Program Notes SIR MICHAEL TIPPETT RITUAL DANCES FROM THE MIDSUMMER MARRIAGE Duration: ca. 29 minutes Overview Michael Tippett, born in London in 1905 and raised in the Suffolk countryside, had scant musical experience during his early years but demonstrated sufficient talent to be accepted at the Royal College of Music when he was eighteen to study conducting with Malcolm Sargent and Adrian Boult and composition with R.O. Morris and Charles Wood. Tippett began composing in earnest after leaving school, but during the Depression of the 1930s he also expressed his ardent liberalism by conducting the South London Orchestra, a group of unemployed players who had lost their jobs as theater musicians because of the hard economic times and the coming of soundtracks to the movies. (Tippett’s mother was an active member of England’s Labour Party and a campaigning suffragette who once went to prison for her beliefs.) From 1940 to 1951, Tippett served as music director of Morley College in London, a position once held by Gustav Holst; his tenure was interrupted in 1942 when he was sentenced to prison for three months as a conscientious objector. He remained an avowed pacifist. After leaving Morley, Tippett conducted occasionally (he was especially fond of working with student groups) but largely devoted himself to composition, acquiring an international reputation for his five operas, four symphonies, many scores for orchestra, chamber ensembles and piano, choral works and songs that reflect both his visionary nature and his eclectic tastes. In addition to his work as a composer, conductor and educator, he was also known as an author (Moving Into Aquarius), a musical scholar (several editions of works by Purcell), and a radio and television commentator; he served as well as director of the Bath Music Festival. For his services to music, Michael Tippett was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1959, given an Honorary Doctorate in Music by Cambridge University in 1964, knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1966, and cited by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973. He suffered a stroke at a festival of his music in Stockholm in November 1997 and died in London on January 8, 1998, six days after his 93rd birthday. What To Listen For Tippett said that The Midsummer Marriage, his first opera, THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2017-2018 was conceived at the end of World War II around a visual impression: “a wooded hill-top with a temple, where a warm and soft young man was being rebuffed by a cold and hard young woman to such a degree that the collective, magical archetypes take charge — Jung’s anima and animus.” Tippett created his own libretto for this rather idiosyncratic vision, modeling it on Mozart’s The Magic Flute as a quest opera in a timeless, mythical setting involving a man and woman of noble birth (Tamino and Pamina = Mark and Jenifer) who must pass through trials of self-awareness before they are united, an earthy couple (Papageno and Papagena = Jack and Bella) concerned with more mundane matters, a parent (Queen of the Night = King Fisher, Jenifer’s father) resentful at losing a child, and the keepers of ritual and tradition (Sorastro and his priests = Sosostris and the Ancients). The story that Tippett created around the interactions of these hierarchies is laden with symbolism and philosophical allusion (as is The Magic Flute), “a complex labyrinth of ideas, images and situations which Tippett gives shape through his interest in both psychology and literature,” wrote Kenneth Gloag, a Cardiff University professor and authority on 20th-century British music. Tippett worked on The Midsummer Marriage from 1946 until 1952 and had to wait another three years for its premiere, so in 1953 he extracted the Four Ritual Dances from the opera for concert performance by the Basel Chamber Orchestra led by the Swiss conductor and staunch new-music patron Paul Sacher. In the first three of the Ritual Dances — Earth in Autumn, The Waters in Winter, The Air in Spring, performed continuously in Act II — Strephon, the lead dancer of the temple, appears successively in the guise of a hare, a fish and a bird hunted by a female dancer representing a hound, an otter and a hawk, Tippett’s choreographed allegory of the female pursuit of the male from his initial concept. In these Dances, the hare escapes, the fish is injured, and the bird is caught. Strephon and his dancers perform Fire in Summer in the opera’s final scene before Mark and Jenifer, now successfully finished with their trials and ready for their spiritual and physical union. Strephon holds a lighted torch above his head and becomes enfolded within the petals of a lotus flower, associated in Hindu and Buddhist cultures with spiritual awakening, rebirth and purity. As Strephon is enveloped by the petals, the flower begins to glow from within with metaphorical fire to complete the midsummer ritual. 40
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