability of his own death. “I was like, ‘Somebody’s put my music in a film. Let’s go watch it.’ I remember just sitting there, ‘This is crazy! My stuff’s on that screen!’” he laughs. “A little while later, it got picked up by Robbie Robertson for Martin Scorsese in Shutter Island — Robbie Robertson! — and I was like, ‘I guess my life is complete now.’” Richter’s favorite use of the piece might just be its application in Hamnet, how it rallies together the swell of life and death that the movie has been building toward. “I wanted the music to feel transparent to the psychology of the story,” Richter says. “There are big feelings that just need a light touch — to push it in any way would take away the room to breathe. It’s not as if Jessie needs the music to act.”
