¹ Welten, Ruud, ‘“I'm Not Ill, I'm Nervous”: Madness in the Music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’, Tempo, no. 196 (April 1996), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Andrew Clements in The Guardian 21 January 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2002/jan/21/classicalmusicandopera.artsfeatures (accessed March 2011).

³ Tom Sutcliffe in The London Evening Standard 18 January 2002 http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/review-576818-walk-on-the-wild-side.do (accessed March 2011). The Clements and Sutcliffe reviews are of the double bill performance of Mr Emmet Takes a Walk and Eight Songs for a Mad King given by Psappha at the Lyric Hammersmith in London on 17 January 2002.

⁴ Composer's note for the work at http://www.maxopus.com/work_detail.aspx?key=143 (accessed November 2010). Subsequent events in his personal life led him to modify this claim and leave open the possibility that he might write another music-theatre work. In 2010 he completed an opera Kommilitonen! (Young Blood), also to a libretto by David Pountney, which was commissioned jointly by the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School in New York. It was first performed at the Royal Academy of Music in London on 18 March 2011.

⁵ Whittall, Arnold, ‘Cross-Currents and Convergencies: Britten, Maxwell Davies and the Sense of Place’, Tempo, no. 204 (1998), 5–11, here page 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This will be discussed further in due course.

⁶ ‘Sir Peter Maxwell Davies in conversation with Paul Driver’ (hereafter Davies/Driver): PSA CD 1002. Davies says ‘[the idea came] from David himself … he wanted to make the music a part of the discourse that isn't normal in opera perhaps by making musical forms an integral part of his libretto’.

⁷ This is a recurring feature of Davies' work, which Paul Driver picks up in his interview with the composer. Driver points out a relationship between Mr Emmet and the seventh symphony, specifically referring to the fact that the symphony leads back to Davies' first symphony so that the cycle of seven could begin again. This is an idea also implicit in the series of ten Naxos quartets and, as Driver points out could be said to be a feature of the opera Taverner also. Davies remarks that he wasn't aware he ‘liked doing it’ until he was writing the fourth symphony. Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002.

⁸ Davies has never been afraid of utilizing established forms, and sometimes his programme notes make a point of drawing attention to this element, as in the first two movements of the sixth symphony, which he describes in ‘classical’ terms: ‘the first movement proper is a scherzo masquerading as a sonata allegro, and the second a sonata-allegro masquerading as a scherzo’. See http://www.maxopus.com/work_detail.aspx?key=263 (accessed November 2010). In his interview with Davies, Paul Driver draws attention to links with the seventh symphony, which Davies wrote at the same time as Mr Emmet. Davies' relationship to, and engagement with, sonata form in particular has been explored by a number of commentators and most notably in: Jones, Nicholas, ‘Playing the “Great Game”? Peter Maxwell Davies, Sonata Form, and the Naxos Quartet No. 1’, The Musical Times, 146 (2005), 71–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Peter Maxwell Davies' “Submerged Cathedral”: Architectural Perspectives in the Third Symphony’, Music and Letters, 81 (2000), 402–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lister, Rodney, ‘The Ghost in the Machine: Sonata Form in the Music of Peter Maxwell Davies’, in Gloag, Kenneth and Jones, Nicholas, eds, Maxwell Davies Studies (Cambridge, 2009), 106–28Google Scholar; Kenneth Gloag, ‘Questions of Form and Genre in Peter Maxwell Davies' First Symphony’ in ibid., 129–49.

⁹ Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002.

¹⁰ Andrew Clements (The Guardian 21 January 2002) hears Beethoven in this opening (no doubt the fourth movement of the Eroica, although he does not say so, though the ninth symphony has also be mentioned in this context) but in fact the initial phrase is derived from the bass line of the Bach prelude which underpins this work: the F minor prelude from Book 2 of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. The train horn will be discussed later in the context of the Emmet theme (Ex. 5).

¹¹ Note that the use of frame here is not the same as that proposed by Burden, Michael in ‘A Foxtrot to the Crucifixion; the Music Theatre of Peter Maxwell Davies’, in Perspectives on Peter Maxwell Davies, ed. McGregor, Richard (Aldershot, 2000), 51–65Google Scholar, but rather that the action happens between two fixed points which have some specific connection.

¹² Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002.

¹³ Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002. Davies used similar framing devices in other works such as Eight Songs for a Mad King where the bass drum marks the King's entrance and exit and, as Welten has suggested, defines the percussionist as the King's keeper: Welten, ‘“I'm Not Ill, I'm Nervous”’, 23. As a further example, Driver cites the opera Taverner. In his discussion of the opera David Beard characterises these as ‘recurring devices that connote underlying tension’. See David Beard ‘Taverner: an interpretation’ in Gloag and Jones, Maxwell Davies Studies, 79–105, here 104.

¹⁴ Williams, Alan E. ‘Madness in the Music Theatre Works of Peter Maxwell Davies’, Perspectives of New Music, 38/1 (Winter, 2000), 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Davison, Gerald C., and Neale, John M., Abnormal Psychology, 8th edition (New York, 2001), 270Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002.

¹⁷ Foucault was no stranger to suicide attempts: it has been surmised that his death from AIDS in 1984 was actually a planned suicide, although this has been strongly disputed. For his various statements see ‘Un plaisir si simple’, Gai Pied, 1 (April 1979), 1, 10; and ‘Un systéme fini face à une demande infinie’, in Sécurité social: l'enjeu (Paris, 1983), 63; both are cited in Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault, (New York, 1993), 55 and n. 52, 402Google Scholar, and referred to in John Carvalho's, ‘Fact and Fiction: Writing the Difference Between Suicide and Death’, available online at: http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=463#FN14link (accessed March 2011).

¹⁸ Michel Foucault's ‘The Simplest of Pleasures’ is available in translation online at: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault13.htm (accessed March 2010).

¹⁹ Adapted from http://durkheim.itgo.com/suicide.html (accessed May 2010), referring to Durkheim, Emile, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, translated by Simpson, George and Spaulding, John A. (New York, 1951)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Foucault, ‘The Simplest of Pleasures’.

²¹ The idea might appear rather old-fashioned in the context of a contemporary opera but it assumes a particular telling resonance in this work because of the suggestion of some typical manifestations of mental disturbance in the mind of the suicide through Durkheim's ‘fatalistic’ category.

²² Clément, Catherine, Opera, or, The Undoing of Women, trans. Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis 1988)Google Scholar.

²³ Librettist's note for the work at: http://www.maxopus.com/work_detail.aspx?key=143 (accessed March 2011). Davies' conversation with Paul Driver suggests that Pountney may have written the libretto based on personal experience. This is the implication when he says ‘because it was involving somebody as a role model for the main protagonist whom David had known’. Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002.

²⁴ ibid.

²⁵ The significance of the cello as an instrumental expression of Emmet's consciousness is explored later in this article in the discussion following Table 1.

²⁶ Davies responding to a question from Paul Driver: Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002. Driver uses the phrase ‘symbolic agent’ in relation to the ‘borrowed’ musical ideas used in Mr Emmet and the subsequent discussion refers to these and other overarching ideas as ‘archetypes’. It is not entirely clear what Davies views this ‘predicament’ to be: the most likely interpretation is that he conceives that Emmet has no choice other than to commit suicide.

²⁷ CD liner Mr Emmet Takes a Walk, PSA CD 1002.

²⁸ The clarinettist Tony Pay, writing on the Clarinet Blackboard website (http://test.woodwind.org/oboe/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=303436&t=303436), refers to the first performance of Eight Songs, in which a member of the audience was heard to ‘shout “Rubbish!” and walk out, only to return a few seconds later to shout, “It's STILL RUBBISH!”’ (accessed August 2012). On the other hand with regard to Resurrection, Majel Connery suggests that by the time it was finally staged in the late 1980s the effect of the pop music take-offs was already out-of-date: ‘the group is meant to sound ‘terrifying’ but the ensuing musical reference sounds like a grouchy Linda Ronstadt … Resurrection is an opera not of its time…’. Connery, Majel, ‘Peter Maxwell Davies' Worst Nightmare: Staging the Unsacred in the Operas Taverner and Resurrection’, The Opera Quarterly, 25 (2009), 247–69, here 248CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Respectively Chat Moss (1993) for the fifth symphony and Time and the Raven (1995) for the sixth.

³⁰ Programme note for Mr Emmet takes a walk: http://www.maxopus.com/work_detail.aspx?key=143.

³¹ Various claims have been made for the symbolic significance of the key of F minor. Nattiez cites several composers and writers over various centuries whose descriptions of the key range from ‘gloomy’ (Charpentier) to ‘morose’ (Lavignac): Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music, trans. Abbate, Carolyn, (Princeton, 1990), 125–6Google Scholar. The opening motif of Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 4 in F minor was described by the composer himself as a Fate Motif, which when allied to the Mozart quotation that Davies uses here could explain why the composer actually chose to quote this particular Prelude and Fugue.

³² The score specifies that the Grand Piano on stage should be ‘ideally adapted to play a CD pre-recorded by the pianist, or which can be played live’. See Davies, Peter Maxwell, Mr Emmet Takes a Walk (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1999)Google Scholar. As Emmet leaves, the score instructs that ‘The V-shaped room opens out to reveal the grand piano against a blue background which could be the sea. It is playing’. The Trio, and thus the Exposition, ends with a direct quotation from the Prelude heard simultaneously with its associated fugue (the use of which is not signposted in the programme note).

³³ For the Gabrieli chorus I have referred to the Schrade edition of 1960: Schrade, Leo, La représentation d'Edipo Tiranno au Teatro Olimpico (Paris, 1960)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Mr Emmet Takes a Walk, CD liner notes.

³⁵ See www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/apr/19/pressandpublishing.guardianobituaries (accessed January 2010).

³⁶ Gabor is a genuine Hungarian surname (as borne by the Hungarian born actress Zsa Zsa Gabor) and it is also a race of Romanian Gypsies from whom the surname may have come.

³⁷ This may be a deliberate reference to the minor third sound of a train whistle.

³⁸ All Extracts from Mr Emmet Takes a Walk © Copyright 2000, 2006 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

³⁹ A good example of this tritone relationship using the same pitches F and B is found in the second symphony. See McGregor, Richard, ‘The Maxwell Davies Sketch Material in the British Library’, Tempo, no. 196 (1996), 9–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Nicholas Jones, ‘Peter Maxwell Davies' “Submerged Cathedral”’ and Lister, ‘The ghost in the machine’. See note 8.

⁴⁰ Many of Davies' stage works include a dramatic role for instrumentalists. In Vesalii Icones the dancer shares the stage with the solo cellist who is the musical embodiment of the physical presence of the dancer, while in Resurrection it is the pop group who are onstage. In Davies' directions for Eight Songs, in addition to the percussionist who accompanies the King's entrance and exit on the bass drum, the other instrumentalists on stage in cages represent the birds that the King is trying to teach.

⁴¹ Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002.

⁴² Davies does something similar with his use of a ‘marching band’ in his latest opera Kommilitonen (2010).

⁴³ On the CD this line is heard as: ‘Why is my mother playing the piano?’.

⁴⁴ The cello line is not obvious in the published vocal score.

⁴⁵ Fig. S1 in the Main Act following Arthur's Song.

⁴⁶ In his programme note to The Martyrdom of St Magnus, Paul Griffiths says of Scene 8 that ‘Håkon [i.e. the military officer] is a hysterical officer and Magnus merely a prisoner’. The use of an individual performer to express different but related roles is common in Davies' dramatic works. It is a way in which the composer habitually manages to turn the economies and limitations of chamber opera to dramatic advantage by interlocking ideas and characters in various ways. See www.maxopus.com/work_detail.aspx?Key=289 (accessed August 2012).

⁴⁷ Davison and Neale, Abnormal Psychology, 272.

⁴⁸ Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002.

⁴⁹ Davison and Neale, Abnormal Psychology, 273.

⁵⁰ This musical idea is probably connected to Exposition no. 2 – Duet where Ka and Todd sing about polishing ‘the train for future abuse’, scrubbing blood, and ‘plastic bags’ sealed ‘tight with security tags’. Similarly related are the piano introductions to Exposition no. 4 Cabaletta and Episode 2 – The Park. These connections are summarised in Table 1.

⁵¹ Mr Emmet Takes a Walk, CD liner note.

⁵² Davison and Neale, Abnormal Psychology, 272.

⁵³ Including the Introduction, the Schumann was previously heard towards the end of the Exposition No. 5 Trio, prefacing Ka's words ‘I sense he's leaving’, and, significantly, right at the end of Exposition when Davies directs that Emmet himself should play it on the piano. It is possible that Davies thought of the Schumann theme as in some way representing Emmet himself or his unconscious mind.

⁵⁴ In many cultures, the raven has a connection with death. For the American Indians, for example, it is ‘the messenger of death’ and in parts of the United Kingdom the raven is associated with the devil – and this association can be read into the next Episode. It is possible that the raven here is a deliberate reference to Edgar Allan Poe's poem ‘The Raven’ which has resonances with the Faustian contract – the protagonist asks the bird leading questions and the bird can only say one word – ‘nevermore’ – a fateful word which becomes a significant answer for the questioner. Thus, the bird becomes the personification of Fate. The same personification can be read into Mr Emmet – a harbinger of the inevitable. The raven is also a Biblical symbol of ill omen; sent out as a white raven by Noah to bring back news of the floodwaters it fails to do so immediately and is cursed by being turned black and condemned to feed on carrion. There may also be a connection with Davies' own work Time and the Raven, which provided some of the source material for his sixth symphony. As well as these, the raven in Schubert's Die Winterreise is often interpreted as intimation of a death wish, which would certainly be applicable to the present work.

⁵⁵ There is undoubted symbolism at work here in the libretto. The Japanese 1958 film Ballad of Narayama, tells the story of a community where aged inhabitants are carried voluntarily up a mountain to die in order to allow the community to survive in times of scarcity. This is itself based on a Japanese folklore tradition of Ubasute, whose literal meaning is ‘abandoning an old woman’. Another possible allusion is to the end of book two of the Aeneid where Aeneas carries his father Anchises towards the mountains.

⁵⁶ This is a brief glimpse of the early Davies – invoking parody of a pre-existing musical object.

⁵⁷ The full Italian text is as follows: ‘Vero dirò già morend'io:/Potesti l'alm’ in me rivocando/Darmi spirito e vita/Et hor mi chiudi gl'occhi/In tenebre eterne' (‘Already dying I will truly say: calling back my soul you could have given me spirit and life, but now you close my eyes in eternal darkness’). Schrade, La représentation d'Edipo Tiranno.

⁵⁸ Davies agrees but notes that Pountney wrote the libretto for Mr Emmet while he himself wrote that for Resurrection: Davies/Driver PSA CD 1002.

⁵⁹ At the climax of the work, the members of Die Weisse Rose are executed for their resistance to the Nazi regime.

⁶⁰ On Foucault, see note 18, above.

⁶¹ This is detailed in the stage directions and according to Davies it was Pountney's idea: personal communication with the author via the www.maxopus.com link.

⁶² This has resonances with Acts I and II of Taverner where the characters change roles (for example the Cardinal becomes an Anglican archbishop). In addition, Emmet's relationship with his mother and The Woman has some parallels with the relationship between John Taverner and Rose Parrowe particularly in Davies' early libretto drafts (which were not used in the final version) as discussed by David Beard, ‘Taverner: an interpretation’, 87.

⁶³ Some of the tensions in the work created by the use of the quoted material might be resolved by examination of the deeper relationships not really perceivable at the level of the finished work but perhaps may be more discernible in the sketches when they become available for study.

⁶⁴ As derived from Foucault who wrote: ‘everyone's life [should] become a work of art’ in ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul (New York, 1985), 350Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Welten, ‘“I'm Not Ill, I'm Nervous”’, 21.