4 AUGUST 1990, Page 35

The Proms

What bugs me about Tippett

Peter Phillips

Most creative artists seem to have some kind of transforming emotional ex-

perience in their early adult years. Very often this gives them the impetus not to drift into being lawyers and stockbrokers, as their parents had always intended, but to take a few risks with life in order to dedicate themselves to the expression of that inner meaning to which they have become enthralled. With religiously minded painters and musicians this is a common occurrence; but I particularly value the memory of talking to a Spanish Basque composer (whose name I never quite grasped) who told me that he had fallen into a wasps' nest at the age of 18 and for ever more could not bear to hear or write for stringed instruments since they reminded him of the sound of the wasps. By his own account this inspiration had rendered his orchestral writings aston- ishingly original.

The curious thing about the guiding experience in Sir Michael Tippett's life was that it came at the age of 60. At least, if he had a motivating theme behind the work he wrote before that, it was completely superseded by his first visit to the USA in 1965, so that everything he has written since has been affected by it. Indeed I suspect his whole manner of living has been affected, from his clothing (fluores- cent on the night in question), to his gestures whilst on stage (pop star-like), to his use of English (as shown in his libretti). If the transformation really has been as complete as I describe, it must be extreme- ly rare for a major composer to undergo such a change so late: it makes Stravinsky's quite regular changes of direction seem almost casual. Tippett gives the impression (at 85) of being eteinally youthful; perhaps this is proof enough that it was always so with him.

One of the most moving works to result from this sojourn in the States, and one of the least known, is the opera The Ice Break, which was performed at the Proms on 23 July by the London Sinfonietta and their Chorus directed by David Atherton. David Wilson-Johnson, Heather Harper, Sanford Sylvan and Cynthia Cleary took the leading roles. The story revolves atbund a stylisation of race riots in an American city, which provide backdrop for the entirely uninvolving trials and tribula- tions of an emigre Russian family. Although The Ice Break was written in the Seventies, it carries a great deal of baggage from the Sixties. The message of recon- ciliation between black and white, old and young, capitalist and communist underlay the flower-power mentality, of course, but the actual language of Tippett's libretto is what most particularly dates the opera. The throw-away lines like 'What's bugging you, man' and 'Wow! This chick wants balling' are not quite as embarrassing or as numerous as in Tippett's The Mask of Time (1982), but they set up for most listeners now, I imagine, a barrier which it is not

easy to overcome. Even Americans feel uncomfortable with it. I noticed, too, that that disinclination amongst people of sensi- bility in the Sixties to say anything outright had even affected Tippett's stage direc- tions: the words 'probably' and 'perhaps' invade the requirements in an unhelpful way: 'the two hooded figures begin perhaps to recede' and 'perhaps Lev de- cides to accept Luke's advice'.

Tippett's colloquialisms make us squirm and they detract from our view of the opera as a whole; but the issues raised remain powerful and the music is undeni- ably effective and well written — music, as I believe, for all time. The libretto offends good taste now, yet in a few more decades such taste may become impervious to this use of language, at which point the music will come into its own. One cannot help thinking of Wagner's wretched libretti and how happily everyone ignores their inade- quacies now. It is an interesting point, 'Gentlemen, we've been infiltrated. One of us here is Roger Cook.' though, that if both Wagner and Tippett had not had the intellectual arrogance to explore their own systems of moral phi- losophy, but had kept with existing ones, like the Christian one for example, they would have been able to set words of great poets and masters of the language. What they gained and lost by being obliged to write their own scripts is a knotty one, but we shall not in the end complain that these words inspired the musician in them. The Ice Break is a masterpiece.