Miss Donnithorne's Maggot, music-theatre work for soprano or mezzo-soprano & instrumental ensemble, J. 121

• Date: 1974
• Composer: Peter Maxwell Davies
• Period: Contemporary (1950- )

Review

At a reception following the premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies' psychologically disturbing and musically overwhelming Eight Songs for a Mad King, the composer was approached by Randolph Stowe, the writer who had so vividly imagined King George's hallucinations into prose. "Let's write a funny one as a sequel," he proposed. Over the next five years they created a counterpart to the Eight Songs, using the same instrumental ensemble but replacing the male singer with a female, and choosing an equally intriguing subject: Eliza Emily Donnithorne. Miss Donnithorne had become rather famous in Australia when, upon being abandoned at the altar by her naval officer fiancé, she locked herself in her house and, as the story goes, continued to wear her wedding dress and even left the wedding breakfast untouched on the table, until her death some three decades later. (In fact, her odd story is thought to have been one of the inspirations for Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.)

In rendering her tale as a song cycle (or Maggot, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines both as "a whimsical or perverse fantasy" and a dance tune), Stowe and Davies speculated on the kinds of strange rituals of obsession that the abandoned bride might have enacted behind her closed doors, imagining the poor woman in going through the same tragic motions of anticipation and longing each day. Although, like the Eight Songs, the work is a caricature of sorts, it is likewise a dark one and, as the composer describes, "certainly only 'funny' in a most qualified manner."

Though not quite as extreme as the Eight Songs in its demands on the singer, Miss Donnithorne's Maggot nonetheless employs a wide array of vocal acrobatics to depict the title character's fractured mental state. For the premiere this task was entrusted to Mary Thomas, who had demonstrated her agility and expressivity in stunning performances of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

The instrumental writing is likewise highly individualized, with string screeches and swoops, pianistic outbursts, and percussive exclamations punctuating Donnithorne's outrageous imaginings and exaggerating her elaborate sexual metaphors. One particularly haunting moment occurs when the instrumentalists set in motion several mechanical metronomes, conveying the twisted conception of time to which Donnithorne subscribes. Over this dysfunctionally ticking clock one hears a violin playing an isolated dance tune, the percussion intoning the chimes of a lost hour, and Donnithorne drifting absently through all manner of literary and musical allusion, from wedding marches to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Throughout the song cycle Donnithorne invokes her untouched wedding cake as a symbol of her unconsummated love, with blatant phallic symbols and violent sexual imagery. Davies' score is correspondingly grotesque, with Romantic references and Victorian parlor and dance hall tunes that moiré into intractable spells of cacophony. Though utilizing methods similar to those of Eight Songs, says Davies, Donnithorne's music is "more introvert, more contemplative, and, I would think, ultimately more disturbing." ~ Jeremy Grimshaw, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Peter Maxwell Davies: Miss Donnithorne's Maggot; Eight Songs for a Mad King	1987

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