In Memoriam Michael Tippett
Published: 1998 Author:
IN JANUARY of this year, Michael Tippett, one of the greatest British composers of our century, died in London at the age of ninety-three.
Born in London in 1905, the child of a lawyer father and a mother who was a member of the Suffragette movement, the young Tippett exhibited a quite precocious musical talent, although appropriate formal training was late in coming, and recognition by the English musical establishment more belated still: admitted to the Royal College of Music in 1920, Tippett studied composition there with Charles Wood and C.H. Kitson, alongside piano and conducting. From the beginning of the 1930s the essential features of Tippett’s personality (he was at that time an obscure French teacher in a Surrey school) were starting to take shape: his political concern – if politics is taken in its noblest sense, that of service rendered by the individual to his own community – and his sensitivity to the social issues of the time, especially those having to do with work and unemployment. To these years may be dated his first experiences as orchestral and choral conductor and as a composer (String Quartet no. 1, 1935); not long after came his appointment as director of the Morley College of Music – which under the ‘Tippett regime’ (1940–52) became one of the nerve centres of London musical life – and the composition of perhaps his most famous works, A Child of our Time (1939–1941) and the opera The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52). Official recognition came not long after (he was awarded the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1959, and honorary degrees by the Universities of Cambridge and Dublin in 1964); it continued uninterruptedly until his death, affirming a diverse and versatile range of activities (as presenter of radio programmes for the BBC, conductor, essayist and director of the Bath Festival).
The composer’s musical legacy includes opera (one of these, King Priam, requires a guitar in the orchestral ensemble) and choral, symphonic, chamber, instrumental and vocal works: in spite of his very personal avant-garde tendencies, the complexity of his rhythmic language, and his vision – at times somewhat strict and severe – of tonal harmony, Tippett never abandoned the traditional forms; on the contrary, he acquired a profound knowledge of counterpoint and the great music of the past, above all of the Tudor English composers, Bach, and Beethoven, as the foundation of his work. Out of all of this he forged a formidable eclecticism, a capacity to mix elements of the most disparate musical traditions (in the Bach-inspired oratorio A Child of our Time the expected chorales are replaced by spirituals adapted from American ‘Negro’ music), and an ability to celebrate and confront elements of different styles, all the while never losing sight of the unifying aim of expressive purpose and communicative power.
To a relatively recent phase of Tippett’s output belong the two works for guitar: the song cycle Songs for Achilles for tenor and guitar (1961, on texts by the composer), first performed at the Aldeburgh Festival in July 1961, and above all the complex Blue Guitar (1982–1983). The latter work, subtitled Sonata (to be understood in its original meaning of ‘instrumental piece’ rather than in the classical sense of the word), draws its inspiration from Wallace Stevens’s poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar, suggested in its turn by Picasso’s well-known painting of the same title. It is divided into three movements bearing equally laconic indications of tempo and titled respectively Transforming, Dreaming and Juggling (the titles allude to the poetic content of Stevens’s text). With The Blue Guitar Tippett shows us, not for the first time, the irresistible attraction exercised on the composers of our time by the mysterious, evocative, almost magical side of the instrument – the same mystery, evocation and magic which had formed the basis, over twenty years earlier, of Nocturnal, by the younger Benjamin Britten, and which we recognise in Stevens’s poem:
They said: “You have a blue guitar.
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied: “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
—Translated by Jonathan Leathwood
Copyright © 1998 Lorenzo Micheli