Michael Tippett: The Biography
By Oliver Soden
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 768pp, £25/$34.95
It’s virtually a law of nature that composers fall from fashion when they die. And a distinguished victim was Sir Michael Tippett, whose reputation as the grand old man of British music could hardly have been higher when he died in 1998, aged 93. But then it collapsed, with no one much to fight his corner for him.
Apart from a handful of (mostly early) works such as the oratorio A Child of Our Time and a couple of Classic FM favourites like the Fantasia on a Theme of Corelli,
he all but disappeared from concert programmes. And loving Tippett’s music, I was shocked to find that so many of my colleagues in the arts press suddenly didn’t. I remember turning up at a rare performance of his opera The Midsummer Marriage, excited by the prospect – only to run into the critic of another national newspaper looking at his watch and calculating, with a sigh, how long we’d all be stuck in this abomination of a piece.
