The current and future reputation of Michael Tippett's music?

[Guest]

I wonder where Tippett's music will be by the end of this century? Looking for information on Tippett just now, I came across the piece below and was shocked as I scanned it.

http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/041222-NL-tippett.html

Tippett is really the only composer almost every piece of whose music has some personal meaning for me, even those few pieces of his which I don't at all care for. However, even as I got into his music 20 odd years ago, I became aware of controversy and wide variation in his reputation.

An obituary isn't generally a place to look for or expect to find objective evaluation and the tagline for the one from The Daily Telegraph is a case in point. Tippett, its headline claims, is " ... is assured of a place in the front rank of 20th-century composers."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/6916569/Sir-Michael-Tippett-OM.html

I understand why Tippett elicits the wildly-varying feelings and opinions he does. His opera texts are hard to swallow, his counterpoint can be 'agnostic' as I've seen it described (unless it's sometimes, still, just played wrong), the music can be organised in such a way that it's 'centre of gravity' does not let it 'balance' overall, as a piece.

But, to me, his music has a forceful personality and, like Beethoven's, it's the personality of someone I should like to know, even feel that I do. It's music, to me, somehow, of the utmost intimacy and humanity and for that reason alone I am surprised it does not inspire more interest, love and loyalty in the world at large.

[LeMartinPecheur]

I fell in love with some works of Tippett at an early age - the usual suspects: Child OOT, Concerto for double str orch, Corelli fantasia. Also the pf conc which was perhaps a bit more of an individual choice? Works of special, often radiant, beauty IMO. As a student I got blasted in the Sheldonian by a Del Mar perf of the 1st symph (sat beside my future bride, like her sucking in breath, face contorted, but discovered afterwards that I had loved, she had hated, every note. We remain divided on this issue). Have explored most of his works since then. IMO most are challenging, but also well worth the effort of getting to know them even if sometimes they remain Misses rather than Hits.

I feel many will lose works of beauty and great individulaity if concert promoters, radio stations and record companies side with 'pundit Lebrecht' (note the inverted commas) and ensure he isn't heard. I shall continue to play my discs, and hope to get deeper into the works that I currently call as Misses.

[hackneyvi]

I fell in love with some works of Tippett at an early age - the usual suspects: Child OOT, Concerto for double str orch, Corelli fantasia. Also the pf conc which was perhaps a bit more of an individual choice?

I like the piano concerto very much for it's melody, swagger and rhythm but I do feel (apologies, from a non-pianist) something crucially lacking in the pianism in places. And, oddly, for me Child of our team is a key 'miss'. There are wonderful moments - the spirituals, inevitably, and the wordless finale; but it's too fragmentary to ever take-off and a bit too respectable to affect me.

But there are 3 wonderful operas (maybe 4; I love The Ice Break's music); magnificently vigorous and luxurious symphonies, vibrant piano sonatas, eloquent string quartets bursting with movement and melody, song cycles (particularly Boyhood's End and not least the gorgeous, tiny settings of songs from The Tempest), Byzantium, the two string concertos you mention plus the fascinating, rich one for orchestra, The Blue Guitar. If I was putting The Mask of Time on, I'd slightly scandalize even myself and programme highlights but there are an awful lot of those amongst the piece's few blunders.

[Suffolkcoastal]

I wouldn't worry too much about Lebrecht, sometimes he does have something worthwhile to say, but a lot of the time, and increasingly so these days, he is becoming a total laughing stock. Tippett is one of those composers whom it seems will always sharply divide opinion. I do find some of his music a bit hard to take, the 3rd Symphony, The Mask of Time, The Knot Garden for example, but other works of his I find totally ecstatic, King Priam, the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, The Midsummer Marriage. first two symphonies, the String Quartets, the Piano Sonatas and Byzantium. Whether one likes or dislikes his music one cannot deny that he wrote music of great originality and music that is clearly and distinctly his own, which is more than one can say of many composers writing today.

[Chris Newman]

Ignore Lebrecht: he lives out on a limb and is in danger of sawing it off close to the trunk. As I said on another thread the same thing happened to RVW and Sibelius. Tippett will be back. He is too important to disappear.

[Thomas Roth]

There was a time when Tippett was played quite a lot here in Sweden, in Stockholm at least. We even had a Tippett festival with a full week of his music in the same year as he died, if I remember correctly. Before that I wrote a lot about him and his music in different magazines. I had the pleasure of meeting Tippett and his partner Meirion Bowen for an hour long talk once, wonderful men both. At the time there was a very active Tippett office in London and I tried my best to promote him in Scandinavia. After his death interest died too. Yesterday I listened to his Concerto for Orchestra and was so impressed once again of the quality.

[Suffolkcoastal]

Ah yes I'd forgotten about the Concerto for Orchestra, very impressive piece I also forgot to mention another of my favourite Tippett works above, the Triple Concerto.

[Serial_Apologist]

Much as I like Tippett very much, roughly up to the Piano Concerto, what I like so much about the early scores is their comparatively uncluttered straightforwardness. After the Piano Concerto I have always felt Tippett "overintellectualised" his idiom, incorporating eclectic sources in an undigested way, to largely, imv, unsuccessful rhetorical effect, presumably in a bid to stay "fashionable", like a 1960s CofE clergyman talking about "keeping with it", donning leathers and tonning it up on the M1. The "rock" and "rap" elements in Icebreaker are frankly embarrassing, whereas in the early works the influences - Stravinsky, jazz, folk music, Renaissance polyphony and madrigal sprung rhythms - had been successfully absorbed into a personal style that could have evolved on its own terms without recourse to the obvious references already apparent in Midsummer Marriage - e,g. Petruschka, Mathis der Maler.

A well-known jazz musician, discussing Miles Davis with me, pointed out that "People talk a lot about sincerity; sincerity is all very well, but you can be completely sincere and also be a complete idiot". Tippett was no fool; he was cultured, no question about that, and personalities whom I have met who knew and were helped by him in their careers all speak highly of him; but maybe he overestimated his own talent as a composer?

All that said, for me at any rate Tippett redeemed himself in one of his last works, the lovely, evocative Rose Lake, where he ditched the overcomplexity gathered over the intervening years, while at the same time retaining what he had learned about orchestration from composers of more advanced idioms than his own, e.g. Messiaen.

S-A

[LeMartinPecheur]

...maybe he overestimated his own talent as a composer?

S-A

If he did, we Tippett-lovers must be guilty of the same error, which would be sad but not unprecedented: there are so many composers with decent followings in their lifetime who have sunk without trace. I don't suppose many of them told their followers that they were completely undeserving of all the adulation. In Tippett's case, only time will tell!

[Chris Newman]

Serial_Apologist,
I think Tippett's Triple Concerto is as simple and as beautiful to love as the Rose Lake is.

Chris.

[Serial_Apologist]

Then I must hear it!

[Suffolkcoastal]

You definitely must S-A! It is by far the most satisfying work of Tippett's later years IMO.

[hackneyvi]

I have to say that I like the Triple but I seem to remember the Colin Davis recording doesn't catch the rhythms right in the finale (?). Several years after coming to know the piece through the Davis recording, I heard the BBCSO play it and had one of those, "That's what it's supposed to sound like!" moments. A similar one occured after I first encountered Sunday Morning in Britten's Sea Interludes. There seemed to be several recordings that really make a mess of the syncopations as they grow.

For myself, I love:

the second piano sonata with its welter of contrasts;

the 3rd symphony - the stamp of brass and swim of strings in the opening - the musics alternating and elongating as they go; the huge and lovely glitter of the night music next, the stridence and chaos of the scherzo before the passion of the final blues;

the 4th string quartet is ripe with energy, perverse melody and gutting depth in some of its harmony.

[salymap]

If he did, we Tippett-lovers must be guilty of the same error, which would be sad but not unprecedented: there are so many composers with decent followings in their lifetime who have sunk without trace. I don't suppose many of them told their followers that they were completely undeserving of all the adulation. In Tippett's case, only time will tell!

Inthe 1950s and 60s I am sure there were more living composers being played at the Proms and indeed, generally.
Apart from RVW, Tippett, Bax,Bliss, Walton, Britten, many more lesser lights from this country there was Sibelius alive until 1957, and several others. They were around, attending rehearsals, visiting publishers.
Who is there now that is as well known to the general musical public? [Okay,I know I'm out of touch!}

[hackneyvi]

Inthe 1950s and 60s I am sure there were more living composers being played at the Proms and indeed, generally.
Apart from RVW, Tippett, Bax,Bliss, Walton, Britten, many more lesser lights from this country there was Sibelius alive until 1957, and several others. They were around, attending rehearsals, visiting publishers.
Who is there now that is as well known to the general musical public? [Okay,I know I'm out of touch!}

It's an interesting question. There isn't a mass audience for indigenous contemporary music anymore, is there, but I wonder if there ever is an enthusiastic mass audience for the contemporary very often. There may be vociferous audiences for it, a number of critical notices and better or worse informed public commentary. But, in sum, that number at its peak might never constitute more than a few thousand.

A secondary question arises from your original one, I think, which is: What is the general musical audience? Is there one/1? An audience we might consider to be a single entity? If there is, who are they and what are their numbers?