Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the former Master of the Queen’s Music who died in March, began his career as an enfant terrible. Nothing unusual about that, except that he was more ‘terrible’ than most. As a young man, ‘Max’ was well known and widely written about (virtually unheard of for young composers today), and his early years were filled with shocks, scandals and lurid imagery. His music was thought, at best, horribly discordant; it went on so long that members of a BBC Proms audience walked out during his Worldes Blis; it was used in a film in which a nun pleasures herself while a priest burns at the stake (Ken Russell’s The Devils). It could involve a ‘scarlet nun’ screaming through a loudhailer (Revelation and Fall), or the mad, howling George III being led offstage by a bass-drummer striking his instrument with whips (Eight Songs for A Mad King). The cast of the opera Taverner, on the life of the Renaissance English composer – staged...