The MHS Review 406, VOL. 12, NO. 10 • 1988
by Paul Kresh
Eight Songs For A Mad King
Baritone Vocals – Michael Gallup
Cello – Rebecca Reese (2)
Clarinet – Julian Spear
Flute – Ann Le Berge
Keyboards – Delores Stevens
Percussion – M.B. Gordy
Violin – Mary Terranova
Miss Donnithorne's Maggot
Cello – David Scott (41)
Clarinet – Julian Spear
Flute – Jill Shires
Percussion – M.B. Gordy
Piano – Delores Stevens
Soprano Vocals – Marni Nixon
Violin – Arthur Zadinsky
Before he went off to live in the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, where the austere air and the salt of the sea seem to have penetrated into the very fabric of his music, the Manchester-born Peter Maxwell Davies was busy writing works influenced by his studies with Roger Sessions at Princeton in the early '60s and by that ineluctable influence on so much of the music of our time, Arnold Schoenberg.
In 1967, when he wrote Eight Songs for a Mad King (the text is attributed to ''Randolph Stow and King George Ill") Davies was 33 and had already written about a dozen works--including a set of Shakespearean dances--in a variety of styles, but none of them prepared audiences for the treatment of madness in this hair-raising piece for a vocalist and six instrumentalists, with the vocalist as often as not functioning more as a seventh instrument than as a voice.
The moods of Eight Songs swing from humor to horror, the events from a vaudeville ditty to clusters of wild chords and the actual shattering of a violin. King George goes mad before our very ears. There is so much latitude for the performers as he does so that an earlier recording (by the group with whom Mr. Davies is closely identified, the Fires of London) departs in numerous details from this equally arresting interpretation, taken from a live performance at the Los Angeles County Art Museum with baritone Michael Gallup and the New Music Settings Ensemble under their brave music director Rhonda Kess.
Here are words George Ill is really supposed to have said, intoned by the mad monarch as he wanders about, trying to teach his caged birds how to sing, accompanied by some of the mechanical instruments in his collection. The range of his voice is startling, disconcerting. The tortured music he intones is heartbreaking. Yet the whole of this tour de force is constantly under the composer's complete control. At times when you're hearing it you only wish it to be over; then when it's over you immediately want to hear it again.
Seven years after Eight Songs, Davies returned once more to the subject of madness, this time taking for his subject Miss Eliza Emily Donnithorne, a woman who might well have been the inspiration for Dickens' Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. But Miss Donnithorne, whose life reads like fiction, was an actual person. Her father was a Judge and Governor in the East India Civil Service in Bengal in the mid-1820s when Eliza was born. Later he retired and they moved to Australia, but when she was growing up hers was an upper-class life of luxury in India.
Before she was 30 she-became engaged to a naval officer, and a fine feast was planned for their wedding day; but with the guests assembled and all in readiness her fiance failed to show up, nor was he ever seen again. And so, in And so, in Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, with a text by the same Randolph Stow who worked with the composer on Eight Songs for a Mad King, the lady relives the whole humiliating experience, amid the ticking of erratic clocks (four metronomes set at different tempi), the decaying wedding cake, and hallucinations of snakes and spiders She hates the little boys in town who jeer at her and tell off-color jokes about her. She hates the navy, she hates all men. She prepares for her role as bride to a tortured version of the "Bridal March" from Lohengrin.
Doomed every day of her life to relive her dusty fantasy, Miss Donnithorne makes a fine companion for King George on the reverse side of this exceptional recording. Davies has supplied her with music even more daring and remarkable, as is the virtuoso performance by that versatile soprano of both the popular and classical music worlds, Marni Nixon. Ms. Kess and her game ensemble supply the misty milieu of arrested time in which poor Miss Donnithorne is mired.
These are twin works devoted to madness, by one of England's sanest and most masterly composers, both brilliantly performed.
