Tippett & Purcell - background
Henry Purcell's reputation in modern times owes much to the efforts of Michael Tippett who, from the 1940s onwards, conducted many performances of his major works and, in collaboration with the baroque music specialist, Walter Bergmann, published editions of several of his solo songs. Their editions of these songs appeared individually between 1947 and 1956, but they are now collected in five volumes and available both for high and low voices (Schott Edition numbers 12409, 12411, 12413, 12493, 12494).
Tippett discovered Purcell's music by accident. In 1940, Morley College - the adult education college in London where Tippett had recently become Director of Music - was hit by a bomb during an air-raid. Amid the rubble, Tippett discovered some volumes of the old Purcell Society Edition and took them away to study. Immediately, he sensed a composer of extraordinary individuality. He became fascinated with Purcell's deploymnet of the ground bass with variations and made use of the technique in all his subsequent music - from the slow movement of his
Symphony No. 1 (1944/45), the third movement of his Little Music for strings, (1946) to the final movement of The Mask of Time (1980/82).What Tippett found most riveting, though, was Purcell's dramatic treatmnet of words. So also did Benjamin Britten, who participated, along with the tenor Peter Pears and countertenor Alfred Deller (another Tippett discovery at this time), in the revivals of Purcell's Odes and church music that became a regular feature of Tippett's renowned wartime concerts at Morley College.
Thereafter, Tippett and Britten in their own way emulated and extended Purcell's vocal style - a style that was florid and flexible, sensitive to the finest nuances of meaning and accentuation. Tippett's five operas*[link to info on operas section] develop many facets of Purcell's dramatic vocal style, linking them often with comparable vernacular idioms of the present day - e.g. jazz and blues. There is a kind of continuity, also, from Purcell's song-writing to Tippett's. His early cantata,
Boyhood's End (1943) was explicitly modelled on Purcell's own extended multi-section songs and cantatas (such as The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation and Mad Bess).In an essay on Purcell, published in
Tippett on Music, Tippett singles out several technical features of Purcell's vocal music that influenced him (and others) considerably:his treatment of words, his use of ground basses, and above all -'...his ability to create intensity, particularly in poignant moments, by a sort of harmonic polyphony...The technical means to produce this intense polyphony are chiefly the hanging on to notes in one part so that they make a momentary dissonance with another part before their resolve themselves; and the planing of harmonically unexpected notes at the moments of resolution, so that the music is never quite resolved and still...Exactly this feature of Purcell's style...has become a feature in its turn of my own musical language.'
Tippett made one classic recording of Purcell's music, conducting the Ode for St Cecilia's Day (1692), which Tippett had brought to the forefront of public attention in his concerts at Morley College in the 1940s. Amongst those taking part was the countertenor Alfred Deller, whom Tippett had also 'discovered' and featured in his concerts. Omega Records has now made this recording available for the first time on CD, number OVC 8020.
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©Meirion Bowen