15. Tippett

The word reached the London office of The Scotsman a month before the start of the1963 Edinburgh Festival. Alastair Dunnett, the editor, would like me to write a profile of someone appearing at the festival that year. The choice was mine, he said, but I was to let him know whom I had chosen.

It was not a difficult task. The 1960s were the time in festival history of Lord Harewood’s specially featured composers. He had already had Shostakovich and now Michael Tippett was to be represented by a selection of works, along with something specially written for the occasion.

Tippett, enthusiastically responding, said he would supply a Concerto for Orchestra. It was agreed that Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra would perform it, and I decided to find out if the composer might be willing to discuss the new score with me.

Though I had never met him before, I knew him to be amiable and a good talker.  I eagerly contacted him. He said he would be happy to see me. The only snag was that he lived rather inaccessibly in the Cotswolds. Could I find my way there? He would meet me at the station and cook us some lunch.

All went well. He was living at the time in a roomy country cottage on the edge of an estate designed in the eighteenth century by the great Capability Brown. While he prepared salad in the kitchen, he spoke in detail  of his new concerto. He had never, he said,  composed anything quite like it before. It would be a somewhat dotty work, employing clusters of instruments and highlighting them in sharp colours. He made it sound fun but it would also quite clearly have its serious side.

Tall and willowy, and already short-sighted, he led me through to the piano and played a number of key passages for my benefit. I soon discovered that “dotty” and “sharp” were key words in his vocabulary at the time, though they seemed no longer to be a number of years later when I interviewed him at the Sheraton Hotel in Edinburgh, where he was staying before conducting a programme of his music with the Scottish National Orchestra at the Usher Hall.

Meanwhile lunch was about to be served and we continued our conversation eating the rustic salad he had prepared and sipping a cool white wine.

Tippett was a sociable host. He had been to Edinburgh in the past but had bad memories of it because he had spent some of his unhappiest schooldays there.

Unaware of this, I asked him about it and he said it was not something he  ever discussed. But in the end, since I, too, had been schooled -  no more happily - in Edinburgh, he spoke out, though only on condition that I did not name his school in my article. I kept his secret, though in the end, some years later, he decided that the time had come to disclose its name. It was Fettes College.

Strolling after lunch across Capability Brown’s lovely landscape, he told me more - of how he had been beaten, abused, made  constantly miserable, and in the end had fled home to his parents in the south of England. Thereafter  he was sent to a more congenial school where he was immediately happier.

More famous, of course, was the fact that he was a pacifist during the Second World War and suffered imprisonment. About this, and about his early musical experiences, he spoke freely. An investigative  book comparing him with Benjamin Britten, also an unhappy schoolboy and wartime pacifist, would make enthralling reading, but that is something that has yet to come.

The afternoon progressed. After tea, he spoke  of A Child of Our Time, his pacifist oratorio employing Black soul music in place of Bachian choruses, a performance of which, by Alexander Gibson and the Scottish National Orchestra, would open the 1966 Edinburgh Festival. Gibson was soon to become one of Tippett’s champions. Meanwhile, with Alastair Dunnett’s approval, it was agreed that I would mention Tippett’s schooldays in my profile of him, without saying where they took place.

The afternoon was almost over but one subject remained. Had I ever been to Bath, the historic town closest to where he lived? No I hadn’t, I confessed. Then I must see it, he said, hopping into his car and driving me round its sights before putting me on the London train with my scribbled notes about my day with a great composer.

10 October 2014