All excerpts from recording by:Faye Robinson (soprano), Sarah Walker (mezzo-soprano), Robert Tear (tenor), John Cheek (baritone), BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis
EMI Classics CMS 7 64711 2

The Mask of Time was one of a number of works commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in connection with its centenary celebrations in 1981. The world premiere, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, took place three years later. The work was not, of course, merely written in response to a commission, but was conceived over a period of nearly ten years: he wrote the text between 1977 and 1980 and the music between 1980 and the end of 1982. It is Tippett's most extended work for the concert-hall, its two parts, comprising ten movements, lasting about 95 minutes. Its scope is vast, sketching out the evolution of the world and mankind, demonstrating relationships between Man and Time, and meditating on man's place in the world as we know it and in the universe at large. Part I follows a largely chronological sequence, from the creation of the world, through the Ice age, the wanderings of tribes to the emergence of settled societies and a depiction of paradise. Part II is discontinuous, focussing mainly on individuals in more recent history and their attempts at survival in an alien, highly threatening and destructive world.

When writing The Mask of Time, Tippett was influenced above all by Jacob Bronowski's BBC TV series and book, The Ascent of Man (1973). In some respects he took this as a model, sometimes even paraphrasing Bronowski in his text. However, their two standpoints were not identical. For Bronowski, the scientific achievements of the century justify confidence in the future ascent of man, notwithstanding many upheavals and catastrophes.

Tippett is more reserved, more sceptical. His stance is that of the artist who has to defend values that are in dagner of being ignored or obliterated by societies that put their economic resources primarily at the disposal of technology. So, in The Mask of Time, there is no celebration of science, of the new world of metaphor opened up by quantum theory or whatever. Instead, it is the perversion of scientific discoveries that are brought sharply into the foreground. For Tippett could not close his mind to the many inhuman consequences of technological advance, especially in the strife-torn epoch through which he himself had lived. For him, recent history had often resembled the natural world in which there were 'fixed' and frequently horrific and pointless cruelties, an everlasting struggle of prey and predator.

In another period, Tippett might have been tempted to call his work an oratorio. But its richness and variety of content and format suggested more an allusion to the Renaissance masque, together with the ambigious and ironic connotations of the modern spelling, Mask. At one stage, in its conception Tippett toyed with the idea of making The Mask of Time a theatre piece. But gradually he decided that all the drama in it could be concentrated into the musical techniques as such, as well as into the roles and relationships enacted by the soloists and chorus. In musical terms it is closer in conception to Monteverdi's Vespers (1610) than to the symphonically organised large-scale choral compositions of a later date, such as Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Like the Vespers , also, it is dominated by singing - there are very few purely orchrestral episodes - and the heterogeniety of its scoring led him to describe it as a work 'for voices and instruments'.

Throughout the four soloists and chorus are sharply polarized against each other. After the choral opening evoking an ever-present universe, the tenor soloist intervenes to make a personal comment and in so doing, provides an important clue to an understanding of the work: "All metaphor', he sings - and The Mask of Time is indeed all metaphor , for that is the only way an agnostic artist might view the world. The final song of the ninth movement is allotted to a young actor for this very reason, as if Tippett wanted to echo Shakespeare's famous line: "All the world's a stage...and one man in his time plays many parts'. The tenor, many times in the work, represents the artist and the individual. Quoting Yeats at the start, he represents the artist who 'stalks on' through life, through history - a recurrent idea in the work (cf. Orpheus' song in the ninth movement).

In the second movement, the other soloists join in to comment on possible meanings of the creation and introduce other themes. In the third, they try to make sense of struggles for survival in nature at large. Absent in the fourth movement, in the fifth movement they become named individuals - Man, Woman, Dragon and Ancestor - a carfully balanced group encapsulating the blissful state of communion between humans, the supernatural and the animal world in the Paradise Garden - a communion that eventually ruptures. The intimacy of thismvement is enhanced by the use of a chamber choir for Tippett's madrigalian setting of lines from Milton, supported by a small accompanying ensemble.

Thereafter, in the second part of the work, the soloists have strong individual identities. In the sixth movement, the tenor represents the poet Shelley charting (as in a dream) the horrific triumphal progress of the Chariot of Life, then Shelley himself, in actual life, defying the elements and drowing at sea: the other soloists join in, during a coda, to depict and comment on the ritual burning of his body.

In the succeeding movement, after the orchestra (mainly) and the chorus (peripherally) have depicted the scientific discoveries that led to the splitting of the atom, the jubilation turns to horror as the cataclysm of Hiroshima is conjured - both in pictorial eruptions of violence and in symbolically in a Shiva's dance of destruction (a duet for brake-drums). Linked to this is the eight movement, in which the soprano soloist comes powerfully into the foreground with a keening threnody, accompanied by humming male voices.

Subsequently, the baritone, in the first of the three songs of which the ninth movement is comprised, overtly assumes the role of Orpheus 'returning from Hades' and 'stalking on' into the daylight; the mezzo- soprano sing then sings as representative of the imprisoned anti-Nazis in Peking, hoping for deliverance from freedom; and finally, introduced by an invocation of sunlit spring, the tenor appears as the young Greek actor , receiving oracular advice from Zeus. All three of them here are unmistakably the voices of hope: and their ardent outpourings are then fused with those of the chorus in a culminative surge of music cued in by the final phrase of a First World War poem by Siegfriend Sassoon, worth quoting in full:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark green-fields; on- on - and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away...O but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done. [my italics]

The end of The Mask of Time is a metamorphosis of its beginning: for the chord on which the chorus ululated at the start, on the 'Sound' now returns as the core of a texture of decorative vocal lines, over an orchestral ground bass. The final wordless singing is suddenly cut off in mid-flow.

©Meirion Bowen(1997)

David Clarke: The Mask of Time - Images and Structures

A full understanding of The Mask of Time has to proceed from anexamination of its artistic intentions. These are intimately bound up withTippett's view of his relationship to the the society within which he as acomposer operates. For Tippett, the modern Western condition ischaracterised by a polarity between the needs of our inner, imaginativeworld and the way we perceive and live in the outer world of reality. Inpast cultures (and still in tribal ones today) mythological images,products of the inner life of the psyche, were crucial in providing astructure for relating to, and indeed controlling, the outer world.Religious imagery in the history of our own society has played the samerole. As Tippett has said, 'Haydn, when he...wrote The Creation, couldstill take an account of the creation which he believed was literally theword of God.' The stock of images belonging to that account still heldsocial currency as a way of enabling the individual to articulate his orher place in history and the universe. In twentieth century Westernculture, however, the situation is radically different. Although today'sreligious fundamentalism would still assert a similar cosmology, it canonly do so in contention with the dominant modes of thought of the times.

The present world view is formed in the wake of a scientific revolution.However indirectly, we are all touched by the thought of such seminalfigures as Darwin and Einstein; and the same scientific paradigm has led toan ever greater faith in and reliance upon technology. Thus scientificthought has furnished increasingly powerful explanations for the behaviourof the universe, and an increasingly powerful manipulation of the world.What is left out of the equation, however, is that which Tippett calls the'inner world': the realm of images whose source is the unconscious, therealm of feelings, of values, of those things, in short, which areessential to our humanity. 'As man becomes more and more capablescientifically, the debasement of the world of the imagination produceshuman beings who find it harder to use decently the material abundance thusprovided, writes Tippett in his essay, Poets in a Barren Age (1971). Hebelieves that the divorce and imbalance between these two domains ofexperience is a major source of widespread spiritual impoverishment whichin its most extreme manifestations has made possible such atrocities asHiroshima. Against such debasement Tippett believes himself mandated as anartist 'to create images from the depths of the imagination' in an attemptto put the listener back in touch with the inner world and possibility ofspiritual sustenance.'

It is in this light that The Mask of Time must be understood. 'It dealswith those fundamental matters that bear upon man,' the composer states inhis preface. Although many of these concerns have been individuallyaddressed in various of his previous works, the point here is that theyare all brought together and placed in a cosmological context. Through anelaborate amalgam of images, both textual and musical, Tippett attemptsnothing less than a metaphorical representation of our contemporary outlookon the world and the universe.

Because in its post-Christian condition our culture has no shared religiouspractice or philosophical system The Mask of Time is unable to adopt anypre-existent liturgy or conceptual framework. Any private epistemologywould similarly be a barrier to the collective experience so essential tothe work. For these reasons Tippett had to tackle his subject-matter bycompiling a libretto from a multiplicity of sources and ideas. Here thenis the link with the Renaissance Masque tradition implicit in the title,though in fact the most significant model in this respect is T. S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land. Like Eliot's poem, Tippett's libretto is largely afragmented assembly whose meaning depends as much on allusion and inferenceas on a logical sequence of ideas. Both artists address their works to aBarren Age, but ironically it is Tippett the confirmed agnostic who mostconfidently presents the possibility of affirmation. For as the firstwords of its preface declare, 'The Mask of Time is explicitly concernedwith the transcendental.'

Whereas for Eliot this would have entailed a return to religion, which forthe majority of Europe would mean Christianity, Tippett is unable to narrowdown his conception of the transcendental in this way. In The Mask of Timethe transcendental is only sometimes allied with religious belief systems.It is more frequently explored in its relation to unspecifiedapprehensions of the numinous and to metaphysical conceptions of time.These various aspects of the transcendental, and the possible relationshipsbetween them, form a matrix through which the fragmented and highly diversecontents of the libretto might be made into a more fully articulatestructure.

Part One of The Mask of Time represents humankind's view of itself inrelation to the rest of Creation, and accordingly its starting-point is thebeginning of Time. It incorporates two notions of time which Tippett hadexplored in a broadcast talk nearly 20 years earlier: '...Time as unique,from Genesis to World's End...[and] Time as repetitive, or circular - themyth of the Eternal Return.' Both are compatible with the modern worldpicture. Cosmologists are more or less agreed on the idea of a finitestarting-point at which time and space, and hence our universe, came intobeing; but differ over whether the universe will continue to expandinfinitely, or at some point contract back into itself ('falling away' asTippett puts it) and perhaps begin the process again. This temporaldichotomy is encapsulated in the first movement of The Mask of Time.

A metaphor for the Big Bang -

Exploring
Exploding
Into time
Into space
- is following by a cyclic image of time
Turning
Returning
Eternal
Reversal.

The notion of Reversal, connoting Eternal Return, is fundamental to thework. Among other things, it pertains to three of the ideas in the secondmovement: 'The great wild satellite' (i.e. Halley's Comet) eternallycircling back into our solar system; 'Lord Shiva dancing with informingfeet', who in the seventh movement is depicted 'dancing our destruction';and Orpheus who, in the ninth movement, returns from Hades. In the first movement, prior to both the temporal conceptions cited above,Tippett presents an image of a domain outside of time altogether. Fittingly, the ideas employed here have musical connotations:

Sound
where no airs blow
Sound
Song
Resounding.

These notions in particular are metaphors of the transcendental whichreturn at various points throughout the piece. The effect is always one ofirruption: a potent image of eternity breaking into linear perceptions oftime and thought.

Tippett is careful to avoid any implied connection with a named Godhead(the reference to Shiva in the second movement is only one of a pluralityof images used to weave a creation myth). However, in the fourth movement,the composer is able to associate the transcendental with the religiouspractices of Ice Age and post-Ice Age communities - even savage ritualsatop Mexican pyramids - because those societies held images of the naturalworld, images of the divine, and the patterns of their everyday lives in amuch more intimate communion than in our own time.

The third and fifth movements reflect more closely the modern outlook onsuch matters. In 'Jungle' the marvellous abundance and intricacy of thenatural world is contrasted with its amorality. When predators feedruthlessly on prey, where is the impulse for praise of the divine? Whereindeed is the evidence for a compassionate God? The fifth movementconcludes with a related theological viewpoint. The Paradise Garden remainsa dream: the divine figure, neutrally labelled 'Ancestor' withdraws to aposition of infinite remoteness, 'far, far beyond the stars'. This is anallegory for the loss of faith in our culture; if the universe really isgoverned by a caring presence, we seem unable as a society convincingly tocommunicate to one another any evidence for it.

In Part Two of The Mask of Time, the actions of man under such an agnosticworld-view is an important theme. Movement 6, The Triumph of Life, depicts the romantic artist heroically attempting to assert his ownimmortality. Movement 7, Mirror of Whitening Light, recounts in threeepisodes the development of the exact sciences which, isolated from anycomparable development in man's inner life, leads ultimately to nuclearcatastrophe, the victims of which are mourned in the eighth movement. Images of the divine are absent here: there is instead a deeply expressedhumanity. The Three Songs of the ninth movement conclude with anexhortation to an acceptance of mortality: however, the final wordlesschorus of No. 10, The Singing Will Never Be Done, is once againsuffused with the numinous, restoring the transcendental to a vividness ofexpression, without making any final verbal assertions on the question ofthe divine.

It is clearly possible, thus, to extract from the mosaic-like text of TheMask of Time a network of meanings which creates a certain measure ofcoherence, though that coherence is ultimately grounded in the musical experience. As the composer states, the many metaphors of the text '...areswallowed up within the music, so the libretto should not be read asliterature'.

Like the text, the musical format is highly diverse, though each of the tenmovements establishes its own sound world and structural procedures. Onestrategy Tippett employs to give some pervasive sense of continuity is therecurring use of certain musical metaphors which signify thetranscendental. These in fact form part of a complex of harmonicconnections which ramify into numerous moments of the work. For example,the chord consisting of perfect 4ths sung to the word 'Sound' at the startof the work and recurring several times within its course, also forms thehub of the much more elaborate texture of the closing movement. Closeacquaintance with the score reveals many more connections of this kind, which help form the structural threads running through its dicontiguousmovements.

Also discernible is a criss-crossing network of parallelism betweenmovements. For instance, the three instrumental preludes of Movement 7and their bond with Movement 8 are matched by the Three Songs of Movement9 and its fusion with the final movement. The fourth movement's powerfulclosing evocation of the numinous provides a convincing symmetricalcounterpart to the very end of the work. Similar relationships exist between the final sections of Jungle and TheTriumph of Life: the ends of both movements contemplate the mysteriouselements underlying the seemingly inchoate and destructive forces of nature(the life and death struggles between members of the animal kingdom in theformer, Shelley's death at sea in the latter). Both are marked by musicalmetaphors of the transcendental: Sound, Resounding , finally leading tonew, quietly mysterious and delicately coloured harmonies. The Shelleymovement is also related to the fourth movement, The Ice Cap Moves South-North. Common to each is a clearly directed narrative steered bythe equally strongly oriented and unremitting pace of the music.

One of the most significant features of The Mask of Time is a dichotomybetween two types of musical structure. This is well illustrated in thecontrasts between two of the movements - The Triumph of Life and TheSevered Head. The former comprises two narrative sequences - firstly,Shelley's poetic vision of a blind charioteer chaotically driving thechariot of life across the sky, then a depiction of the poet's own death bydrowning. Both episodes are strongly oriented towards a climactic goal,developing a limited amount of musical material - indeed, in the first, theprocess is driven by an unremitting ground-bass. New material is onlyintroduced when dramatically appropriate and both its relationship withwhat has gone before and its subsequent transformations are carefullyordered.

The Severed Head, by contrast, contains an abundance of non-developingmaterial which - framed by scenes from the Orpheus legend - generate akaleidoscopic network of associations. Literary quotations from one ofRilke's Orpheus sonnets are found alongside musical quotations from Dowlandand Tippett's own music. The composer's aim here seems to be to enrich thesignificance of Rilke's lines through wide-ranging allusion, pullingtogether threads from elsewhere in the work, juxtaposing the violence ofthe Furies's dismemberment of Orpheus' body with the gently euphonious'gamelan' sounds quoted from Tippett's Triple Concerto.

In general, the interaction of linear and associative structures in TheMask of Time is a particularly fascinating outgrowth of the composer'spre-occupations with the two different perceptions of time, mentioned atthe start of this essay. The Jungle movement is a good instance. Itsinitial progress is linear. Two scenes depicting life mercilessly feedingon life are each followed by questions as to the meaning of it all in thereligious scheme of things. Accepting that further logical argumentationwill not provide an answer, Tippett's response is to enter into adiscontinuous mode of musical thought. A few quiet sounds (drawn from thefirst interlude of the Triple Concerto) presage a momentary clarity ofvision - Occasionally the mountains part - which seems to come from nowhere and leads to a series of numinous images. That the original questions remain unanswered in strictly logical terms no longer seems relevant, now that we have had opened up to us a different way of seeing.

On a still grander scale, the final movement engages in a similar kind ofresponse to the collected issues of the entire piece. Its final act ofwordless sound offers us a direct apprehension of the numinous. Significantly, this is also the most highly structured movement: over astrict ground bass the chorus, soloists and orchestra have their ownprecisely measured cycles of different lengths and speeds. By thesecarefully controlled means, Tippett is able to convey an image of ceaselessascent towards some visionary moment - unifying, maybe, cyclic and linearnotions of time. That the implied moment of vision is indeed realised istestimony to the composer's ability to reach deep into the subconsciousstore of images. Here we have the emotional and structural consummation ofall previous images of the transcendental and the fulfilment of atrajectory of reversal which has been one of the crucial paradigms in thepiece: we return to the opening image of eternity and infinity, only nowthere is an overwhelming sense of the place of humanity within it.