Miss Donnithorne's Maggot/Eight Songs for a Mad King

Peter Maxwell Davies - Miss Donnithorne's Maggot/Eight Songs for a Mad King

CD released in 1987

Miss Donnithorne's Maggot (1974)

recorded at Henry Wood Hall on May 24, 1984

text by Randolph Stow

Performers:

Mary Thomas - mezzo-soprano
The Fires of London: Philippa Davies - flutes; David Campbell - clarinets; Rosemary Furniss - violin; Jonathan Williams - cello; Stephen Pruslin - piano; Gregory Knowles - percussion

The author has described his text as "a slur on the reputation of an unfortuante lady". Eliza Emily Donnithorne was a real-life model for Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations. An avid reader, she was probably well acquainted with her fictional counterpart. She was born in Bengal around 1827, and, upon her father's retirement, returned to live in New South Wales. In 1856 she became engaged to a naval officer, but was jilted en route to the altar. Miss Donnithorne coped with this traumatic event by "freezing" the moment of her impending wedding for the rest of her life. The wedding breakfast was left to moulder on the table, the bride continued to wear her wedding dress, and she became a virtual recluse, only indulging in minimal necessary conversations through a chink in her front door. In Maxwell Davies's outrageous but deeply compassionate portrait, we may well infer that Miss Donnithorne's re-living of her experience is a compulsively repeated ritual, one that may have taken place every night of her life. She died on May 20, 1886. Her funeral was her first outing for thirty years.
Although Miss Donnithorne certainly makes forays into the domain of the extended voice, the work fundamentally represents an extension of the ideals of bel canto into the music of our own time. And although there is a wealth of dramatic gesture, it is above all through pitch and harmony that Maxwell Davies informs the listener of his precise location on the axis between comedy and pain. (Stephen Pruslin)

Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969)

recorded at Decca Studios, London on October 1-2, 1970

text by Randolph Stow and George III

Performers:

Julius Eastman - baritone
The Fires of London: Judith Pearce - flutes; Alan Hacker - clarinets; Duncan Druce - violin; Jennifer Ward Clarke - cello; Stephen Pruslin - piano/harpsichord; Barry Quinn - percussion

Peter Maxwell Davies - conductor

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". Another fragment identifies its second owner as "James Hughes who served his Majesty George 3 near 30 years penshen of in 1812 at 30 pouns year served HRH princes Augusta 8 years Half penshen of in 1820 at 30 year".
The organ remained in the family of Hughes until modern times, when it 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 entertainment. 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. The quotations, and a description of most of the incidents to which reference is made, can be found in the chapters on George III in The Court at Windsor by Christopher Hibbert (Longmans and Penguin Books). (Randolph Stow)

Tracklisting:

1. Miss Donnithorne's Maggot {36:40}

1. Prelude - Miss Donnithorne invites the listener to her imagined wedding.
2. Miss Donnithorne's Maggot - The first "song" suggests a parallel between Miss Donnithorne and the White Woman of Berners Street, a famous London apparition and another prototype for Miss Havisham. It also presents the image of the wedding cake as a tower, the first in a series of "Freudian" references invoked by Miss Donnithorne's fevered imagination.
3. Recitative - The well-read Miss Donnithorne here casts herself as Ophelia. Reference is also made to Bea Miles, the rich drop-out who slept rough and, until her death in Sydney in 1974, could recite all of Shakespeare by heart, and also to the "Eternity Man", who went round Sydney at night, chalking the word "Eternity" on the paving stones.
4. Her Dump - The phallic tower of wedding cake is here construed as a lighthouse, connecting it more specifically with Miss Donnithorne's naval officer fiance.
5. Nocturne, instruments alone
6. Her Rant - Miss Donnithorne now fantasises a rape, while further military and anatomical images proliferate from the cipher of the wedding cake.
7. Recitative - Miss Donnithorne rails against the local youths, while taking a more than ladylike interest in their conversations.
8. Her Reel - Miss Donnithorne anticipates the return of her bridegroom and finally pirouettes offstage in a shower of confetti to her imagined consummation.

2. Eight Songs for a Mad King {30:10}

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".)
2. The Country Walk (La Promenade) - The King imagines himself to be walking in the countryside, which he loves, but his failing sight distorts it into grotesque forms and his "nervousness" grows.
3. The Lady-in-Waiting (Miss Musgrave's Fancy) - The King imagines himself indulging in another of his chief pleasures, conversation with a wellbred young woman, but is reminded that wellbred young women are terrified of him.
4. To be sung on the water (The Waterman) - The King fancies himself in a boat on the Thames, and dreams of being relieved of his God-given burdens. (It was in such moods that he talked of retiring to Hanover, or even America.)
5. The Phantom Queen (He's ay a-kissing me) - The King yearns for his imaginary Queen. (Esther, Lady Pembroke, had been a famous beauty in his youth. During his first period of madness in 1788-9 he formed the delusion, which recurred later, that he had divorced Queen Charlotte and married Queen Esther, in the presence of his doctors.) Distrusting the doctors, whom he accuses of keeping Queen Esther from him, he remembers the brutal treatment to which he was subjected before the advent of the humane Doctor Willis.
6. The Counterfeit (Le Contrefaite) - The text is taken from one of the King's own monologues, recorded by Queen Charlotte's eavesdropper, Fanny Burney.
7. Country Dance (Scotch Bonnett) - The King imagines the people of Windsor (of whom he once said, weeping: "These good People are too fond of me") engaged in country merrymaking. He encourages them with one of the quotations from Handel which punctuated his conversation. He recalls a piece of local knowledge with which he once startled his grooms. Then (as in his famous interview with Fanny Burney at Kew) he becomes suddenly agitated about the evils of the age. (The Kew interview was terminated by the doctors after the King had cried: "When once I get away. I shall rule with a rod of iron!")
8. The Review (A Spanish March) - The King (who in this life occasionally wore mourning, "in memory of George III, for he was a good man") announces his death to the nation and reviews his career.

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