Philip Hensher

A born rebel

Twenty years after his death, Michael Tippett is too rarely performed. Can Oliver Soden’s compelling biography renew interest in his music?

issue 13 April 2019

Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English composer who worked within established forms —symphonies, oratorios, string quartets, piano sonatas — to startlingly new effect. But his innovation was not just as a composer. He was also a political and social radical, embedded in Trotskyite, pacifist and gay rights ideas. The newness made itself known in a long attempt to find novel ways of living.

Oliver Soden’s biography feels like an attempt to answer a series of questions. How, in the 20th century, should a creative artist live? Or be a pacifist? Or a homosexual? The answers were sometimes wrong; the music could be disastrously unsuccessful. But Tippett got things right too, though his age sent him to prison for it. Sometimes, also, the curtain rises on The Midsummer Marriage, the greatest English opera before The Mask of Orpheus.

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