King Priam (review)

Sir Michael Tippett's creative mind led him in two directions which he explored with equal vigor and success. In the first, his composition of concert music, Tippett took up such traditional genres as symphony, sonata, and string quartet; these works show a remarkable synthesis of many disparate styles behind which looms the decisive influence of Beethoven's model and manner. In the second—represented, above all, by his five operas—Tippett produced some of the most striking examples of music theater at modernism's midpoint, even if his contributions are so heterogeneous as to defy any overarching description.

To be sure, some of these works are not without their flaws. As his own librettist, Tippett wrote texts that sometimes lacked the felicity of his music; his representations of Jungian psychology in The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52) often seem heavy-handed, and the psychedelic surface of The Knot Garden (1965–70) has not aged very gracefully. Even so, both works contain both beautiful music and more than a few moments which speak to his sureness as a dramatist. At least one of his works for stage, however, repays close study and deserves to enter the general operatic repertory: King Priam (1958–61), his retelling of the Iliad.

For Priam, Tippett effected a drastic change in his compositional style by abandoning the lush, strongly tonal lyricism he had cultivated in The Midsummer Marriage in favor of a stark, fragmented presentation of material. The harmony is more wide-ranging and frequently dissonant (though Tippett's more luminous manner is by no means absent), and the simpler textures are sharply delineated from one another to emphasize their differences, rather like a mosaic. Certain musical ideas represent characters and situations in the manner of Wagner's music dramas: but where Wagnerian leitmotifs often have a fluid, malleable quality that allows them to function in symphonic discourse, Tippett's brief ideas seem iconic, even when they are varied. They shape the unfolding drama by appearing and reappearing in alternation with each other and, in certain climactic moments, superimposed upon one another. Tippett's discoveries in King Priam were decisive for the rest of his work, which constantly treated the vastly different modes of continuity and discontinuity in an endlessly evolving dialectic.

In King Priam, Tippett's aim for the opera was to make the story relevant to the present; this he did by focusing on the characters of the drama—their beliefs, their relationships with each other, and their humanity. At the end of act 1, Hermes presents Paris with the momentous judgment he must make between Athena, Hera, and Aphro dite. But Paris sees in the goddesses the women he knows and the values they uphold. (Tippett makes this connection clear by his libretto and the musical ideas associated with each character.) He rejects Athena's (Hecuba's) promise of wisdom on the battlefield and its great service to honor Troy; he has no interest in Hera's (Andromache's) promise of contentment in marriage; but he succumbs to Aphro dite's (Helen's) one word: "Paris!" In act 2, the first scene shows Hector and Paris at odds with each other, each critical of the other's strengths, and Priam's tragic attempt to reconcile them; the second shows an intimate conversation between Achilles and his beloved Patroclus. The terrible battle in which Hector slays Patroclus occupies no stage time whatsoever; only the aftermath is important. Paris reports the death to Priam, Hector arrives to lead father and brother in a prayer of supplication to Zeus, interrupted by Achilles' anguished war-cry: all these actions reveal the separate feelings of each character and the inevitable course of the drama. In act 3, Tippett creates another poignant counterpoint: the first scene shows the three principal women in lamentation or contemplation of the events, and the third is a moving representation of Priam's meeting with...