In 1760, King George III ascended to the throne. Barely five years later he would have the first episode of what would come to be understood as recurrent cases of ‘madness’ and would leave him largely incapacitated, eventually handing over his powers to a regent who governed for the last 9 years of his reign, before his death in 1820. The precise nature of his condition remains contested, but reports describe periods of mania particularly characterised by endless talking, repetitive and often nonsensical (at Christmas 1819 he supposedly spoke continuously, and senselessly, for 58 hours; another vignette describes him shaking hands with a tree which he apparently understood to be the King of Prussia).

 

In 1966, the writer Randolph Stow was shown a miniature mechanical organ which had belonged to George III. On encountering this, Stow “imagined the King, in his purple dressing-gown and ermine night-cap, struggling to teach birds to make music. Or trying to sing with them, in that ravaged voice, made almost inhuman by day-long soliloquies”. This image formed the basis for the tripartite collaboration that would ensue between librettist, composer, and singer, as the trio sought to depict this unique character.

 

Many of George III’s outbursts were recorded by Fanny Burney, the Royal Housekeeper, and Stow used some of these as the basis for the texts that Peter Maxwell Davies would set. The third member of the trio was the ‘king’, the baritone Roy Hart. Possessed of an enormous vocal range and the capacity for a variety of extended techniques (perhaps most famously, singing chords), Hart provided Maxwell Davies with a remarkable expressive palette.

 

As the title suggests, the work is structured around eight songs, interspersed with two instrumental transitions. The songs alternate use of the full ensemble with smaller subsets of the group, though as the ten movements all run attacca, the effect is more of a single monodrama. Maxwell Davies himself suggested that the instrumentalists have a dual function, both accompanimental and theatrical: the percussionist represents the King’s “keeper”, while the others illustrate the bullfinches that George III sought to teach to sing. This is perhaps most obvious in the third song where the King chases the flautist, attempting to incite her into conversation.

 

As the work progresses, the King oscillates through a kaleidoscope of emotions. At times terrifying, funny, intimate, the work rejects a simplistic equation of madness with idiocy. The protocols of eighteenth-century royalty were themselves mad, and the work hints at the trope of the wise fool probing these bizarre customs. As the King puts it at the close of the fifth song, “I am weary of this feint. I am alone.” As the work builds to its climax at the end of the seventh song, Maxwell Davies suggests that the King gives in to his madness, and we are left wondering: is this George III, or someone who thinks he is George III?

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Joshua Ballance