A born rebel

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.

The biography can hardly be anything but compelling, and this — the first full-dress one, 20 years after Tippett’s death — is an exceptional piece of work. It has so much to say about the 20th century from an unusual and compelling angle that it ought to appeal to many readers who don’t necessarily find themselves deep in the world of art music. Tippett has been much neglected since his death by both performers and commentators compared to his ubiquitous contemporary Benjamin Britten. On the other hand, I would say that the post-1990 generation of composers is much more interested in him than in Britten. The Britten bibliography may be 100 times the size, but it contains hardly anything as brilliant as this book. Let the revival begin.

Tippett came from a radical background. His mother, Isabel, was a militant suffragette who served her time in Holloway (his father was under strict instructions not to pay the alternative of a fine).