The Lighthouse (1979)

The most frequently performed of Maxwell Davies’s operas, The Lighthouse owes its appeal to a score of atmospheric concision. Benjamin Britten may be the greatest English composer of the sea, but in Maxwell Davies’ abrupt orchestral squalls and unexpected textures we get a violence quite unlike the swelling grandeur of Britten’s Suffolk coastline. Sounds as well as music emerge from a pit in which percussion instruments outnumber all others. Trombone splatters are tempered by plaintive little flute gasps, with muted trumpets supplying the “crack of the blackbeaks’ wings”. [...]
Despite its age, Maxwell Davies’ music still feels fresh. Perhaps it’s the specificity of the music-world he conjures, his familiarity with the island landscape he creates, but there’s nothing strikingly dated here. Even a guitar in the chamber band finds its place in the colouristic blend. Rejecting the consolation of melody for much of the work, the composer offers us a brief reprise in a set-piece that sees each of the three keepers sing a song to their companions. [...]
There’s a balance between feral abandon and precision in all of Maxwell Davies’s scores, and here these warring oppositions find themselves amplified in the contained studio space of the Linbury. [...]
In Maxwell Davies’s hands a potential ghost story becomes a terrifying psychological drama about the fragility of civilisation and the “beast” that lurks just beneath the surface in all of us. The ghosts here are no alien spirits but the guilty secrets of the past – flesh and blood spectres whose weapons are also very much of this world. In this latest production by English Touring Opera it’s a show that will haunt you well beyond its brief 80-minute span.

Written a couple of decades after the Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse is cast in a similar mould. This is also a chamber opera, lasting only 75 minutes and with a small orchestral ensemble of 12 players that belies its size in the other-worldly sounds the composer draws from it. It is ideal for a company that goes out on the road...
Maxwell Davies tests his performers to the limit.

Few instances of that staple mystery, the unexplained maritime vanishing (As in the Mary Celeste or the Bermuda Triangle) can be more baffling than that of the three keepers who dematerialised without trace from their lighthouse in the Hebrides in 1900.
Peter Maxwell Davies's fictionalised reconstruction of this tale has been hugely successful since its premiere in 1980, and one can soon hear why. Perhaps nobody since Britten has so masterfully used music to create atmosphere - not just a subtle spookiness, but also a marvellously vivid seascape evoking the lurch of the waves, the salt in the spray, the cawing of the gulls.
Parallel to this is a narrative of explosive psychological tension, handled with consummate theatrical adroitness.
... a truly gripping yarn, and it's not often one can say that of an opera.

A genuinely Poesque donouement suggests that the composer could have had a side career as a macabre mystery writer.
By the time of the opera's composition, eight years of Orkney air had blown the arch-modernism out of Davies' music, but we are still dealing with a fairly cold and abstract sound world. We see the composer working with a fine paintbrush, creating sparse textures with little sustained foward motion. The diverse instrumentation eschews the comfort of a familiar orchestral sound, throwing up snippets of guitar, crotales, flexatone, jangly out of tune piano. A deafening climax, when it comes, is all the more surprising. It may not be emotional music, but it is certainly atmospheric, and it is easy to see why The Lighthouse maintains a position in the repertory.

In his version, the three lighthouse keepers are sick of themselves and of each other, the abysses within and between them cracking open during the second act. In an attempt to defuse the tension, each sings a song – giving the composer the opportunity to draw on his long-favourite device of parody. One of the keepers, Blazes, launches into a rough-hewn ballad that reveals his violent family history and murderous past. Sandy waxes lyrical in parlour-song idiom about a romantic love idyll that also turns out to enclose a dark secret he would prefer to forget. Religious obsessive Arthur (pictured left) intones a tub-thumping hymn. His vision of a threatening apocalyptic beast leads the three increasingly deranged individuals outside the lighthouse, where their fate awaits. Davies frames the action with scenes of the naval officers at the subsequent inquiry and just after their arrival at the lighthouse.

Peter Maxwell Davies has found a subject that could only work as opera, and he treats it to one of his most evocative scores. His beloved Orkney is everywhere in this music: the orchestration is steeped in its storms and gulls...
After a Prologue whose ostinato passages suggest the disciplined atmosphere of a naval hearing, the main Act unfolds through brooding, extended figures in the accompaniment that are interspersed with those paroxysms of mayhem that were a ‘Max’ hallmark in his 1970s’ Fires of London days. (There are unmistakable shades of The Devils in this music.) The composer’s affinity with popular music, too, is given free rein in the dark songs each lighthouseman sings to lift, if not leaven, the oppressive mood.
The opera’s final section, a vivid depiction of psychological hell, is a virtuoso drama in its own right. The three protaganists are pushed to the limits of their craft as they drag themselves and the audience into a self-destructive orbit of despair around the stone tower. A seastorm brings madness in its wake, and by its end “the room is full of ghosts called out by the foghorn”. Yet even here, as the dance of death gives up the ghost, Maxwell Davies has a final surprise to spring.

Peter Maxwell Davies’s 75-minute The Lighthouse (1980) is ideal for an opera company on a budget – high in quality but demanding only three singers and 12 instrumentalists.

Besides writing ingratiatingly for voice, Maxwell Davies supplied assertive, jagged, inventive, rhythmically vital, idiomatically conceived instrumental writing.

“The Lighthouse’’ by Peter Maxwell Davies, opened last night at the John F. Kennedy Library and it is another clear success, a night of darkly riveting modern chamber opera played out against the backdrop of Boston Harbor. [...]

Davies’s score, with his own libretto, is a marvel of economy, deploying the most modest vocal and instrumental forces - admittedly pushed to the very edge of their techniques, and sometimes beyond - to create distinct characterizations for each keeper, sketch three misty backstories, and then push each man, under extreme stress, into the abyss of his past. [...]

Davies’s wonderfully pungent music is full of rasps, rattles, shutters, and cries. It pushes singers and instrumentalists into extremely high and low registers, churns subliminally in the background, and ultimately telegraphs an atmosphere of pristine dread.

...terse and haunting, it explores the documented mystery of three keepers in 1900 who disappeared from the Flannan Isles lighthouse, on the Outer Hebrides' outer rim. Psappha's production, directed by Elaine Tyler-Hall, is solid. So is the musical delivery, undertaken with the verve expected from a group who have carved a formidable niche reviving the composer's music-theatre pieces.

The Lighthouse wears its age well. By 1980 the mad clown in Davie's music had been subdued; he'd refreshed his language with classical forms, descriptive writing, even take-home tunes. Indeed, his ear for pictures is so strong that Aaron Mardsden's black, minimalist setting stunts nothing, for the craggy rocks, wind gusts and squawking sea birds are all in the music.

This intriguing chamber opera takes a disturbing look at the potential for paranoia, madness and despair in a claustrophobic lighthouse. Max's ever inventive orchestration delighted and captivated throughout.