Michael Tippett was among those 20th-century composers who saw their work in a social context, always alive to the social and philosophical issues of the day. In his compositions, blues and spirituals can be found side by side with the extended dissonances of the atonal 20th-century idiom.
Tippett was born in London on January 2, 1905, the child of a lawyer and a nurse. His mother was an active suffragette, and perhaps it is from her that he acquired the social activism that marked many of his works. Residence on the continent gave him fluency in French, Italian, and German as a child. Tippett attended the Fettes School in Edinburgh, and in 1923 entered the Royal College of Music as a student of composition, conducting, and piano. At the college, Tippett familiarised himself with the scores of Palestrina and other 16th-century composers, and some of his compositions echo the unmetred fluency of early music. In addition, he studied counterpoint with R. O. Morris for over a year, supporting himself by teaching French and only able to compose in his leisure time. A concert of his early compositions was given in Oxford in 1930, and his first string quartet was published in 1935.
In the 1930s, Tippett worked with the unemployed in the north of England, composing for them a short opera, Robin Hood. In 1940, he became director of music at Morley College, London, where Gustav HOLST had taught three decades earlier. Tippett remained in the post until 1951. During World War II, he served a three-month jail term as a conscientious objector. The revelation of the destruction of European Jewry affected Tippett deeply, and he adapted his oratorio, A Child of Our Time, to tell their story. The score was enthusiastically received at its first performance in 1944.
The success of A Child of Our Time gave Tippett the impetus to compose four more operas, the first of which, The Midsummer Marriage, was performed at Covent Garden in 1955. His other operas are King Priam (1962); The Knot Garden (1970), and The Ice Break (1977). The last opera depicts American race relations, using riot scenes and a broad mix of musical references including the blues. All these operas had libretti written by Tippett himself. His operas moved in great strides of experi-mentalism—King Priam is based on the Greek epic, the Iliad, and the score has something of the impersonal grandeur of Greek tragedy. In The Knot Garden, Tippett moved to a contemporary scenario, dealing with a web of complex human relationships although without a conventional plot.
Other works include a piano concerto, four piano sonatas, five string quartets and four symphonies, plus the well-known Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. Tippett set to music the words of modern poets—Crown of the Year (1958) was a choral setting of a poem by his friend Christopher Fry, and he used the poetry of W. B. Yeats in Music for Words Perhaps (1960) for speaker and chamber ensemble, and in Byzantium (1989) for soprano and instruments.
During the 1960s, Tippett served as director of the Bath Festival in England, taught in the United States at Aspen in 1965, and was knighted by the Queen in 1966. His last major work, the oratorio The Mask of Time, premiered in 1983. Tippett was always an active and articulate figure in music education, and a proponent of the broader implications of music in people’s lives. He wrote a number of books including Moving into Aquarius, which embodied his philosophy of the New Age. Tippett died on January 8, 1998.
Jane Prendergast
SEE ALSO:
CHAMBER MUSIC; OPERA; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC; VOCAL AND CHORAL MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Kemp, Ian. Tippett, The Composer and His Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984); Tippett, Michael, and Meirion Bowen, ed. Tippett on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
A Child of Our Time; The Blue Guitar; Five String Quartets; King Priam; Symphony No. 4; Triple Concerto for Violin, Viola and Cello.