Composers: Going Like 60

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As Composer Michael Tippett turned 60 last month, orchestras all over Britain gave him the best gift of all: they performed his works. The tribute has since become something of a surprise party—for critics and audiences. For while Tippett ranks second only to his friend Benjamin Britten as England's most notable living composer, his music has not been widely played hitherto, chiefly because its polyphonic complexities and juggled rhythmic patterns scare off most performers. Now, thanks to the birthday boom, performances of Tippett's music are finally winning the popular recognition that conservative Britons have long denied him.

Topical Relevance. In a dual salute to his own work and the reopening of an enlarged, acoustically sharpened Royal Festival Hall, Tippett last week conducted the London Philharmonic in a performance of his most celebrated oratorio, the 23-year-old A Child of Our Times. The libretto, based on the savage pogrom with which Hitler avenged the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish boy in 1938, poignantly plumbs the agonies of the persecuted. What gives the theme a wider, painfully topical relevance is Tippett's skillful weaving into the score of five Negro spirituals, after the style of a Bach chorale, that were sung last week by the magnificent, 232-voice Philharmonic chorus. Tippett, a lean, Lincolnesque figure who looks half his threescore years on the podium, seemed to inspire rather than instruct the ensemble in his brooding, hauntingly compassionate music.

Son of a Cornish lawyer, Tippett was raised in Suffolk, and attended London's Royal College of Music. As a student, he flirted with Marxism but was later bitterly disillusioned, has since occupied "the middle ground of compassion"-pacifism; in 1943 he was bounced into prison for three months for refusing to do war work. From his hatred of violence was born A Child of Our Times, begun with the encouragement of Tippett's Monopoly partner and "sort of father," the late poet T. S. Eliot, the day that World War II broke out.

Shadow & Light. Premièred in bomb-torn London in 1944, Child proved a big, immediate success. Curiously, Tippett then retreated into a cocoon of meditative quietude for the next ten years to crystallize his musical vision—which, as he puts it, is to "know my shadow and my light." He emerged in 1955 with The Midsummer Marriage, a kind of 20th century Magic Flute, overloaded with symbolism but containing some of his most lyrically beautiful music. His next major work was the powerful opera King Priam, which marked a dramatic departure from anything he had done before. Spare, angular, dramatically taut, it has served as a jumping-off point for everything he is presently working on, notably a cantata drawn from the Confessions of St. Augustine, and a new and as yet untitled opera, which was commissioned by Covent Garden.