Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage is an opera of exuberant genius — but forget about the text

Whenever Michael Tippett’s first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, is revived, there is a chorus of voices, including mine, complaining that it should be done much more often, for it is a work of exuberant genius, full of wonderful musical invention, and life-affirming in the way that Britten’s operas never are (with, I think, the exception of Albert Herring). Yet the Prom performance, semi-staged, it was claimed, but rather less than that, did make clear, while doing justice to Tippett’s score, why Marriage is always likely to be something of an outsider. For the text was provided complete in the programme book, and since the balance, at least where I sat, favoured the orchestra over the voices, I followed it and was, yet once more, nonplussed and sometimes incredulous that it could have been so inept, pretentious and downright undramatic.

Tippett’s next two operas, King Priam and The Knot Garden, though no paradigms of dramaturgy, are markedly superior. In fact it’s hard to think of any other opera where one’s responses are so divided between love, even ecstasy, of and at the music and recoil from the text. It’s not only the words, though they are often bad enough; it’s the overall construction, which led even the composer himself to suggest that he had written a masque or oratorio rather than an opera. But even those genres have their limits, and it’s difficult to imagine any category that Tippett’s piece wouldn’t transgress.

His claim that at least in part it is meant to be a modern Zauberflöte is damaging, for although Mozart’s masterpiece has a notoriously chaotic plot, the two central figures, Tamino and Pamina, are kept constantly in view and we see and hear them progress towards the light.