Judith Weir her appointment as the Master of the Queen's Music, succeeding Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (whose term of office expired in March 2014), would be announced; this was officially confirmed on 21 July. In May 2015, Weir won The Ivors Classical Music Award at the Ivor Novello Awards. Weir is a member of the Incorporated Society of Musicians. In 2018 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Weir's musical language is fairly conservative, with a "knack of making simple musical ideas appear freshly mysterious." Her first stage work, "The Black Spider", was a one-act opera which
Armida (Weir) Armida (Weir) Armida is an opera by British composer Judith Weir. It premiered on 25 December 2005 as a television broadcast on the UK station, Channel 4 which had commissioned the work. The English libretto, also written by Weir, is loosely based on the story of Rinaldo and Armida, in Torquato Tasso's 1581 epic poem set in the First Crusade, "La Gerusalemme liberata" ("Jerusalem Delivered"). Armida had been a highly popular subject for operas in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, but only rarely afterwards. In Weir's 50-minute-long opera, the setting is updated to a modern Middle-East conflict which alludes