Listen and learn

Michael Tippett’s first opera The Midsummer Marriage is so great that one can afford to admit that it isn’t perfect. He tries to do too many things in it, and so despite its considerable length — three full hours of music in the Royal Opera’s revival of the 1996 production — there is a sense at the end both that it is almost indigestibly rich but also that there are inconsequentialities, even inadvertencies, as with an exciting conversationalist who starts up so many lines of thought that he has to drop some of them. Even so, it is such an invigorating and uplifting work, especially when one thinks of its context in history and in operatic history, that the first reaction should be gratitude. Instead of which, when it was first performed half a century ago, it was grandly dismissed by the majority of critics for pretentiousness and obscurity, and now, after heaven knows what we have been through — operatically and otherwise — since then, we see it being grandly dismissed, by the majority of critics, for pretentiousness and obscurity — and for being ‘dated’ into the bargain, though works that are dated belong irretrievably to their time, and that isn’t at all true of Marriage (it is true of some of Tippett’s late works).

If the libretto, which is not nearly as bad as its reputation would suggest, is admittedly sometimes imponderable, it may still be, as Wilfrid [sic] Mellers wrote in one of the first encouragingly intelligent remarks on the opera, ‘probably the only kind that Tippett could have set’. And — very much to the point — Mellers continued, ‘The Ritual Dances — if not the whole opera — are magical in the old, celebrative sense, offering not illusion, but a revelation of the deepest compulsions from which our lives draw sustenance.