Michael Tippett

English classical composer

• Born: January 2, 1905
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: January 8, 1998
• Place of death: London, England

The protean nature of Tippett’s mind, the importance of his dreams, the literary sources that informed his passionately presented musical ideas, and his embrace of contemporary popular music made an unprecedented contribution to English music in the form of operas and orchestral works.

The Life

Michael Kemp Tippett was raised in the English countryside of Suffolk. He was drawn to music, but it was not until he experienced concerts and theater in London while studying at the Royal College of Music, beinning in 1923, that he focused on a musical career. In 1928 he moved to Oxted, Surrey, where a performance of his music at the Barn Theater made him realize his need for further study. He studied counterpoint and fugue with R. O. Morris at the Royal College of Music. This period led to the creation of his first published works.

Tippett was music director of Morley College in London from 1940 to 1951, although for three months in 1943 he was imprisoned for pacifism. While at Morley College, Tippett sparked a revival of the music of Henry Purcell, an English composer who deeply influenced him (and Benjamin Britten). After leaving Morley College, Tippett devoted himself exclusively to composition, moving to Wadham, Surrey, then to Wiltshire in 1960, first to Corsham and the hills of Chippenham, and finally to South London. Tippett found his reputation advanced by the appearance of recordings of his works in the 1960’s, and he was knighted in 1966.

The Music

A Child of Our Time. Tippett’s war oratorio, A Child of Our Time, based on events surrounding the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938, is unquestionably his most popular and well-known work, and its story is indicative of Tippett’s lifelong interest in contemporary issues. At the prompting of poet T. S. Eliot, Tippett wrote the text, a practice he would continue in his operatic librettos (and for which he was frequently criticized). His decision to base the structure of the work on George Friderich Handel’s Messiah (1742), incorporating Negro spirituals as commentary on universal suffering, is powerful. It is the earliest indication of Tippett’s interest in African American music.

The Midsummer Marriage. Tippett’s first opera was drawn from his own dream world, a source of great significance to him, and from several other influences, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) and the writings of psychoanalyst Carl Jung and of dramatist George Bernard Shaw. The story reflects the journey to individual discovery of Mark and Jennifer, and then the discovery of each other, told through a remarkable outpouring of musical lyricism unique in the history of British opera, and perhaps in the history of the entire genre. (A secondary couple, Jack and Bella, provide a comedic diversion.) Although the action takes place in a single day, Tippett uses seasonal imagery to chart Mark and Jennifer’s spiritual progress, embodied in the ritual dances of act 2 and act 3.

Concerto for Orchestra. The Concerto for Orchestra connects the stylistically transitional Symphony No. 2, which moves from early lyricism to starker neoclassicism, to the monumental Symphony No. 3. Tippett’s new grittily objective musical manner in Concerto for Orchestra derives from the spare language developed in his second opera, King Priam (based on Homer). Tippett breaks the orchestra into smaller groups, which become characters; for example, strings are not used until the second movement, and the full orchestra is reserved for the third movement. Such dry and spare textures are matched by a new blocklike arrangement of form, where development occurs more through musical juxtaposition and superimposition than through the traditional organic thematic method.

The Knot Garden. Tippett’s third opera, The Knot Garden—the title refers to a rose garden where lovers meet—draws upon William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623), as his Prospero-like Mangus oversees six dysfunctional relationships: Faber and Thea, a married couple on the brink of divorce; their innocent ward, Flora; a homosexual couple, Mel (black) and Dov (white, perhaps representative of Tippett); and Thea’s sister, Denise, a political freedom fighter. The rapid cuts and dissolves of the action mirror those seen on a television show, and the music advances in sudden juxtapositions of musical fragments and segments, like a mosaic. The characters are thrown together in different combinations, until they join hands in the conclusion to sing about unity. Tippett’s grand achievement in this work is his use of a complex, postmodern urban musical language to reflect the psychodramatic world depicted in the unfolding drama (including a fully developed blues ensemble at the end of act 1). A similar development occurs later in Tippett’s Symphony No. 3, in a Charles Ivesian confrontation with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (1824).

Triple Concerto. The Triple Concerto for violin, viola, cello, and orchestra represents a blending of Tippett’s early lyricism and his midlife musical complexity. In the third of three works constructed in single-movement form (including String Quartet No. 4 and Symphony No. 4), the string soloists are like operatic characters who sing without words. The Indonesian gamelan-inspired second movement celebrates the intense lyrical beauty that is a hallmark of Tippett’s style.

Musical Legacy

Tippett’s early works exhibit a mood of sonorous optimism at odds with the bleak tone of much of modern music. The spirit of the dance is rarely absent from his musical vision, and he could write propulsive, fast music, as his symphonic scherzos amply demonstrate. However, Tippett’s middle-period style established an intensely Expressionistic urban manner, similar to that of Leonard Bernstein, with a musical grammar closer to that of Ives. The works of composers Harrison Birtwistle, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Thomas Adés testify to Tippett’s enduring influence.

Principal Works

brass works:Fanfare No. 1, 1943; Fanfare No. 2, 1953; Fanfare No. 3, 1953; Wolf Trap Fanfare, 1980; Festal Brass with Blues, 1984; Fanfare No. 5, 1987.

chamber works: String Quartet No. 1, 1935, revised 1944; Piano Sonata No. 1, 1938, revised 1942 and 1954; String Quartet No. 2 in F-Sharp, 1943; Preludio al Vespro di Monteverdi, 1946; String Quartet No. 3, 1946; Sonata for Four Horns, 1955; Piano Sonata No. 2, 1962; Piano Sonata No. 3, 1973; String Quartet No. 4, 1979; The Blue Guitar, 1983; Piano Sonata No. 4, 1985; String Quartet No. 5, 1992.

choral works:A Child of Our Time, 1944; The Heart’s Assurance, 1951; Crown of the Year, 1958; Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis Collegium Sancti Johannis Cantabrigiense, 1962; Songs for Ariel, 1962; A Vision of St. Augustine, 1966; The Mask of Time, 1984; Byzantium, 1991.

operas (music and libretto): The Midsummer Marriage, 1952; King Priam, 1962; The Knot Garden, 1970; The Ice Break, 1977; New Year, 1989.

orchestral works: Concerto for Double String Orchestra, 1940; Fantasia on a Theme of Handel, 1942; Symphony No. 1, 1945; Suite in D, 1948; Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, 1953; Divertimento on Sellinger’s Round, 1954; Piano Concerto, 1956; Symphony No. 2, 1958; Concerto for Orchestra, 1963; Symphony No. 3, 1972; Symphony No. 4, 1977; Triple Concerto, 1980; The Rose Lake, 1995.

Bibliography

Bowen, Meirion. Michael Tippett. London: Robson Books, 1997. An essential biography of the composer, which outlines the details of his life and examines in depth his personality and his works.

Clarke, David. The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Clarke locates Tippett’s music in the nineteenth century, relating it to cultural developments, literary criticism, and gender-sexuality studies.

Kemp, Ian. Tippett: The Composer and His Music. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1987. A traditional biography, with personal details not covered elsewhere, and musical insights.

Tippett, Michael. Selected Letters of Michael Tippett. Edited by Thomas Schuttenhelm. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. This complements a collection of letters published in Those Twentieth Century Blues, Tippett’s autobiography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson, 1991. Indispensable insights into the composer’s dream life, his letters, and his personal archives.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tippett on Music. Edited by Meirion Bowen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Expands on material from Tippett’s earlier books, Moving Into Aquarius and Music of the Angels: Essays and Sketchbooks of Michael Tippett.