Facing the New Year Without a Composer of Bright Vision

Michael Tippett was born the day after the start of a new year in 1905. His fifth and last opera, which premiered in Houston to a bewildered audience in 1989, was titled “New Year.” And Tippett, Britain’s grand old man of music for a very long time, died Thursday in London, just after his 93rd birthday and the start of another new year.

There was certainly something of the new year, a time of both remembering the past and projecting into the future, about Tippett. He lived on that kind of cusp, always seeming slightly out of step, a visionary with his sights set upon utopia and a traditionalist fervent in his convictions of the great high standards of classical thought and moral forthrightness.

But he was also a child of his time, to paraphrase the name of his most famous piece, an antiwar oratorio. He adored youth and was ever alert to the wide world around him. He appeared eternally young himself, even well into grand-old-man-hood.

In fact, the appellation grand old man never fit Tippett very well. Odd duck, I think, suited him far better.

I remember him at the premiere of “New Year.” What was one to make of this distinguished84-year-old composer writing a Space Age opera about a burned-out rock singer, a combination of Pete Townshend and Prospero, with a can of Bud in hand? What was one to make of this great traditionalist, this Beethovenian, this wonderful re-imaginer of Elizabethan music, using rock guitars and electronic music?

But characteristically Tippett said that his influences included his favorite television show, “Fame,” a 12-hour rock concert benefit for Nelson Mandela, “Guys and Dolls” and a supernatural circus novel by Angela Carter about a sexy aerialiste with wings. Equally characteristic was Tippett taking his bow before a black-tie audience sporting casual sport coat and the painted sneakers that were popular with skateboarders at the time.

But that was Tippett, and his music could be just as unexpectedly colorful and wacky as his sneakers. The hallmarks are an irrepressible impulse toward lyricism, the rush to ecstasy and a masterful counterpoint that allowed Tippett to make simultaneous sense of the many different kinds of music he adored.

What most characterized the composer, though, was his use of music as a magical and transformative force, be it in symphony, string quartet, concerto, occasional music, song or opera. His music strives for the integration of darkness and light, illuminating a path both for us as individuals and for society.

It was a brave, by no means easy or instantly comprehensible path that Tippett chose. He took chances in his music, and sometimes he didn’t get it right. But more often he did and we didn’t get it, at least right away.

When his first opera, “Midsummer Marriage,” had its premiere at Covent Garden in London in 1955, it was practically laughed off the stage for its libretto. A mix of Mozart (“Magic Flute”), Shakespeare (“A Midsummer’s Night Dream”), T.S. Eliot (“The Wasteland”) and Jung (“Psychology of the Unconscious”), his libretto was thought so odd that even the cast, including a young Joan Sutherland, didn’t have a clue as to what the work was about and said so. In its eloquent and glowing obituary Saturday, the London Times still spoke about Tippett’s “gauche colloquialisms.”

Yet “Midsummer Marriage” is the first great work of transcendent optimism to follow World War II. With music of extraordinarily uplifting spirit, it is a recondite opera about our inner lives that no conventional libretto could have served. It was not unlike Tippett, either, that his third opera, “The Knot Garden,” his “Tempest” recast as group therapy in 1970, included the first overtly homosexual love scene in mainstream opera.

That too was Tippett, willing to take dangerous chances, because he felt it was absolutely essential to show us a vision of a better world. It sometimes got him in trouble. During the war, he spent three months in jail for his conscientious objection to participation in a war machine--any war machine. But he also made his point with utter eloquence in “The Child of Our Time,” his famous wartime work about a Jew who shoots a Nazi who turns out to be not what he seemed. Tippett shaped it like a Bach oratorio but with Negro spirituals for the choruses.

Little of Tippett has entered into the standard repertory, and we don’t hear much in Los Angeles. Emanuel Ax played the lush piano concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic a few years ago, and the orchestra also commissioned Tippett’s Fourth Piano Sonata in honor of his 80th birthday.

The operas are all but unknown here (as they are even in New York, which has seen only one, “Midsummer Marriage”). But ironically, one of today’s most impressive Tippettians, Richard Hickox, happens to be conducting “Salome” at L.A. Opera this week. Hickox has been surveying Tippett’s symphonies and other orchestral music for Chandos, rich and illuminating performances in sumptuous recorded sound. And it is this splendid series that gives hope that Tippett’s music will find a new audience in our new year.