Manorbier resident Paul Griffiths was in Bonn, the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven recently (September 1) - for the performance of his piece ‘The General’ at the opening weekend of this year’s Beethoven Festival.

‘The General’ was commissioned in 2006 by conductor Kent Nagano for his first season as music director of the Montréal Symphony Orchestra. Partly to honour his new community, partly to introduce audiences to new and rediscovered music and partly to offer fresh insights into well established repertoire, Maestro Nagano asked Paul to replace Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s original drama of Prince Egmont (1788) with the modern drama of General Roméo Dallaire, the French Canadian leader of the United Nations ‘peace-keeping’ force in Rwanda during the events of 1994.

Paul constructed a montage of pieces from Beethoven’s stage music and rewrote the spoken and sung texts based on his readings of General Dallaire’s memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil (2005), and other sources. Along with the Egmont overture, the piece presents rarely-performed selections from Egmont and other music Beethoven composed for the theatre, ending with a beautiful but little-known hymn-like piece for soprano and chorus.

In its review of the Bonn performance, the German music magazine Neue Musikzeitung described The General as ‘enthralling’.

The piece received its German premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 2009.

Recordings of ‘The General’ by Maestro Nagano with the MSO were released by RCA Red Seal and the Canadian record label Analekta in both the original English version and in a French translation, also by Paul. The two-CD set is titled ‘Beethoven: The Ideals of the French Revolution’. In the English-language version, the part of the General is spoken by the late Austrian-born Swiss actor Maximilian Schell.

Kent Nagano is in his final season with the OSM, after which he will continue at the podium of the Hamburg State Opera and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

Paul Griffiths is currently at work on projects with three living composers, one British, two American.

His most recent collaboration, ‘let me tell you’ for soprano and orchestra with Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, won the Royal Philharmonic Society award for large-scale composition in 2015.

In 2014 Paul was appointed O.B.E. in the New Year Honours for services to music literature and composition.