A Child of Our Time

At the climax of A Child of Our Time, four soloists emerge from the rich orchestral and choral texture with extended vocalizations that forego the explanatory power of language (Ex. 13.1). In this glorious moment we encounter a fundamental truth underpinning Tippett’s work: music can express profundities that are beyond the signifying power of words. In the case of A Child of Our Time, the fleeting apprehension gained is of the undivided psyche. Though the most immediate impetus for the work – the assassination in 1938 of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by the Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan, and the subsequent Nazi pogrom (Kristallnacht) – provides a narrative background, it is the underlying psychological message, universalizing the historical event, with which Tippett’s music is most concerned. Central to this was the choice of genre: oratorio provided a means of contemplating, rather than dramatizing, the causes and consequences (both external and internal) of the issues at hand.

Ex. 13.1 A Child of Our Time, No. 29, chorus and soli, Fig. 136:3–9

This much was already clear in a draft libretto that Tippett showed Eliot, in which the particular compositional situations and metaphors had already received their decisive formulation.¹⁸ The sketch clarified a tripartite form derived from the Messiah that in turn determined the structure of the philosophical argument. In the first part, Tippett outlines the general human condition, with reference to both groups and individuals, in which certain unconscious forces, and in particular the ‘shadow’, have been suppressed. In Part II specific consequences of this suppression are explored through a portrayal of Grynszpan’s story. The concluding part returns to a generalized stance. Here, Tippett reflects upon the necessity of confronting and accepting the inhumane within us if compassion, understanding and ‘the expression of our total humanity’ is to be possible – ‘I would know my shadow and my light’.¹⁹ Punctuating the work are five Negro spirituals that correspond to congregational hymns in the Bach Passions, and that stand metaphorically for ‘deep-seated collective responses’.²⁰ Moreover, Tippett planned each individual number, with both ‘function’ and ‘mood’ stipulated, prompting metaphorically and psychologically appropriate musical responses, such as the use of aria and recitative, or the use of fugue to present unitary moods. The words given to these numbers were designed primarily to fit the musical schema he had devised; the wealth of allusion contained within them (Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, C. G. Jung, the Bible and ‘folk idioms’) provides a link between musical and literary metaphor.

The temptation is to pursue the significations of these verbal allusions prior to attending to the music.²¹ However, with all of Tippett’s libretti, the assumption that there exists a unitary vision that can be expressed verbally is problematic: allusions might be chosen with scant regard for conveying the precise meaning of the sources, but rather, by virtue of the musical setting, they are chosen to articulate a deeper artistic truth.²² If the desired illumination of the human condition is to occur amidst the paradoxes presented in the libretto, then it is to the music that we must look. Thus the internal dynamic between recitative and dramatic scena – to provide forward momentum – and aria and spiritual – to provide points of emotional focus and sometimes repose – is given further impetus by virtue of a tonal plan that provides structural focus in Parts I and III and dramatic relationships within Part II; the form of the work thus provides a corollary to the arguments being made.²³

Such accounts, however, tend to smooth over the stylistic jolts caused by the spirituals which are just as problematic as the collision of literary allusions. Following Tippett’s lead, commentators have attempted to account for their inclusion by noting how the employment of certain intervals characteristic of the spirituals – notably the minor third, perfect fifth and minor seventh – are prominent too in the main body of the oratorio, though Kenneth Gloag has rightly questioned whether that is sufficient to mediate between Tippett’s ambiguous harmonic language and the relative simplicity of the spirituals.²⁴ Nevertheless, the stylistic jolts that result from their inclusion do have expressive impact which reminds us that, like in all oratorios, there are unfolding dramatic as well as abstract musical concerns.

In this context, shared motifs, as can be seen in the transition from the soprano aria (No. 7) to the first spiritual (No. 8) (see Ex. 13.2), ensure a certain expressive effect: the consolation of ‘stealing away to Jesus’ offered to the soprano gains additional force by virtue of its musical links to the cry of anguish ‘when I am dead’ (motifs x, x¹). And when, for instance, we hear the lilting rhythms of the cradle song and spiritual (motifs y, y¹), again over a harmonic pedal and with reference back to the same motivic shapes in the climax of the work (see Ex. 13.1), at the point of illumination when we are to understand that ‘spring’ cannot truly occur unless we accept the ‘winter’, we can begin to make more sense of the situation which led to such a cry in the first place.

Ex. 13.2 A Child of Our Time, Nos. 7, soprano solo, and 8, ‘A Spiritual’, Figs. 58:2–60:1

Such musico-dramatic interconnections help compensate for the stylistic jolts of the spirituals, and indicate that the problems posed by the libretto – not least the ‘indigestible psychological metaphors’ contained within²⁵ – are alleviated to a certain extent by the generic setting. More broadly, the oratorio suggests that Tippett’s belief that genre and form can be communicative vehicles for archetypical principles has some basis in practice. Thus although Tippett never again wrote music of such directness, the lessons learned in this work about the relationship between words and music were to prove invaluable in his vocal music for at least the next quarter of a century.

Smaller choral works

The smaller choral works, all composed for specific occasions or for amateur ensembles, have recently suffered from unfair critical neglect; they contain much that is attractive. Tippett wrote none of their texts; those that were not written specially for him usually contained some relevant reference or allusion, metaphorical or otherwise, to the event in question. Nevertheless, his dictate that the music should be the dominant partner generally remains operative, and these works, particularly the earlier ones, continue to treat genre archetypically.

The madrigals written in 1942, The Source (Edward Thomas) and The Windhover (Gerard Manley Hopkins), and the motets Plebs Angelica (1943–4) and The Weeping Babe (Edith Sitwell, 1944), represent a considerable advance on the choral writing of the oratorio, reflecting Tippett’s ongoing exploration of early music and his increasing fidelity to the rhythms of the English language. For Tippett, madrigals meant conversations,²⁶ prompting fluid shifts between unison, contrapuntal (frequently imitative) and homophonic textures; the works demonstrate too an increasing facility to animate strophic poetic texts with varied repetitions. The numerous poetic images in both texts suited this conversational attitude, inspiring new musical points for each new idea (to a fault, perhaps). Conversely, the motets, benefiting from poetically less dense texts, place greater emphasis on lyricism and textural contrasts;²⁷ expressively, they are more reflective than the madrigals. Plebs Angelica employs to good effect the double choir and triadic language common in English church music, without sacrificing individuality. The most accomplished of the four works, The Weeping Babe, offers an example of music ‘swallowing’ poetry, reversing the normal accentuation of words such as ‘flower’ by rhapsodizing on the final syllable (Ex. 13.3). This provides an analogue for the poetic softening of ‘sharp trochees, like “little” and “bitter” into gentle ones, like “flower” and “bower”’ by treating them all in a similar musical manner.²⁸ Doing so also enables the more conventionally set ‘Lullay’ at the centre of the work to gain (by virtue of contrast) both musical and expressive weight, thus contributing considerably to the work’s charm.

Ex. 13.3 The Weeping Babe, opening

Of the ten contributions to ‘A Garland for the Queen’, commissioned to mark Elizabeth II’s coronation, Tippett’s five-voice madrigal Dance, Clarion Air (Christopher Fry, 1952) has best stood the test of time. The text is notably more concise than those in Tippett’s previous choral works, enabling him to linger musically on the poetic images of each line. Repetition of words – almost entirely absent in the choral works of the 1940s – serves a dramatic and textural function (for instance, in the opening fanfare-like setting of ‘Dance’). It also enables Tippett to extend lines so that the formal proportions of the work are correct – a technique that he may have borrowed from Stravinsky’sLes Noces.²⁹

Stravinsky may also have reinvigorated Tippett’s interest in folk idioms; over the course of the 1950s this interest manifested itself in a series of folksong arrangements. In 1948, Tippett had used part of ‘Early One Morning’ in the Suite in D for the Birthday of Prince Charles, only for it to appear eventually in full as the first of the Four Songs from the British Isles for unaccompanied SATB choir (1956). Another song that Tippett had long admired, the Scottish ‘Skye Boat Song’ (published separately in 2002 as ‘Over the Sea to Skye’),³⁰ was eventually replaced for copyright reasons by ‘Poortith Cauld’; songs from Ireland and Wales completed the set as the second and fourth songs respectively. Together, the four movements correspond to the instrumental model of faster outer pieces flanking a scherzo and slow piece. Instrumental thinking may also contribute to the technical challenges presented by these pieces, despite Tippett’s claims to the contrary.³¹ An arrangement made in the same year of a Northumbrian folksong, Bonny at Morn, evaded such problems by having the choir sing in unison; above this, three recorders wheel and turn in ever-evolving and increasingly complex dancing lines, capturing something of the airiness of the melody itself. Similarly straightforward is the 1958 Unto the Hills Around Do I Lift My Longing Eyes (‘Wadhurst’ hymn tune), written in a ‘Scottish melodic style’ for the Salvation Army.³²

An altogether more successful contribution to amateur music-making can be found in the cantata Crown of the Year (1958). Composed for the girls of Badminton School, Bristol, to another text by Christopher Fry (which had previously been considered for ‘A Garland for the Queen’), the work balances the demands of writing for amateurs with a commitment to the highest musical values. As with the Four British Songs, there is an underlying four-movement schema, readily integrated into the cantata format, that complements the seasonal imagery of Fry’s libretto, which considers in turn the three former Queens of England before ending with Queen Elizabeth II as a ‘spring’ monarch (following the implied winter of World War II). Of these four movements, the outer two are for chorus and the inner two for soloists, between which are interspersed instrumental interludes and an icy refrain. Each section presents one or two clearly delineated expressive situations, with the exception of the extended fantasia finale which gathers up many of the moods, if not material, of the earlier movements in order to express a qualified optimism for the future. The instrumental accompaniments range from the relatively simple (such as the open strings of the violin in the second instrumental interlude) to the far more complex pianistic writing; the vocal writing, for the girls’ choir, is challenging in its use of dissonance but never ungrateful. The occasionally dry, if not didactic, passage aside, The Crown of the Year, particularly in the vocal movements and in the third interlude, contains some memorable and wonderfully executed ideas.

Tippett’s final four choral works are somewhat uneven in quality. Commentary techniques inform Lullaby (1959), a setting of a Yeats poem for six voices, a work that has certain shared concerns with Tippett’s later Yeats setting, Byzantium (1989–90). Written for the countertenor Alfred Deller, it is a curious study in line and colour: the accompanying voices provide a gloss on the countertenor’s words, repeating short motives and words to provide a halo around the central text, but also serving to throw the unique properties of the countertenor’s timbre into relief. Music (1960), a setting of Shelley’s words for unison voices, was written for the East Sussex and West Kent Choral Festival. In an inversion of Tippett’s usual practice – strangely, given the poem being set – words, rather than music, dominate: there is little in the somewhat functional accompaniment that aspires to the sentiments of the text. With The Shires Suite (1965–70) Tippett once again returns to writing for children. As in Crown of the Year, the more difficult material can be found in the instrumental writing – a recognition of the limitations of young people’s voices – and instrumental movements are interspersed between those for voice. All of the vocal material is canonic, drawing on sources from the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century. As with Bonny at Morn, the decision to keep the source material relatively intact throws the weight of the work onto the accompaniment, and the shifting and boisterous contexts Tippett provides are both touching and, where appropriate, vigorously good natured.

With the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis (1961), however, we have at least one choral work that holds its own in the company of those from the previous two decades. In the Magnificat, the progression through radically contrasting timbres and ideas (instrumental and vocal, chordal and polyphonic) obscures the fundamental notion that the organ is offering a running commentary on the material it punctuates: the jubilant Priam-like fanfares (exploiting the trumpet stop on the organ of St John’s College, Cambridge, for whom the work was written) and the continuously upward striving of organ chords expound the underlying joy of the setting. In the Nunc Dimittis, the organ’s role shifts to ‘primitive onomatopoësis of the thunderings of God’, with a treble soloist angelically voicing Simeon’s otherwise inexpressible thoughts.³³ By focusing on the poetic situation of the sacred texts – respectively, the altogether human apprehension of the transcendent provided by Mary and Simeon – Tippett demonstrates once again how musical metaphors can elicit fresh and original settings of even the most familiar texts.

Works for solo voice

By designating The Heart’s Assurance (1950–1) a song cycle, and Boyhood’s End (1943) a cantata in the Purcellian tradition of an extended solo song, Tippett contrasts the general situations of a ‘poet’s voice describing rather than an “I” talking’.³⁴ The emphasis on ‘situation’ leads naturally to The Heart’s Assurance’s exploration of a single theme (‘Love under the Shadow of Death’)³⁵ rather than the presentation of a story over a cycle, as it does in the character studies of Songs for Achilles (1961) for voice and guitar. The Songs for Ariel (1962), drawn from music written for The Tempest, have a dramatic background that binds them together.³⁶ In all these works we again encounter the vital communicative role played by genre.

Boyhood’s End sets a passage from W. H. Hudson’s autobiography that reflects on the loss of communion with nature experienced as he approached adulthood.³⁷ The text fulfils Tippett’s criteria for a cantata (an ‘I’ talking) whilst, more surprisingly, possessing strong musical implications. After an introductory declamatory recitative, ‘What then, did I want? . . . I want to keep what I have’, there follows a series of activities that Hudson deemed lost. Formally, the list is structured by infinitives (‘to rise’, ‘to climb’, ‘to ride’, ‘to lie’ and so on), though Tippett transforms the individual actions into particular emotional states that are wedded to a tight musical design. In fact, the relative energy of the activities corresponds closely to that of Tippett’s favoured multi-movement sequence (see above), thereby vouchsafing the cantata’s musical coherence.

Critics frequently highlight the climactic Purcellian melismas crowning the second section,³⁸ not least because they point towards The Midsummer Marriage. Yet their expressive impact requires the cumulative development across the first three strophes, the first of which is re-notated in Ex. 13.4. Here the situation is one of mounting excitement, evident in the non-alignment of accents between voice and accompaniment; in the shifting between simple, compound and irregular time; in the gradual ascent governing the voice; and in the expansion present in the setting of ‘morning’, ‘day’ and ‘year’. Each subsequent strophe inventively reworks such devices, building up to the jubilant climax. Purcellian influences can be found too in the ground bass of the slow recitative-like third section. The fourth section contrasts galloping motifs with florid water figures, following the text closely; the fifth is an example of Tippett’s predilection for fantasy forms in his finales. Though the directness and vigour of the music of all of these sections conflicts with the nostalgic aspects of Hudson’s text – another example of music ‘swallowing’ words – it is by no means to the work’s detriment. Rather, it suggests that although Hudson is no longer able to experience such activities first hand, the ecstatic images and memories nevertheless remain part of his adult self: they shape his inner life and as such retain a permanent freshness and vitality.

Ex. 13.4 Boyhood’s End, bars 38–53 (re-barred; octave doublings in accompaniment omitted)

The Heart’s Assurance, dedicated to Francesca Allinson, whose suicide in 1945 affected Tippett deeply,³⁹ is a sequence of five alternately slow and fast songs setting texts by the Second World War poets Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis. The chosen texts demand strophic forms: Tippett’s capacity for varied repetition is demonstrated masterfully in his settings. The slow songs have been criticized, however, for an over-abundance of decoration within which the poetry is easily ‘swallowed up’.⁴⁰ For instance, in the opening ‘Song’, the demisemiquaver flourishes in the accompaniment do indeed seem to sit at odds with the steady tread implied by the words ‘O Journeyman’ with which it begins. Yet the pianistic virtuosity sets ‘the poet describing’ into appropriate relief, regardless of whether one feels the figuration represents ‘the endless belt’ described in the text or not,⁴¹ and when this technique yields rewards such as the coruscating intensity generated between the static E♮s in the voice and the swirling accompaniment that envelops it (Ex. 13.5), arguments over general aesthetics of word–music relationships fast become moot.

Ex. 13.5 The Heart’s Assurance, No. 1, ‘Song’, bars 53–63

Similar qualities inform the remaining songs. The second, ‘The Heart’s Assurance’ juxtaposes dancing figuration (‘never trust the heart’s assurance’) with more reflective gestures (‘trust only the heart’s fear’); there is a similar, if less clearly demarcated, balance between sharpwards and flatwards tonal regions. ‘Compassion’ is underpinned by repeated ostinato-like figures within which moments of stillness provide expressive contrast. ‘The Dancer’, as Ian Kemp argues,⁴² mimics in its refrain the movements of a dancer. The weighty chords of ‘Remember your lovers’, alternating with fanfare-like solo refrains for the singer, provide a striking close.

The first of the three Songs for Achilles comes from Act Two of King Priam. Though the words and expansively lyrical lines speak of nostalgia, the sinewy counterpoint and barely repressed frustration of the guitar accompaniment suggest more complex emotions. These are developed in the remaining songs, of which the last is also notable for the use of a (near) palindrome to represent Achilles’s mother’s rise from and descent into the sea.

The Songs for Ariel are more accessible. On the one hand bound by the challenges of writing songs for actors, and on the other perhaps unable to ‘destroy’ the words of his beloved Shakespeare, Tippett strikes a balance between words and music that is unique in his output. It is in the central ‘Full Fathom Five’ that the resulting quality of restraint enables Tippett to rise fully to Shakespeare’s challenge. David Matthews has noted how the song is ‘a superb demonstration of how to make conventional chords sound fresh’;⁴³ the song as a whole might be taken as a marvellous metaphor for the situation conveyed in the words ‘rich and strange’.

From Ostia to Byzantium

Tippett returned to The Tempest in his short final work, Caliban’s Song (1995). Its paean to ‘sounds, sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’ culminates with the line ‘when I waked, I cried to dream again’, ending with an ambiguous chord, neither confirming nor denying the tonic A♭. This chord embodies the tension between ‘delight’ – the desire to ‘dream again’ – and the acknowledgement that ‘hurt’ does exist and cannot be wished away, and encapsulates Tippett’s increasingly ironic questioning of the relevance of artistic statements. In four large-scale compositions – The Vision of Saint Augustine, Songs for Dov (1969–70), The Mask of Time and Byzantium– such tensions manifest in complex (and abstruse) metaphorical constructions that place word–music relationships under sustained pressure. This in turn problematizes generic decisions: if the old certainties of music–text relations no longer obtain, or are no longer relevant, then the use of traditional genres for communicative purposes becomes suspect. The loosening of the bonds between text and genre consequently throws the weight of the word–music relationship elsewhere; in particular, intricate cross-references between both media become of increasing importance as a means of generating coherence.

The Vision of Saint Augustine for baritone solo, chorus and orchestra recalls A Child of Our Time in its tripartite preparation for, narration of and reflection upon the second of St Augustine’s visions as described in his autobiographical Confessions. Yet it is neither oratorio nor cantata, for neither is appropriate for the situation – our experience of temporality and our apprehension of eternity. Thus Tippett constructed a sophisticated libretto that treats Augustine’s text – in its original Latin – as a palimpsest, over which is laid related passages from elsewhere in the Confessions and from the Bible. For instance, Augustine’s first mention of the garden in Ostia where he and his mother experienced their vision prompts a setting from the Song of Songs; this in turn alludes to Augustine’s struggles with sensuality that prompted his first vision (Ex. 13.6). In doing so, a linear narrative is eschewed in favour of sudden shifts into the past and future as memories combine with anticipations of coming events. This is achieved within a musical design that similarly hints at, or develops, material that is to come, or has passed, enabling both text and music to comment on, and analyse, each other.

Ex. 13.6 The Vision of Saint Augustine, Figs. 19:4–22:1

The musical material is itself simultaneously progressive and retrospective in terms of Tippett’s own compositional output. On the one hand, there exist strong connections to his musical past, not least in the use of word-painting. For instance, verbs of motion tend to attract melismas, as with erigentes (‘rising’, Fig. 90) and perambulavimus (‘we passed through’, Fig. 93); hortus (‘garden’ – see Ex. 13.6) generates topical references to the pastoral; and inhiabamus (‘panting’, Fig. 61) suggests a leaping figure that is taken up in the choral alleluia at the end of Part I.⁴⁴ On the other hand, the communicative immediacy of such traditional elements is problematized, if not obscured, by (amongst other things) the complexity of both literary and musical organization; the superimpositions of material that is already tonally uncertain to form dense, chromatic passages; and a mosaic-like sectional construction that together serve as pointers towards the expressionism of Tippett’s music of the late 1960s and early 1970s.⁴⁵

This is most apparent in representations of spiritual ecstasy, for which Tippett drew on traditional Christian descriptions of angelic music, and in particular the idea of glossolalia: the shamanistic, if not orgiastic, use of lengthy melismas on vowels. Whilst this is not for Tippett a new resource (see Ex. 13.1), the frequency and above all virtuosity of his own glossolalia engenders a new mode of expression, pushing soloist and chorus alike to their technical limits: this is not a comforting alleluia, but rather a glimpse of something hovering just beyond our understanding.

The work’s textual and textural complexity, coupled with the use of Latin, requires more than had been the case in Tippett’s earlier works in that the music becomes the prime vehicle for the underlying sense of the piece. Thus Part I, which prepares for the vision in Part II, generates a sense of anticipation by virtue of a series of tensional waves. Recognizable points of focus, such as the numerous varied repetitions of the opening vocal exchanges, balance the tendency elsewhere towards differentiation and fragmentation. In combination with deft shaping of rhythmic energy, aided too by the broad spans of the baritone lines, Tippett ensures each successive climax is more potent than the last.

Part II concerns the vision itself. It begins with three broad paragraphs, which are recapitulated instrumentally at the end; the text reviews different and increasing levels of spirituality. The depiction of eternity requires of Tippett a new technique: a series of superimposed ostinati that are organized in such a way that it would take many hours before the music returned to its original state.⁴⁶ We only hear it for a minute or so before returning back ‘into’ time (as was the case for Augustine). Yet despite this glimpse of the divine there is also a sense of agency: the ostinati crescendo and diminuendo together, creating the impression of a slower, larger pulse that compromises the sense of eternity.

Whether the sense of agency in the vision was intentional or not, the distance between the human and the divine is explored in Part III. Here, Tippett reworks ideas from the earlier movements; though formally traditional, their appearance and function arise intimately from the musical depiction of Augustine’s contemplation of, and attempts to recapture, the experience of his vision. Of particular note is the recurrence of the Alleluia from Part II, repeatedly interrupted by the baritone, but each time picking up from where it left off. As Anthony Payne noted, such insertions vividly depict human fallibility, thus preparing the final spoken exhortation ‘I count myself not to have apprehended’.⁴⁷ The divine thus remains inaccessible, and neither words nor music are sufficient to alter this state of affairs.

A related path from innocence to experience informs the Songs for Dov. American influences in the foreground of the first song – derived from Act Two of The Knot Garden – can be detected in both libretto (‘play it cool’) and orchestration (an obbligato electric guitar); these are projected against the background of the European art song, indexed by an AAB construction and sophisticated harmonic language. This provides the metaphorical ‘situation’: the optimistic desire, born of innocence, to recreate the pastoral for modernity. The second song allegorizes Eliot’s thesis that artists learn through the imitation of, and development from, their predecessors.⁴⁸ Dov encounters Goethe, Shakespeare and Homer; none of the certainties embodied in these examples are found to be suitable for the modern world. The use of quotation here (we might add Wagner and, in the third song, Mussorgsky) and in the Third Symphony marks Tippett’s most extended use of collage, in a highly stylized depiction of how creative artists gain ‘experience’. In the final song, Dov faces the problem for all creative artists: how to confront the loss of communicative certainties and to write authentic music that nevertheless speaks to the world. Tippett introduces the opposition between the urban and the rural to represent the dilemma outlined by Pasternak of ‘rhetoric’ – the poet’s confrontation with society – versus ‘poetry’ – the images of beauty that come from the internal creative drive.⁴⁹ The former is presented by the boogie-woogie from The Knot Garden, the latter by a modern reclamation of the pastoral. The two are presented in opposition; the lack of reconciliation between them offers a potent metaphor for the problems facing an artist, yet the necessity of singing in the face of such uncertainties remains as strong as ever.

The Mask of Time’s title announces its generic background – the Renaissance masque, with its associations of pageantry and spectacle – whilst suggesting something secretive, unknown or unspoken. Written for ‘voices and instruments’ – actually a large chorus, four solo voices and an extended orchestra – it attempts in two extended parts, each subdivided into five movements, to deal with man’s attempts to understand his place in the universe. In Part I various modes of understanding – religious, scientific and artistic – are surveyed; each leads to alienation or confusion. In Part II the focus shifts to attempts to dominate or relate to the world; despite the presentation of a series of successive failures or tragedies, the work ends with a final, wordless exhortation to the need of continuing to celebrate, as and how we can.

The theatricality of the masque is realized with reference to a different musico-dramatic metaphor, that of television. Tippett acknowledges the influence of Jacob Bronowski’s 1973 television series The Ascent of Man on certain scenes and images,⁵⁰ but more generally, the fast cross-cutting between different musical, philosophical and literary ideas has a filmic quality. A more apposite metaphor, however, would be of a viewer armed with a TV remote control, regularly changing channels and attempting to make sense of the multiple images and points of view that pass by. By aiming to ‘accommodate a plurality of co-existing viewpoints’ Tippett offers a subjective, provisional and contestable attempt to ‘make sense’ of the multiple perspectives that he presents.⁵¹

To this end, his dense, allusive libretto makes ingenious connections and cross-references between disparate sources; the score similarly abounds in strongly articulated gestures and intra- and inter-textual links. Yet Tippett’s continued assertion that the text ‘compounded of metaphors’ is ‘swallowed up within the music’ seems disingenuous:⁵² even more than in The Vision of Saint Augustine, the words structure the music as much as the music structures the words. It is telling in this respect that Tippett’s notes for the work concentrate almost exclusively on explicating the meanings and references behind the libretto, with barely a mention of the musical ideas he uses; the repetitions and mosaic structures in the music consequently make little sense without the words. In fact, to evoke another metaphor, the work is closer to a hypertext than a text as such: each idea is specifically linked to others in a never-ending chain of signification.

Take, for instance, the word ‘sound’. Tippett offers a typically arresting image of this at the opening of The Mask of Time in order to ‘depict the cosmos metaphorically’ (Ex. 13.7).⁵³ The extended ‘sou-’ recurs in the word ‘resounding’ (Fig. 7), the fourths and fifths of Ex. 13.7 softened into implied dominant chords. The opening returns near the end of the ‘Jungle’ movement (Fig. 93), highlighting the relationship between creation and nature. In the depiction of early human societies in the fourth movement, the syllable ‘sou’ occurs in the phrase ‘southward to the sun’ (Fig. 110), establishing a tenuous link between man and nature; with the return of ‘resounding’ (Fig. 147), colouring the ritual trumpets and sacrifices of sun-worship, nature is explicitly bound up with religion and thereby creation myths. Yet in the sixth movement, mankind’s attempts to dominate life, represented by Shelley’s poem ‘The Triumph of Life’, are contrasted with the poet’s own death at sea; the burning of his corpse triggers another reiteration of the ‘resounding’ figure (Fig. 289) that is at once ironic (destruction, rather than creation) and ritualistic (sacrificial). Ex. 13.7 returns once more, in the Orpheus legend of movement nine, to underpin Rilke’s use of the word ‘sound’: here the citation acts as a literary analysis, noting the interconnectedness between sources.⁵⁴ Such links reinforce the idea that as mankind attempts to understand or control the cosmos through religion or art, we construct instead new forms of incomprehension, and we remain subject to, rather than masters of, death. Science, too, leads to the horrors of Hiroshima, as depicted in movements seven and eight.

Ex. 13.7 The Mask of Time, Part I, ‘Presence’, opening

The dynamism generated by such cross-references provides a momentum of its own, offering an alternative experience to the more traditional forms of development and teleological structures found in Tippett’s earlier vocal music. Yet it must also be acknowledged that despite telling and memorable musical images such as Ex. 13.7, there exist within the score problematic lapses of taste and invention. Though the onomatopoeic animal noises and cries of ‘Merde’ in the ‘Jungle’ movement might be excused as humour (see Ex. 13.8)⁵⁵ – this is, after all, a pageant, and certain aspects of the world are better dealt with with laughter – other ideas are much harder to explain away. For instance, the musical figure first heard in respect to ‘Allah’ and later for ‘China’ (Ex. 13.8) – thereby collapsing ‘the East’ into one questionable stereotype – leaves Tippett open to the same accusations of cultural, historical and geographical insensitivity of which he elsewhere accuses Eliot.⁵⁶ And if the central tone of The Mask of Time is one of sincere irony and ironic sincerity – witness the continual collapse of the profound into the mundane and vice versa – is it possible to take at face value the deeply felt and absolutely un-ironic moments such as the musical depiction of Hiroshima and the affecting threnody that follows?

Ex. 13.8 The Mask of Time, Part I, ‘Jungle’, Figs. 68:3–70:3

‘All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all’: thus sings the tenor, quoting Yeats, near the start of the work (Fig. 4). For Tippett, Yeats’s image of ‘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 mêlée of experience . . . it struck me also as a marvellous image of the artist, trying to put his message across’.⁵⁷The Mask of Time is accordingly an ambitious musical re-enactment of this mêlée, balancing the banal with the inspired, the authentic with the artificial, creating an innovative structure from the intricate network of metaphors and cross-references. Its undoubted generosity of spirit does not – cannot – conceal its problems, but it remains rarely less than interesting, and at its best it is profoundly beautiful and deeply moving.

Originally intended as the second of three songs for soprano and orchestra, it soon became apparent that Tippett’s setting of Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’ was substantial enough to stand on its own. Tippett treats the first two of Yeats’s stanzas as introductory – in the sense of providing a fund of images, both verbal and musical – before concentrating on the images of song and dance in the third and fourth stanzas. The ‘crystalline intensity’ of the text,⁵⁸ and in particular its internal cross-references, enabled Tippett to apply his by-now-familiar techniques of using precise musical gestures to underpin verbal connections – enabling the expansion of a short poem into nearly half-an-hour of music – sacrificing only the external allusions and commentaries found in The Vision of Saint Augustine and The Mask of Time.

The underlying ‘situation’ is that of the poetic ‘artefact’, ‘enshrining values that can be set against the impermanence of the everyday world and the complexities of the human beating heart’.⁵⁹ Thus although the setting contains numerous instances of direct word-painting (the use of gongs and birdsong, and a marvellously airy setting of the word ‘dome’ (Fig. 24) that evokes The Midsummer Marriage), Tippett’s music reflects the polished, objective quality of the poem in its own sharply defined material and virtuosic vocal writing. It was through Eliot that Tippett got to know both the poetry of Yeats and the idea of artefacts. This return to Eliot – consistent with the idea of reversal articulated in The Mask of Time – creates a neat symmetry to Tippett’s vocal output, forging unexpected yet entirely characteristic links with A Child of Our Time written some fifty years before.