The Ice Break was Sir Michael Tippett's fourth opera. First produced at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 7 July1977, with Colin Davis (its dedicatee) conducting and Sam Wanamaker belatedly called into direct the production, it received a further staging at Kiel (in German) the following year, and became the first of Tippett's operas to receive a professional production in the USA, when the Boston Opera Company mounted the work in May 1979 under the direction of Sarah Caldwell. Apart from a revival of the CoventGarden production, conductedby David Atherton in 1979,the opera was then not see nor heard until theconcert performance at the Henry Wood Proms in the Royal Albert Hall on 23 July 1990, that led to a recording of the work with the same forces.

Each Tippett opera tends to be an essay in a new genre, creating itsown sound world and calling for individual staging requirements. After the radiant lyricism, comic interplay and nature-magicof TheMidsummerMarriage (first produced in 1955) and the abrasive, Brechtian treatment of Homer in King Priam(1962), Tippett moved into a theatrical domain where diverseelements could more freely intermingle. Thus The Knot Garden (1970) is both a comedy of forgiveness, after the manner of Shakespeare's The Tempest and Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, and also a study in psychological game-playing, following the example of Edward Albee's Who'sAfraidof Virginia WooIf?. The Knot Garden almost ruthlessly lays bare the acute psychological difficulties of its seven characters; The Ice Break continues in a similar vein, widening its scope to tackle social and psychological issues.

Just as Lorca was prompted by his stay in New York in the l93Os to start writing a new kind of poetry, so Tippett, visiting America for the first time in 1965 when he was sixty, felt himself released into an open, polyglot society which affected everything he wrote thereafter. The Knot Garden was the first fruit of that stimulus; The Ice Break, too, is steeped in the American experience, though its subject-matter is of broader significance, and it isquite wrong to treat it simply (as some, unfortunately, have) as a documentary about the Watts riots and flower-power cultureof the I 960s.

The title

The titleof theopera embodies both actual and symbolic meanings. On the one hand it refersto "the frightening but exhilarating sound of ice breaking on the great northern rivers' which signals the arrival of spring. Such extreme seasonal transformations are best known to Russians and others in the more Northern latitudes where they form part of the whole experience of living from one year to the next. Stravinsky, asked by RobertCraft what he had loved most in Russia, replied: `Theviolent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking. That was the most wonderful event of every year from my childhood.' Galina von Meck (granddaughter of Tchaikovsky's patroness), recalling in her memoirs her time in a labour camp, notes that `when Spring comes to Siberia, it comes so intensely that one can positively watch things coming out of the earth.' The ice-breaking sounds are therefore naturally prominent in the deathbed recollections of Nadia, one of two Russian emigrés in Tippett's opera. But the breaking of the ice - the motif that starts the opera and recurs three times later on (it consists of a brass and percussion chord and rhythmically manipulated minor and major thirds) - signifies more than a background context in nature or the seasons. lt draws our attention to the main concern of the opera - in the composer's own words: "whether or not we can be reborn from the stereotypes we live in". That is what Tippett calls "the central problem of our time" and it manifests itself in the plot through the struggles between racial groups (black versus white) and opposing generations (young versus old). The opera is about the need for reconciliation.

The first two acts delineate the tensions that arise between Lev, a Russian teacher newly released into exile to join his wife Nadia, and their son Yuri, who finds it difficult to accept him. Theirdiscord is exacerbated by the racial strife in which Yuri becomes involved, sustaining serious injury when it turns into a riot. Vuri's survival in Act 3, after a successful hospital operation, is immediately interpreted by the chorus as a spring-like portent of reconciliation in the world at large:

"Spring came to you at the farthest
in the very end of harvest."

Sadly, but inevitably, this is a dream: reconciliation is only temporary, and Tippett ends the opera with a scene between Lev and Yuri that echoes what he had read in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahresome fifty years earlier. Wilhelm, by this time in his career acountry doctor, has to save his son's life. He bleeds him, and as he looks down at his naked, sleeping body, says:

"Yet you will always be brought forth again, glorious image ot God, and likewise be maimed, wounded afresh from within or without."

These are the closing words of the opera: a perception that (metaphorically) spring may be followed by many more winters, necessitating an even greater effort to achieve rebirth .The cycle of conflict and resolution is eternal. Tippett drivesthe point home musically in the bleak motif which ends the opera - held chords decorated by harp arpeggios - whose first appearance in Act 1 accompanied Lev's recollections of imprisonment, when he comments:

Poetry upheld me.
[quoting from Mandelstam]
The earth was worth ten heavens to us.'

The chorus

The Ice Break differs from Tippett's previous three operas in giving the chorus a variety of roles. At the start they are the crowds of fans that gather at the airport to meet the black champion, Olympion - a mixture of blacks and whites, collectively supporting their idol with uninhibited slogan-shouting and sexually chauvinist behaviour. In Act2 they polarise into rival black and whitemobs, and eventuallycome to blows. Off-stage during Act 3, they represent Nadia's friends from her childhood, calling to her as she dies. Then they become another stereotypical group, seekers for Paradise invoking their guru, the androgynous Astron (a role sung jointly by mezzo-soprano and counter-tenor, following the example of Britten's music forGod in his canticle Abraham and Isaac); later the same group rushes through the hospital where Yuri has survived his operation, heralding a new spring.

Thechorus is, in short, a metaphor forpeople in general, basically anonymous, but capable of donning many masks that indicate the particular stereotype they have adopted. Their activities cut across the narrative in a surrealist manner. (This notion Tippett derived from seeing a Covent Garden production of Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini in the 1968/9 season,where the chorus constantly whirled around the stage. But his idea of using a masked chorus stemmed from a production he saw in the 1920s of Ernst Toller's play Masse Mensch, in which the rows of chorus figures with their backs to the audience suddenly turned round and disconcertingly revealed that they were faceless).

A consequence of these choral interpolations is that they accelerate the pace f the action, making the opera Tippett's shortest and fastest. In his essay, The Birth of an Opera, written as an explication of The Midsummer Marriage, Tippett noted that in the film Citizen Kane "the cutting and the shots themselves (that is scene- changing in excelsis) become part of the artistic experience and put the old-fashioned scene-changing of the operatic stage to shame'. Thus, already, in the 1950s, Tippett had begun to think in terms of introducing cinematic procedures into the presentation of stage-works. While in The MidsummerMarriage and King Priam Tippett retains the orchestral transitions necessary forscene-changing, in The Knot Garden he merely writes fast-moving, schematic "dissolves" whose music is purely functional, implying that the stage-picture should change as if by magic. But in The Ice Break he dispenses with transitions altogether. This presents the stage-director with a difficult task, for, in consequence, the action of the opera constantly shifts back and forth between exteriors and interiors. In these days og sophisticated theatrical technology the problems of staging should not ultimately be insurmountable. More tricky is the implied requirement that the chorus should be capable of fast movement, even dance: "to obtain the imperatively necessary histrionic vitality inthe chorus scenes", Tippett writes in his libretto, `non-singing performers may have to be used'. (Tippett attained what is perhaps a more satisfactory solution in his fifth opera, New Year, where he specified two independent choruses of singers and dancers, whose contributions to the action overlap but can be skilfully integrated.)

Just as there is an archetypal sound for the ice breaking, so, too, with the chorus, whose music relies mainly on basic chanting shouting and hymn like-motifs Against their anonymity the nine characters in the opera have to assert their individuality.

This isquite a test fo rthem as some are by their very nature stuck in stereotypical postures while others die off in Act 2 and three of them - a Police Lieutenant, Luke, the doctor, and Astron the Messenger - make far too brief appearances to have a chance to develop. In an early draft of the scenario, in fact, Tippett contemplated bringing back a number of them as ghosts (so to speak) in what was to become the Psychedelic Trip scene of Act 3, as a way of clinching their inter-relationships.

Aside from the three peripheral figures just mentioned there are two main groupings of characters, with one person in common: the first comprises a family - Lev, Nadja and Yur ; the second, two pairs of young people - Olympion, `a black champion', and Hannah, his girlfriend; and Gayle, Hannah's white friend, whose boy-friend is Yuri. The two girls cross sides, as it were: Hannah finds Olympion's violent, divisive character increasingly intolerable; Gayle, on the other hand, identifying with the black cause, enrages Yuri by offering herself to Olympion, thus triggering off the tensions that lead to a riot in Act 2. Lev and Nadia stand apart from it all, as it paralysed into inaction.

The speedy exposition of Act I isfollowedby a second act of overt confrontation. In the dense opening quartet, Gayle, Nadia, Yuri and Lev each moralise from their own entrenched positions: no-one will budge and the ensemble simply ends with the younger figures being lured away by some sinister chromatically duetting trumpets, calling them to the crowd of whites engaged in a ritual outside. Olympion, too, must abandon his love-making with Hannah to join the rival black group: whereupon Tippett provides Hannah with a crucial aria (coloured particularly by the electric guitars in the orchestra) in which she looks for some hint of sanity amid the wroughtup situation prevailing outside, and asserts an attitude of calm compassion as an alternative. Hannah, a nurse by profession, is the tirst character in the operato grow in stature.

Now the black and white mobs strike up ritual poses of aggression. The cries of the black group, `Burn, baby, burn', are superimposed on the barber-shop harmony of the white group's distorted hymn tune (an original Methodist hymn appropriated by the Ku Klux Klan, and now given new words). Taunts and provocation are articulated by means of an (authentic) Voodoo tune on the clarinet for the blacks and a hoe-down on the violin for the whites; these, too, are then superimposed, and with rival vocal groups added, it turns into a wild mêlée of competing musical strands.

A brief withdrawal into the reflective world of Nadia and Lev precedes an eruption of crudely explicit violence and shooting. The Police Lieutenant, discovering the carnage on the streets - which has cost Olympion and Gayle their lives and leftYuri maimed - offers only a standard response: he sees only bodies to be removed to the mortuary or hospital. At the end, Hannah, left alone with Lev, shares with him a mood of unspoken sympathy and understanding, encapsulated in a soaring solo violin line that sustains its lyrical course throughout the orchestral epilogue.

The death of Nadia at the start of Act 3 denotes simply her withdrawal from the conflicts about her. Only her memories matter now. Lev, on the other hand, has an inkling of the reconciliation that may be possible with Yuri, reading to Nadia on her deathbed the very scene in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, from which Tippett quotes at the end of the opera. Nadia's death, perhaps symbolising the passing of an older generation of attitudes and ideas, makes way for a new beginning. And this is the underlying purpose of the controversial Psychedelic Trip scene.

The crux of the opera

Seekers after paradise exist in every generation and in virtually every culture. Their notions of Eden vary: sometimes they find it in a return to Nature (naturism, even) and organic foods; or in the re-enactment of prehistoric rituals (hence the Stonehenge hippies); sometimes, paradise can be a gambler's Heaven (Paradise, California, derives its name from "pair of dice"!); or it might be found in Zen or other oriental cults; or in the hallucinations induced by drugs. Behind the trendy jargon of Tippett's Psychedelic Trip an age-old aspiration finds expression. It is here that the chorus is faced with the need to break out of stereotypes. For when Astron appears to them and hands down a Jungian adage -

`Take care for the Earth.
God will take care for himsellf."

- they still naively acclaim him as a God or guru, a status he ironically disowns:

"Saviour?! Hero?! Me!!
You must be joking."

This is germane both to the message of the opera and to Tippett's own stance as an artist. The common fault of the crowd is to worship a prominent figure one day and seek to demolish him (or her) the next. Hero-worship is suspect, guru adulation risky, deification deadly. As an intellectually alive, socially committed composer, Tippett has encountered all three and has always sought to disabuse those inclined to put him on a pedestal. Astron (like the messenger-figures in the earlier Tippett operas and the Presenter in New Year,) represents Tippett's own stance: he himself would wish to be regarded as a messenger, not as a divine figure whose message is sacred, forthe latter can only lead to dogmatic self-righteousness and intolerance.

In the succeeding hospital scene, Yuri is the centre of attention, as Luke, assisted by Hannah, trees him from the plaster in which he is encased. (Tippett's model here is the transformation scene in Shaw's Back to Methuselah, in which the egg with a girl inside appears on stage; she asks to be let out, the egg is cracked open and she heads straight for the first handsome man she sees. Levs reference to the "naked human chick" preserves the original image.) After a choral eruption (with its invocation to spring drawn from the masque in The Tempest), Hannah brings Yuri to meet Lev, and with their uncertain reconciliation the opera ends.

Words and Music

In terms of its genre, The Ice Break is characteristic of all Tippelt's operas in that it is anti-verismo. What we do not see is an elevated form of television soap, with the plot contained within the framework of the three-walled stage, the fourth wall being left open for us to view the action. Tippett has always followed his mentor TS. Eliot in envisaging a type of theatrical action that can spread beyond, beneath and above the stage-set. Hence the tendency of all his operas (with the possible exception of KingPriam) to resemble in style thesixteenth-century masque, in which supernatural figures, dance, spectacle and magicare all vital to the action. While this has generally been accepted with regard to Tippett's other operas, it has not been appreciated in relation to The Ice Break.

Tippett has always written his own operatic librettos (tollowing the advice he received from Eliot in the late 1 930s): and in The Ice Break he used a lot of groovy American slang that has probably distracted attention away from the universal elements in the piece. lt has been too easily assumed that the action should be situated ini 960s USA. n fact, it could equally well belong to Belfast, Johannesburg, Beirut or Delhi. Such considerations need not impede one's appreciation of it in a recording, where the listener's imagination can clothe the musical experience in appropriatevisualterms. But they are worth bearing in mind, becauseTippett's music would not carry so much weight, and suggest so many resonances of meaning, were his conception of the opera tied to a single place or period.

On the other hand the music of The Ice Break continues in the same direction as that opened up by The Knot Garden, using an idiom that discloses abundant influences from American music. But again, it is not a question of local colour. One American influence was the blues, which deeply affected Tippett's melody and harmony from A Childof Our Time onwards, and along with other elements from the jazz/rock tradition colours the orchestration of the opera overtly. But what Tippett discovered in the blues is not some authentically black American ingredient, but a musical archetype: the false relations (major/minor clashes) in Elizabethan madrigals and Purcell's music were to him "bluesy": likewise, what he heard in Javanese gamelan music, inspiring the cadences to the marvellous melody that opens the slow movement of his Triple Concerto, was what he called a `blues' gong. Tippett would probably have tried to write Hannah's Act 2 aria about the "blue-black" night of her soul in the way he did whetheror not he had encountered the specifically American manifestation of the archetype.

Similarly, Tippett's freely pluralistic attitude to his musical materials is one that tends to be associated with certain kinds of American music. Studying and conducting the music of Ives, Gershwin, Copland and others certainly suggested ways in which he could expand his musical idiom Ä superimposing disparate layers of music, forinstance, to create a feeling almost of collective improvisation, allowing vernacular and art-musicelements fruitfully to interact, and extending his orchestral palette (especially with the inclusion of electric guitars and a lot of extra percussion). But the most important underlying reason for all such diversity is that Tippett felt this was the way to write something new for the theatre. And in this respect, he has felt his real model to be the supreme dramatic pluralist - Shakespeare.

© copyright Meirion Bowen 2003