Michael Tippett - A composer 'of our times'

Michael Tippett's musical output was prodigious, bold, questioning and passionate but not to everyone's taste. Depending on one's view, Tippett's music is as often enlightening and uplifting as it is dense and seemingly directionless. It is always unashamedly intellectual and reflects the personal bravery and unquenchable curiosity of this 20th century English cultural giant who died in 1998, 3 days after his 93rd birthday.

Tippett was not a genius but he had a talent for creating music that was attuned to the temper of the times although he didn't always hit the mark. His oratorio, A Child of our Times, written at the start of World War II is brilliantly moving, but his opera, The Knot Garden, written in the swinging '60s and dealing with the politics of sexual identity, is forced and the characters stereotyped.

Despite such flaws, what marks Tippett as a composer whose music has a fair chance of standing the test of time are his vision and his weaving of the mystic and visionary, poetic and dramatic genres into musical settings. There is an elasticity of imagination in Tippett's composition that stems in part, from his early years which were marked by unconventionality, political radicalism and a peripatetic lifestyle.

Tippett was born in London on January 2, 1905, and he and his older brother, Peter, who became a prominent naval historian, were the products of parents who, although relatively materially comfortable, were politically liberal. The father Henry, a lawyer, was a rationalist and a Manchester liberal and his wife, Isabel Kemp, was a novelist, Labour Party member and a suffragette.

World War I was a difficult time for Tippett he was only nine when it began in 1914. His parents' financial situation deteriorated and he moved with them through France, Italy and Corsica, living in shabby hotel suites.

The young Tippett's sensual and sensitive nature was evident early on. As a teenager he attended the public school Fettes near Edinburgh, where he was at once bullied and lost his virginity to another boy. He was more comfortable at Stamford Grammar School in Lincolnshire, where he completed his secondary education, although his quite public atheism was, according to biographer Merrion Bowen, perceived as being so destabilising for the school that Tippett, at the headmaster's request, was billeted in the local village.

Unlike Britten who was marked out as a child prodigy, Tippett appears to have come to music relatively late for someone who excelled at the art. In 1923 Tippett entered the Royal College of Music where he found a fertile creative environment. Luminaries, including the conductors Henry Wood and a young Adrian Boult, and composer Vaughan-Williams, were all available to students. Boult in particular, nurtured Tippett, allowing him to assist with Friday rehearsals of the college's orchestra for four years.

By now Tippett's interests were catholic: politics, literature and 16th and 17th century English music were stimulating his natural intellectual curiosity. And unlike many of his contemporaries, he appears to have accepted his homosexuality in a matter of fact way.

The 23-year-old Tippett who graduated from the Royal College in 1928 had in him earnestness and a desire to use his musical talents for the advancement of society. The Depression years gave him an opportunity linked to the great and intense love he had found with the painter Wilfred Franks. Franks, who thrived on hiking through Italy, Germany and the north of England, exposed Tippett to child poverty, an experience that made its creative mark in the monumental A Child of our Time.

The political radicalism that his parents had imparted engendered an intense period of organising, producing and conducting. Tippett conducted choirs for the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society Choir and when they toured London's Dickensian East End, Tippett would arrange for meals to be served for choir members and the audience.

Tippett, in common with many of the intellectual and cultural class in Britain at the time, was attracted to Marxism (Trotskyism was more appealing to him than Stalinism) and he flirted with the British Communist Party, but was not a dedicated party man. It was specific causes and a genuine commitment to social justice ideals and actions that seemed to drive Tippett's political engagements rather than a slavish adherence to doctrine. He could not, for instance, stomach the idea of revolution by violent means.

In the political, romantic and social awakening that the 1930s brought, Tippett found expression in music of genuine substance. In addition to A Child of our Time, the String Quartet in A and his Concerto for Double String Orchestra emanate from this period. The Concerto for Double String Orchestra is an exemplar of Tippett's experimentation with rhythmic changes and in this sense it echoes prominent the modernist composers Igor Stravinsky and Leos Janacek.

Tippett conducted the Concerto’s premiere with a group of unemployed musicians in London on April 21, 1940, but he missed its first professional performance in 1943 as he was a conscientious objector to participation in World War II. He even refused the authorities' offers of peaceful activities as substitute for joining the armed services and was imprisoned for three months.

A Child of our Time, written between 1939 and 1941 is Tippett's most satisfying and creatively brilliant work and is one of his most recorded pieces. Written in traditional oratorio style but with a contemporary and symbolic twist, A Child of our Time was Tippett's response to the 1938 killing of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew (an event that sparked the Nazis' terrible slaughter of the Jews on November 9 that year the so-called Kristallnacht).

But it was more than that. The work also reflected Tippett's immersion in Jungian therapy. He had, through a friendship with Evelyn Maude, the wife of a senior civil servant, Sir John Maude, been introduced to the writings of Carl Jung and found in the man and his writings, with its emphasis on the primary importance of imagination and dreams, a capacity to unlock his creative spirit.

And then there is the role of TS Eliot in the work's gestation. Tippett and Eliot had known each other from the mid-1930s and when Tippett asked the poet to write a libretto for A Child of Our Time, Eliot asked to see a plan of the work. Tippett's drafts already well advanced and including texts from William Blake, Jung, the World War I poet Wilfred Owen and others impressed Eliot who told Tippett to continue to write the libretto himself.

A Child of Our Time uses negro spirituals placed in the oratorio setting where JS Bach had used parts of Christ's Passion. It is, for this reason, an extraordinarily moving and clever work. As Tippett explained it, these spirituals have turned and twisted the Bible's language into a modern dialect: the stories they tell of biblical Jews are used to comfort negroes in the bitterness of oppression. And in this sense they connect directly in this context with any group or individual that is rejected and cast out from the centre of society onto the fringes Jews in World War II, ghetto and slum dwellers.

Stephen Threlfall, the director of Manchester's Chethams School of Music, has observed of A Child of our Time, "Although the work arose out of the general situation in Europe before the Second World War, the composer knew that the work itself had to be one which could be embraced by all to reach the deepest levels of common humanity."

Tippett's libretto is acutely awake to the reality of the world in which suffering occurs. As the opening chorus sings:

The world turns on its dark side.
It is winter.

But Tippett was not content to be maudlin. The alto's aria in Part 111 speaks of hope and optimism. There is, so to speak, light at the end of Tippett's tunnel.

The soul of man
is impassioned like a woman.
She is old as the earth,
beyond good and evil,
the sensual garments.
Her face will be illumined like the sun.
Then is the time of his deliverance.

It is the capacity of the work to resonate with the suffering and reflection that a myriad of social disasters or tragedies generate which makes it such a fine contribution to the 20th century repertoire.

A Child of our Time seemed to provide Tippett with a confidence to tackle the dramatic genre opera. His operative output extended from The Midsummer Marriage which he composed between 1946 and 1953, to 1988, when New Year was first performed. The operatic medium seemed to suit Tippett and Eliot's seeming confidence in the composer's libretto technique led him to compose the words for each of his operas. Opera allowed Tippett to explore metaphysical and psychological themes and fantasies, even if musically and dramatically some of his efforts were uneven.

The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970, falls into this latter category. It is fair to say that it's a slave to the fashion of the time. It's Tippett at his most woolly-headed, trying to say something musically about the 1960s cultural and social revolution simply so that he is not left behind.

As British music writer Conrad Wilson has noted, The Knot Garden deals with "seven characters a bearded psychiatrist, a civil engineer and his gardening wife, a black and white male gay couple, a disturbed adolescent and a female freedom fighter disfigured by torture who explored an emotional labyrinth in search of self-discovery and self-understanding".

The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam are, however, masterpieces. The former burst onto a rather stultified English opera scene in 1955 with its homage to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as its primary setting, and its imaginative use of dance. The Midsummer Marriage explored the breaking down of class and the capacity of man to transcend rules to find true worth.

In King Priam, Tippett takes Homer's story in the Iliad of Priam, King of Troy, and his family to emphasise the inevitability of fate and that the perfect outcome is not always just around the corner. It's a tightly woven work, harsh and unforgiving in parts, but just as a block of stone has its own innate beauty before it is chiselled by the sculptor, so does the score of King Priam.

In Tippett's four symphonies, five string quartets and piano sonatas, the use of metaphor to unravel the mysteries and complexity of the universe are also apparent. In this Tippett was following in the footsteps of his two great heroes, Goethe and Beethoven. Like the latter, Tippett wanted to communicate a declaration through the musical form.

As Bowen points out, Tippett's String Quartet Number 5 takes as its model Beethoven's "Hymn of Thanksgiving" in the latter's famous Opus 132 quartet. In both Tippett and Beethoven there are slow mediative passages interspersed with rapid episodes, symbolising affirmation and light.

When Tippett died on January 8 1998, he could well be satisfied with his life. While his 25-year relationship with artist Karl Hawker had broken down in the 1970s, Tippett had travelled widely, befriended creative and political people around the globe and involved himself in causes such as the international peace movement.

His musical output is not always easy to play or listen to, but his importance as a composer lies in his capacity to experiment, to infuse old forms such as the opera and symphony with new life, and to use music as a tool of social change.

In a series of essays Tippett published in 1974, with the decidedly 1970s title of Moving into Aquarius, he noted that his role in society was "to continue an age-old tradition, fundamental to our civilisation, which goes back into prehistory and will go forward into the unknown future. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form whether visual, intellectual or musical. For it is only through images that the inner world communicates at all."

Tippett's contribution to musical culture was always ambitious, often flawed, but never lacking in integrity.

The Sydney Philharmonia Choir, conducted by Brett Weymark and featuring Kirsti Harms, Elizabeth Campbell, Jamie Allen and Michael Lewis will perform A Child of our Time on May 28, 29 at the Sydney Opera House.The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will perform Tippett's Symphony No 4, with Mark Wigglesworth conducting, on June 2-4 at Hamer Hall.