A ten-minute 'grand opera in three acts' for a single unaccompanied soprano, who plays the king, his army and his queen (1979)
King Harald's Saga — from Snorri Sturluson's account of Harald Hardrada's 1066 invasion of England
Music
Judith Weir
born 1954 · British
Contemporary British — narrative opera and storytelling
Dame Judith Weir is a British composer of Scottish parentage who in 2014 became the first woman appointed Master of the Queen's Music, a post dating from 1626. Her music is lean, tuneful and narrative, drawing on Scottish and medieval Chinese sources, and she has a particular gift for compressing whole epics into very short spans — one of her operas is a ten-minute piece for a single unaccompanied soprano.
How to spot them
- ▸Spare textures and clear tunes, often modal or folk-derived, with wit and understatement rather than bombast
- ▸Storytelling: Icelandic sagas, Chinese Yuan dynasty drama, German Romantic ghost stories and Scottish folk tales become operas
- ▸Extreme compression — a whole Norse saga sung by one unaccompanied soprano playing several characters in ten minutes
- ▸Questions pair her with the Master of the Queen's Music post she took up in 2014, succeeding Peter Maxwell Davies and preceding Errollyn Wallen
Key works — listen
A 1987 opera in which a 13th-century Chinese play is performed to Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Khan (1987)
A Night at the Chinese Opera — her first full-length opera, for Kent Opera
A 1990 opera built from two Scottish folk tales, one about a bridegroom stolen away by the fairies (1990)
The Vanishing Bridegroom, written for Scottish Opera
A 1994 opera after a Ludwig Tieck story about a woman whose childhood secret destroys her marriage (1994)
Blond Eckbert, after Tieck's Der blonde Eckbert
A 1985 carol for unaccompanied choir on a 15th-century Scots poem by William Dunbar, calling on the holy city to shine (1985)
Illuminare, Jerusalem — written for the King's College, Cambridge Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
An orchestral piece of 1997 whose title, from a Sanskrit poem, describes rain long hoped for (1997)
The Welcome Arrival of Rain, for the Minnesota Orchestra
A 2011 opera on a Sicilian folk tale about a woman pursued by a personified bad luck, staged at Covent Garden (2011)
Miss Fortune, premiered at Bregenz in 2011 and at the Royal Opera House in 2012
An oratorio on the Book of Job, written during her residency with the BBC Singers and premiered at the Proms (2017)
In the Land of Uz — 'Uz' is the land where Job lived
Quick-fire facts
- •She was born in Cambridge on 11 May 1954 to Scottish parents and played the oboe in the National Youth Orchestra
- •She studied composition with John Tavener while still at school, with Robin Holloway at King's College, Cambridge, and with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood in 1975
- •She was appointed Master of the Queen's Music in July 2014, the first woman to hold the post since its creation in 1626, succeeding Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
- •Unusually, the appointment was made for a fixed ten-year term; she was succeeded by Errollyn Wallen in 2024
- •She has held residencies with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle and with the BBC Singers
- •She was made a CBE in 1995, received the Queen's Medal for Music in 2007, and was promoted DBE in the 2024 New Year Honours
- •Her ten-minute King Harald's Saga is described on the title page as a 'grand opera in three acts'
- •She wrote music for the 2018 wedding of Princess Eugenie and for the coronation of King Charles III in 2023
- •Her Proms work Moon and Star, on a poem by Emily Dickinson, was performed at the 2026 Proms
- •She has taught at Princeton, Harvard and the Royal Academy of Music
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Judith Weir — Judith Weir — About
- Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press) — Weir, Judith
- The Royal Household — Errollyn Wallen CBE appointed first Master of The King's Music of the new reign