Britten and Tippett
By DAVID CAIRNS WE expect a composer's later music to be like his earlier, only more so. A change in manner like that between middle-period and late Beethoven is terribly disconcerting to contem- poraries, who have fol- lowed the composer that far only to find him un- gratefully abandoning
them. The music of Michael Tippett's Midsummer Marriage style is no sooner accepted than the extraordinary fellow, irlstead of exploiting this splendid lyrical gift, goes off on a completely new tack.
Tippett, who used to be reproached for writing too many notes, is now reproached for writing too few—both in the sense that the new spare- ness of texture is a denial of his essential nature and in the sense that he has renounced the sacred principle of development that has nourished Western music time out of mind. But music has been condemned as not music so often, and with such disastrous' consequences to the reputations of the condemners, that it would be at the very least imprudent to dismiss the new Tippett. It seems to me too early to do anything with his Concerto for Orchestra except listen to it and let our musical consciousness absorb what the work is and leave bothering ourselves with what it isn't; to pronounce judgment at this stage is —as Tippett has remarked of attempts to decide in his lifetime the exact status of Britten—pre- tentious.
The Concerto—particularly the first move- ment (scored for wind and percussion) with its separate hermetic groups of instruments each with its own music, heard in various conjunc- tions but passing in unheeding orbit like planets round an undiscovered sun—does represent, even more than King Priam, a radically different method of writing for the conventional orchestra, as well as of composing music that is traditional in idiom. But how are we to, say that the method is 'wrong,' that it doesn't, even that it cannot, work? The performance by the LSO under Colin Davis the other day filled the ear with fascinating sounds—the radiant but mysterious network of string sound in the slow movement (a touch of the 'old' Tippett) dissolving at the end into a single, suspended line of muted viola melody, the exhilarating Priam-like noises in the finale— which mine at least will not relinquish. It is quite possible that it will one day be a popular work, when its shocking and misguided approach to composition is forgotten.
It is also quite possible that Gloriana will come to be one of its composer's most admired works. Certainly the jaundiced reception of the Opera in coronation year, and its subsequent eclipse (apart from the choral dances in Act 2,
which were allowed to be charming) had noth- ing to do with musical merit, any more than with difficulty of idiom, and a good deal to do with the stupidity of the mob (in Fielding's definition of 'persons without virtue or sense in all stations'), the jealousy of other musicians, and some of the squalider prejudices of our national life.
All this has changed, thanks to the admirable concert performance which Bryan Fairfax con- ducted at the Festival Hall on Britten's fiftieth birthday. We cannot help recognising it as music of striking beauty and invention and skill, and on the whole (with a few grumblings about 'ex- cessive tributes') we are in the mood to do so gladly.
The music is a feast. The thrust and glitter of the splendid opening—which plunges us in- stantly into the thick of things and in its brilliant trumpet writing, leaping rhythms and exultant counterpoint (almost Tippett-like) projects thrillingly the reality of the nearby tilting-ground and the angry energy of Essex, forced to hear description of his rival Mountjoy's triumph, is equalled in imaginativeness by the quiet ending, where the alternation of spoken word (for the utterances of the old Queen's public self) with orchestral reminiscences of music associated with her love for Essex, has the curious double effect, at once heraldic and personal, of creating a long and beautiful dying fall (like Queen Vic- toria on her deathbed, her memory flowing peacefully backward, in Lytton Strachey's famous account) and at the same time of fixing her ritually in history, 'a crowned rose among the leaves so green.' In this ending the sadness of the Queen's relationship with Essex is not evaded, but it is absorbed in her wry acceptance of the only love open to her, a kingdom's.
There have been objections that the opera re- mains a drama on two different levels—the dynastic and the private do not fuse into a single entity. This is a large statement. One can point to scene after scene in which the idea of the interaction of private and public lives, con- stantly worked into the libretto, is, by motifs and by other means, embodied in the music. An example is the stealthy little woodwind flourish which first appears when the Queen is discussing with Cecil the endless cares of state, and which i3 dissolved into a radiant high string chord at the entry of Essex, only to come back at the conclusion of their duet when she• conquers her longing and dismisses him on the plea that 'the business of the kingdom waits'—the anxiety and .the ever-watchful spirit of routine which Essex i3 never prepared to endure.
Throughout, it seems to me, pageantry and public ceremonial have a consistent and subtly realised dramatic purpose. The copious songs and dances and the whole Elizabethan ambience
have only stimulated Britten to a more audaciously personal and original use of con- cord and the common chord. The music played by the stage band in the Palace of Whitehall alone tends to pastiche (apart, that is, from the powerful and tragic Pavane, a genuine re- creation), but it is arguably a sound theatrical technique to use a neutral background for the court intrigues and psychological conflicts which come to a head in this scene. It. is one of the questions that can only be resolved, or clarified, when the work is put back on the stage—which Covent Garden, having revived Billy Budd, must speedily set about doing. We may well discover that these two are after all the richest of all the operas that Britten has yet given us.
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