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Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

by
18 March 2016

PA

Peter Maxwell Davies, photographed in 1996

Peter Maxwell Davies, photographed in 1996

Roderic Dunnett writes:

TO CALL Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who died on 14 March, aged 81, one of the world’s greatest composers might seem a truism. To add that he was a non-churchgoer who placed the sacred-music tradition at the heart of his compositional process might also amount to a cliché.

To hold good, both statements need justifying. “Max”, as he was universally known, was a composer of stature not just because of the variety and imagination of his work, but because he was a master technician. From the outset, his music was founded on shapes and patterns that had their roots in early plainsong, and in the highly complex medieval motets from the 15th century, which themselves depended on plainchant for their material, and allowed early composers to give each work its specific spiritual and emotional charge.

This applied to instrumental as much as choral music. Early on, Davies was composing music with titles that included “Alma Redemptoris Mater” and “Te lucis ante terminum”, which give a clear indication of the foundations on which even his most avant-garde output rested.

From Prolation, his first symphonic work, composed in Italy in the late 1950s, to the opera Taverner, which preoccupied him in the next decade and examined critically the life of the Tudor composer, who abandoned music in the service of Cardinal Wolsey to become a feared agent of Thomas Cromwell in Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries, Davies devised an underlay rooted in Gregorian chant, and made plainsong the raft that underpinned almost all of his works.

An obsession with betrayal informed many works of this period in which Davies emerged, in his early- to mid-thirties, as a landmark figure in British contemporary music. The betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot he addressed head-on in the choral work Ecce manus tradentis.

What was important in Davies’s work was that he had contrived the technique to illustrate the very dissolution and disintegration of decent values. The music itself, altered and distorted, illustrated the process of corruption and the revulsion felt at the betrayal.

An equally rigorous technique underlays his later music, which some described as “going soft” on his dazzlingly confrontational early works. While he took to devising his “own” plainsong patterns deployed in his many concertos and symphonies, and to employing musical “squares” and “secret” paths by which the linear music, as it were, “wrote itself”, the same intensely disciplined approach underwrote everything he composed.

This was the very opposite, in fact, to “going soft”. As he taught his many pupils, and as his own teacher Goffredo Petrassi had instructed him in Rome, there was no room in music for the spurious or gratuitous: everything must have its own logic, its own justification.

A variant of those techniques of distortion appeared in his third symphony, based on differing-angled views of the interior of the Duomo in Florence, designed by Brunelleschi, just as wave patterns around his adopted Orkney Islands supplied the musical essence of his second symphony.

Churchgoer thereafter he may not have been, although he had earlier immersed himself in Tallis, Byrd, and Gibbons, at Manchester Cathedral, performed by the choir under Allan Wicks.

But his sense of moral leadership — seen in his contribution to so many musical causes and passionate championing of young people — and of moral indignation at everything from advertising slogans and industrial pollution of the Orkneys to the Iraq War, informed his choral song-cycles and operas for children (of which his last, will be presented at the Barbican Hall on 26 June, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle), as well as adult masterpieces, such as Black Pentecost, which draws on his long-term collaborator, the poet George Mackay Brown.

Max was fun to be with, often outrageous and scurrilous, possessed of a delightful laugh and chuckle and a mischievous playfulness that offset the intense gaze of his famously piercing eyes. He was left-wing in his views, vigorously anti-Tory, and passionate about Scottish independence. He loved to cook, having mastered Italian cuisine while a pupil in Rome, and was particular in his choice of wines, favouring Italian and latterly Australian.

His house was peppered with glorious artefacts, including from Oceania and Africa, which he began collecting in his twenties, when they could be obtained at a low price. Clad in sou’wester and a woolly hat, he was an avid walker, pacing the Orcadian landscape even in the grimmest weather in search of inspiration.

Davies was awarded a CBE and a knighthood, and was appointed Companion of Honour. He spent ten years as Master of the Queen’s Music, showing himself as adept at commemorating great national anniversaries (the end of the Second World War, and the Queen’s 80th birthday) as at railing against impropriety.

He was openly gay: his last and most public partnership, after a series of close and intense relationships, was with Colin Parkinson, which ended in 2012.

Diagnosed with leukaemia in 2013, Max died on Monday, as he would have wished, at Airon, his home in the Orkneys, which he had adored since moving to Hoy in 1974. The St Magnus Festival, centred on the magnificent sandstone cathedral of Kirkwall, survives as his legacy, along with a vast body of work of exceptional quality.

 

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