Oliver Knussen is an important English conductor and composer who in his music uses an "advanced" late twentieth century style. His music is characterized, frequently, by energy and muscularity. He has written two children's operas based on two famous illustrated books by Maurice Sendak. They are clattery, modernistic scores, yet children do seem to like them.

Where the Wild Things Are is a story similar to Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges in some respects. A boy, Max, is sent to his room, having been called a "wild thing." Here, his imagination takes him to the land of the Wild Things, where he is crowned king by a sextet of very wild-looking wild things (to amusing quotations of the Coronation Scene from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov), and then back again.

Many adults thought the book much too wild: too approving of wildness, too scary in its illustrations of the six hulking, toothy monsters (well, five are hulking, the goat wild thing is small, and five are toothy, the rooster wild thing has a wicked beak rather than wicked teeth.) Similarly, some think the music too wild and advanced for children. But the book appealed broadly to children, probably because confronting and mastering one's own internal and external "wild things" is very much a part of childhood. And the music no doubt does too, because children at that age have simply not learned that they are not supposed to like modernist classical music. What they have is an understandable story, and music that goes along with it.

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