Biography
Sir Michael Tippett was born in London in 1905 and spent his childhood in Suffolk, making little contact with music until his teens. While at Stamford Grammar School, near Peterborough, he took piano lessons from a local teacher, Mrs Tinkler, sang in the local church choir and took part in amateur stage-productions. It was the experience of a hearing an orchestral concert in Leicester, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, that led him to decide to become a composer - even though he had little idea what it involved. His musical ambitions were not encouraged school, so he pressurised his parents into supporting him as a student at the Royal College of Music in London, where he enrolled in 1923.
While studying at the RCM, he took advantage of London concert life and the theatre scene to equip himself for his future career. After leaving the RCM in 1928, Tippett lived in Oxted, Surrey. Teaching French in a preparatory school and conducting a concert and operatic society, he earned just enough to enable him to spend long periods at composition.
In April 1930 a concert at the Barn Theatre, Oxted, featured his main works to date; but these he afterwards withdrew. He then went for further lessons with R. O. Morris. These proved formative: he developed special skills in counterpoint which propelled him towards the first works of his creative maturity, his String Quartet No. 1 (1935; revised 1944) and Piano Sonata No. 1 (1936-7).
Both during his student days and after, Tippett responded deeply to world events - the First World War, the Depression and mass unemployment, children starving. He became involved in political radicalism, organised the South London Orchestra of Unemployed Musicians and directed two choirs sponsored by the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society. At the same time his aesthetic ideas had crystallised in the course of several informal encounters with T. S. Eliot. The outcome of all this was the oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939-41), an impassioned protest against persecution and tyranny and now his most widely performed composition.
Tippett became musical director of Morley College in 1940 and remained there until 1951, giving it a new lease of musical life. The college became the focal point of the revival of Purcell's music; it also featured a lot of new music and upcoming artists like Alfred Deller, Peter Pears and the Amadeus Quartet, who were later to achieve worldwide fame. Meanwhile, in 1943, he was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for refusing, as a pacifist, to comply with conditions of exemption from active war service. He has remained committed to the pacifist cause.
After leaving Morley College, Tippett devoted himself almost entirely to composition, earning a small secondary income from radio talks. He completed his First Symphony in 1945 and then embarked on his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage; like his next three operas, it was first produced by the Royal Opera House, though they have all been presented abroad. They have exerted a considerable influence upon his subsequent symphonies, sonatas, concertos and quartets.
Tippett's international reputation blossomed from his sixties onwards, partly through a proliferation of recordings of his music. He is especially esteemed in America, and some of his most significant works (such as his Fourth Symphony and The Mask of Time) have been US commissions. Tippett has received many honours and awards; he was made a CBE in 1959, was knighted in 1966, became a Companion of Honour in 1979 and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1983; he is also one of the recipients of the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society.
Throughout his eighties, Tippett remained exceptionally active, composing, conducting and travelling worldwide. His fifth opera, New Year, commissioned jointly by Houston Grand Opera, Glyndebourne and the BBC, received its premiere in 1989, was toured all over the UK the following year and the BBC screened their own television production in 1991. Immediately after the opera came Byzantium, for soprano and orchestra (premiered in Chicago in 1991 and repeated the same year at the Proms) and a Fifth String Quartet (1992).
Celebrations of Tippett's ninetieth birthday in 1995 opened with the BBC Music Magazine issuing a CD of Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4, played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer. A month-long Tippett festival at the Barbican reached a climax with the world premiere of his last major composition, The Rose Lake, given by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis. Subsequently, during a two-month tour of the USA and Canada, Tippett heard this greatly acclaimed work performed eleven times - in Boston (under Seiji Ozawa), Toronto (Andrew Davis) and Hartford (Michael Lankester).
Also in 1995, following upon his autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues (1991), there appeared his definitive collection of essays, Tippett on Music, and an idiosyncratic contribution to the Purcell tercentenary celebrations, Caliban's Song, part of a newly devised Tempest Suite commissioned by the BBC.
In 1996, Tippett moved from the isolated Wiltshire house in which he had lived for over 25 years to South London. That year saw the third production of his opera The Midsummer Marriage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In November the following year, the Stockholm Concert Hall mounted the largest retrospective ever of Tippett's concert music. Sadly, the composer fell ill with pneumonia just after arriving in Stockholm. Although he recovered sufficiently to be brought home, he died there peacefully on January 8, 1998.
Top
