Hamnet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

With its intimate and intense scenes of young love, family life, birth, death and the afterlife, Hamnet is a film that deals in fundamental human emotions. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, it tells the story of how William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, each navigated grief following the loss of their 11-year-old son. According to the novel’s unproven yet compelling hypothesis, it was this grief that inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. But as Max Richter’s score makes clear, Hamnet is Agnes’s story: soft, wordless female voices gently overlap with hypnotic pianissimo strings in the film’s opening track, delivering us dreamily into her earthy, witchy world and the woods where we first find her asleep. Returning in “Look at me” and “Of the sky”, these chants set the tone for a meditation on the forces of Mother Nature in a searching exploration of motherhood. But at the same time as digging into the elemental dimensions of Agnes’s journey (the ethereal string harmonics of “In all my philosophy” expose the fundamental fabric of music, the “harmony of the spheres”), Richter never loses sight of the time in which these events take place. Listen, for instance, to how the music uses viols (bowed string instruments) and folk instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy to anchor his emotive themes within the Elizabethan era. In “Of Orpheus”, a harp evokes Orpheus’ lyre, heard in the film’s early courtship scene when Will (played by Paul Mescal) tells Agnes (Jessie Buckley) the story of Eurydice’s descent into the Underworld; while in “I was the more deceived”, we hear a repeated (or “ostinato”) bass line, a popular musical building block in Shakespeare’s time. Elsewhere, ambient electronic textures (“An abysm of time”, “Of the heart”) take us into darker, more dissonant territory as Agnes herself descends into a metaphorical underworld, torn apart by grief. “I used the basic elements of Elizabethan music—period instrumentation, grammar, and sensibility—but applied them in ways that emerge directly from the story’s psychology,” Richter tells Apple Music Classical. Much has been made of director Chloé Zhao’s decision to use Richter’s signature tune, “On the Nature of Daylight”, at the emotional climax of the film. Originally conceived as a protest piece, written in response to the build-up of the 2003 Iraq war, and since recycled in films such as Arrival and Shutter Island, this sombre quintet has become a popular choice among directors looking for an added injection of poignancy. Ubiquitous? Perhaps. But coming after the dramatic choral sighs of “The great globe itself”, and the supernaturally still “Of a ghost”, it also offers a lasting reminder of how Richter has long been the master of melancholy.