Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Judith Weir is not prone to navel-gazing. “Honestly, I’m the last person to ask about my style or the way it has evolved,” she tells me when I meet her at her publisher’s office in London. “I don’t in any way contemplate this when I’m writing.”At the moment, however, she has reason to be reflective. Weir, who concludes her tenure as Master of the King’s Music this summer, has just turned 70, and she acknowledges that, unlike her 50th or 60th birthdays, this one feels like a milestone. “To have kept working for 50 years and to have supported myself: that has taken some doing. And it gives me a good feeling actually.”The product of that determination can be sampled next month, when the Aldeburgh Festival puts the spotlight on Weir’s music. A survey that scatters her pieces throughout the season features recent works as well as music dating back to her early career. Arguably the most intriguing draw, however, is the festival opener: Blond Eckbert, an opera that Weir wrote 31 years ago.Based on a late-18th-century short story by the German writer Ludwig Tieck, it tells the tale of Eckbert and Berthe, husband and wife, who are visited by their friend Walther. To entertain him, Berthe talks of her childhood flights, first from her home, then from an old woman in the forest, from whom she stole a bird that lays gems instead of eggs. Mysteriously, Walther knows the name of Berthe’s childhood dog, rousing suspicions in the married couple that he will steal their fortune. The consequences are violent.In her score, Weir focuses on description and scene-painting, using the role of the bird as a replacement for Tieck’s narrator: a soprano sings joyfully, lyrically, extolling the beauty of nature as the narrative descends into ever-darker depths. But Weir is reluctant to offer any interpretation or analysis: “A problem of some modern opera productions is that they force you in a particular direction. As an audience member I’d like to have my own reflections so I think my role as the composer was simply to say, ‘Look at these characters.’”Weir promotes the causes she cares most deeply about, including music education and ensuring that as many people as possible have access to itIn her music — as in her interviews — the composer holds herself in check; her work evokes character and atmosphere through the most economical of means. In The Vanishing Bridegroom (1990), her opera based on macabre folk stories, she relies on fragment and allusion — a touch of Gaelic psalmody; a snatch of Hebridean waulking song — to locate us in the Scottish communities. In her epic cycle woman.life.song (2000), a cascading flourish summons the frisson of first love; a deep, sighing motif is the tears of bereavement.Does the restraint of her music cost it a degree of emotional impact? “I would not like to think that emotional depth and craftsmanship [are mutually exclusive]. Look at Mozart — his is the perfect example of music that combines both qualities.”Growing up in north-west London, the daughter of Scottish parents, Weir was surrounded by music. Her teacher mother was a keen amateur violist; her psychiatrist father was a self-taught trumpet player. An oboist herself, Weir played with the National Youth Orchestra, but also studied with the celebrated English composer John Tavener, who lived around the corner from her in Wembley. She went on to read music at Cambridge.This was the early 1970s, a time when the contemporary classical music scene was suffused with the dissonant rumblings of the post-serialist avant-garde. But despite admiring Boulez and other exponents of the movement, Weir was never tempted to emulate them: “There seemed to be something quite severe about that aesthetic that wasn’t really relevant to me as a teenage girl from the London suburbs.” Instead Weir sought to make herself useful, teaching music in schools while cultivating a style as sympathetic to the student and amateur player as it was to the professional.That sense of social conscience has defined her decade-long tenure as Master of the Queen’s, now King’s, Music. In addition to writing works for state occasions, Weir has used the appointment to promote the causes she cares most deeply about, including music education and ensuring that as many people as possible have access to it. Given recent funding cuts in the sector, this has been an uphill struggle. But she remains optimistic: “When people complain about the [lack of] music education in schools it somehow implies that the quality of the [existing] education isn’t any good, when in fact, it’s the opposite.”One striking thing about Weir’s career is that she forged it without seeking the limelight. “This is something I got from my Scottish parents and my background: not wanting to show off, to be seen bigger than you are, to make a song and dance. In England that might be called reserved; we [Scots] would just say it’s normal.” She continues, “Besides which, writing music takes so much time that there isn’t much of it left to do other things.”On the subject of the late Queen’s and new King’s comparative attitudes to music, Weir is statesmanlike: “Whenever I took a musician to see the Queen for an audience it was amazing to see what she knew: she was a good asker of questions. As for the King: I can’t claim to know him well . . . latterly he has not been around much. But I think, like everyone says, he has hit the ground running . . . and it makes such a change to meet someone right at the top in authority who is really interested in classical music.”About herself, Weir is less generous: “I cannot say I’ve managed to be effective very often in the last years of the post [given the] problems with funding and so on.” She will concede, however, that “when I’ve written a letter or tried to get in touch with somebody about these daily issues, I’ve felt that people will listen to me not as Judith Weir the composer but as the holder of this post. So long may the role continue.”Yet she is not unhappy to be handing over the reins this summer to the next Master of the King’s Music — whoever that may be. What will she do with the spare time? “I will still be composing but I’m looking forward to more time on my allotment, more time outdoors generally and indeed, more time going to concerts. Like many musicians, I don’t get much of a chance to go to concerts that are not my own.” She laughs. “And, given that I live in London, that’s ridiculous.”The Aldeburgh Festival opens on June 7 with Judith Weir’s ‘Blond Eckbert’, brittenpearsarts.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
