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Michael Tippett 1905–1998

by David Cairns

In his book Delius as I knew him, Eric Fenby observes that Delius the composer cannot exult, nor can he ‘dance’. Michael Tippett’s music did both pre-eminently, to a degree unparalleled in the 20th century except by Messiaen. The exultation was never facile; it sprang from sources deep within him but its intellectual justification and artistic expression were attained by the sweat of the spirit, wrestling with the torments and terrors of the age. And the dancing was embodied in a complex polyphony of long, irregularly stressed rhythmic patterns which is among the most original musical achievements of our time but which made and still makes severe demands upon the performer.

When Tippett’s style is understood by the conductor, and his technical difficulties mastered by the players, the rhythms lilt and leap, the sweep of the melodies unfolds and the takes wing; but until then it can sound laboured and congested. That is one reason why his greatness went for so long unrecognised. He was admitted to be inspired in flashes to be in his naive way quite a visionary – but muddled and amateurish, lacking the skill to give his visions effective practical shape. The meticulous craftsmanship and thoroughly conscious mastery were effaced by botched performances (a factor which critics never remember to allow for). The Second Symphony, a work of incisive clarity, broke down at its premiere in 1958 and had to be started again. Tippett was duly accused of clumsiness and an excessive fondness for Hindemithian counterpoint: the score was simply overloaded with notes.

This was the received opinion forty years ago. He had splendid ideas, but lacked the talent and discipline to realise them. Likewise, it was said, his operas would have been much better if only he had got an experienced literary person to write the librettos for him, instead of insisting on writing them himself.

His genius was also hidden from the avant garde by the very nature of what he was trying to bring about, the renewal of musical tradition from within – an exercise which to the post-Webern generation of composers could only seem futile and irrelevant. Tippett’s harmonic idiom automatically disqualified him; indeed, the whole ethos of a work like The midsummer marriage, his first opera, its affirmativeness and joyful abundance, was alien to their notion of contemporary art. They remained blind to the life-and-art-enhancing originality of his achievement, in his second opera, King Priam, of the diatonic harmony and thematicism of The midsummer marriage tended to be dismissed as a gesture to fashion.

Yet he was not part of the English establishment either. Though his musical style was partly rooted in the Elizabethan and Jacobean madrigalists and in Purcell, and though his early works show a passing interest in folksong, he had only slight and superficial affinities with the pastoralism of Vaughan Williams and his followers.

Tippett was always his own master. He worked things out for himself, developed and altered his style and remade tradition in a wholly individual way. The naivety that people used to laugh at was one of his great strengths, a vital, positive force in his artistic makeup that enabled him to respond to musical styles from whatever age and of whatever status – Gibbons, Stravinsky, negro spirituals and blues; Beethoven, Bartók, conventional triadic harmony – with total freshness. At the same time he had within himself the toughness and resilience of spirit, the power of self-scrutiny, the patient measuring of ends and means, to forge a language unique to himself and to continue composing according to his own beliefs, whatever happened to his music in the short term. He was over thirty before he was satisfied that what he was composing was good enough to be acknowledged and published. Not till he was getting on for seventy did his music begin to reach a wide public and bring him fame and prosperity.

The process of enlightenment was gradual; several interacting factors contributed to it. First and most important was the advent of a new generation of conductors – Colin Davis, Richard Armstrong, Andrew Davis, David Atherton among others – sympathetic to his music and willing and able to investigate it and find out how it worked; secondly, the general rise in the technical skill of our orchestras. These things in turn fostered a more understanding and enthusiastic response in the musical press.

A crucial event was the BBC concert performance of The midsummer marriage conducted by Norman del Mar in 1963. The music had been admired when the opera was first put on, under John Pritchard, at Covent Garden in 1955, but as a stage drama it had been pronounced fatally obscure and fundamentally untheatrical. Now what struck perceptive listeners was not only the abundance and beauty of the score but its mastery of dramatic language and gesture.

The result was a new production at Covent Garden; and though it was worse than the first one had been (it was left to the Welsh National to demonstrate, in 1976, what an eminently stageable and magnificently theatrical opera it is), it led to a recording which, when released in the United States, made The midsummer marriage something of a cult work there and Tippett a composer with a large and eager American following. In the last decade of his life, America became for him almost a second home. Three of the major works of his fertile old age, the Fourth Symphony, The mask of time and Byzantium, were commissioned by American orchestras (the Chicago and the Boston).

What is thought of by some in Britain as his slightly embarrassing quirkiness doesn’t worry Americans, who seem to take him exactly as he is, and perhaps are also readier to accept that the subjects Tippett tackled in many of his large-scale pieces – human intolerance, fate and choice, the divisions in our souls and their possible healings, science as benefactor and destroyer, the role of the artist in modern society – are a composer’s right and proper concern.

Tippett believed that art, rather than reflect its times, should be a corrective to them, should strive to turn sorrow to joy, confront complacency and escapism with grim reality, and always combat the dehumanising forces in modern life. Though he constantly questioned and at times doubted the right of the privileged Western artist to hold forth in a world racked by suffering, his passionate concern compelled him to do so.

To the end his spirit remained youthful, his curiosity unblunted, his mind alert and open to new ideas. The most heterogeneous sources fed his tumultuous imagination – Goethe, television serials, Jung, Shaw, American pioneer history, news items in the daily papers, Akhmatova, the I Ching. But what came out was his own, reasoned and all of a piece. He was a visionary with his feet firmly on the ground, seeking the transcendental in everyday things; in Bernard Jacobson’s phrase, ‘one of the few great non-neurotic musical masters of the past 100 years.’

Now, with his work complete, we can look back and recognise its unity. As with Stravinsky, the apparent changes of direction and the experiments with different compositional processes were stages in a journey pursued with farseeing single-mindedness. The composer of the public works – A child of our time (the oratorio written in response to a particular event, the Nazi pogrom in Vienna in 1938, but universalised into an archetypal statement of mankind’s inhumanity), the Third Symphony, King Priam, The ice break – and the composer of the private works, the string quartets, the piano sonatas, the Triple Concerto, was the same man and the same voice, asking the same questions, suggesting the same truths; offering visions of sanity, of the dark and light in our natures reconciled, fulfilling the task of the artist as he himself envisaged it: ‘the creation of images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too violent, images of reconciliation for a world torn by divisions, and in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty.’

Musical Times, March 1998