Michael Tippett: The Biography by Oliver Soden (review)

In 1918, the nineteenth-century English naturalist and author W. H. Hudson published an autobiography of his Argentinian upbringing, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (New York: E. P. Dutton). It is a text that—while entirely pleasant to read and very evocative "of an era"—more frequently than not borders on over-wrought sentiments and an excessive verbosity one might never hear from a child. They are the words of an aging, timeworn man reflecting (and capitalizing) on the now-perfect remembrances of childhood. This clearly had an appeal, for a portion of Hudson's most improbable writing formed the basis for the first song work that Michael Tippett (1905–1998) composed for tenor Peter Pears and pianist and fellow composer Benjamin Britten, his cantata Boyhood's End (1943). But Hudson's attempt to recollect childhood with any veracity complicates things for his reader. Ironically, Tippett appears to fall under the same spell as Hudson. "'You see,' [Tippett] begins, 'if you go back from ninety, it's a very long time. You see, I can't go back now. I can take myself back, as I am now. Or look back, whatever you like to say. But I can't go and be the child I was'" (p. 7).

Insinuating the theme for the volume, the epigraph to Oliver Soden's Michael Tippett: The Biography comprises two quotes tucked in after the table of contents—a 1964 line from Sylvia Townsend Warner's Letters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982): "The essential in a biography, so I believe, is that the subject of the biography should have known himself"; and Tippet's own words from a BBC documentary, Songs of Experience, directed by Mischa Scorer and broadcast in 1991: "For the whole of my life my creative work has been determined by what is happening in the world outside, and by what is happening in the world inside—that is, inside me." Warner's statement is entirely appropriate, given Tippett's adoption of analysis by Carl Jung and individuation, his own introspective dream journals, and his acceptance of psychological types and archetypes (pp. 193–94, 220–21). Both reveal the composer's proclivity to solipsism. And Tippett's inclination toward internal monologue and interior contemplation—if not yet Jungian, per se—existed long before Evelyn Maude introduced him to Carl Jung's The Psychology of the Unconscious. Bolstering this fact, although not acknowledged in Soden's writing, Tippett owned a copy of Amy Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of the Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1934).

Soden recounts in the introduction to the volume that efforts to begin Tippett's biography commenced in the 1970s when Ian Kemp was a professor at Leeds University, and Kemp ultimately received Tippett's permission; a long friendship ensued. His landmark volume Tippett: The Composer and His Music (London: Ernst Eulenburg, 1984) was both the spark and the real beginning of modern Tippett studies. Even if less than a fifth of the book was "life," one must remember that Kemp's elucidation of Tippett's music frequently traversed biographical elements via an exploration of his creative processes as evidenced in the analysis. Soden states that "there is little to no technical or evaluative analysis of the music" in his volume, adding that he extends an invitation to "musicologists and performers to go on from here" (p. 2). He makes clear that Michael Tippett: The Biography "is a 'life', not a 'life-n-works'" (p. 2), yet throughout his ensuing biography, Soden does indeed engage with Tippett's compositions, if admittedly not on a granular, Kempian level. And, to the envy of any musicologist, Soden can be credited with finding the manuscript of Tippett's Piano Sonata no. 1 (1936–38) in Francesca Allinson's home—a score that...