Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has died, aged 81. The Salford-born composer, universally known as Max, had been suffering from leukaemia for several years and died at his home in Orkney on 14 March.

One of the foremost musicians of our time, Maxwell Davies was a fearless figurehead for the postwar avant garde. He made it his mission to connect with as many different audiences and performers as possible, writing music for children, for his Orkney community, as well as grand symphonies – 10 of them, concertos, string quartets, and music theatre works.

He was also an experienced conductor, holding the position of associate conductor/composer at both the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras for 10 years, and guest conducting orchestras that included the San Francisco Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus and Philharmonia. He enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as composer laureate.



From 2004 to 2014 he was master of the Queen’s music, and was knighted in 1987. Last month he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s gold medal – the highest accolade the society can bestow.

Peter Maxwell Davies (left) conducts Welsh soprano Mary Thomas in a rehearsal for Revelation and Fall, February 1968. Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

Maxwell Davies started composing as a teenager, and studied at the Royal Northern College of Music, where his fellow students included Harrison Birtwistle, John Ogdon and Alexander Goehr. He came to international prominence in the 1960s, most particularly with pieces such as Eight Songs for a Mad King and Revelation and Fall in which he created a new, shocking and exhilarating vision of music theatre.

In 1971 he moved to Orkney, the landscape and culture of which had a deep impact on his music; in 1977 he founded the annual St Magnus festival, which he continued to be involved with until the end of his life.

“From the earliest days organising things from a phone box on Hoy to his more recent role as the festival’s honorary president, Max has won the hearts of the Orkney community and been a significant part of many generations of musicians from the islands,” said Alasdair Nicolson, the festival’s artistic director.

An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise

Maxwell Davies was passionately committed to the social responsibility of the composer and the concept of music as a social force. His third string quartet, written in 2003, was a defiant personal statement against the Iraq war; his 2010 opera, Kommilitonen! was a dramatisation of student protest movements in the 20th century and a call to arms for today’s young people.

The composer’s 1980 chamber opera The Lighthouse was performed at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury theatre in October 2015, with Maxwell Davies in attendance. “The dazzling score ... held our attention. Luminous and salty, it conveys the desolate, sea-battered mood, the cries of seabirds, the waves’ roar, equally as tellingly as Britten in Peter Grimes, but in an entirely different musical voice. Maxwell Davies was there to take a bow and hug his performers. His smiles were reward enough for all,” wrote Fiona Maddocks in the Observer.

The previous year the ROH’s Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra had given the world premiere of Maxwell Davies’s 10th symphony. “A wonderful opportunity presented itself to me when I was asked to conduct [it], a piece that was as much bound up with Italy as Max’s native land. [He was] a dear and generous man with whom it was a joy to collaborate and an example of perseverance in the world of music and the arts,” said Pappano. Reviewing, the Guardian’s Andrew Clements admired the work’s vivid and vivacious writing. “It’s one of the most movingly personal of Davies’s recent scores, and a major new symphony,” he said.

Alan Davey, controller of Radio 3, said: “We have lost a musical giant, a major composer with a strong and unique voice through all parts of his extraordinary career, from his early avant garde musical theatre works to his symphonies and his work for children and young people. It is a sad loss to the world of music and we will remember him through his recordings and the glorious spirit that shines through his music.” Maxwell Davies’s works have featured in over 50 proms over five decades, of which nine were world premieres. “The link with the Proms was not just through his strikingly individual music, but also a shared vision of bringing classical music to wider audiences,” said David Pickard, Director, BBC Proms.

What will be Maxwell Davies’s final large-scale work is, appropriately, a community opera, The Hogboon, that Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra will perform in June.