Tippett's Midsummer Marriage
David7Gable
Any other fans of Michael Tippett's opera Midsummer Marriage out there?
-david gable
Jeremy Dimmick
"David7Gable" <david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20030411192947...@mb-fx.aol.com...
>
>
> Any other fans of Michael Tippett's opera Midsummer Marriage out there?
>
> -david gable
Yes! I'm a fan of most early Tippett (up to and [possibly including bits
of] King Priam), admire quite a lot of late Tippett (e.g. the Triple
Concerto), and am largely bemused by most of what he wrote in the mid-60s to
early 70s. But The Midsummer Marriage, despite its pretentious libretto,
has some of the most gorgeous music I know. Who'd have thought English
composers were allowed to be so sensuous?
Jeremy
Christopher Webber
>But The Midsummer Marriage, despite its pretentious libretto,
>has some of the most gorgeous music I know. Who'd have thought English
>composers were allowed to be so sensuous?
Hear, Hear, at least as far as the music goes!
There are some interesting points touched on here. What do you find
pretentious about Tippett's libretto? It's become an accepted criticism
position that his libretti are a weakness, a judgement has always seemed
to me to be totally off beam. It stems from the fact that he is happy to
use banal, contemporary sound-byte cliche (often American, from the
dominant linguistic cultural power of our times) to emphasise the ways
in which verbal language falls short, leaving the emotional clarities
and complexities to music.
Given that his wonderful operas are not mimetic, but deal in archetypes
and symbols through character (that is their whole power), it's always
struck me as odd that we label such obviously practical words for music
as Tippett's, as "pretentious". They are a perfect vehicle for his
musical thought - of which "The Knot Garden" is perhaps the most perfect
expression.
A lot of his verbal work is rather memorable. There's nothing in "The
Midsummer Marriage" which fails to serve the music, and such pieces as
Bella's song and her duet with Jack (Tippett's version of "when the
children are asleep") are quite beautifully written; Jenifer's and
Sosostris's aria are similarly impressive as poetic libretto making, in
the 'elevated' tradition of Hofmannsthal.
As to English composers not being sensuous, I like your irony! Which
major British composer of the 20th century - with the exception of
Britten - could fail to be sensuous? The old fallacy still lurks about,
pushing coldness of character and emotional restraint as "typically
English" modes of expression.
I - and I guess you - don't recognise this as remotely true. Howells in
his big breathtaking, big choral works such as the "Missa Sabriniensis"
or "Stabat Mater" rivals Szymanowski for sensuousness any day; and both
Elgar and Vaughan Williams are - or can be when they choose - amongst
the most sensual and earthy of musicians. Tippett is indeed in this
respect, as in many others, their heir; he is plum in the main line of
highly emotional, sensually supercharged 20th c. British composers.
--
Christopher Webber, Blackheath, London, UK
http://www.zarzuela.net
"ZARZUELA!" The Spanish Music Site
Richard Bernas
> Any other fans of Michael Tippett's opera Midsummer Marriage out there?
>
> -david gable
Definitley! Tippet learned a lot about how characters move on stage
after Midsummer Marriage, but I don't think he ever made them sing so
eloquently.
Two performances you may be able to track down. Moshinsky made a very
good video production about 15 years ago with Lucy Shelton, Philip
Langrdge, The London Sinfonietta and David Atherton conducting. The
visual style was similar to the Ealing comedies of the 50s with huge
swathes of Blake's imagery thrown in. Very brilliant performances and
good direction. Haitink's Covent Garden production opened a
substantial unaccompanied choral episode in Act 3 that had always been
cut. Rich, soft and very sensuous, it may hold up the action but it
was wonderful to hear. And the action has pretty much frozen over by
that stage of Act 3. His performance was among the best things he did
with the ROH and a broadcast tape has turned up in House of Opera's
lists. Among a very competent cast - and a strong company effort - I
especially remember John Tomlinson as a titanic and compelling King
Fisher.
Jeremy Dimmick
> pretentious about Tippett's libretto? It's become an accepted criticism
> position that his libretti are a weakness, a judgement has always seemed
> to me to be totally off beam. It stems from the fact that he is happy to
> use banal, contemporary sound-byte cliche (often American, from the
> dominant linguistic cultural power of our times) to emphasise the ways
> in which verbal language falls short, leaving the emotional clarities
> and complexities to music.
>
have, so I'll use brevity to limit how much I'm going to embarrass myself
here. It's possible that pretension wasn't a good word to use; I'll come
back to it. One problem I have with the libretto to The Midsummer Marriage
is its unevenness of tone; parts of it work admirably, but then there are
lines like "I am a medium, not an end" (Sosostris) which puncture the
solemnity of the music to no good purpose. Unlike you, I don't enjoy the
writing (I mean some of the music too, actually) for Jack and Bella, which
often strikes me as patronising in its desire to use these characters as
demotic, down-to-earth types. I have an exceedingly low embarrassment
threshold and ny reactions are probably idiosyncratic, but I do find their
lullaby in Act II scene 1, for example, pretty embarrassing.
As far as "pretentious" goes: well, here goes! I suppose the term is
generally used by people who don't understand something abstruse in a work
of art, and want to make it seem that this is the artist's fault rather than
their own as audience - but also registering their suspicion that there's
not actually anything very profound going on, only the desire on the
artist's part to make it look profound. In other words, pretentiousness is
the striving after the impression of philosophic profundity, without the
technical or intellectual grasp to achieve it. Am I accusing The Midsummer
Marriage of pretension in that sense? Yes, probably - I do think the
transfiguration of Mark and Jennifer in Act III is pretentious (and, again,
deeply embarrassing).
> As to English composers not being sensuous, I like your irony! Which
> major British composer of the 20th century - with the exception of
> Britten - could fail to be sensuous? The old fallacy still lurks about,
> pushing coldness of character and emotional restraint as "typically
> English" modes of expression.
>
> I - and I guess you - don't recognise this as remotely true. Howells in
> his big breathtaking, big choral works such as the "Missa Sabriniensis"
> or "Stabat Mater" rivals Szymanowski for sensuousness any day; and both
> Elgar and Vaughan Williams are - or can be when they choose - amongst
> the most sensual and earthy of musicians. Tippett is indeed in this
> respect, as in many others, their heir; he is plum in the main line of
> highly emotional, sensually supercharged 20th c. British composers.
> --
I'm not going to get into this business of English music and sensuousness,
for fear of humiliating myself further. I was being somewhat ironic, but
not in a very thought-out way. I tend to think Tippett lies outside the
mainstream of early 20th-century English lyricism (by the mainstream, I
probably mean "things that sound a bit like Vaughan Williams in his pastoral
mode") insofar as I think he avoids the tendency of English pastoralism to
go for sentimentality rather than sensuousness. But that comment is more
prejudice than informed opinion.
Jeremy
Alan Watkins
> Jeremy Dimmick <fwo...@clara.co.uk> writes:
> >But The Midsummer Marriage, despite its pretentious libretto,
> >has some of the most gorgeous music I know. Who'd have thought English
> >composers were allowed to be so sensuous?
>
> Hear, Hear, at least as far as the music goes!
>
> There are some interesting points touched on here. What do you find
> pretentious about Tippett's libretto? It's become an accepted criticism
> position that his libretti are a weakness, a judgement has always seemed
> to me to be totally off beam. It stems from the fact that he is happy to
> use banal, contemporary sound-byte cliche (often American, from the
> dominant linguistic cultural power of our times) to emphasise the ways
> in which verbal language falls short, leaving the emotional clarities
> and complexities to music.
>
> Given that his wonderful operas are not mimetic, but deal in archetypes
> and symbols through character (that is their whole power), it's always
I can't comment upon the pretentious aspect of the libretto of this
work for it has never struck me as such but I can certainly tell you
that the Ritual Dances have a fearsome timpani part but like all such
fearsome parts a joy to play. As previously commented upon, the storm
in "Peter Grimes" (Britten) is also a fearsome part but a joy to bring
off well. That is also true for the timpani obbligato appearance in
the Nocturne, premiered brilliantly in Mr Britten's original recording
by Denis Blyth (Philharmonia).
Kind regards,
Alan M. Watkins
JRsnfld
-david gable >>
I haven't thought about this work in a long time, but now that you mention it,
it was one of the first 20th century operas I took an immediate liking to. I
should drag it off the shelf and listen it again.
--Jeff
Christopher Webber
>One problem I have with the libretto to The Midsummer Marriage
>is its unevenness of tone;
I think that's Tippett's intention: it's one of the techniques he takes
over from "The Magic Flute". The solemnity is always on the verge of
being punctuated wholesomely by farce and triviality. I think this is in
fact one of the reasons the opera works well, taken as a whole.
> parts of it work admirably, but then there are
>lines like "I am a medium, not an end" (Sosostris) which puncture the
>solemnity of the music to no good purpose.
Oddly enough, I find that particular line one of Tippett's cleverest and
least obtrusive - it's very T.S.Eliot! Now if you'd picked on "No mortal
ever lifted my garment" from a line or so later I think you might have
had a point - except that the orchestration of that line transcends the
inherent dangers quite magically!
>I do find their
>lullaby in Act II scene 1, for example, pretty embarrassing.
I share your concern about the demotic dangers of Jack and Bella, but
the music of their duet itself takes off wonderfully at "I'll lay the
baby to my breast", don't you think? The "Sleep, sleep ..." section is
one of the most profoundly beautiful sections of the score. And the
older I get, the more I feel that the Papageno-type pair offer an
all-too-accurate reflection of how a great many people view their own
lives and ideals - as formed by convention and corporate advertising,
and yet with something profound and true at the base of it.
>In other words, pretentiousness is
>the striving after the impression of philosophic profundity, without the
>technical or intellectual grasp to achieve it.
I like your definition and exploration of pretentiousness, and if the
music weren't there "Midsummer Marriage" could certainly be accused of
it - as I believe Tippett himself would have been the first to
acknowledge. The words for the 3rd Act transfiguration are simply the
jumping-off point for the superb Ritual Dance of Fire. All we pick up as
we listen are the cosmic, astrological / astronomical references, which
for me add to the sublimity of this climax to the opera.
"Midsummer Marriage" is not perfect. It is much better than that!
>I tend to think Tippett lies outside the
>mainstream of early 20th-century English lyricism (by the mainstream, I
>probably mean "things that sound a bit like Vaughan Williams in his pastoral
>mode") insofar as I think he avoids the tendency of English pastoralism to
>go for sentimentality rather than sensuousness.
I agree wholeheartedly about Tippett's lack of sentimentality. But I
think many of his major works are very much concerned with Pastorale in
the broader sense, as explored by William Empson and others. A work such
the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli perhaps most obviously
so, but "The Knot Garden" and "Midsummer Marriage" equally strongly. All
seem to be quintessentially English in their mystic slant - and very,
very sensuous!
Jeremy Dimmick
> Jeremy Dimmick <fwo...@clara.co.uk> writes:
> >One problem I have with the libretto to The Midsummer Marriage
> >is its unevenness of tone;
>
> I think that's Tippett's intention: it's one of the techniques he takes
> over from "The Magic Flute". The solemnity is always on the verge of
> being punctuated wholesomely by farce and triviality. I think this is in
> fact one of the reasons the opera works well, taken as a whole.
>
mind next time I listen to the opera! By unevenness I think I mean places
where the words strike me as bathetic or clumsy without the music giving any
indication that they're supposed to, rather than the systematic and surely
deliberate shifts of tone you talk about. King Fisher's a great example of
the latter: he thinks in self-aggrandizing clichés, and so his music tends
towards sub-Wagnerian gestures that often ring hollow, yet without my
feeling that Tippett wrote *bad* music for him -- an astonishing tightrope
walk. King Fisher always strikes me as the most interesting person on the
stage, psychologically and musically.
> > parts of it work admirably, but then there are
> >lines like "I am a medium, not an end" (Sosostris) which puncture the
> >solemnity of the music to no good purpose.
>
> Oddly enough, I find that particular line one of Tippett's cleverest and
> least obtrusive - it's very T.S.Eliot! Now if you'd picked on "No mortal
> ever lifted my garment" from a line or so later I think you might have
> had a point - except that the orchestration of that line transcends the
> inherent dangers quite magically!
>
Perhaps the music thereabouts is so sublime that I'd never stopped to
interrogate the line! Funnily enough, that one works for me even now I
think about it - the sense of a transgression that's both mystical and
sexual works. (Perhaps it works because in this opera, the mystical
regularly is the sexual and vice versa.) My objection to the earlier line
is just a feeling that a pun here is tonally inappropriate, and sounds
awkward when sung in a numinous monotone. Yeah, I know puns work for
Shakespeare! But there's so many of them in Shakespeare, as often on
serious occasions as in comic dialogue, that you accept them as part of the
medium, part of the work the language does. This one sticks out.
> >I do find their
> >lullaby in Act II scene 1, for example, pretty embarrassing.
>
> I share your concern about the demotic dangers of Jack and Bella, but
> the music of their duet itself takes off wonderfully at "I'll lay the
> baby to my breast", don't you think? The "Sleep, sleep ..." section is
> one of the most profoundly beautiful sections of the score. And the
> older I get, the more I feel that the Papageno-type pair offer an
> all-too-accurate reflection of how a great many people view their own
> lives and ideals - as formed by convention and corporate advertising,
> and yet with something profound and true at the base of it.
>
Another interesting comment. The Papageno comparison is telling -- that's a
case where I tend to feel there's a creative tension between the libretto
and the music. (Actually, that's code for "the music is much better than
the libretto".) I always get the feeling that Mozart is on the side of
Papageno, where Schickaneder wants to regard him as little more than a
write-off as a human being, merely sensual and almost brutish. Mozart's
music seems to keep insisting "yes, but... he's such fun! and so basically
decent" -- a sort of resistance to the (to my mind) excessive mystification
of the opera's Masonic streak. That element of "yes, but..." is, perhaps, a
recurring feature in Mozart's operatic music -- I'm thinking of Cosě, where
the libretto seems, at root, quite crudely cynical and misogynistic, while
the music isn't. Of course creative tension between music and libretto when
the composer and the librettist are the same person would be a slightly
different case!
Jeremy
Jon A Conrad
>...that his libretti are a weakness, a judgement has always seemed
>to me to be totally off beam. It stems from the fact that he is happy to
>use banal, contemporary sound-byte cliche (often American, from the
>dominant linguistic cultural power of our times)
But it can be countered (and perhaps especially by Americans) that he does
it unconvincingly and inaccurately. Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert
Brown use banal contemporary language for its precise value, and achieve
something memorable thereby. Tippett, to my taste, does not; it just
sounds as if his characters are having words put in their mouth.
>to emphasise the ways
>in which verbal language falls short, leaving the emotional clarities
>and complexities to music.
That's a valid aim. But one can recognize that he attempts this two-level
expression, and still feel that he doesn't achieve it. (I still love the
music, but have to tune out most of the words.)
>Given that his wonderful operas are not mimetic, but deal in archetypes
>and symbols through character (that is their whole power)
Only if one feels that he achieves what he was after. It's not enough to
say "Look! I'm not being mimetic, but dealing in archetypes!", one has to
make them effective and convincing. (And for certain tastes, invoking
"archetypes and symbols" as a justification is already heading down the
path of pretentiousness. Good operas may indeed do that sort of thing --
Mozart, Verdi, Wagner all do -- but they do it by being specific and
humanly convincing first. Because we get involved in the plights of the
people we see, we can take in [probably without knowing that we're doing
so] the deeper meaning as well.)
>As to English composers not being sensuous, I like your irony! Which
>major British composer of the 20th century - with the exception of
>Britten - could fail to be sensuous?
Now it's time for my own eyes to bug out. Britten not sensuous? What have
I been luxuriating in for all these years, then? :)
Jon Alan Conrad
Department of Music
University of Delaware
con...@udel.edu
Christopher Webber
>Christopher Webber wrote:
>>...that his libretti are a weakness, a judgement has always seemed
>>to me to be totally off beam. It stems from the fact that he is happy to
>>use banal, contemporary sound-byte cliche (often American, from the
>>dominant linguistic cultural power of our times)
>
>But it can be countered (and perhaps especially by Americans) that he does
>it unconvincingly and inaccurately.
The point is that they're English, not American, texts. Tippett's
American slang, like Brecht's in "Mahagonny", is filtered through a
foreign, European consciousness, not intended to be realistic American.
You might just as well criticise the superb "blues" at the end of Act 1
of "The Knot Garden" for not being 12-bar or formally authentic!
His engagement with the USA, in his later works, is that of an excited,
sceptical but sympathetic outsider.
There was a reason Tippett wrote as he did, as I outlined: it enriches
our appreciation of his remarkable operas if we're able to put aside
received prejudice and get to grips with what he was trying, rather than
not trying, to do. Have his texts ever bothered you in the theatre?? It
will enrich us to extend our imaginative response, not crab his. I fully
agree that not everybody 'gets' this, but that doesn't mean that Tippett
was inadequate. Not everybody gets Mozart, even.
>Good operas may indeed do that sort of thing --
>Mozart, Verdi, Wagner all do -- but they do it by being specific and
>humanly convincing first. Because we get involved in the plights of the
>people we see, we can take in [probably without knowing that we're doing
>so] the deeper meaning as well.)
Well put. But there is more than one way of skinning this particular
cat. The protean Mozart wrote good opera in a self-consciously
archetypal "Magic Flute" style as well as a more humanly complex "Don
Giovanni" style. Strauss could write a conversational "Rosenkavalier"
opera well enough, but his greatest musical creation is probably the
hyper-conscious, marmoreal world of "Die Frau Ohne Schatten".
As you're moved by Tippett's music, I'm surprised you don't find his
characters (Priam, Helen, Dov, Flora, Denise, Jenifer, Lev et. al.) just
as involving, humanly convincing, specific, as Strauss's Barak or
Mozart's Pamina. Tippett's subtle and passionate presentation of human
beings in relationship to one another is precisely what makes his operas
tick. Just as with Eliot's poetry, the elusiveness of his librettos is a
texturing, not something to get hung up on or distracted by.
It's a twentieth century, dislocated world view which he gives us
("these fragments have I shored against my ruin"); uncomfortable,
chaotic, violent and challenging. We live in a much more self-conscious
age than the 19th century romantics, which may be our tragedy; and
Tippett reflects that self-consciousness, or self-imaging, with
remarkable power. We may not like it, but - in part - it is what we are.
>
>>As to English composers not being sensuous, I like your irony! Which
>>major British composer of the 20th century - with the exception of
>>Britten - could fail to be sensuous?
>Now it's time for my own eyes to bug out. Britten not sensuous? What have
>I been luxuriating in for all these years, then? :)
To say he was *never* sensuous would be nonsense - and I didn't say
that! But he is undoubtedly more prone to be lean, mean, epicurean and
astringent than the luxuriant Bax, Tippett and Howells - to name but
three of his great contemporaries. It's the idea that these chaps are
emotionally reticent English gentlemen that is so imbecile.
--
"THE ZARZUELA COMPANION" (Scarecrow Press)
Christopher Webber, Foreword by Placido Domingo
http://www.zarzuela.net
Scott Kurtz
Christopher Webber
>Elizabeth Lutyens is hardly sensuous.
Well I did specify major composers. But then thinking about it there is
"O Saisons, O Chateaux", Op.13 which qualifies on both counts. I can
think of few short pieces which revel so sensuously in the wonder of the
distilled moment.