The accolade is as arresting today as it was in 1964: ‘Scenes and Arias is an outstanding achievement for a young man of 27, comparable in its orchestral mastery to Erwartung and the best of Elektra’. Even though Anthony Payne carefully qualified the comparison, his intention was evidently to suggest that Maw's work was worth associating with two expressionist masterpieces which were neither English nor composed in the early 1960s. For Payne, Scenes and Arias embodied a ‘post-expressionist language’ developed ‘to a new pitch of elaboration and intensity’. It demonstrated ‘the composer's exceptional feeling for the movement inherent in atonal harmony’, and neither quality, we infer, was found by Payne in most other twentieth-century British works written before 1960.

This transparent attempt to talk up Maw's Euro-legitimacy was in harmony with the prevailing internationalism of the 1960s, and the effect was to stress the radical side of Scenes and Arias at the expense of its satisfyingly unselfconscious immersion in the warmth of romantic expression and farfrom- unconsonant harmony. Today, we might wish to argue that Scenes and Arias is as much a post-romantic erotic pastoral as a post-expressionist psychodrama, and we might complain that talk of ‘atonal harmony’ is too reductive by half, given those salient fifth- and fourth-based sonorities which, if they do not exactly establish diatonic tonality, do not affirm the consistent absence of tonality either.

More than half a century on, the richness of Scenes and Arias seems to stem from its distinctively modernist blend of darkness and light, the score's moments of fierce aggressiveness balancing its ecstatic expansiveness. At the same time it offers an individual interpretation of that most fundamental of all mainstream twentieth-century phenomena, the polarity between singlenote centricity on the one hand and chromatic saturation on the other, a polarity which leaves the alternations between confrontation and synthesis ambiguous and unresolved. Indeed, Maw's subsequent development suggests that moments of synthesis in his work were often more unstable than secure, his music exploring the incompatibilities as well as the continuities between a ‘post-expressionist language’ and the pre-expressionist, romantic language which it both absorbed and rejected. It is the consistency with which Maw analysed the interaction between his own brand of romanticism and its various technical alternatives which defines the essence of his creative personality.