12 - The Public and the Personal: Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies at 80

Summary

It has long been a critical convenience to define the musical and personal characters of close contemporaries Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934) and Peter Maxwell Davies (1934–2016) by way of contrast and, occasionally, conflict: and nowhere have these distinctions seemed more convenient than when considering each composer's distinctive relationship with British traditions on the one hand, wider European musical initiatives on the other. Back in the mid-1960s, when the pair were in their early thirties, Maxwell Davies was far and away the more prominent and prolific: and the establishment, in 1967, of The Pierrot Players (with Maxwell Davies as principal conductor) can be linked to an early swerve away from certain Italianate qualities in his music, which reflected Maxwell Davies's seminal period of study with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome (1957–8) – a shift from the kind of Monteverdi-by-wayof- Nono detectable in scores like the String Quartet and the Leopardi Fragments (both 1961) to something more explicitly Austro-Germanic, and stemming from Maxwell Davies's particular enthusiasm for the Schoenberg of the piano piece Op. 11 No. 3 and Pierrot lunaire.

Maxwell Davies's first setting of a German text (by Georg Trakl) in Revelation and Fall (1965–6) showed that to revive post-tonal expressionism was an effective way of bringing new dramatic intensity to the sometimes arid abstractions of post-1945 serialism. Still more remarkably, the work Maxwell Davies had done in the early 1960s on his opera Taverner and its orchestral off-shoots had already revealed a relish for a more sustained, symphonic kind of expressionism that brought Berg and Mahler into its net, weakening the bonds of ‘pure’ atonality and avant-garde fragmentation promoted at Darmstadt. Even before Maxwell Davies's music began to respond to the relatively restrained qualities of Sibelian northernness, it had as much to do with late romanticism itself as with attempts to go beyond late romanticism: and the analogies with Hans Werner Henze probably seem more resonant today than they did at the time.

Such was the sweeping force of Maxwell Davies's musical achievements in the 1960s, it is easy to forget that the founding of The Pierrot Players owed more to Birtwistle (along with Alan Hacker and Stephen Pruslin) than to Maxwell Davies.