Underrated Classical Musicians: Michael Tippett

Speaking of disappearing British reputations, let's talk about Michael Tippett...

The English simply knew what they were doing in string music. It shows up again and again: Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Holst, Arnold, Tippett, all wrote string masterpieces. I'm sure there are a a few I'm forgetting, and frankly also a few more besides which many British music lovers swear are masterpieces that aren't....

It's not too hard to figure out why the British are so good at string orchestras. There's something about the sound of a mass choir is lodged in the collective limbic system of British citizens. Whether in the stalls of a parish church or a giant middle class choral society or tavern folk songs or working class coal miners or at sporting events in Wales, the mythos of British part-singing is literally everywhere and the homophony of mass string texture is the closest thing one gets in instrumental music to a choir.

I doubt Michael Tippett is the equal of geniuses like Vaughan Williams and Britten, I'm not sure he's even equal to slower developers like Elgar or Holst. Whenever I hear his music, I think of that line from Mendelssohn about Berlioz that 'Berlioz has genius but lacks talent.' Tippett's reach clearly exceeded his grasp, and while that's is a commendable quality in any artist, it also means that there is inconsistency in their output. Most composers are brilliant musicians, Tippett seemed, rather, like a brilliant mind who happened upon music.

Tippett had the slightly unfortunate luck of belonging to a generation of unquestionable geniuses like Shostakovich, Britten, and Messiaen (to say nothing of Gershwin and Ellington and Weill...), against whom he obviously comes up wanting. He had artistic ambition just as enormous, but he clearly did not have their easy fluency that would have allowed him to hear musical possibilities in his head. He clearly worked like a dog, no one could have written the Corelli Fantasia or the Little Music for Strings without a thorough understanding of counterpoint. But the string orchestra was the perfect size for his abilities. The operas are... well.... listen to them. It's not that they're bad, but they suffer, as so many ambitious artists do, from 'importantitis.' Importantitis is the idea artists get into their head that their work has to make a major statement, and that by making major statements they will lodge their claims into history and their work will even be of some good to the world.

Every artist must beware of importantitis: a surfeit of ambition so great that even the most titanic gifts cannot reach summits imagined for itself. Importantitis suffuses everything it touches with creative block and permeates everything which finds its way through the creative block with pomposity. The artist writing this post has suffered from a twenty-year case of importantitis, and even composers far greater than he like Britten and Messiaen suffered from importantitis so debilitating that it ruined decades' worth of their music. The only musician of that generation who reached the entirety of his grasp was Shostakovich, and Shostakovich could only do it with the barrel of a gun pointed at his head for his whole life. Meanwhile, popular musicians of genius like Gershwin and Ellington created music that was no more ambitious than what their gifts and the economy's invisible hand gave them room to create, and the result was that they both were more crucial musicians to their era than any musician save Shostakovich.

Tippett is one of the worst 'importantitis' sufferers in the 20th century. He almost always wrote his own texts, and the result is of a pomposity not to be believed. So many of his opera and choral works have gorgeous and moving passages where an obviously generous human being peaks through those grandiose clouds (the moment when Tippett sets 'Go Down Moses' in A Child of Our Time is literally tear-inducing), but in between lies acres of pretentious text set with such an absence of humor or irony that you can tell the composer means this absolutely seriously and expects that you will take it the same way.

The 20th century is littered with the corpses of literally tens of thousands of talented artists of every genre who had creative freedom well past what any forbearer could dream, and yet could never cross a threshold to get a general public interested in what they created because they believed that as artists, it is the audience's job to appreciate them and not their job to reciprocate.

But listen to the voluptuous beauty of the Corelli Fantasia and try telling me that this is a composer well-suited to epic statements. Tippett is at his best in intimate forms - piano music, string music, concertos written for soloists who were friends, this is the scale at which Tippett excels. This is not a giant capable of Peter Grimes or the London Symphony or even The Planets and Enigma Variations. This is music written by a composer of human-sized talent who worked sufficiently hard that he could create humane masterpieces on an entirely human scale. This composer created the Corelli Fantasia, the Little Music for Strings, the Piano Concerto, the Double Concerto for String Orchestra, the Fantasia on a Theme of Handel, the Divertimento on Selliger's Round. This is the Tippett worth listening to - perhaps not the most brilliant musician, but a brilliant listener to music through whom passes the English and Italian Renaissance and Baroque, tavern folk song and dance, jazz and blues and spirituals, Stravinsky and Bach, an array of influences so diverse that his music can only sound like himself so long as he does not try to make music more important than it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNqTeQa7MDQ