Sir Michael Tippett

Sir Michael Tippett0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty five, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week is one of our premier composers, Sir Michael Tippett.

Presenter0:35

Sir Michael, would you rather have scores than records?

Presenter0:38

I can't know. I'm sorry, this is a personal thing. I have lost my central vision, and I only have peripheral vision, and I can't read easily, and I can't read a score at all. I'd have to be allowed, or I have him somehow attached to my person, the magnifying glass with which I read these things at all. It has to be dreadful. I can't see insects, which is also another very interesting problem. I'm not the least bit worried about being the tropical insects. I cannot see them.

Sir Michael Tippett0:53

At all.

Presenter1:00

So that I go to bed perfectly happy. But the point is that I don't now want to read the score. I would like to hear the sounds. Some of it will be memory, but the records are the things I really would like. There's no question. Where do we start? What's the first one you've chosen? The first piece of music I ever heard as a schoolboy, and that was a long ti long, long time ago. It must have been about 1920, 21. And there was very little music then in schools whatsoever. In any case, I were allowed to go to a concert by Malcolm Sager, as he was then, and I heard a work which is the only one I can remember in the whole concert, which was Mother Goose by Ravel. I had no idea who Ravel was, really, but I was fascinated by this piece. Much later on, when I tried to play the piano, I found that the beautiful sonnatine which Ravel wrote, I could play portions of it. I couldn't play the first and last movement very well, but I could play the minuet that is in the middle, which I have myself used even now as a model for a salah band in the last piece I wrote. And by an accident, this is very interesting, is that about, I don't know, the middle of the twenties or perhaps the nineteen thirty, certain major composers from Europe came to England and and were given a complete concert in the old Queen's Hall.

Presenter2:12

One of them was Stlavinsky, who came with Nudushkin and played all sorts of pieces arranged for that purpose. The other one was Ravel. All I can remember about Ravel is his back view conducting in tiny, tiny gestures, though he only had a pencil. But eventually he went off the stage and a young pianist, French pianist, came on and played this Ravel Salmatine, very, very dry. But the minuet is the most enchanting, beautiful piece of music which is there forever as far as I'm concerned, so that that would be a joy to have.

Presenter3:41

Part of the second movement of Ravel's Sonnatine, played by Paul Crossley. I chose this record, Roy, because Crossley is a young pianist who I esteem very much. He's played all my own pieces, and he understands French music in a supreme degree. So that although it it isn't what was played to Ravel in 1920 something or other, it's certainly what was played to me now.

Presenter4:03

So, Michael, you were born in Middlesex and moved to Suffolk. I was, in fact, born in a in a nursing home in London. Then, at the age of whatever it was, a few weeks or whatever I went, or exactly I went to Suffolk. Your father sounds to have been a a character. He invested in the theatre, he ran a hotel in the south of France. Did you spend a lot of time down there? As children, we went twice, before the before the First World War, a long time ago, and of course I can remember it fairly well. Then comes the First World War, you see, which which cut my life off, like a lot of people's life off, just like that. I was nine years old. And everything went. Ev my father had no more money because the French hotel didn't pay any and so forth. And we never went back again, you see, until we are older. In other words, fifteen, sixteen, or something like that, when he after the war, First World War, he went back and then sold the hotel and then began to live over in France. So the life in the hotel was a memory of it, but not but we never lived there very much. You were always good at languages.

Presenter5:05

Well, French, you see, my father taught a beautiful French, and somehow I was drawn to that Latin language. It was easy. I learnt I taught myself German when I came to Royal College of Music about nineteen twenty-two, because I felt that German was very much a musical language, and I was drawn to German literature. I wanted to read literature. Your mother was a novelist who had suffragette leanings.

Presenter5:27

She had leanings all right. She lent on her children, it seems to me, looking back on it, but that's another matter. But she she she a novelist of a kind. She wrote romance novels of that period, and they were what they were. Well, I don't I mean, I didn't know them terribly well, obviously,'cause I was a c very much a child. Were your parents musical? The answer is no, not in the sense of knowing what it was to have a musical child. They had no idea at all. My mother sang boozy ballads, or what they would call them now, but they were they were lovely sort of songs of which the best were quilter. And she sang them in a tu to a tiny piano in in a tiny room in a tiny village.

Presenter6:08

Well there was nothing at all. There was no radio, you see. There was no there was no music at all. Were you en encouraged in your interest?

Presenter6:15

I was encouraged we were both encouraged, as were normal enough in that kind of sort of lower middle class or upper middle class family, whatever it was, you see, in a village, we were encouraged to to have piano lessons. I mean, everybody, as it were, did.

Presenter6:27

And I I liked them. My brother didn't. I don't think very much. And I I didn't go to a musical school. Good heavens, no, no, no, no, no. I went first, you see, to a secondary school, which was a public school at that time, and wa and I I had to run away from it finally. And it isn't until I get to Stamford Grammar School. Where Sergeant had been, that as the thing begins, and I have some real training of a v very primitive kind. At which point let's have your second record.

Presenter6:53

Yes, now here you see is the real loves. I went up to a Royal College of Music after that in about nineteen, whatever it is, twenty three, and suddenly the whole music scene was like a dam breaking. And I went to the first uh whole concert series, the proms, with Henry Wood, just after the war. And of course Beethoven was the big figure, but all the others were. And I always from the very early days had a feeling of Haberiotz, which was rarer then. It came much later and has come after the war.

Presenter7:22

And Herald in Italy was the strangest of them, this strange sound that the viola makes, and and there it was all so new. And and yet this tune, which I would like to have played now, has a kind of song to us that is absolutely unique, absolutely berliot, and it will be just when you play it to me now, I shall be in exactly the same mood I was when I was then.

Presenter8:48

Part of the first section of Harold in Italy by Berlioz, the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis and the viola soloist Nabucco Imai. Yes, she's a very lovely girl and a marvellous soloist, and Colin Davis, of course, associated with me, when they came to do my triple concerto, Violin Violencello, she was the chosen violist, and she's she's of great quality.

Presenter9:12

You went to the Royal College of Music. What were your subjects? The first subject it was known as was was composition clearly. And I had the luck to have a very good teacher. I also learnt piano, which is a second subject, under the idea that I might be able to do something. I d I was too lazy and didn't got proper technique.

Presenter9:29

Because composition took over. But the other was a was a sort of instinct that that if I couldn't play the piano, as Beethoven, Mozart, and all that um period did, I would have like m later periods. I'd have to learn to conduct properly. And so I went to conducting as the third study. Your professors in the conducting course were Malcolm Sargent and Adrian Bolt. How do you remember them? As much, much younger men than we think of them now. Sargent was only ten years older than I was, so I was twenty-something. He was just in his early thirties. Bolt was in his middle thirties, I should think. Now, Bolt only conducted the senior sort of orchestra, and therefore the senior students who were learning conducting, they went to Bolt. The absolute juniors began with Sargent. He was a very clear man who thought we were pretty fair rubbish. And he said none of us were ever going to be any good anyhow, as far as you could see. And he then made a very sensible statement. He said, Look, you're never going to conduct real orchestras. You've got to learn how to conduct amateurs. And that means you have to be very good, very precise, have an absolutely clear beat, and we will try and train you how to do that, because that's all you're ever going to do. All right, well, you you got a very good training. When I did venture to go with Bolt, of course, that was something different. Because Bolt

Presenter10:42

Bolt was a much grander figure, if I may put it that way, as far as conducting is concerned, and he'd been taught by Nikish, and it was a very clear German account. He wanted the score understood. But what came out of it is what really mattered, absolutely and totally, is that I wanted to hear the sounds of an orchestra. And I asked Bolt, quite before I was there, whether he would mind if I stood beside him on every Friday rehearsal of the senior orchestra to see what he what was going on. He was rather surprised, said yes indeed. And in the end, after two years or so, he took me right inside this Rostrum stand with him, and for four years I practically never missed a Friday, so that I heard an absolutely fabulous amount of music, directly, not as a conductor, though I watched him do it but as a composer.

Presenter11:23

When you graduated, you became a schoolmaster. Yes. I want had to have some sort of money to live on, after my father wouldn't give me any more. I was very lucky, because someone was willing to a small private school. We wanted a a Frenchmaster, and I could do that really very well. And they were prepared to let me do the minutest amount of teaching, gave me a middle-day meal, etcetera., and gave me a very small sum, like something like sixty pounds a year or something of this kind, which you could r really live if you tried. And I lived at the simplest level, absolutely to keep time to compose. Your third record.

Presenter12:01

It must be Monteverdi. See, Monteverdi first came to us all.

Presenter12:06

And we are now, you know, just up against the war, or just not long before, because this strange figure of Nadia Boulanger from France, she made a set of of seventy eights, which became absolutely famous. They had magicals on them.

Presenter12:19

Monte Verdi Metros, and they were the extraordinary new world. And I was at Morley College, which was a small, tiny place, but we did quite interesting things. And we played music in the sort of chamber of music versions. But eventually we launched out a bit, and after the war, Goh, as the Alexander Goh's father, he realized, or somebody had off had shown him, this extraordinary score of the Monte Verde Vespers, which had been performed in Switzerland, but not not complete at all. And we decided to give its almost f complete

Presenter12:52

world performance. With no money at all, I put some private money over like fifty pounds or something. I don't know. It was the most extraordinary world. Goer must have done something similar and then produced what was a most extraordinary occasion. We did it in Central Hall, Westminster, with not knowing the least bit what we were going to have. It turned out to be a world beater. This lovely, wonderful piece of music, because it's of such grandeur, such variety.

Presenter14:09

An excerpt from the Monteverde Vespers, the Taverner Consort and Choir, conducted by Andrew Parrott. And he, in my opinion, Roy is one of the best choir masters and real coming conductors there is of the younger generation here in England.

Presenter14:24

Now you were working at Morley College, which has now, partly thanks to you, an enormous reputation as a workshop for for young musicians.

Presenter14:34

You were doing quite a lot of composing yourself by that time. That is true. Yes. In fact, I I went on, even though I had to earn m go on earning my money and I worked at Morley.

Speaker 314:39

You said I

Presenter14:43

I did as little as I could. I earned p practically little. I let somebody else do it if I could possibly do it, so that I could always go on composing. All the time.

Presenter14:51

Because of your deep pacifist principles you elected to go to jail for those principles, and that made your mother rather happy, because she'd gone to jail too for her principles, had she not? Yes, perhaps I really chose her up once, because I was always at cross purposes, mamma. You had some distinguished supporters at your tribe.

Sir Michael Tippett15:02

Uh

Presenter15:09

I was never quite sure about this, Roy, because I felt why should they be drawn into the fact I had offended the law and I should accept the criminal sentence given me. And I thought it was a lot in a way something baloney, but they felt differently. And so I went to criminal jail, of course.

Presenter15:23

A very interesting experience, may I say. How long were you inside? Oh, the shortest possible. Perhaps by generosity of these distinguished figures who suggested it, and and I don't know how much to do with me, I got the minimum sentence with three months. Now, as I behaved myself quite nicely and properly in prison, I therefore came out after two months.

Presenter15:42

It's an absurd story, you see, because after that I was free to do what I wanted. And the extraordinary thing, which is only English, is that within one month of coming out to Jail, I was in Canterbury Cathedral, hearing a first performance of a work of mine, that is no other country in the world.

Presenter15:57

While you were at Morley, your first symphony was performed, was it not? First symphony was performed in 1945. I wrote it during the war, but I was or it was probably done in 1946. It was done in Liverpool, and it was just the war had only just ended. How long were you at Morley altogether? I went on till 1951, that's all I had. And you built up a a musical tradition there which did. This had been there.

Sir Michael Tippett16:18

This has

Presenter16:21

With Holst. You see, he was there. And there was a gap that wasn't quite so glamorous as either Holst or mine, to be quite honest, and we did some very exciting things. There's no question about that. And therefore it got this reputation, which is a great deal larger than its buildings.

Presenter16:38

A fourth record, please.

Presenter16:40

I had a small turntable of a not very complicated kind, and, you know, there were seventy eights of all sorts, and I was at that time finding my way to jazz through recordings.

Presenter16:51

But also there came out the various

Presenter16:54

song records that came from the movies or, you know, the the musicals. But the one the one that absurdly remained is because it has this lyric which cheers me up, because I think it's part of the other side of music, and you have to learn, even if you're a very serious composer or whatever, you have to learn this is part of it, that there's a financial situation involved in. And the other kid put it extremely well. She said, amongst other things, and she said, um, I like Chropin and Bizet and the songs of yesterday, string quartets and Polynesian carols. But the music that excels is the sound of oil wells that slurp, schlurp, schlurp into the barrels. I've never forgotten it, you see. And it seemed to me that it would be interesting to be reminded of that more gentle and more ironic on you know, an entertainment side of music. And when we've come to try it out, you see, it turns out to be a lovely and glorious song.

Speaker 217:58

I'm just a pilgrim at heart, oh so pure and genteel Watch me in Las Vegas when I'm at the spin and wheel I want an old fashioned house with an old fashioned fence And an old fashioned millionaire I'll ask for such simple things when my birthday occurs Two apartment buildings that are labelled hers and hers I want an old fashioned house with an old fashioned fence And an old fashioned

Presenter18:30

Earth a kid.

Presenter18:32

Your first opera, Sir Michael.

Presenter18:34

The Midsummer Marriage. What was the inspiration for that? You also wrote the libretto in it all. Yes, I had written operas before, quite a number of them, of various kinds. I mean, they sound rather grand, but I had been consonantists in the theatre.

Presenter18:47

And so I came to feel that I knew what the opera the opera that I wanted to write should be, and that it should be an opera which should have two great things behind it. One was Mozart, which was the magic flute, which F was an opera about illumination and and and getting there, you see, the point at which the vision appears. And the other was the Midsummer Night's Dream of Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was the absolute always has been of me in the theatre. It's a it's a wonderful world of tremendous variety. Out of these came this belief that I could put somewhere upon the stage this going from this world of the everyday into the theatre of magic. It was a very, very, very long process. It went on for years and years and years before I could get to the point where I could start. The Midsummer Marriage was a difficult opera. Were you happy with the production it was given? Happy enough.

Sir Michael Tippett19:29

The critics are

Presenter19:38

The the thing about the critics felt are two things. One is if if the opera's written in English they can understand it. Now this sounds very odd. If it were written in Czech they wouldn't have known whether it was good or bad in that sense about what the text read. So that a ninety per cent of all the criticism was concerned about the text. The music was more or less accepted.

Presenter19:56

And the question of the production was a very, very difficult question of what the what the theatre was at that time. It was done in Covent Garden, and Covent Garden has been marvellously generous to me. But it was the Covent Garden of that period. I had to accept what it was. So it was good. You did have a patch when you felt that your works, on the whole, in the concert hall as well, were being inadequately performed.

Speaker 320:09

Yeah.

Presenter20:17

They were performed rarely, and they they had difficulties. The second symphony was performed by the BBC, BBC Commission. It broke down in public after about a minute, and I was going to say nastily it amused me. It didn't disturb me as much as it disturbed everybody else.

Presenter20:33

But it did make it difficult Pratt, because naturally the people didn't want to have the same experience again.

Presenter20:38

And it was many years before it was returned. Whereas the first symphony, which we spoke of at you know, that had a performance in London by Walter Gerr, and the Times critic of the day said, We now have had a good enough performance to say that it is neither music nor a symphony. That settled the matter, as far as London's concerned, for twenty five years. Well, you have to put up with it. This is how it is. But if the music has something inside it which people can hang on to, they will hang on to it, and sooner or later if, if, if it's real.

Presenter21:08

It will come through. The bad patch really ended with your next opera, King Priam, that was admired. Well, yes and no, love. On the contrary, another bad patch began like crazy. By this time they thought, Oh, it's Mitsawame's nice lyrical work. That's the work he should be doing. When I didn't, and went the other way.

Sir Michael Tippett21:13

Uh

Presenter21:24

A forceful, dramatic work where I've changed my style and things which were almost the real heroic world were put before you. They said, Christ, let's have none of that. So you can't win easily. It's only now when the young ones I mean, I call them young ones. I've had just Pram now with the with the Kent Opera. Stunning.

Presenter21:45

Dramatic, strong, young cast, loving it really singing it it speaks everything to you. So somebody, very nicely, very sweet man.

Presenter21:54

critic of time. He wrote to me a card after it and said

Presenter21:58

What chumps we were

Presenter22:02

Another record.

Presenter22:03

After all that, the music itself began to travel, and with it I went to America and what have you, and so on and so forth. But Harry Parche is a very strange character who he he was born in nineteen four or something like that. He was born just for me. His music he wrote his own pieces, he wrote his he built his own instruments, it was all a sort of theatre thing, he didn't get very far, or rather he had even worse a time, and nobody even had to pay his music now, except for the real fans. But it was very interesting. I was with Marlin Boeh in my biographer, and we were in the Far East this last year, and we always asked the young composers what they thought they were doing. You know, did they think there was Eastern music or Chinese music or whatever? And we met all the Hong Kong composers, young and old, and they were played us all sorts of music. And some one said to me, What did you think of that? I said, Well, I thought it was quite mildly interesting or something of this kind. He said, Was it Chinese? I said, I've no idea. How should I know whether it's Chinese or not? I had not been born into China, so how would I know? How do you want me to judge it? I must judge it as I hear it.

Presenter23:04

So then we played a trick on them. We played them part of this record that comes now Harry Part.

Presenter23:10

And it's a marvellous sound, and everything is there.

Presenter23:14

And so we said, What did you think of that? What is that? and they nearly said it's Chinese. Of course it wasn't, it was American.

Presenter23:21

Now, we didn't really mean it only to play them a trick. But in that is some of this new world which accepts instruments that come from Africa or from China and vice versa, you see, and we possibly we are in a wider, much, much wider world, as far as music is concerned. We certainly are, of course, if you're in the pop and jazz world or rock world. But I don't know about it in serious work, but yet all of them had to face this thing.

Presenter23:49

And I have to face it at my age now, but the younger ones must face it even more clearly if they want to know whom they talking to.

Presenter24:27

Harry Parch and his composition The Bewitched.

Presenter24:30

Your real success, Sir Michael, seemed destined to come late. This year you're eighty, and it was really at about sixty that uh you came into your own. You and America discovered each other, which was important. And in the past twenty years, well, your third and fourth symphony the third contains a blues, very interestingly. Yes, I always thought that the blues was something that belonged to our century.

Presenter24:55

And it's a vernacular. You can't in other words, if you want to put the popular or the vernacular into music now, you can't very easily do it as Mahler did out of the Lindle of Vienna. You have somehow to take from something else. And I thought that the blues, which came out of Louisiana or whatever it did, has that extraordinary quality, so both simplicity and complexity, so that I slowly learnt my way towards the blues. I never wrote real blues, I wrote my blues.

Presenter25:20

Another record

Presenter25:21

I'm interested in w the newer techniques, and I'm too old to do them. I can't go into really into the studio, I don't think and so no I can't, and learn how to make records that are made made of electronics and lots of channels and so forth, but I'm fascinated by what he's done. You publish your music through a record which is then goes round the world and is imitated and so on, and which we'll call rock for the moment. All right. This interests me because within that extraordinary world, which is absolutely universal right over the world. I've heard it in in the bush of Africa, see, and everywhere else. Okay.

Presenter25:57

What does it mean to me? It means something to me, because it belongs to human beings of this date. It's also when I come to play the record which I wish to have from the police, you will hear the sounds. It might have come out of Harry Part. It's of the time there are these same xylophones, these same crackling sounds, and the beat. And the beat well, we know what it is.

Speaker 326:22

No one else

Speaker 326:26

And I can only play that part.

Speaker 326:32

And sin and nurse my broken

Presenter26:50

The police so lonely. Tell me how you work, Sir Michael. Do you work regular hours? Yes. I am now at the age I am I work only in the morning and I don't work on Saturday or Sunday, but it's extraordinary regular. But I work straight on to the full score, which technically means that I write all the instrumentation down there and then. I want all the sounds there to play with, all the colours, all the instruments. Do you check on the piano occasionally while you're all the time? Not because I I can play the actual notes I want to because you can't play the sound of a trumpet on a piano. But you can produce and like Stravinsky and Haydn or quite a lot of people have had to do they want a physical sound around them. You can produce this, I mean it's an extraordinary sound. I assure you it doesn't sound like piano playing because it isn't. It's to do too with that area in which you're imagining within that sound and you find you have your imagination stirred by this method.

Sir Michael Tippett27:17

All the time.

Presenter27:40

Your seventh record. No, I whether I really want to hear any pieces of mine, we never know. I'd like perhaps to be reminded in some reasonable way that I did compose when I was not so lonely on the island.

Presenter27:52

And Song Sadov is interesting to me because it is very personal, but it is also this strange world in which I am playing about with language which is Shakespearean and language which is Beethovenian. At the same time I'm going towards the American language and and jazz and what have you. And so out of the song Sadov, which is the way in which a human being goes wandering around right round the world and comes back to where he wants to start and is a more mature human being. After all that's part of the pilgrimage I've had to make myself. So let us have a portion of the Song Sadov. What shall we have? We better have, I think, the opening to the second song.

Speaker 329:27

Remember

Presenter29:34

An excerpt from Songs for Dove

Presenter29:37

Robert Teer with the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Atherton.

Presenter29:43

Nearly all your life you've spent as a countryman, haven't you? Yes. Do you think that's going to help you look after yourself?

Presenter29:49

An island. Mildly. I mean, in as far as I'm prepared to know which is vegetable and which is not. But uh that's about the limit of it. Could you put up a shelter? Oh, no. I would had hope it was hot enough to do without, or I'd get into a cave. Food. Do you fish? No.

Presenter30:05

Cataboofish.

Sir Michael Tippett30:05

Head of the

Presenter30:06

Have I fished? Whoa, yes, I suppose so, kelf minnows when I was a kid. Would you try to escape?

Presenter30:12

If there was the slightest possibility, yes. But I'm not a s long swimmer, and I certainly wouldn't go very far without coming back hastily to the island if there were sharks or whales about. You're not a sailor? No.

Presenter30:24

Your last record. What have you saved till the end?

Presenter30:27

I've saved to the end the composer who's been with him all my life from the very beginning and Beethoven. This is a r very serious record. I mean it has to be, because we have somewhere to come back to the thing that is inside oneself. And Beethoven himself seems to have had at some time in his later life some i serious illness, it appears, and he wanted to give some kind of inner thankfulness and he wrote a strange chorale for string quartet, and string quartet was the most intimate instrument for him to use, as it has been in fact for myself. And so this very curious work, which is very well known, it was written in a mode, and it was a holy thanks song, as he put it, for being brought back, as it were, to life and to new life. What we can only play is some very short thing from the theme itself, which is so intensely still that it's difficult to do this as we are now in a studio, because you see in a concert hall you would have heard the music before, and you would groan towards that stillness when we would hear with that not intensity, but that sensibility towards this strange, remote, but very beautiful sound.

Presenter32:44

An excerpt from the third movement of Beethoven's string quartet, Opus one three two, played by the Lindsay Quartet.

Presenter32:52

If you could take just one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would it be?

Presenter32:56

I'd have to think a bit. But if I don't think too hard, I would say certainly the Monte Verde Vespas,'cause it's so rich and grand and such variety.

Presenter33:05

And to make life easier for you on the island, you are allowed one luxury, one object of no practical use, that it would give you pleasure to have. No practical use No. Oh, then I would have an egg timer.

Sir Michael Tippett33:13

No, then I

Presenter33:17

Ha ha ha.

Presenter33:18

You mean that you're not going to get any eggs? Well, I don't know, but if I had them, I'd like to know how long they're going to be boiled, and I hadn't got a watch. Because if there was a practical use, I'd have a telescope, because I can't see very far. I'd love to look at the stars. But if I'm not allowed a telescope, because it isn't a practical use, then give me an egg timer. You should have both. And one book. You already have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Well, being the person I am, and as I can't read very clearly, but I can still manage to write in very large letters, I would write the book myself. So I want like some blank pages on which I might do it. And I would draw my few lines and put some notes down, and there would be, perhaps it might be even the fifth opera, which I would have to call The Music of the Angels. Write. Whatever you need to compose or write. And thank you, Sir Michael Tibbett, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. I would like to say thank you very much, because I've enjoyed it extremely. Goodbye, everyone.

Sir Michael Tippett34:16

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.