Tribute to Michael Tippett (1965)

Abstract My dear Michael,Now it is your turn! A year ago I had one of these ‘memorial’ years and so I know what you are in for. I am sure you will be touched by the tributes, but I hope you won’t be too embarrassed by all the ‘evaluations’. You must not be made to feel-as I was-that you are already dead and that the musicologists are busy on the corpse! We both have a lot more notes to write yet!Evaluations, comparisons-the whole apparatus; does it mean anything to you? It doesn’t to me, much. Slaps or bouquets, they come too late to help, long after the work is over. What matters to us now is that people want to use our music. For that, as I see it, is our job--to be useful, and to the living. Criticism likes to separate, to dislodge, to imply rivalries, to provoke jealousies. But I don’t think I am jealous-(yes, envious, possibly of the man who can do something much better than I can), and the colleagues whom I admire, I regard as friends on the side of the angels rather than as rivals. Do you remember the story of Haydn banging the table and rushing from the room when someone poked fun at Don Giovanni (I think it was)? He knew very well the problems of finding the right notes and balancing forms. Schumann, too, who later found such difficulty in getting the courage to write at all, was the tenderest of critics. What does it matter if some of the people he admired mean little to us? His first duty was to his contemporaries, not to us. No one could have expressed the agony of composition more sympathetically than yourself, Michael, when you wrote about me last year.1 For you are a composer, living in the same environment, facing the same problems as myself. This is the natural soil for friendship, and friendship is stimulating and creative and unifying.