STAATSOPER.TV: MONTAGSSTÜCK IX: EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING

The situation is oppressive: to teach your own birds to sing is an impossible undertaking. And then there is also the king who talks to his animals. One experiences a world in fractures, which produces truths that deeply affect people. 

In his small monodrama Eight Songs for a Mad King from 1969, Peter Maxwell Davies took the risk of setting a character study of the mad English king George III to sound and set to music eight poems written by Australian author Randolph Stow based on original texts by the king. But the king's madness proves to be astonishingly clairvoyant, even if his words and actions are provocative - like the score by Peter Maxwell Davies, which provides for the destruction of a violin on stage ...

Peter Maxwell Davies
Eight Songs for a Mad King
     1. The Sentry (King Prussn’s Minuet)
     2. The Country Walk (La Promenade)
     3. The Lady-in-Waiting (Miss Musgraves fancy)
     4. To be Sung on the Water (The waterman)
     5. The Phantom Queen (He’s ay a Kissing me)
     6. The Counterfeit (Le Conterfaite)
     7. Country Dance (Scotch Bonnett)
     8. The Review (A Spanish March)