Michael Tanner

Stirred into action

Kommilitonen! is Peter Maxwell Davies’s new opera, to a text by David Pountney, who also directs the première production at the Royal Academy of Music.

issue 02 April 2011

Kommilitonen! is Peter Maxwell Davies’s new opera, to a text by David Pountney, who also directs the première production at the Royal Academy of Music.

Kommilitonen! is Peter Maxwell Davies’s new opera, to a text by David Pountney, who also directs the première production at the Royal Academy of Music. It makes a stirring, invigorating evening, though at the end it isn’t clear which direction it is pointing in, while the whole mode of the work makes you feel that it must be pointing somewhere.

The title means ‘Fellow Students’, and there are three separate strands, which become interwoven towards the end. One is of the black American student James Meredith, who insisted on attending the University of Mississippi in 1962, and had to have massive military protection. The second is of the Weisse Rose, a student protest group in Munich who rebelled against the Nazis in 1942, and were guillotined in 1943.

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