Tippett, Eliot and Madame Sosostris 1

The origins of Sosostris in Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52) are traced back to a passage in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) in which a character disguised himself as ‘Madame Sesostris, Sorceress of Ecabatana’. In between is Madame Sosostris, the ‘famous clairvoyante’ of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Tippett, on Eliot’s advice, had written his own libretti for The Midsummer Marriage and all his subsequent operas, later writing that ‘echoes of [Eliot’s] prosody sound in everything I have written for myself to set to music’. In a parallel to Eliot’s harnessing of the post-war vogue for spiritualism in order to communicate with the dead, the opera’s business tycoon, King Fisher (another allusion to The Waste Land), consults the clairvoyante in order to find his disappeared daughter. Tippett’s Sosostris has been described as a genuine oracle, in contrast to Eliot’s, but to regard the dialogue between The Waste Land and The Midsummer Marriage as a simple case of Tippett’s having translated a fraud into a genuine seer is to miss the complexity and duality of Sosostris in each work.