Che So hos ho Me Fog (b. 1934)
TEXT BY RANDOLPH STOW & ee a Ill
swith, Archies Catlaanss deledit need! Shas Taal ofl Pepin
(Jennifer Ward Clarke, Cello. Duncan Druce, Violin/Viola. Alan Hacker, Clarinets. Judith
Pearce, Flutes. Stephen Pruslin, Keyboard Instruments. Barry Quinn, Percussion) .
Conducted by the Composer
——
The poems forming the text of this work were suggested by a miniature mechanical organ playing
eight tunes, once the property of George III. A scrap of paper sold with it explains that ‘This Organ was
George the third for Birds to sing’’.
A few years ago, the organ was acquired by the Hon. Sir Steven Runciman who in 1966
demonstrated it to me. It left a peculiar and disturbing impression. One imagined the King, in his purple
flannel dressing-gown and ermine night-cap, struggling to teach birds to make the music which he could so
rarely torture out of his flute and harpsichord. Or trying to sing with them, in that ravaged voice, made
almost inhuman by day-long soliloquies, which once murdered Handel for Fanny Burney’s entertain-
ment. There were echoes of the story of the Emperor’s nightingale. But this Emperor was mad; and at
times he knew it, and wept.
The songs are to be understood as the King’s monologue while listening to his birds perform, and
incorporate some sentences actually spoken by George III.
In performance, the flute, clarinet, violin and ’cello players sit in cages, representing, on one level,
the bullfinches the King was trying to teach to sing. The King has extended dialogues with these players |
individually — in No. 3, the flautist becomes, in the King’s mind, the ‘Lady in Waiting’ concerned, as well,
as a bullfinch — in ‘To Be Sung on the Water’, the ‘cellist incarnates the River Thames; in ‘The Review’,
the percussion player becomes the King’s brutal keeper, who plays him off stage at the end, beating a bass
drum with acat-o-nine-tails. The climax of the work is the end of No. 7 where the King snatches the violin
through the bars of the player’s cage and breaks it. This is not just the killing of a bullfinch — itis a giving-
in to insanity, and aritual murder by the King of a part of himself, after which, at the beginning of No. 8,
he can announce his own death.
As well as their own instruments, the players have mechanical birdsong devices, operated by clock-
work, and the percussion player has a collection of bird-call instruments.
The vocal writing calls for extremes of register and a virtuoso acting ability; my intention was, with
this, and the mixture of styles in the music together with the look of the cages, suggesting prison or hospital
beds, to leave open the question, is the persecuted protagonist Mad George III, or somebody who thinks
he is George?
THE FIRES OF LONDON
The Fires of London have won an International reputation as the world’s leading music-theatre
group, based on their celebrated staged performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and of Maxwell
Davies’s extraordinary theatre-works, Eight Songs for a Mad King, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, Vesallii
Icones, Le Jongleur de Notre Dame, and The Martyrdom of Saint Magnus.
The group, which has played throughout Britain, Eastern, Western and Northern Europe, North,
Central and South America, and Australia and New Zealand, is equally renowned for its brilliant and
committed performances of twentieth-century classics and of the most recent chamber music, as well as
for its exhilarating excursions into ‘‘early music brought forward’’ which provide a cross-fertilisation
between past and present.
Peter Maxwell Davies
PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
Davies has achieved, by his early forties, a unique position in the musical world, as a prolific yet
meticulous composer, as the Director of The Fires of London, and also as the committed exponent of
creative musical education for children.
Peter Maxwell Davies’s compositions link musical and cultural history, the medieval, renaissance
and baroque traditions with contemporary ideas. His operas; Taverner, The Martyrdom of Saint
Magnus, The Two Fiddlers and his ballet (Salome), as well as his song cycles and works for the music-
theatre, recreate the role of the musician as bard, story-teller and seer.
A further strand of Maxwell Davies’s creativity is his feeling for the Islands of Orkney, where he
lives between tours and concerts, from which he has drawn inspiration for all his recent works. These
include Stone Litany, Ave Maris Stella, A Mirror of Whitening Light, Solstice of Light and Black
Pentecost. Orkney is where he founded and still directs the Saint Magnus Festival.
Parallel to his career as acomposer, he has been involved with the teaching of music; the success of
his method at Cirencester Grammar School has led to frequent broadcasts, lecture tours in Europe,
Australia, and New Zealand and North and South America, and participation in the UNESCO conference
on musical education. This has been further expanded by the children’s opera The Two Fiddlers written
for performance by children which has been mounted in a number of countries. He is also the director of
Dartington Summer School of Music.
Some of his best known works have been written for the Fires of London — Vesalii Icones, Eight
Songs for a Mad King, Missa Super L’>homme Arme, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot and he conducts their
concerts all over the world.
SIDE 1 (19:08)
1. The Sentry (Tune: King Prussia’s
Minuet)
The King imagines himself approaching the
sentry before going for a walk in the
country. He speaks paternally to the
soldier, and promises him a present from
his vegetable garden. Then suddenly,
seeing himself as the prisoner of the sentry,
he breaks down. (In this mood, he once
burst into tears and cried: “‘I wish to God I
may die, for I am going to be mad’’.)
Good day to Your Honesty: God guard
who guards the gate.
Here is the key of the Kingdom.
You are a pretty fellow: next month I
shall give you a cabbage.
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