One of the pleasures of attending the Bard Music Festival – which focuses on a primary composer and his or her world – is the chance to listen to music by dozens of ancillary figures that in one way or another further illuminate the year’s subject. This makes for some felicitous discoveries. One of these, in this year devoted to Ralph Vaughan Williams, was surely the Piano Sonata No. 1 by Michael Tippett.
I went through a Tippett phase, back in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, when I first discovered his Concerto for Double String Orchestra, his oratorio “A Child of Our Time,” the “Suite in D (for the Birthday of Prince Charles),” and the opera “The Midsummer Marriage,” which I was lucky to see in a revival at New York City Opera. But then I kind of cooled on him, still liking the pieces I liked, of course, but not going out of my way to revisit the thornier, more perplexing works of his later development. There are exceptions, of course. I’ve always been partial to his Symphony No. 4, for instance, which the composer compares to a birth-to-death cycle, complete with intermittent “breathing” effects. And of course, I have recordings of his piano sonatas, which, if I ever listened to them at all, have sat dormant on the shelf. In the case of No. 1, no longer!
The sonata was composed in 1939, it turns out not long after the Concerto for Double String Orchestra. You would never know it from the music, but at the time the composer was going through quite a lot of turbulence. He’d recently weathered a particularly messy break-up. Tippett was homosexual, so even under the best of circumstances, there would have been a degree of stress at a time when same-sex relationships were viewed as criminal offenses. But the break-up was acrimonious and threw the composer into turmoil. Furthermore, Europe was full to bursting with political and military tension. Tippett always leaned far to the left, which placed him in further jeopardy with the authorities, especially when he not only refused to fight, but to participate in the war effort in any way.
Vaughan Williams always did much to assist and support younger composers, not only as a teacher but as a colleague, even if he didn’t particularly care for the kind of music they happened to be writing. Tippett was one such composer. I don’t believe it ever came up during any of Bard’s panels or pre-concert talks, but Vaughan Williams, as one of the country’s most venerated composers, volunteered himself as a character witness during Tippett’s trial as a conscientious objector.
Tippett admitted to, as a young man, having despised Vaughan Williams and all that he stood for. But probably in part because of the elder composer’s unusual kindness, he came to realize “there was an essential goodness about the man.”
Later, after Vaughan Williams’ death, Tippett began to perceive that it was Vaughan Williams more than anyone else “who had made us free.” After two hundred years of German cultural domination following the death of Henry Purcell, when the most popular composers in England were Handel, Haydn, and Mendelssohn, Elgar brought new hope; but it could be argued, and to Tippett’s way of thinking, it was Vaughan Williams who allowed English composers to be comfortable in their own skins. He had bequeathed to all who followed the freedom to be “English.”
Tippett talks about Vaughan Williams here:
The first movement of Tippett’s sonata is cast in the form of a theme and variations; the second is based on a Scottish folksong, “Ca’ the yowes” (which Tippett also employs in the Concerto for Double String Orchestra); the third movement scherzo, in sonata form, unusually bears the greatest weight (I hear flashes of Beethoven); only to have that weight lifted in the fourth movement by a cakewalk. Tippett was always interested in Black music, with jazz, blues, boogie-woogie, and spirituals frequent influences on his work.
Tippett’s sonata was performed at Bard by Orion Weiss. Here’s a recording with Phyllis Sellick, who introduced the piece, from the 1940s.
And Daniel Harding and the London Symphony Orchestra with the lovely Concerto for Double String Orchestra:
PHOTO (left to right): Sir Adrian Boult, Michael Tippett, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Ursula Vaughan Williams in 1958. Tippett would be knighted in 1966. Decades earlier, Vaughan Williams declined a knighthood. In 1935, he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George V.
