Flamboyant musician and firebrand
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CH CBE, composer, master of the Queen’s music: b Salford, Lancashire, Britain, September 8, 1934; d March 14, 2016, Sanday, Orkney Islands, Britain, aged 81.
An avant-garde firebrand who once provoked an audience walkout at the Proms; a prolific and protean craftsman who wrote reams of music for every medium; a republican and socialist who nevertheless became master of the Queen’s music and then proceeded to castigate the ‘‘philistines’’ at the heart of the British establishment – Peter Maxwell Davies was arguably the most influential British composer since Benjamin Britten.
And ‘‘Max’’ – as he was universally known – had a life as flamboyant as anything in his music.
Though he spent the final 44 years of his life on the remote islands of Orkney, his opinions and his mishaps – which included being prosecuted for eating a dead swan, and being swindled out of hundreds of thousands of pounds by his own manager – regularly made headlines in the national press. As did his gay relationship with a local builder and its bitter collapse.
Charming, idealistic, impish and perhaps naive in many ways, Maxwell Davies hid nothing. A born provocateur, he mellowed with age but never lost his talent or his relish for making mischief and scandalising the prudish and conservative.
In his finest music, he went way beyond shock and satire. His 1980 chamber opera The Lighthouse is a terrifying study of the psychoses caused by childhood abuse, repressed sexuality, religious fanaticism and establishment cover-up.
Much more recently, the opera Kommilitonen!, specifically written for music students to perform, is a moving and powerful celebration of youth protest throughout the 20th century.
In the last of his 10 symphonies, composed in 2013 as he underwent chemotherapy for chronic leukaemia, he set to music a suicide note written by a 17th-century architect, Francesco Borromini, who had been persecuted by contemporary critics. ‘‘Identifying with him was a huge help in overcoming any self-pity that you might feel when you’re told that you have six weeks to live,’’ Maxwell Davies observed.
He knew what it was like to be stung by a hostile press. The savagely discordant and gleefully disorientating music-theatre pieces he produced in the late 1960s – often based on medieval source-material anarchically and anachronistically distorted by 20thcentury foxtrots – were incomprehensible to many British music critics.
His 1972 grand opera, Taverner (an allegory about a 16th-century composer forced to become a tool of a repressive government to save his own skin), proved far too complex, musically and philosophically, for even those performing it at the Royal Opera House to fathom. ‘‘The chorus couldn’t sing it, the orchestra didn’t like it, and I was treated very badly,’’ Maxwell Davies recalled. He vowed never to be involved with ‘‘one of those posh opera houses’’ again. However, he liked to cause a fuss.
Much later, when he tamed his musical style and concentrated on writing in conventional forms for conventional forces, the criticism went the other way: he had ‘‘lost his boldness’’, he was writing too much, and his music had become dull and functional. ‘‘I’ve even been called a prostitute and accused of playing to the gallery,’’ he said. That view was exacerbated during the 10 years from 2004 to 2014 when he was master of the Queen’s music.
A professional composer to his fingertips, Maxwell Davies claimed with justification that he was merely tailoring his music to suit his patron. ‘‘The Queen doesn’t like dissonant music,’’ he revealed. ‘‘I see no point in rubbing her up the wrong way about that.’’
Peter Maxwell Davies was born to working-class parents in Salford in 1934, and taken to see The Gondoliers by Gilbert and Sullivan before he was five. The experience opened a window for him, not so much in musical terms but as a glimpse of a potential life not bound by his grandfather’s shop or the factory where his father worked.
Although he had virtually no encouragement or musical training at school, he had his first composition broadcast on the BBC’s Children’s Hour when he was 12.
Between 1952 and 1957 he was a student, first at the University of Manchester, then at the Royal Manchester College of Music.
After a period studying in Rome, during which he had astonishingly complex works performed at two consecutive festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music, his life took a new direction. He became the music teacher at Cirencester Grammar School. The need for a regular income prompted this unexpected move, but it had a beneficial impact on his compositional style as well. To write music that his pupils could manage, he had to simplify his style considerably.
Three years later, a Harkness Fellowship took him to America to study with Roger Sessions at Princeton University. Returning to London in 1965, he and composer Harrison Birtwistle decided to start a flexible music-theatre of avant-garde specialists for whom both could write pieces. The Pierrot Players – later renamed The Fires of London when Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle irrevocably fell out – was launched in May 1967, and for it Maxwell Davies composed some of his most powerful and disturbing early pieces, including Eight Songs for a Mad King and Vesalii Icones.
Aware that he was ‘‘burning the candle at three ends at least’’, and perhaps shaken by the extreme reactions to his music, Maxwell Davies retreated to the wilderness. In 1970, he visited the Orkney island of Hoy and decided – ‘‘instantly’’, he said – that he would live there. The cottage he found was primitive, but with a breathtaking view across ‘‘the great cliff-bound bay . . . where the Atlantic and the North Sea meet’’. He felt at home and at peace.
So closely did he come to identify with Orkney that he threatened to leave the country if uranium mining was developed in the islands. He was disgusted, too, when the London Symphony Orchestra, which had commissioned his dramatic cantata Black Pentecost, rejected it on discovering that it embodied a protest against industrial pollution.
It was during his early Orkney years that Maxwell Davies started composing in more conventional musical forms. In the end, he wrote 10 symphonies, initially much influenced by Sibelius; 10 accessible string quartets known as the Naxos quartets after the record company that commissioned them; and a sequence of concertos for the principal players of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, whose associate composer and conductor Maxwell Davies became in 1985.
In 2005, Maxwell was cautioned by the police for the unusual crime of being in possession of a swan corpse. The bird, a protected species, had flown into a power cable and died; Maxwell Davies recovered it and had already cooked it when the police arrived.
‘‘I asked them if they would like to try some swan terrine but I think they were rather horrified,’’ the composer told the BBC. ‘‘That was a mistake, wasn’t it?’’
Two years later he had another brush with authority when Orkney council refused him permission to conduct his civil-partnership ceremony on Sanday Light Railway. He had set up home six years earlier with a local builder, Colin Parkinson, who was 20 years his junior. However, the partnership ended badly. In 2011, Maxwell Davies went to court to evict Parkinson, claiming ‘‘domestic abuse’’. Parkinson later left the island after a financial settlement.
Knighted in 1987, he became master of the Queen’s music in 2004, succeeding the troubled Australian composer Malcolm Williamson. ‘‘Your predecessor never finished anything,’’ the Queen was reported to have said to Maxwell Davies after he accepted the post. Initially, the appointment seemed startling, given his forthright egalitarian views and frequently expressed despair at the way Britain was going.
Yet he proved to be a huge success, using the post to champion music and particularly music education in a series of trenchant speeches and articles, and supplying the monarch with a steady stream of well-written pieces for ceremonial occasions. He also played a big part in commissioning a Choirbook for the Queen, a compilation of anthems by 40 living British composers to mark the Diamond Jubilee.
Asked how he reconciled his political views with holding such an establishment position, he gave a typically candid response: ‘‘It’s true that I once had republican leanings, but I’ve started to see that the Queen does a bloody marvellous job. She steadies things, stops them from going – dare I use the phrase? – tits up.’’
Max remained utterly direct and unstuffy to the end, his gimlet eyes always twinkling with mischief, his indignation forever primed by tales of injustice, inequality, hypocrisy, warmongering, ecological madness or corruption in high places.
Most of all, though, he remained a composer totally dedicated to serving his community, whether by writing for a primary school in Orkney or for one of the country’s great orchestras.