Symphony No. 3 by
Michael Tippett
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett (2 January 1905 – 8 January 1998) was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten ...
is a work for soprano and orchestra with text written by the composer.
It was composed between 1970 and 1972 and received its premiere on 22 June 1972 at the
Royal Festival Hall
The Royal Festival Hall is a 2,700-seat concert, dance and talks venue within Southbank Centre in London. It is situated on the South Bank of the River Thames, not far from Hungerford Bridge, in the London Borough of Lambeth. It is a Grade I l ...
, London, performed by the
London Symphony Orchestra
The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is a British symphony orchestra based in London. Founded in 1904, the LSO is the oldest of London's orchestras, symphony orchestras. The LSO was created by a group of players who left Henry Wood's Queen's ...
with the soprano
Heather Harper
Heather Mary Harper (8 May 1930 – 22 April 2019) was a Northern Irish operatic soprano. She was active internationally in both opera and concert. She performed roles such as Helena in Benjamin Britten's ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' at the Roy ...
conducted by
Colin Davis
Sir Colin Rex Davis (25 September 1927 – 14 April 2013) was an English conductor, known for his association with the London Symphony Orchestra, having first conducted it in 1959. His repertoire was broad, but among the composers with whom h ...
.
The symphony is notable for its use of
blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...
and its direct quotation of the opening of the finale of
Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical ...
's
Ninth Symphony. The work criticises the ecstatic and utopian understanding of the brotherhood of man as expressed in the ''
Ode to Joy
"Ode to Joy" (German language, German: , literally "To heJoy") is an ode written in the summer of 1785 by German poet, playwright, and historian Friedrich Schiller and published the following year in ''Thalia (magazine), Thalia''. A slightl ...
'' and instead stresses man's capacity for both good and evil. The work is consequently characterised by contrasting and conflicting parts, its overall design being "one massive antithesis".
Movements
The work consists of two parts:
# Allegro non troppo e pesante (Arrest) - Allegro molto e con grande energia (Movement)
# Allegro molto - Slow Blues (Andante) - Fast blues (Allegro)
Background
Tippett's conception of the Third Symphony occurred during a concert in
Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...
in 1965 during a performance of either
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music.
Born in Mont ...
's
Piano Sonata No. 2 or ''
Pli selon pli
''Pli selon pli'' (Fold by fold) is a piece of classical music by the French composer Pierre Boulez. It carries the subtitle ''Portrait de Mallarmé'' (Portrait of Mallarmé). It is scored for a solo soprano and orchestra and uses the texts of th ...
''. Tippett detected an absence of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic motion in the work. Such an approach to composition could only be utilised by Tippett if he presented it within the context of a dialectic with its opposite, hence the Third Symphony was constructed on the concepts of "arrest" and "movement" which Tippett likened to the pull and thrust of a jet engine. Parts 1 and 2 of the work, and their component sections, follow this cycle of "arrest" and "movement".
Describing its creative cycle, Tippett remarked: "The work took seven years of intermittent consideration and eventual creation. From such tiny noting of a future possibility I had to put down a kind of mnemonic shorthand, so that I could remember what I thought the structure of the whole work might be when I’d only experienced the initial moment of conception. ...a great many disjointed, unstructured notions have been noted in my own kind of verbal shorthand. ...the original spontaneous conception of “immobile” polarized against “speedy” (so ridiculously simple, but clearly having the power to initiate the creative process now apparently ready to being) was always the structuring factor. While holding these ideas in my mind over a period of years, allowing them gradually to grow, I come next to a moment when I had nearly everything in my mind except the notes. The symphony so far had a structure and balance; it had ideas about orchestration. Thus I could begin what is usually thought of as the composition. I began at the piano a search for the right sounds. Now I don’t find the precise sounds I want on the piano, but through the piano (this is after all a piece for an orchestra). But I can invent as though the orchestral score were in my head all the time."
Tippett wanted to avoid the "
Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, , group=n (9 August 1975) was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throughout his life as a major compo ...
bombast" characteristic of many finales and decided to compose the finale as a set of blues. He possessed a great admiration for
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith (April 15, 1894 – September 26, 1937) was an American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the " Empress of the Blues", she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and ...
's 1925 recording of ''
St Louis Blues'' in particular. Tippett interpreted the repeated bass line of the blues in terms of a
Purcellian ground bass, which would make the finale a form of
passacaglia
The passacaglia (; ) is a musical form that originated in early seventeenth-century Spain and is still used today by composers. It is usually of a serious character and is often based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple metre.
Origin
The ter ...
. The most important reason for Tippett's decision to use the blues was its ability to communicate simply and directly.
By the time Tippett came to compose the symphony in spring 1970, he had already written the text of the four songs for the finale.
Mahler
Gustav Mahler (; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism ...
's settings of Chinese poems in ''
Das Lied von der Erde
''Das Lied von der Erde'' ("The Song of the Earth") is an orchestral song cycle for two voices and orchestra written by Gustav Mahler between 1908 and 1909. Described as a symphony when published, it comprises six songs for two singers who alte ...
'' served as a precedent for Tippett of a work which articulated song text in the shape of a symphony: "I began thus to plan and organize lyrics that would have a shape - of a human being moving from innocence to experience". The symphony's text was formulated as a critical response to the sentiment embodied in
Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (, short: ; 10 November 17599 May 1805) was a German playwright, poet, and philosopher. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller developed a productive, if complicated, friendsh ...
's ''
Ode to Joy
"Ode to Joy" (German language, German: , literally "To heJoy") is an ode written in the summer of 1785 by German poet, playwright, and historian Friedrich Schiller and published the following year in ''Thalia (magazine), Thalia''. A slightl ...
'': Schiller's ecstatic celebration of the brotherhood of man was untenable in a century that had witnessed the
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
,
gulag
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
s and the dropping of the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima
is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui h ...
. In the dramatic fourth song, therefore, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is quoted three times at climactic points and its message is challenged in the text and music of the work. Tippett's confrontation with Beethoven is suggested from the outset of the piece, the abrupt chords in the first bar being reminiscent of the opening of Beethoven's own
Symphony No. 3.
Manuscript
The Third Symphony is certainly one Tippett’s most peculiar looking manuscripts, and his notational practices deserve closer inspection as they reveal how his conceptual design and the compositional strategies he required to deliver it demanded he entirely re-conceive the orchestra, even his own re-conceptualized post-Priam orchestra found in his Concerto for Orchestra.
[Thomas Schuttenhelm, ''The Orchestral Music of Michael Tippett: Creative Development and the Compositional Process'' (London: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 239.]
The manuscript of the work is in the Tippett Collection (Add MS 61796-61798) of the
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
.
Notes
References
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External links
''Gramophone'' 1975 review of the first recording
{{Authority control
Compositions by Michael Tippett
1972 compositions
Tippett 3