The Confession of Isobel Gowdie

The world premiere of James MacMillan’s The Confession of Isobel Gowdie at the 1990 BBC Proms was a sensation. Placed at the heart of an otherwise popular programme, such a complex, intense, at times violent new score could easily have bombed. But although MacMillan’s musical language here is often thorny, dissonant, abrasively coloured, it spoke to a packed Royal Albert Hall with an open warm-heartedness that could be compared to Tchaikovsky, Mahler or Shostakovich. Since then it has been recorded several times and performed frequently across the world. One of the main ingredients of its success is the way it conveys a story, related with burning passion. MacMillan was moved by the story of a woman who, in post-Reformation Scotland, was tried as a witch, tortured and executed. The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, he said, was an attempt to offer, in music, “the requiem she never had”. What makes this work so much more than a horrifying depiction of man’s inhumanity to woman is that the horror and pain of the middle section is framed by two radiantly beautiful prayer-like sections for strings, based on the old chant “Lux aeterna” (“Eternal light”). The gradual re-emergence of this warmly compassionate music, and its eventual triumph over human destructiveness, has a near miraculous quality, making it one of the most eloquent testimonies to the redemptive power of MacMillan’s faith.