The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett Modern Times and Metaphysics
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett Modern Times and Metaphysics David Clarke The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011–4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, VIC 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © David Clarke 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface 10.5/13.5pt Minion in QuarkXPress™ [] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Clarke, David (David Ian) The music and thought of Michael Tippett : modern times and metaphysics / David Clarke. p. cm. – (Music in the 20th century) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 58292 X 1. Tippett, Michael, 1905 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Music in the twentieth century. ML410.T467 C62 2001 780.92–dc21 00–052994 ISBN 0 521 58292 X hardback Contents Acknowledgements x References to Tippett’s scores and essays xii 1 Tippett and the ‘world vision’ of modernity 1 The concept of ‘world vision’ and the concept of modernity 1 Tippett as ‘post-romantic modernist’ 4 Tippett’s writings, and writing about Tippett 7 A man of whose time? 10 2 The significance of the concept ‘image’ in Tippett’s musical thought: a perspective from Jung 13 Tippett and images 13 Images and the unconscious 14 Elaborations: interpreting with Jung 17 Images in music 20 The significance (and signification) of images 28 Conclusions 32 3 Back to Nietzsche? Transformations of the Dionysiac in The Midsummer Marriage and King Priam 36 I The sense of an ending 36 Nature, myth, Hellenism 38 II Images of the Dionysiac in The Midsummer Marriage 41 Enchanted nature 44 The Apollonian and Dionysiac in music 46 Excursus: metaphysical variations 52 Madame Sosostris: voice of the noumenal 57 The will to life: optimism vs pessimism 62 III The turn to tragedy: King Priam 66 Sex and violence 67 The sound of the Dionysiac 71 The will to power 75 Helen 80 IV The aesthetics of violence: Nietzsche, Yeats and Tippett 85 Aesthetics and politics 87 vii On the uses and disadvantages of Nietzsche for understanding Tippett 89 viii Contents 4 Metaphysics in a cold climate: The Vision of Saint Augustine 96 Reframing the critical debate 96 I Historicism, history and modernity 97 Time and history 100 Augustine and modernity 103 II The aesthetics of inwardness: subjectivity, time and music 105 Tippett and the critique of unified subjectivity 108 III The Vision of Saint Augustine: general principles of form and structure 111 Vision II 115 ‘Impendente autem die . .’ 116 ‘Fenestram!’ (Strategies for the transcendent) 123 ‘Quaerebamus . .’ 127 ‘Et . transcendimus eas’ 131 Evaluation 137 IV Metaphysics: a perspective from Adorno 138 Time and history revisited 142 Coda 145 5 ‘Shall we . ? Affirm!’ The ironic and the sublime in The Mask of Time 147 I The sublime and the ridiculous 147 Humanity and nature 149 From Shelley’s vision . 151 . to television 154 II ‘The triumph of Life’: from Shelley to Tippett 159 Excursus: irony, dialogism and heteroglossia in Tippett 161 ‘Voices’ and their deployment in Tippett’s ‘The triumph of Life’ 164 The ‘instrumental voice’ enters 167 Elaborations 170 The storm scene: the instrumental voice resumed 173 The cremation scene 179 III Human values and the separation of spheres 182 Excursus: Kant, Tippett, and the aporia of reason 183 The sublime in Kant and Tippett 188 ‘The singing will never be done’ 191 From mind to body 199 Coda 204 ix Contents 6 The meaning of ‘lateness’: mediations of work, self and society in Tippett’s Triple Concerto 206 Prospects 206 The model of late Beethoven 209 Tippett’s Triple Concerto and its late status 211 The mediation of lyricism and fragmentation 220 After modernism 222 Musical material and its social mediation 227 Mediations of the personal: gay traces 229 Self, society and the musical work in late Tippett 231 7 The golden bird and the porcelain bowl: Byzantium and the politics of artefacts 236 What did Tippett mean by ‘artefact’? 236 I Tippett and Yeats: imagination and images 238 Two functions of art 240 Yeats, Stravinsky and Unity of Being 243 II Byzantium: the golden bird 249 Structures and imagery 254 The feminine as critical locus 261 Closing statements 268 Notes 270 Bibliography 315 Index 328 1 Tippett and the ‘world vision’of modernity The concept of‘world vision’and the concept of modernity On the plane of personal psychology, there are no people more different than the poet, who creates particular beings and things, and the philosopher, who thinks and expresses himself by means of general concepts . [Yet] we must accept the existence of a reality which goes beyond them as individuals and finds its expression in their work. It is this which I intend to call the world vision. At a crucial point in his career Michael Tippett (1905–98) would probably have read these lines. The book from which they come, Lucien Goldmann’s The Hidden God, is appropriately discussed in the Tippett literature as being influential on the tragic conception of the composer’s second opera King Priam (1958–62).1 But Goldmann’s text affords other possibilities too. For one thing it offers me a way round the invidious problem of begin- ning this book, which – because it deals with a complex of issues where none takes priority over the others – has no natural starting point. In the spirit of the present volume I want to use Goldmann as an interpretative catalyst or intermediary through which to read out certain of Tippett’s own values. Tippett’s growth to artistic maturity is rightly correlated with the tech- nical development of his musical language. Yet his claim to the status of composer of stature depends on something beyond this: something which conforms to that characteristic Goldmann terms ‘world vision’. The notion, which he adapts from Wilhelm Dilthey, refers to ‘the whole complex of ideas, aspirations and feelings which links together the members of a social group’. Goldmann continues: A philosophy or work of art can keep its value outside the time and place where it first appeared only if, by expressing a particular human situation, it transposes this on to the plane of the great human problems created by man’s relationship with his fellows and with the universe.2 No doubt Tippett would have empathized with these sentiments. Indeed the words themselves appear to find an echo many years later in his description of The Mask of Time (1980–2) as a response to ‘the most fun- damental matters bearing upon man, his relationship with time, his place 1 in the world as we know it and in the mysterious universe at large’.3 No one 2 The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett could accuse Tippett of humble artistic pretensions! Whatever the hazards of operating on ‘the plane of the great human problems’, the fact that he risked doing so forms an irrefutable part of his chemistry and significance as a composer. Perhaps the first work where this tendency became evident was A Child of our Time (1931–41), and thereafter all his operas and choral–orchestral works were in one way or another concerned with making big statements about the human condition. But the trait is dis- cernible – often as a preoccupation with the ‘visionary’– in the instrumen- tal and orchestral works too. It would be remiss, of course, to characterize Tippett’s entire œuvre in this way, but the engagement with ‘grand narra- tives’ (to borrow a term from Lyotard) is certainly a vital stream within it, and it forms a key ingredient of this book’s subject matter. What makes such impossibly grandiose aspirations potentially tractable (for the musicologist as well as the composer) is the mediation of the uni- versal in the particular – a point evident in the preceding quotations from Goldmann, and also in his observation that ‘as we move away from the abstract idea of the world vision, so we find that the individual details of each vision are linked to historical situations localised in place and time, and even to the individual personality of the writer or thinker in ques- tion’.4 Concentrating for the moment on the middleground of this pan- orama, what is the historical situation to which Tippett’s world vision relates? Even here, the scope is anything but modest. What Tippett engages with in many of his major works (even though he does not quite put it this way) is nothing less than the social, epistemological and psychological condi- tions of Western modernity. This is modernity considered as a historical longue durée: the period from around the time of the age of Enlightenment (some would place it earlier) to the present day. To define its conditions in a nutshell is a tall order. But a working basis is found among theoretical accounts which characterize modern consciousness as divided following reason’s rise in the Enlightenment to the West’s dominant paradigm of knowledge. Whereas, so such narratives run, the received dogma of relig- ion had, in pre-modern times, provided men and women with a unified basis for their perception of the world, their moral conduct and their sen- suous being, reason’s dominion over conceptual knowledge causes a schism between that realm and those of ethics and other, sensory sources of insight.