Sir Michael Tippett
Born in London in 1905, Michael Tippett died nearly one hundred years later, his life and career spanning a tumultuous century to which he and his music were especially attuned. Raised in a world of gaslight and Empire, in his mid-eighties he would write an opera, New Year, that encompassed computers and space travel, its soundscape spiced with reggae and electronics.
Early life
He was brought up in Suffolk, his childhood largely overtaken by his mother’s fierce commitment to the women’s suffrage movement. It was an innate sense that he should respond creatively to global events, rather than any natural talent, that led to his studying at the Royal College of Music. His twenties and thirties were given over to compositions, now withdrawn, that he later decided were weakened by lack of originality and a devotion to left-wing politics. Aghast at the Great Depression and the threat of fascism, Tippett initially dedicated much of his time to political endeavours, not least major musical projects formed to boost the morale of unemployed miners in the north of England. He quickly rejected the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism, believing instead, with a temporarily violent fervour, in Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent worldwide revolution.
Second World War
A break-down of a major love affair and a subsequent period of Jungian therapy coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, leading Tippett to reject violence of any persuasion – Trotskyian, Hitlerian, Churchillian – in favour of an ardent and absolute pacifism. He registered as a conscientious objector, and his refusal to comply with the terms of his exemption from military service led to his serving two months in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. By the end of the war he had produced a clutch of powerful works, characterized by imaginative counterpoint and an eclectic list of influences from Beethoven to blues: two string quartets, a symphony, the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, and A Child of Our Time, an oratorio woven around the events of Kristallnacht.
Post-War
In 1951 Tippett resigned as Director of Music at Morley College, an adult education college in South London, where he had created a music department of historic significance, the choir and orchestra championing and even broadcasting then-neglected figures from the Renaissance and Baroque. The post-war years saw Tippett dedicated to the lushly-orchestrated lyricism of his first mature opera, The Midsummer Marriage, and its satellite works, chief among them his piano concerto, and the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. Critical reception was either politely perplexed or openly hostile, an attitude only exacerbated by the breakdown of his second symphony at its first performance, in 1958. Undeterred, Tippett reinvented himself musically with his second opera, King Priam (a re-telling of Homer’s Iliad), splintering the orchestra into a jagged mosaic of juxtaposed motifs, alternately harsh and lyrical. Praise of King Priam and the works it gave rise to – The Vision of Saint Augustine and a concerto for orchestra – coincided with a reappraisal of earlier pieces to cement Tippett’s reputation as one of the country’s leading composers. He was knighted in 1966.
Later life
Operas three and four – The Knot Garden and The Ice Break – were rapturously reviewed, younger audiences thrilling to the septuagenarian Tippett’s grappling with twentieth-century life in a soundworld that now fizzed with jazz and blues, the orchestra augmented with electric guitars and a drum kit. His commissions became international and lucrative; happy to appear on television chat shows wearing brilliant and eccentric outfits, he was something of a celebrity. In 1979 he was made a Companion of Honour, and four year later was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit. He enjoyed a mainly vigorous old age, reintroducing to his music a lyricism some thought had gone for good: the Triple Concerto; a large-scale setting of Yeats’s “Byzantium”; and a further two symphonies, one culminating with a set of blues songs in dialogue with Beethoven’s Ninth, the other incorporating the pre-recorded sound of human breath. For his ninetieth-birthday celebrations, working with an amanuensis as a result of macular degeneration, he produced a final blaze of instrumental colour in The Rose Lake, a ‘song without words for orchestra’.
Tippett’s honorary presidency of the Peace Pledge Union was lifelong, but his active political engagement eventually dissolved almost entirely in the face of his dedication to music. This dedication did little to help the continuing difficulties of his private life, which was caught between Platonic relationships with beloved women friends (the closest of whom, Francesca Allinson, drowned herself at the end of war), and passionate, often overlapping, affairs with men (his partner Karl Hawker committed suicide some years after their split). By his and the century’s seventies he had settled into a lasting relationship with the music writer Meirion Bowen, though continued to live alone in the Wiltshire countryside. He died aged ninety-three, in January 1998; his obituaries proclaimed a composer to rank alongside Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten. Centenary celebrations followed hard on the heels of funeral tributes, and he fell speedily from fashion, a situation exacerbated by the financial disarray of his estate, a result of his life-long generosity and the need for full-time care in his final years.
“This most poetical, most serious, and very passionate composer is among the very few who have created worlds of their own… He is a major asset to our age.”
Legacy
Tippett was a composer of risk and originality; his imagination often ran ahead of performers, audiences and critics. Early pieces, once dismissed, are now thought masterpieces of British composition. Reappraisal of his later work may yet prove that, while he never eschews the British tradition, Tippett is most fruitfully comparable to international contemporaries such as Bernstein or Messiaen. His importance lies in his being a gathering place of twentieth-century music, where his national inheritance collides with European modernism and the American vernacular. Advocacy by new generations of performers has assured that he will continue to be appraised, in the words of musicologist Ian Kemp, as “one of the giants of the century”.
(c) Oliver Soden 2022
“Worthy of comparison not only with Stravinsky, but, by God, with Beethoven himself.”
“Up there with the greatest twentieth-century composers, on an international level. ”
“I am reminded of the spirit of courage and integrity, sympathy, gaiety and profound musical independence which is yours, and I am proud to call you my friend.”