From a purely biographical point of view, 2012 to 2016 were profoundly turbulent years for Davies, and these personal circumstances without doubt left their imprint on the music that he produced. This Postlude discusses the ways in which the composer's final works were an aesthetic response to his ailing physical condition and an acute awareness of death; it also considers to what extent these factors, and the resulting music, may be linked to a ‘late style’.

‘DEATH'S DARK DOOR STANDS OPEN’

As discussed in the previous chapter, the orchestral overture Ebb of Winter (2013) was inspired ‘by the daily walks along the beach and watching the change of the light and the coming of the spring’. However, the work is much more than a mere pictorial representation of the landscape and seascape of Airon and its surrounding environs. In a pre-concert interview given before the premiere of the work in November 2013, Davies also made reference to another contributing factor to its inspiration – what he described as ‘this extraordinary personal thing’. He explained that the work was written when he was very ill: his diary from this time indicates that he had received a diagnosis of aggressive leukaemia on 29 January 2013; work on Ebb of Winter (originally titled Winter Worlds) started before the original diagnosis and was completed on 25 February.

An additional biographical detail that Davies did not divulge in the November interview, however, was an all together entirely different ‘personal thing’: in September 2012 he had to endure an acrimonious court battle to evict his long-term partner Colin Parkinson from their home on Sanday in a dispute involving allegations of domestic abuse. As a consequence, according to Davies in the interview, there is some ‘very dark’ music in the overture which he ‘wasn't quite aware of’ at the time: ‘It's as if the music knew something that I didn’t’ – a statement that vividly encapsulates the two very difficult years that he had just experienced, both in the context of his deteriorating relationship with Parkinson and with regard to his own failing health, and its unpremeditated surfacing, initially at least, in the music.