In television documentaries composers are always shown sitting at a desk or piano with manuscript paper busily scribbling away. It is an understandable attempt to dramatize the compositional act. But in fact such scenes are attempts to bridge a mysterious gap. The same is true of composer biographies. We can be told where they lived, who they loved, what they read and what they ate (Tippett was keen on marmalade it turns out), but the biographer can narrate the life only as far as the point when the composer sits down to work. Then there is the gap. On the other side, the performer, critic, and musicologist, and not least the listener, responds to the resulting music. Even significant work on composer's sketches (I think here of Barry Cooper's work on Beethoven most obviously) navigate around a lacuna, the scribbles and jottings reflective of a mysterious process bubbling beneath.

Oliver Soden's new biography of Michael Tippett stays firmly and deliberately focused on the life, which spanned almost the entire twentieth century. As he puts it himself, ‘this book is a “life”, not a “life-n-works” … There is little to no technical or evaluative analysis of the music’ (2). This is not quite true, for at the end Soden does briefly jump over the gap to evaluate the music in a telling and welcomed epilogue. But overall the book can be read both as a path through the cultural landscape of twentieth-century Britain following an extraordinary life of creativity and as a companion to Ian Kemp's ‘-n-works’, Tippett: The Composer and his Music (1984, revised 1987) which centred on discussion of the music (though never updated, alas, to cover a handful of late works including an opera). Kemp's biographical note of a mere sixty pages is now obviously superseded by Soden's book. One of the many achievements of this biography is that the reader's attention never wanders far from thinking about what kind of relationship exists between the life lived and the work produced. In Tippett's case the always tangled relationship was tangled in intriguing ways.

Roger Savage's monograph is on the same side of the gap as Soden's biography, exploring with meticulous detail through archive documents the pre-history (which is to say pre-musical) part of the creative process of Tippett's first opera, The Midsummer Marriage. Premiered to general critical bafflement in January 1955, the opera slowly secured its place at the heart of Tippett's output and in the hearts of his admirers, becoming in 1996 the first opera written since the Second World War to achieve three new productions by Covent Garden. In examining the kinds of collaborations that occurred between the composer and others, Savage, like Soden, reveals new things about how Tippett's life generated the environment in which his compositional process could flourish. It is good at the outset, then, to be reminded that the gap that exists for us – biographer and reader alike – between a composer's life and work is lived as a continuity by composers themselves. Tippett himself pointed out that, ‘the concepts come first, and then a lot of work and imaginative processes until eventually, when you're ready, finally ready, you look for the actual notes’.Footnote ¹

The strengths of Soden's biography are obvious from the opening pages. Here is a writer who engages the reader with a style direct, uncluttered but always inventive. The portrait that emerges is alive to Tippett's contradictions and weaknesses, but ultimately celebratory of his considerable achievements. Historical events are not so much a background, but interact with the narrative, much as they did in Tippett's work. And while the book is structured conventionally, there are telling moments when Soden makes play with more experimental and self-conscious biographical forms. A series of ‘Diary’ sections places the author into his own narrative to reflect on the process of research in a manner much beloved of contemporary biography from A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo (1934) onwards. He attends the first performance in over eighty years of Tippett's early Symphony in B flat, stands in a warehouse in Birmingham to watch The Ice Break (1977), and even ends up holding the composer's ashes. It is in these passages that the question of Tippett's reputation today, twenty years after his death, comes strongly into focus. If Soden's book has an agenda beyond telling the story of a great man's life, it is to remind the public that Tippett still is a great man. It is an argument that becomes explicit in the book's final pages.

The biography also contains superb moments imagining alternative histories. For example, Soden speculates on what might have happened if a never-to-be collaboration with W. H. Auden for Dance of Death in 1934 had succeeded, thereby leaving no room for Britten to find a home in the Auden–Isherwood circle. If I regret that there are not more passages like this, it is a reflection on how today's biographer of a contemporary composer, writing for the general reader, is restricted by how little of the cultural landscape under discussion is common knowledge. On the other hand, Soden succeeds admirably in recreating a cultural scene that is all the richer for bringing names largely forgotten – notably Priaulx Rainier and Christopher Fry – into the light because of their friendship with Tippett.

But Soden's principal achievement is to have formulated a continuity, a flowing narrative, for a life that seems to have been lived, from Tippett's own perspective, permanently in the present tense. ‘I dislike focusing endlessly on what is past and gone. The future matters more’ he wrote at the start of his entertaining but largely unreliable autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues (1991). This affected his relationship to his own music. When a piece was complete, a box snapped shut and the man moved on, seemingly indifferent to the fate of the music that had taken him so much effort to produce. He felt an acute sense of separateness from his finished compositions, and as a result he felt able to judge their quality objectively as if he had not written them. He found most of it very good. I agree. But to those who did not, Tippett's joyful self-satisfaction, particularly in later life, was taken to be evidence of vanity.

Tippett travelled light, seemingly dislocated from his own past, music and all. As Soden puts it, ‘It was as if Tippett's past life were separate from himself, and had become someone else's territory’ (4). This was the means by which he renewed his creativity, maintaining a youthful openness to new ideas and influences and rejoicing in a naiveté which his listeners found either endearing or annoying, sometimes both. Lovable and kind a man though he was (and overall Tippett comes across in this biography as someone you would be delighted to get stuck in a lift with), there was a process in which he quickly disposed of his past. This is understandable when it relates to the trauma of sexual bullying at school, which earlier biographies alluded to, but Soden outlines with suitable restraint and clarity. But later too, Tippett recoiled from confronting events that would mean turning back. His ‘stepdaughters’ found him unwilling to involve himself in the aftermath of his former partner, Karl Hawker's death. ‘I'll phone you back when you're steadier’ he told one of them. He never did. He seems to have had a phobia about funerals, not even attending Michael Vyner's, despite his close friendship with Vyner's partner, the pianist Paul Crossley. Soden puts it poetically, ‘Unlike his heroine, JoAnn [in his opera New Year], Michael would not drink from the lake of remembrance’ (578). Curiously, he did attend Delius's (re)burial in May 1935.

Such a characteristic is usually evidence of the kind of personality that spurs introspection. But though Tippett never wanted to look back, he was always looking inwards. Here was a creative artist profoundly engaged with self-reflection and his mature music finally came into utterance in 1938 after a period of self-analysis in which Tippett notated his dreams according to the theories of Jung, driven by needs to confront his sexuality and unblock his creativity. He was by then thirty-three. Maturity brought an interesting balance between responding to ‘the world outside, and by what is happening in the world inside – that is, inside me’.Footnote ² Hugh Wood put it best when reviewing Tippett's Letters, ‘At the heart of Tippett burned a Blake-like energy, and a simple fascination with his own activities and thought processes too extroverted to be written off as egotism, too conscious of the whole of creation to be dismissed as solipsism.’Footnote ³ Soden comes to the same conclusion, pointing out also that Tippett's ability was always stretched to keep up with aspiration:

Soden's biography, because of the wealth of its materials, captures this tension, bringing it into focus with a poignancy that has not happened before.

Tippett was in the business of self-expression, but he projected it onto large canvases that aimed to make universal pronouncements. The sense of speaking for the collective (‘of our time’ as the tag line used so frequently had it) is one of the most inspiring things about Tippett's work. But it can also be one of the facets that dates the man and his music too. Who alive today would have the kind of cultural confidence (sense of entitlement?) to dare to speak for us all? The use of African American spirituals in A Child of Our Time was once considered a radical and inclusive gesture: black music incorporated into a 1930s British oratorio. But it is now suspect because we are unsure whether we believe a work of art can, or indeed should, transcend its maker. A recent student performance of the oratorio in Chicago led to newspaper discussion on whether the piece should be performed at all. An undergraduate op-ed argued, ‘Tippett's arrangement of the spirituals in A Child of Our Time also does a disservice to Black American musical and cultural tradition. The spirituals are simplified from the original, and were intended by Tippett to be performed in the style of traditional Western choral music.’Footnote ⁴ Responding, a postdoctoral teaching fellow took a more nuanced position regarding the performance of Tippett's work by contextualizing the piece and biography: ‘I believe A Child of Our Time offers a vital opportunity to consider the ugliness of progress; the impossibility of true empathy and the necessity to pursue it regardless; and the bravery of holding onto hope in the face of unspeakable horrors.’Footnote ⁵ But in the end she concluded that Tippett had indeed failed ‘to transcend his upbringing as a privileged Anglo-Saxon man immersed in the values of Western classical music culture’, and just in case students doubted her sympathy, she added,

So an oratorio proclaiming a message of forgiveness and tolerance for all the human family is now a work so compromised that we can only ‘sit with the work's mission’ (rather than boycott it entirely) and maybe allow ourselves to be nudged. There will be more of this in the years ahead. Will understanding of the man's life be used to justify the music's message, or will Tippett's identity become fixed in time, nationality and class, and thus circumscribed in what we permit him to pronounce upon?

Soden captures well the fact that everything in Tippett's life eventually became either useful to his musical needs or was dropped. Passionate left-wing convictions were recalibrated. At one point a Communist, he briefly took extreme anti-capitalist positions: ‘my one hope is that the British Empire will go under and Hitler win’ he wrote to Alan Bush in 1936 (183). But by October 1939 he was admitting, again to Alan Bush, in a letter curiously not quoted by Soden, ‘I seem to have drifted out of serious politics some time ago – the music demanded too much and the politics ceased to excite me.’Footnote ⁶ By then he was busy composing A Child of Our Time. Pacifism remained a constant in his life (he was sentenced to prison in 1943 as a conscientious objector), but his Trojan War opera, King Priam (1958–61) is imbued with as much of the spirit of heroism and excitement of war as denunciation.

Soden focuses more on Tippett's earlier years. Over the 614 pages, 346 cover the post-war period, which might sound balanced, but the post-war years cover nearly all of Tippett's major works, including all five operas. As his life settled down into the routine of creation, like the film director of the composer biopic, Soden slightly struggles to show what Tippett did between the long periods of sitting at the piano. Nevertheless, the later parts of the biography are essential in understanding the fortunes of Tippett's music since the Grand Old Man left the stage in 1998.

Money was plentiful from the 1970s onwards, as Tippett received lucrative commissions, but it was not well managed. Vanity led to a series of foolhardy projects including even a Tippett shop ‘with a costly and short-lived outpost in New York’ (564). Upon his death, the composer's Will directed his estate to fund the promotion of young composers, forbidding royalty income to promote his own music. Soden calls this, ‘a typical gesture of self-assured generosity’ (605). Tippett thought that history would do its usual work by separating the good from the bad and saving and promoting the former, of which he was part. But history seems not to have done its job, at least so far. Readers of Ian Hamilton's study of literary estates, Keepers of the Flame (1992), will know that what keeps a reputation alive after death is money and the right executors. Tippett died with debt and his large country house had been sold, so there was no Aldeburgh or La Mortella to which fans and researchers could gather and keep the flag flying. Nor did Tippett follow Auden's canny decision to appoint a much younger person to head the estate during the first twenty years when survival is nearly always in doubt. And so Tippett's work seemed to quickly fall into neglect.

This neglect can be overstated: Soden argues that ‘bar the continuing popularity of A Child of Our Time, it was as if Michael Tippett had been wiped from musical history’ (604–5). This is exaggeration. Recordings have continued to appear. Many of these, such as the Heath Quartet's performances of the complete quartets, have far exceeded in quality anything committed to disc during Tippett's lifetime. Nor has academia forgotten him. There has been a Cambridge Companion (2013) following on from the Studies published at the time of Tippett's death; an examination of the orchestral music by Thomas Schuttenhelm, and a volume of Tippett's Letters.Footnote ⁷

But Soden is right to argue that after the ninetieth birthday festivals in 1995 and similar commemorations to mark his passing in 1998, come the centenary year of 2005 there was a sense of over-kill. It was probably healthy for Tippett to slide a little towards the sidelines for a while. The class of 1934 and their near contemporaries needed to have their moment in the senior roles, though as often happens, younger British composers rebelled against the immediate generation above them and took Tippett as an important influence. For composers such as Steve Martland, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Julian Anderson, and Huw Watkins, Tippett has always been an audible point of reference. Is Tippett re-emerging now? I hope so. Two new productions of The Knot Garden will appear in 2020.

But there is another issue affecting the fortunes of Tippett's music today: the widespread belief that the music got worse from the late 1960s, as Tippett got older. This view has mainly arisen from confusions between life and work. Enter Tippett the Celebrity, the ‘Sir Michael With-it’ of Private Eye, the composer who caused Clive James frustray-hay-shun with his orchestray-hay-shun.Footnote ⁸

The problem with celebrity is that it tries to convince you that the person is more worthy of the spotlight than their work. Soon, the two become interchangeable and everyone is confused. If in later life Tippett was seen in colourful ensemble outfits, including a cowboy hat when appearing on Wogan, or talking half-nonsense and crying in a Channel 4 interview, it became easy to presume that the music being produced must be the same kind of binge: garish, confused, evidence of what Robin Holloway called, ‘sheer old British battiness’.Footnote ⁹ Derrick Puffett's ninetieth birthday ‘tribute’ made the case for decline (‘I want to defend the early Tippett against the later one’) arguing that much Tippett criticism had mistaken intention for achievement.Footnote ¹⁰ But he too seemed unable, or unwilling, to entirely separate the man and work. Listing the problems with Tippett's setting of Yeats's Byzantium (1991), Puffett ends with, ‘the appearance of Tippett in orange jacket, flower-patterned trousers and yellow sneakers at the end of the performance made a sad contrast with the sober photograph (dark suit and tie) on the original cover of Moving into Aquarius’.

If one disentangles the man from the music – a process easier now for critics – and focuses on the latter, I would dismiss the entire argument for a decline in the music. Soden does too. Such technical problems that exist can be found in Tippett's early works as much as the later ones, and are anyway evidence of a man who was always stretching his technical abilities to achieve new ideas. Space only allows me to tackle one charge often made. Puffett claims, ‘The criticism of “too many notes” (first levelled, I believe, against Mozart) has never been more justly made than when applied to Tippett's late works.’ A passage such as the scurrying semiquavers in the first movement of the Fifth Quartet (1991) creates a thrilling effect. How could it have been created any other way? Close examination of the score shows that the ear is focused: the lines carefully shaped and not at all evidence of a plethora of arbitrary pitch material. Tippett's later orchestral music shows an increasing mastery and originality in his use of instrumental sonority. The opening bars of The Rose Lake (1991–93) are precision in their delicacy. The thrilling brass scalic passages in the first movement of the Triple Concerto (1978–79) are indeed tricky to execute in performance, but that just means more rehearsal is needed. All these passages could be described as extravagant, but that is an expressive description of the character of the music, not a claim that the compositional technique is flimsy and unfocused.

By the end of the biography the reader might well ask themselves whether Tippett's music is now better off without the man, since the man and his celebrity seem to have been a distraction in the latter part of his life. Soden as biographer is aware of this apparent contradiction and confronts it directly by finding a happy formula in his last sentence: ‘My hope is that, with his life narrated, his creations may more fully be understood, and so more easily fly free’ (614). I concur. The thoroughness of Soden's research and the style and attractiveness of his writing have clarified the life. Demythologizing it will hopeful finally disable the effects of its past celebrity. We can now let go of him, while holding onto his music.

When writers dismiss the later works, they take as the highpoint The Midsummer Marriage. Puffett quotes approvingly Ian Kemp's view that the opera is, ‘the crux of Tippett's entire output, the fulfilment of an artistic programme which remains the touchstone against which all his works can be measured’.Footnote ¹¹ Much early criticism of the opera arose from the libretto which Tippett produced himself, as he did for all his subsequent stage works. Roger Savage's monograph examines letters and sketchbooks in the British Library to cast light on the early stages of the opera's formation, particularly the years 1943 to 1946, when Tippett actively engaged with a collaborator. Douglas Newton (1920–2001) is the man now being rescued from obscurity. He met Tippett through pacifist circles and was briefly a lover. A poet (four of his poems are reproduced in this volume), he later moved to the United States becoming a revered curator of Oceanic art. He was only briefly mentioned in Tippett's autobiography (a book he found ‘rather chilly’) and is no more than a footnote in Kemp's book. Soden gives more space to Newton's role as almost-librettist, but this monograph is rich in detail for it follows the twists and turns for a prolonged birth-cycle.

The opera came together in a process that became familiar throughout Tippett's later career. A sudden moment of ignition launched everything. Tippett claimed in 1952 that in this case it was a sudden image: ‘I saw a stage picture … a wooded hilltop with a temple, where a warm and soft young man was being rebuffed by a cold and hard young woman’ (22). There followed a slow amalgamation of readings (the I Ching is an important text at one point) that gradually settled into a sense of operatic genre. Particularly interesting is Savage's chapter 4, which shows the Act 2 scenario as it stood around February 1944. No ritual dances appear, but much of the action that was to find a home in Act 3 of the final opera, including the consultation and unveiling of Madame Sosostris, is there in embryo. But it is still here a fertile jumble of symbols. Next, a strong sense of plot was drafted: ‘the story is taking on more naturalistically human dressing and the allegorical and mythological element is receding behind. It constantly gets warmer’, Tippett wrote to William Glock in mid-1945. This quotation appears on page 55 and is the moment one first feels the drama is taking on an atmosphere that will create a certain kind of musical landscape.

The collaboration with Newton collapsed in 1946. Tippett, now seized by energy and focus, was eager to proceed. In an ultimatum on 13 March, Tippett acknowledged the value of the work both men had done together but sensing hesitation from Newton, he suggested seeing ‘what I can do either alone or with help between now and the summer’ (64). Savage is probably correct in thinking that Newton withdrew because he ‘may have felt that the operatic project was reducing him to the level of a mere syllable-provider for a driven and demanding task-master, to say nothing of committing him to find words for a grand affirmation of the triumph of psychological individuation and related social revolution when privately he was doubtful about such things’ (65).

In his essay, ‘The Birth of an Opera’ written later, Tippett stated, ‘everything is accepted or rejected eventually according to whether it fits this preordained thing, which itself will not be fully known until it is finished’.Footnote ¹² These words are quoted by Savage at the end of his monograph, and it is impossible not to read this valuable study without the wonderful warm sounds of celeste and wind that Tippett would eventually bring into the world through this opera. Tippett was convincing himself that the work had always been as it was going to be: that it was all inevitable; that it had arrived fully formed without a history. That was not true, of course. But the box had snapped shut and Tippett was about to move on.