Miss Donnithorne's Maggot

Peter Maxwell Davies

• Performers : 5 musicians, soprano, conductor
• Themes : music theatre, Dickens, wedding, loss, time
• Running Time : 60 mins
• Age suitability 14+
• Pre-Concert talk available Yes

ORDER OF SERVICE

Welcome
Robin Holloway - Five Haydn Miniatures
The Procession
Peter Maxwell Davies - Fantasia upon one note, after Purcell
The Main Event
Peter Maxwell Davies - Miss Donnithorne's Maggot for soprano and ensemble
The Recession
Gustav Lange - Blumenlied for solo piano

The real life Miss Donnithorne lived in Newtown in Sydney, Australia. There is some discussion as to whether she really was jilted at the altar in 1856, living the rest of her life in stasis, but she would have been an obvious inspiration for Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Auricle's presentation of Maxwell Davies' seminal music theatre work, is framed as a mock wedding. The audience, greeted by wedding ushers, find their seats are complete with cobwebbed flowers, with refreshments in the form of wedding cake. Background music is played throughout until the 'ceremony' begins with Robin Holloway's Haydn Miniatures. This set of five little pieces were inspired by Haydn's collection of mechanical clock music, though these are a little more off kilter than the originals - gently setting up the clicking metronomes and general mayhem to come in 'Miss Donnithorne's Maggot'.

Miss Donnithorne then makes her entrance through the auditorium, accompanied by Maxwell Davies' Fantastia upon one note, written after Purcell. This work, at first shimmering and stately, descends quickly into hillbilly and foxtrot, complete with banjo and a harpsichord playing violinist. We then segue directly into 'Miss Donnithorne's Maggot'...

Peter Maxwell Davies on 'Miss Donnithorne's Maggot': The music refers constantly to the Victorian salon music with which one must assume Miss Donnithorne was familiar. After the Prelude, her song 'Green mooned the white lady' is even strophic, in the manner of a Victorian ballad. The next song starts with a quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet, 'They say the owl was a baker's daughter', and the ensemble evokes an empty house full of clocks, at first ticking, and eventually chiming and jangling through the protagonist's disturbed, distorted memories of her tragic wedding day. 'The harbour lay on her indigo back' is based on a dump (or dompe), an Elizabethan dance form, but the surface is close to a Victorian quadrille. The purely instrumental Nocturne that follows is a dreamy distant cousin of Gustav Lange's Blumenlied, a very popular display piece for asipring late nineteenth-century lady pianists. In Her Rant ('On the doorsills of my cake') Miss Donnithorne hears sailors drill-marching ('in the exercise yard of my cake'): her betrothed was a sailor, the music is essentially military - except for her vulgar excursions into Jenny Lind-like operatic recitative. In the following recitative, 'In the dusty afternoon', the Victorian piano style becomes even more distorted into her over-heated personal memories and fantasies, while the violin accompaniment to her actual words suggests the theatrical traditions of Victorian music-hall. (Could such a well-bred Victorian lady ever have visited such a common establishment?) Her final Reel ('Hark, hark, his voice!') refers to both Mendelssohn's and Wagner's Wedding March, and quite literally has the lady reeling drunk on her own dandelion wine, as her fantasies about her betrothed become ever more lurid. In her ramblings she hears a bosun's whistle (is it the wind through the trees?), evoking the presence of the betrothed in the next room. She ecstatically rushes into his imagined arms, to a cheap tune summing up the whole masquerade, and we realize that she is imprisoned absolutely in these imaginings in this music, forever estranged and alone.