1998 and All That

Michael Tippett's death, on 8 January 1998, six days after his ninetythird birthday, came at a time when performers’ interest in his music was buoyant, and scholarly writing about his life and work was flourishing. A comprehensive collection of his own writings, Tippett on Music (edited by Meirion Bowen), appeared in 1995, the year of his ninetieth birthday, and this was soon followed by the second edition of Bowen's relatively brief survey of his life and works (1997); then came Tippett Studies (edited by David Clarke) and Kenneth Gloag's handbook on A Child of our Time (both 1999), Clarke's own monograph on The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics (2001), and a further collection of essays, Michael Tippett: Music and Literature, edited by Suzanne Robinson (2002). By then it was only three years to 2005 and the Tippett centenary, an event less wellmarked than it might have been had his death been less recent. The only major publication of that year was Thomas Schuttenhelm's edition of Selected Letters, with its fervent prefatory declaration by David Matthews that Tippett ‘was such a central figure in our musical life that his absence is still strongly felt, not simply as a composer but as a man whose integrity and conviction were evident in everything he said and did’.

Since 2005, publications, performances and recordings have tailed off, and it has not been difficult for those who sincerely believed that Tippett's prominence in the last quarter-century of his life was more to do with the premature death of Benjamin Britten in 1976 than with the positive qualities of his actual compositions to declare ‘I told you so!’, and point to the contrast in the way in which ‘the Britten industry’ has continued to flourish. The handed down by Robin Holloway in his brief obituary notice, where the ‘marvellous personal synthesis’ of the ‘two visionary song cycles, two masterpieces for string orchestra, the first two symphonies, The Midsummer Marriage’ was the prelude to ‘a long, slow decline’ in which ‘feckless eclecticism and reckless trendiness’ ruled,3 is less persuasive than it might be simply because of the melancholy fact that the earlier music has been sidelined as much as the later.