Miss Donnithorne's Maggot / Eight Songs for a Mad King by Davies, No (2023/2023), Režisēja Stefanie Hiltl, Katarzyna Bogucka,, Diriģents Giulio Cilona, Staatstheater, Mainz, Germany

The wedding cake has long since spoiled, rotted and crumbled to dust. But Miss Donnithorne is still wearing her wedding dress. She hasn't left the house since her fiancé dumped her on the wedding day. Alone with her grief, she indulges in memories and ever more bizarre fantasies. The English King George III. is alone. Because of his progressive mental illness, he had to resign from state affairs and has been living in seclusion in a castle ever since. Nervous and confused, he monologues about the lost kingdom and tries to teach his beloved birds to sing. With Miss Donnithorne's Maggot and Eight Songs for a Mad King , Peter Maxwell Davies has created two resonant portraits of madness. In it, the British composer spans the spectrum from beguiling cantilenas and echoes of 18th-century salon music to garish torrents of speech and deliberately placed dissonances. He follows the two characters, who go back to historical personalities, into their memories of normality and empathizes with their daydreams, incantations and eccentric outbursts.