ABSTRACT
1987 was a decisive year in Peter Maxwell Davies's career. He disbanded The Fires of London ensemble, which had dominated his composing activities for the previous twenty years, having relinquished the directorship of the St Magnus Festival in 1986. The libretto of Resurrection was originally conceived in response to Davies's experience of American commercialism during the early 1960s. Resurrection can be described as Davies's last Faustian or thoroughly experimental work, and several parallels can be cited with scores attributed to the fictional Adrian Leverkuehn in Mann's novel, notably, Apocalypsis cumFiguris, and the Faust Cantata. Davies extended the ravings of the hot gospeller to include certain strident politicians of the 1980s, and incorporated autobiographical elements, such as his earlier association with wind-up gramophones. The opera was unusual in the context of Davies's Orcadian works in that it alludes neither to the local community, nor to land or seascapes.
