In my conversation with Maxwell Davies before I wrote this book, he described the optimism composers felt during the sixties:

There was a feeling among all composers of hope for the future; that we were moving into areas of experience and technique that had never been done before. At the time I didn’t think the sixties were anything special at all. I thought that this is how things were in every generation, striving to make things work. What united all composers was a sense of optimism. But this optimism gradually evaporated after about 1973. The music we had created in the fifties and sixties was not being played. Glock had retired, and the spirit of adventure which had characterised the Proms, for example, quickly evaporated. Perhaps we had been over optimistic.

As mentioned in Chapter One, 1973 was the year of the international oil crisis, when, in Arthur Marwick’s words, ‘the doubling of oil prices led to widespread recession and a general crisis of confidence’. It ushered in a period when composers of Music Theatre felt the need to be simpler, more direct, less experimental than they had been. This explains why Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (1974) is based on Victorian salon music, Wishart’s Fidelio (1976) on a phrase from Beethoven’s opera, Birtwistle’s Bow Down (1977) on one basic pulse and three basic intervals, and Buller’s The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (1977) on children’s songs.

The same ethos applies to the music-theatre works composed thirty years later and beyond, which I want to discuss briefly in this chapter: Goehr’s Kantan and Damask Drum (1999), Maxwell Davies’s Mr Emmet Takes a Walk (2000) and Birtwistle’s The Io Passion (2004), and as an addendum to these Birtwistle’s double bill Semper Dowland, semper dolens and The Corridor (2009), and Eve Harrison’s The Rose Collector and Hera’s List (2011).

In the years between 1974 and 2000, Maxwell Davies composed two operas: Resurrection (1987) and The Doctor of Myddfai (1995); two chamber operas: The Martydom of St Magnus (1976) and The Lighthouse (1979); and two children’s operas: The Two Fiddlers (1978) and Cinderella (1980).