Courageous Tippett
Michael Tanner
The Knot Garden Scottish Opera A Child of Our Time English National Opera Michael Tippett’s centenary year is being celebrated chiefly, so far as one can see yet, by productions of his third opera, The Knot Garden. Perhaps it’s the last of his stage works which isn’t indefensibly wacky, though it’s already going that way. Tippett made things as difficult as possible for himself in this opera, and then for his spectator-listeners. He chose a topic rather than a plot, the state of 1970-ish personal relationships, six tormented people being sorted out by a self-doubting psychiatrist, like his author of broadly Jungian persuasion. The opera lasts only 90 minutes, so the pace is swift, only one character has a chance to display herself at any length, and the first openly gay operatic couple prance on to the stage camping it up like mad, as if they were refugees from the contemporaneous The Boys in the Band. Tippett uses a quasi-cinematic technique of dissolves, jumping from one dysfunctional pair to another, setting them in a medley of contexts, with lavish helpings of The Tempest, and a final act in which the psychiatrist explicitly identifies with Prospero and gets some of the other characters to act out the central figures in that play.
Tippett was never afraid of courting comparisons, and in this work Act I concludes with ‘And my ending is despair... ’ followed by the bisexual black writer deflatingly singing ‘Sure, baby’, while in Act II the girl Flora, having been molested by her guardian Faber, takes refuge in singing one of the most haunting songs from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. That is so much the most beautiful moment in the whole score that one wonders, as often with Tippett, if he realised how reckless he was being, at the same time as I find myself resenting his gaining his most potent effects by lifting from other, much greater, artists. The Schubert is all the more obtrusive because the idiom of most of the score is close to the hard-bitten one of his previous opera King Priam, with savage brass chords and an enormous amount of energy generated and dissipated in the orchestra, with scant relation to the people on stage and what is happening to them.
Scottish Opera’s heroic new production — heroic that it exists at all — is nearly flawless, with a cast of uniform excellence and Richard Armstrong conducting inspiredly, singers and orchestra up to his every demand. The director/designer Antony McDonald on the whole makes things as lucid as they can be, though the only maze we see is a small bas-relief on the wall at the opening and close. This is one work where the use of a maze is a huge help in clarifying what’s going on. Otherwise McDonald guides his cast and us through the action, or lack of it, with exactly the right vigour, and no directorial conceits. The most taxing music, that of the tortured freedom fighter Denise, is sung with intensity by Rachel Hynes, looking strikingly like Josephine Barstow, but even more identified with the role. Tippett’s cruelly melismatic writing makes many of the most important words impossible to hear — there’s a strong case here for surtitles. Jane Irwin as the frustrated, garden-planting wife Thea makes her wonderful Act III aria the climax of the work, but everyone in this demanding opera deserves mention and praise. It’s a difficult work to assess, no less now than 34 years ago. It seems clear to me that Tippett bit off more than he could chew, but with so many of his contemporaries doing the reverse I can’t bring myself not to be grateful for his courage. And the score does contain one after another vivid passage, even if few memorable ones. My major reservation is his tendency to undercut what he has achieved, just as Mangus the psychiatrist does, when he says (not sings) ‘Prospero’s a fake, we all know that’, while actually sorting most of the muddles out, at least provisionally. Tippett could always laugh at himself, but he seemed to think that he could have it both ways, where really he should have been wondering whether he could have it either way.
There are no problems of that kind in A Child of Our Time, the oratorio which sealed his reputation. It remains a moving piece, perhaps more of its time than Tippett meant it to be, but responding with grief and dignity to a situation where the obvious response is rage and vengefulness. ENO has staged it, for two performances, and though the musical results are strong, it seems if anything to detract from the power of the work to act it out. Mainly that is because there is almost, one comes to realise, no action, only briefly recounted narration and then long and heartfelt meditations on it, with the climactic and extremely moving spirituals. After about 45 minutes, I closed my eyes and listened, and found it much more moving that way.
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