Michael Tippett
English composer known for A Child of Our Time.
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett, an English composer, gained fame during and just after World War II. Often compared to Benjamin Britten as a leading 20th-century British composer, his most famous works include the oratorio A Child of Our Time, the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, and the opera The Midsummer Marriage.
Quick Facts
- Full name
- Sir Michael Kemp Tippett
- Born
- 2 January 1905
- Died
- 8 January 1998
- Nationality
- English
- Notable works
- A Child of Our Time
- Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli
- The Midsummer Marriage
- Prison term
- 1943 for refusing war-related duties
- Political stance
- Pacifist after 1940
Facts from the source article.
Life
The Tippett family originated in Cornwall. Michael Tippett's grandfather, George Tippett, left the county in 1854 to seek fortune in London through property speculation and other business schemes; he had a strong tenor voice popular at Christian revivalist meetings. His business later faltered, leading to debts, prosecution for fraud, and imprisonment. Henry Tippett, Michael's father, was a lawyer by training, successful in business, and independently wealthy by his marriage in April 1903.
Unusually for his background, Henry was a progressive liberal and religious sceptic. Henry married Isabel Kemp, from a large upper-middle-class Kent family; among her mother's cousins was Charlotte Despard, a campaigner for women's rights, suffragism, and Irish home rule. Despard influenced Isabel, who was briefly imprisoned after participating in an illegal suffragette protest in Trafalgar Square. After marriage the couple settled in Eastcote, outside London, and had two sons.
Shortly after Michael's birth, the family moved to Wetherden in Suffolk. His education began in 1909 with a nursery governess and private tutors, including piano lessons. He later boarded at Brookfield Preparatory School in Swanage, Dorset, for four years, and won a scholarship to Fettes College in Edinburgh. After revealing a homosexual relationship to his parents in March 1920, they removed him to Stamford School in Lincolnshire.
Music
Bowen has called Tippett a composer of his time, engaging with social, political, and cultural issues. Arnold Whittall sees the music as embodying an ultimately optimistic humanism. Kemp writes that Tippett sought through his works to preserve or remake values that had been perverted while never losing sight of contemporary reality. The key early work is A Child of Our Time, whose closing ensemble words, 'I would know my shadow and my light, So shall I at last be whole', have become canonical in commentary on Tippett, crystallizing a Jungian ethic central to his world-view.
Sceptical critics such as Derrick Puffett have argued that Tippett's craft was insufficient to transmute his personal agonies into something universal. Michael Kennedy has referred to Tippett's open-eyed, even naive outlook on the world, while accepting his music's technical sophistication. Tippett's music is marked by expansive melodic lines; the Daily Telegraph's Ivan Hewett noted his astonishingly long-breathed melodies. According to Jones, an individual voice emerged in 1935 with Tippett's handling of rhythm and counterpoint, demonstrated in the First String Quartet, using additive rhythm and cross-rhythm polyphony derived partly from Bartók and Stravinsky and from English madrigalists.
Colin Mason observed that sympathy with the past was at the root of the neoclassicism in Tippett's music, at least until the Second Symphony.
Reputation and legacy
After Britten's death in 1976, Tippett was seen as the leading figure in British music, but his later work drew mixed reviews. Following the 1980 premiere of the Triple Concerto, Driver felt Tippett had not matched his early masterpieces since The Knot Garden, and Whittall doubted that any piece started in his seventies could compare with earlier ones. Both critics later softened their views, but the general consensus held that Tippett's creativity faded after King Priam.
Derek Puffett blamed this on Tippett abandoning myth, which had been central to The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam, and trying too hard to turn personal struggles into universal music. Though he admired the early works, Puffett placed Tippett among noble but tragic composers who outlived their prime. In 2005, Norman Lebrecht dismissed nearly all of Tippett's output, calling him a composer to forget. Kemp countered that, despite a less accessible style, the later works showed no drop in creative power.
Peter Wright, writing in 1999, rejected the decline theory, arguing that the later pieces are simply harder to grasp because their musical language is more challenging.
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