question: What was the title of the work that Mellers called a mind-boggling comic history of the universe?
context: In the late 1970s Tippett produced three single-movement instrumental works: the Symphony No. 4 (1977), the String Quartet No. 4 (1978), and the Triple Concerto for violin, viola and cello (1979).  The symphony, written in the manner of the tone poem or symphonic fantasia exemplified by Sibelius, represents what Tippett describes as a birth-to-death cycle, beginning and ending with the sounds of breathing. This effect was initially provided by a wind machine, although other means have been tried, with mixed results—according to Bowen "the sounds emitted can turn out to be redolent of a space-fiction film or a bordello".   The Fourth String Quartet, Tippett explains, is an exercise in "finding a sound" that he first encountered in the incidental music to a television programme on Rembrandt. In the Triple Concerto, which is thematically related to the Fourth Quartet and quotes from it, the three solo instruments  perform individually rather than as a formal grouping. The work acknowledges Tippett's past with quotations from The Midsummer Marriage.
   
  Tippett described the longest and most ambitious of his late works, the oratorio The Mask of Time (1982), as "a pageant of sorts  with an ultimately lofty message". Mellers called the work "a mind-boggling cosmic history of the universe".   Paul Driver, who had been a critic of Tippett's new style, wrote that the Mask  revealed "the authentic early Tippett", with a return to the lyricism of The Midsummer Marriage and multiple acknowledgements of his early compositions.Tippett had intended The Ice Break to be his final opera, but in 1985 he began work on New Year.  Bowen saw this work as a summary of ideas and images that had attracted Tippett throughout his working life. Donal Henahan was dismissive of the music: "... the score generally natters along in the numbing, not-quite-atonal but antimelodic style familiar from other Tippett works." In Byzantium (1990), Tippett set the five stanzas of W. B. Yeats's poem, with added orchestral interludes. By this time he was professing little interest in his own work beyond its creation; performance and reception had become irrelevant to him. In 1996 he told an interviewer: "I'm outside the music I've made, I have no interest in it". After the String Quartet No. 5 (1991), which connects thematically with earlier works, Tippett closed his main output with The Rose Lake (1993), described in Tippett's Daily Telegraph obituary as "of luminous beauty ... a worthy ending to a remarkable career".
answers.text: The Mask of Time