Eight Songs for a Mad king

The English composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934) was not the first to try to depict insanity in music. He certainly chose a rich subject, King George III, and a dramatic scenario in which to explore one man’s decline into madness. The texts of Eight Songs for a Mad King were compiled by Randolph Stow and are all based upon writings left behind by England’s maligned monarch. Even the music goes back directly to George, whose mechanical organ still exists and which contains numerous songs he tried to train birds to perform. Of course, the contours of those eight songs are sometimes hard to discern in the midst of Davies’ vocal acrobatics, which call for extremely difficult extended range techniques and dynamics from a whisper to a scream.
This is uncomfortable music, to say the least; it is music that crosses the threshold into monodrama, a work on the edge between concert music and realist opera. For the original production, the various onstage performers were to be placed inside large birdcages, mimicking the mad king’s vocal gestures from their respective prisons. Premiered in 1969, it opens with an aberrant tick-tock of the clock before going completely off the rails, musically speaking. Behind the expressionist surface stands the form of a Baroque suite, where each movement is a different dance. The opening movement is perhaps the most difficult to embrace. Subsequent movements feature more vestiges of melody, touches of rhythmic underpinning, that help us get our footing. At times Davies introduces a familiar, “mainstream” piece from the classical repertoire in order to parody it. Used in his other operas, this technique merges the composer’s formal training and interest in music history with a personal, radical style of expression. It is ideally suited as a way to reference the tunes King George himself knew and which must, during his mania, have taken on a distorted quality. Many listeners will be bothered, some will be mesmerized by the intensity and the originality of the composer’s conception. Musical depictions of madness will, by their very nature, push the boundary between music and chaos. It is undeniably a credit to Davies that he could channel that altered mindset so convincingly.

(c) Jason Stell