Adagio

Fragment #63

Hamnet feels like a film that could have been made for these slow winter hours and this cold, damp February air. Much has been written regarding its beautiful imagery and the performances of its lead actors. Much, too, of its haunting soundtrack, composed by Max Richter, whose spare minor-key arrangements dovetail perfectly with Maggie O’Farrell’s wrenching story of love, loss and grief and Chloé Zhao’s cinematic adaptation. Richter’s most famous piece of music, ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’, was added to the film’s newly composed score at the very last minute, rendering its climactic scene with a near-overbearing weight of emotion and feeling. As elegiac swells of textured sound go, there are few modern pieces of music which can compare. It’s more than twenty years since I first discovered it – the standout track from The Blue Notebooks album that would effectively launch Richter’s career. Originally written for five string instruments, the song has a sonorous backbone of double bass, cello and viola, with one oscillating violin that gently unfolds over the top, then another that cries mournfully above everything else. String instruments – more than any other and especially in adagio arrangement, especially here in this piece of music – have an ability to replicate the human voice in its most desolate moments of despair and sorrow. Of music capable of ‘describing the indescribable’ – the pain of losing a child – I don’t know of many pieces quite like ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’.¹

Several years before Richter, I’d fallen under the spell of Mahler and the fourth magisterial adagietto movement from his Fifth Symphony (also to be immortalised in film: Luchino Visconti’s Death In Venice). Linking Mahler and Shakespeare would be the death of a child: Shakespeare would write his grief into Hamlet, Mahler expressed all of his into the slower and yet more heartbreaking albeit lesser known adagio that would begin his unfinished tenth symphony. Before I found Mahler, there was the more muscular modern work of Samuel Barber: his beautiful ‘Adagio for Strings’ (forever too to be associated with cinema – Oliver Stone’s Platoon – but also with the assassination of a president, the death of a princess and with those who died in the attack on the Twin Towers). I was working a part-time job at a homeware store during my university days when I heard Barber’s soul-stirring arrangement for the first time. His adagio was the first track to feature on the second side of a two-hour cassette of store music that played on rotation throughout the day as people shopped. My friend Nick and I once spent a deathly-quiet Sunday morning running back into the store room to rewind the tape recorder and listen to Barber’s musical lament again and again in between selling rattan furniture and bags of nightlight candles. We never did tire of hearing it repeat, though our manager eventually would.

Whilst the musical term translates as ‘in slow time’ adagio comes from two Italian words – ad agio – meaning ‘at ease’. It is curious that some of the musical canon’s most profoundly sad pieces of music should place us into such a state, but rarely do I feel more at ease than when listening to and carried away by these compositions of Barber, and Mahler and the daylight-exploring, grief-unfolding wonder of Richter.

1. In popular music, Nick Cave created arguably his most personal and profoundly moving album, Ghosteen, in the aftermath of losing his child. ‘Waiting For You’ is every bit as delicate and heartbreaking as Richter’s ‘…Daylight’. In modern minimalist classical music, there is Henryk Górecki’s achingly beautiful Symphony No.3 – known colloquially as the ‘Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs’ – three laments on the loss suffered between a mother and a child.