Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage is an opera of exuberant genius — but forget about the text

Whenever Michael Tippett’s first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, is revived, there is a chorus of voices, including mine, complaining that it should be done much more often, for it is a work of exuberant genius, full of wonderful musical invention, and life-affirming in the way that Britten’s operas never are (with, I think, the exception of Albert Herring). Yet the Prom performance, semi-staged, it was claimed, but rather less than that, did make clear, while doing justice to Tippett’s score, why Marriage is always likely to be something of an outsider. For the text was provided complete in the programme book, and since the balance, at least where I sat, favoured the orchestra over the voices, I followed it and was, yet once more, nonplussed and sometimes incredulous that it could have been so inept, pretentious and downright undramatic.

Tippett’s next two operas, King Priam and The Knot Garden, though no paradigms of dramaturgy, are markedly superior.