Opera
The New Tippett
By DAVID CAIRNS .dTOWARDS the end of Michael Tippett's opera The Midsum- mer Marriage one of the characters remarks: 'Fate and freedom propound a paradox. Choose your fate, but still the god speaks through whatever acts ensue.' This paradox has become the theme of his second and superficially quite different opera, King Priam, which was performed for the first time on Tuesday at Coventry by the Covent Garden company. King Priam is about the nature of choice, seen through the timeless symbols of Troy and the Trojan War. The libretto, by Tippett himself, shows in swift-moving sequence certain crucial moments of decision in the familiar story.
At the outset of his reign, with the cares of the young city weighing eagerly on him ('though I'm yet young I've found that once the unknown is known, the way ahead is clear'), Priam is told that Paris, the child just born to him and Hecuba, will cause his death if allowed to live. Moved by compassion for the child who, like himself before him, did not choose to be born, but also full of his duties to the State, Priam, 'a father and a king,' struggles, then chooses that the baby shall be killed. But Paris, saved by a Guard, lives and is brought up by shepherds. In the second scene Priam, confronted with the chance frustration of this choice, now volun- tarily accepts his destiny, and Paris returns to Troy to be brought up as a hero beside his elder brother Hector. But before his own death, Priam's choice leads to the death of his beloved Hector; at the end of the opera, a solitary, tragic creature, Priam is brought to his knees before the inexplicable mystery of human life : 'toys, dupes, decoys of fate, never masters in the house.'
But the problem of choice remains. (Only for Helen, the amoral being, is there none. When Priam asks, 'Why do I speak gently now, below the screams of the dying, as the city burns?' Helen has only this answer, and needs no other : 'I cannot tell. I am Helen.') Paris freely chooses to abduct Helen and provoke a war, though he asks: `Do we choose at all when our divided bodies rush together as though halves of one?' But the grandeur, the necessity of choice is seen always as a gleaming thread in the web of obscure destiny. The characters accept an instinctive foreknowledge of their allotted end. Which of the Trojans will kill me, Achilles asks, and knows the answer : Paris. 'And who will kill you at the altar, King Priam? Neoptolemus, my son.' Yet this does not remove the inevitability or the significance of choice—or the blindness of it: 'My death, they said, not Hector's.' In the end Priam, who has cursed life for the death of Hector and cried, '1 do not want these deaths, I want my own' and 'I have no son Paris,' is led through suffering and humiliation to an under- standing of the human predicament: that we do not know what we are doing and yet are re- sponsible for it (`you engendered Paris, that cannot be shuffled off') and that compassion, the justification of man, may be deeply involved in the cause of his sharpest agonies. Where did Hector's death begin? He turns to the Guard: 'at that fatal flaw of pity that you sensed in me.' And in a wonderfully moving moment of acceptance Priam says, in answer to the Guard's question, 'Who kills Achilles?' Paris—my son.'
Described inadequately, these concepts may appear cloudy, trite, philosophically crude and naïve. But it is the greatness of opera that what in the spoken word by itself is vague abstraction or mere banality can take on unquestionable shape; lofty but perilously insubstantial moral questions are articulated by music into living dramatic reality. And in the context of Tippett's magnificent opera they are precise, alive and in the strictest sense tragic. The text takes strength from the eternal reverberations of the greatest of all Western myths, its inexhaustible richness as a source of theatre (what a superb dramatic idea, for instance, is that incidental detail of Priam and Achilles, drawn together against all probability by pity, knowing that each will be killed by the other's son), but this is much less important than the mastery with which Tippett has organised his chosen material. King Priam is, before anything else, a superb libretto. There are a few weak or jarring phrases which the barracudas will fasten on; but as a whole this is a text amazingly sure in dramatic instinct, un- erring in detail, economical, exact, cunningly proportioned from first to last. The central idea is always before the mind and the eye, but em- bodied in continually theatrical form; equally, the external events of the Trojan War and the causes leading up to it are presented with thrilling effectiveness, but never in such a way as to deflect the course of the drama. The libretto in itself indicates Tippett's statement that his opera is 'constructed to drive forward inevitably to the tragic end—Priam's death at the altar as Troy burns.' A composer could not hope for a better one.
' If this is surprising to many people, so is the spareness and terseness and austerity of the music after the reckless fecundity of texture, the pro- liferating counterpoint and ecstatic diatonic melodies of The Midsummer Marriage. But the 'new style' of King Priam, though it marks a de- finite advance in Tippett's idiom, need not really surprise. It is a new style because it is a new subject. The density of texture in The Midsum- mer Marriage arose naturally out of an attempt (I still believe largely successful) to match Tip- pett's vision of nature at its ripest moment of richness and accumulated energy and man's, organic tie with it, and not from an inability to get out of a luxuriantly Hindemithian under- growth—a talent helpless before its genius. The Tippett of King Priam is a Tippett who has, as it were, suddenly 'discovered' Stravinsky, in particular Agon. But, as with Stravinsky's own discoveries, the influence has been digested. (It makes it not altogether absurd to see the recur- ring Interlude in Agon—or at least the effect of the flutes' triplet turn against the grave march rhythm of the drums and double basses—as Stravinsky at his most `Tippett-like.) We hear it right at the beginning in the tension of the trumpet fanfares (answered with quickening urgency from offstage) which open the work; in the frequent use of ostinato figures in the orchestra; in the low placing and measured rhythm of the bassoons at the entry of the Old Man who reads Hecuba's dream; in the use of small specialised groups of instruments (the strings do not play at all in Act 2). The music is also, for Tippett, unprecedentedly dissonant. In The Midsummer Marriage dissonance is re- served for particular moments—Mark's descent into the underworld, or the wounding of the fish in the second Ritual Dance.
Its frequent presence in King Priam makes the opera, in one sense, more difficult to listen to, but drama and music are so closely inter- locked that one is continually carried forward. Dissonance, as well as a style in which an angu- lar vocal line is often supported by only a single line of independent melody in the orchestra, places a special obligation on the composer to be consistently interesting, but Tippett meets it, except perhaps for a few passages in the short second act; and this act ends with one of the most electrifying curtains in opera—the sonor- ous, brazen ritual thanksgiving of the Trojan leaders on the death of Patroclus suddenly struck dumb and frozen into fear by the war-cry of Achilles, a strange ululation repeating the same intervals on a rising scale with dreadful insistence. Again and again the external events of the drama are projected with a sense of theatre that a verismo composer would not have disdained. At the dress rehearsal there were times when I felt that Tippett had sacrificed too much to his expressed need to be declamatory rather than lyrical. But this impression largely vanished on Tuesday. There are passages whose melodic shape is hard to grasp—for instance, Achilles's improvised lament for his homeland (to a fascinating guitar accompaniment), which I still hear as bafflingly aimless, or the music of Paris's moment of decision, whose monoto- nous effect may well have been due to John Dobson's Paris, good to look at but vocally mis- cast. Tippett has kept his musical invention un- der constant discipline—even the great scene where Priam ransoms the body of Hector has not tempted him to spread himself—but it is restraint, not repression. Through it all, sub- dued, unhtirried, deeply flowing, runs his mar- vellous lyrical gift, discernible beneath the rocklike surface, sometimes rising above it, as in Andromache's premonition of Hector's death and Helen's magnificent vindication of her existence, and near the end broadening into a beautiful compassion in the scene where the `Chorus' of the Old Man, the Guard and the Nurse, who stand partly outside the action (a dangerous device handled with perfect tact), reason with the stricken king, and a mysterious, self-communing passage in the lower strings, originally heard when the young Priam, first stood in doubt over the cradle of his son, is heard again, charged now with layers of indescribable irony and love.
I must postpone all discussion of the perfor- mance until it comes to London (first night, June 5), except to say that it is a noble achievement
by the resident company, and that the staging gives the new work as fine a start as the staging of The Midsummer Marriage gave that mis- judged opera a wretched one. The notion of Tippett the inspired amateur, the eccentric stumbling on moments of perfection, was always three-quarters due to shortcomings of perfor- mance. If there is sense and sanity in our musical life, King Priatn will come to be generally recog- nised, as it must surely now be recognised by all who have believed in the unlimited potentialities of his genius, as a great opera-- great in idea, great in working out, great in fulfilment.
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