Tippett’s creative cycle

The music of Michael Tippett has often been described as visionary, an attribution acquired in part from the role imagery played in his creative cycle. Tippett’s ‘vigour’ as a creative artist can be measured by his ability to apprehend ‘images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty’ while his progress as an artist is determined by the radiance with which these images are projected in the music.¹ There exist pervasive and archetypal images that appear throughout Tippett’s oeuvre or that link two or more compositions. His operas contain a multitude of visual manifestations but of particular interest are the metaphorical (and sometimes programmatic) images that permeate his music for the concert stage, and provide a determining influence on both his creative cycle and the musical development of the specific composition. To appreciate how these guiding images originate and how they are manifest in his compositions first requires examining the general condition predating their appearance, then tracing them through the creative cycle, and finally to their projection in performance.

The struggle all creative artists must endure is selecting the appropriate content for the desired conception. All too often certain cultural conditions can predetermine the selection. Tippett subverts these conditions by maintaining that his process of discovery was involuntary, and thus substitutes particular choices with universal alternatives. With his preternatural reach, he mined the Yeatsian ‘Great Memory’ for images of collective and universal value. As his creative vision gained momentum in the accretion of peripheral metaphors which aim to transcend the singularity of the image that served as catalyst, his creative cycle approached inevitability. If the preconditions of his creative cycle occasionally left traces on the work-as-artefact, his strongest compositions succeed by erasing the subjective tracks of the individual. Tippett’s progress as an artist narrates his struggle to achieve a position of depersonalization where access to the mytho-poetic content is a fluid exchange between composer and image, until the composer is completely subsumed by the creative cycle.

The absence, acquisition, accumulation, transmutation and projection of images were conditions in his creative cycle and had a determining influence on the conception, realization and reception of his compositions. Each condition had a significant role to play in his broader creative cycle which included five phases: Precondition-Preconception, Einfall-Experience, Image-Accretion (creative process), Transformation-Notation (compositional process) and Performance-Reception. Table 6.1 summarizes how the conditions determine the phases of his creative cycle.

Table 6.1 The five phases and conditions of Tippett’s creative cycle

To assess properly how the cycle gets activated, and the influence an image exerted on specific compositions, it becomes necessary to return to a point in Tippett’s creative development when the apprehension of the image was nascent but not yet available to the composer’s consciousness, and contains – in potentia – the details of the composition. Commenting on the works of Wallace Stevens, Harold Bloom writes: ‘A poem begins because there is an absence. An image must be given, for a beginning, and so that absence ironically is called a presence.’² This applies equally as well to Tippett, whose compositions, with rare exceptions, resonate from a similar and distinctly contemporary ironical absence.

Tippett’s appreciation for this concept dates back to his earliest student days, when he was studying Greek and classics at Fettes College in Edinburgh. The curriculum certainly included cosmogonies where he must have encountered the term χάος (chaos), which is related to the verb χαίνω (to yawn, or to gape). In a cosmogonical context χαίνω creates a space where χάος – an absence of order – exists. Tippett believed his role as a creative artist, the demiurge, was to fashion order from this condition: ‘I must create order out of chaos.’³ The absence (of order) necessitated a procreative response, and his metaphorical image-driven music was designed to reverberate in that condition.

The most vivid manifestation of this absence was revealed in The Mask of Time (1980–2) in which the first section, entitled ‘Presence’, is filled metaphorically and literally with ‘Sound’ and then followed by ‘an extended instrumental “sound picture” of dispersal (consequent upon some supposed explosion “in the beginning”) to one of stability (as of the galactic universe, the stars, and the sun). Here, the tradition of Purcell and Haydn seemed relevant: music can create order in the cosmos.’⁴

Two other natural phenomena that exert imagistic influence were ‘the frightening but exhilarating sound of the ice breaking on the great northern rivers in the spring’ and the experience of actually seeing Halley’s comet.⁵ But Tippett cautioned against describing ‘art as derived from nature’, where we risk losing ‘sight of the one absolute idiosyncrasy of art, that works of art are images of inner experience, however apparently representational the mode of expression may be’.⁶ These representations, however ‘natural’ they might be in origin, do not exclude depictions of historical or mythical events that exploit nature as a source for representation in the manner demanded by the concept of the artwork. Such an example exists in The Vision of Saint Augustine (1963–5). Tippett explains that:

Certainly, many of Tippett’s strongest projections occur in the works just prior to his conceptualization of Augustine’s ecstatic vision. Many of these appear in the form of abstruse introductory texts to his compositions, while others were used in the creative cycle and either subsumed into the process or suppressed when it was completed. One of the earliest examples occurs in his String Quartet No. 1 (1934–5, rev. 1943). The creative cycle for the quartet coincided with Tippett’s ‘deepest, most shattering experience of falling in love’ with Wilfred Franks, which he believed resulted in the discovery of his own musical voice.⁸ Tippett reflected: ‘all that love flowed out in the slow movement . . . an unbroken span of lyrical music in which all four instruments sing ardently from start to finish’.⁹ By the time Tippett came to revise the work, in 1943, his relationship with Franks had ended, and this is perhaps the reason why he removed the poem ‘Happiness’ by Wilfred Owen, which appears as a preface to the manuscript in its earlier version.¹⁰ This was followed by another strong allusion to an even stronger poetic influence: William Blake, whose fusion of image and word provided a perfect acoustic absence for him to fill. Tippett subsequently set A Song of Liberty (1937) from Blake’sThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but the line ‘Damn braces, bless relaxes’ appears in the manuscript to the finale of his String Quartet No. 1. The conceptual image can also be applied to his Piano Sonata No. 1 (1936–8, rev. 1942) and informs the creative and interpretive cycles to both compositions. The sonata, and the subsequent works that were composed in its wake, celebrate a ‘marriage’ of Blake’s Urizen and Los, which Tippett identified as the archetype for the creative artist, whose ability to apprehend the image and measure it into a poetic vehicle for others to experience is their primary mandate: ‘Let the Human Organs be kept in their perfect Integrity / At will Contracting into Worms, or Expanding into Gods.’ Tippett affirmed that ‘I cannot escape the special impact of any art which seems to be a product of a marriage’ – a process which continued throughout his creative development.¹¹ Tippett’s next work, the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938–9), has no such overt association, but its origin and manifestation are clear enough: Orpheus’s lyre – an image that ‘haunted’ his mind, and which represents both the creative artist and the sounds of the modern string orchestra.¹² Then his most exuberant piece to date, and the one most universally appreciated, it is, paradoxically, the genesis of a deliberate conceptual ambivalence that pervaded his creative development. The concerto is a blend of abstraction and humanism, manifested in the two ensembles. These types of dualities were a ‘problem of abiding fascination’ for the composer, from which he could not escape and returned to again and again.¹³ When he did recycle the image, it was in The Mask of Time, but the ambivalence had receded and been replaced with ‘the triumph of Orpheus’s song, its eternal potential’.¹⁴

Conceptual ambivalence returns in his next work, the Fantasia on a Theme of Handel (1939–41), which integrates critical scenes from Samuel Butler’s dystopia Erehwon – the source of the Handelian quotation in its phantasmogorical transmutation. Except for the opening passage it was completely subsumed into the process and appears only as an interpretive association that gains integrity as it establishes deeper connections between the images of the Erewhonians and the treatment of the theme. All of his previous work culminates in A Child of Our Time (1939–41), a product of conscious technique and premonition that delivered a convincing synthesis of tradition and originality, an ideal marriage between abstraction and humanism, and provided him with primary and obsessive images of ‘shadow and light’ that would return again and again in his creative cycle and occupy him until more powerful and shattering ones replaced them.

The String Quartet No. 2 (1941–2) is the conceptual counterpart to the oratorio, thoroughly absolute and excelling in its ambition without being monumental. A series of incidental pieces and vocal works followed, where the source of the commission or the text determined the image used throughout. Boyhood’s End (1943) seems to rise above the rest, as its narrative chronicles a loss of innocence that Tippett was experiencing. A prison sentence must have been as harrowing then as it is now, but somehow Tippett was not too stripped of his dignity, as he managed one last nostalgic look to a more innocent past before he took the strange leap into the magical forest of The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52). The strength of those images resonates throughout his oeuvre and is present even in a work as ‘late’ as the Triple Concerto for Violin, Viola, Cello and Orchestra (1978–9), which uses a quotation of the dawn music found in the opera. The Symphony No. 1 (1944–5) has no avowed programme, but Kemp identifies in it a subtextual commentary on the war.¹⁵ Considering the context of the creative cycle in which it was conceived and composed this seems likely, even if unsubstantiated. Closer study of the divisions of textures and the use of programmatic allusions, most notably a fanfare, seems to confirm this. The works that followed in the wake of the opera, such as the Piano Concerto (1953–5), are so strongly indebted to its imagery and influence they scarcely escape the associations. Neither the composer nor the compositions suffer from this condition. In fact, Tippett was that rare creative artist who could make such strong associations function as another layer to the multiplicities that informed and defined his works in the decade after the war, and the Piano Concerto was the first of such works that appear as offshoots of the opera. Tippett’s first attempts at extending the dramatic horizons of his operas began with the concerto. Here, his use of quotation and association establish a dependency that strengthens the shared imagery and anticipates his use of envoi in the song cycles Songs for Achilles (1961) and Songs for Dov (1969–70). As his ‘midsummer’ progressed into late, turning eventually into autumn, the metaphorical leaves began to fall from the trees in the magical forest. Tippett accepted this condition entirely and, echoing T. S. Eliot, reminds us how ‘it is vain to gum back the autumn leaves on to the trees’.¹⁶

From the exuberance of his first period he moved into a more ironic second where he rejected the strong affirmations of the past as naïve conventions unavailable to him in his present ‘barren age’. Instead, he indulged in an ironical ambiguity that allowed him to create music with undeniable transcendental aspirations while simultaneously challenging the general condition that made his compositions necessary expressions of the age. This ambiguity was indicative of a decentralized age which he believed defined the cultural condition. Within this he struggled to ‘create a world of sound wherein some, at least, of my generation can find refreshment for the inner life’, and ‘to try to transfigure the everyday by a touch of the everlasting, born as that always has been, and will be again, from our desire’.¹⁷ Although he never admitted to reading Adorno, Tippett located this decentralized age within Adorno’sder letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur as described in his essay ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’.¹⁸ It was Friedrich Hölderlin who gave both a poetic voice to Tippett’s observations and the courage to keep searching for the image to accompany the age:

Tippett not only suffered the creative drive to fill the absence with an acoustic presence, he was also acutely aware of the conditions that made image-driven music so urgent for the ‘age’ in which he created it. The division between his desire and the cultural moment formed a defining part of the Precondition-Preconception:

Thus, Tippett both perceives and projects the paradoxical, a necessary ingredient to his ironical ambiguity.

From Einfall-Experience to Performance-Reception

Tippett remained ‘curiously objective about composition’, stating: ‘I am the person to whom the inspiration comes, but I know I am not its originator.’²¹ Of course the multiplicities that resonate throughout Tippett’s music dismiss any single source as its originator, but the materia prima for a particular composition can often be traced back to an Einfall-Experience that provided him with a guiding image. This experience was spontaneous and unwilled, presented as ‘a conceptual spark, and a spark of self-fertilization’.²² The origins of these images are as diverse as his oeuvre and their manifestation takes on many different forms. Some are used quite literally while others have a decidedly conceptual influence. Tippett acquired these images in many different ways, but they were most commonly assimilated through listening to music. Three such experiences rise above all others: hearing a broadcast of a concerto by Vivaldi (conducted by Amaducci) in which the ‘pounding cello and bass C’s’ are transformed into Tippett’s ‘own world’ in his Symphony No. 2 (1956–7);²³ attending a performance of Pli selon pli by Boulez at the 1965 Edinburgh Festival which stimulated the beginning of Symphony No. 3 (1970–2); and listening to Solti rehearse Tippett’s own Byzantium (1989–90) which activated the creative cycle for The Rose Lake (1991–3). The last is certainly the most peculiar but it accompanies a period of self-quotation and uses a wide range of inter-opus references that dominate and direct his creative cycle. He was confident in his ability to transcend the initial Einfall and therefore remained remarkably forthcoming about which composers or pieces elicited the experience. An agon between the source and the music he composed in the wake of the Einfall-Experience might still exist, but certainly not as an anxiety. Rather, it is an assurance of influence that is often exhibited in the very title of the compositions, most notably the Fantasia on a Theme of Handel, Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli (1953) and the Divertimento on ‘Sellinger’s Round’ (1953–4).

As previously stated, Tippett often found inspiration in nature, such as when he witnessed Le Lac Rose in Senegal while on vacation (which, combined with hearing Byzantium in rehearsal with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, gave him the necessary Einfall-Experience to envision The Rose Lake),²⁴ and sounds such as the ‘peculiar, liquid tone’ of a nightingale,

Literary stimuli (which often provide a visual image) worked in very much the same manner, and could imprint upon his imagination an image of such overwhelming power; the only way in which to release it was by creative transformation. The characters found in his operas were frequently derived from such sources: Sosostris from Eliot’sThe Waste Land in The Midsummer Marriage; King Priam and cast from Homer’s The Iliad in the eponymous opera; and Mangus, as the modern incarnation of Prospero from Shakespeare’sThe Tempest in The Knot Garden (1966–9), are three easily identifiable examples. But these were designed to represent archetypes with only loose associations to their literary originals. Theatrical works can more easily accommodate such projections, but Tippett did not limit this kind of representation to vocal works. Despite the images that pervade his music, and the associations they maintain, they rarely operate as programmes. Part of the ‘trick of correspondence’ resided in his ability to transform these images into metaphorically charged instrumental music that maintained traces of the original imagery. Two of the most compelling images derived from literature but transformed into ‘pure’ music are found in The Vision of Saint Augustine and The Blue Guitar (1982–3). In The Vision Tippett needed to depict the instrumental music the angels played, but ‘the harps, trumpets, tubas, and cymbals . . . are not those of any modern orchestra’.²⁶ And thus the timbres he created to represent this music – ‘an imperfect echo of the angelic music (in eternity)’²⁷ were metaphorical: ‘much of the extended instrumental coda to the second part of the work was suggested by the persistence of the athletic metaphor in Augustine – running to get away from time, running away from things as they were, running towards things as they will be’.²⁸ The Einfall image for The Blue Guitar, a sonata for solo classical guitar, was derived from the words of a poem by Wallace Stevens (‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’) which Tippett cites in his preface to the score and which invokes images of ‘the lion in the lute’ and the ‘lion locked in the stone’.²⁹ The lines serve as an introductory text for the first movement, which is aptly titled Transforming, and describe the process of turning the poetry into abstract music. Tippett identified with, anticipated even, Stevens’s own ‘reality-imagination complex’.³⁰ Both Tippett and Stevens agree that ‘For each individual the imagination comes first and the world afterwards. The baby, with its powerful but underdeveloped and imprecise senses and without any experience or understanding of the world, dwells in a fantasy realm. That is transformed only gradually into reality. This mutually enriching interplay between the imagination and reality is the process that creates the self and art.’³¹

In each of the operas, and the works that resonate in association, Tippett creates a messenger character that represents the creative artist: Sosostris in The Midsummer Marriage, Hermes in King Priam (1958–61), Dov in The Knot Garden, Astron in The Ice Break (1973–6) and Pelegrin in New Year (1986–8). As Tippett explained in an interview: ‘I guess all my operas have the one messenger who comes from the gods or whatever it may be, but perhaps comes from another world.’³² In his essay ‘Art and Man’ he wrote: ‘Hermes . . . speaks for me when he sings: O divine music, O stream of sound, In which the states of soul, Flow, surfacing and drowning.’³³ Hermes appears in various guises throughout Tippett’s output, but perhaps nowhere more dominantly than as an archetype and originating resonance for the Concerto for Orchestra (1962–3), which begins with a strong allusion to his ‘divine music’.

Although he understood that society’s mandate for an artist was to entertain, Tippett’s allegiance was to his creative impulse which originated from a world that was primary and obsessive.³⁴ Despite living in a ‘barren age’ Tippett wrote:

Vivid manifestations of this desire often appear veiled in a programme or guiding concept, such as the birth-to-death cycle found in Symphony No. 4 (1976–7) and the String Quartet No. 4 (1977–8), or the epochal cycles found in the Triple Concerto and The Rose Lake. But they differ slightly in that they are not strict narratives that dictate the progression of events in the individual compositions, rather they suggest metaphors – ‘power’, ‘radiance’ and ‘lyric grace’ – that associate a universal archetype with a particular resonance or timbre. These timbres typically originate in the operas but the imagery is perpetuated and often amplified in the instrumental works. For example, the ‘otherworldly’ horns heard at the conclusion of the second movement of Symphony No. 2 achieve a heightened exoticism gained from their appearance as signifiers of the magical forest in The Midsummer Marriage.

The image of the creative artist is one of the strongest images projected in his oeuvre and is present in the dramatis personae in each of the operas, but it is also present as a conceptual construction, in the form of a dialectic on the origin of the artwork, in each of his instrumental compositions. Tippett confessed that ‘the people who’ve always been the closest to me [are] the professional healers, in a world that needs it. That may be the initial concept. Then you have to structure, and the structure would be the scenario. That’s a very long process indeed, because you have to try to put the jigsaw into position with your own imagination.’³⁶ Tippett’s strongest projection of the image of the creative artist was appropriated from Yeats’s poem ‘High Talk’ in which ‘the whiffler stalking about on stilts in front of the circus parade is a perfect analogy for the human being trying to remain unswamped by the melee of experience, trying to assert an identity; it struck me also as the marvellous image of the artist, trying to put his message across.’³⁷

Although the Einfall that initiated the creative process was often a singular and memorable experience, the creative cycle gains momentum through an accumulation of images that contribute to a multiplicity of images found at the core of Tippett’s compositions. He explained:

The spinning coin of originality and tradition constitutes a fundamental polarity in Tippett’s music and his reliance on image, forged into a ‘poetic vehicle’ such as an opera or symphony, mediates these exclusive positions. Tippett used his ironical ambiguity to avoid slipping into an entrenched ideological system of thought that might threaten to overdetermine his creative development, and while the diversity of his output remains problematic for some critics it is a testament to his ability to create ever anew and evidence of his creative confidence and visionary qualities which cut a path directly through the central art of his age.

While the original image of the Einfall-Experience occupies a special place in Tippett’s creative cycle, it might eventually get subsumed into the broader process and dissolved into an archetype meant to represent a universal condition which the composition symbolizes through particular resonances. The third phase, or Image-Accretion (creative process), naturally followed the second: ‘Once the [conceptual] spark exists and the fertilisation is in process, then the accretion of images begins. Now, this accretion can come from dipping into the great memory, if you like. It comes in all sorts of ways. It comes quite subjectively. But that accretive process is fundamental.’³⁹ It was also prolonged, and although he remained disciplined about it, he allowed it to progress involuntarily:

These apprehensions are often recorded in his sketchbooks, and appear as metaphors that were retrieved by ‘dipping your hand into the great memory; not only your own memory, but the archetypal memory, and producing from this a set of metaphors which you hammer into’ music.⁴¹ They play a particularly influential role in the formation of the conceptual designs of his large-scale compositions. Tippett explained: ‘I have, in a sense, been drawn from time to time to these larger scale works which are multilayered, part of whose process must go on in an accretory process from inside what we call the collective unconscious.’⁴² What the creative artist retrieves ‘are not yet art. It takes a lifetime’s work to mould them into works of art. For this the artist can have no reward but the joy of doing it.’⁴³ Behind this statement was a deeper awareness of the ‘disrelation’ between the creative artist and the public.⁴⁴ Although Tippett desired to create music that had a profound and lasting impact, ‘wherein some, at least, of my generation can find refreshment for the inner life’,⁴⁵ it must be through the ‘activation of the Great Memory: that immense reservoir of the human psyche where images age-old and new boil together in some demoniac cauldron’.⁴⁶ Describing the prolonged Image-Accretion phase for Symphony No. 3, he explained that:

‘Immobile’ and ‘speedy’ were eventually transformed into the strong images ‘Arrest’ and ‘Movement’ which replaced the former ‘shadow’ and ‘light’.

Tippett allied himself with other creative artists, especially poets, most notably Eliot and Yeats who used similar structuring factors. In an interview Tippett explained that:

The concepts had to be clear and well defined before progressing onto the next phase (Transformation-Notation). He insisted that:

As images combine they lose their singularity but contribute to the overall force of the creative cycle. Regardless of their particular resolution, they are used obliquely and provide grist for the archetypes that are projected. These archetypes then suggest the particular metaphors which populate his scores. To complete the process the metaphors are then translated into music, notes and timbres, which retain their associations, and when applied to the compositional process exert a direct influence on the creation and development of the musical material. Once the accumulation of images and formation of concepts took on a critical shape, he entered into the Transformation-Notation (compositional process) stage, where the transmutation of images into music would begin. In a letter to Eric Walter White, written on 26 October 1965, he described a breaking point where ‘I expect I shall have to let the music start soon. But . . . that is always v. slow in accumulating.’⁵⁰ Relating this to Symphony No. 3, he explained: ‘While holding these ideas in my mind over a period of years, allowing them gradually to grow, I come next to a moment when I had nearly everything in my mind except the notes. The symphony so far had a structure and balance; it had ideas about orchestration. Thus I could begin what is usually thought of as the composition. I began at the piano a search for the right sounds. Now I don’t find the precise sounds I want on the piano, but through the piano (this is after all a piece for an orchestra). But I can invent as though the orchestral score were in my head all the time.’⁵¹

Determining a direct correlation between the image and the music is difficult to establish: ‘The process of transformation inside the psyche may be an easy one, or it may be exceptionally arduous. What is clear is that once that transformation has taken place, it is difficult to trace it back to its original stimulus.’⁵² Even when he provides the image and a conceptual map to retrace the steps, the process of transmutation is anything but routine: ‘Now when it gets transformed into music, that is something other. The image goes, disappears into the music.’⁵³ Thus the images that get projected in the music may not resemble the image of its origin. When the Einfall-Experience could be traced back to a particular piece of music the transmutation process was even more critical because ‘if this process of transmutation did not occur, then you would not be aware of me as a composer at all . . . The blues in my Third Symphony would revert to being real Bessie Smith; the pounding C’s at the start of my Second Symphony might even become Vivaldi again! What I write sometimes borders on quotation.’⁵⁴

According to Tippett the role of the creative artist was to ‘transmute the everyday for the sake of poetry’.⁵⁵ He reminds us: ‘Our English word for poet comes from the old Greek word ποιειν [poiein], to make. The composer is in this sense a poet of tones. He makes structures of tones (and silences) which when performed appear as works of musical art substituting independently of composer and performer.’⁵⁶ In a letter to William Glock he stressed the importance of using precise imagery to allow for a smoother process of transmutation:

The Transformation-Notation phase was a physical act – finding the notes on the piano and then placing them on the page – and was aided, in part, by the precision of his images and how developed the concepts were (including structure, instrumentation, genre and so on). If the Einfall-Experience was spontaneous, and Image-Accretion more cognitive to conceptualize the parameters to match the chosen metaphors, then the last phase, the transmutation and notation of material, was the most consciously driven. ‘As a creative musician, I can designate two general categories of activity which enable me to capture and express this inner flow of experience. One entails spontaneity and accident; the other, a more self-conscious process of testing and measuring.’⁵⁸ Spontaneity, distinct from choice, has the capacity to reveal authentic truths, while measurement is more consciously directed. Between the sketchbook and the manuscript the process was largely complete and little evidence of the transmutation was left on the pages. Tippett’s manuscripts exhibit a multilayered process that included visions and revisions, but once committed to the page he was confident the image was captured and transmuted. Measurement and testing was almost entirely an internal process associated with and submitted to a physical trial to determine its aesthetic standard. Describing this process he said: ‘The movements of the stomach or any other part of the nervous system, in response to the imagined music, is the somatic test of aesthetic validity within the combined psycho-somatic act of creation – just as sets of gradually acquired intellectual judgments of formal patternings, of taste, of values, are the tests of the conscious mind.’⁵⁹

This process continues in the next and final phase: Performance-Reception, where the images are projected in performance. Acknowledging this, he wrote: ‘I have to polarise these two, the irrational psychic instructions and the rational formality, in some such way that it’s set down finally as a collection of notes and instructions, but if they are heard in the concert hall, something of this strange transmutatory magical experience happens to you from the sounds you psychically hear.’⁶⁰ Tippett understood the importance of performance, and therefore always left something pending: ‘the song if you like – that would depend always on performance, which is the real thing that happens in the place with the people . . . I’m trying to say that this is something special for myself. You can attempt to have a kind of non-living music, and various composers feel they can put it onto a perfect disc or something. I have no feeling like that at all. I like the performance, and each performer does it differently.’⁶¹ Despite his engagements as a conductor and interpreter, his interest in the music was almost entirely with its creation: ‘I have, in principle, nothing to do with the performance: my interest is simply with invention.’⁶² Once the composition was complete, fully emancipated from the creative cycle of the individual composer, it held no interest for him: ‘from my point of view of a composer, all is finished. When I conduct or even listen to my own works, it is as though the music has completely left me, the creator, and now has a life entirely of its own.’⁶³ And in an interview from 1996 he maintained his objectivity: ‘It’s difficult. I’m outside the music I’ve made, I have no interest in it.’⁶⁴

Tippett’s disinterest and objectification culminated in his last composition, The Rose Lake. Meirion Bowen described it as ‘his most reticent piece, really, he’s almost saying he doesn’t exist. It reminds me of the JoycePortrait of an Artist as a Young Man where the highest you aspire to as an artist is to be totally outside, independent of the art itself; you are simply there looking at it from all directions. You are detached from it completely. It’s there, the work. You’ve disappeared. He simply said: “bye, bye, I’m not there, it’s just the music”.’⁶⁵ This was anticipated in Byzantium, which Tippett described as ‘an artefact: an artistic object in which all the emotion of the artist has disappeared inside’.⁶⁶ But the creative artist was still ‘ambivalently’ present in the composition, most especially in the last lines – ‘Those images that yet / Beget fresh images’ – which ‘fascinated’ him, as he had yet to beget his last two compositions, pieces that would fully emancipate him from the creative cycle and thus arrive at the end of Eliot’s process of depersonalization.⁶⁷ But The Rose Lake takes this concept one step further, not by concluding the progress of an artist but rather through a metaphorical depiction of an exit of the artist from the professional stage. In his play Amadeus Peter Schaffer depicted a fictional Mozart composing his own requiem, but Tippett might very well be the truest manifestation of this portrayal. Certainly the last images give pause: an onomatopoeic ‘plop’ into the lake followed by a bar of silence – a return to the metaphorical absence that was the origin of his creative cycle.