

Nor was this necessarily, so far as German music was concerned, a case of ‘post-Nazi hysteria’, the result of the shattering of German musical culture by the insane destruction through racial hatred of large swathes of the country’s heritage in the course of the years of Hitler’s rule or the necessary destruction of that rule by the combined Allied forces in 1945.

Nor is this the place to revisit the reasons for the neglect at that time in the UK of the Second Viennese School and its post-war followers (and, let’s be honest, developers), for it was certainly the case that, by the beginning of the 1960s, most young British composers, generally speaking, lagged behind their European counterparts in their knowledge of the latest developments in music on the Continent.

It’s all very well having freedoms, but you’ve got to know what to do with them, and on the one hand, classical musicians had the ‘freedom’ (some commented that this ‘freedom’ was nothing more than the freedom to tie oneself up in a straight-jacket) to explore the consequences of serial composition (at times, of course, total serialisation) and, on the other, popular musicians had the ‘freedom’ to explore the fact that – thanks to the playing-time of the average ‘long-playing’ record – pop music didn’t have to be confined to songs lasting three minutes (today, of course, we’ve reverted to the ‘three-minutes’ syndrome, unless there’s a nine-minute disco mix or other smaller-scale fragmentations of the imagination of pop ‘composers’) – late 1950s and 1960s popular music, crystallised in instrumental terms into a four- or five-piece rock band of a couple of guitars, perhaps keyboard, and drums (again, the instrumental make-up hasn’t changed in half a century) explored the greater ‘freedom’ afforded by the long-playing disc by expanding into such seminal masterpieces as The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or The Who’s Tommy (a genuine ‘grand opera’ in two acts), with the creators’ ability to make comments on all aspects of contemporary life, and to so do on a bigger scale than hitherto.
Perhaps these twin streams of 1960s music could come together? In some respects, they did – with Jon Lord’s Concerto for Rock Group and Symphony Orchestra a prime example of such a fusion, or the rock group the Soft Machine giving a late-night gig, devoted entirely to them, at the Henry Wood Proms in the Albert Hall (another worthwhile innovation by William Glock) being another, or Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells demonstrating what can be achieved through electronics – but rather than exploring one or other attempt in those days to bringing together musics that are fundamentally separate, I should like to highlight an aspect of the influence of one composer in the broad ‘classical’ field on another in the broad ‘pop’ arena.

The effect of Eight Songs for a Mad King on the audience was electrifying; outside, perhaps, of a horror movie, no-one had ever seen or heard any piece of music quite like it. The text, by Randolph Stow, concentrated upon the depiction of the madness of King George III in the last years of his life, when he attempted to teach bullfinches to sing, the bullfinches personified musically by the flute, clarinet, violin and cello, with which the King has extended ‘dialogues’, as the composer described them: the percussion player ‘stands for the King’s “keeper”’. In his programme note, the composer continued: ‘they are projections stemming from the King’s words and music, becoming incarnations of the King’s own psyche.’

At this point in the work, the violin itself is absorbed into the narrative; as Michael Burden has pointed out, in his essay A foxtrot to the crucifixion [in Perspectives on Peter Maxwell Davies, edited by Richard MacGregor, Ashgate Publishing, 2000], ‘The violin can also be seen to represent the King’s voice, an ‘instrument’ also driven to complete destruction by being used so constantly during the King’s ravings that it becomes hoarse and unrecognisable.’ In that first production, as Burden earlier stated: ‘the musicians, as the bullfinches, were ‘caged’ in large wooden latticed upright cylinders. Yet there is the feeling here that the cages kept the King out as well as the musicians (as ‘songbirds’) in, a feeling which conveys all too clearly the isolation of the King in his madness.’
Paul Griffiths [in Peter Maxwell Davies, Robson Books, 1982] hits the nail firmly on the head when he states: ‘… this is far from being a Bedlam sideshow to titillate an audience. Nor does the work allow us to congratulate ourselves as superior to the eighteenth [actually, early nineteenth] century in our gifts of compassion, and in this respect it joins all those other Davies works that reject the easy solution ... the perturbing character of the work is due not merely to its startling depiction of insanity but more to the fact that it obliges us to acknowledge that the madhouse does exert a terrible fascination.’
The smashing-up of the violin may have been akin to those contemporary accounts of rock musicians smashing-up their guitars and loudspeakers – the personification of a deep frustration, railing against a world that could not then bring to account the American quagmire of the Vietnam War, or the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia – and if, forty years ago, peace was not being given a chance, as John Lennon hoped it would be, it seemed – more to the point, in this instance – Peter Maxwell Davies’s later arrangement for solo guitar of the Lennon-MacCartney song Yesterday, demonstrated that, beneath the surface differences of late-1960s rock music and avant-garde ‘classical’ composers (even Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Concert for Peace’ in Washington Cathedral – radical-chic or no), there was a unifying sense of common humanity, especially amongst the young, which could – in Eight Songs – depict a ruler’s madness at one historical remove and relate it powerfully to the ongoing ‘terrible fascination’ (as Griffiths said) for modern audiences of what happens when things get wholly out of hand and beyond our control.

The more one studies Bowie’s work after Cygnet Committee, the more one is convinced that the impact of witnessing Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs set off one of the most iconic rock careers in living memory. Ziggy Stardust – an imaginary other-worldly figure, infuses the next album, concluding with a deranged suicide attempt, the whole traversing the diabolus in musica, an augmented fourth (G major to D flat) and the following album, Aladdin Sane (‘a lad insane’?), is chock-full of further extraordinary dichotomies: in essence, those of derangement and rediscovery. Are we reading too much into our observations if we relate Bowie’s later work to Maxwell Davies’s succeeding Vesalii Icones, as if both artists, the one having influenced the other, in going their separate ways, arrived at similar conclusions – in the sense that, at any one time, no artist’s work is ever concluded – except by death? Perhaps we are – but, then again, maybe not, for Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King can be shown to have spawned more than his own later developing work, which – as we celebrate his 75th-birthday this year – stands as a series of images, reflections and shadows from one of the most powerful creative minds in music today.
- This article was written for Musical Opinion and published in the May-June 2009 issue
- It is reproduced on The Classical Source with permission
- Musical Opinion