On Michael Tippett’s Piano Sonata No. 2

Originally published in the Piano Tuners Association Newsletter, February 2022. https://pianotuner.org.uk I see mirrors,

Myriad upon myriad moving

The dark forms

Of creation

—King Priam, Act 3 Scene IV

‘All things fall and are built again and those that build them are gay’: so the words of W. B.  Yeats conclude the final act of The Midsummer Marriage (1955), Michael Tippett’s first opera, and herald what was to happen to the composer’s own musical style in the intervening years between his next opera, King Priam (1961). Indeed, the differences between the two works suggest not so much a progressive development but rather a complete dismantling and rebuilding of what was a remarkably successful compositional idiom. The heady mix of Mozartian optimism and efflorescent lyricism which characterised The Midsummer Marriage gave way to a Brechtian enquiry into the primal urges of modern warfare and the futility of human choice in King Priam, whose new musical language replaced motivic development with ‘repetition and superimposition’ and formal unity a ‘mosaic construction…composed of self-contained paragraphs.’[1] The stylistic shift was so jarring to some that one critic wrote: ‘the change is so great as to make one wonder how the two works could possibly have emanated from the same mind’.[2]

In its hostility towards concepts of musical continuity and thematic development which characterised music of previous centuries, the Piano Sonata No. 2 (1962) is cut from the same ideological cloth as King Priam. On the topic of his own sonata, Tippett wrote that:

‘Everything in the sonata proceeds by statement. The effect is one of accumulation; through constant addition of new material; by variation and repetition. There is virtually no development and particularly no bridge passages. The formal unity comes from the balance of similarities and contrasts.’[3]

Unlike the Viennese Classical sonata—whose formal architecture, it could be argued, was self-determined by the content of its own ideas with which it begins—Tippett’s Second Sonata relies not on concepts of teleological development but instead on violent contrasts and rhetorical juxtapositions. Professor David Clarke has referred to the Second Sonata as an ‘anti-sonata’ and, in more philosophical terms (those of Hegel, to be specific), has suggested the ‘the discontinuous musics of the Second Piano Sonata…generate individualized pockets of consciousness [and] do not allow themselves fully to be given up into any such larger, single synthesis.’[4]

The lack of becoming or unity in the Tippett’s Second Sonata is a deliberate compositional choice central to the works dramatic conception; that the sonata was originally to be entitled Mosaics is telling of the works architectural framework. Indeed, a mosaic—what the OED defines as ‘a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic’—almost perfectly expresses how the sonata operates, although we must take a conceptual leap and acknowledge that the sonata moves through time and must be experienced, rather than observed. The eight motivic cells which make up the piece are, in themselves, incomplete and fragmented: splintered cells of musical material vastly different in their modes of expression. The violent opening gesture fortissimo cluster chords are quickly answered by a succession of gestures characterised by double octaves, which in turn are followed by an aquatic wave of sonority, rhythmically propelled by a kaleidoscopic left-hand configuration. These flowing passages are of particular beauty and are direct quotations from King Priam. Their quality of sacred luminosity calls to mind the words of the chorus from the third interlude in act three:

O divine music,

O stream of sound,

In which states of the soul

Flow, surfacing and drowning,

While we sit watching from the bank

The mirrored world within, for

Mirror upon mirror mirrored is all the show.

O divine music,

Melt our hearts,

Renew our love.

Linking passages conventionally found in earlier sonatas are nowhere to be found in this music. Instead, the evanescent quality of each idea is heightened by the silence built in between each musical unit. This combination of statement, reiteration and silence is certainly a radical approach to the piano sonata, and it remains divisive among listeners. An early review by Simon Walsh wrote: ‘I confess to just a little sense of disappointment: there is so much excellent material here in a state of deliberate unfulfillment.’[5] There is, certainly, a sense of unease created by the prophetic opening chords and their subsequent failure to evolve beyond their sounding immediacy. Like many works of modernist art, the destruction of familiar forms comes at the cost of an irremovable sense of the apocalyptic and dystopian. 

However, while it easy to remark how developmental processes are absent here, a closer analytical inspection reveals how ‘a complex system of motivic and intervallic relationships is used to provide a degree of integration’, although the extent to which this is perceptible to the listener is unclear.[6] Furthermore, there is another vantage point from which the sonata can be viewed in which the concept of development cannot be abandoned altogether. As Alastair Borthwick wrties: ‘Tippett had access to a musical past that he himself had both constructed and acknowledged as his own…this opens up the possibility of self-quotation, which potentially strengthens his individual identity rather than diminishes it.’ When viewed biographically, the Second Sonata in its entirety can be thought of as a development of Tippett’s own practices and thought across the timeline of across the composer’s own artistic life. Once again, Yeats comes to mind ‘He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World.’

Reccommended recordings: John Ogdon (HMV, 1963), Paul Crossley (CRD, 1985), Peter Donohoe (Naxos, 2005), Steven Osbourne (Hyperion, 2007).

[1] Andrew Clements, ‘Music for an Epic’ in The Operas of Michael Tippett, ed. Nicholas John (John Calder, London, 1985), 65.

[2] “Cited in Richard Elfyn Jones, The Early Operas of Michael Tippett: A Study of The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam and The Knot Garden (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 108.

[3] “Tippett, quoted in Colin Mason, ‘The Piano Works’ in Ian Kemp (ed.), Michael Tippett: A Symposium on his 60th Birthday (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 206.

[4] David Clarke, The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett, (CUP, Cambridge, 2001), 109.

[5] Simon Walsh, “Piano.” The Musical Times, vol. 104, no. 1441, Musical Times Publications Ltd., 1963, 201–02.

[6] Nicholas Haralambous, A Trojan Horse deconstructed: structural procedures in Michael Tippett’s Second Piano Sonata (RNCM).