What do Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Jennifer Peedom’s Sherpa, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, HBO’s The Last of Us, and most recently, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet have in common? If you have ever found yourself inexplicably reduced to a teary-eyed mess while watching any of these projects, you probably already know that Max Richter is to blame.
Known for fusing classical technique with electronic textures across a string of genre-defining solo albums, the German-born British composer is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of his generation. This Saturday, Max will perform live in India for the very first time at Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC). As a long-time admirer, I had the pleasure of speaking with him ahead of his long-awaited Indian debut.
I first heard ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ — the same tear-jerking motif that runs through all the aforementioned titles — at the end of Arrival, alongside the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s brilliant, unconventional score, whose avant-garde treatment of Villeneuve’s sci-fi masterpiece incorporated clipped, staccato vocal patterns and intricate polyrhythms. But it was Max’s instantly recognisable composition that scored the film’s crushing denouement, a placement that came about after the filmmakers repeatedly struggled to find a replacement for it.
“Johann and I were friends. We were both based in Berlin for a long time. I knew that he was scoring Arrival,” Max recalls. “And then I got a phone call from the production saying could they license On the Nature of Daylight, which I was a bit surprised about.” Concerned about how this might affect Jóhannsson’s score, Max called him directly. “He [Jóhann] said, ‘Please just let them have it because it’s driving me crazy, and I just want to get on with the rest of the score’,” he chuckles.
Max also spoke briefly with Villeneuve about the film’s underlying themes, discovering an unexpected affinity with the ideas that had informed his own composition. “The film advocates language rather than bombs. And I felt that was very much in tune with the origin of that piece, which is from The Blue Notebooks.”
Released in 2004 on The Blue Notebooks, Richter’s second solo album, On the Nature of Daylight was written for a quintet of strings, comprising two violins, two cellos and a viola, its slow-moving repetitions and restrained melancholy lending the composition an almost unbearable stoicism. Conceived in opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the album was an explicitly anti-war work concerned with the fragility of truth and the persistence of beauty amid political violence, although the piece has since acquired an extraordinary life beyond its original context, becoming one of the most recognisable compositions in contemporary classical music.
Asked how he regards a work that continues to find new audiences and meanings more than two decades after its release, Max says, “One of the lovely things about doing creative work is you make a piece, it goes out into the world, and then it starts to have its own life, beyond your control in a way. People connect to it; they find ways that it makes sense for them in their own lives. I find it very beautiful, actually, the way that a piece of music can become a sort of intermediary between two different people from different times, different places”.
The 60-year-old composer’s musical vocabulary emerged from the convergence of rigorous classical training and an early fascination with electronic experimentation; a combination that would eventually place him among the defining figures of postminimalist and contemporary classical music. Reflecting on the minimalist movement’s evolution, Max says, “The first generation with Philip Young, Terry Riley — these sorts of figures were iconoclasts in a kind of revolution against the modernist orthodoxy and their legacy has been extraordinary.” He believes their influence extends far beyond the composers who followed directly in their footsteps, adding that minimalism “has reaffirmed tonality within music which for a long time was kind of banished”, paving the way for a beautiful diversity of approaches across contemporary classical, instrumental, electronic and dance music.
Max Richter
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There may be no better illustration of Max’s postminimalist sensibilities than SLEEP, an eight-and-a-half-hour composition conceived with his partner, visual artist Yulia Mahr, to accompany an entire night’s rest, drawing on the neuroscience of sleep and the possibility that music might reach us differently when consciousness begins to recede. Structured as an expansive sequence of variations that recalls the architecture of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the work has been performed in its entirety from midnight until 8 AM, including at London’s Wellcome Collection in 2015, where audience members listened from beds during the climax of BBC Radio 3’s Science and Music weekend.
The idea emerged from a conversation between Max and Yulia after she listened to a livestream of one of his concerts from Berlin while he was touring, which was an experience that prompted her to consider how sleep might alter our emotional receptivity to music. “When I got back, we talked about this experience, and she said, ‘there’s something really special here because your emotions are kind of wide open when you’re sleeping, so the music affects you in this very special way’, and those conversations really led to SLEEP itself coming to being,” Max recalls.
Earlier this year, Max received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score for Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the family tragedy that shaped Shakespeare’s life. Asked about collaborating with the auteur and seeing the film receive recognition, Max was unequivocal about the experience, describing the filmmaker as “a visionary director” who was “really, really insightful and thoughtful”, before adding that the production was “a real pleasure to work on, with a great team and beautiful cast.”
He also seems gratified that audiences had connected with a film so thoroughly. “I think it’s beautiful that it had the recognition it had because I do think it’s not a film for everyone in a way, but I was so happy to see that audiences connected,” he said, describing it as “a film about the big events of life and trying to make sense of those” and concluding that “in that sense I think it’s an important film”.
Though for all the attention his work on Arrival or Hamnet has attracted, one of the lesser-known credits in Max’s catalogue is, in fact, The Lunchbox, Ritesh Batra’s 2013 drama starring the late Irrfan Khan about an accidentally misdelivered lunch that sparks an unlikely correspondence between two strangers in Mumbai. The film marked Max’s first collaboration with an Indian production, and he remembers the experience with affection. “I loved that film. I absolutely loved it. It’s such a beautifully well-judged, put-together film with lovely acting,” he tells me, describing Batra as “a very sensitive and thoughtful director”.
He admits that committing to a film before it has fully taken shape can be a gamble, since the promise of a project does not always survive its realisation. “Everyone says it’s going to be great, but is it always great?” he asks with a smile, before making an exception of Batra’s film: “I felt The Lunchbox was really special. It was very beautiful.”
This Saturday’s performance will also mark Max’s first visit to India, a prospect he is approaching without a fixed idea of what to expect. “It is my first time, so I’m trying to go without any preconceptions. I’m excited to come and experience it for what it is.”
Max Richter performs live at the NMACC’s Grand Theatre in Mumbai on October 24, 2026, at 7:30 PM. The NMACC has previously staged acclaimed Indian productions including Mughal-E-Azam, Rajadhiraaj: Love. Life. Leela and The Great Indian Musical: Civilization to Nation, alongside international productions such as The Sound of Music, MAMMA MIA!, The Phantom of the Opera, The Nutcracker on Ice and Wicked The Musical. Tickets are available on the NMACC website.
