Music
The Tippett Question
By DAVID CAIRNS ALTHOUGH the BBC's broad- cast of The Midsununer Mar- riage (recently repeated on the Home Service) has raised the stock of Michael Tippett as well as forcing a change of emphasis from the alleged in- coherence of the opera's lib- , retto to the indisputable mag- nificence of its music, the Tippett question re- mains open. He is a composer who cannot be allowed to know best. Like other artists of genius before him he must be treated as an in- spired amateur who frequently gabbles his gift of tongues. He is pictured as a vatic vessel which cannot help spilling rather badly the sacred fire, a poor dear visionary with not quite enough savoir-faire to translate his visions into the everyday language of the world.
Accordingly what is conceded to him in praise with one hand is taken away in blame with the other. If The Midsummer Marriage is a wonder- ful outpouring of lyrical invention—and how long it has taken to concede that!—then it fol- lows that King Priam, so very different in style, is a terrible mistake, an attempt at epic which does not come off and the sacrifice of an essen- tially lyric gift to the delusion that opera can argue a philosophical principle; in short, an- other Tippettan miscalculation. It is simply out of the question that both should be fine works.
Tippett may or not be barking up a dead end in this opera and in the Second Piano Sonata, a work in some ways related to it. But the music of Priam is as much his individual own . as is Stravinsky's in its various meta- morphoses, and if one cannot hear this in the ,work itself, it becomes clear when one hears a work like the Piano Concerto (broadcast the other day) in which qualities reminiscent of The Midsummer Marriage—the sheer profusion of notes- and the suffused radiance of texture and feeling—are combined with distinct intimations of his current manner. I admit to an instinctive affinity with Tippett's music. After a good many hearings I find the score of Priam as fine as I did when it was first performed—finer, indeed, because now that it is clearly separated in my experience from its superb embodiment in the Kenny/Wanamaker production, it remains in- teresting and rewarding on its own : to hear it again, or to recall in my mind the sound and shape of certain passages, is an active pleasure. One can only offer such experience in contra- diction to those who complain that a great deal of the score is demonstrably lame, or even devoid of music.
As to objections that the music is never `developed' (it is not meant to be), or that the actors in the drama do not effectively choose their actions although the opera is supposed to be about choice, or that there is no earthly reason beyond mere wilful obscurity why Priam in the end should speak only to Helen (of course he does! She, who alone makes and attempts no choice, stands for an antithetically opposed conception of life), or that a Homeric character should not talk about having a bath (read Homer and try not to be so destructively sophisticated)—with such objections, dutiful-1Y echoed on all sides, it is futile to reason. Tippett will always find people to call him muddled and woolly-minded in a country where ideas only penetrate the rubber-protected national mind through the pinprick of positivism. The immediate future of King Priam remains, however, uncertain. It was not well conducted at its recent revival (Bryan Balkwill's direction showed him as out of his depth with the large gestures and swift-moving contrasts of the work as his excellent conducting of Count Ory at Sadler's Wells showed him perfectly in tune with that masterpiece) and the restored passages for violin in Hecuba's music—which sound arguablY better on the piano, to which Mr. Pritchard transferred them when he conducted the opera— were no compensation for the lack of pace, momentum and dramatic timing. I hope Covent Garden will not be disheartened by this and by some poor houses into concluding that this is the end of a work which they gave to the World in one of the finest productions of opera in living memory. Yet it may be more politic at this stage to use our energies in agitating for a new and adequate production of The Mid- summer Marriage. The principle that music which is complicated or unfamiliar or both depends on accurate and spirited performance for its effect is so obvious that it is always being forgotten. Critics are expected to make up their minds; the frequently expressed suspicion that there may be much more in a work than the performance indi- cated does not make for exciting copy, and is better suppressed. But no one, not even the rare accomplished score-reader, is above the illumination that a fresh hearing of even the most familiar masterpiece can, bring. With a new work performance can mean everything, and not least when the music contains as marl
notes as the works Tippett was writing until recently. Consider even the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939), a piece nearly a quarter of a century old and in its masterly assimilation of Elizabethan music to a modern but conservative idiom posing no great prob- lems to the listener: it took an orchestra as great as the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, and the obviously inspiring effect they had on the Bath Festival players, to realise to the full its dazzling qualities. I vividly remember their per- formance of it at the Festival Hall last summer.
The audience at the end was beside itself; and the reason was not merely that public taste had only just shed enough of its habitual dis- trust and advanced to the point where it could appreciaie a thoroughly un-`modern' piece by
a living composer, but that for the first time the work was being heard in a performance whose triumphant vivacity and sense of movement, superb attack and incisiveness and marvellously airy textures did justice to it and allowed people to see what a delightful piece it is. This per- formance was recorded about the same time, and has now, been issued (HMV, coupled with the arrangement by the conductor, Rudolf Barshai,
Prokofiev's Visions FugitiveA). It is a record that deserves and may well get a large sale.
The Audio performance of the Piano Concerto .0956), ly Ogdon, del Mar and the BBC Scottish, Was not entirely successful. Listening over the wireless I could not tell whether the ineffective- ness of the slow woodwind canon beneath spread chords on the piano was due to the players, to Poor balancing or to misjudgment by the com- poser. This movement only began to make clear and beautiful sense at the end: a dialogue, like the famous slow movement of Beethoven's F. ourth Piano Concerto in reverse, with the piano Ignoring the ecstatic summons of strings leaping upwards in chords of fourths, and withdrawing Into deeper and deeper self-communion. The finale, brilliantly written, presents no problems. The first movement is one of Tippett's supremely Poetic inventions, hard to bring off in its pro- liferation of notes and rapt, repetitive harmonic make-up, but the most obvious expression of the composer's aim to write a lyrical work which re-creates the sound world of Beethoven's G Major in modern terms. Enough came through Performance and broadcast to suggest that, in this movement, he has succeeded. To those who are prepared to listen there is nothing at all im- probable in the idea.
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