Sir Michael Tippett | British composer | Britannica.com Sir Michael Tippett Alternative Title: Michael Kemp Tippett Sir Michael Tippett Gunther Schuller Sir Michael Tippett, in full Michael Kemp Tippett (born Jan. 2, 1905, London , Eng.—died Jan. 8, 1998, London), one of the leading English composers of the 20th century. Tippett studied composition (1923–28) at the Royal College of Music and privately (1930–32) with R.O. Morris. After serving as music director (1940–51) at Morley College, London, he became a radio and television speaker for the BBC and active as an orchestral conductor. He was knighted in 1966, and he served as director of the Bath (music) Festival from 1969 to 1974. Tippett developed slowly as a composer.

His early music was conservative , but in the late 1930s he developed a personal, modernistic idiom that was marked by rhapsodic lyricism, intricate counterpoint , and polyphonic rhythms that have a lilting, bounding quality. His first significant composition, an oratorio on his own libretto, A Child of Our Time (composed 1939–41), made him famous upon its performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1944. Tippett’s most successful works were on a large scale, in particular the operas The Midsummer Marriage (performed 1955), King Priam (1962), The Knot Garden (1970), and The Ice Break (1977), for which he wrote his own librettos. His instrumental works include four symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and piano sonatas. Beginning with King Priam, his surging rhythms and lush harmonies give way to a starker, more taut style featuring abrupt juxtapositions of sharply contrasting musical subsections. Tippett’s works were not frequently performed in Great Britain until the 1960s.

Similarly, it was not until the following decade that his works were regularly scheduled in the United States . Learn More in these related articles: Interview with Sir Michael Tippett - F. David Peat A text only version of this interview is available to download. Michael Tippett British composer noted for his operas - including Midsummer Marriage, King Priam, The Knot Garden - for which, on the advice of T.S. Eliot Tippett wrote his own libretti. As a composer he was somewhat of a late developer who first attracted major notice with his choral work A Child of Our Time (1944). His output includes several other major choral works (The Mask of Time, The Vision of Saint Augustine, Byzantium), symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, etc. Tippett was still composing up to the age of ninety. His last major work was The Rose Lake. Tippett's music, and Tippett the man, began to interest me after some radio and television programs about the composer and his music made by the BBC. I first heard A Child of Our Time in the winter of 1971, after walking in pouring rain to the Royal Festival Hall, London.

My shoes let in water and my clothes were soaking but soon only the power of the music remained. At the end of the work I noticed that Tippett was sitting in the audience below me and he rose to take an ovation. Later Tippett came to Ottawa to conduct A Child of Our Time at the National Arts Center. I was lucky to be in London in 1995, during Tippett's 90th birthday festivities, when much of his music was performed in London. At the end of each concert a sprightly Tippett would be led onto the stage by his friend, Meirion Bowen. I had read Tippett's essays, such as the collection in Moving into Aquarius, and having heard much of his music decided that I must meet the composer. Through a secretary I set up a meeting in the house Tippett now rented in a west London suburb. The date was June 1996. Tippett was now 91 and I was warned that he tired so easily and that at most I could have an hour with him. I was shown into the back room overlooking a garden with the river Thames in the background.

Tippett reclined in a chair but seemed agile, alert and full of energy. He had a very rye sense of humour and enjoyed poking fun at me, partly for being a scientist and partly for asking so many questions. Although I was a total stranger to him he rapidly established a feeling of affection between us. Soon he was calling for a bottle of wine which we drank together - the permitted hour stretched into two and then three. By the time my cassette in the tape recorder had run out I didn't want to disturb the atmosphere by putting in a new blank tape, we just talked on. I began by describing a book I intended to write on the way spirit manifests itself within the material world. I felt that music represented the most perfect marriage of spirit and matter. Tippett One of the things that comes out of it is that music is a performing art. As any Native American will tell you. So it isn't there in the score. Peat Native Americans would say the songs are living beings and have an existence apart from performance. Tippett Possibly. Peat In your case how do you allow for this spirit to manifest itself? What role do you play personally?

Tippett I leave 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. Peat Having talked to sculptors and painters I get the sense that they begin with intention, with building up a sense of intention, and then step aside in such a way that no personal history is involved. In this way something else comes though. Tippett I'm much the same. Its difficult. I'm outside the music I've made, I have no interest in it. I've made it and so much has gone into it that came from all sorts of forces. The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare. It involves disparate elements of the theatre ...the theatre to me is the thing I belong to, going back a long, long way. Theatre being a very embrasive term. Opera would be one particular form, also symphonies. Characters are an extreme form of it...in Shakespeare's theater. 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. Peat Does what differently? Tippett That's more complicated. For me its the performer and audience. Every performer may be standing with his back to the audience and he knows them collectively though his back. His technique can help the singers. Churches and temples were also theatres. Greek theatre went on for a very long time. For me it's the original, I don't go further back than the Greek theatre. I asked Tippett to reflect on the two gods, Apollo and Dionysus. The philosopher Nietzsche in "The Birth of Tragedy" suggested that civilization represents an encounter between the two gods. Benjamin Britten's opera, "Death In Venice" explores, in the mind of von Aschenback, his dilemma in always having adhered to Apollo's clear light of reason but now falling under the seduction of Dionysus. In this sense Britten's operate is about music, about composing, just as Sosostris's Aria from Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage is about his own position, as the composer-medium, Tippett replied by referring me to the Greek images of the two gods.

He even hunted around in his room for a Greek medallion. Tippett Yes, go and see it - the meeting of Dionysus and Apollo on one of the Greek vases. This period when the Greeks were not so alone. They reached into the Middle East and their theatre went on for about a thousand years, changing. There is a history of their theatre and their techniques. The location itself - it was a strange piece of acoustics. There is a picture of Apollo meeting Dionysus. Dionysus is dressed in silks out of a sensual physical world. Apollo looked like a Greek Apollo. It's a famous picture. Read "Greeks and the Irrational" by E.R. Dodds who discusses what the irrational meant right the way back. It used to be thought that the Appolonian view.... (that meeting) it's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell for Blake. I mentioned that I'd recently seen Tippett's opera Midsummer Marriage at the Royal Opera House, London. Tippett It was a first work, a plumb cake of a work. There are not many performances now. Covent garden was rather absurd because it was done exactly as the instructions I had left for the first performance.

They were regarded as final. But of course they were not. My other music is not so rich. It is spare and not (lucid?). I then began to ask Tippett about the idea of possession, the artist who works though possession and about the role of the gods. I mentioned the story that the Hindu god Shiva danced the world into existence. Peat In your essays you have talked about possession. Tippett The terms you use! Language is very difficult. When we use terms we get confused, yet we have no other ways. Shiva danced the world into existence.... that's a very nice thought. Then there are Song Lines. It began for me with a fascination with anthropology as a source of....of what? I don't know. It's so difficult. Possession exists. Jung was very helpful on this point. There is no invocation, no act of will. The projection or propositions ....I can invent them by the yard but only certain ones will do..by accretion..they have to be seminal in some way and then I'm very gradual. Eliot and I talked a lot. He said "the words come last".

With other poets, on the contrary, its sudden and there it is, they accept it. It appears to me like that. There is long period before you write. You may be doing more than once thing at once. Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme, so what came out in the end..... he works away at several things at once and sets them aside. He lived completely in this world of imagination and you pay a price. The body takes over. Jung puts it well. If you live in the world of ideas and imagination as though there was no body, your body will react medically. He himself had to have some sort of different world, he used to row down the lake, and he built his tower brick by brick. He was a doctor, a remarkable one. I told him that although I was born in England I had lived for over thirty years in Canada and had now moved to Italy. Tippett I've never wanted to live in that way. I have done it but again Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was world-wide though reading. My body got upset from time to time.

A thing that is going to be sung or performed has that tension, and its done in the body itself. You sing and the body in the end ... it did in the end have bowel cancer. It gets tired of being the endless servant of something. Peat As you say this I'm thinking of Cezanne and the importance he give to his sensations before nature. And these sensations had to be held inside him. I get the sense that there was a certain pain in holding these sensations and then trying to realize them. Tippett True. I learned it early on. There was a painter, Roger Fry. He had a cousin Lewis Fry who had private money and lived on the edge of London near where I had a small choir which I used to conduct to find out what I wanted in sound, how a thing worked, how the English language worked. One of the ones who sang was a daughter of Lewis Fry. She was a mature woman, I was still a student in my 20s. They had a substantial house looking over the valley and Louis had his own studio . The daughter asked me to come occasionally to have supper to talk to her father.

One occasion he wanted to talk with someone who could understand a bit about what he was trying to do. He said, "look at the painting on the easel. My trouble is that I can't put upon the canvas what I want you to feel from the canvas." But I knew I could in music. I'd be able to do it. You have to make it ....Beethoven had it in excelsis. Every thing he ever did speaks to you. But Beethoven's body gave up, Mozart gave up even sooner. Tippett then showed a painting "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" by Oskar Kokoschka. Tippett I knew Kokoschka. The painting has two sides, one is Mania and the other is the opposite, Anima. How deep it all goes. He was a person who was possessed, by both anima and mania, very often in the form of a woman. Music has a tactical difference because it is a performance and needs the audience. I know the advantage in widening the scope of where the music can be heard, radio, disc and not everyone in same theatre. Peat Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist, gave up all personal performance.

He felt the future of music lay in the recording studio where he could work on a piece over and over again. He even predicted that people would eventually be able to create their own performances at home out of various musical samples. Tippett That is not me. He is rather foreign to me personally. The Canadian I know best is Timothy Finley. Peat Could we go back to the way you had to hold the tension of music within your body as you composed. Tippett The body suffered in my case. Berlioz writing Les Troyens, he had what was called then "intestinal catarrh" and he took laudanum. He was drugged to sleep by it during all the long months and years of making this huge piece. Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance. The difference between a string quartet, they meet every day and go on tour, or a pianist. But the orchestras don't. The nearest thing is the one who writes the drama and has to contain it. In a strict concert hall it's all enacted there and then. But as soon as you go into the live theatre then we're already in another world, something has to be there to perform to us.

The Greeks for a long time only two characters on stage at one time. You went in the daytime and sat on stone seats, very uncomfortable. It was a strange society. Each city state had its theatre and a temple which was part of turning stone and marble into delicacy. Peat A composer has to support this tension in the body, yet the result has an effect on a whole of society. Tippett Yes that's close to me, a healing in the music. There can't be a shared meaning today. Jung wanted to know if it was possible to get any nearer to the period of the Renaissance when people were apparently entire. That's in The Child of Our Time. "I would know my shadow and my light" ("so shall at last be whole". Possibly you could find this wholeness. But did he believe it in art? I think you could become a whole human being - a single human being. I don't think he thought it could exist in communities. I certainly don't think so. Communities do what they have always done. But the Greek theatre was still part of a city state with its own temple and theatre. But once they began to take the temple at Athens as the center things changed.

And the Greek sculptor- I don't think he was very different from any of us. Yeats spoke of artifacts - things made by humans. He said "I can understand the excitement a god feels in getting into a stature." He felt "artifact" was something he made from time to time. I think we're all pretty odd. Peat Making is bringing something into manifestation. But music, does that have to be manifest? To have been made? What about Bach and "The Art of Fugue"? It was pure, absolute music, maybe it was never meant to be performed. Tippett It didn't have any meaning. He was practicing his art. He left plenty behind that disappeared. Peat But isn't it true that for other composers the physical nature of the sound is important? Tippett Yes and it's partly to do with history. Perform the work somewhere else where there was no oboe d'amore player and it was performed on something else. That was going on in that period. Peat I'm trying to get to the idea of the physical sound itself, as opposed to some sort of abstract Appolonian structure Tippett It would be rather boring if such a thing could exist, the Appolonian.

Peat I've talked to some sculptors who spoke about their work as involving an alchemical transformation - the matter itself changes. That is spirit changing matter. But I also wonder if spirit itself can be transformed by matter in its act of manifestation? Maybe it's similar to language. When you write, you move into the world of language. In one sense you use language and in another sense language uses you. Tippett You can if you're using language in an artistic way. Peat But then to what extent is the physicality of the world - to what extent is it something coming though you and onto a score? Tippett Yes, that's one sort of attempt. Peat But the other, the sheer physicality of sound and voices and resonances. How does that transform the act of composition? Tippett It does not transform, it's the material you are using for the purpose. Poetry is the most fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and therefore we know somehow prose can go over into poetry. But your question is about the physical thing, what does that do? I don't know.

Peat We're circling around matter and spirit and one of the things that concerns me, I give talks in the United States quite a lot, is the way some people want to deny the physical, the fact of their own bodies, and try to live in the world of spirit. They want to float off the earth. A Jungian could call that psychic inflation. Tippett Of course, yes. Peat So I'm asking about the other side, the spirit entering matter, incarnation. Tippett I know about it. When you say incarnation you are really using a very odd word. That might be one of the things that is troubling the present period. We're not in a golden age. It appears to me that we get periods in history in which the problems seem to be both in the material and the non-material worlds ...both at once. We're in that now, a place when nobody can find things. The Jungians should be able to..you've read the Eranos yearbooks? Jung attempted to try to bridge this gulf. But he did not succeed. I got some wonderful ideas from reading the yearbooks, particularly on time - nature has different times.

Peat I think time is probably the most puzzling question for physicists. Tippett Naturally. Peat Time in physics does not understand about generation and creativity. Tippett "The Mask of Time" (one of Tippett's choral works) begins "sound where no airs blow". That physically is impossible but I've seen it. It's a metaphor. I use therefore quote from one of Yeats's poems "All metaphor, Malachi. Its all metaphor." Well, that's a bit extreme, but the way the art world is dipping into that metaphorical world, but it's material, what it's made with is material. Music remains the most strange of the materials because we don't understand what happens when music moves you, who or what moves you. It isn't easy at all. It's a strangely -- in (modern?) German philosophy, music was on the top and sculpture on the bottom. I couldn't go as far as that. But the famous remark "all art tends to the condition of music". It was made about Giorgione, not about music at all! That's another way of saying we all want to enter this strange world. I think I understand it up to a point.

The conversation began to turn to Tippett's age, he was 91 at the time of our meeting. Tippett I lived for a very long time so that you are living over many periods. Who am I contemporary with? I'm not contemporary with anything. Peat Raves? Tippett Well, yes, We all do it ourselves. But it isn't really true, they didn't make it themselves. But the more difficult ones are the ones who fall out. Jung himself didn't get much out of music. You can't get it out of everything. He was a practicing psychologist, an absolutely seminal figure. He then went over into the world of art because he recognized something there. What he meant by "art" I don't quite know. He was a pastor's son but he believed - though he might remain an older religious form - but felt that when a patient came to him he always thought from the lowest depths. His own first dream predicts the whole thing - going down and down and reaching the bottom and then beginning to come up again. This is what could be done if you want to do it. But if he thought it was happening in society ...I don't know. He wrote "Wotan".

This was because of first result of Hitler's anti-Semitism, and he wanted to know what relationship it would take in another country. He said, it isn't Zarathustra who has come back but Wotan!. In "A Child of Our Time - a mixed art - it is the "soul watching the chaotic mirror knows that the gods will return". But which gods? During our discussion had earlier Tippett spoke about laying himself open to possession when he composed. The god was free to come but Tippett could never know which god would appear. It was something he had to do on trust. Peat It was very significant that Negro spirituals play such a powerful role in the piece. Tippett They have gone nearly all over the world. You don't get it except where they were singing. They couldn't perform it is Israel because they couldn't publicly use the word "Jesus" They had to get over that before they could perform the Bach chorals!

A Child of Our Time refers to a real incident in which a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynspan, in desperation at his failure to get official papers and the persecution of his mother, shot a German diplomat Ernst von Rath and precipitated a pogrom against the Jews. "He shoots the official - but he shoots only his dark brother - and see - he is dead". Tippett The father [of Herschel] was already in Israel and was brought to that performance. He was in tears most of the time and had no idea what had happened to his son. I was Persona Non Grata in Israel. (When I was thinking about the piece...) I heard something though the radio, a singer. And by the tone of the voice it was a black singer, I don't know. He suddenly sang "The trumpets sound"'. I realized it was like a choral. It was a banal piece of tune and yet it does something. What did it do and how did it do it? I sent to the US to get a copy. It was just like what Bach did with the book of chorals. He opened the book and chose what he wanted. I found there was a spiritual for every known spiritual need.

I chose the five - it was in no way different from Bach. It told a story which was tragic. I asked him about his also drawing on the blues for use in one of his symphonies. Tippett The blues...they are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time. These are technical things. Peat Maybe that the answer to what I was seeking. The matter is the structure, the choral, fugue, blues or whatever. Maybe these are structures that are determined somewhere at the level of our physical bodies? Tippett That is how you see it. I don't know. I've been a practicing composer and had to live in that world. But you come out of it if you can. It's difficult. You pay a price which you willingly do. Or you are driven to. Peat You once wrote that if you didn't do this, the body would pay you back. Tippett Yes, it did. You'd have to do it or get ill. It happens to heaps of people. Or you go over the edge.

A person gets more and more into this strange world, but in the end he topples over because that is the danger. You have to... Another thing occurs to me, a figure I know. He was Jewish but broke away and married a gentile, went to the Maharishi and god knows what. Then he finds a woman in Holland and sits on her lap. He says he was annoyed with his mother-in-law, who is a marriage guidance councillor, and says she should get peace of spirit. "But that's the point," he says, "she's there to help people who are not there. She can't herself get detachment." And then he said the same thing to me. I said, "it's even stupider!" It's vital to me to keep that chaos. There is a wonderful quote, and its probably from Nietzsche. "One must have chaos within oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star." The dancing star is there - the material, the whole thing. We don't know what this universe is. I remain a humanist, as I must. That is the condition I'm talking to. We are a very curious race.

In other words, Eliot put it - "these things I shore against my ruins." He knew it but he went into the Anglican faith and lost something but... Holding the chaos. That's....I have to be there as a human being and... [pause and Tippett begins to speak of the ending of his own creativity]... I've finished now. I've stopped. It stopped. It's very curious. It happened about three years ago. And now I have had to make a new lifestyle in which it doesn't exist. I'm sorry I haven't been able to help you, only deepened your anxiety. Peat I have to keep the chaos inside me. I then tell him about my association with David Bohm, about Bohm's search for wholeness in physics yet the sense of fragmentation be must have experienced inside himself and the depression he suffered at the end of his life. Tippett That's the sort of thing I might pick up. I used to write those sort of things in a note book but I never said where I got them from. I like that.

Sir Michael Tippett, British Composer, Dead at 93 | Playbill Sir Michael Tippett, British Composer, Dead at 93 News Sir Michael Tippett, British Composer, Dead at 93 Jan 09, 1998 Sir Michael Tippett, composer of symphonies, concertos, chamber music and opera -- including The Midsummer Marriage (1955), today considered a masterpiece of 20th century opera -- has died at the age of 93. Sir Michael Tippett, composer of symphonies, concertos, chamber music and opera -- including The Midsummer Marriage (1955), today considered a masterpiece of 20th century opera -- has died at the age of 93. The operas of Tippett, after those of Benjamin Britten, were the most important to emerge from England during the last half of the 20th century.

In addition to The Midsummer Marriage, which explores the inner development of a man and the woman he is about to marry, Tippett's operas include King Priam (1962), which is based on Homer's Iliadand which received a successful revival three seasons ago at English National Opera; The Knot Garden (1970), The Ice Break (1977) and New Year (1989). Sir Michael's final composition, the lush symphonic work The Rose Lake, was given its world premiere three years ago by Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Center; at the end of the enthusiastically received piece the composer, still-spry at the age of 90, bounded down the stairs of the auditorium in his customary canvas shoes and took an enthusiastic bow onstage with Maestro Davis. Michael Tippett - A composer to Forget Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column.

[Index] Michael Tippett - A composer to Forget By Norman Lebrecht / December 22, 2004 Read La Scena Musicale CD and Book Reviews Most New Years allow a decent interval for recovery before triggering the ritual orgy of anniversary festivities which, in a clueless world, passes for clever musical programming. Beware, then, of 2005 which cruelly from its very second day marks the centenary of the composer Michael Tippett with a commemorative week on Radio 3, a filmed portrait on BBC4 and performances of his music in all four corners of the kingdom  but, nota bene, nowhere beyond, except Chicago and Boston where two British Davises, Andrew and Colin, will impose his creations on bemused (and minuscule) audiences. Tippett is a British taste, and none the better for that. With the exception of his oratorio A Child of Our Time, which is a wonderful singalong in any tongue, none of his 80-odd (some very odd) works have travelled well, despite the best efforts of his German publisher, Schott, and many British supporters.

I once looked around during an Andrew Davis performance of a Tippett symphony in Philadelphia and counted fewer than 200 paying heads. As I looked around, so were many others  so feeble was the music's grip on our attention. Tippett, born into Home Counties comfort on 2 January 1905, was an inglorious exemplar of English amateurism. After studies at the Royal College of Music he drifted into vagrancy in the 1930s, espousing Trotskyism, living in a hovel and running musical teach-ins for farm workers. His first piano sonata, string quartet and chamber ensemble pieces are Beethovenian in form and content. A Child of Our Time is a Handel-like response to political events, a protest at the climate of inhumanity originally sparked by the November 1938 murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish refugee and Hitler's Kristallnacht retaliation. When war broke out, Tippett refused to bear arms. Registered as a conscientious objector he could not be bothered to undertake fire watching duties and was jailed for three months.

Vaughan Williams appealed for his release, calling him 'a national asset' and Britten came with Peter Pears to play at Wormwood Scrubs. A Child, premieredin March 1944, was acclaimed as a masterpiece of secular humanism. Powerful as the music is, singers often find hard to stifle a giggle at banalities in Tippett's text: 'He shoots the official  but he shoots only his dark brother  and see: he is dead.' The press had him down as an intellectual and cultured society bracketed Tippett with Britten. Both composers were pacifist, leftist, gay and on unusually good terms with one another; their differences, however, were greater than any superficial affinities. Britten's music was tightly disciplined, never a note out of place, its topics timeless yet always contemporary, its resonance global. Tippett's scores sprawled all over the page, his themes were vague and parochial, his style archaic or contrived. Highly trained German musicians, exiled in Britain, were aghast at the sloppiness of his structure, likening him to a poet who cannot make lines balance or scan.

Even sworn admirers, like the composer Michael Berkeley who presents BBC4's tribute, admit that his music 'does not trip off the page'. On the contrary, it trips over itself. When Adrian Boult premiered Tippett's second symphony on live radio, the performance broke down in confusion after a couple of minutes. Tippett dismissed criticism as prejudice or ignorance, a failure to grasp the uniqueness of his idiom. When Covent Garden commissioned an opera, he took T S Eliot's brush-off as serious advice and decided to write his own librettos. A Midsummer Marriage (back in a new production at the ROH next October) is consequently lumbered with an irresolute plot and impossibly naïve dialogue. King Priam, his next, had a Greek myth to keep it on the rails, but The Knot Garden is a rambling indulgence in late-Sixties psychobabble, unrelieved by so much as one credible character. Peter Hall, the director, perhaps in desperation, ordered one of the singers to drop her top  historically, the first such exposure on the Royal Opera stage.

Discovering America's sexual freedoms, Tippett pranced about in hippie sandals and injected transatlantic rhythms into later works, without winning many new friends. The tedium of his fourth opera, The Ice Break, was briefly relieved by the use of laser beams, which Tippett had copied from Stockhausen's Licht. His final opera, New Year, commissioned by Houston and Glyndebourne in 1989, achieved the lowestratings ever measured on BBC2 and gave vital ammunition to those who sought, more or less successfully, to ban modern opera from British television. Yet  and here's the paradox  the woollier Tippett's music grew, the more powerful were his advocates. There is not a musical administrator in the land who will fail to pay in the coming year fervent tribute to our great centennial Briton. Scottish Opera, on its last legs for want of public support, will (unless the bailiffs arrive first) stage the baffling Knot Garden. The LSO, almost bankrupted by a Tippett cycle in 1982, will attempt another. Schott are publishing  for whom?  an exhaustive new edition of King Priam.

Beyond critical considerations, Tippett was an unfailingly gentle man who could charm anyone (myself included) over a cup of tea and did much by brave and benign example to diffuse public fears over homosexual rights. He gave unsparingly of his time to up-and-coming young musicians who are now in positions of authority where they can repay the debt with fond interest. There is something admirable about their stubborn advocacy of a genuine English eccentric, an affirmation that not all in cultural life has to be ruled by box-office, or logic. That said, I cannot begin to assess the damage to British music that will ensue from the coming year's purblind promotion of a composer who failed so insistently to observe the rules of his craft. Set beside any of his contemporaries, radical or conservative, British, American or European, Tippett fails the driving test of coherence. That, devotees argue, is his essential charm. But in the eyes of the world their yearlong celebration will revert our music to pre-Britten standards of anything goes. American critics often accuse us of abusing state subsidy to exaggerate the merits of British composers. Here is a classic instance of local patriotism and personal affection running riot at public expense.

Since his death in January 1998, Tippett has scarcely been played at all. Once the next year is over, oblivion will mercifully resume. Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column. [Index] The Great Queers of History The Great Queers of History Compiled by Rictor Norton Part 3: Born since 1900 Hughes Aaron Copland (1900-1990) American composer Ballets drawing from American folk tradition (Billy the Kid 1938, Appalachian Spring 1944). Also operas, symphonies (El Salon Mexico), film scores. Honors included Pulitzer Prize, Congressional Gold Medal. Margaret Mead (1901-1978) American anthropologist Bisexual cultural relativist, ethnologist & curator at American Museum of Natural History. Popular works Coming of Age in Samoa and Growing up in New Guinea argued that personality, sexuality & gender are shaped more by culture than heredity.

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) German-American actress Cabaret performer in Nazi Berlin, sang lesbian songs, famous role in film The Blue Angel (1930), then became a Hollywood goddess whose roles emphasized sexual ambiguity. Bisexual glamour offstage, popularized women's trousers. Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) Spanish poet Romantic autobiographicl poetry of isolation and suffering, trying to recapture lost pleasures, openly homoerotic. Identified as a dandy, celebrated gay culture. Left Spain after the Civil War. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) African-American poet Central figure in Harlem Renaissance, founding father of black American literature. Popular poetry combining black folk culture, jazz, colloquial speech (Weary Blues 1926), also plays, short stories, journalism. Guarded his privacy. Countée Cullen (1903-1946) African-American poet "Poet laureate" of the Harlem Renaissance, friend of Langston Hughes. Poetry about the Negro experience using classical models (Color 1925). Five vols of verse; journalism ("The Dark Tower" column).

Member of a Harlem gay coterie. Mead Garbo Marguerite Yourcenar (pseud. de Crayencour) (1903-1987) Belgian-born French novelist, poet Many honors, first woman elected to Académie Française. Humanistic novels, historical reconstructions, some on gay love (Memoirs of Hadrian 1951). Lived with her lover for 42 years. Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) British photographer, stage designer Stylish portraits of high society celebrities incl. royalty. Fashion photography, designed scenery & costumes for theater & film (My Fair Lady, Gigi) with a camp aesthetic. Kept humorous, bitchy diaries. Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) British-American writer Novels on decadent 1930s Berlin (Mr Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin), basis of the musical Cabaret. Moved to California 1939, worked with W. H. Auden, scriptwriter for MGM. Later became a follower of Hinduism. Gay diaries.

Sir John Gielgud (1904-2000) British actor, producer Leading Shakespearean actor (Hamlet) of his generation, also director. Cameos in films in the 1980s (the father in Brideshead Revisited; recited every role of The Tempest in Prospero's Books). Beautiful voice, fastidious style. Mary Renault (pseud. Mary Challans) (1905-1983) British novelist Trained as a nurse, after WWII settled in South Africa with Julie Mullard for 50 years. Acclaimed novels about ancient Hellas (The Last of the Wine), often with gay heroes, also WWII gay novel The Charioteer. Greta Garbo (1905-1990) Swedish-American film actress Hollywood star (Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Camille), retired in 1941, became a recluse. Affair with scriptwriter Mercedes de Acosta was foundation for her lesbian-coded portrayal of Queen Christina.

Beaton Johnson Sir Michael Tippet (1905-1998) British composer Held strong social-political convictions, as in oratorio A Child of our Time 1939; imprisoned as a conscientious objector in WWII. Successful operas The Midsummer Marriage 1952, The Knot Garden 1970, with gay characters. Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) Italian film director Important neo-realist films, often with gay themes (trilogy The Damned 1969, Death in Venice 1971, Ludwig 1973). Evocations of a vanished Belle Epoque. Also theater and opera productions. John Beresford Fowler (1906-1977) British interior decorator Established the romantic English Country House Style with Nancy Lancaster and Sibyl Colefax in 1940s-1960s. Advisor to England's National Trust, responsible for authentic restoration of many historic interiors in 1970s.

(Richard) Bruce Nugent (1906-1987) African-American writer, artist Member of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote important short stories "Sahdji" and "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" (1926), the first African-American gay short story. Founded a salon for black writers called the Dark Tower. Philip Johnson (1906-2005) American architect Prize-winning designer of Seagram Building in NYC (with Mies van der Rohe, 1945), Lincoln Center, postmodernist buildings since the 1980s (AT&T Building). Designed a proposed Cathedral of Hope for gay & lesbian Metropolitan Community Church. George Platt Lynes (1907-1955) American photographer Knew Gide, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein in 1920s, fashion photographer in 1930s, notable dance photography in 1940s. Shared studio with gay artist Marsden Hartley. Many dramatic photos of the male nude, often erotic.

Visconti Rustin W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907-1973) British-American poet "Poet of the Thirties" with left-wing commitments. Worked with Isherwood on plays; librettos for Britten (Paul Bunyan). Stormy lifelong affair with Chester Kallman, together wrote libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) British writer, celebrity Courageous queen in 1930s Soho, model celebrated as The Naked Civil Servant (his 1968 autobiography; film starring John Hurt). Showed how to construct an effeminate identity in defiance of homophobia. Emigrated to NYC 1982. Francis Bacon (1909-1992) Irish painter Settled in England in 1928. Self-taught. Celebrated blurred & distorted human figures (Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944), sometimes gory or terrifying images (Screaming Popes after Velï¿½zquez 1953). Existential alienation.

Jean Genet (1910-1986) French novelist, playwright A thief-turned-writer who celebrated the queer as outcast, in the criminal underworld where queers wear their stigma like a crown (Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Querelle of Brest). Canonized by Sartre. Bayard Rustin (1910-1987) African-American civil rights activist Main organizer of the black civil rights movement, esp. the March on Washington (1963). Openly gay, but kept out of the limelight to avoid damaging image of the black movement. Friend & supporter of Martin Luther King. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) American playwright New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for The Glass Menagerie (1945), Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Gay themes in Suddenly Last Summer (1958) and Night of the Iguana (1961).

Crisp Strayhorn Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) British mathematician Pioneer inventor of computer programming, "the Turing machine". Cracked the German Enigma Code during WWII. Awarded OBE and elected FRS. Forced to have hormone therapy for a gay offence, he ate an apple dipped in cyanide. Patrick White (1912-1990) Australian novelist, writer Oblique homosexual themes and closeted characters of ambiguous sexuality & gender in all his works (The Twyborn Affair). Received Nobel prize for literature in 1973. Came out in 1981 autobiography Flaws in the Glass. Henry (Harry) Hay, Jr. (1912-2001) American activist Member Communist Party 1933-c.1953. Founded pioneer gay rights campaigning group the Mattachine Society in 1951 and One, first American gay periodical, in 1952. First chair of South. Calif. GLF 1969. Founded Radical Faeries 1978.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) British composer Worked with Auden in America 1939-1942. Popular instrumental works (The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra). Major operas (Peter Grimes), some with gay themes (The Turn of the Screw), many for his lover, the tenor Sir Peter Pears (1910-1986). Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) African-American jazz musician, composer Nicknamed Swee Pea. In 1939 joined Duke Ellington, who recorded his works ("Satin Doll"). Openly gay and a dandy, but had close relationship with Lena Horne, who sang many of his songs ("You're the One"). Roland Barthes (1915-1980) French critic, philosopher Revolutionized literary criticism with structuralist focus on "texts" & "discourse". Founder of Cultural Studies movement to unmask codes of convention. Drew aside the veil on his own gay life in 1975 autobiography.

White Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) American composer, conductor Became celebrity after conducting New York Philharmonic in 1943. Composed popular musicals (West Side Story 1957), operetta (Candide 1956, with the song "Glitter and Be Gay"). Status as conductor-as-superstar was partly due to TV. Robbins Capote Jerome Robbins (1918-1998) American dancer, choreographer, director American Ballet Theatre & Broadway musicals (Fancy Free 1944, Gypsy 1959). Dancer, choreographer, joint director of New York City Ballet for 40+ years. Awards incl. Oscars for Hollywood's West Side Story 1961. Liberace (Wladziu Valentino) (1919-1987) American pianist, entertainer Camp showman, exuded charm, popularized piano classics on his TV show, candelabra trademark. Live appearances broke all box office records. Flamboyant lifestyle, outrageous costumes.

Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen) (1920-1991) Finnish erotic graphic artist Commercial artist after service in WWII, published popular "dirty drawings" from 1950s in Physique Pictorial, B&W comic-strip Kake booklets from 1968. Macho men in uniforms enjoying gay sex. André (Émile) Baudry (1922- ) French activist Jesuit-trained "pope of the homophiles". Wrote for Swiss gay magazine Der Kreis in 1952, joined Dutch gay rights org. COC in 1953, launched French gay magazine Arcadie 1952-1982 (10,000 subscribers in 1970s). Truman Capote (1924-1984) American writer Gay Southern Gothic (Other Voices, Other Rooms), portrait of a playgirl (Breakfast at Tiffany's), invented "non-fiction novel" (In Cold Blood). Books became successful films. Became a celebrity, petted then dumped by socialites.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) African-American novelist, writer Brought up in Harlem, lived mainly in Paris. Autobiographical gay novels Giovanni's Room, Another Country. Campaigned for black civil rights in USA (The Fire Next Time). Exemplifies revolutionary spirit of the 1960s. Liberace Baudry Baldwin Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin (right) in 2003. On 12 February 2004 they were the first same-sex couple granted marriage licenses in San Francisco, after being together for 51 years. (Photo by Jane Cleland, special to Woman Vision ï¿½ 2003) Phyllis Lyon (1924- ) American activist Founded the first US lesbian civil rights organization, Daughters of Bilitis, in 1955, and the lesbian magazine The Ladder in 1956, with her partner Dorothy (Del) Martin (1921-2008), designed to overcome isolation and support lesbian identity.

Rock Hudson Thom Gunn Rock Hudson (1925-1985) American film actor Hollywood's top box office star as the boy next door (many films with Doris Day, e.g. Pillow Talk), allowed the heterosexual image constructed for him by his managers to be shattered only a few weeks before he died from AIDS. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) French philosopher of history Influential books on the ideological history of madness, sexuality, prisons and social control, emphasizing use of power to "construct" and oppress "deviants". Postmodern social constructionist, fount of Queer Theory. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) American poet, activist The Beat Generation, with Jack Kerouac & William Burroughs. Major notoriety with Howl (1955), defiantly gay. Anti-establishment speaker at universities 1960s-1970s. Poet of drugs, Buddhism & gay liberation. Many literary awards.

Andy Warhol (c.1928-1987) American pop artist, filmmaker Pioneer of pop art (Campbell's Soup Cans), silk-screen portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Mao Zedong. Underground films from his "factory" with Paul Morrissey, mostly gay, starring Joe Dallesandro (Flesh, Trash). Thom Gunn (1929-2004) British-American poet Moved to USA after publishing Fighting Terms in 1954. Formalist, influenced by 17th cent. Metaphysical poets. Contemplative My Sad Captains 1961, frankly gay Jack Straw's Castle 1976, The Man with Night Sweats 1992 about lovers dead from AIDS. Harvey Milk (1930-1978) American politician, activist Involved in local politics, openly gay, elected San Francisco Supervisor in 1977. He and Mayor Moscone were assassinated by disgruntled "family values" colleague Dan White on 27 Nov. 1978; lenient sentence provoked riots.

Foucault Mapplethorpe Joe Orton (1933-1967) British playwright Outrageous sex farces (Loot 1966, What the Butler Saw posth. 1969), with subversive gay themes (Entertaining Mr Sloane 1964). Black comic view of human cynicism, intended to shock. Murdered by his envious lover & mentor Kenneth Halliwell. Audre Lorde (1934-1992) African-American writer, activist West Indian parents settled in Harlem. Black lesbian feminist writer (Sister Outsider 1984) and campaigner, arguing that respect for differences fuels social change. Autobiography Zami 1982 explores black lesbian cultural roots. David Hockney (1937- ) British painter, artist Early gay-themed work influenced by pop art. Erotic etchings (Cavafy Poems), hedonistic swimming-pool acrylics (A Bigger Splash), opera stage sets (The Rake's Progress) and composite photography. Settled in California 1963.

Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993) Russian dancer, choreographer International icon, sex symbol & superstar "god of the dance", successor to Nijinsky (whom he portrayed on film). Left Kirov Ballet for Britain's Royal Ballet 1962-1977, many performances in USA. Left US$40m to charities. Troy D. Perry (1940- ) American religious leader Baptist preacher, founded Metropolitan Community Church for gay Christians in 1968 in Los Angeles, now largest GLBT religious ministry in the world with over 250 congregations. Motto: "The Lord is my shepherd and he knows I'm gay." Lillian Faderman (1940- ) American scholar, activist Prof. of English, Univ. of California-Fresno. Major work on lesbian history, Surpassing the Love of Men (1981); history of lesbian life in 20th-cent. America, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (1991); ed. anthology of lesbian literature (1994).

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) American photographer Homoerotic photographs, fetishistic imagery from the world of SM contained by classical formalism, exhibited in art galleries amidst great controversy. Many striking portraits of both people and flowers. Martina Navratilova (1956- ) Czech-American tennis player Czech National Tennis Champion 1972, defected to USA 1975. Won Wimbledon 7 times & US Open 3 times, holds world record for singles (166) and doubles (163) titles, 54 Grand Slams. Widely publicized lesbian relationships. Lorde Classical: Reaching the Tippett point | Music | The Guardian Reaching the Tippett point Sunday 9 January 2005 08.16 EST First published on Sunday 9 January 2005 08.16 EST Share on Messenger Close How would schedulers manage without anniversaries? This year is no exception to the rule that each season be crowded with concerts and records marking the centenary (or multiple thereof) of a composer's birth, death or finest hour.

Even Michael Tippett, born 100 years ago this month, might raise an elegant eyebrow at the barrage of his music now coming at us. Tippett's operas will be everywhere: The Knot Garden at Scottish Opera and Music Theatre Wales, The Midsummer Marriage at Covent Garden and King Priam at the Royal Northern College of Music. This month alone sees his oratorio, A Child of Our Time, staged by ENO, and the launch of a four-month Tippett festival at the Royal College of Music. The Lindsay Quartet has just anchored a week-long programme of his chamber music at London's Wigmore Hall before taking complete cycles of the string quartets to Southampton and the Sage, Gateshead, which will also be staging Tippett concerts by the LSO, Northern Sinfonia and BBC Singers. Orchestral series elsewhere will be led by Colin Davis and the LSO, Mark Elder and the Hallé, Richard Hickox and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, plus the Orchestra of the Swan and the Britten Sinfonia. There will be Tippett weekends in Oxford and Cambridge. He has just been composer of the week on Radio 3, which also profiled him in Music Matters.

New Tippett recordings are due from Chandos, NMC, Hyperion, Metronome and Naxos, plus rereleases from EMI. Faber is publishing his Selected Letters and Schott a new edition of King Priam. No doubt this year's Proms , when announced, will also be joining the party. But do audiences? These one-composer orgies can founder when they celebrate those, like Tippett, whose music now needs some such excuse to get an airing. It is not so long since Tippett's glory days, when he was celebrated as the 'grand old man' of British music in the last decade of his long life. His work has since fallen into desuetude. Quite, I hear you say - all the more reason for a comprehensive reappraisal. But a spotlight so intense is not always the most effective or flattering showcase for a composer. Even wall-to-wall Mozart (which awaits us next year, the 250th anniversary of his birth) can pall, if not as swiftly as deep-pile Tippett.

Better, surely, to programme so austere and demanding a composer alongside his seminal influences: Monteverdi, Beethoven and Stravinsky, madrigals and the blues? The Wigmore was canny enough to do just that at either end of its six-concert festival. At today's 'coffee concert', for instance, the Psophos Quartet will play Debussy and Purcell alongside Tippett's fourth quartet; last weekend, the Transatlantic Horn Quartet sandwiched his sonata for four horns amid Schwertsik, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. By midweek, as tunnel vision set in, the box office began to deliver a more dispiriting verdict. The audience had distinctly thinned by the second of the two evenings devoted to Tippett's chamber works, in which the Lindsays played all four string quartets, and his song cycles were performed by tenor Mark Padmore with pianist Andrew West and guitarist Craig Ogden. He is not the most user-friendly of composers. Much of his music is more cerebral than expressive; he expects audiences and, indeed, performers to work as hard as he did in the throes of creation.

After an intense few hours roving his jagged, often arid soundscapes, it can seem a close call whether he was not a more interesting man than musician. Like that of his friend Britten, Tippett's music is as much of the mind as the heart, but Britten's greater performing skills played a significant part in his broader appeal. Passionate about the composer's role as public intellectual, Tippett was imprisoned during the Second World War (and his music banned by the BBC) for pacifist beliefs so strong that he refused even to make a conscientious objector's contribution to the war effort. On the day of his release, in August 1943, it was here, to the Wigmore Hall, that he came to hear his second string quartet, performed again on Wednesday by the Lindsays as if their lives depended on it. Soon to disband, to pursue individual careers, these fine players are uniquely qualified, by their long association with the composer, to remain his chamber representatives on earth. Yet even they struggled to convey the work's tormented mood shifts, its contrapuntal nuances, its profoundly inward darkness.

In the shorter, much later fifth quartet, some yearning lines from the lead violin at last suggested that inside the Spartan sage was a sentimental old romantic struggling to be heard. Tippett was not a natural songsmith, the accompaniment often seeming to bear little relation to almost arbitrary vocal lines, and such subjects as Achilles milked solely for his trademark pacifism and camp sexuality. But Songs for Achilles found an eloquent champion in Padmore, as had 'The Blue Guitar' in his accompanist, Ogden. The true Tippett was a larger-scale thinker, more himself in symphony, concerto, oratorio and opera, as the year ahead will surely show. Zoë Dominic/Opera News Archives The Michael Tippett centenary year of 2005 did not get off to an auspicious start. The British magazine Opera led off with an overview of the composer's life by Andrew Clements. Given the capstone status of Tippett's five operas in his career, the piece was something of a keynote address.

But it took note of the relative scarcity of Tippett performances in Britain (nobody was producing The Ice Break or New Year) and the "problematic" nature of the scores, and it floated the possibility that Tippett's music may be "so rooted in its era that when taken out of it can only seem hopelessly, squirmingly dated." There were the usual cries of disagreement two months later in the Letters column, as well as a less-usual second article in rebuttal, an appreciative piece by Dennis Marks. But the final word came in the May Letters column, where a writer took the trouble to suggest that Tippett's talents were not especially suited to the writing of operas but might have qualified him for writing headlines at the Guardian. For Tippett's operas, it was ever thus. This month, the first of them, The Midsummer Marriage, comes to Lyric Opera of Chicago in a company premiere. This shouldn't be news, but the company has never done any of the composer's stage works. (Neither has the Met.) And Midsummer, first heard in 1955, did not get a U.S. production until San Francisco mounted it as late as 1983.

King Priam, one of the dozen greatest operas of the last century, has never caught on. The U.S. premiere of The Knot Garden was in a university production. When Sarah Caldwell produced Tippett's fourth opera, The Ice Break, in Boston in 1979, none of the first three had been given a professional production in this country. TheIce Break went unrecorded commercially for thirteen years, and Tippett's fifth opera, New Year, never received a commercial recording at all. The rough reception of these works in America is especially difficult to understand when there has generally been admiration for the music itself. In Act I of Midsummer, Chicago audiences will hear some of the most radiant music ever written for soprano - an aria resembling an alien, platinum version of the presentation of the rose from Der Rosenkavalier, followed by a long, glittering Handelian vocalise. It is music that was first sung by Joan Sutherland; her performance, currently available on a CD release of the original live radio broadcast, still provides heart-in-throat excitement.

Rachel Hunes (Denise), Jane Irwin (Thea), Rachel Nicholls (Flora), Peter Savidge (Mangus) and Andrew Shore (Faber) in Antony McDonald's 2005 Knot Garden for Scottish Opera © Drew Farrell 2005 King Priam brought an entirely new sound world, one in which a prominent orchestral piano part and quick juxtapositions of block phrases contribute to what Lyric Opera music director Andrew Davis calls the composer's "mosaic style." Two other neglected Tippett works, the Variations for Orchestra and the second piano sonata, were produced in this same vital idiom. It is music that reminds us we have veins. In The Knot Garden, the intricate personal relationships of a small group of people are mirrored in an intricate fabric of musical motives; one of them comes from Schubert's song "Die liebe Farbe." Listeners who enjoy the crossword-puzzle motivic construction in Janácek, Berg and Sondheim have found it fascinating. And the sound of the apocalyptic title event in The Ice Break, an orchestral tour de force, manages to portray both the possibilities of the future and the impossibility of clinging to the past.

The most prevalent theory about the neglect of Tippett's operas is that the librettos are weak. Tippett wrote all five of them himself after first seeking the services of T. S. Eliot for the early oratorio A Child of Our Time. According to Tippett, Eliot carefully studied an outline of text the composer had prepared, felt that Tippett had the talent, and told him anyone else's words would merely be doing the job the music should be doing. Few critics have argued with the results in the oratorio, but few have defended the opera librettos. Even Andrew Porter, long the most eloquent and passionate of Tippett's champions, once wrote in reference to The Ice Break that "Tippett's English is frequently off-key and awkward…. As a poet, he allows himself a verbal recklessness and promiscuity of allusion at odds with the precision of his notes." But Porter quickly went on to explain that after repeated hearings he came to realize how the peculiar expression of the words was inextricably bound up in the overall communicative force of the operas.

Peter Hall, who will direct the Chicago Midsummer, and who directed the first productions of The Knot Garden and New Year, agrees. "People immediately start pointing at Tippett's librettos and saying, 'What a pity he followed T. S. Eliot's advice and wrote them himself.' But actually I think without the librettos you don't really have what he's about. He's very cryptic, he's very ironic. He's actually quite funny." There's no question that operagoers have had trouble finding intentional comedy in Midsummer. Many are put off by the metaphysical aspects. There is also a heavy Jungian cast to the work. The lead couple, Mark and Jenifer, are engaged to be married. In Act I they come to a temple guarded by a group of Ancients. A spiral stone staircase leads upward on one side; stone steps descend to the bowels of the earth on the other. Jenifer ascends the staircase and disappears, while Mark descends. At the end of the act, they return. Mark goes up the stairs, Jenifer descends. We don't see them again until Act III.

It would seem to be a straightforward depiction of the anima and animus: with typical pre-marriage jitters, the lovers examine the aspects of each other's personalities most unlike their own. (Hall sums it up as "a young man's description to his analyst of what he went through before he went to his wedding.") In Tippett's conception, the opera is about the way we are both self-deluded and ignorant of ourselves. But the reaction to the premiere was simple befuddlement. Tippett cheerfully allowed the original reviews to be reproduced in his publisher's tribute to him. "Nonsense - But it's music," announced the Daily Express. The Daily Telegraph headline was "Opera Marred by Obscurity." A preview article in the News Chronicle trumpeted, "This Opera Baffles Us Too, Say Singers." Meanwhile, in Act II, we meet the secondary couple, Bella and Jack. Like Papagena and Papageno, like the Dyer and his wife, they are lower class, down to earth and not given to poetic flights. Jack is a handyman and mechanic, Bella a secretary. She works for King Fisher (Jenifer's father), a blowhard tycoon who feels that money can solve every problem.

(He seems specifically created to offend the very people who keep an opera house solvent.) Jack and Bella witness three Ritual Dances, an eighteen-minute allegorical display danced by the attendants of the Ancients. In the first, a hound pursues a hare. In the second, an otter pursues a fish. Hare and fish both escape at the last moment, but in the third dance a hawk menaces a broken-winged bird. The spectacle ends just as the bird is out of luck. Before the dances, Bella had decided that it was time to marry Jack. But now she is unnerved. In a moment that has never gone over well with audiences, Bella reacts by singing a little two-part aria about fixing her hair and freshening her makeup. Davis finds it "most endearing. There's a lot of humor, a lot of delicacy, a lot of tenderness, as befits the Papagena--Papageno pair in the piece. They're the two who don't have to worry about bringing the anima and animus into perfect balance before they can get married." But audiences today, of course, are inclined to find this moment at best embarrassing, even patronizing.

That is because we tend to take things so literally, divorced from context. Verdi was never accused of supporting the tossing of babies into bonfires (let alone the wrong babies). But playwrights David Hare, Wallace Shawn and Tom Stoppard have now found that audiences can't seem to separate the viewpoint of a character from that of an author. Peter Hall volunteers, "If I may be rude, I don't think that Americans are big on irony. And I think that you take Tippett at literal face value, which is I think fatal. You've got to think more of Restoration comedy and the kind of humor that we get out of, say, George Bernard Shaw, or even Harold Pinter. It's very difficult to sing irony, to sing wit. And that's a problem in receiving Tippett." Davis agrees, explaining that a production can sometimes undermine the opera. "I do think this is a very important part of the piece - the dancing should be scary! It frightens Bella. At the end of the third dance, the victim is about to be killed. It should have a lot of tension in it. The progressive tension of the dances carries the plot forward.

It is a continuation in the second act of what has started in the first - the struggle, the contest, the tension between the anima and animus. That is what Mark and Jenifer are exploring in the first act." And that is the only way in which Bella's reaction can work. Tippett's music clearly delineates what is happening in life and what is in dreams. Moreover, he specifies that the hunters - the hound, otter and hawk - are female roles, while the pursued are males. Who among us, having witnessed something we would rather not face, hasn't wanted to pretend that nothing ever happened? It's no wonder Davis says the Chicago company "should really be doing it in German. Then we wouldn't have to worry." He is joking, but it is a fair point. There is nothing in Midsummer so obscure and difficult to parse as Act II of Wagner's Tristan. And if Tippett is faulted for certain perceived lapses, he should be given credit for his successes as well. His librettos are elegant structures, with sometimes-brilliant lines.

In King Priam, Priam tells Paris, "You are not the founding sort." Before battle, Paris is visited by Athena (played by the singer of Hecuba), Hera (played by the singer of Andromache) and Aphrodite (played by the singer of Helen). He of course chooses Helen. Later, nearing death, Priam has three visitors. He refuses to see Hecuba and Andromache but admits Helen. The Knot Garden is one of the few operas to portray a believable gay relationship, and an interracial one to boot. The lovers in The Ice Break, Hannah and Olympion, ask, "What is so strange and deep as love?" Later, after three quick acts of brutality, Hannah asks, "What has more power of pain than love?" Tippett's operas share a theme, the eternal possibility of reconciliation and renewal. After Hector, son of Priam, is killed, Priam visits his enemy Achilles in his tent. Achilles defiantly displays the corpse. But Priam kneels before Achilles, clasps his knees and kisses his hands. Achilles feels pity; he agrees to return the body, he offers wine, and he shelters Priam for the night.

The Ice Break takes place against the background of race riots. A white mob in Klan-like white robes kills the black champion boxer Olympion. A black mob in black robes severely injures Yuri, son of an exiled political prisoner. Yuri's father and Olympion's girlfriend wordlessly find unexpected consolation in each other during a bittersweet, Bergian orchestral interlude. Tippett's fundamental Age of Aquarius aesthetic, summed up by New Year's "one humanity, one justice," has always been easy to mock. It is important to remember that it was hard won and genuine. Tippett spent three months in prison for violating the conditions of his registration as a conscientious objector. He had refused even non-combatant military duties, unwavering in his conviction that the greatest service he could provide was the production of concerts. Ralph Vaughan Williams, no less, testified on his behalf: "I think Mr. Tippett's pacifist views entirely wrong, but I respect him very much for holding them so firmly." To be sure, Tippett's operas have some embarrassments and stereotypes. Later in life, he became dazzled by all things American.

(Peter Hall remembers one of them as the TV series Dallas.) New Year involves a visitor from the future, "Nowhere Tomorrow." The chorus characters in The Ice Break go on a group "trip" (is it still called that?) and seek their guru, Astron. Olympion, offered a ready and willing white woman, reacts, "Wow! This chick wants balling!" As Davis puts it, "Michael had this gift for, when he was trying to be contemporary and with-it, he'd find some sort of verbal imagery that had gone out of fashion ten years ago." But one of Tippett's primary concerns was "whether or not we can be reborn from the stereotypes we live in," and for the works to last they must retain the stereotypes. The Ice Break druggies end up rejecting Astron's teachings; Olympion's girlfriend, in the elemental "Blue Night of My Soul," transcends the opposing forces around her. Davis, who conducted a spring revival of The Knot Garden in London, feels that Tippett's work is ripe for rediscovery, because "time has lent a certain distance to it.

You don't wince at some of the lines the way you did when it first came out, because there's a certain period quality to it." Andrew Clements, on the other hand, concluded his Opera article with "Whether their time will ever come again I don't know, but I'm not holding my breath." Personally, I'm more optimistic. For one thing, music of craft, quality and universal expression doesn't usually stay in the shade forever. And in our singer-centric age, music that offers performers such golden gifts tends to survive. Sutherland's Jenifer, Thomas Allen's overwhelming Hector and Cynthia Clarey's "Blue Night of My Soul" are eloquent advocates for their composer. Davis recalls that there seemed little hope of a Midsummer Marriage revival after the premiere run until Janet Baker sang Sosostris's aria for a BBC broadcast. Immediately, fascination with the unique sound of the work was reborn. Hall and Davis are energized at the prospect of their Chicago production. Hall has the right frame of reference when he observes, "One should think not only of Figaro but of Così as well, which was also a seminal work for Michael." Davis takes the long view.

"It was something that came to Tippett in a visionary way. That's what makes the piece so great, I think, is that it sustains this extraordinary sense of mystical adventure, somehow, that sets it apart from anything else. That makes it difficult to put onstage. I do have high hopes for this production. But I'm sure everyone who's ever done it has had high hopes." WILLIAM R. BRAUN is a pianist and writer based in Connecticut. Send feedback to Opera News

Question: Which British composer wrote 'The Midsummer Marriage' and `The Knot Garden'?
Answer: SIR MICHAEL TIPPETT