Composed in 2004 for The Blue Notebooks, Richter's slow-building lament for strings has become modern music's signature elegy, heard in Arrival, Shutter Island and now Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, which Richter scored. Zhao chose it for the film's devastating final scene at the Globe Theatre, where Agnes watches Hamlet performed. Over a patient ground of cellos, the violins rise in overlapping waves of almost unbearable consolation.
