95 Facts About Michael Tippett

1.

Sir Michael Kemp Tippett was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War.

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2.

Michael Tippett withdrew or destroyed his earliest compositions, and was 30 before any of his works were published.

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3.

Michael Tippett's centenary in 2005 was a muted affair; apart from the few best-known works, his music has been performed infrequently in the 21st century.

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4.

Michael Tippett was a strong advocate of music education, and was active for much of his life as a radio broadcaster and writer on music.

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5.

Michael Tippett's son Henry, born in 1858, was Michael's father.

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6.

Michael Tippett's education began in 1909, with a nursery governess and various private tutors who followed a curriculum that included piano lessons—his first formal contact with music.

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7.

In September 1914 Michael Tippett became a boarder at Brookfield Preparatory School in Swanage, Dorset.

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8.

Michael Tippett spent four years there, at one point earning notoriety by writing an essay that challenged the existence of God.

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9.

When Michael Tippett revealed to his parents in March 1920 that he had formed a homosexual relationship with another boy, they removed him.

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10.

Michael Tippett transferred to Stamford School in Lincolnshire, where a decade previously Malcolm Sargent had been a pupil.

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11.

Around this time Henry Michael Tippett decided to live in France, and the house in Wetherden was sold.

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12.

Michael Tippett found Stamford much more congenial than Fettes, and developed both academically and musically.

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13.

Michael Tippett found an inspiring piano teacher in Frances Tinkler, who introduced him to the music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin.

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14.

Michael Tippett sang in the chorus when Sargent directed a local performance of Robert Planquette's operetta Les Cloches de Corneville.

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15.

Michael Tippett remained in Stamford in private lodgings, while continuing lessons with Tinkler and with the organist of St Mary's Church.

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16.

Michael Tippett began studying Charles Villiers Stanford's book Musical Composition which, he later wrote, "became the basis of all my compositional efforts for decades to come".

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17.

In 1923 Henry Michael Tippett was persuaded that some form of musical career, perhaps as a concert pianist, was possible, and agreed to support his son in a course of study at the Royal College of Music .

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18.

Michael Tippett began at the RCM in the summer term of 1923, when he was 18 years old.

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19.

Michael Tippett heard Chaliapin sing, and attended concerts conducted by, among others, Stravinsky and Ravel—the last-named "a tiny man who stood bolt upright and conducted with what to me looked like a pencil".

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20.

Michael Tippett overcame his initial ignorance of early music by attending Palestrina masses at Westminster Cathedral, following the music with the help of a borrowed score.

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21.

Kitson, whose pedantic approach and lack of sympathy with Michael Tippett's compositional aims strained the relationship between teacher and pupil.

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22.

Michael Tippett studied conducting with Sargent and Adrian Boult, finding the latter a particularly empathetic mentor—he let Michael Tippett stand with him on the rostrum during rehearsals and follow the music from the conductor's score.

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23.

In 1924 Michael Tippett became the conductor of an amateur choir in the Surrey village of Oxted.

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24.

Michael Tippett passed his Bachelor of Music exams, at his second attempt, in December 1928.

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25.

On leaving the RCM, Michael Tippett settled in Oxted to continue his work with the choir and theatrical group and to compose.

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26.

In February 1930 Michael Tippett provided the incidental music for a performance by his theatrical group of James Elroy Flecker's Don Juan, and in October he directed them in his own adaptation of Stanford's opera The Travelling Companion.

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27.

Michael Tippett withdrew the music, and in September 1930 re-enrolled at the RCM for a special course of study in counterpoint with R O Morris, an expert on 16th-century music.

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28.

On 15 November 1931 Michael Tippett conducted his Oxted choir in a performance of Handel's Messiah, using choral and orchestral forces close to Handel's original intentions.

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29.

In mid-1932 Michael Tippett moved to a cottage in neighbouring Limpsfield, provided by friends as a haven in which he could concentrate on composition.

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30.

In 1932 Michael Tippett arranged the staging of a shortened version of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, with locals playing the main parts, and the following year he provided the music for a new folk opera, Robin Hood, with words by Ayerst, himself and Ruth Pennyman.

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31.

Michael Tippett was not formally a member of any political party or group until 1935, when he joined the British Communist Party at the urging of his cousin, Phyllis Kemp.

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32.

Michael Tippett resigned after a few months when he saw no chance of converting his local party to his Trotskyist views.

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33.

Plant, Michael Tippett then joined the Bolshevik-Leninist Group within the Labour Party, where he continued to advocate Trotskyism until at least 1938.

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34.

Franks had a passion for the poetry of both William Blake and Wilfred Owen; Michael Tippett claimed that Franks knew Owen's poetry 'almost word for word and draws it out for me, its meanings, its divine pity and so on.

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35.

Michael Tippett was saved from despair when, at Ayerst's suggestion, he undertook a course of Jungian analysis with the psychotherapist John Layard.

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36.

Michael Tippett hoped that Eliot would provide a libretto for the oratorio, and the poet showed interest.

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37.

However, when Michael Tippett presented him with a more detailed scenario, Eliot advised him to write his own text, suggesting that the poetic quality of the words might otherwise dominate the music.

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38.

Michael Tippett called the oratorio A Child of Our Time, taking the title from Ein Kind unserer Zeit, a contemporary protest novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer Odon von Horvath.

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39.

Michael Tippett began composing the oratorio in September 1939, on the conclusion of his dream therapy and immediately after the outbreak of war.

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40.

Michael Tippett's challenge was to rebuild the musical life of the college, using temporary premises and whatever resources he could muster.

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41.

Michael Tippett revived the Morley College Choir and orchestra, and arranged innovative concert programmes that typically mixed early music, with contemporary works by Stravinsky, Hindemith and Bartok.

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42.

Michael Tippett continued the college's established association with the music of Purcell; a performance in November 1941 of Purcell's Ode to St Cecilia, with improvised instruments and rearrangements of voice parts, attracted considerable attention.

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43.

In 1942, Schott Music began to publish Michael Tippett's works, establishing an association that continued until the end of the composer's life.

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44.

Michael Tippett's case was heard by a tribunal in February 1942, when he was assigned to non-combatant duties.

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45.

Michael Tippett rejected such work as an unacceptable compromise with his principles and in June 1943, after several further hearings and statements on his behalf from distinguished musical figures, he was sentenced to three months' imprisonment in HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs.

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46.

Michael Tippett served two months, and although thereafter he was technically liable to further charges for failing to comply with the terms set by his tribunal, the authorities left him alone.

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47.

On his release, Michael Tippett returned to his duties at Morley, where he boosted the college's Purcell tradition by persuading Alfred Deller, the countertenor, to sing several Purcell odes at a concert on 21 October 1944—the first modern use of a countertenor in Purcell's music.

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48.

Michael Tippett formed a fruitful musical friendship with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, for whom he wrote the cantata Boyhood's End for tenor and piano.

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49.

Michael Tippett's immediate reward was a commission from the BBC for a motet, The Weeping Babe, which became his first broadcast work when it was aired on 24 December 1944.

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50.

In 1946 Michael Tippett organised at Morley the first British performance of Monteverdi's Vespers, adding his own organ Preludio for the occasion.

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51.

Michael Tippett's farewell took the form of three concerts which he conducted at the new Royal Festival Hall, in which the programmes included A Child of Our Time, the British premiere of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, and Thomas Tallis's rarely performed 40-part motet Spem in alium.

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52.

In 1951 Michael Tippett moved from Limpsfield to a large, dilapidated house, Tidebrook Manor in Wadhurst, Sussex.

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53.

The Midsummer Marriage was finished in 1952, after which Michael Tippett arranged some of the music as a concert suite, the Ritual Dances, performed in Basel, Switzerland, in April 1953.

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54.

Much of the music Michael Tippett composed following the opera's completion reflected its lyrical style.

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55.

Such comments helped to foster a view that Michael Tippett was a "difficult" composer, or even that his music was amateurish and poorly prepared.

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56.

The Dennis Brain Wind Ensemble, for whom Michael Tippett had written the Sonata for Four Horns, complained that the work was in too high a key and required it to be transposed down.

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57.

In 1960 Michael Tippett moved to a house in the Wiltshire village of Corsham, where he lived with his long-term partner Karl Hawker.

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58.

Michael Tippett chose for his theme the tragedy of Priam, mythological king of the Trojans, as recorded in Homer's Iliad, and again he prepared his own libretto.

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59.

The music for the new work displayed a marked stylistic departure from what Michael Tippett had written hitherto, heralding what a later commentator, Iain Stannard, refers to as a "great divide" between the works before and after King Priam.

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60.

Michael Tippett had been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1959; in 1961 he was made an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Music, and in 1964 he received from Cambridge University the first of many honorary doctorates.

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61.

In 1965 Michael Tippett made the first of several visits to the United States, to serve as composer in residence at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado.

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62.

At home in 1969, Michael Tippett worked with the conductor Colin Davis to rescue the Bath International Music Festival from a financial crisis, and became the festival's artistic director for the following five seasons.

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63.

In February 1974 Tippett attended a "Michael Tippett Festival", arranged in his honour by Tufts University, near Boston, Massachusetts.

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64.

Michael Tippett was present at a performance of The Knot Garden at Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois—the first Tippett opera to be performed in the US.

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65.

Between these American journeys, Michael Tippett travelled to Lusaka for the first African performance of A Child of Our Time, at which the Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda, was present.

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66.

In 1976 Michael Tippett was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

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67.

Michael Tippett maintained his pacifist beliefs, while becoming generally less public in expressing them, and from 1959 served as president of the Peace Pledge Union.

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68.

Michael Tippett's eyesight was deteriorating as a result of macular dystrophy, and he relied increasingly on his musical amanuensis and near namesake Michael Tillett, and on Meirion Bowen, who became Tippett's assistant and closest companion in the remaining years of the composer's life.

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69.

Michael Tippett's libretto has been criticised for its awkward attempts at American street vernacular, and the opera has not found a place in the general repertory.

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70.

In Michael Tippett's words, this is an attempt to deal "with those fundamental matters that bear upon man, his relationship with Time, his place in the world as we know it and in the mysterious universe at large".

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71.

In 1983 Michael Tippett became president of the London College of Music and was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit .

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72.

Michael Tippett intended The Rose Lake to be his farewell, but in 1996 he broke his retirement to write "Caliban's Song" as a contribution to the Purcell tercentenary.

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73.

Rather than ignoring the barbarism of the 20th century, says Kemp, Michael Tippett chose through his works to seek "to preserve or remake those values that have been perverted, while at the same time never losing sight of the contemporary reality".

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74.

Michael Tippett's music is marked by the expansive nature of his melodic line—the Daily Telegraphs Ivan Hewett refers to his "astonishingly long-breathed melodies".

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75.

Michael Tippett described himself as the receiver of inspiration rather than its originator, the creative spark coming from a particular personal experience, which might take one of many forms but was most often associated with listening to music.

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76.

The process of composing was lengthy and laborious, the actual writing down of the music being preceded by several stages of gestation; as Michael Tippett put it, "the concepts come first, and then a lot of work and imaginative processes until eventually, when you're ready, finally ready, you look for the actual notes".

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77.

Michael Tippett preferred to compose in full score; once the writing began, progress was often not fluent, as evidenced by Michael Tippett's first pencil draft manuscripts which show multiple rubbings-out and reworkings.

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78.

Purcell became significant later, and Michael Tippett came to lament his ignorance of Purcell during his RCM years: "It seems to me incomprehensible now that his work was not even recommended in composition lessons as a basic study for the setting of English".

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79.

Michael Tippett recognised the importance to his compositional development of several 19th- and 20th-century composers: Berlioz for his clear melodic lines, Debussy for his inventive sound, Bartok for his colourful dissonance, Hindemith for his skills at counterpoint, and Sibelius for his originality in musical forms.

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80.

Michael Tippett revered Stravinsky, sharing the Russian composer's deep interest in older music.

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81.

Michael Tippett had a high regard for Alan Bush, with whom he joined forces to produce the 1934 Pageant of Labour.

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82.

The 1960s marked the beginning of a new phase in which Michael Tippett's style became more experimental, reflecting both the social and cultural changes of that era and the broadening of his own experiences.

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83.

Michael Tippett pondered for years whether to include this work in his formal canon before deciding that its debt to Sibelius was too great.

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84.

Michael Tippett feels that in the musical outlook of the 16th and 17th century lies the clue to what composers in this century should do in order to restore to their music a greater measure of contact with and intelligibility to the general public.

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85.

Michael Tippett had obtained recordings of American singing groups, especially the Hall Johnson Choir, which provided him with a model for determining the relationships between solo voices and chorus in the spirituals.

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86.

Michael Tippett considered the opera one of the best musical-theatrical works of its era.

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87.

Many of the minor works that Michael Tippett wrote in the wake of King Priam reflect the musical style of the opera, in some cases quoting directly from it.

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88.

Michael Tippett's intention, explained by the music critic Calum MacDonald, was to explore the contemporary relevance of the grand, universal sentiments in Schiller's Ode to Joy, as set by Beethoven.

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89.

Michael Tippett's conclusion is that while the need to rejoice remains, the twentieth century has put paid to the Romantic ideals of universality and certainty.

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90.

The symphony, written in the manner of the tone poem or symphonic fantasia exemplified by Sibelius, represents what Michael Tippett describes as a birth-to-death cycle, beginning and ending with the sounds of breathing.

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91.

The Fourth String Quartet, Michael Tippett explains, is an exercise in "finding a sound" that he first encountered in the incidental music to a television programme on Rembrandt.

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92.

Michael Tippett described the longest and most ambitious of his late works, the oratorio The Mask of Time, as "a pageant of sorts with an ultimately lofty message".

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93.

Michael Tippett had intended The Ice Break to be his final opera, but in 1985 he began work on New Year.

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94.

In 1982, in his comparative study of Britten and Michael Tippett, Whittall asserted that "it would be difficult to claim that any of the works [Michael Tippett] has begun in his seventies are the equal of earlier compositions".

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95.

Michael Tippett is commemorated in the Michael Tippett Centre, a concert venue within the Newton Park campus of Bath Spa University.

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