The Ubiquitous Melancholy of Max Richter

The composer's song "On the Nature of Daylight" has popped up in countless sob fests including "Arrival" and "Hamnet." With billions of streams, he's become one of the most popular and successful composers of our time. If a character in a movie is sad, there's a good chance that Richter's on the soundtrack. If you've ever felt down, you may have found your way over to Spotify's "Sad Classical" playlist--a sixty-song, four-and-a-half-hour collection of such all-time emos as Frédéric Chopin, Samuel Barber, and Gustav Mahler. But at the very top is a track called "On the Nature of Daylight," by the composer Max Richter, from his 2004 album, "The Blue Notebooks." Any time a character in a film or a TV show experiences anything vaguely approaching melancholy, there's a good chance that Richter's brooding, cyclical strings are the soundtrack to their tears--and yours. "Daylight" was used in "Stranger Than Fiction" (2006), when Will Ferrell destroys a lamp after realizing that he'll soon be dead. In "Shutter Island" (2010), it plays when Leonardo DiCaprio struggles with visions of his wife, who, because of him, is dead. It bookends "Arrival" (2016), when Amy Adams talks aloud to her daughter, who is dead. You hear it in "The Last of Us" (2023), when a couple spends a final day together, before they kill themselves, and are dead. And in "Hamnet" (2025), when Hamnet is dead. "We recorded that album in three hours," Richter told me one drizzly afternoon, in a booth at Café Chelsea, in Manhattan. Slender and tall, with cropped hair and wearing a crisp black button-down, he went on, "When I'm working on something, I'm, like, 'Is anyone going to hear this?' I sort of don't expect anything. I'm just trying to put notes in the right places."