Like his younger contemporary Benjamin Britten, the English composer Michael Tippett grew up in Suffolk, and studied at the Royal College of Music in London. He left in 1928 and became a schoolteacher and part-time composer. His first mature works were the First String Quartet (1935), the First Piano Sonata (1936–1937), and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938–1939), which belongs to the early 20th-century British tradition of works for string ensemble.

 

During the 1930s Tippett became involved in radical politics, organizing the "South London Orchestra of Unemployed Musicians". His passionate antipathy towards the horrors of war, initially aroused by the plight of European Jews, found expression in his deeply moving oratorio based on the true story of a Jewish boy who killed a Nazi diplomat, A Child of Our Time (1939–1941), which articulates Tippett's lifelong belief in the opposing "dark" and "light" sides of human nature, present in everyone. The oratorio is influenced by Bach's Passions, with negro spirituals replacing Protestant chorales. Tippett was briefly imprisoned for his pacifist beliefs in 1943.

 

From 1940–1951 Tippett was director of music at Morley College in South London. He subsequently became a full-time composer. His first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, was produced in 1952, and like each of its successors – King Priam (1961), The Knot Garden (1970), The Ice Break (1976), NewYear (1989) – it spawned instrumental and vocal works, including an important series of five string quartets, four symphonies, four piano sonatas and the Songs for Dov (1969–1970) for tenor and chamber orchestra.

 

In 1995, the year of his 90th birthday, a Tippett Festival at the Barbican in London included the premiere of his last major work, The Rose Lake, a "song without words for orchestra". His last work was "Caliban's Song", part of a Tempest Suite commissioned by the BBC to mark the tercentenary of Purcell's death. Renaissance and Baroque music had been a major influence on Tippett's earlier works, including the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli for strings (1953).

 

Major works

Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938-1939); A Child of Our Time (1939–1941); five operas, including The Midsummer Marriage (1952); Piano Concerto (1953–1955); The Vision of St Augustine (1965); The Mask of Time (1980–1982); four symphonies; five string quartets.