Book Review
(ed.) Suzanne Robinson, Michael Tippett: Music and Literature. Reviews of this symposium are gradually appearing in the press and on the internet. Noting that much more could have been done to promote the composer's music since his death in 1998, Gary Higginson, Classical Music Web, writes:
"...This book may just be a start, let's hope that more will follow. One thing it certainly throws up is the amount of research which still needs to done if we are gain an overall picture of Tippett the complete creative artist. It also points up what a great deal of prejudice there is to overcome.
"There is prejudice concerning... his libretti, which is what Suzanne Robinson, discusses in relation to 'A Child of our Time' but there is also prejudice further afield. Despite gallant attempts in Germany, Tippett's music seems, to Meinhard Saremba, to be but little regarded there and little heard.
"This symposium looks at... two further and perhaps lesser-known aspects of Tippett's life.
"Lewis Foreman... on 'Michael Tippett and the BBC' throws light upon the composer's persistence in keeping his name in front of the 'big-wigs' of the day and the opposition he encountered for over a decade. Suzanne Cole in 'Tippett, Morley College and early music' demonstrates how his programme planning, experimentation and imagination in the performances of Monteverdi, Purcell and Gibbons helped his cause with the BBC. It offered the Morley College choir a place in broadcasting schedules. It also forced the powers that be to take note of Tippett's work, irrespective of his compositional activity. Cole's chapter 'Musical Trail-blazing' shows that even the BBC were not too blinkered to see that something special was happening in part of South London during those very dark war years... The legacy lives on to this day in programme planning on the network, mixing old with new.
"One thing that... this book has done is to send me back to some works which I haven't heard for a while. These include the 3rd Quartet mentioned by Sean Flanagan, the 1st Piano Sonata by Lewis Foreman as one of the composers earliest broadcast successes, and The Heart's Assurance (1951). The latter is fascinatingly analysed by Barbara Docherty in a submission describing it as 'Tippett's War Requiem', This is an analogy which is most apt when one considers that the two poets, Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes were both victims of the Second World War. She convinces me that this work is very fine indeed. "There is much to ponder here and much to be developed"
Describing the essays in this book as "disparate but thought-provoking", David Matthews, in the Times Literary Supplement, also found Meinhard Saremba's account of the reception of Tippett's music in Germany "makes rather disconcerting reading. It includes quotations from a large number of mostly uncomprehending reviews of German performances of Tippett operas and concert works." Matthews cites a 1980 review of the Concerto for Double String Orchestra by Karl Robert Brachtel, who declares that it "is not music which will survive the times...Today this neo-classical-contrapuntal pounding to and from the 1930s, this expanded tonality - which de facto only seasons major and minor with some notes foreign to the scale - appears completely irrelevant to us." Matthews "senses some deep cross-cultural barrier here, which can perhaps be traced back to Tippett's use of British folksong...as the basis of his musical language...[which] with its irregular rhythms and characteristic modal inflexions, may always sound quaint and whimsical to the serious Germanic mind."
Matthews also applauds the "due acknowledgement here of Tippett's contribution to the early music revival". His main criticism is that "while proper attention is paid in the book to Eliot and Yeats, other important influences of Tippett's thinking could have been more closely examined [e.g. Jung, Shaw]."
In Musical Times, David Wright focusses most of his review on Lewis Foreman's essay: " For Tippett, the BBC was a vital means of getting his career started -it made him credible in official funding body eyes as a commissionable composer -and, through his talks for radio, for establishing him as a presence in the contemporary music world.This is something that Foreman brings out clearly, from various early unsuccessful attempts by Tippett to secure broadcasts, to the effectiveness of his strategy of making his performers his most important advocates, especially through the broadcasting of the adventurously programmed Morley College concerts." He also applauds a "typically insightful essay, 'Transcending song: Tippett's play with genre in vocal composition', " by Arnold Whittall.
Michael Tippett: music and literature Edited by Suzanne Robinson (Ashgate, 2002) ISBN-07546-0132-3 £45