‘I’ve written as well as I can’

Igor Toronyi-Lalic talks to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies as he celebrates his 75th birthday

A month ago, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies shuffled on to the Royal Albert Hall stage to a wall of sweet applause after a performance of one of his works. It wasn’t always so. Rewind to the 1960s when etiquette dictated that half the audience would walk out or boo whenever his shock of hair bobbed into view. But the Master of the Queen’s Music has come a long way. He’s now an obedient courtier — a very convincing, plummy one with an aristocratic stoop, and, though one can catch something every now and again in his mad blue eyes, the radical charge has by and large gone both from his demeanour and his musical language. His stage presence and music elicit nothing but warmth and applause of the sort reserved for Her Majesty or a handsome walnut sideboard. He is establishment now. And he’s lapping it up. In Leipzig the night before, his new violin concerto — which, in celebrations marking Davies’s 75th birthday, receives its UK première at the Proms next week — prompted an audience frenzy. ‘It was great; it really was!’ Even Davies was surprised: ‘At the end, the whole audience jumped to its feet and applauded!’

Davies is rare among former enfants terribles in that he actually wants people to like his music, and he remembers being pained by the derision that greeted his early works. ‘That year, 1969, when people shouted “rubbish” at the première of Eight Songs for a Mad King and half the audience walked out of the Worldes Blis Prom, was very upsetting; there’s no way around it,’ he says. ‘But for a lot of composers it always has been a part of the rite of passage.’