Page 320 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained
P. 320
318
IF YOU TELL ME
A LIE, LET IT
BE A BLACK LIE
EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING (1969),
PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
ith some exceptions— to a traditional past rather than
IN CONTEXT such as the areas pointing toward an exciting
W of psychology and new future. As the 1960s arrived,
FOCUS imagination explored in the operas however, with their release of
Theatre and radicalism of Benjamin Britten and Michael long pent-up desires for social
in English music
Tippett—British classical music and political change, a similar
BEFORE after World War II was generally in revolution in classical music
1912 Arnold Schoenberg’s thrall to convention. Prominent new was about to erupt.
song-cycle melodrama Pierrot works, such as Sinfonia antartica
lunaire launches the concept (1952) by Ralph Vaughan Williams, New blood
of the avant garde. or William Walton’s Cello Concerto When Peter Maxwell Davies
(1956), were seen as looking back entered the Royal Manchester
1968 The ritualistic violence College of Music in 1952, he found
of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera a number of like-minded radical
Punch and Judy disconcerts fellow-students: composers
listeners at the UK’s Aldeburgh Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander
Festival, including its founder, Goehr, trumpeter and conductor
Benjamin Britten. Elgar Howarth, and pianist John
Ogdon. This new “Manchester
AFTER School” was an informal group of
1972 Maxwell Davies’s opera very different artistic personalities.
Taverner, an ambitiously While Goehr’s music related to the
dramatic portrait of the Tudor modern Austro-German tradition
composer John Taverner, is of the inter-war years, with its roots
first performed at the Royal in the style and technical method
Opera House, Covent Garden. of Arnold Schoenberg, Birtwistle
looked to reconnect with ancient
1986 Birtwistle’s “lyric theatrical ritual, particularly Greek
tragedy” The Mask of Orpheus,
a theatrical representation on
an immense scale of multiple The ravings of the mentally
versions of the Orpheus afflicted George III (1738–1820), King of
Great Britain and Ireland, provided the
legend, premieres in London. disconcerting basis for the libretto
of Eight Songs for a Mad King.
US_318-319_Maxwell_Davies.indd 318 26/03/18 1:02 PM
