Obituary: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

Born September 8, 1934

Died March 14, 2016

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who has died aged 81, was the most irrepressibly active of modern British composers and the only one since Benjamin Britten whose music is so closely connected with the environment in which he wrote it. 
From the 1970s, that environment was Orkney, where he settled after his country cottage in Dorset burned down and he needed to find new surroundings. That he found them so startlingly far from his previous residence - and so far, indeed, from his native Manchester, as well as from London, where he had many associates and many of his works were first performed - was a stroke of luck from which Scotland hugely benefited.
Though he was said to have transformed Stromness and Kirkwall - along with the island of Hoy, where he settled in a renovated croft - into his own multiple Aldeburgh, the familiar description of him as Max, in the same way as Britten was invariably Ben, could sound a bit too glib.
Yet the more you thought about it, the closer the parallel seemed. Like Britten, he transformed his surroundings (even the glimpse they once gave him of a sea eagle) into music of the most vivid sort. Like Britten, he was a magnet who attracted other musicians - composers, conductors, players, singers, as well as audiences - from far and wide. 
And, again like Britten, he resourcefully found the right local facilities for the performance of his own and other people’s music at the midsummer St Magnus Festival which, with local support, he brought into being in 1977, surprising us each year with an array of events which Edinburgh’s much larger and longer-established festival sometimes found hard to rival.
They were different sorts of festival, of course - Max’s (and everybody by then called him Max) being more intimate, yet at the same time incredibly alive, prompting supporters to walk from one event to another, from a children’s opera (naturally composed by Max himself) in a local school hall to something haunting and sonorous in St Magnus Cathedral, and from poetry readings (the craggy-voiced Ted Hughes was once lured all the way to Stromness) to exhibitions.

Max’s musical output around this time grew more and more phenomenal, and hearing it in Orkney helped it to stick in the memory. His muse, if he could be said to need a muse, was the island poet George Mackay Brown, who inspired the first of his Orcadian masterpieces The Martyrdom of St Magnus, as well as that haunting score entitled The Blind Fiddler, written for members of his own beloved ensemble The Fires of London, a bunch of ardent, much-travelled metropolitans who grew out of his previous group called The Pierrot Players and who every year set Orkney ablaze.
Though The Blind Fiddler seemed an improbable name for one of Max’s major works - Six Songs for a Mad King, his savage portrait of George III, seemed more his style - its evocation of island sonorities haunted the memory, even if, as one London critic suggested, the effect of two pebbles softly striking each other did not represent the Max he used to know.
Sauntering alone round Kirkwall harbour after its cathedral premiere, beneath a still luminous post-midnight sky, I could not escape the strains of these songs Max wrote for the gifted Mary Thomas and the rest of the Fires.
Yet his backlog of music, before he settled in Orkney, was already enormous. In his native Manchester he became one of the so-called Manchester Group - Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr were others - who had studied at what is
now the Royal Northern College of Music and brought to life all the sounds, calm or violent, sweet or sour, ancient or modern, that had seized their imagination.
Previously educated at Leigh Grammar School in Lancashire, he was the only child of a working-class mother and father about whom Birtwistle once remarked: “If you’d known his parents and said what sort of son do you think these people have, it would not be Max.” 
Though he detested what he called the “dull, keep-the-aspidistra-flying” aspects of his childhood, his mother at the age of 80 confessed it had been thrilling to live with her son, and hear about his permanent war with authority figures at school. Even with a determinedly anti-musical headmaster, whom he nicknamed The Pig, Max taught himself A-level music, memorised all Beethoven’s symphonies, and had his first composition performed on BBC Children’s Hour. 
A scholarship to Princeton and a spell in Darmstadt added to the sophistication of what he was now producing. At Cirencester Grammar School, where he taught for three years, he revolutionised school music, coaxing children to sing O Magnum Mysterium, the inspired set of modal carols and meditations he composed for them. Much later, for Orkney’s kids, he wrote punchily subversive operas (which deeply offended the local music critic) and a set of Kirkwall Shopping Songs which, in true Scottish fashion, referred to “going the messages.” 
And because so many of his works were by now being premiered in Orkney, rather than in London, metropolitan critics were forced to fly north (at prices, they grumbled, as high as a flight to New York) in order to hear them. The sight of Peter Heyworth and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, the great rival critics of their day, breakfasting together in fishermen’s sweaters at the Kirkwall Hotel was a vision to behold.
Yet Max still made trips to London, changing trains in Inverness and Edinburgh, as well as to his beloved Italy, where he had once studied under the distinguished Petrassi. On one occasion, when he had a few hours to spare between trains, he lunched with me in Edinburgh’s Cafe Royal, supping lentil soup and disclosing future plans. Out of this encounter rose an annual confabulation - sometimes in Edinburgh (where eventually he maintained a handsome transit abode in Regent Terrace), sometimes in a Stromness cafe that served his favourite nordic “butteries” for breakfast - when he fiercely talked politics. The threat of Orcadian uranium, dealt with by the subversive Yellowcake Revue he wrote for Eleanor Bron, was a hot topic at the time. Once, suffering toothache, he stunned everyone within earshot by piecing together a broken tooth with super-glue because he was too busy to visit a dentist.
When, in 2004, he was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music (having been knighted in 1987) it was feared that he might do something outrageous, but somehow the man who had composed Antechrist in 1967 and brought blasphemy into his opera Taverner in 1968 managed to subdue his anti-establishment feelings and confess that he liked the Queen.
Trouble, however, inevitably came when Orkney’s Island Council refused to allow a local registrar to conduct a civil wedding ceremony for him and his long-term companion, the builder Colin Paterson, on the remote island of Sanday, to which he had by then moved from Hoy.
Max, quick to react, threatened to compose a comic opera vilifying such bureaucracy and to set the action in Kirkwall’s council chambers, but before that could happen he and his partner broke up and Paterson was eventually found dead in the small Kirkwall flat to which he had moved. 
By that time, in any case, the most popular of all Max’s orchestral works, the glorious Orkney Wedding with Sunrise which, complete with its bagpipe finale, he composed for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, had long established itself as the most sensational music of its kind he could possibly have written. His nine symphonies - the ninth a sometimes raucous homage to the Queen, the eighth a souvenir of a visit to Antarctica - - and his series of Strathclyde Concertos for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he was composer laureate, were other achievements. So were his ten string quartets, produced one after another with the fecundity of a modern Haydn.
Yet nothing, it must be said, quite surpassed the vast and surprisingly Sibelian seascapes of his Symphony No 1 when Simon Rattle conducted it.
On Hoy, he performed obligatory (and dangerous) coastguard duties and found delight in an atmosphere of solitude that might have made another composer disintegrate, These, it seems, were the conditions he constantly desired. But he also knew how to celebrate, as his post-festival parties - entailing a five-mile hike from Stevie’s Ferry on the other side of the island - memorably confirmed. Despite being attacked in 2013 by a vicious form of leukemia, he went on composing to the end and had just sent the manuscript of his last work - not a sad and valedictory Song of the Earth but his latest children's opera - to his publisher when his death was announced.

Conrad Wilson