TIPPETT, MICHAEL ( b. London, England 2 Jan 1905 )
Tippet ranks with Benjamin Britten as one of the twentieth century's most successful English opera composers. Having trained in London at the Royal College of Music, he taught for a short time before beginning to compose.
In the mid-1930s he disowned all his early work and began to look for a new style. The first of three piano sonatas was finished in 1937, but he didn't achieve international success until his oratorio A Child of Our Time was produced in 1944. Tippett describes this work as having arisen ΓÇ£out of the general situation in Europe before the Second World War ..... [It is] a Passion; not of a god-man, but of a man whose god has left the heavens for the dark of the collective unconscious.ΓÇ¥
All Tippett's work is informed by his literary and wide cultural interests. For his first opera The Midsummer Marriage, he wrote his own libretto, clearly influenced by the works of the poets T.S. Eliot and W.B.Yeats and of the psychologist, Jung. It was produced at Covent Garden in 1955 and - like A Child of Our Time - is concerned with the reconciliation of the dark and light sides of human nature.
Throughout his career he has created most of his own texts and libretti, partly at the instigation of T.S. Eliot. This choice has led to the age-old argument about the differences in the nature of words and music, and the advisability, or otherwise, of composers attempting to write both. It's an argument that's unlikely to be settled as long as artists continue to create.
Tippett continued to write orchestral and choral works and, in 1962, another opera, King Priam. This was followed by The Knot Garden, produced at Covent Garden in 1970, and a song-cycle Songs for Dov, presented in 1971.
His fourth opera The Ice Break premièred in 1977. Like The Knot Garden, it returns to the theme of reconciliation, using musical and dramatic metaphor to great effect. By this time Tippett had reached the status of Grand Old Man of British opera, having been knighted in 1966, and given the order of Commander of the British Empire as early as 1959.
His next vocal work was The Mask of Time, an oratorio which harks back to the ideas of A Child of Our Time, but deals with them across a broader timescale.
