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The German-born British composer Max Richter had never been nominated for an Oscar until this year, though he may – unintentionally – have once scuppered someone else’s chance of winning one.
In 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for the film Arrival on the grounds that viewers would find it impossible to distinguish the late Icelandic composer’s soundtrack from the bought-in piece of music that book-ended Denis Villeneuve’s alien invasion psychodrama: Richter’s soaring, maximalist-minimalist On the Nature of Daylight.
A decade later, Richter is up for this year’s best original score for his work on the Shakespeare drama Hamnet. If he wins, it would be the crowning glory of an already superlative 12 months for the musician, who turns 60 a week after the Oscars ceremony in LA.
Last year, his 2015 album Sleep surpassed 2bn streams across all platforms, becoming the first classical record to do so. Awarded a CBE in the new year honours list, his work will be celebrated with the Berlinale Camera award at the Berlin film festival, which starts next week, and from Monday a Richter-scored ballet inspired by the works of Virginia Woolf will be livestreamed in UK cinemas.
The only thing that might check Richter’s ascent at this stage is his own success. Hamnet once again relies on On the Nature of Daylight to pull the heartstrings, and the piece of music has become so ubiquitous on screens big and small that it has invited a backlash among critics, with the Guardian’s Tom Service recently dismissing it as “the go-to cliche for moments of serious contemplation or emotional intensity” on film.
Yet in terms of his musical origins, there was nothing predictable about Max Richter’s meteoric rise. Born in Hamelin, Lower Saxony, but raised in Bedford, he was introduced to minimalist music at the age of 12-13 by the local milkman, an avid new music fan who delivered him records by Terry Riley, Philip Glass and John Cage with the daily pint and inspired an epiphany. “Until then, I thought ‘new music’ was Stravinsky,” he told the German newspaper Die Zeit in a recent interview.
An ability to walk across the invisible divide between “high” and “low” music became a career-defining skill. Though classically trained, Richter has never hidden his enthusiasm for the early electronica of Kraftwerk or the snarling punk of Stiff Little Fingers.
Before making his breakthrough as a composer in his own right, he worked with electronic hippies The Future Sound of London in the mid-90s and contributed strings to Roni Size & Reprazent’s 2000 album In the Møde.
Christian Badzura, the vice-president of A&R at Richter’s label Deutsche Grammophon, recalled being startled by his 2002 debut album Memoryhouse and its 2004 follow-up The Blue Notebooks. “He clearly had these classical pen-and-paper skills, but he managed to create tonal music that never sounded thin. There was a lot of emotional intensity.”
These albums have retrospectively been recognised as landmarks of the genre variously known as “neo-classical”, “post-minimalism” or “new repertoire”, but one curious factor about Richter’s career is that he has managed to gain a profile mainly through collaborations.
“The first thing about Max is that he’s really, really good with deadlines,” said the Royal Ballet’s director, Kevin O’Hare, whose company has performed three collaborations between Richter and the choreographer Wayne McGregor. “In ballet, you commission a work two or three years in advance, and the person who really gets it going is the composer. So you’re reliant on Max, and he always delivers.”
McGregor’s ballet productions, like 2015’s Woolf Works and 2022’s MaddAddam, eschew linear narratives in favour of snapshot storytelling. O’Hare said Richter’s music had proved especially pliable to sudden changes of mood or setting. “It’s not that everybody’s sobbing all the time, but he has that ability to just hit the right emotions at the right moments.”
In the world of film, Richter has been a sought-after collaborator ever since his synth-led score for Ari Folman’s 2008 animated war documentary Waltz with Bashir.
On the Nature of Daylight, in particular, has proven irresistible to film-makers, featuring in fantasy romances (Stranger than Fiction), noir thrillers (Shutter Island), post-apocalyptic dramas (The Last of Us) and even the 35th anniversary episode of EastEnders. Chloé Zhao employed the track in the final minutes of Hamnet even though Richter had already written original music for the scene, later saying it “could not be replaced, spiritually” after a choral version had been used during rehearsals.
The piece starts with an almost ecclesiastical 24-bar chord progression on lower strings that is then layered in a minimalist fashion with circling, repetitive melodies on the violins. Yet what On the Nature of Daylight lacks in variation, it makes up for in its use of harmonies.
The piece’s inner voices – the melodies situated between its soprano and bass parts – are such that they will be as familiar to pop fans as they are to classical devotees, said Jono Buchanan, a TV composer and music lecturer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. “You are just as likely to find similar harmonic shapes in Coldplay’s Fix You as in Barber’s Adagio for Strings”.
The piece achieved a feat of being bright and dark, warm and cold at the same time. “It doesn’t nail its emotional colours to the mast, so you can nail it to any mast you like.”
That same chameleon-like adaptability, its algorithmic efficiency at delivering big emotions, is what has irritated some critics. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross wrote: “What troubles me about Richter’s enterprise is, ultimately, its inoffensiveness. The music is impassive, deferential, anonymous.”
To the question “what is art good for”, Richter’s music provides a confident, if perhaps too answer-oriented response: it amplifies our emotions and calms our nerves. Richter’s record-breaking eight-hour Sleep album is engineered to facilitate a full night’s slumber and comes with an app “to create your personalised musical sessions to better meditate, focus or sleep”.
Sam Jackson, the controller of BBC Radio 3 and the BBC Proms, insisted Richter’s music was more than a highly functional wellness tool. “Contemporary composers who embrace melody, like he does, are sometimes dismissed as making music to ‘lean back to’; to have on in the background to serve your mood. But his music also inspires people to lean forward.”
He pointed to Richter’s 2020 project Voices, made with his creative and life partner, the visual artist Yulia Mahr, which weaves words from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into music. Every time Radio 3 played On the Nature of Daylight, Jackson said, listeners wrote in because they wanted to find out more about the work: “They really do engage with the music and the message behind it.”
