Know Yourself - Acknowledge The World

Michael Tippett's Operas, by Harry Halbreich

"I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole". This phrase from Tippett's earliest masterpiece, the oratorio A Child of Our Time, remains the key to his whole life's achievement, as he stressed it himself as late as 1977: "the only truth I shall ever say". When he was gathering the first ideas for his oratorio, in 1938, he had just passed through the decisive experience of his inner human development, the discovery of Jungian psychoanalysis. This gave him the answer he had found neither in Trotzkyite marxism, nor in traditional Christian religion.

Improving the world begins be improving oneself, by coming to terms with our dark, death-longing side and thus surpassing it. His five operas, written within a period of more than four decades, are all variations on this fundamental theme. Man can rely neither on an extant ideology, nor on a helpful divinity, which the agnostic Tippett cannot consider. As a healing force and weapon, only love remains, love in the sense of charity, of which we know (1 Corinthians 13) that it surpasses even faith and hope.

From Tippett's Third Symphony, we learn that Hitler and Stalin have long since strangled Beethoven's Ode to Joy in our cursed century's human throats. But there remains "a huge compassionate power to heal, to love".

What immense courage it needs to achieve it all alone, without any help from above! From The Mask of Time, we learn that God the Father has long since withdrawn to inaccessible heights, leaving man only with the non-committed message that he may pray to Him. In fact the Jewish believer Arnold Schoenberg hardly says it differently in his unfinished Modern Psalm (though for him God's message is of course committed), and "yet he prays" ("trotzdem betet er"). For Tippett, the agnostic humanist, God has abandoned humanity, but not without leaving a divine spark in every human creature (remember the motto of Janacek's From the House of the Dead!), and the name of that spark is love.

But man is unable to love his kinsmen unless he loves himself, and to achieve this, he must reconcile himself with his dark, shadowy side, that is with his death instinct. How is it said in The Mask of Time?: "O man, make peace with your mortality, for this too is God".

Thus all of Tippett's important works, and especially his five operas are as many variations on this basic theme, as many possible answers to the one question: to know and to acknowledge yourself and the other. This is also inseparable from his life-long commitment as a pacifist and a freedom-fighter. In his operas, this is treated either as individual or as collective responsibility.

It is already basic in his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, the result of seven years of hard toiling, in many ways a modern counterpart to Mozart's Magic Flute (even though there also exist some points in common with Strauss' Frau ohne Schatten). The two couples (Mark-Jenifer and Jack-Bella, in a way equivalent to Tamino-Pamina and Papageno-Papagena) first have to recognize and accept their own self and its complementary part in the other in order to become "whole". Only after having overcome their aggression by acknowledging the other and his/her difference do they gather the strength to vanquish the oppressive bullying of King Fisher. But let us not forget, as his chosen name makes clear, that King Fisher carries the unhealable wound (=sin) of Amfortas. The irresistible pantheistic rejoicing of the final scene culminates in the voluntary sacrifice of love: two young couples, representing the whole of humanity, have succeeded in reaching their goal.

The Midsummer Marriage, the most extended of all Tippett's works (without the cuts he later authorized, it last a full two hours and three quarters) is also his most lavish, both in sonority and by its melodic and harmonic language, the crowning climax of his creative development so far. His idiom, an already quite enlarged tonality, relishes in euphony, but the music never sounds overripe or cloying, for everything here radiates in youthful, virginal freshness. If its contents reminds us of The Magic Flute, on the other hand its position within Tippett's own creative development rather recalls Idomeneo: a unique creative explosion at the exact threshold between youth and maturity (he was forty-seven at the time, but of course he was a late developer). That even in this intoxicating luxuriance the more serious moment of admonestation is not missing (and we shall find it in all subsequent operas) is shown by the stupendous Aria of Madame Sosostris (the comparison with Wagner's Erda is inescapable!). In the wake of this radiant score came a number of works (The Heart's Assurance, the Corelli Fantasia, the Piano Concerto) which carry its truly arborescent melodic and rhythmic exuberance another step further. After more than forty years, the almost total lack of understanding which then greeted the masterpiece is incomprehensible indeed. True, most composers of the period where offering more sober and even, more meager products. But the fact the libretto (Tippett's own, as always) was rejected as confused or downright silly only shows how unknown the work of Carl Jung was at the time, at least in England.

The Second Symphony (1956-58), above all in its last two movements, shows a leaner, harsher, more dissonant idiom, and thus acts as a transition towards the second Opera, King Priam (1958-61), whose subject absolutely requires it. Amongst the five operas, it is unique, both by being a tragedy and by borrowing its subject from Greek mythology, revisited by Jungian psychoanalysis. The outer circumstance that gave birth to it was the consecration of the new Cathedral of Coventry, a city totally destroyed during World War Two (Britten's War Requiem was also premiered there the very next day). Thus Tippett's opera is about human responsibility in the face of the choice between war and peace, the overcoming of the self-destructive death instinct being now shifted from the individual to the collective. Musically speaking, King Priam is certainly more difficult of access than the other operas, and this applies even more for the works which followed in its wake, the Second Piano Sonata, the Concerto for Orchestra and in a certain sense even the oratorio The Vision of Saint Augustine, the most complex of all his works. The idiom has not only become very dissonant and practically atonal, but extremely concentrated and elliptic, the additive, mosaic-like succession of static structures, as found in late Stravinsky, replacing more traditional melodic development. The orchestral sound is correspondingly hard, tutti are few, brass and percussion are prominent, strings withdraw into the background, to the point of being totally absent in the second of the three acts, as are female voices. If lyricism is less present here, it is far from missing, and towards the end the genuine compassion of Achilles yielding to old Kings Priam's request to be given back the body of his killed son brings it to the fore, so that Priam's inescapable violent death is transfigured into a final catharsis. King Priam's profound meditation over war and violence remains highly relevant for our own time, but it could only be entered upon after the fundamental exercise in self-knowledge of the foregoing opera.

After completing King Priam, Tippett extracted from it one of Achille's Arias and added two more, in order to probe more deeply into the hero's psychology. Thus the Songs for Achilles were born. In a similar way, the Songs for Dov would appear after the next opera, The Knot Garden.

The Knot Garden (1966-69) is unique amongst Tippett's operas in being a "chamber opera" without a choir, which explains how it could be arranged without any problem for an orchestral combination of only 22 players, and that is continues to be produced in that form with total success. If The Midsummer Marriage made us think of The Magic Flute, here it is more Cosi fan tutte that springs to mind. The (Jungian) psychoanalyst Mangus plays a part fairly similar to that of Don Alfonso in Mozart's masterpiece: he too pulls the action's strings and helps the other characters to better self-knowledge. But the piece also shows strong links with Shakespeare's The Tempest, whose main characters are taken over by the protagonists who re-act them as in a psychodrama. Once again, the subject is overcoming negative, self-destructive forces. Thus the married couple Faber-Thea, who had fallen apart, find the way back to each other, whereas their foster-child Flora liberates herself from the fright of the aggressive adult world, which for her is embodied by the threat of the sexual aggression she believes to see in Faber's attitude to her. In order to achieve this, she has to overcome her childish sexual ambivalence, which she succeeds in doing with the assistance of the homosexual musician Dov, whose relationship with the black poet Mel breaks up, while Mel comes closer to the maimed, embittered freedom-fighter Denise. Whereas The Midsummer Marriage was not precisely defined in time and King Priam took us back three thousand years into the past, The Knot Garden's setting is unmistakably contemporary, even if not as accurately defined in time as the two later operas. But there is one decisive element that comes to the foreground most clearly, both in the libretto and the music, and that is the crucial experience of Tippett's discovery of the United States, which he visited for the first time as late as in 1965, but to which he immediately felt tied by the strongest affinities. The Negro Spiritual, the Blues and Jazz had of course always been present in his music, but there is much more here: the homosexual couple Mel-Dov is clearly an American one, as appears from their words and even more from their music, with the important presence of the electric guitar and of Jazz rhythms, developed even further in the ensuing Songs for Dov. The powerful Third Symphony (1970-72), whose extended vocal Finale contains a succession of three Blues, also partakes in that ideological and musical world, and this powerful attraction for America reached a further stage in the next opera, The Ice Break.

Whereas The Knot Garden, in its perfect concentration, is perhaps the most accomplished masterpiece amongst Tippett's operas, The Ice Break (1973-76), in spite of even greater concentration, or just because of it, is probably the most problematic of the lot, and none the less fascinating for it. It is more period-bound than any other and, just as in the case of New Year, it shall require some years for it to outgrow its narrow ties with the topics of its day and regain more general significance. Tippett has been scorned in the two late operas, for trying to make himself younger by submitting to fashionable trends, and maybe these criticisms are not totally unfounded. Some of the German "Zeitopern" from the late twenties, as by Hindemith, Krenek and others, have also needed time to assert their lasting value. The dangerously tense action of The Ice Break takes place in a great American airport at the height of the Cold War (the Russian poet-exile Lev is all too reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn!), which also coincided with the worst racial riots in the United States: as a representative of defiant Black Power, the champion Olympion is an almost literal incarnation of Muhammad Ali. The conflicts here happen at three levels: East against West (communism against capitalism), Black against White, plus a conflict of generations. Lev's son Yuri, who escaped to the West twenty years before his father, now feels wholly American (white of course), and has to go through the hard ordeal of a long convalescence after having been grievously wounded in a racial riot in order to attain reconciliation with his father. For his girl friend Gayle and for Olympion it is too late:they died the victims of blind violence. But even here there is final hope, and the ice-break of the title stands as a symbol of the thaw that is to succeed the cold war. The music too alternates aggressive battle sounds and warm lyricism. This expressive warmth, already vastly recaptured in The Knot Garden, here reaches new heights.

It was Tippett's intention to write no more operas after The Ice Break, and New Year (1986-88) was first planned as a kind of Musical, with lots of dancing and songs. Only gradually did it develop into a full-fledged opera, and even a slightly longer one than the two that came before it. This time, it is not only the music which sounds even more American than in The Ice Break, but the very premiere took place on the other side of the ocean, in Houston, Texas. In The Ice Break, the "trendy" aspect had taken the shape of a "psychedelic trip" devised by a "messenger" from the Beyond (who, it is true, gave his followers a clearly sobering warning: "Saviour? Hero?! Me!! You must be joking."). In New Year, two groups of characters face each other: the children's psychologist Jo-Ann, her young black foster-brother Donny and their foster-mother Nan are from "Somewhere" and "Today", whereas the computer wizard Merlin, the space pilot Pelegrin and their woman boss Regan appear in their space ship from "Nowhere" and "Tomorrow". Again the theme is overcoming one's crippling shadow side, and Jo-Ann appears as the vulnerable sister of The Knot Garden's Flora: she does not dare leave her working room anymore, fearing to go out into the "terror town", where the delinquent rebel Donny feels at home, and thus she cannot help the many children out there who need her, and whom her professional training would indeed allow her to help. Here the rescue comes through the love of the space pilot Pelegrin, who leaves her a freed, courageous woman before he vanishes into Future and the Beyond. Written for a medium size orchestra (lots of winds, percussion and electronic instruments, but few strings), the score is vintage Tippett from beginning to end, even when he uses electronic sounds for the "space" music. But here the tone has become even warmer, almost popular at times, with the reconciliator Auld lang syne at the end of act two and with several places close to the idiom of Rock of even Rap music. Are these compromises, needs to adapt to the times from an ever youthful octogenarian, who feels one with the young people of today? The sometimes very young (at least by their year of birth) critics who scorned him for it are simply themselves hopelessly old. The composer here did not strive to produce some inaccessible masterpiece for a remote future, but simply to give a valid testimony of his participation in the problems of contemporary society, aimed at today's audiences. He has remained the unshakeable idealist who created A Child of Our Time more then fifty years ago, as witnessed by the final and crucial words that end his last opera: "One humanity; one justice".