y separately published work icon Eight Songs for a Mad King single work   musical theatre   opera  
Issue Details: First known date: 1969... 1969 Eight Songs for a Mad King
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Notes

  • Author's note: Stow describes the original inspiration for this work as follows: 'The poems forming the text of this work were suggested by a miniature mechanical organ playing eight tunes, once the property of George III ... 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 ... 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.'
  • Stow has explained the context of his libretti as follows: 'I wrote the Libretti of Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot to be complementary. The Mad King is desperately tragic, and Peter Maxwell Davies's music often mocks the King, and one can't help laughing, and myself I find that distressing. So I wrote Miss Donnithorne as a companion piece, at which one could laugh with a clear conscience.' (A. J. Hassall, 'Interview with Randolph Stow', Australian Literary Studies 10 (1982): 322-323).
  • Dedication: To Sir Steven Runciman

Production Details

  • First produced at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, England, 22 April 1969. Conducted by the composer. Eight Songs for a Mad King was performed with Miss Donnithorne's Maggot in April 1974 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, England. (Anthony J. Hassall Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow (1986):190).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

First known date: 1969
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Boosey and Hawkes ,
      1971 .
      Extent: [iv], 33p.
      Description: facsim.
      Note/s:
      • For male voice and instrumental ensemble.
      • Full score reproduced from the composer's autograph MS. (Title page.)
      • Notes on the music and the text in English, German and French.

Works about this Work

Alternative Vocalities : Listening Awry to Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King Adrian Curtin , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Mosaic , June vol. 42 no. 2 2009; (p. 101-117)

'This essay analyzes the use of extended-voice technique and "extreme" vocalizations in Peter Maxwell Davies's avant-garde music-theatre work Eight Songs for a Mad King. Using poststructuralist and musicological theories of voice, the essay makes the case for a conception of "queer vocality" that disrupts and subverts socio-cultural and aesthetic norms.' (p. 101)

'Like a Chained Man's Bruise': The Mediated Body in 'Eight Songs for a Mad King' and 'Anatomy Theatre' T. Nikki Cesare , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Theatre Journal , October vol. 58 no. 3 2006; (p. 437-457)
'Through an analysis of two recent productions by the New York-based new-music group the International Contemporary Ensemble, this article considers the means by which the mediated body, technologically and otherwise, enables a reimagination of the relationships between traditional theatre, contemporary music, and music theatre. A new production of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's 1969 Eight Songs for a Mad King, in which the King's image is projected onto a video screen in real-time, and a workshop of composer David Lang and artist Mark Dion's recent collaborative project, Anatomy Theater (2005), in which a hanged woman's body is publicly dissected in an eighteenth-century English dissection theatre, both move toward a means to consider the theatricalization of the musical body onstage and the blurring of genres within technologically mediated live performance.' - from Theatre Journal on Project Muse website
A Colonist with Words : An Interview with Randolph Stow Xavier Pons (interviewer), Neil Keeble (interviewer), 1976 single work interview
— Appears in: Commonwealth , vol. 2 no. 1976; (p. 70-80) Randolph Stow : Visitants, Episodes from Other Novels, Poems, Stories, Interviews, and Essays 1990; (p. 356-368)
'Like a Chained Man's Bruise': The Mediated Body in 'Eight Songs for a Mad King' and 'Anatomy Theatre' T. Nikki Cesare , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Theatre Journal , October vol. 58 no. 3 2006; (p. 437-457)
'Through an analysis of two recent productions by the New York-based new-music group the International Contemporary Ensemble, this article considers the means by which the mediated body, technologically and otherwise, enables a reimagination of the relationships between traditional theatre, contemporary music, and music theatre. A new production of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's 1969 Eight Songs for a Mad King, in which the King's image is projected onto a video screen in real-time, and a workshop of composer David Lang and artist Mark Dion's recent collaborative project, Anatomy Theater (2005), in which a hanged woman's body is publicly dissected in an eighteenth-century English dissection theatre, both move toward a means to consider the theatricalization of the musical body onstage and the blurring of genres within technologically mediated live performance.' - from Theatre Journal on Project Muse website
Alternative Vocalities : Listening Awry to Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King Adrian Curtin , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Mosaic , June vol. 42 no. 2 2009; (p. 101-117)

'This essay analyzes the use of extended-voice technique and "extreme" vocalizations in Peter Maxwell Davies's avant-garde music-theatre work Eight Songs for a Mad King. Using poststructuralist and musicological theories of voice, the essay makes the case for a conception of "queer vocality" that disrupts and subverts socio-cultural and aesthetic norms.' (p. 101)

A Colonist with Words : An Interview with Randolph Stow Xavier Pons (interviewer), Neil Keeble (interviewer), 1976 single work interview
— Appears in: Commonwealth , vol. 2 no. 1976; (p. 70-80) Randolph Stow : Visitants, Episodes from Other Novels, Poems, Stories, Interviews, and Essays 1990; (p. 356-368)
Last amended 27 Feb 2008 13:56:23
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