1998 and all that

Michael Tippett’s death, on 8 January 1998, six days after his ninety-third birthday, came at a time when performers’ interest in his music was buoyant, and scholarly writing about his life and work was flourishing. A comprehensive collection of his own writings, Tippett on Music, appeared in 1995, the year of his ninetieth birthday, and this was soon followed by the second edition of Meirion Bowen’s relatively brief survey of his life and works (1997); then came Tippett Studies (edited by David Clarke) and Kenneth Gloag’s book on A Child of Our Time (both Reference Gloag1999), Clarke’s own monograph on The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett (Reference Clarke2001), and a further collection of essays, Michael Tippett: Music and Literature, edited by Suzanne Robinson (Reference Robinson2002).¹ By then it was only three years to 2005 and the Tippett centenary, an event less well marked than it might have been had his death been less recent. The only major publication of that year was Thomas Schuttenhelm’s edition of Selected Letters, with its fervent prefatory declaration by David Matthews that Tippett ‘was such a central figure in our musical life that his absence is still strongly felt, not simply as a composer but as a man whose integrity and conviction were evident in everything he said and did’.²

Since then, there has been little or nothing. Performances and recordings have also tailed off, and it has not been difficult for those who sincerely believed that Tippett’s prominence in the last quarter-century of his life was more to do with the premature death of Benjamin Britten in 1976 than with the positive qualities of his actual compositions to declare ‘I told you so!’, and point to the contrast in the way in which ‘the Britten industry’ has continued to flourish.³ The argument that such speedy and summary dismissal bore out the verdict handed down by Robin Holloway in his brief obituary notice, where the ‘marvellous personal synthesis’ of the ‘two visionary song cycles, two masterpieces for string orchestra, the first two symphonies, The Midsummer Marriage’ was the prelude to ‘a long, slow decline’ in which ‘feckless eclecticism and reckless trendiness’ ruled,⁴ is less persuasive than it might be simply because of the melancholy fact that the earlier music has been sidelined as much as the later.

Consideration of possible reasons why the cultural practice of British music has evolved in the way it has between 1998 and today cannot sensibly be confined to statistical tabulations claiming to measure degrees of prominence and obscurity. It is nevertheless natural to speculate about whether some composers have a definable ‘staying power’ denied to others, and whether it is reasonable to consider ‘eclecticism and . . . trendiness’ as proof of ephemerality – at least when proven to be ‘feckless’ and ‘reckless’ respectively. Since this chapter is concerned, among other things, with arguing that Tippett is more properly considered in terms of dialogues between eclecticism and consistency, trendiness and ‘classic’ timelessness, it should be clear that I tend to the view that in his case recent neglect is not an infallible index of musical value, any more than it was for Sibelius in the first decades after his death in 1957. It follows that now is not the time to pursue a topic that needs a longer timeframe: so, rather than continue with the subject of ‘Tippett since his lifetime’ I will take a fresh look at the rich cultural practice of that lifetime, so nearly coinciding with the twentieth century, and explore Tippett’s relationship with that practice.

The background in outline

To list the British composers born between 1900 and 1914 is to establish a rough-and-ready context for Tippett himself (born in 1905) and for the century within which he and his contemporaries lived and worked. Born just before 1905, Alan Bush (1900–95), Gerald Finzi (1901–56), Edmund Rubbra (1901–86), William Walton (1902–83) and Lennox Berkeley (1903–89) were all involved to varying degrees with reinforcing rather than radically challenging the generic and stylistic predispositions of earlier generations. If – apart from Finzi – none of them could be thought of as essentially English in idiom after the model of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, or even Holst, their engagement with more radical (non-British) initiatives did not on the whole generate compositions as radically progressive as many in continental Europe or America before 1939.

Of those born alongside Tippett in 1905 itself, William Alwyn (d. 1985) would prove to be the most traditionally orientated symphonic composer of this vintage, while Alan Rawsthorne (d. 1971) would embody a more determinedly gritty reaction against what many perceived as the rather flabby effusions of Vaughan Williams or Arnold Bax. Likewise, both Walter Leigh (a casualty of the war in 1942) and Constant Lambert (who also died young, in 1951) found continental neoclassicism attractive as a means of evading the more pious and passive aspects of their national musical heritage – the kind of tensions Tippett himself would deal with so resourcefully during the 1930s and 1940s. (Lambert was also very perceptive about the significance of Sibelius in his book Music Ho! (1934)⁵ – but it was Walton’s music which grew closer to Sibelius’s during these years, not Lambert’s.)

Among composers born between 1906 and 1913 the only clear sign of those stronger disparities between radical and conservative which would define twentieth-century musical life and compositional practice is provided by Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83); it would be another ten years before two other composers of comparable progressiveness, Humphrey Searle (1915–82) and Denis ApIvor (1916–2004), came along. Nevertheless, while Arnold Cooke (1906–2005), Grace Williams (1906–77), William Wordsworth (1908–88), Robin Orr (1909–2006), Stanley Bate (1911–59), Daniel Jones (1912–93) and George Lloyd (1913–98) were all in their different and in some cases quite distinctive ways on the conservative end of the formal and stylistic spectrum, Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94) would show particular skill in crafting a progressive path leading closer to Bartók as model than to her teacher Vaughan Williams, and by this means to a kind of ‘mainstream’ engagement with modernism after 1950 that was as personable as Tippett’s own. By the early 1930s, of course, it was Benjamin Britten (1913–76) who was the most promising and successful exponent of mainstream progressiveness, his various ‘continental’ affinities – Mahler, Berg, Ravel, Stravinsky, Prokofiev – and the internationalist sympathies of his most important teacher, Frank Bridge, proving no hindrance to the rapid forging of a well-integrated personal language.

Britten was a challenge to those like Tippett, Rawsthorne and Maconchy who might have had comparable instincts and ambitions in relation to the British inheritance as it seemed to define itself after the watershed year of 1934, when Elgar, Delius and Holst all died. Tippett may never have been likely to strive for a less explicitly mainstream stylistic and technical amalgam than that which Britten was deploying to such effect immediately after 1935, but he seems gradually to have defined his own relation to the established and emerging polarities between radical and conservative in ways which reinforced the differences between his own personal compositional voice and that of his contemporaries, especially Britten. Nowhere was the contrast between Britten’s economical intensity and Tippett’s more flamboyantly decorative idiom greater than in two compositions written for Peter Pears and Britten to perform – Britten’sSeven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1940) and Tippett’s Boyhood’s End (1943). By the mid-1950s, with the first performances of The Turn of the Screw (1954) and The Midsummer Marriage (1955), the contrast in opera was even more apparent: and contrast remained of the essence, as Tippett’s dedication of his notably progressive Concerto for Orchestra to Britten in 1963 was complemented the following year by Britten’s dedication to Tippett of one of his most intensely constrained later works, the first parable for church performance, Curlew River.

In the years immediately after 1945, it was evident that British musical life was robust enough to sustain a diversity of styles, embracing Vaughan Williams, Britten and a younger, more internationalist figure like Peter Racine Fricker (1920–90), who, together with others born during the 1920s, including Malcolm Arnold (1921–2006), Robert Simpson (1921–97), Kenneth Leighton (1929–88) and Alun Hoddinott (1929–2008), bridged the divide between the 1900–14 generation and the new radicals born in the 1930s – Alexander Goehr (b. 1932), Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934), Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934) and Jonathan Harvey (b. 1939). It was from within this pluralism that Tippett emerged as something more than just another distinctively English composer born in the years between 1900 and 1914. Yet it was only with Britten’s premature death in 1976 that he achieved the unambiguous prominence of a leader within a spectrum of compositional activity in which the generation of the 1930s was in turn finding itself complemented by younger minimalists – John Tavener (b. 1944) and Michael Nyman (b. 1944) – and those more conservative (Robin Holloway, b. 1943) and more radical (Brian Ferneyhough, b. 1943). This context of supreme heterogeneity suited Tippett’s own probingly pragmatic aesthetic, as well as his consistently internationalist outlook.

Interactive oppositions

There is perhaps more than a touch of irony in the fact that, had Tippett died at Britten’s age of (barely) 63 – in 1968 – he would be seen in terms of a career that ended with one of his most demanding scores, The Vision of Saint Augustine (1963–5), a work which showed him beginning to reassert his belief in the positively visionary – and blues-healing – nature of music after the upheavals occasioned by the stark tragedy shown in the opera King Priam (1958–61). As it was, Tippett survived and prospered for thirty years after 1968, and David Clarke encapsulated that near-century of life with admirable percipience in 2001, declaring that ‘one result of his longevity was an engagement with the radically different social and cultural climates across the century, particularly reflected in a dramatic, modernist change of style in the 1960s’.⁶ That ‘engagement’ with radical difference is also a crucial theme in Clarke’s book of the same year, the most penetrating and far-reaching critical study of the composer yet published, whose blurb sonorously declares that ‘Tippett’s complex creative imagination’ involves a ‘dialogue between a romantic’s aspirations to the ideal and absolute, and a modernist’s sceptical realism’. The book itself ends with the declaration that ‘Tippett’s is a music that contains a continuing and salutary reminder to face up to contradictions and to keep our minds and imaginations open’.⁷ ‘Contradictions’ can be another term for ‘polarities’, and facing up to them realistically, as they are, is a clear alternative to seeking compromise. If fusing – integrating – rather than merely balancing out the opposites is the most fundamental quality of a classicist aesthetic, then maintaining, even revelling in the persistent polarity of centrifugal superimpositions would seem to be the essence of modernism, celebrating twentieth-century culture’s distinctive embrace of fragmentation, stratification and disparity.

For some commentators, the pursuit of fragmentation and juxtaposition, at the expense of unity and connectedness, amounts to something ‘post-modern’ – especially when materials and stylistic associations with ‘pre-modern’ art materials are involved. While it is a symptom of current terminological diversity to note that what, for some, is ‘post-modern’ is, for others, ‘late modernist’, there is still likely to be broad agreement that the stylistic heterogeneity this kind of music displays demonstrates the willingness of the composer in question to challenge conventional concepts of stylistic consistency and ‘integrity’. Such issues became very relevant to Tippett’s later compositions. Indeed, of all the images that have clung to him, that of the magpie maverick is probably the most persistent. It allows for Robin Holloway’s pejoratively slanted ‘eclecticism’ as well as Clarke’s more positive ‘empiricism’;⁸ but, more importantly, it lays the foundations for a productive dialogue between the ‘formative’ and the ‘found’ – something whose varied manifestations helped to determine the Tippett ethos and the Tippett idiom. Since for Tippett the found – from spirituals and blues to Renaissance polyphony and the music of Beethoven or Schubert – tends to be tonal, and the formative to question the basics of tonality as much as to reinscribe them, it is by means of such very basic binary oppositions – or complements – that a critical and theoretical context for the informed reception of Tippett’s compositions in terms of meaningfully deployed polarities has been forged.

Tonality and polarity: a theoretical interlude

In the Poetics of Music lectures delivered by Igor Stravinsky at Harvard University in 1939 there is a straightforward statement showing how thinking about tonality had evolved since the earliest, nineteenth-century attempts to systematize those processes which were primarily concerned to enrich (if also to undermine) the essential stability of ‘classical’ diatonicism: ‘our chief concern is not so much what is known as tonality as what one might term the polar attraction of sound, of an interval, or even of a complex of tones . . . In view of the fact that our poles of attraction are no longer within the closed system which was the diatonic system, we can bring the poles together without being compelled to conform to the exigencies of tonality.’⁹

Had the great twentieth-century theorist of classical tonality, Heinrich Schenker, still been alive to read those comments they would have reinforced his conviction that Stravinsky was a destroyer of music’s most fundamental, most natural materials, not a real composer at all.¹⁰ However, by the 1930s such anti-progressive views were far less salient than the more enlightened and progressive understanding of post-Beethovenian processes of change found in such prominent twentieth-century composer-theorists as Vincent d’Indy, Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg.¹¹ Indeed, despite the obvious and strong contrasts in style between Schoenberg and Stravinsky during the inter-war decades, the ideas about tonal harmony set out in The Poetics of Music demonstrate considerable convergence with Schoenbergian beliefs about the need to retain tonality as a flexible conceptual basis for meaningful composition, and to reject the wholly negative concept of ‘atonality’. In his Harmonielehre, Schoenberg had forcefully declared that ‘a piece of music will always have to be tonal, at least in so far as a relation has to exist from tone to tone by virtue of which the tones, placed next to or above one another, yield a perceptible continuity. The tonality itself may perhaps be neither perceptible nor provable . . . Nevertheless, to call any relation of tones atonal is just as far-fetched as it would be to designate a relation of colours aspectral . . . If one insists on looking for a name, “polytonal” or “pantonal” could be considered.’¹²

Music theorists have not been slow to seize on the implications of these statements and to try to tease out the terminological and technical consequences of regarding ‘polar attraction’ as a factor in the establishment of ‘pantonality’ or – alternatively – ‘suspended tonality’.¹³ For Tippett, who responded to and wrote about both Stravinsky and Schoenberg,¹⁴ the possibility that they might have significant similarities as well as essential differences could have been part of the attraction to an aesthetic instinct that acknowledged and worked with the tensions between two very fundamental artistic categories – classicism and modernism – both of which were accessible by way of the kind of thinking about harmony and principles of formation that the views on tonality of Stravinsky and Schoenberg exemplified.

Classicism, modernism, modern classicism

When work on The Midsummer Marriage was drawing to a close, Tippett wrote that he considered ‘the general classicizing tendency of our day [the 1930s and 40s] less as evidence of a new classic period than as a fresh endeavour . . . to contain and clarify inchoate material. We must both submit to the overwhelming experience and clarify it into a magical unity. In the event, sometimes Dionysus wins, sometimes Apollo.’¹⁵ The blithe self-confidence of this declaration is very much of a piece with the thumpingly upbeat tone of the Yeats couplet that ends the opera’s text – ‘All things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay’ – and it strongly suggests that any possible confrontation between such ‘classicizing’ and Schoenbergian modernism (which around 1950 meant, essentially, ‘atonal’ twelve-tone technique) was of much less significance than a continuingly productive contest between Dionysian romanticism and Apollonian classicism.

Such formulations reflect the general reluctance before the mid-1950s – particularly strong in British music – to follow through on the consequences of the expressionist, avant-garde initiatives, primarily in Schoenberg and Webern, which had emerged before 1914. These initiatives had been countered in the years after the First World War by a neoclassicism much more far-reaching than that developed by Stravinsky alone (it can also be traced in such twelve-tone exercises as Schoenberg’s Third and Fourth String Quartets). In addition, many of the most established and successful composers of the time – seniors like Richard Strauss, Sibelius and Janáček (even if his music was much less well-known until the second half of the century), the younger generation around Bartók, Hindemith and Prokofiev, and juniors like Britten and Shostakovich – refused to embrace fully that ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ which, coupled with resistance to harmonic centredness, was proving to be the most fundamental strategy in modernism’s principled resistance to classicism’s dissonance-resolving, unity-prioritizing qualities. While it is true that these composers often adopted harmonic characteristics that replaced simple major and minor triads with less standard chordal formations, such characteristics did not require the complete abandonment of degrees of relative consonance and dissonance, any more than the textures in which they appeared required the rejection of all points of contact with harmonic and contrapuntal techniques that had flourished in the time of diatonicism – the kind of chords, like those with which Tippett ended his First String Quartet (1934–5, rev. 1943) (Ex. 1.1), that are sometimes termed ‘higher consonances’.¹⁶ This ending is not a ‘perfect cadence’ in A major of the precise, traditional kind, but its relationship with such a cadence is unambiguous and depends for its meaning and function on recognition of that relationship.

Ex. 1.1 String Quartet No. 1, third movement, ending

Tippett might well have been prepared to concede that the kind of unsparingly sordid modern expression found in Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck (1914–22) could provide a humanly compassionate as well as psychologically penetrating experience, thereby to a degree cathartically transcending the unrelievedly tragic aura of its subject matter. But he himself needed a stronger degree of idealism, and he was never more determined than in his early years to equate the musical representation of the visionary, the transcendent, with the triumphantly ‘cohesive . . . mingling of disparate ingredients’ he admired in Holst, and (eventually) in Ives: in both Holst’sThe Hymn of Jesus and Ives’s Fourth Symphony, he would eventually argue, ‘the constituent elements and methods may be disparate, but their essence is one of distillation’.¹⁷Berg might have been a master when it came to distillations of the disparate, but a modernism that downplayed the cohesive – the aspiration to renewal that was also an advance socially, politically and culturally – was initially far less appealing to Tippett than an aesthetic that retained enough of classical and romantic qualities to give space to his sense of how the modern world of the 1930s and 1940s needed to evolve if its political and spiritual crises were not to prove terminally destructive.

The heady mix of Marxist political progressiveness and Jungian psychological self-exploration, so typical of the 1930s, fuelled Tippett’s conviction that the ‘everyday’ world in itself was an inadequate environment for properly aspirational and inspiring art. Even Stravinsky’sThe Rite of Spring had to be seen as something other than an unsparingly vivid portrait of human cruelty and social repression: it was ‘a drama of renewal’, and ‘deadly serious’ as such.¹⁸ But even if the cultural climate of the years between 1920 and 1945 did little to promote the positive qualities of an absolute, avant-garde rejection of tonality and traditional formal models (hence the strong admiration of the Mahler-worshipping Britten for Berg’s Bach-quoting, Bach-subverting Violin Concerto of 1935),¹⁹ it did allow for the kind of more mainstream modernism that worked with a heady blend of celebration and subversion to bring elements of traditional aesthetics and compositional technique into a newer world of scepticism and potential fragmentation – a world in which the belief that ‘renewal’ was a wholly positive and realistic proposition was countered, if not actually contradicted.

Precarious balances: before 1945

In British music of the inter-war decades the kind of deconstructive response to Purcellian counterpoint found in Elisabeth Lutyens’sFive-Part Fantasia for Strings (1937) was a rare and flawed attempt at truly radical reappraisal of ‘classical’ traditions.²⁰ Nevertheless, as the recent studies of Vaughan Williams’s Third (Pastoral) and Fourth Symphonies by Daniel Grimley and J. P. E. Harper-Scott have argued, even in a music that remained ‘classical rather than modern’, a deeply rooted ‘mingling of classical and modernist processes’ could function effectively.²¹ Most significantly, despite its relatively unprogressive kind of extended tonality, Vaughan Williams’sPastoral Symphony (completed in 1921) was able to project an unusual degree of ambivalence in reaching back to the remembered horrors of the First World War with something of a ‘nihilist’ trajectory, offering ‘a complex and often fractured vision’ in place of a ‘magical unity’.²² It was Tippett’s resistance to such nihilism which did most to determine the relatively traditional style of his music up to A Child of Our Time (1939–41) – his own first, mature attempt at ‘a drama of renewal’ in which the very immediate evidence of human weakness and social cruelty is distanced and ritualized, the work of art offering spiritual consolation or psychotherapeutic counselling as well as political instruction.

A Child of Our Time does not work as a productive dialogue between old and new, classical and modern, sacred and secular. If anything, it seems more concerned with failures of communication, and with disparities that can be lived with, accommodated, as long as they do not seriously inhibit that natural process of resistance to annihilation (and therefore of healing, renewal) that underpins the drama. Undoubtedly, pious aspirations to ‘know one’s shadow and one’s light’ as a sure means of effecting personal wellbeing are the most dated, least convincing aspect of the work from a twenty-first-century perspective. Because the continuing status of Jung is as problematic and unresolved an issue as the continuing status of Karl Marx, A Child of Our Time might be more of a problem piece today than it was in the 1940s. But it served the important purpose, for Tippett, of making him wary of using musical materials – the spirituals – whose social, religious function was so unambiguously explicit, so profoundly at odds with the more innately aesthetic purposes of art. When, at the end of The Midsummer Marriage, he alludes to a (purely instrumental) hymn-like chorale the atmosphere is perfectly poised between the ironic and the elevated, refining rather than simply underlining the ritualized collectivity of the generic association. And A Child of Our Time itself is redeemed aesthetically, to a degree, by the downbeat austerity of the way its concluding spiritual, ‘Deep River’, fades away (Ex. 1.2). The build-up of affirmative regeneration, the ‘rite of spring’ that precedes it, is countered, not transcended or given emphatic closure, and the fact that Tippett never seems to have considered bringing back the soaringly upbeat music which begins the finale (No. 29: Ex. 1.3) to round off and resolve the work as a whole leaves it polarized between two very different expressions of hopefulness in a way that not only seems relevant to the zeitgeist of 1941, but also lays a foundation for the methods Tippett would later employ to intensify the representation of polarities.

Ex. 1.2 A Child of Our Time, No. 30, chorus and soli, ‘Deep River’, ending

Ex. 1.3 A Child of Our Time, No. 29, chorus and soli, ‘I would know my shadow and my light’, opening

Precarious balances: after the war

As I have argued elsewhere, by the time he came to compose the ending of The Midsummer Marriage, Tippett was capable of ‘refining and intensifying the work’s dramatic themes without dissolving all traces of darkness, or even of scepticism’ – despite that Yeatsian textual assertion about ‘all things’ being ‘built again’.²³ To this extent, Tippett was already on the road that would lead, in his late Yeats setting Byzantium, to the use ‘of symbol and myth to further the process of human self-understanding in a far more sceptical, circumspect and (on the face of it) realistic manner’ than in the opera.²⁴ Arguably, however, that journey took the form and character it did in part at least because of being rooted so firmly in the relatively unambiguous classical ideals of his earlier years – ideals that remained conspicuous in the works composed immediately after The Midsummer Marriage – the Piano Concerto (1953–5) and the Symphony No. 2 (1956–7). The continued presence of a Stravinskian aura in the symphony has often been highlighted, and in 1999 Kenneth Gloag added a distinctive gloss on the music’s modern classicism – or ‘classicised modernism’ – in aligning his own analysis of it with Stephen Walsh’s comments on Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Pianos: ‘here Stravinsky seems less and less to be confronting us with the irreconcilable nature of classicism and modernism and more and more to be synthesising a sort of personal classicism out of precisely their reconciliation’. As a result, ‘neo-classicism dissolves into a classicised modernism’,²⁵ and Gloag surveys a range of analytical attempts to interpret Tippett’s version of ‘classicised modernism’ in terms of polarities or oppositions whose potential for reconciliation was clearly a vital aesthetic issue for him.

Remaining faithful to Tippett’s aesthetic instincts has required commentators to acknowledge his commitment to ‘fusion’. Elliott Carter once famously acclaimed Stravinsky for his mastery of the paradoxical yet supremely contemporary technique of ‘unified fragmentation’, in keeping with his ‘classicising’ declaration that ‘music gains its strength in the measure that it does not succumb to the seductions of variety’.²⁶ Yet it seems to have been exactly this commitment to connectedness that Tippett came to challenge as he moved from the Second Symphony to its immediate successor, the opera King Priam. If the Stravinskian equivalent is that most potent of Greek tragedies, Oedipus Rex, the composer’s claim that he had assembled the work ‘from whatever came to hand’, making ‘these bits and snatches my own, I think, and of them a unity’ might lie behind Ian Kemp’s suggestion that Tippett’s opera offers a ‘unity of pluralities’.²⁷ My own 1995 gloss on Kemp’s conclusion was to suggest that ‘as a post-romantic modernist, Tippett is led to problematize the synthesis of old and new’, seeking out ‘the deep relationship between all the dualities’ and making musical drama out of a search whose successful conclusion cannot be taken for granted.²⁸

A specific and very basic technical factor supported this conclusion: ‘the role Tippett assigned to the perfect fifth in a post-tonal context is the strongest evidence we have of his refusal to let irony and ambiguity destroy all optimism, all dreams of Utopia’²⁹ – even when violence and death appear to sweep all before them, as in King Priam’s final stages. Focusing on the role of a particular ‘triadic’ formation – semitone plus perfect fourth (set-class [0,1,6]) – and its motivic, metaphoric significance in the opera, suggests an implicit contrast with those more directly tonal, fifth-based cadential triads central to Tippett’s earlier music: set-class [0,3,7] – the major or minor triad, as at the end of The Midsummer Marriage or (in a different formation) the Second Symphony; and set-class [0,2,7] – the major second plus perfect fourth – that ended the First String Quartet.³⁰ It was polarities acknowledged yet questioned – challenged, rather than wholeheartedly embraced and underlined – that remained the core quality of Tippett’s gradual retreat from the possible extreme that the starkly dissonant, fractured conclusion of Priam and its satellite successor, the Piano Sonata No. 2 (1962), represented.

The centre under threat: after King Priam

In his later years Tippett admitted to being ‘unsettled’ by the presence of what he termed ‘solid cadences’ in ‘one or two’ of his ‘earlier pieces’.³¹ Nevertheless, the extremes of ‘unsolidity’ to be found in the dissolving endings of King Priam and the Piano Sonata No. 2 were even more unsettling, confirming his wariness that such musical metaphors for unsparing and unrelieved tragedy might constrain, or even lame, the expressive contours of music which sought to acknowledge the realities of a modernist cultural position while not completely abandoning the more affirmative elements endemic to classicism. As early as the sonata’s immediate successor, the Concerto for Orchestra (1962–3), his chosen conclusion, while avoiding any hint of higher consonance, seems to involve stopping in the middle of the rediscovery of rhythmically regular melodic counterpoint – a wholeheartedly traditional texture given fresh post-tonal perspectives, and expressively more Apollonian than Dionysian in its imposing gravity. If, here, ‘a romantic’s aspiration to the ideal’ is tempered, held at bay, the polar opposite – ‘a more sceptical realism’ – seems also to be in question. And even if the abrupt termination of the concerto’s mosaic design was as much to do with a looming performance deadline as with deep aesthetic pondering, it seems to have reinforced the creative self-confidence that, over the next decade or so, would see Tippett’s most ambitious and controversial solutions to the paradox of polarities that demanded to be connected even as their contrasts were most starkly delineated.

The Vision of Saint Augustine, following hard on the heels of the Concerto for Orchestra, might almost have been conceived as a direct response to the utterly dark moment of vision that Priam describes just before his death – a vision whose mysterious exaltedness has little of Utopian euphoria about it. But in The Vision of Saint Augustine the prophetic human voice – in awe of inaccessible transcendence, and glorying in nature rather than worshipping the image of some all-powerful divinity – links the post-tonal jubilation and awe-struck speech at the end of the work with the ‘floating’ final vision of Boyhood’s End – something whose triadic purity, Purcellian ornateness and ecstatic sensuality, coming so soon after the more brittle rhetoric of A Child of Our Time, seems perilously close to aesthetic escapism, fantasy divorced from rather than polarized against reality.

Twenty years after Boyhood’s End, jubilation was even more uninhibited, but reconciliation much harder to achieve. As David Clarke’s extended and complex analysis of The Vision of Saint Augustine argues, ‘the work in which he most relentlessly pursues the transcendental is also his most uncompromisingly modernist statement’, ‘the resistance of each section to synthesis’ being ‘a measure of the extent to which it offers itself to the transcendental’.³² In aligning modernism with the transcendent in this way, Tippett for once foregoes the more far-reaching polarities to which his usual texts, dramatic themes and compositional priorities accustomed him. Augustine’s visionary voice, even though alternating between the singular solo baritone and the collective choir, has a monolithic insistence that fixes it in its own time and yet distances it from those adumbrations of the twentieth century’s real world to which Tippett would return in his next pair of major works, the opera The Knot Garden (1966–9) and the Symphony No. 3 (1970–2).

Here the prophetic voice becomes more sharply delineated as Dionysian idealism resisting the kind of Apollonian sobriety heard at the end of the Concerto for Orchestra. The challenge, it might be thought, was to find a Dionysian rhetoric that did not float away into the clouds of Utopian fantasy, as idealism pure and simple, unchallenged and unrealistic. In The Knot Garden the freedom fighter Denise’s resistance to idyll, in a powerfully austere account of torture, sets up the kind of psychological nexus for the drama which Tippett would soon encapsulate in what he thought of as the Third Symphony’s confrontation between the diametrically opposed human attitudes of aggressiveness and sympathy – violence and compassion. In relation to the symphony, Tippett wrote eloquently of polarities as ‘fundamental to my temperament’: ‘I was living in the twentieth century, which had seen two world wars, numerous revolutions, the concentration camps, the Siberian camps, Hiroshima, Vietnam, and much else’, and this meant that ‘affirmation had to be balanced by irony . . . And at the very end, I wanted to preserve the underlying polarities, concentrating all the violence into strong, sharp, rather acid wind chords, but matching them with string chords, representing some kind of compassionate answer from behind.’³³

Tippett’s resolutely non-technical language here has opened up a fathomless space in which commentator after commentator has attempted to specify exactly how ‘the underlying polarities’ result in particular pitches in particular registers. The first three ‘violent’ chords, alternating with the first three ‘compassionate’ chords, seem determined to suspend any clear-cut tonal character or direction, although each of them in different ways – and often because of the ‘perfect fifth with other intervals’ aspect of their construction – can be shown to anticipate the content of the decisive final pair (Ex. 1.4). Whether Tippett’s choice of C major and A major triads for the lowest pitches of these closing sonorities was a conscious allusion to the rich romantic tradition of third-related harmonic structures, to the idealistic yet uncertain juxtaposition of C major and A major at the end of The Midsummer Marriage (Ex. 1.5), or to these tonalities as standing for his First (A major) and Second (C major) Symphonies at the end of his Third can never be known; nor can we determine whether he saw the climactic, cadential fusion of the two in his late Yeats scena Byzantium (1989–90) (Ex. 1.6) as a decisively ambivalent image of the numinous for the modern(ist) age. Where the Third Symphony is concerned, the evolution of theoretical thinking over the past half-century might favour the argument that the suspension rather than elimination of these two tonalities stands as a metaphor for the conjunction of conflicting human attitudes – the violent and the compassionate – that Tippett’s own sense of the music’s most fundamental polarity provides. Whatever explanation is preferred, the evidence of the music Tippett composed after the Third Symphony is that the polarized imagery that stimulated his creative imagination – shadow and light, violence and compassion, scepticism and idealism, the humanly real and the transcendentally ideal – continued to lead him to dramatic themes, musical ideas and cadential conclusions that explored comparable elements and evoked comparable states of mind.

Ex. 1.4 Symphony No. 3, Part II, ending

Ex. 1.5 The Midsummer Marriage, Act 3, ending

Ex. 1.6 Byzantium, ending

Towards an ending: integrity and irony

Tippett’s poet-prophets would continue to embody the essence of that doubting visionary, represented most poignantly in his texts for the Third Symphony, who senses ‘a huge compassionate power to heal, to love’,³⁴ and who is prevented from succumbing to sentimental self-indulgence by the abrasive environment in which she is obliged to function. Such issues also help to define the role of the exiled writer Lev in The Ice Break (1973–6), who achieves a fragile yet hopeful reconciliation with his son after the death of his wife, and also of the trainee children’s doctor Jo Ann in New Year (1986–8), whose experience of love leaves her feeling able to face a dangerous and probably hostile urban world for the first time.

The mix of fantasy and realism, the transcendental and the earthly, in both these operas might not have worn particularly well, if only because of the continued prominence of comparable dramatic themes in contemporary fiction and cinema. But Tippett made a still more ambitious foray into the mythologizing dramatization of the human condition in his third large-scale choral and orchestral composition, The Mask of Time (1980–2). The struggle in this turbulently energetic score to balance positive and negative, human and inhuman, compassion and violence, has been well summarized by David Clarke, writing of how ‘the sublimity of the final moments . . . asserts a transcendent humanity over negative experience through a partial assimilation of it . . . Here the sublime is used in a spirit that is essentially modernist, pointing forward to the possibility of a different order, and suggesting that for Tippett images of the visionary signify not escape into a different world, but a challenge to the existing one.’³⁵ In 2002 I aligned this with Ian Kemp’s no-less-penetrating comments about Tippett’s personal brand of expressionism, which

Together, these assessments convey much of what makes Tippett’s way with twentieth-century – and other – polarities difficult to pin down yet impossible to escape. He seems consistently to be seeking to celebrate something timeless, archetypal, and to combine it with something elusive, even ephemeral. At one extreme, the archetypal musical states of singing and dancing provide the perfectly balanced complementation from which a satisfying classical synthesis can be forged. At the other extreme, challenges to such idealized integration are shown to be the more effective as their disruptive, dissonant identities ironically absorb fundamentals from those very factors to which they are most productively hostile. Nowhere are these diverse balances shown to more powerful effect than in the last work in which Tippett alluded to his beloved A-centred harmony, the Fifth String Quartet (1990–1), the ending of which – quite unlike that of Tippett’s actual swansong, The Rose Lake (1991–3), which relishes making something downbeat and understated of something that is nevertheless decisively conclusive – discovers the ‘rich’ unanimity of this fifth-based higher consonance with a freshness that belies its deep roots in the composer’s past (Ex. 1.7).

Ex. 1.7 String Quartet No. 5, second movement, ending

In 1998 I interpreted this ending in terms of ‘the pervasive tensions and ambiguities of an idiom which has abandoned extended tonality for a harmonic world which is altogether more mobile, but in which there is still a polyphonic equality of line and a “classicising” use of repetition, imitation and sequence as the principal tools in the search for a sufficient closural stability . . . In late Tippett intensification does not secure a trouble-free stability. A sense of strain, doubt and openness remains, even though the prevailing mood is one of hope.’³⁷

That element of ‘even though’ ambivalence is no less apparent in those later Tippett endings which require a sudden, unresolving shutting off of sound, as with The Mask of Time and New Year, where the upbeat but possibly over-optimistic tone of the Presenter’s final message – ‘one humanity, one justice’ – does not prompt an unambiguously affirmative musical coda. Rather, as I concluded in 1990 after seeing New Year’s British premiere:

The archetypal blues

Having chosen a particular title, courtesy of Noel Coward, for his autobiography, Tippett brought its generic allusion to the surface in a final section headed ‘Singing the Blues’, in which he attributed two vital topics to LeRoi Jones’s book Blues People: Negro Music in White America:³⁹ firstly, ‘the blues is the most fundamental musical form of our time’; and secondly, ‘when you sing the blues, you do so not just because you are “blue”, but to relieve the blue emotions. When I heard Noel Coward sing, “Those twentieth-century blues are getting me down” he sang because the blues were doing exactly that and the singing of them is his means of discharging their effect: simultaneous involvement and detachment, in other words – which is how artefacts are made.’⁴⁰

Tippett was quite clear that his own objective was never simply to reproduce or imitate the jazz and popular derivatives of the blues: for him it was an ‘archetype’, reinforcing in a special, twentieth-century way the possibility that artefacts (like successful psychoanalysis) can purge the negative emotions of despair – along with the fear that comes from lack of self-awareness. Perhaps it is best to interpret his hyperbolic assertion that ‘the blues is the most fundamental musical form of our time’ as a declaration of his belief that it was the ‘musical form’ best suited to this therapeutic role – and certainly better suited than ‘Schoenberg’s twelve-note method’, with which he compares it, thereby failing to distinguish ‘method’ from ‘form’, or indeed to consider whether these two musical archetypes might not be complementary in their capacity for presenting extended tonal statements of great expressive intensity.

Tippett’s mindset in this autobiography reveals the persistence of his neo-romantic commitment to idealization, his need to be upbeat (however sceptically or insecurely), in ways which contrast notably with the capacity of more outright modernists like Carter and Boulez to avoid pessimistic despair without going beyond that into suggesting that music can actually purge pessimism and despair in a great, consolatory outpouring of ‘relieving’ emotional discharge. Tippett in this respect contrasts even more fundamentally with the thoroughgoing English late-modernism of a Harrison Birtwistle, for whom the purpose of music is to inspire, and therefore also to console, by the aesthetic, expressive strength and power with which it represents its own stark resistance to consolatory rhetoric. It is therefore no surprise that, to the end, Tippett would speak of ‘fusion’ as much as of ‘polarity’. In what Clarke defined as that ‘dialogue between a romantic’s aspiration to the ideal and absolute, and a modernist’s sceptical realism’, Tippett’s instinct was, by and large, to move the latter into the field of the former. In this way, his personal angle on twentieth-century polarities was unfailingly rich, challenging and memorable. As was said – presciently – of Sibelius in the 1960s: his time will surely come again.

I

Let us first start with a dictionary’s definitions of ‘tradition’:

1. 1:

   1. a): an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom)

   2. b): a belief or story or a body of stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable

2. 2: the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction

3. 3: cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions

4. 4: characteristic manner, method, or style <in the best liberal tradition>.¹

All four of these are relevant to musical tradition, which is a complex business with different types and sub-branches continually interacting. To take a relatively straightforward example: traditions of compositional practice normally arise reciprocally with traditions of performance, but while notations of the pitches and rhythms in the music of, say, Bach have remained more or less fixed (subject to generations of editorial interventions, which of course have their own traditions), ways of performing have changed markedly, leading in Bach’s case to a romantic style of performance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (enshrined in the latter part of this period in recordings, but also in phrase and dynamic markings in many editions of his scores). In the second half of the twentieth century a burgeoning number of performers reacted against this romantic manner by making what they believed to be a reconnection with the lost performing tradition. But as Richard Taruskin has persuasively argued, this was subject no less to the (essentially modernist) ideology of the reconnectionists’ own time.² The later volumes of Taruskin’s largest project, The Oxford History of Western Music,³ and more of his writings besides, are much concerned with the interrogation of assumed notions of tradition, and in particular the hegemonic value placed upon the Austro-German tradition and the distortions of Hegelian and neo-Hegelian historiography that sustain it.⁴ The constructedness of tradition is also emphasized by the historian Eric Hobsbawm through his notion of the ‘invented tradition’, which ‘is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.’⁵ As we shall see, establishing continuity with ‘a suitable historic past’ was of some concern to the generations of English composers born in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Clearly, this chapter needs to try to identify whose ‘English tradition’ we are talking about, as well as interpreting what it consists of.

We might start by asking: what can be determined of Tippett’s notion of ‘tradition’ and, in particular, the ‘English tradition’? The word ‘tradition’ occurs a few times in his published writings and letters, though it has to be said that the composer does not always express himself with the greatest clarity, and a fair amount of speculation has to be employed in order to determine both localized meanings and what his overall view of tradition might be. One of the earliest occurrences of the word is in a letter to Francesca Allinson of March 1942. Tippett is initially concerned with some criticisms of his Fantasia on a Theme of Handel (1939–41), but he soon turns to tradition, suggesting this was very much on his mind when he was composing what might be called his breakthrough work, A Child of Our Time (1939–41), which is exactly contemporary with the Fantasia:

What exactly does he mean by ‘English ancestry’ and ‘Continental’ approaches? The former almost certainly refers to Purcell and the earlier generations of composers including Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Morley, whose music he had been exploring since the early 1930s with the various choirs he conducted: in a letter to Alan Bush dated 6 February 1940 (two years earlier than the letter to Allinson) he states that ‘The recitative [in A Child of Our Time] in principle goes back to Lawes and Purcell.’⁷ Tippett began to explore his responses to Purcell in various BBC radio talks and programme notes during the 1940s and early 1950s, and I will discuss these further below.⁸ This is not to say, though, that the influence of more recent English composers is insignificant (as we shall see presently). And the English tradition was not the only one in play: in the same letter to Bush Tippett writes that ‘The question of assimilation of the “classical” tradition is the point I’ve just got to, having lived out the jejune romanticism of my adolescence.’⁹ This might suggest some kind of engagement with neoclassicism, which might be partly what he means by a ‘Continental’ feeling: he goes on to refer to A Child of Our Time as ‘Almost a resuscitation of a traditional form. There are choruses, arias, recitative (!) and chorale. It is only the content and one or two more subtle means of expression which are modern.’¹⁰ The oratorio genre, though, suggests more strongly an engagement with the English tradition that starts with Handel (who could be said to have been adopted by the English) and is then sustained by Mendelssohn and numerous minor composers (with performances at provincial festivals) through to Elgar and Walton (in the form of Belshazzar’s Feast (1930–1)). With Handel incorporating various aspects of Purcell’s style himself,¹¹ the oratorio tradition could almost be seen as a thread of continuity from Purcell to Tippett. The point is, though, that Tippett sees a break in the tradition, such that it has to be ‘resuscitated’. Writing to Robert Ponsonby on 28 July 1972 about his (Tippett’s) ideas about British music, having declined to collaborate with Ponsonby on the 1974 Proms season (Ponsonby had just been appointed Director of the Proms), he says:

The existence of the oratorio tradition and recent research into music in nineteenth-century Britain give the lie to this gap.¹³ What Tippett seems to have been latching onto, along with most composers, performers, historians and listeners (including the Germans who viewed Britain, famously, as Das Land ohne Musik), was the lack of composers of the front rank.

One of the most interesting of Tippett’s comments about tradition is to be found in another letter roughly contemporaneous with A Child of Our Time (actually written two years later, on 7 February 1943). This time the recipient is William Glock, and the subject is the promotion of ‘the moderns’:

Key in this is the notion of what Tippett calls ‘the true tradition’, the ‘whole mass of stuff’ which is constantly (if only ‘ever so little’) given new perspective by subsequent generations of composers. This reflects some comments made by T. S. Eliot (a significant influence on Tippett¹⁵) about tradition in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ published in 1919, which Tippett quotes in his article ‘Schoenberg’, first published in 1965, though it seems likely that he had come across it many years earlier: ‘The existing monuments [of art] form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new, the really new work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives. For order to persist out of the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.’¹⁶ Glossing this, Tippett writes:

If all this suggests that, for Tippett, a sense of tradition provided the means of ensuring coherence and meaningfulness in the face of the profusion of allusions which are part and parcel of his compositional approach from A Child of Our Time onwards, the evidence of his scores is that tradition was at least as importantly a straightforward matter of resource.

II

Rarely in the Tippett literature is the influence of English composers immediately after the ‘gap’ – the composers of the so-called English Musical Renaissance – regarded as being of much importance. Meirion Bowen’s assertion is typical of many commentators:

But as David Clarke has shown in an essay on the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938–9), Tippett’s relationship with his national environment was not so straightforward. Clarke’s view is that while ‘Tippett seemed to have projected onto [Vaughan Williams and Holst] the different aspects of a personal ambivalence towards Englishness and English music’, the composer’s ‘stance towards these various aspects of English musical culture was in fact far from one of rejection. We might surmise that his reservations were directed less to the actual sound the music made, so to speak, than to its perceived technical limitations and ideological connotations.’¹⁹ In this regard, he took a rather softer approach than his contemporary, Benjamin Britten, whose judgements were much more severe.²⁰

Tippett’s attitude to one of the best-known proclivities of the previous generation, the use of folksong, was also not simply one of rejection, as evidenced by the incorporation of instances of it into the Concerto for Double String Orchestra and the derivation of much of the work’s thematic material from folk-like shapes.²¹ He seems to have had some sort of role in Francesca Allinson’s researches, written up in an unpublished monograph entitled The Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes, which represent a ‘challenge to [Cecil] Sharp’s beliefs (and the whole nationalist edifice built on it) that these songs represented pure, quintessential Englishness’.²² But as Clarke points out:

As for any influence of the first wave of the English Musical Renaissance, we have seen that Tippett himself sees the Concerto for Double String Orchestra as springing partly from ‘a special English tradition – that of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro and Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis’.²⁴ But the possibility of Elgar and Parry playing even a minor role in the composer’s development has hardly been entertained. And when these composers are mentioned in the literature, it is usually with a negative tone. Thus Kemp sees the influence of Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens in Tippett’s unpublished A Song of Liberty (1937) as detrimental,²⁵ and is at best equivocal about the small number of indebtednesses to Elgar he identifies – in, for example, the slow movement of the String Quartet No. 1 (1934–5, rev. 1943) (‘The G [major] in the second section . . . creates a fresh, open sound (albeit unpleasantly suggestive of Elgar . . .’²⁶)) and the beginning of the Scena for solo quartet (No. 15) in A Child of Our Time (‘. . . it is difficult to see precisely what Tippett intended here [No. 15] by conjuring up the spirit of the Enigma Variations, unless it was simply that Elgar’s theme crystallizes a universal mood of valedictory sorrow’²⁷). Yet certain practices that can be identified as originating in nineteenth-century English church music and culminating in Parry and Elgar are still important elements in the stylistic mix of the music through which Tippett first achieved recognition, as Peter Evans suggests in his passing observation that those passages exhibiting ‘traditional harmony’ in the Concerto for Double String Orchestra are ‘very English in [their] ardent appoggiaturas – see the finale’s second subject’.²⁸

Although chromaticism is not eschewed, the opening of A Child of Our Time is characterized by the abundance of ‘“clean” diatonic dissonance’ that was one of the principal means of expression in the work of composers from S. S. Wesley to Parry and beyond:²⁹ see, for example, the appoggiatura in bar 6 (F♯–G), the 4–3 suspension in bar 8, and in particular the 9–8 suspensions over minor-seventh chords in the sequence in Fig. 1:1–2 (see Ex. 2.1). Meanwhile, the more chromatic opening bars display the obliquity that Evans has identified as a Parry trait:³⁰ the E minor triad that begins the work is a prime candidate for tonic (the opening paragraph ends on V of E at Fig. 1:7 and the music begins again on the same E triad, while the chorus’s initial entries are all over a V pedal in E), but this status is immediately fudged by the bass C♯; and while the subsequent movement to the putative dominant in bar 2 (via C♮) is conventional enough, the D above that resolves the suspended E is the flattened leading note. The opening is in fact a descending series of seventh chords ending on ii⁷. The movement on to the E-based chord in bar 6 almost confirms E as tonic, but the C above the bass, which displaces B, sustains the obliquity. To be sure, the obliquity is mild, for the tonic is not seriously in doubt; indeed, it is its very undemonstrativeness that points to the source. The beginning of the penultimate number, General Ensemble (No. 29) – the most expansive music in the work – also has its origins in Parry, again through the yearning appoggiaturas in a context that remains diatonic, at least for the tenor’s opening statement.

Ex. 2.1 A Child of Our Time, opening

The rather less restrained late romanticism of Elgar is, perhaps inevitably, less apparent. As noted above, Kemp finds a section of the central slow movement of Tippett’s String Quartet No. 1 ‘unpleasantly suggestive of Elgar’, though he does not actually say what is unpleasant about it. It seems to me that more than just this bit of the movement (which, from his comments, I take to be Fig. 23:1–3) has links with Elgar: Ex. 2.2 reproduces the beginning of the movement alongside the beginning of the slow movement of Elgar’s Symphony No. 1, which is scored for strings with telling reinforcement of the inner voices and melodic peak from the wind. I would not claim it was a conscious model – to my knowledge there is no evidence of this, and clearly much of the harmonic structuring is very different – but what Kemp describes as ‘that long soaring melodic line characteristic of so much of Tippett’s music’ (he sees this as the first example of it)³¹ has a clear precedent in Elgar (where it is born of Wagner’s endless melody), as does the diatonic dissonance that is again prominent.

Ex. 2.2 (a) String Quartet No. 1, second movement, opening bar to Fig. 23:3; (b) Elgar, Symphony No. 1 in A♭, third movement, opening

Closer to Elgar stylistically is the central section of Madame Sosostris’s aria in The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52; Act 3, Scene 5, from Fig. 380), the beginning of which is reproduced in Ex. 2.3 (a).³² Once again, the expressive burden falls on diatonic appoggiaturas, at the beginning of bars. Also finding a parallel in Elgar is the harmonic parenthesis from Fig. 381 (a flatwards deflection via triads of G and F before folding back through V⁷ of E at Fig. 381:8 – though it is linear movement, particularly in the outer parts, rather than functional progression, that is the principal agent here); compare this with Ex. 2.3 (b), the beginning of the ‘big tune’ in the final section of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius (from Fig. 126), which has a similar kind of deflection. There are also melodic figures in common between these examples (compare Fig. 380:3, last beat in the Tippett with 126:3, first beat in the Elgar), and the tempo indications are similar (Andante espressivo and Andante tranquillo; the metronome markings are exactly the same). But it is the expressive mien born of the particular use of diatonicism that is the clearest link. There is little else in Sosostris’s aria (which is very wide-ranging stylistically), or indeed in the opera as a whole, that could be said to be so clearly of English Musical Renaissance provenance: the first part of the aria (from Fig. 367 to Fig. 380) seems, for example, to point more to one of Elgar’s main sources, Wagner.³³

Ex. 2.3 (a) The Midsummer Marriage, Act 3, Scene 5, Figs. 380–382:4

Ex. 2.3 (b) Elgar, Dream of Gerontius, Part II, Figs. 126–127:4 (choral parts of first two bars omitted)

The main substance of the aria is Sosostris’s presentation of her visionary credentials – or, as Kemp puts it, ‘a classic account of the creative process, laid out in four sections, each describing a particular stage’.³⁴ The ‘Elgarian’ section introduces relative calm and luminosity after the darkened, angst-ridden descriptions of her condition in previous sections: the voice-part is cantabile, with none of the tortured intervals that have characterized much of her music thus far; the phrasing is regular (the initial statement is 4 + 4); and the harmonic rhythm is also regular and relatively conventional (Arnold Whittall sees here ‘a more orthodox extension of a tonic triad’³⁵). Kemp’s interpretation, continuing from the point where the previous quotation leaves off, identifies Sosostris with the composer and is worth quoting at length:

Ex. 2.3 (a) does indeed come across as lucid and serene. It is actually the shortest of the four sections Kemp identifies, but achieves far more ‘presence’ than this might suggest. I have already mentioned some of the features that promote this. Possibly the most important, though, is the use of a conventional V⁷ to stabilize the key at the beginning and again just before the varied repeat at Fig. 381:8. When the opening paragraph is repeated (transposed, and considerably varied after the initial chromaticism), the harmonic parenthesis is not, this time, closed: Kemp’s serenity is interrupted by a drastic change of tone – literally, since Sosostris is instructed to sing ‘in an altered voice’, accompanied by more astringent harmony. It is certainly the case that the music is far from ‘fashionable conceptions of “contemporary” music’, though clearly I disagree with Kemp that this particular passage is as ‘original in voice’ as he asserts. It is, though, a testament to Tippett’s skill that the section is integrated so smoothly into the heterogeneous mix of styles.

The final section of the aria, from Fig. 387, introduces another kind of music again that presents a different ‘take’ on pastoralism from that of Vaughan Williams and Holst. Sosostris’s vision is a pastoral idyll (actually marked by Tippett ‘tranquilmente à la pastorale’) that gradually becomes disturbed. The voice parts (Sosostris describing what she sees, with interjections from King Fisher) are essentially arioso, over a texture consisting of ‘a fabric of short ostinati, interrelated but of varying lengths, which combine into sound patterns at once the same and always different – a marvellously apt symbol of the infinite, timeless nature of Sosostris’s vision’.³⁷ As Kemp observes, there are parallels here with Stravinsky’s layered ostinati and with medieval isorhythm. There is no hint of the folksong generally associated with English pastoralism, though the modal usage (which in Vaughan Williams’s and Holst’s cases is prompted by folksong) has similarities. A broad modal field is set up in which emphasizes shift: thus A♭ is the referential pitch for Sosostris at the outset, whilst F is for the orchestra, though at Figs. 388 and 389 the orchestra supports King Fisher’s interjections with an A♭ triad in the bass ‘layer’; then from Fig. 389:3, without any change to the ‘collection’ in play apart from a brief chromatic A♮, the voice shifts allegiance to B♭; and so on.

The highest stratum of the ostinato texture (the scalic descent from B♭ to F, paralleled at a fourth below) is derived from the music that presages the Ancients’ appearance in Act 1, Scene 1 at Fig. 14. Thus the original association between pastoralism and Ancient Greek culture is evoked, for, as a note at the beginning of the score of The Midsummer Marriage instructs, ‘the costumes are of the present day, except for those of the Ancients and Dancers, which are old Greek’. The note draws further attention to the opera’s pastoral setting and its use of classical symbols:

Pastoralism and classicism are central to the seventeenth-century English genre of the masque. The influence of Renaissance and early baroque music on Tippett is more obvious to the listener than the influence of the immediately preceding generations both in this opera and in his output in general (it is more extensive, and has a particularly strong rhythmic impact). Not surprisingly, it has been discussed at much greater length in the Tippett literature.³⁹ During gestation The Midsummer Marriage was referred to by Tippett as ‘the masque’,⁴⁰ so it is not surprising that Renaissance elements – particularly those associated with dance – are often to the fore. ‘Dance’ is evident almost at once, in the madrigalian sprung rhythms in the sixteenth bar (Fig. 1:2) of the work. It is most apparent when the mise-en-scène is at its most pastoral (though not so much in the best-known embodiment of the pastoral, the Ritual Dances, which were subsequently extracted as a concert work) – for example, in the ‘post-scene’ at the conclusion of Act 2 where the off-stage chorus (who are ‘heard singing as they pass behind the hill’) present what is essentially a madrigal in praise of the midsummer sun; and then at the beginning of Act 3 when (again, initially off-stage) the chorus follows the orchestra’s lead in music that, as Evans writes of one of the first works to develop Renaissance rhythmic attitudes, ‘discovers an entirely original buoyancy, a sensation that many bars pass in which one’s feet do not touch the ground’.⁴¹

The madrigalian influence is generally so clear that there is no need to list examples. What is of greater interest than individual instances per se is that Tippett’s approach to English Renaissance music as source material was at least to a certain extent via Purcell. As Clarke states, Purcell was ‘a further formative figure, whose music Tippett had explored with the choir of Morley College and would subsequently edit in collaboration with Walter Bergmann’.⁴² Thus Tippett continued the ‘Purcell tradition’ begun by Holst when he taught at Morley,⁴³ and recreates what Kemp calls the ‘Purcellian syndrome’, ‘[taking] over a tradition and develop[ing] it’ and integrating the best of the native traditions and ‘new styles and techniques from abroad’, especially jazz and ‘the new classicism’.⁴⁴ The Purcellian syndrome is apparent in Tippett’s essay on the composer, in which he discusses ‘harmonic polyphony’:

What he writes next provides a link from Purcell to Elgar via the Wagnerian concept of ‘endless melody’:

One can observe this effect in Purcell simply by turning to the Overture to Dido and Aeneas: the first point of rest is the cadence on the B♭ triad at the beginning of bar 6, but it is relatively weak (first inversion V–I) and on the flattened leading note (extraordinarily distant from the tonic key of C minor), so that ‘rest’ is illusory: there is no proper resolution until the break into the fast section.

Before the part of his Purcell essay just quoted, Tippett gives an example of the way in which the composer acts as a ‘resource’ beyond being a straightforward stylistic model:

There is indeed little which seems directly Purcellian in the setting of the phrase that Tippett mentions, which is in the tenor aria that forms No. 6. And the orchestral introduction, the beginning of which is reproduced in Ex. 2.4, is not, on the surface, particularly Purcellian either: thus the syncopations are a pre-echo of the tango of the aria rather than a redeployment of Renaissance dance rhythms. However, the means by which Tippett makes sure his music is ‘never quite resolved and still’ is very much the result of the ‘intense polyphony’ to which he was drawing attention. Of particular importance are the constant modal variations (for example in the viola in bars 1 and 2) and the dissonances on the main beats (see particularly bars 8–10), or at the very least the use of consonant chords in unstable positions (for example at Fig. 42:3–4). The only root-position consonances occur in bar 5 – a peak that is obviously the beginning of a descent rather than a finishing point – and Fig. 42:6, the end-point of diminuendo. The latter is preceded by a perfect cadence (actually, an English cadence, with the flattened seventh degree (B♭) followed by the sharpened seventh degree (B♮) at Fig. 42:5),⁴⁸ but in its weakest position (second inversion V).

Ex. 2.4 A Child of Our Time, No. 6, tenor solo, ‘I have no money for my bread’, orchestral introduction, opening

III

Perhaps the most interesting of Tippett’s comments on Purcell, however, are those concerning the 1692 Ode to St Cecilia (Hail, Bright Cecilia):

What he perceives here is close to the mosaic form that emerges with such dramatic forcefulness in King Priam (1958–61). In that work and many others that followed, Tippett maximizes the block-like nature of the music by emphasizing the non-connectedness between the different materials – in particular, he ensures that the blocks are non-concluding, eschewing any sense of transition. It can be demonstrated, though, that the block-like approach to the overall architecture of a work is of the essence from the first music that Tippett thought worthy of publication: Peter Evans identifies what he terms ‘Tippett’s block transfer methods’ in the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938–9) and Piano Concerto (1953–5), resulting from the composer’s ‘tendency to shape the second half of a piece by juxtaposing literal or transposed paragraphs from the first’.⁵⁰ Perhaps listeners and critics have been overly swayed by Tippett’s statement about the importance of Beethoven to him to listen and look for a Beethovenian attitude towards form. Whereas it could be said that Beethoven’s music is all about form, and that his material serves his forms entirely, Tippett’s approach is more pre-classical, in the sense of being looser, less organically oriented – the order of events, timing, and so on is important, but there is a sense in which form is a vessel for, or conveyor of, material, rather than the other way around.

It can be argued that the most significant influence of early English music is to be found in the notion of ‘fantasy’, the English version of ‘Fantasia’ (other English variant names include ‘Fancy’ or ‘Fancie’ and, in the case of Purcell’s viol works, ‘Fantazia’). Christopher D. S. Field defines ‘Fantasia’ as:

The entry goes on to note a variety of approaches in works for lute, keyboard, and viols in Dowland, Ferrabosco, Byrd and Gibbons, amongst others. Thomas Morley’s description of what he called ‘fantasie’ in his A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke emphasizes the freedom offered to the composer:

The flexibility to invoke elements of the strict but reserve the right to change direction and do whatever your ‘fancy’ pleases might stand as the central characteristic of Tippett’s attitude to composition. Clarke encapsulates this in his observation of the language of the composer’s later music:

The slow movement of Symphony No. 2 (1956–7), composed halfway between the lyrically abundant The Midsummer Marriage and the severely mosaic-based King Priam, is a particularly good example of Tippett in fantasy mode. In this he adopts a block-like form (see Table 2.1 below) that is not too dissimilar from his description of Purcell’s Ode to St Cecilia quoted above. Section A and the beginning of B are reproduced in Ex. 2.5. Section A is a good example of the compositional manner Tippett sustained throughout his career. There are two planes: the trumpet melody coloured by fragmentary doublings on flute and clarinet, and arabesques in the harp and piano. The trumpet melody traces an ascent from D♭ to G via D♮, E♭ and F, with various leaps away from and back to these notes. I am not suggesting that the notes I have named have any hierarchical superiority over the others, but that, in forming the most obvious pattern (of stepwise ascent), they are the means by which the ear is most likely to organize the passage.⁵⁴ The melody begins in a sketchily-defined flat tonal area (D♭ itself, perhaps), though A♮ and D♮ are introduced later, suggesting a move sharpwards. The precise tonal area is not, though, I would suggest, of much significance, in that it seems to have no broader structural function. Neither is there any sense of progression from D♭-as-reference to G-as-reference: G is not so much a goal as simply the next step away. The arabesques also sketch out, rather than clearly define, a tonal area – generally the same broad area in each instrument, but usually at a tangent with the trumpet. Possibly it is the apparently decorative profusion of the arabesques that most suggests fantasy here, but the trumpet line too may be so considered in its variation and extension of the first phrase for no apparent purpose other than the desires of the moment. The inorganic nature of the mosaic form throws emphasis onto the local action. Events within the blocks are liberated from the creation of form, allowing a degree of freedom not generally accorded ‘in any other musicke’. Rather, form is determined by the ‘external’ ordering of the blocks. This in itself might be said to be fantasy in spirit. Even the transposition of material (in, for example, sections A¹ and B¹) is ‘wresteth and turneth [. . .] as he list’, rather than to fulfil a part in an overall design. Only in the final section, which is labelled E in Table 2.1, does form-shaping genuinely take place: beginning with material from section C, it proceeds by intercutting fragments from A and D with a new element on the horns, first heard at Fig. 83:5, that subsequently flowers in the coda. The extent to which the ending truly ‘resolves tonal tensions’⁵⁵ might be debated; but this material does have a specific formal function: of effecting, through its static rotations, a sense of closure.

Ex. 2.5 Symphony No. 2, second movement, opening

Table 2.1 Symphony No. 2, second movement, formal outline

Bowen sees the two works written immediately after King Priam, the Piano Sonata No. 2 (1962) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1962–3) – both of which make even greater play of the mosaic approach than the opera – as further elevating the role of fantasy in Tippett’s compositional approach: ‘The fantasy procedures of Purcell and Gibbons are given a new lease of life. Tippett’s musical thought flows uninhibitedly within a more concentrated, tightly organized format.’⁵⁶ It would appear that the greater (or the more severe) the apparently ‘external’ determination of the overall pattern of the music, the greater the scope for ‘internal’ freedom within the sections. It might be doubted, however, whether the succession of blocks is likely to resolve into a higher synthesis along the lines of the locus classicus of mosaic form, Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments:⁵⁷ while various commentators have argued the case for specific formal processes (Kemp, for instance, identifies a number of movements and transitions, while Iain Stannard sees ‘evidence of a proportional scheme’⁵⁸), I would suggest that the only sections that genuinely have a sense of acting to shape the form are those that start and finish the work – the opening fanfare and its one-and-only return at the beginning of the final section (bar 301), which employs an intercutting process similar to section E of the slow movement of Symphony No. 2 (see Table 2.1 above). Otherwise, the switches from one kind of material to another resist form-making, leaving the listener (who will recognize returns and some of the variations, extensions and contractions, but probably not make much long-term significance out of them) to focus on the (impressively diverse) invention.

IV

Tippett’s career continued for thirty years after the Concerto for Orchestra was completed, his last major work being The Rose Lake (1991–3). The form of this, like in most of his works after King Priam, is again mosaic in nature, which has the effect of drawing attention to the return, in the five Lake Song episodes, of the long-breathed lyricism of his earlier output (a feature that was also apparent in the Triple Concerto of 1978–9). In a programme note for the first recording of the The Rose Lake Tippett states: ‘the idea that took shape gradually [during gestation] was that some kind of lyric utterance would burgeon within the design, initially polarized against a sharper, more pungent element, but ultimately reached a climactic stage where song reigned supreme’.⁵⁹ An argument could be put forward that the central Lake Song episode, ‘The Lake is in full song’, represents the peak of Tippett’s engagement with fantasy. Thus while there is little stylistically that is likely to trigger a sense of Englishness (though some of the dance-like rhythms might do this as a memory of Tippett’s earlier madrigal-inspired work), and while there is much in the piece that is specifically non-English (the inspiration for it was a visit to Le Lac Rose in Senegal, and some of the sonorities and indeed techniques have their provenance in non-Western musics), the work may be said, at the broadest level of musical behaviour and topic (for the work is essentially pastoral), to have an underlying link with particular aspects of musical Englishness.

Whether one can conclude from this and my earlier discussions of other kinds of English influence that a fundamental Englishness, rather than a more general appeal to tradition, provides the anchor-point throughout Tippett’s output for what I referred to above as the profusion of allusions in his music, is not something that can be broached here. However, it is interesting that in the work that Tippett must have thought of as the summation of his artistic ideals, The Mask of Time (1980–2), it is the indigenous genre of the masque that provides the ‘force’ by which an extraordinarily ambitious array of ideas – seeking to encompass the totality of human experience since the dawn of time – is held together. It is not an especially strong force, however – one suspects that its very looseness (the lack of strong expectations of how things will be organized) is what appealed – so that, if the English provenance is not exactly disguised (just as the use of the word ‘Mask’ barely disguises the fact that it is a ‘Masque’), it certainly does not dominate. Indeed, it is difficult to say that any of the elements in Tippett’s stylistic amalgam – European modernism, Ivesian collage, jazz, popular music and the demotic in general – consistently holds sway. As is usually the case with composers with something original to say, the sources are subsumed by the composer being himself. But originality comes more into focus against a backdrop of contemporaries and traditions. In seeking to establish Tippett’s international stature, commentators have thus far tended to emphasize his links with modernism and the radical in general. However, in order to develop a more rounded view, Tippett’s relationship with the English traditions needs to be taken into account.

I

Tippett’s numerous autobiographical reflections repeatedly stress the limited nature of his early musical education. In his autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues, he wrote that ‘the one thing missing in my childhood home was music, or at least contact with professional music-making’,⁴ while elsewhere he claimed that in the ‘middle-class schools of England music was absolutely non-existent’.⁵ He took piano lessons as a child with various local teachers, but recalls that while he was passionately engaged with the pieces he studied, he had absolutely no awareness of their historical context. When he began his studies at the Royal College of Music (hereafter RCM) in 1923, Tippett was, in his own words, ‘an entire greenhorn’, who ‘didn’t know hardly one end of the piano from the other’.⁶

There is undoubtedly an element of exaggeration in these accounts,⁷ but there can also be little doubt that the young Tippett’s general musical knowledge was extremely limited. He recalls, for example, that he was unable to answer an RCM examination question on the importance of Orlando Gibbons, as he had never heard of him,⁸ even though interest in the music of Tudor and Elizabethan composers, including Gibbons, was at a peak in the mid-1920s. The tercentenary of the death of Gibbons was widely celebrated in 1925, with performances across England,⁹ and may well have stimulated the examination question. Tippett was acutely aware of his own ignorance, and set out to teach himself about the history of music ‘from the beginning’:

While still a student, in a bid to familiarize himself with English madrigals, and with traditions of setting English texts, Tippett enquired at the RCM about the possibility of conducting a small choir. Fortuitously, at this time the Oxted and Limpsfield Players (an amateur theatrical group in Surrey) had decided to form a ‘Musical Section’ and were looking for a conductor: Tippett filled the post from late 1924.¹¹ There are no records of the early activities of Tippett’s choir, but he recalled that he experimented with ‘the contrapuntal repertoire that I regarded as my main musical focus – Elizabethan madrigals in particular’, and Kemp reports that Tippett asked his choir to buy copies of Byrd’s Though Amaryllis Dance in Green.¹² In March 1927, Tippett’s choir and the Oxted and Limpsfield Players mounted a performance of the medieval mystery play Everyman and Vaughan Williams’s opera The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains. Tippett later wrote that:

The following year, the Players performed Tippett’s own version of the eighteenth-century ballad opera The Village Opera (1927–8), inspired by John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (first performed in 1728), which enjoyed an astonishingly successful revival in the early 1920s, running for 1,463 performances.¹⁴ This revival triggered a renewed interest in ballad opera, and Nellie Chaplin, who played harpsichord in the orchestra alongside her sisters Kate and Mabel on viola d’amore and viola da gamba, remarked that the ‘old instruments’ used in The Beggar’s Opera ‘aroused a great deal of interest and hundreds of people have spoken to us and asked to look at them’.¹⁵

Tippett’s Village Opera, which was based on a copy of the 1729 original by Charles Johnson that he found in the RCM library, included parts for piano and harpsichord. The harpsichord did not, however, act as a continuo,¹⁶ but served purely as an accompaniment instrument, usually alternating with the piano, but occasionally playing with it, to create an ‘olde world’ atmosphere.¹⁷

On 5 April 1930, the Oxted and Limpsfield Players presented a concert of Tippett’s own compositions.¹⁸ Disappointed with the negative critical response and sensing that he had failed to write anything of genuine worth, Tippett returned to the RCM to undertake further study with R. O. Morris. Morris is best known for his influential book Contrapuntal Technique of the Sixteenth Century,¹⁹ which, unusually for the time, placed a far greater emphasis on actual sixteenth-century practice than on the standard rules of counterpoint, and included a chapter on the distinguishing characteristics of sixteenth-century English polyphony. His work with Morris appears to have provided the stimulus that Tippett needed and enabled him, somewhat belatedly, to discover ‘his individual voice’.²⁰

The early 1930s were, however, also a time of intense political activity for many young artists and musicians, including Tippett, and this had a direct impact on his musical activities.²¹ He became involved in the work camps organized for the unemployed at Boosbeck; in 1933, he returned to his original inspiration for The Village Opera, and directed a shortened version of The Beggar’s Opera. He also became increasingly involved in conducting amateur choirs, as a way of ‘communicating messages and ideas of significance’,²² and was influenced by the ideas of the communist composer Alan Bush, who believed that art and music should be viewed historically, as a product of the prevailing social conditions of their time.²³ This political viewpoint seems to have temporarily dampened Tippett’s enthusiasm for the madrigal: he reportedly lectured the participants in a 1934 London Labour Choral Union competition on the distressingly bourgeois capitalist origins of Morley’s April is in my Mistress’ Face.²⁴

Despite such ideological misgivings, Tippett’s first published works, which were composed after the completion of his studies with Morris in mid-1932, all show signs of the influence of early music, and particularly early English keyboard music. The form of the slow movement of the String Quartet No. 1 (1934–5, rev. 1943), like that of Tippett’s First Symphony (1944–5), is based on the Pavans found in English virginal and instrumental music, with three equal sections forming an extended thematic unit.²⁵ The first movement of his Piano Sonata No. 1 (1936–8, rev. 1942) is made up of a series of variations, modelled, Kemp suggests, upon the sets of variations favoured by the English virginalists, such as Byrd’s The Carman’s Whistle,²⁶ while he identifies the rhythmic techniques in the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938–9) as grounded in the practices of Elizabethan and Jacobean composers, such as Byrd, Morley and Gibbons.²⁷

These works would appear to be influenced primarily by Tippett’s private study and Morris’s teaching (he urged modern composers to learn from the ‘rhythmical freedom and subtlety’ of sixteenth-century music).²⁸ There is little evidence, however, that Tippett was particularly interested in the early English keyboard repertoire in the 1930s, or indeed at any later time, apart from a single performance on 7 November 1937 by the South London Orchestra, conducted by Tippett, of his own orchestration of John Bull’s popular The King’s Hunt.²⁹

In 1939, he began work on his Fantasia on a Theme of Handel (1939–41), based upon a Prelude from a Suite in B♭. As Kemp has observed, this theme is not inherently well-suited to variation treatment, but Tippett had been fascinated by it since stumbling upon it as a musically starved schoolboy in Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon.³⁰ Despite his youthful determination to familiarize himself with music ‘from the beginning’, to this point the evidence suggests that Tippett’s encounters with early music – whether ballad opera, the anthems of Gibbons or this theme from Handel – were rather ad hoc.

In October 1940, however, he was appointed director of music at Morley College in Lambeth, a position that he held for eleven years. This appointment ushered in a period of intense and structured engagement with early music, in which Tippett was able to develop genuine expertise, and which had a profound effect upon his subsequent compositions.

II

Tippett’s association with Morley College actually began in 1931, when he was appointed conductor of the South London Orchestra for unemployed musicians. It was based at Morley College, which had been founded in 1889 to provide non-vocational education for working men and women.³¹ The orchestra, which performed little in the way of early music, flourished under Tippett’s somewhat unconventional baton,³² but on 15 October 1940 the college buildings were badly damaged by a German bomb, and the destruction of their rehearsal space led to the orchestra’s collapse. At the same time, the director of the College’s music programmes, Arnold Foster, was evacuated out of London, and Tippett was asked to take over.

Morley College had, since the appointment of Gustav Holst as director of music in 1907, enjoyed a reputation for high quality and adventurous music programmes.³³ Under Holst, the students performed Bach, Vittoria and Palestrina, and English madrigals and folksongs. The music of Purcell was a particular interest, and in 1911 the College gave the first modern performance of The Fairy Queen.³⁴Holst resigned, due to ill health, in 1924, and was succeeded by Arnold Goldsbrough (1924–8) and Arnold Foster (1928–40). Goldsbrough and Foster both maintained the College’s high musical standards: Goldsbrough was a harpsichordist of some note, who went on to make an important contribution to the revival of early music;³⁵Foster, alongside his work at Morley, conducted the English Madrigal Choir, and believed madrigals to be the ‘finest foundation upon which a choir’s technique can be formed’.³⁶ Contemporary composition was not, however, neglected: the Annual Report for 1936–7 states that ‘Morley is now becoming established in the minds of music lovers as a place where new works can be heard’.³⁷

Nevertheless, the war had taken its toll, and Tippett had to ‘rebuild the musical life of the College over again’.³⁸ Only ten singers attended his first choir rehearsal, held less than two weeks after the bomb struck, but Charles Stuart reports that ‘They sang madrigals and knew in their hearts that all would be well’.³⁹ The numbers slowly swelled over the next few years, and under Tippett Morley College developed a reputation as one of London’s most significant centres of innovative and adventurous music-making.⁴⁰ And from the earliest days of Tippett’s tenure, the music of Purcell occupied a central position in the Morley programmes.

At the time of his appointment to Morley, Tippett was not entirely unfamiliar with Purcell’s music. In the 1930s, his close friend Francesca Allinson had edited some works by Purcell for the German publishing house Nagel, although the series editor, Herbert Just, refused to credit her in the publications. At the time of her death in 1945, Tippett considered her edition of Purcell’s fantasies to be ‘the finest obtainable’.⁴¹Allinson had also arranged Don Quixote for performance by the Intimate Opera, and had asked for Tippett’s assistance with the realization of the figured bass (although he later recalled that she had rejected all his suggestions, in his opinion rightly, given his lack of experience).⁴²Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, King Arthur and Dido and Aeneas were reasonably widely known;⁴³ a few anthems had remained in the cathedral repertoire; and ‘one or two lovely songs’ were, in Tippett’s words, ‘popular favourites’,⁴⁴ and had appeared from time to time on RCM student concert programmes when Tippett was a student.⁴⁵ The bulk of Purcell’s larger choral works, both sacred and secular, however, were almost completely unknown, both to Tippett and more generally. It was only when he discovered some of the Purcell Society’s editions amongst the rubble of the bombsite that Tippett belatedly realized ‘what an extraordinarily rich corpus of music [Purcell] had produced in his short life-span’.⁴⁶

Tippett’s work at Morley and his new-found enthusiasm for Purcell first came to public attention on St Cecilia’s Day (22 November) 1941, when the choir performed the then little-known 1692 Ode to St Cecilia (Hail, Bright Cecilia) together with ‘a madrigal for three voices’ by Weelkes, one in five parts by Wilbye, and three ‘English songs’ sung by Esther Salaman.⁴⁷ For this performance, Tippett engaged the services of a German émigré musician, Walter Bergmann, to play the continuo part – on the piano! Bergmann was a lawyer, but had also briefly studied flute and piano at the Leipzig Conservatoire, where he was recognized as a gifted accompanist.⁴⁸ He had reputedly learned how to realize a continuo part as a teenager, and was, from the early 1930s, highly regarded in Germany as a performer of the music of Telemann, Rameau, Handel, J. S. and W. F. Bach and Purcell.⁴⁹ In the course of an extremely bitter divorce, however, Bergmann’s estranged wife drew the attention of the Gestapo to his mother’s Jewish background. In March 1939, after several years of increasingly serious persecution, he left Germany for England, taking with him one suitcase of clothing, and another with his flute and recorder, and sheet music, including the Purcell fantasias (possibly in Allinson’s edition).⁵⁰

The 1941 performance of Purcell’s Ode to St Cecilia marked the beginning of an extremely productive relationship between Bergmann and Tippett. Bergmann regularly played continuo for Morley College concerts; he conducted extremely successful recorder classes at Morley, making a significant contribution to the burgeoning popularity of this instrument in Britain; and he was recognized as an expert on the music of Telemann, the Bachs, Buxtehude and other German composers, which appeared often on Morley programmes. In a tribute to Tippett on his sixtieth birthday, Bergmann recalled that when he first started at Morley, Tippett pretended ‘not to know anything about old music, and I the opposite, both of us of course being wrong’.⁵¹ There is little doubt, however, that Bergmann was considerably more experienced in the performance of this repertoire, and that Tippett benefited significantly from this expertise. In late 1942, Tippett wrote in a letter to his friend Douglas (Den) Newton, that although he sometimes teased Bergmann, ‘he’s also a true friend and a very sharp ear. Just the mentor I need.’⁵² Indeed Tippett’s ability to bring together interesting, talented people, many of whom were European refugees – including not only Bergmann, but the conductor Walter Goehr, the musicologist Hans Redlich and the composer Matyas Seiber – was one of the keys to his success at Morley College.⁵³

Ode to St Cecilia became a cornerstone of the Morley repertoire – it was performed on at least fifteen subsequent occasions – but it was far from the only work by Purcell that Tippett revived at Morley.⁵⁴ The verse anthems My Beloved Spake, O God, Thou hast cast Us out and Why do the Heathen? all appeared regularly on Morley programmes, together with instrumental works, particularly the string fantasias. The earlier piano accompaniment was replaced by harpsichord, from 1944 Alfred Deller regularly sang countertenor solos, and Morley came to be seen as a place where Purcell could be heard ‘as written’.⁵⁵

By the mid-1940s, Tippett’s public advocacy of Purcell’s music had extended beyond simply conducting concerts. In 1947 he gave two series of four talks for the BBC Third Programme devoted to Purcell’s music: further talks were given in the 1950s, and in 1951 Tippett became a member of the committee of the reformed Purcell Society.⁵⁶ The BBC talks were illustrated with live performances by the Morley College Choir, soloists and instrumental ensemble, which included recorders, and were generally accompanied by Bergmann; the examples were largely drawn from the Morley repertoire (see Table 3.1 below). From around the same time, Tippett and Bergmann jointly edited a series of Purcell’s songs; in 1955 they published an edition of the Ode to St Cecilia, which they subsequently recorded.⁵⁷ Tippett relied heavily on Bergmann’s expertise in preparing these editions: his biographer, Anne Martin, reports that Bergmann ‘did a significant part of the editing, taking the results to Tippett for his approval’, which was usually given.⁵⁸ Fellow Purcell enthusiasts Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, whom Tippett had met through Bergmann in late 1942,⁵⁹ published a similar series of editions, but while Britten’s florid continuo realizations almost constitute new arrangements, Bergmann’s were restrained and scholarly.

Table 3.1 BBC radio talks by Michael Tippett on early music

Although Tippett was particularly passionate about Purcell’s music, the Morley College concert programmes were also rich in ‘Monteverdi, the Elizabethans . . . [and] the Bachs’.⁶⁰ Tippett and others repeatedly used the term ‘Elizabethans’ to describe the composers performed at Morley, but the focus was mainly upon the composers of the early seventeenth century. Tippett’s BBC talks on ‘Purcell and the Elizabethans’ were dedicated to Morley, Gibbons, Dowland and Weelkes, and these composers, together with Wilbye, featured prominently in Morley programmes (see Table 3.2). A concert given on 18 November 1944 is typical, with a judicious mix of old and new music, including part-songs by Matyas Seiber, who was teaching at the college (see Fig. 3.1).

Table 3.2 Popular madrigals and anthems performed at Morley College concerts under Tippett

Fig. 3.1 Morley College concert programme, 18 November 1944

In his early years at Morley, Tippett seems to have been determined to compensate for his previous ignorance of Gibbons and his music. A concert devoted exclusively to Gibbons was given on 7 November 1942, which included madrigals, motets, a Pavan and Galliard that Tippett had persuaded Antony Hopkins to play on the piano,⁶¹ and three unidentified string fantasias that Tippett had recently discovered.⁶²Gibbons’s madrigals, anthems and fantasias were played at several other concerts.⁶³ In a letter to Allinson from around this time, Tippett mentioned an arrangement he had prepared, with Walter Goehr, of four Gibbons fantasias, having ‘got Goehr to see in Gibbons . . . the modernity of the music’; Goehr performed these with his Orchestre Raymonde for the BBC.⁶⁴

Although Tippett’s main interest in madrigals lay with the so-called ‘Elizabethans’, the madrigals of Monteverdi also appeared frequently on Morley College programmes, and once again Tippett had been introduced to this music by Francesca Allinson.⁶⁵ The earliest recorded performance of Monteverdi’s music was in a Christmas concert in 1941, when John Amis recalls they performed ‘unaccompanied carols, some Monteverdi . . . and the Corelli Christmas Concerto’.⁶⁶ Essentially similar Christmas programmes were given for several years (see, for example, Fig. 3.2), and it seems likely that the Monteverdi performed in 1941 was the Christmas motet Angelus ad pastores ait, which was also given in 1943, 1944 and 1945.

Fig. 3.2 Morley College concert programme, 17 December 1944

A concert devoted to Dowland songs and Monteverdi madrigals was given on 1 May 1943, and a few weeks earlier Tippett had written enthusiastically to Allinson: ‘The Monteverdi madrigals are just super – oh, but most lovely – and sensual!’⁶⁷ He discussed Monteverdi’s madrigals in a radio talk, given in 1951, on ‘The Madrigal in Italy and England’ (see Table 3.1 above),⁶⁸ and in 1968 he nominated Nadia Boulanger’s 1937 recording of Monteverdi’s Chiome d’oro, alongside Purcell’s ‘Dido’s Lament’ (from Dido and Aeneas), as one of his Desert Island Discs.⁶⁹

Under Tippett’s enthusiastic guidance, the Morley College Choir thrived, and after the war they tackled ever more adventurous programmes. In May 1946, at Walter Goehr’s suggestion, they gave the first English performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, an event that was described as ‘the outstanding musical event of the year’.⁷⁰ It was performed repeatedly over the next few years, and in 1948 they revived Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, an even more ambitious, if rather less successful, undertaking.⁷¹

III

The influence of the music performed at Morley, and particularly madrigals (and their sacred equivalent, anthems and motets), soon became apparent in Tippett’s own compositions. In 1942 he began work on two ‘madrigals’ for the Morley choir, The Source and The Windhover. Kemp suggests that The Source is closer in form to a part-song than a madrigal,⁷² but Tippett explained in a letter to Den Newton that he used the term simply to mean music written for a cappella choir. In his BBC talks and elsewhere, he also repeatedly stressed that the distinguishing feature of a madrigalian text is that it is ‘epigrammatic’, ‘one Epigram per chunk of singing, so to speak’.⁷³

On 8 May 1944 Tippett wrote to Newton that he ‘had a whim’ to compose more madrigals, ‘possibly in a sequence as Monteverdi did’, and asked Newton to think about suitable texts; a later letter shows that the ‘conversational’ nature of madrigals continued to occupy his thoughts, and that he believed that wrestling with a new ‘spaced-out’ form of polyphony would be good practice for the masque that would eventually become the opera The Midsummer Marriage.⁷⁴

Although Tippett never wrote the proposed sequence of madrigals, in 1944 he completed two choral works, Plebs Angelica (1943–4) and The Weeping Babe (1944), described by Kemp as motets ‘da chiesa’ and ‘da camera’ respectively.⁷⁵ Kemp sees the influence of Tallis and Byrd in these works, comparing Tippett’s treatment of the two choirs in Plebs Angelica to the polychoral effects in Tallis’s Spem in alium, and suggesting that The Weeping Babe ‘belongs to the tradition of Byrd’s polyphonic songs’.⁷⁶ Tippett certainly admired both these composers: he considered Spem in alium, which was sung at Morley frequently from 1947, to be ‘probably the most extraordinary piece of European music of its period’,⁷⁷ while he repeatedly described Byrd as the greatest composer of his generation.⁷⁸ Yet apart from Spem in alium, neither of these earlier ‘Elizabethans’ were performed often at Morley, particularly in the early 1940s.⁷⁹

All of these choral works were unambiguously influenced by Tippett’s study of English text-setting, particularly in Purcell. Tippett dedicated his first BBC talk, ‘The Singing of the English Language’, to this topic, focusing particularly on Purcell’s setting of the short syllables in the many trochees (long/short) found in English texts (such as ‘music’, ‘wondering’ and ‘Cecilia’) to weak, unaccented beats. He argued that the dominance of the less idiomatic Handelian tradition had ‘harmed our proper sense of the language’, and had the choir demonstrate the way it had originally performed the unaccented final syllable of ‘Cecilia’, ‘before we corrected ourselves’.⁸⁰

In The Windhover, the final syllables of the many trochees, including ‘morning’, ‘minion’, ‘Falcon’, and finally ‘vermillion’, are all carefully placed on weak beats. The one contrasting cadence falls on ‘chevalier’: in this French word the accent falls on the final beat, in contrast to the English ‘lovelier’ with which it is rhymed (see Ex. 3.1). In The Weeping Babe, on the other hand, Tippett experiments with setting the short syllables of trochees to extended melismas, although still carefully placed on weak beats (see, for example, ‘flowers’ and ‘bitter’ in Ex. 3.2).

Ex. 3.1 The Windhover, bars 69–76

Ex. 3.2 The Weeping Babe, bars 55–69, sopranos only

Tippett’s interest in madrigals can be seen, however, not just in his choral works from this period, but also in his Second String Quartet (1941–2), which was dedicated to Bergmann. Tippett’s note to the score identifies the first movement as ‘partly derived from the madrigal technique’, in that the parts have their own independent rhythms and ‘the music is propelled by the differing accents, which tend to thrust each other forward’.⁸¹

Indeed it is possible to identify some sort of implicit or explicit influence, not just of early music generally, but of the music that he performed at Morley College, in much of the music Tippett composed at this time. He acknowledged the influence of Purcell and Monteverdi on his cantata, Boyhood’s End (1943),⁸² and explained in a note accompanying the score of his Symphony No. 1 (1944–5) that the scherzo was inspired by the rhythms of a conductus by Pérotin that he had found in the Oxford History of Music. This conductus, Salvatoris Hodie, was sung at the Morley College Christmas Concert on 19 December 1943.⁸³

Many pieces of early music that made their way into Tippett’s compositions appeared on these Christmas programmes. Tippett used the medieval carol ‘Angelus ad Virginem’, which the Morley choir also sang at Christmas in 1943, in both his early folksong opera Robin Hood (1934) and his 1948 Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles.⁸⁴ The ‘Non nobis, Domine’ canon, widely attributed to Byrd, was a regular item on the Christmas programmes, and appeared in two of Tippett’s own works for children, Robert of Sicily (1938) and The Shires Suite (1965–70).

In the post-war years, however, as Morley’s concert programmes became bigger and more successful, Tippett was increasingly finding that his work there was getting in the way of his composition and he began to withdraw from his activities at Morley. Goehr, Bergmann and Seiber increasingly took over responsibility for the College’s concert programmes and a subtle shift in programming is discernible from this time.⁸⁵ In 1951, after conducting a special concert in the newly opened Festival Hall – featuring works by Stravinsky, Tallis’s Spem in alium and his own A Child of Our Time (1939–41) – and one of eight concerts devoted to the music of Purcell (as part of the celebrations for the Festival of Britain), Tippett resigned from Morley College to concentrate on composition.⁸⁶

IV

Early the next year, in February 1952, King George VI died, and the imminent coronation of Elizabeth II inevitably turned the collective consciousness to the glories of the first Elizabethan era.⁸⁷ The Arts Council of Great Britain commissioned ten composers to write a set of madrigals, A Garland for a Queen (modelled upon Morley’s 1601 Triumph of Oriana), to which Tippett contributed Dance, Clarion Air (1952), set to a text by his friend Christopher Fry.

In 1953, the coronation year, Benjamin Britten invited a number of composers, including Tippett, to contribute to a composite work, Variations on an Elizabethan Theme, for performance at the Aldeburgh Festival. Each composer was asked to base a movement on the old folk tune ‘Sellinger’s Round’; the work opened with Imogen Holst’s orchestration of Byrd’s version of this tune from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. In his movement, the second, Tippett chose to incorporate a second quote, Dido’s first aria, ‘Ah, Belinda!’, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which he had recently conducted, in Italian, in Switzerland.⁸⁸ Tippett was pleased with his effort, claiming ‘Mine was the best!’,⁸⁹ and expanded it the following year to create the five-movement Divertimento on ‘Sellinger’s Round’ (1953–4). In each movement Tippett combined the ‘Sellinger’s Round’ theme with a second quotation; these quotations, which are presented in chronological order, form a kind of overview of the history of English music. The first movement quotes thirty-two bars from Gibbons’s eighth three-part fantasia of 1620, which Tippett described as the ‘most exciting’ of the fantasias,⁹⁰ and which was presumably one of the unidentified fantasias that had been performed at Morley, while the later movements feature an air from Thomas Arne’s Comus, a John Field nocturne and ‘I Have a Song to Sing, O’, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeoman of the Guard.⁹¹

Critical opinion of the success of the Divertimento is mixed (Kemp thinks it a failure, while Derrick Puffett finds it ‘marvellous’⁹²), but in 1953 Tippett was commissioned, by the Edinburgh Festival, to compose another early-music-inspired work, his Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, to commemorate the tercentenary of Corelli’s birth and, somewhat more fancifully, the four-hundredth anniversary of the violin.⁹³ It was an unqualified success: Kemp considers it ‘his perfect work’, Peter Dennison a ‘masterpiece’.⁹⁴ Tippett was not, however, particularly interested in, or knowledgeable about, Corelli’s music, and apart from the annual performance of the Christmas Concerto, little Corelli was performed at Morley. Kemp reports that Tippett more or less stumbled upon suitable thematic material (once again this is attributed to ‘instinct’), after ‘a friend’ told him about Bach’s organ fugue based on a theme from Corelli’s Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 2 in F.⁹⁵ The Fantasia Concertante, the early Fantasia on a Theme of Handel and the Divertimento on ‘Sellinger’s Round’ are the works by Tippett that deal most explicitly with early music, and together they have shaped public perceptions of Tippett as a composer interested in this area. Yet they give a somewhat misleading view of Tippett’s areas of particular interest: in 1963 he admitted that while he felt a particular affinity with the coloratura of the baroque, he was less drawn to Bach and Handel, and, presumably, Corelli, than to Monteverdi and Purcell.⁹⁶

From the mid-1950s, early music played a less important role in Tippett’s music, although he never completely lost interest in it. The Shires Suite of 1965–70 incorporated not just the canons ‘Non nobis, Domine’ and ‘Hey, ho! to the Greenwood’ (both traditionally, but incorrectly, attributed to Byrd), but also ‘Sumer is icumen in’ and canons by Purcell, Gibbons and Alexander Goehr (Walter’s son). In his Symphony No. 4 (1976–7), he returned to the Gibbons fantasia used in the Divertimento, which he paraphrased in the third episode.⁹⁷The Mask of Time (1980–2) contains allusions to Dowland’s ‘I saw my Lady weep’ and Monteverdi’s Ecco mormorar l’onde, amongst others.⁹⁸ And once again, the majority of these references are to the music that Tippett had performed at Morley College.

Michael Tippett’s interest in early music extended across his entire lengthy career, both pre- and post-dating his relatively brief time at Morley College. His experiences at Morley, however, were pivotal to understanding his relationship to early music. His knowledge of early music before he went to Morley was somewhat limited, but those works that really engaged his interest – English madrigals, the anthems of Gibbons, the medieval carol ‘Angelus ad Virginem’ – were incorporated into Morley concert programmes. And Tippett returned to these works, together with the music that he discovered while he was at Morley, again and again throughout his career, in concerts, in public lectures and in his own compositions. As he explained in an interview in 1963: ‘What I worked at at Morley College was always the things that chiefly interested ME – the Elizabethans, Monteverdi, Purcell.’⁹⁹

The 1930s: parties and propaganda?

Let us first of all lay out Tippett’s various activities in greater detail. His involvement with political organizations is obviously the most clear-cut evidence of political engagement, and this may have been more extensive than is usually surmised. He was only a card-carrying member of a political party for the few months in 1935 when he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). However, Tippett also wrote to Bushc. 1936–7 that he was still involved in political work with a group and preferred ‘the severe training of my present group to the CP’, although he gives no indication of which specific group this was.⁷ Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson have indicated that Tippett had some dealings with various Trotskyist groups that sprung up in 1930s Britain. He was reportedly part of the Musicians’ Group of the Bolshevik/Leninist Group (known as the Militant Group) in the Labour Party, a Trotskyist group operating within the Labour Party.⁸ Tippett wrote to its leaders in January 1938 regarding the handling of an internal split (the ‘Lee affair’)⁹ and read their newspaper, The Militant.¹⁰ He may briefly have been a supporter of the slightly later group, the Workers’ International League, founded in 1937, a new group resulting from the split in the Militant Group.¹¹ All of this indicates that Tippett’s interest in organized politics outlasted his membership of the CPGB. Nevertheless, there is nothing to suggest that he was very heavily involved with any of these groups (we know nothing, for example, about the nature of the work of the Musicians’ Group). These affiliations also reveal nothing about the relationship between politics and Tippett’s musical activities.

A more promising field of enquiry is Tippett’s range of cultural projects and activities in the 1930s. In 1932, he began conducting two Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society choirs in London, as well as the South London Orchestra for unemployed musicians. The latter marked the beginning of his association with Morley College, an institution for the education and enrichment of working people. In 1933 and 1934, Tippett participated in music-making at a work camp for unemployed miners in Boosbeck, Yorkshire. For the 1934 camp he co-wrote and composed the music for the ‘folksong opera’ Robin Hood. That year Tippett began to get involved with some of Alan Bush’s activities in the field of workers’ music. He assisted Bush that year with the Pageant of Labour at the Crystal Palace, a spectacle boasting some 1,500 performers which told the history of, and sought to promote, the trade union movement, and for which Bush composed original music. Tippett provided the South London Orchestra for the occasion and shared the conducting of the seven performances with Bush. He was also at this time, with Bush, involved in an unknown capacity with the left-wing American organization of workers’ music groups, the Workers’ Music League.¹² In 1935 he joined Bush’s choir, made up of members of the LLCU, when they competed in the International Workers’ Olympiad in Strasbourg. On at least one occasion in the mid-1930s, Tippett acted as adjudicator in LLCU competitions. In 1934 and 1935 he was involved with organizing two ‘concert-demonstrations’ – ‘a practical demonstration of the various ways in which music could be used to further the class-struggle’ – held at Morley College and involving the LLCU and other groups.¹³ The year 1935 also saw War Ramp, Tippett’s revolutionary play about the relationship between capitalism and war, performed in various Labour Party premises and produced by the Labour League of Youth.¹⁴ In 1936 Tippett helped Bush found the Workers’ Music Association and was a member of the first executive committee.

Again, the significance of these activities is difficult to determine. On the one hand, in 1937, Tippett emphasized that ‘I do not do any political activity in my choirs – I am simply earning my living – as far as I know no one in my choirs knows what I am’.¹⁵ While this comment should not be taken at face value, it is important to note that Tippett’s political sympathies were Trotskyist and radical, while the cultural organizations with which he was involved represented a far broader range of opinion, and members were not necessarily politically engaged. Tippett’s 1937 statement also raises the question of what political importance he himself attached to some of this work. On the other hand, events like the concert-demonstrations as efforts to ‘further the class-struggle’ suggest a very strong link between practical music-making and political goals.

Our final area of enquiry with regard to Tippett’s music and politics is, naturally, his relevant compositions, listed in Table. 4.1. The same questions I have posed in relation to Tippett’s party activism and political-musical activities are relevant here: in what sense are these works political? Given its text, Robin Hood presents the strongest case of political music. Tippett considered the work a reinterpretation of ‘the legend of the famous outlaw in terms of the class war then dividing English society’, apparent in such passages as the following:

Yet how much importance can be ascribed to this work? With Miners (to be discussed further below), it was one of only two attempts on Tippett’s part to introduce topical content and incitement to action into his works. Other works are far more tenuously political. Neither Robert of Sicily nor Seven at One Stroke has a political subject matter. While A Song of Liberty’s pronouncement that ‘Empire is no more!’ had contemporary resonances, Blake was a favourite poet of socialist songbooks long before the radicalism of the 1930s.¹⁷

Table 4.1 Political (?) works of the 1930s

It is also important to consider the impact and dissemination of these works. None were published and performances were few. More significantly, even leaving aside the problems of establishing the extent to which Tippett’s work with the London choirs who performed Miners (and Robin Hood in its second production)¹⁸ was political, the context of the first production of Robin Hood at the Yorkshire work camps was ambiguous given the politics of the organizer, Rolf Gardiner. As Dan Stone has written, while Gardiner was not a member of a self-designated fascist group, his interests in the rural revivalism that was the main focus of the work camps was a cultural expression of far-right ideas about masculinity, race and nationalism.¹⁹ In 1933, Tippett’s first year in the camps, Gardiner was writing that the decadence of taste in the modern state must be addressed through ‘the resumption by masculine leadership and by state-building forces of the musical life of the people’.²⁰ Tippett’s politics were, of course, very different from Gardiner’s, yet their differences raise the question of whether the political content of Tippett’s work was lost in the circumstances of the work camp production, especially given the obvious potential of the subject of Robin Hood to appeal to a ruralist and nationalist ethos. And given that he was, as Kemp indicates, ‘guarded’ towards Gardiner’s ideas, we must also ask how seriously Tippett took Robin Hood as an attempt to fuse musical and political goals, or even more crudely as a political statement.²¹ If this, one of his most overtly political works, was unimportant even in those terms, did the political works have any lasting significance for Tippett’s growth as an artist?

Models for political music

Having thus examined Tippett’s activities and works for overt propaganda, the evidence is scarce. Nevertheless, the incitements to action in isolated works and the notion of particular musical events contributing to ‘class-struggle’, for example, point to some sense of music and musical activities having some role to play in achieving political change. What now needs to be addressed, therefore, is Tippett’s conception of what this role might be, and here it is revealing to examine his models of political music in more detail. The two composers who strongly influenced Tippett in this area were the aforementioned Bush, and Bush’s own mentor in music and politics, Hanns Eisler (1898–1962). Both composers were communists and committed to musical composition and other cultural activities which directly related to their political work. Eisler, a frequent collaborator with Bertolt Brecht, was internationally renowned in workers’ music, for example directing the Strasbourg Olympiad in which Tippett competed,²² and present in England for periods in the 1930s. Bush, whose music was admired by Tippett in this period,²³ had seen the premiere of Brecht and Eisler’s stage work Die Massnahme as a student in Berlin in 1930, and had been strongly influenced by Eisler’s music and ideas in his work with workers’ music organizations in England. Bush organized the first English performances of Die Massnahme, and one of the concert-demonstrations Tippett was involved with showcased Eisler’s music. The LLCU was involved with the performances of Die Massnahme and various other performances of music by Eisler and Bush throughout the latter part of the decade.

While previous accounts of Tippett’s politics have acknowledged the influence of Eisler and Bush, Kemp in particular presents the long-term influence in somewhat negative terms.²⁴ In describing A Song of Liberty, for example, he emphasizes Tippett’s independence from an example that is tantamount to musical propaganda – the mere simplification of one’s musical style under political pressure:

In the same vein, Tippett’s most Eislerian work (in Kemp’s view), Miners, is by the same token ‘characterless’. Tippett himself wrote on similar lines when he later described Eisler’s music as being ‘uninteresting musically’.²⁶

In reality, both Eisler and Bush went far beyond mere simplification in their work linking music and politics. Certainly, topicality was desirable, but the rationale for this was more complex than the desire to set political slogans. At the heart of both composers’ varied political-musical activities (including stage and film work, pageantry, composition and practical work for amateur groups, and theoretical writing) lay the notion of creating an entire musical culture. This new culture would both help bring about, and eventually reflect, life following the anticipated imminent socialist revolution. While texts relevant to this goal were therefore very important, particular musical qualities were significant too. Firstly, Bush and Eisler endeavoured to foster music and activities that contrasted sharply with bourgeois culture, a criterion that had implications for performance style and context and for musical style. Eisler and Bush were concerned that new workers’ music should be modern, and thus appropriate to the contemporary situation, both through transformation of conventional musical function and the use of new techniques such as the twelve-note method.²⁷ Eisler also sought to create music that promoted action, rather than the passive effect he perceived in bourgeois music; this is illustrated by his ‘Solidaritätslied’, which refers to the need to rise up against oppression in general terms, without specific topical allusions.

Politics and the self

This brief account is not intended as an apologia for Bush and Eisler. Rather, their concerns regarding music and politics form a crucial context for understanding Tippett’s ideas, as becomes apparent if we now turn to Tippett’s beliefs as revealed in his letters to Bush in the late 1930s. The issue at the heart of the correspondence is the two composers’ respective Trotskyism and Stalinism. Following an initial spate of letters from 1934–6 which largely concern arrangements for their joint political-musical projects, the majority of letters from 1938–45 are heavily concerned with the theory and practice of their relative political positions, and most are by Tippett, attempting to bring Bush around to his views. Tippett’s views were in keeping with British Trotskyism in this period. Both Stalinists and Trotskyists laid claim to the true legacy of Lenin, and Tippett adhered to the Trotskyist opposition to Stalin’s policy of ‘socialism in one country’ and the belief that the Third International, the Comintern,²⁸ had failed to bring about international socialist revolution.²⁹ This task could now only be brought about by the Fourth International, an idea being mooted by 1933 but which was only formalized into an organization in 1938.³⁰ Crucially, however, Tippett also subscribed to the Third International belief (shared by Stalinism) in the contemporary period as one of the disintegration of capitalism and imminent war leading to socialist revolution.³¹ While Tippett believed in the Fourth International as the ‘everlastingly new home of the real thing (International Communism)’,³² which would achieve mass popularity in the imminent anti-capitalist war, he also (at least initially) did not see the ultimate goal as the overthrow of Stalinism:

The significance of Tippett’s belief at this stage in a ‘common faith’ becomes apparent when another dimension of his discussion of Stalinism and Trotskyism is scrutinized: his tendency to relate the opposition in his relationship with Bush, his own psychological development and his ideas about music. Late in 1936, Tippett described the differences between himself and Bush both personally and as revolutionaries:

Both in this letter and in subsequent ones, Tippett debated the extent to which his own affinity with Trotskyism and Bush’s with Stalinism reflected these personal attributes. While Tippett saw a precise correlation of Trotskyism and feeling as too simplistic, he did come to paint his differences with Bush as a projection of his internal psychological struggle.³⁵ Around 1936–7 he wrote of going through a ‘sorting out of things inside’, from which he had concluded that ‘I have to learn to think, T-ism [Trotskyism] or no T-ism’:

In some ways, this letter confirms what we know about Tippett’s political and psychological development: it charts his gradual rejection of political involvement, in that he is prepared to sacrifice his Trotskyism for psychological balance. The discussion of finding wholeness rather than a ‘split’ self looks forward to the concerns of A Child of Our Time (hereafter A Child) and The Midsummer Marriage. Yet it is also striking that even when Tippett was still engaged in political work, his interest in psychology was not born of disillusionment with politics. Rather, from an early stage he viewed political beliefs as manifestations of deeper human impulses. Moreover, while Tippett’s condemnation of Stalinism was very real, he also viewed it (as personified by Bush) as reflective of a dialectic of the rational and irrational which was central to his own psychological growth. This in turn reflected his belief at this stage in the underlying ‘common faith’ between Stalinists and Trotskyists, and the hoped-for eradication of their differences in the coming revolution.

Music and politics in practice

This evidence thus points to a strong connection between Tippett’s political beliefs and the psychological issues that would prove so central to later works. Yet there are also implications for understanding the relationship between politics and Tippett’s musical activities and works of the 1930s. While less extensive than the main dispute over Stalinism and Trotskyism, the Bush–Tippett correspondence also charts a serious disagreement concerning the LLCU. Tippett adjudicated at an LLCU event in 1937 and made a speech regarding the repertoire. As Tippett recounted it, he argued that (a) ‘art is art even in workers’ ensembles’; (b) ‘propaganda is not art ipso facto’; and (c) ‘the LLCU is not merely a newspaper, it is the means by wh[ich] certain information etc touches a vaster mass of people using the means of art to that purpose’.³⁷ Bush replied that Tippett’s remarks had ‘only confirmed the sentimental romantics [among the LLCU members] in their reactionary inclinations’.³⁸ He further implied that Tippett had threatened his work with the LLCU by performing sentimental repertoire (specifically naming the song ‘Dorothy’) and suggested that this disruption was the product of Tippett’s Trotskyism.³⁹ Tippett rounded on Bush again by denying any political goal in his repertoire preferences:

It is easy to conclude from the two composers’ argument thus far that Tippett was making a defence of l’art pour l’art against Bush’s co-opting of music for propagandistic purposes. Tippett finishes his second letter, however, by stating that ‘I am taking Trotsky’s position on art and the revolution’ and accusing Bush of the primary flaw of denying human instinct and emotion in revolutionary music, citing Bush’s own song ‘Question and Answer’ as an illustration of this fault. This did not mean that Tippett simply embraced emotion as the guiding principle in workers’ music. Bush, again influenced by Brecht and Eisler, did indeed promote workers’ music that was anti-sentimental. On the basis that fascism was the ultimate manifestation of capitalist tendencies, both bourgeois and fascist aesthetics were perceived to promote passive emotional consumption of music based on an appeal to instinct. Bush and Eisler, on the contrary, sought to create workers’ music that fostered rational thought and (revolutionary) action. Eisler’s songs of this period are consequently characterized by sparse harmonization, marching basslines and the avoidance of any attempt to emotionally illustrate the text, Eisler preferring to simply set forth or even adopt an ironic distance from the words in his settings. Intriguingly, Tippett had written to Bush previously that ‘if you did succeed in getting the Choral Union to be like yourself . . . the irrational element in people would seek at all costs to find a way, and would lie undefended before fascist demagogy’.⁴¹ The parallels here with Tippett’s perception of his own irrationality are clear, and as in that instance, Tippett felt that what was needed was a balance, or rather, a dialectic, between opposing tendencies. Significant too is Tippett’s assertion that his position on art and revolution is Trotsky’s. While Tippett does not elaborate on the claim, the essence of Trotsky’s position as outlined in Literature and Revolution was that aesthetic value could not be reduced to political content, and that proletarian artists must be able to ‘absorb and make use of the cultural history previously withheld from them’.⁴² However, Trotsky also rejected formalism and supported the notion that art related to the age that produced it.

These two beliefs – Tippett’s adherence to Trotsky and his belief in the necessity of balance between the rational and irrational – are central to his ideas about music and politics in the second half of the 1930s. Tippett still, as we have noted, believed at this stage in imminent socialist revolution and, following Trotsky and as he asserted elsewhere, in the notion that the composer ‘should be in some living contact with the age’.⁴³ Yet what sort of music was appropriate to that age, and how should the artist take action? Tippett’s application of his analysis of the modern ‘split’ of the rational and irrational to both politics and workers’ music prompted him not to utterly reject Bush’s ideas about a rational basis for socialist music. Yet he was still unable at this stage to reconcile such a model of new and revolutionary music with his recognition of the ongoing power of the music of the past to move people emotionally. Perhaps this impasse, rather than ongoing disillusionment with politics, offers the best explanation for the weaknesses of Tippett’s most politicized works, as may be seen, for example, in Miners. The work has been described as ‘Eisler-ish’,⁴⁴ yet it is in several respects strikingly different from the sort of Eisler songs Tippett would have known. Like several Eisler songs, there is a change from minor to major that sets a shift in the text from a description of the hardship of the miners’ lives to the need for unity. However, in the music and particularly in the text this is much more crudely done than in Brecht and Eisler’s songs, which were generally strophic and presented a constant and subtle alternation of exposing injustice and presenting solutions in action, often through the presentation of argument as in their ‘Lob des Lernens’ (‘In Praise of Learning’), performed by the LLCU in 1935. Miners is also in contrast to Eisler’s songs in that its suitability for untrained amateurs, or for non-concert performance, is questionable. There is an extensive piano introduction and several interludes into which fragments of the text are woven, again distinct from the driving rhythms of Eisler’s songs. This comparison is not intended to condemn Tippett’s work; rather it may be viewed as testimony to the uncertainty with which he created music which reflected his complex political ideas. This is salutary for understanding Tippett’s work in this period as a whole. Even when his Trotskyism was at its most ardent, he was never simply concerned with writing propaganda. In common with his models, Bush and Eisler, he believed in imminent radical social change and was interested in the notion of music and musical activities that both reflected and helped to achieve this. Where they differed increasingly was in their beliefs about the nature of such music, and how it is able (or ought) to influence people. If we understand the political in music as propounding a party line, Tippett was never a political musician. If, on the other hand, the political in music suggests a worldview that had aesthetic implications, we are closer to appreciating the nature of Tippett’s elusive artistic engagement with politics in the 1930s.

The legacy of the 1930s

What was the legacy of this process of thought about music and politics in later decades? Already in the 1930s, Tippett related political beliefs and courses of action to deeper human qualities. What we see in the 1940s and after is that the exploration of human qualities became central to Tippett’s thought, while politics assumed an increasingly marginal position. As he wrote in 1945: ‘For me the language and ideas of Marxism are only one, and not the only one, apprehension of present social life. The centre of gravity, so to speak, has for me shifted.’⁴⁵ In an article accompanying the first broadcast performance of A Child, Tippett wrote that the third part of the text spoke of possibilities arising from the story, but ‘not in any political sense: only in a spiritual or psychological sense’.⁴⁶ In a 1963 programme note, too, Tippett reflected positively on the fact that the oratorio had outgrown its historical context: at a recent German performance the audience had responded to ‘the eternal tragedy of man’s inhumanity to man’.⁴⁷ These views are also discernible in aspects of the work itself. We have already seen in the discussion of the 1930s Tippett’s belief in psychological imbalance between the rational and irrational. Yet whereas then Tippett saw this conflict as being vitally played out in the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism, in A Child the ‘split’ modern man is rather embodied in both the humanity and capacity for violence of the central figure. One of the key moments of the work is his statement that begins the final ensemble:

Increasingly, as the talks and essays eventually compiled in Moving into Aquarius testify, Tippett viewed this psychological split as manifest in all kinds of dualisms. In a 1944 pamphlet, for example, he described the ‘endless dualisms, of spirit-matter, imagination-fact, even down to that of class’ which had produced the ‘division’ of modern man.⁴⁸

Tippett’s shift also casts light on his pacifism. In the 1930s he was not opposed to violence where it would bring about revolution; rather he believed the inevitable capitalist war would unite Stalinism and Trotskyism (when ‘we sink our differences behind the same machine-gun’). He also wrote with reference to the Russian show trials of the rectitude of Lenin’s view that ‘once past the revolutionary terror of the elimination of the bourgeoisie, greater and greater democracy and liberty of opinion, parties and all are to be allowed and encouraged’.⁴⁹ In contrast, by 1943 Tippett perceived violence and war to be a product of the imbalance of the divided modern man towards the material world and progress based on ‘technics’.⁵⁰ The artist’s role was bound up with the pacifist’s position, as it was to promote imagination as the necessary spiritual balance to these tendencies towards violence. This sense of his artistic vocation as providing both critique and healing of the conditions of post-Enlightenment modernity was one that occupied him for the rest of his creative life.

The breadth of Tippett’s purposes from the 1940s onwards should not, however, be taken as a complete rejection of his earlier, politicized outlook, as there are important points of continuity. As David Clarke has noted, Tippett’s critique of manifestations of modernity such as science, technology and, ultimately, war, amounted to a critique of the dominance of reason in modern life.⁵¹ This focus is already nascent in Tippett’s diagnosis of Bush’s Stalinism and approach to revolutionary art as disproportionately, and (potentially) dangerously, rational. Nor did he cease after the 1930s to include reflections on politics among the issues he was trying to address. In a 1944 letter, he wrote regarding A Child that the scapegoat with whom the work sympathizes was often whole classes of people: ‘Jews, Negroes – and in my opinion political groups like anarchists, Trotskyists’.⁵² While the letter ultimately makes clear Tippett’s now primarily psychological, rather than political, reading of the contemporary situation, he ends with a reference to his plans for The Midsummer Marriage by stating that ‘My “whole man” looks very much like Lenin’s dedicated revolutionary – and the impact such men might make on the change in the climate of opinion.’⁵³ What this statement underlines is that both Tippett’s Trotskyist beliefs and his critique of modernity are conceptions of a historical moment of global proportions, and of the necessity of taking action to enact change. Tippett’s views evolved in that he ceased to believe that communism could bring about positive change, not because he had entirely rejected the ends envisaged by Marxism, but because ‘the methods are so uncivilized that the ends envisaged cannot any longer be encompassed’.⁵⁴ More fundamentally, Tippett had begun to solve his quandary regarding what action it was possible for him to take. Where Bush still believed that music could rationally persuade people to achieve political and social change, Tippett now saw his role as contributing to a better society by restoring psychological balance between the rational and the imaginative. That such action might have a concrete impact in the political or social sphere was a possibility that Tippett still acknowledged:

Narratives of Tippett’s gradual achievement of maturity as an artist in the 1940s have rightly identified an important shift from specific political interests to a much broader conception of the modern world. What this chapter has aimed to do is to trace the nuances of that journey. As we have seen, in one sense Tippett was less political in the 1930s than may initially be apparent, in that his psychological interpretation of politics (and political music) laid the foundation for his later views. Yet equally, even after he ceased to believe in the power of politics to bring about real social change, Tippett remained conscious of the place of specific political events within the landscape of the modern age. He retained his sense that, say, Trotskyism exemplified deeper psychological impulses. His comments in the 1970s that ‘The outbreaks of student protest all over the world have perhaps less to do with any specific political issues than with a widespread impatience with a society that appears to have little time for dreams’ illustrate that this impulse to make connections between the psychological and the political stayed with Tippett in later years.⁵⁶

Politics and reception

There is another area in which we may continue to consider Tippett’s music and politics: that of the promotion and reception of his music. As this has so far been the subject of little research, I will present a brief snapshot of possibilities rather than suggest conclusions. Tippett’s post-war encounters with groups or events that involved politics were sporadic, and he himself was strongly resistant to involvement with politics. Nevertheless, it is notable that Tippett was courted by organizations promoting the political and cultural interests of both Cold War blocs. In 1944 he was invited to sit on the Music Committee of the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. While he declined on the grounds of a lack of time, he wondered whether the society had gained an impression that he was politically sympathetic to the organization on the basis of A Child.⁵⁷ He was also invited (on the Soviet side) to be a delegate at the notorious Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in 1949, but refused to be involved with such a propagandistic exercise. Tippett did, however, involve himself to a very limited extent with various organizations since linked to the US and British ‘cultural Cold War’. He was a member of the British Freedom Defence Committee, a left-wing civil liberties organization set up to defend individual freedoms in opposition to the communist-dominated National Council for Civil Liberties. Tippett’s Plebs Angelica (1943–4) was performed as part of the L’Oeuvre du XXe Siècle (Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century) festival in Paris in 1952, an event organized by the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). According to Frances Stonor Saunders, he was also sent round-trip tickets for a subsequent CCF festival of modern music in Rome in 1954.⁵⁸

In addition to these fragmentary instances of Tippett attracting the attention of organizations with political interests, a more substantial case study relates to Tippett’s reputation during and immediately after the war, given his prison sentence and status as a conscientious objector. As Lewis Foreman has revealed, at the BBC there was a range of opinions as to whether broadcasting, say, A Child was tantamount to endorsing pacifism, and as to whether a conscientious objector should be promoted by the BBC.⁵⁹ More intriguing than the BBC’s decision to support Tippett is the fact that, with Britten, Tippett was one of the two composers most assiduously promoted by Britain in occupied post-war Germany, with A Child being performed in September 1946.⁶⁰ While Toby Thacker sees the choice of two conscientious objectors as evidence of the apolitical British view of music,⁶¹ it is noteworthy that the BBC had already debated – and dismissed – the notion of A Child as a pacifist work. It is also significant that the chief criterion for the Allies’ selections of music for performance in occupied Germany was music that broke decisively with Nazi-period practices. Thus two of the primary categories of acceptable music were (a) music that had been banned by the Nazis on racial grounds, such as Mendelssohn, and (b) modernism.⁶² As Thacker describes, there were other agendas. One concern among the British, as amongst the other Allies, was to compete in promoting their own culture; the other was the belief that Germany required, in one contemporary British commentator’s words, ‘spiritual regeneration’ to achieve long-term peace.⁶³ This is not to suggest that these various concerns coalesced into a definite agenda to promote Tippett’s oratorio. It is reasonable to suggest, however, that A Child was a work that, regardless of the composer’s pacifism, met these various criteria to an extraordinary extent. It had an anti-fascist and anti-racist theme, it had proved remarkably accessible and yet was also perceived to be modern in musical language,⁶⁴ a quality that, potentially, both contradicted Nazi policies and celebrated the achievements of modern Britain.

The very brief examples just discussed do not, of course, present a very substantial body of evidence of official and institutional interest in the political value of Tippett’s music. Nor do they, crucially, suggest involvement on Tippett’s part in these kinds of political-cultural activities after the Second World War. Tippett’s belief in the breadth of the values his music embraced was sincere. Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting that key elements of his music – its perceived modernity, its protest against violence – were not necessarily universal in reception. Rather, elements of music may have had particular value at specific times to groups with particular political interests. While we may recognize Tippett’s diminishing interest in political activities, this did not necessarily render his later music immune from politicized appropriation. The nature and extent of any such appropriation, however, is a matter for further research.

String Quartet No. 1 and A Song of Liberty: ‘For everything that lives is Holy’

From his schooldays, Tippett sought to ‘break free’ from his conventional middle-class background.¹⁵ The signs of rebellion he records in his account of boarding-school life were symptomatic of his awareness of difference.¹⁶ He refused to attend house prayers, engage in rough sports, play for hymns or join the cadet corps. He made clandestine visits to the local Anglo-Catholic church to observe the drama of the Mass and chose to read independently among the Greek classics. From this derived his love of ancient Greece and his appreciation of the Greeks’ ideal of male friendship, so antithetical to conventional morality in the West. Some years later he wrote to a friend, ‘I find for me that this man-love is hopelessly mixed up with Greece’.¹⁷ There was, he confessed, ‘a certain excitement in holding (even if you have no choice but to do so) the personal Greek-ness when you have accepted the outer social fact [of difference]’. But at fifteen his private ‘Greek world’ was irrupted when he was forced to report to the entire school the sexual behaviour of every boy of his acquaintance, including one with whom he had engaged in a sexual relationship. The result of this humiliation was that he left the school.¹⁸

Auden likened the public schools of his class and generation to a fascist state, parodying just such a scene as Tippett endured in ‘Address for a Prize-Day’ in The Orators (1931). The result of the draconian honour code in operation at Auden’s school, which required boys to rat on each other, had a detrimental effect, he later wrote, on ‘all those emotions, particularly the sexual, which are still undeveloped’.¹⁹ It also underlined how socially unacceptable same-sex relationships were – acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men were still punishable by two years’ hard labour and rates of conviction for those who reached court were extremely high.²⁰ Tippett was as conscious of the illegality of homosexual acts as anyone else. Once, in the early forties, when he was shocked to hear that a friend had outed him at a public meeting, he reminded the friend that homosexuality was ‘a criminal matter’.²¹

While still a student, Tippett’s friendships were with theatre enthusiasts, not musicians – he names Aubrey Russ and Roy Langford as friends in the mid-1920s. With Langford he shared a flat and some youthful ‘experimenting in sensuality’.²² Through Russ, Tippett was drawn into Auden’s circle. Russ had been at Oriel College, Oxford, and in 1927 he introduced Tippett to David Ayerst, a former Oriel history tutor. Ayerst himself had been to Christ Church, where he formed a friendship with Auden. Sometime in spring 1932 Tippett met Auden at the home of his friend Bill McElwee, another Christ Church Old Boy (whom Auden had attempted, but failed, to seduce). As though a ritual of initiation, Auden showed Tippett proofs of The Orators, whose ‘hero’, The Airman, is implicitly homosexual.²³ Some friends found the work difficult to comprehend; perhaps it was more accessible to Tippett than most others, but he managed to resist the blandishments (sexual and otherwise) of ‘the Wystan click’, as he called it.²⁴

The meeting with Auden was in fact eclipsed by another event: falling in love. In summer 1932 Ayerst introduced Tippett to Wilf Franks, a young Bauhaus-trained painter. For Tippett the meeting was ‘the deepest, most shattering experience of falling in love’.²⁵ But Franks was ostensibly, and frustratingly, heterosexual. Tippett told Ayerst the relationship was ‘Illusion, love and altruism on his side – and for all I know it’s much the same on mine, with greater accentuation on some one of the characteristics’.²⁶ He soon discovered how enervating the combination of intense physical desire and unrequited love could be. Tippett confided to Ayerst that ‘I shall be glad as the fervour of sudden physical desire dies away to something more placid – which it is doing slowly. Wilf is a hell of a mixture of love and altruistic friendship.’²⁷ Not only was the relationship one-sided, Franks had no income beyond what Tippett could spare him and had no apparent inclination to earn one. Part of Franks’s attraction, though, was his working-class ordinariness, and the most intense phase of Tippett’s relationship with Franks coincided with the peak of his participation in left-wing politics and workers’ movements. In a climate of economic depression and chronic unemployment Tippett sympathized with ‘the underdog; the little chap; the ordinary soldier; the workman; the dopey; the child; the scapegoat’.²⁸ Through Ayerst he became involved in work camps for the unemployed in Yorkshire. In the summers of 1933 and 1934 the camps gave him and Franks the opportunity to escape: alone, they went hiking in the Pennines with a tent. In this idyllic interval, and in a landscape of the rugged North, away from the intellectual and class-ridden South, Tippett spent some of the most blissful weeks of the relationship.²⁹ In this climate, too, he began the composition of the String Quartet in A (later No. 1). Falling in love had allowed what he described to Ayerst as an ‘impulsive release of emotion’ and, as a consequence, ‘we are both less repressed . . . consequently more open and frank to one another’.³⁰

The quartet was completed on 23 September 1935. Tippett was thirty and had finally composed a work that signalled his compositional maturity. Falling in love, he recollected, ‘was a major factor underlying the discovery of my own individual musical “voice” – something that couldn’t be analysed purely in technical terms: all that love flowed out in the slow movement of my First String Quartet, an unbroken span of lyrical music in which all four instruments sing ardently from start to finish’.³¹ The mood at the outset of that movement is one of sweet contentment, with melodic lines that soar ecstatically upwards in pitch and dynamic. It is not without tension, which builds in intensity to an extended fortissimo climax before abruptly subsiding to a more quiescent tranquillo section and ending with the same gentle appoggiatura in the viola with which it began. By contrast, the robust finale, metrically unpredictable and irrepressibly energetic, represents the sudden unleashing of Tippett’s rhythmic gift. Its blithe free-spiritedness is complemented by the intellectual rigour of fugue; both elements seem to hark back to the vitality of a golden age (encompassing the Elizabethans as well as late Beethoven) as an antidote to the present one. On the manuscript of this movement Tippett wrote a quotation from William Blake – ‘Damn braces, bless relaxes’ – those few words signifying the jettisoning of the restraints produced, as Blake makes clear elsewhere, by the words ‘Thou shalt not’.³²

The full significance of the epigraph becomes clear in Tippett’s following work, a setting of Blake’s ‘A Song of Liberty’ from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Soon after the completion of the quartet, Tippett’s relationship with Franks began to fall apart. In about 1936 he wrote to Ayerst that Franks visited on weekends but they no longer slept together. ‘Suffice it to say that physically I’m very turned in on myself at home, very lecherous in the street after handsome young men, apparently longing to be married and with a home, but none of these stop the work which is at high pressure.’³³ Setting Blake was a tribute to Franks, who worked with him on the text. But such was Tippett’s mental anguish that he decided he needed to see the psychoanalyst John Layard because, as he wrote to Ayerst, ‘I’m absolutely lost’.³⁴

If the published sequence of letters to Ayerst is correct, some time during the composition of A Song of Liberty (1937) Tippett was introduced by Ayerst to Layard, who had been instrumental in enabling both Auden and Isherwood to come to terms with sexual guilt and repression.³⁵ Layard was a Cambridge-educated anthropologist who, after a year of research in Malekula (Vanuatu), had returned to England and suffered a nervous breakdown, whereupon he became a patient of American psychotherapist Homer Lane. Lane believed that human nature was innately good and devised a doctrine of ‘Original Goodness’ that proposed complete freedom of behaviour and expression. Layard revered Lane and developed his theories into a theology in which God represents physical desires and the Devil the conscious control of them. He also subscribed to Georg Groddeck’s theory of the psychosomatic origins of illness, assuming that all disease was in some way the consequence of the subject’s self-deception. In Isherwood’s transcription of Layard’s ideas,

For Isherwood, as for Auden, these were ‘life-shaking words’. Layard’s ideas owed as much to Blake as they did to Lane or to D. H. Lawrence, and as the seeds of Tippett’s own rebelliousness were ‘sown by Blake’ Layard’s ideas may have seemed to offer confirmation of the views Tippett had already formed.³⁷

A Song of Liberty was completed, symbolically, on May Day in 1937. Blake’s text is a call to revolution: he identifies the sickness of Albion and exhorts ‘the citizen of London’ to recognize the forces of oppression that inhibit the growth of the (political) body. By recasting words from Revelation, Blake foreshadows a time when society would be released from the fetters of orthodox religion, when ‘the Priests of the Raven’ will no longer ‘curse the sons of joy’. The final line, ‘For everything that lives is Holy’, corresponds to Layard’s idea that desires are inherently good, and that repression is unwarranted. Tippett’s setting is an expression of the shedding of restraint: an emphatic arpeggiating statement in which, in Kemp’s words, ‘compressed musical energy is released in soaring intertwining contrapuntal lines’ ( Ex.5.1).³⁸ By ventriloquizing Blake, Tippett harnessed an elliptical poetic language to his own political ends. But the work is as much a protest against Britain’s benighted history of social puritanism as it is a political manifesto.

Ex. 5.1 A Song of Liberty, ‘For everything that lives is Holy’, opening

A Child of Our Time (1939–41): ‘an impression of something suffered’³⁹

Tippett’s relationship with Franks ended abruptly in August 1938, when Franks announced that he intended to marry. But it had been a festering sore well before that. In a letter to Ayerst from 1937 Tippett referred to the ‘intensity and pain’ of the experience, which made him ‘less sure and happy about myself’.⁴⁰ He had no regrets – ‘it hardly matters if my life does get buggered up a bit in consequence [because] I have also gained in width and love’ – but all of the quandaries of homosexual identity now returned.⁴¹ ‘Queerness’ brought feelings of shame and inferiority. As he began to realize the cost that conscientious objection would bring he empathized more than ever with ‘the outcast and the scapegoats’.⁴² He could not bear the thought of ‘lads’ such as those he met in Yorkshire having to fight; nor could he countenance the annihilation of those children he had met on holidays at the Odenwaldschule in Heppenheim. Such was his identification with the oppressed that when he was finally sent to prison, after years of anxiety and confrontation, he felt he had ‘come home’.⁴³

Only three months after the break with Franks, and during the few months that Tippett underwent formal psychoanalysis with Layard, he read newspaper reports of an attack on Ernst vom Rath, a German official at the embassy in Paris, shot by a seventeen-year-old stateless Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. The boy seemed too young to have committed such an act, looking, as the Daily Worker reported, hardly more than thirteen.⁴⁴ Separated from family members, who had been ‘driven like cattle to the Polish frontier’, the boy was quoted in the papers declaring ‘there was no other way to express my will’.⁴⁵ Vom Rath died two days later, and on the following day German mobs took their revenge on Jews in the infamous Kristallnacht, sanctioned by Goebbels as ‘justified indignation’ for a ‘cowardly assassination’.⁴⁶ Tippett immediately drafted the text of an oratorio documenting the historical moment. He included references to the ‘scapegoats’ of the Great War, the ‘starvation’ he had himself witnessed in the North, the ‘persecution’ and ‘pogroms’ perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the desperate state of dispossessed people at a ‘frontier’. All of this is, however, allegorical of the situation of the young homosexual in thirties English society, too young to have sat ‘the Test’ of masculinity that was the Great War, unfitted for the conventions of marriage and home, persecuted both in print and according to the law, and mired on the borders of acceptable society.⁴⁷ Much later, when Tippett sent Layard the score of the completed work, he confided, ‘You will see a great deal of the roots [?] of the words, wh[ich] others will not & some of the metaphors will be comprehensible, wh[ich] others find meaningless. As you will see at once, there is a psychological as well as social & dramatic plane.’⁴⁸ Layard, more than any other, would have recognized that ‘the child’ of the title is not only ‘a child of my time’, as Tippett told Anthony Clare, but Tippett himself.⁴⁹

The music was composed after nine months of intensive, self-directed Jungian analysis of Tippett’s dreams – one final dream produced the release he needed to begin work. Certain isolated numbers present the autobiographical drama, and without clues provided by knowledge of Tippett’s own psychological journey much of it seems deliberately opaque. In No. 2 Tippett paints a portrait of psychological disorder, described in his notes as ‘the accumulation of unconscious, dark, destructive powers that burst up in man as a disease, war, revolution and so forth’.⁵⁰ The ‘living God’, a figure that can be interpreted in Layard’s terms as the physicality of desire, has been entrapped. Equally, the ‘cancer’ that develops is, taking Groddeck’s view, symptomatic of a disordered mind.⁵¹ Here is the ‘darkest’ hour of the work, a morbid ‘turn’ from the E minor of the opening to a bleak E♭ minor. The interior drama is made more explicit in No. 6 when, after the tenor soloist (the boy) sings of his hunger in an unsullied minor mode, chromaticism infects his confession that he is ‘caught between my desires and their frustration’. The following line, ‘How can I grow to a man’s stature?’, is an impassioned fortissimo outburst that is a deliberate reminiscence of the sinister descending chromatic line of the theme of the earlier ‘Chorus of the Oppressed’ (Exx. 5.2 (a) and 5.2 (b)). Its awkward prosody and sinking spirits place his voice at odds with the simple gaiety of the habanera accompaniment. Here is Tippett drawing an analogy between the poverty and isolation of the dispossessed and the anguish of a boy forced to remain a boy. In doing so he appears to suggest a link between the state’s rapaciousness and its nurture of the forces of sexual repression.

Ex. 5.2 A Child of Our Time: (a) No. 5, ‘Chorus of the Oppressed’, opening, sopranos only; (b) No. 6, tenor solo, ‘I have no money for my bread’, Fig. 46:5–9

In No. 17, ‘A curse is born’, the alto (the anima, who in Jungian terms is the feminine ‘soul’ of man) observes the consequences: the boy’s ‘other self’, which is ‘demonic and destructive’, overwhelms him. He shoots ‘the official’, who is not vom Rath but the boy’s ‘dark brother’. There is a remarkably similar scene in Auden’s play Paid on Both Sides, one that was added to the work’s first draft after Auden met Layard in Berlin in 1928. Auden’s plot is superficially a Romeo and Juliet-type tale of two feuding families: John, the son of one, falls in love with Anne, the daughter of the other. The origin of the feud – a correlative of Tippett’s ‘curse’ – has been lost to memory, leading John to search for it in a dream. The dream takes the form of a trial in which John is the prosecutor and a Spy (Anne’s brother) is the accused. John goes to shoot the Spy, an indication that he is ‘very very ill’.⁵² But a cure is promised. A ‘Man-Woman’ appears, a figure symbolically imprisoned by barbed wire who accuses John of ‘playing with himself’.⁵³ Thus if there is an illness that needs a cure, Auden suggests that its basis is psychological and its symptoms are sexual. Unable to bear the accusations, John shoots the Spy, who is revived by a comic doctor. The dream ends when John and the Spy plant a tree (a sign that ‘Spring will come’) and John recognizes that he and the Spy are ‘sharers of the same house’ – two halves of a single personality.⁵⁴ Afterwards, John and Anne proceed to marriage. But in a tragic conclusion that suggests the ‘cure’ was not a cure after all, the cycle of feuding is renewed by the families’ mothers. Whereas, through his dream, John had repaired his divided psyche, and thereby gained the hope of marrying, the action of the mothers ensures that the play ends with his death. As he does elsewhere, Auden blames mothers for their sons’ inability to grow up or out of a suffocating past. In his own case, he gave credence to the Freudian cliché that ‘the bugger gets too much mother love so sheers off women altogether’.⁵⁵ Tippett’s relationship with his mother was similarly troubled – disclosing his sexuality to her produced an amnesia he alleged lasted for decades.⁵⁶ That personal rift, and Auden’s/Layard’s interpretation of its psychological origins, clarifies why it is that in the oratorio draft of No. 6 (the boy’s expression of his sexual frustration) he complains that ‘Women have hold on my entrails’.⁵⁷ Although Tippett omitted this perhaps too graphic line in the final version, it is the work’s mother (not Grynszpan’s sister as it was in reality) who writes to the boy, the mother he cries out to from prison, and the mother who confesses ‘What have I done to you, my son?’. There is no father figure in either Paid on Both Sides or the oratorio.

Implicit in both works is not just the problem of the aetiology of same-sex desire but the problem of masculinity in a society that associated homosexuality with effeminacy. ‘All buggers,’ according to Auden, ‘suffer under the reproach, real or imaginary, of “Call yourself a man”.’⁵⁸ Sensuality and emotion in a man were suspiciously feminine, which explains Tippett’s constant apology in his correspondence for his sensitivity, emotional fragility and impulsive sensuality. In the wake of Franks’s preference for heterosexual marriage, Tippett was only too conscious of his lack of conformity to the masculine norm, and what this denied him. His theorizing on the subject is poured into the oratorio ‘almost like revelation’ and more explicitly in his letters to Douglas (Den) Newton, a nineteen-year-old poet and conscientious objector whom he met in 1939.⁵⁹ As an artist, Tippett knew he was pigeonholed as a feminine man – he told Newton:

Wholeness, according to A Child of Our Time, can only be achieved when the anima is no longer denied (or imprisoned, as in Auden’s play). Then, ‘The soul of man is impassioned like a woman’ (No. 27). At first, however, the alto/anima’s angular vocal line perpetuates the slippery semitone-infested descent seen in Nos. 2 and 6. But, with the promise that ‘the soul’ will be ‘illuminated by the sun’, the chromaticism is displaced by diatonic F major. ‘Hope’ and ‘spring’ are declared in ecstatic upward leaps that coincide with an arrival in the key of A major. The boy does not find love or marry, and remains outcast, just as Tippett believed himself to be. But the ‘spring’ (or rebirth) he prescribes is more unequivocal than Auden’s because Tippett has achieved something more valuable: passage, in Blakean terms, from the state of Innocence to the knowledge of Experience.⁶¹ As Tippett explained to Layard in 1941, ‘The war happened for me inside, all the years with Wilf. Now it’s a different sort of war – I am at peace – voluntarily in a world where the demonic forces have been let loose, or broke loose again. Whichever way I travel I can’t in myself go under to them, that is all in the past.’⁶² He accepted the complementarity of masculine and feminine in himself, deciding, as he told Newton, that if the intellectual life was ‘active and virile, then sensitivity, the feminine within us, becomes eventually a source of width and strength’.⁶³ ‘Anyhow’, he concluded with references to both Blake and Layard, ‘follow the instincts however they come out and take the joy as it flies’.⁶⁴

The Heart’s Assurance (1950–1): memorial of the ‘personal wound’

A few months after completing the oratorio Tippett informed Layard that ‘Even the biggest price of all, the once shameful buggery, is [now] seen as the inexhaustible mystery, leading straight back to Hermes & the endless shadow world.’⁶⁵ ‘Hermaphroditism’ was no longer a ‘stigma’ but ‘a fecundity’. John Amis recalls the thriving homosociality of Tippett’s home in the war years and that lovers were present from time to time.⁶⁶ In 1941 Tippett dreamed of ‘a sort of gay and sensual notion of sexual life’ with the painter Karl Hawker (another conscientious objector).⁶⁷ But Hawker married during the war, shattering that dream. In 1943, when Den Newton advised Tippett of a girlfriend, Tippett conceded his hurt, which was ‘simply the old sore, or wound that is for a second fingered’.⁶⁸ Knowing he would be asked for an explanation, he deflected it with the remark ‘It’s all in the Child.’ Although not deprived of companionship he sometimes felt starved of sex, and confided to the now-distant Newton: ‘I fall for soldiers in the train – and even they for me – but they get out at other stations.’⁶⁹ Over the course of the next ten years Tippett pursued an intermittent relationship with a young conductor, John Minchinton, but he too had girlfriends and eventually married.⁷⁰

Occasionally Tippett’s friend Francesca Allinson shared his cottage, and although bisexual she attempted to persuade him of the possibility of having children together. She was three years older than Tippett, and they had many interests and convictions in common, including pacifism. But her health was increasingly depleted by the effects of goitre and in 1945 she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Stour. She left Tippett a note and a photo of them both with children taken on a visit to Germany, implying that another cause of her actions was that, in her early forties, she knew she would never have children. Her death was a cataclysm for Tippett. Questioning, as he did, whether he had contributed to her despair reopened a ‘personal wound’ that he knew would never heal.⁷¹ In 1950 he began a song cycle in Allinson’s memory, following her instructions to ‘keep a place warm for me in your heart’.⁷² Coincidentally, it is called The Heart’s Assurance.

In a lecture from the 1970s Tippett referred to the ‘wound’ as a canker in the psyche.⁷³ Tippett could not have been unaware of Auden’s ‘Letter to a Wound’ which forms a section of The Orators. The title of the letter is a pun on a literal wound, an anal fissure that Auden jokingly referred to as ‘the stigmata of Sodom’.⁷⁴ Had it been a war wound, Auden might have boasted of it as the mark of a manly warrior. Instead, it was a guilty secret. ‘The surgeon was dead right’, he confides in the terms of a lover, ‘Nothing will ever part us.’⁷⁵ Tippett’s notion of an ineradicable wound was drawn from the myth of Philoctetes, a Greek warrior who possessed a magic bow capable of ensuring victory in the war with Troy. But because of an incurable and putrid wound he is ostracized and abandoned on an island until rescued by a warrior wanting the bow. In about 1944 Tippett read Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow’, which develops the corollary that ‘genius and disease, like strength and mutilation, may be inextricably bound up together’.⁷⁶ Tippett immediately wrote to Allinson of the myth’s potential for operatic translation. In reflections on the myth’s kinship to elements of the opera scenario he was then crafting he mused on the magic weapon as a ‘profound dream symbol . . . a sexual weapon & many other things (modern war & revolution)’.⁷⁷ What most resonated with Tippett was Wilson’s explanation of the concept of a superior strength that is inseparable from some defect. Tippett, by referring to his own wound, was signifying something socially repugnant, even unspeakable, which can nevertheless be seen as a source of potency.

The Heart’s Assurance began simply as a memorial to the dead, but the dead are, explicitly, ‘young men’. For his texts Tippett chose three poems (‘Song’, ‘Compassion’ and ‘The Dancer’) by Alun Lewis, a young Welsh non-combatant killed accidentally in Burma in 1944. A further two poems (‘Song: The Heart’s Assurance’ and ‘Remember Your Lovers’) are by Sidney Keyes, who died mysteriously at the age of twenty while serving in Africa. For some, Keyes was the most important poet of the war, allotting him a status comparable to Wilfred Owen and A. E. Housman, who Tippett cherished from the previous one. Both poets were pacifist by nature. Lewis is described as ‘a divided man’ struggling with the conflict between his active and contemplative natures, distressed at having to participate in war and being unable to pursue his creative work. Some said Keyes had a ‘split personality’, crazy ‘with the utter futility, destructiveness and emptiness’ of his life, for whom love was ‘a sort of battle and one that never brings any victory, but only unrest and passion’.⁷⁸ Both poets wrote of the tribulations of love: Lewis left a wife in Wales and a lover in India, while Keyes was profoundly affected by the end of an affair that took place when he was a student at Oxford.

The first, third and fifth poems are demonstrably poems of war, the first addressing a soldier-lad, the third depicting a wife tending the bloodied wounds of a dying man, and the last portraying young men ‘in the carven beds of death’. Each addresses the subject of love, predominantly that of husband and wife. Unusually, the voice of the last poem is that of the living, who remind already dead ‘young men’ of the love they shared. But whereas Tippett wrote publicly that this voice was that of ‘a young woman singing out over the Elysian fields to the young men in the fields beyond’, for him personally this voice was male.⁷⁹ Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears premiered the work. Tippett wrote to Britten that he could ‘so clearly . . . hear Peter calling to the young men in the fields of death, even though formally it may be supposed to be a woman. I can’t quite tell why, but the man’s voice seems right-er – and Peter’s particularly.’⁸⁰ The visual and audible double entendre of Pears singing in remembrance of war dead allows for a reading of the piece’s private as well as public meaning.

Underlining the suggestions of homoeroticism that lie in Tippett’s imagining of its performance are the literal memories embedded in the music. The opening ascending fifth of ‘Remember Your Lovers’ is an unmistakable reference to the ‘Last Post’, and so to the fallen of the Great War. Its iridescent setting of the word ‘remember’ is an echo of the ‘magic’ of Purcell’s setting of the word and it was Allinson who had introduced Tippett to Purcell.⁸¹ Yet that relationship was chaste. The lovers Tippett himself remembers from the war years are those he brought ‘home’ into a ‘lust as bright as candle flame’ – not Allinson but men such as Hawker and Newton. For it was Newton who brought him the ‘pleasure’ that in the song is ‘pure and unmixed’ and it was in Newton’s arms that he recalled lying ‘happy as a child’.⁸² When the stuttering piano chords first heard on the word ‘remember’ culminate at the phrase ‘We brought you . . . home’ in a recognizable allusion to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, and so to one of Tippett’s personal ‘gods’, this ‘home’ with its consonant point of rest is identified as Tippett’s own (see Ex. 5.3). The song memorializes his own lost loves and suggests, furthermore, that only memories and music survive. As Tippett told Layard, ‘my serenity and gaiety have always been at a price’, and this price was not just that as a pacifist and a homosexual he was obliged to sit ‘with the scapegoats & the outcasts’ but that as an artist he might have to surrender love itself.⁸³ Tippett may have believed that his personal wounds would never heal, but it is plain that for him it was in music (as in Lewis’s ‘Song’) that ‘what’s transfigured will live on / Long after Death has come and gone’.

Ex. 5.3 The Heart’s Assurance, No. 5, ‘Remember Your Lovers’, bars 32–4

Afterword: ‘sheer old British battiness’?⁸⁴

Through the 1930s and into the 1940s – emotionally turbulent years for Tippett – composition allowed him to explore or evaluate his states of mind. Expressions of love, loss, pleasure and sexual frustration are all present in the works of those decades, amounting to a kind of Bildungsroman of the modern homosexual. Reading those works now, with the benefit of personal papers and the insights of queer studies,⁸⁵ allows a reinterpretation of the idiosyncratic language often mocked as an indication of Tippett’s ‘battiness’. But regardless of his detractors, Tippett was determined to sustain an element of ambiguity, if not mystery, in his works with poetic texts, and in the 1930s and 40s he was intent on discovering a method of ‘transmuting’ the personal through myth and metaphor, a method soon codified into a ‘rule’ that was to hold for the remainder of his output.⁸⁶ In doing so, he arrived at a mode of communication that synthesized private and public worlds. The private remains, both present and absent: present to those privileged few who have access to its codes, and absent because it has not been declared and remains deniable. Yet as much as Tippett might have portrayed himself (and seen himself) as a loner, he was not the only left-wing homosexual artist formulating what Bozorth identifies as ‘a queer aesthetic with a political conscience’, as is shown by correspondences between Auden’s poetry of the thirties and A Child of Our Time.⁸⁷ Nor is there any coincidence in the separation by only a few years of A Child of Our Time and Peter Grimes, works which both allegorize the oppression of the homosexual. If Philip Brett can marvel at how a work such as Grimes could have been written as early as 1945, how much more astonishing is Tippett’s mythologization of ‘queer’ experience in a work completed in 1941.⁸⁸ But where Britten’s Grimes suffers an obliteration that the composer never experienced, the ‘hero’ of A Child (and Tippett himself) reaches a much more positive reconciliation of the psyche. The serenity that Tippett gained in the late 1940s was not won through the resolution of the personal or social dilemmas of his sexuality, but because he understood that what society considered disordered or even diseased could be the stuff of art. This ‘coming out to oneself’ was succeeded, eventually, by a coming out to society itself. If in very old age his ‘spectacularly camp’ appearance in ‘psychedelically swirling trousers’ was for Rupert Christiansen evidence that Tippett had ‘gone a bit potty’, he sensed there was every possibility that ‘it is with Blake and Yeats that his silliness more sublimely belongs’.⁸⁹

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.