Morality Opera

When English Composer Peter Maxwell Davies, 37, was a student at Manchester University, he was thrown out of composition class. "They thought I was no good," he recalls. When he persisted in the new-music salons of London, audiences came to the same conclusion: they shouted "Rubbish!" at the premiere of his brooding, dissonant Eight Songs for a Mad King in 1969, and walked out when his intricate and ironic orchestral work Worldes Blis was unveiled in Royal Albert Hall a few months later. After Davies had labored for more than a decade on his opera Taverner, it was rejected by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden not once but twice. Meanwhile, Davies sustained himself with such side projects as the scores for two Ken Russell films, The Devils and The Boy Friend. "Why should one bother to make a defense of what one does?" he asked. "The music is its own defense."

Davies' best defense to date is that very opera Taverner. The Royal Opera, now under the adventurous direction of Conductor Colin Davis, has given Taverner a handsome, stirring production that turns out to be one of the major events of London's operatic season.

The work is based on the life and music of a 16th century English composer named John Taverner, in his day a respected composer of sacred music. As the Reformation gained strength, Taverner abandoned Catholicism and became notorious as an agent of Thomas Cromwell who allegedly specialized in persecuting Catholic priests and burning their monasteries. To Davies, Taverner is a tragic figure in that his revolutionary zeal led him to turn his back on his artistic gifts. The Elizabethan historian John Foxe wrote that Taverner "repented him very much that he had made songs to popish ditties in the times of his blindness." But Davies maintains that the music Taverner wrote prior to his conversion was "as fine as anything written in Europe at the time, and constitutes some of the best music of our English inheritance."

On this plot, Davies' libretto fashions an Everyman kind of morality opera, in which cardinals, white abbots, Latin-spouting priests, heretics and jesters parade in and out of stylized throne rooms and courtrooms while Taverner's destiny is worked out. Allegorical characters such as Joking Jesus, a Pope/Antichrist and Jester/Death trail them in symbolic profusion. Director Michael Geliot (on loan from the Welsh National Opera) and Designer Ralph Koltai have built their set around a huge tower of seesaw platforms on which the merits--and fates--of Taverner and his antagonists are literally and figuratively weighed in the balance.

Some listeners may be uneasy because Taverner is not so much a traditional opera as a melange of spinning theatrical events that dazzle the eye and rivet the ear. Musically, when Davies is not weaving in themes from Taverner, his treatment of the usual choirs of the orchestra has enough richness and fireworks (ignited in masterly fashion by Conductor Edward Downes) to placate the most avid devotees of Richard Strauss. Davies' hair-raising special effects--massed percussion, squealing clarinets, even the grating of a knife grinder--should be enough to titillate John Cage.

"It is a tough opera," said Davies after the premiere--at which, however, there were twelve curtain calls and no cries of "Rubbish!" "I was pleased that the people listened to it patiently. It will benefit from repeated hearings." Conductor Downes agreed that the score was "murderously difficult" and saw no need to delay a verdict. "This is musical theater at its best, a great step forward to the opera of the future," he said. "I cannot recall a similarly favorable reception to a new opera in Britain."

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