Sir Michael Tippett

Sir Michael Tippett (London, 1905 – London, 1998) was one of the most significant British composers of the twentieth century. His importance lies both in the renewal he brought to genres such as the symphony, the concerto, opera, the string quartet and the sonata, and in his awareness, expressed in his writings and his compositional practice, of the complexities of the modern condition and of the artist's role within it. His long life took him through radically different social and cultural climates, a change reflected in a dramatic shift towards modernism in the 1960s.

Origins and training

Tippett was born into a middle-class family of liberal convictions. His father was an entrepreneur with a free-thinking temperament and his mother a suffragette; both shaped his childhood in rural Suffolk. After entering the British public school system he began to study the piano, and at Stamford Grammar School he resolved firmly to become a composer. In 1923 he entered the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Charles Wood and C. H. Kitson, and conducting with Boult and Sargent. His early student works show how long the road to professional standing would be, and how much of his eventual success rested on sheer application rather than innate facility. His years in London also brought lasting and important friendships.

The apprenticeship in Oxted

After leaving the college in 1928, he settled in Oxted, Surrey, where he remained until 1951. There he led the local amateur music community, explored repertory that interested him, such as the English madrigal school, and staged several operatic productions. After a concert of his own music in 1930, he judged that he needed further tuition and returned to the college for two years to study counterpoint with R. O. Morris.

Social commitment and personal crisis

During the Depression his political consciousness sharpened. He took part musically in work-camps in North Yorkshire and founded the South London Orchestra, made up of unemployed professional musicians. In 1935 he briefly joined the British Communist Party, from which he soon distanced himself because of his Trotskyist sympathies. That same year he embraced pacifism. His political concerns were soon absorbed, however, by a personal crisis, aggravated by the breakup of a relationship with the painter Wilfred Franks and by the question of his homosexuality. After a period of analysing his own dreams in 1939, he reached an acceptance of his creative drives and sexual orientation, with the conviction that composition must come first. From then on his social preoccupations were transposed into the more abstract framework of high art, beginning with the oratorio *A Child of our Time*.

War, maturity and early major works

During the Second World War his pacifism led to three months' imprisonment in 1943 as a conscientious objector. On his release he resumed his post as music director of Morley College, London, which he held until 1951. His reputation grew, and he came into contact with figures such as Walton and Britten. His early style drew on the revival of materials and ideas from the past, especially from the English Renaissance and Baroque and from Beethoven. Works such as the Concerto for Double String Orchestra and the First Symphony explore fugue and sonata form, while his cantatas and song cycles extend the English lyric tradition. *A Child of our Time* (1939–41), which mingles echoes of the Baroque oratorio with African American spirituals, became one of his most performed works. His first opera, *The Midsummer Marriage* (1946–52), presents the union of opposites as an image of human wholeness, in a renewed tonal idiom. The Piano Concerto (1953–55) and the Second Symphony (1956–57) already signalled a rethinking of his stylistic premises.

A radical turn towards modernism

The decisive step came with *King Priam* (1958–61). Its shift towards tragedy, drawn from Homer's Iliad, demanded music that was clear, concise and fragmented, with the orchestra divided into small ensembles. The change owed much to Greek tragedy and to Brecht's epic theatre, and it shaped almost all his later output, which favoured the juxtaposition of ideas over extended development. The influence of Stravinsky is evident, though his harmony keeps its own tension between tonality and dissonance. Later stage works, including *The Knot Garden* (1966–69) and *The Ice Break* (1973–76), deal with violence, alienation and the difficulty of social reconciliation in a harsher idiom.

Spirituality and the symphonic work of the second period

In this phase Tippett explored the spiritual search within human experience. *The Vision of Saint Augustine* (1963–65) takes up Augustine's reflections on time and eternity and seeks a secular metaphysics grounded in the sacred. In his instrumental music of the 1960s he experimented with new ways of breaking with the developmental principles of symphonic form. The Third Symphony (1970–72) condenses this search: its movements are organised into polarised pairs, and its finale parodies the closing ode of Beethoven's Ninth, ironising universal brotherhood almost to the point of negation before attempting a renewed, if fragile, affirmation.

Late works and late style

From the mid-1970s his music took new directions. The Fourth Symphony (1976–77), the Fourth String Quartet (1977–78) and the Triple Concerto (1978–79) share a single-movement form in which the boundaries between sections blur, together with a cyclic treatment that generates metaphors of totality. The Fourth Symphony traces the life cycle from birth to death. *The Mask of Time* (1980–82) addresses, on a cosmic scale, humanity's relationship with time and the transcendent, through quotations and allusions to his own music. His fifth opera, *New Year* (1986–88), revisits the theme of renewal from *The Midsummer Marriage*. His last works, among them *Byzantium* (1989–90), *The Rose Lake* (1991) and the Fifth String Quartet (1990–91), are marked by a simplification of language, a return to lyrical melody and diatonicism, and a heterogeneity of materials coexisting with less unified structures. Many hear in them a music that claims a moment of freedom from modernist prohibitions and affirms a personal humanism.

Legacy

Tippett died in London in 1998, having kept composing into his last years. After Britten's death he was regarded as the doyen of British music. Festivals, documentaries and official honours confirm his international reputation, though critical opinion remains divided over the late works. His music, shaped by a synthesis of English tradition, Central European classicism and modernism, remains one of the most personal contributions to twentieth-century music.