Michael Tippett

Sir Michael Tippett was born in London in January 1905, the son of a hotelier and a suffragist mother. He studied at the Royal College of Music from 1923, where his composition teachers were Charles Wood and (briefly) C H Kitson, and he worked through his twenties in essentially unsuccessful career experiments — teaching, conducting amateur orchestras and choirs, withdrawing his early works. The breakthrough came with the *Concerto for Double String Orchestra* (1939) and the oratorio *A Child of Our Time* (composed 1939–41), drawing on the *Kristallnacht* shooting of Ernst vom Rath as its subject.

His mature output spans four operas — *The Midsummer Marriage* (1955), *King Priam* (1962), *The Knot Garden* (1970), *The Ice Break* (1977) and the late *New Year* (1989) — four symphonies, four piano sonatas, the *Vision of Saint Augustine* (1965), and a substantial body of chamber and choral music. His style — increasingly fragmented and complex through the 1960s, simpler and more direct in the late works — set him alongside but distinct from Britten as a defining figure of post-war British composition. He was a registered conscientious objector during the Second World War and served three months in Wormwood Scrubs in 1943 for refusing to undertake non-combatant duties.

Tippett was knighted in 1966, appointed CH in 1979, and made a member of the Order of Merit in 1983. He died in London in January 1998. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his operatic, choral and chamber work in twentieth-century British performance.