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Michael Tippett
Michael the biography
- GenresMusicBiographyNonfiction
Paperback
Published January 1, 2020
13 people are currently reading
64 people want to read
About the author
Oliver Soden
8 books6 followersOliver Soden is a writer and broadcaster, and the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in April 2019, the biography was hailed by Philip Pullman as a "delight to read", and was read (by the author) for BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, with Sir Derek Jacobi playing Tippett.
Oliver was educated at Lancing College in Sussex, and at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in English. For his research on Michael Tippett he was awarded a Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of Texas at Austin.
His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Guardian, Gramophone, The Art Newspaper, BBC Music Magazine, and Musical Quarterly, and he is the editor of an edition of John Barton's ten-play epic Tantalus. He has appeared as a guest on the Six O'Clock News (BBC Radio 4), Proms Plus, Twenty Minutes, Music Matters, Composer of the Week, and Live in Concert (BBC Radio 3).
Oliver has worked as an assistant producer for a number of award-winning television documentaries, including George III: The Genius of the Mad King and Janet Baker: In Her Own Words (Crux productions), and is part of the team behind BBC Radio 3's long-running programme Private Passions.
Born in 1990, he grew up in Bath and Sussex, and lives in London.
Oliver was educated at Lancing College in Sussex, and at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in English. For his research on Michael Tippett he was awarded a Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of Texas at Austin.
His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Guardian, Gramophone, The Art Newspaper, BBC Music Magazine, and Musical Quarterly, and he is the editor of an edition of John Barton's ten-play epic Tantalus. He has appeared as a guest on the Six O'Clock News (BBC Radio 4), Proms Plus, Twenty Minutes, Music Matters, Composer of the Week, and Live in Concert (BBC Radio 3).
Oliver has worked as an assistant producer for a number of award-winning television documentaries, including George III: The Genius of the Mad King and Janet Baker: In Her Own Words (Crux productions), and is part of the team behind BBC Radio 3's long-running programme Private Passions.
Born in 1990, he grew up in Bath and Sussex, and lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 25, 2019
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...
Description: The music of the British composer Michael Tippett - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas, and four symphonies - is among the most visionary of the 20th Century, but little has been written about his extraordinary life. In this new, first complete biography, arts writer and broadcaster Oliver Soden weaves a century-spanning narrative of epic scope and insight.
Soden has been given unprecedented access to unpublished letters and manuscripts, and has recorded interviews with Tippett’s friends and colleagues. He paints a portrait of a powerful intellect and infectious personality - charming, with a consuming interest in other people, stubborn and great fun.
But he also uncovers the sorrows and secrets that Tippett stowed away beneath his cheerfulness, not least the darker reaches of some tempestuous and often tragic love affairs that sometimes blurred the lines between the professional and the personal.
Tippett’s was a long, exciting life - and woven through it all is his amazing, varied music, as beautiful as it is challenging, and the eclectic supporting cast of his friends, colleagues and lovers. His was truly a life of the 20th Century - but one that can also shine a light on the 21st.
The first episode begins with Tippett’s childhood. The composer was born into the decade before the First World War, his early years spent in the peace and tranquillity of a Suffolk village. But the British Empire was fading, and the culture and philosophy of Victorian Britain were fast being abandoned in a rush of change and social unrest.
Abridged by Elizabeth Burke
Produced by Pippa Vaughan
Read by Oliver Soden featuring Derek Jacobi and Ivor Minchin Berry
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4
April 20, 2019
From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the week:
The music of the British composer Michael Tippett - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas, and four symphonies - is among the most visionary of the 20th Century, but little has been written about his extraordinary life. In this new, first complete biography, arts writer and broadcaster Oliver Soden weaves a century-spanning narrative of epic scope and insight.
Soden has been given unprecedented access to unpublished letters and manuscripts, and has recorded interviews with Tippett’s friends and colleagues. He paints a portrait of a powerful intellect and infectious personality - charming, with a consuming interest in other people, stubborn and great fun.
But he also uncovers the sorrows and secrets that Tippett stowed away beneath his cheerfulness, not least the darker reaches of some tempestuous and often tragic love affairs that sometimes blurred the lines between the professional and the personal.
Tippett’s was a long, exciting life - and woven through it all is his amazing, varied music, as beautiful as it is challenging, and the eclectic supporting cast of his friends, colleagues and lovers. His was truly a life of the 20th Century - but one that can also shine a light on the 21st.
The first episode begins with Tippett’s childhood. The composer was born into the decade before the First World War, his early years spent in the peace and tranquillity of a Suffolk village. But the British Empire was fading, and the culture and philosophy of Victorian Britain were fast being abandoned in a rush of change and social unrest.
Abridged by Elizabeth Burke
Produced by Pippa Vaughan
Read by Oliver Soden featuring Derek Jacobi and Ivor Minchin Berry
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00...
The music of the British composer Michael Tippett - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas, and four symphonies - is among the most visionary of the 20th Century, but little has been written about his extraordinary life. In this new, first complete biography, arts writer and broadcaster Oliver Soden weaves a century-spanning narrative of epic scope and insight.
Soden has been given unprecedented access to unpublished letters and manuscripts, and has recorded interviews with Tippett’s friends and colleagues. He paints a portrait of a powerful intellect and infectious personality - charming, with a consuming interest in other people, stubborn and great fun.
But he also uncovers the sorrows and secrets that Tippett stowed away beneath his cheerfulness, not least the darker reaches of some tempestuous and often tragic love affairs that sometimes blurred the lines between the professional and the personal.
Tippett’s was a long, exciting life - and woven through it all is his amazing, varied music, as beautiful as it is challenging, and the eclectic supporting cast of his friends, colleagues and lovers. His was truly a life of the 20th Century - but one that can also shine a light on the 21st.
The first episode begins with Tippett’s childhood. The composer was born into the decade before the First World War, his early years spent in the peace and tranquillity of a Suffolk village. But the British Empire was fading, and the culture and philosophy of Victorian Britain were fast being abandoned in a rush of change and social unrest.
Abridged by Elizabeth Burke
Produced by Pippa Vaughan
Read by Oliver Soden featuring Derek Jacobi and Ivor Minchin Berry
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00...
Want to Read
April 13, 201912 APR 2019 - recommendation through Dear Bettie. Many Thanks.
Listen here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...
Listen here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...
May 3, 2021
I have always been a fan of Michael Tippett’s music. Indeed, the wonderful English music written in the first fifty years of the twentieth century I have always considered to be my musical home (apart from rock and blues). I saw that this biography had been published and thought ‘Michael Tippett; there’s a blast from the past’. Nobody plays his music any more. Except for the exceptional arrangements of the Negro Spirituals from Child of our Time.
It being a time of pestilence, and one’s social life a casualty, I have been reading a lot – so a thumping great biography of some 800 pages was not as daunting a prospect as it might normally have been. Indeed, it was this or another crack at War and Peace. I’m glad I went for this. And it was available on Kindle, at a very reasonable price, which I preferred so as not to aggravate my sore wrists with holding a tome.
But what on earth made me think it good for reading in bed? Because I found it to be so. And not because it is a soporific. I came to look forward to my nightly sojourn with Soden and Tippett more than anything else I have read over the past six months. Soden has a style so light and yet informative that half an hour with the two of them last thing at night has been a habit, formed over several months, from which I am even now experiencing withdrawal.
I am not a music specialist, but it seems to me that Soden has been diligent almost to a fault with his research for this book and his decisions on what to include. It was a long and full life (1905 – 1998), which explains the 800pp. Soden has, however, done his best to keep matters moving and I think succeeds admirably, partly by grouping photos, lists of the works and other reference matter at the back. The pages keep turning because Tippett’s life was so full of incident and he such a complicated, at times downright difficult, individual.
It’s all in here. The triumphs, the lack of money, the rows with friends, the bad reviews, the excitement at a new piece; his lack of self-discipline juxtaposed with how driven he became when a new musical idea came to him, how he worried at it, sometimes for years, before it saw the light of day. Also in here is what he thought about his own music and about the music of others – notably, of course, Benjamin Britten. Soden also considers how other contemporary and later composers were influenced by Tippett from which it is clear that if Tippett hadn’t existed, we would have needed to invent him.
Tippett’s correspondence was copious. (What will biographers do in the future, when only txtspk emails glimmering dully in the ether will remain to be mined for this kind of precious material?) And Soden sets the life alongside the extraordinary events which shaped it: two world wars, the Space Race, the gradual acceptance of homosexuality, the Summer of Love, the Winter of Discontent – the twentieth century was certainly eventful.
Even if you don’t like the music, Tippett’s life is a fascinating microcosm of those coteries of clever, gay, artistic men who, before 1967 and even thereafter, had perforce to express themselves in metaphor so as to avoid the attention of the authorities.
It being a time of pestilence, and one’s social life a casualty, I have been reading a lot – so a thumping great biography of some 800 pages was not as daunting a prospect as it might normally have been. Indeed, it was this or another crack at War and Peace. I’m glad I went for this. And it was available on Kindle, at a very reasonable price, which I preferred so as not to aggravate my sore wrists with holding a tome.
But what on earth made me think it good for reading in bed? Because I found it to be so. And not because it is a soporific. I came to look forward to my nightly sojourn with Soden and Tippett more than anything else I have read over the past six months. Soden has a style so light and yet informative that half an hour with the two of them last thing at night has been a habit, formed over several months, from which I am even now experiencing withdrawal.
I am not a music specialist, but it seems to me that Soden has been diligent almost to a fault with his research for this book and his decisions on what to include. It was a long and full life (1905 – 1998), which explains the 800pp. Soden has, however, done his best to keep matters moving and I think succeeds admirably, partly by grouping photos, lists of the works and other reference matter at the back. The pages keep turning because Tippett’s life was so full of incident and he such a complicated, at times downright difficult, individual.
It’s all in here. The triumphs, the lack of money, the rows with friends, the bad reviews, the excitement at a new piece; his lack of self-discipline juxtaposed with how driven he became when a new musical idea came to him, how he worried at it, sometimes for years, before it saw the light of day. Also in here is what he thought about his own music and about the music of others – notably, of course, Benjamin Britten. Soden also considers how other contemporary and later composers were influenced by Tippett from which it is clear that if Tippett hadn’t existed, we would have needed to invent him.
Tippett’s correspondence was copious. (What will biographers do in the future, when only txtspk emails glimmering dully in the ether will remain to be mined for this kind of precious material?) And Soden sets the life alongside the extraordinary events which shaped it: two world wars, the Space Race, the gradual acceptance of homosexuality, the Summer of Love, the Winter of Discontent – the twentieth century was certainly eventful.
Even if you don’t like the music, Tippett’s life is a fascinating microcosm of those coteries of clever, gay, artistic men who, before 1967 and even thereafter, had perforce to express themselves in metaphor so as to avoid the attention of the authorities.
March 1, 2020
Tippett love or loath his music remains one of the most colourful characters of the twentieth century. Ardently pacifist and at a time when such things were illegal an advocate of gay rights. I really enjoyed his own autobiography moving into Aquarius but this book is both scholarly and far more extensive. It paints a fascinating picture as much of the times he lived as much as the man and his music. Highly recommended to anyone with more than a passing interest in the composer.
August 8, 2022
Exhaustively researched, but exhausting
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews