The Ubiquitous Melancholy of Max Richter

Detailed summary

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 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.” Never heard it? Yes, you have. 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.

“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.” In part because of “Daylight,” Richter became the best-selling living artist on the classical label Deutsche Grammophon.

Measured and not easily ruffled, Richter comes across like the human version of a beta-blocker. His vocal cadence is similar to his music—lulling and copacetic, with a tendency to repeat. Normal frustrations don’t seem to stick with him. He had recently experienced a disruptive tech issue during a show in North Carolina. “It was the keyboard—it broke in such a wonderful way,” he said. “I stood up and it was still going, and it turned into this blur of noise. Audiences kind of like that stuff, because it’s human, isn’t it?”

For the past two years, Richter has been on tour with two of his albums, “In a Landscape” (2024) and the omnipresent “Blue Notebooks.” He considers them both ever relevant. “ ‘In a Landscape’ is an attempt to model an ideal society,” he told me.

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