Music: 'The Knot Garden'

...The great achievement of the Northwestern production was the understanding on the part of Director Robert Gay of the nature of the emotional turmoil, an understanding which resulted in added dimension to the music and events described...

...It was there, in suburban Evanston, that the Northwestern University School of Music Opera Theatre presented the American premiere of Tippett's opera The Knot Garden...

...The Knot Garden' CHARLES-GENE McDANIEL The music of Sir Michael Tippett has been largely neglected in the United States while that of his contemporary British compatriots, Benjamin Britten and Sir William Walton, has had full and consistent exposure in performances and recordings...

...He was imprisoned for three months in 1942 for refusing to comply with the conditions of his registration as a conscientious objector to military service...

...He had begun in 1939 to work on his oratorio Charles-Gene McDaniel is a free lance writer and critic based in Chicago...

...The three short acts take place in the course of a day...

...of the horror of war and of compassion...

...This was, in fact, the first performance of any of Tippett's operas (there are two others) in the United States...

...The platform for this production was raked, rising from six inches off the stage floor at the front to five feet at the back, so that the audience could see the action within the garden...

...It is scored heavily for brass and percussion...

...This is a very kinetic opera in the sense of the turbulence and emotional disturbances within the characters," Gay said...

...This part also has vocal scoring, for soprano rather than chorus...

...the ending of the twisted adolescent fears and fantasies of Flora, ward of Faber and Thea, and the introduction of a human relationship into the life of Flora's sister, a hardened young revolutionary who had been concerned only with The Cause...

...Part I has two sections, "Arrest," representing, says the composer, a compression of energy, and "Movement," representing the explosion of energy...

...The result was a polished, well-knit production...

...These were spotlighted with pinwheels of light, intensifying the kinetic effect...

...At a press conference I asked Tippett, who is his own librettist, how he came to select an analyst as the central character...

...their acting has not been inhibited by the standard gestures and techniques of traditional grand opera...

...The title, too, might be taken as a double entendre, reflecting the efforts of the analyst to unknot the lives of the troubled characters...

...It was something of a coup for Northwestern to win the historic premiere in this country...

...There is a London Symphony Orchestra recording of this work, conducted by Davis, who also has recorded the London cast production of The Knot Garden...

...Three turntables set in the platform revolved during intensely emotional scenes, adding visible turbulence to the inner turmoil of the characters...

...Gay fully understood that "much of the opera's meaning is implied" and succeeded in communicating this meaning to the audience, who might otherwise have been even more baffled by the fragmented nature of the scenes...

...The music is demanding, marked only occasionally by extended melodic passages...

...The "Arrest" section is rather static in preparation for the more flowing, vibrant "Movement" section...

...At the beginning of the opera, Man-gus„ the analyst, sings, "So, if I dream,/It's clear I'm Prospero:/Man of power./He put them all to rights...

...But it also quotes directly the "Ode to Joy" theme, Beethoven's setting of the Schiller poem in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony...

...He gave it a masterful reading, yet hardly set a definitive standard for this piano composition...

...Beginning in late February and extending into March there were performances of Tippett's work in Canada (a choral work, The Vision of St...

...In its complexity and use of atonalities it is perhaps best described as Stravinsky-an...

...There was some criticism that the singers often could not be understood...

...Unfortunately, Northwestern presented only two performances of The Knot Garden, both of them sold out (at the unbelievably low top price of $2.50...

...The work was completed in 1942, while he was musical director of Morley College, a post to which the musician returned after his ninety days of imprisonment...

...There are the three blues songs, followed by a fourth dramatic scene...

...the breaking of a homosexual relationship between a black man, Mel, a writer, and Dov, a white musician...

...Part II is divided into three blues sections—slow, fast, and slow, reiterating Tippett's debt to the tradition of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith...

...For many it was a profound and deeply emotional experience...

...certainly it is unexcelled in its technical aspects, an achievement nothing short of phenomenal...

...He explained that he was interested in someone who wanted to change the world in a nonpolitical way...

...Suddenly, Tippett achieved such popularity that recordings of his work were difficult to obtain within a week of their release...

...Tippett has had a fascination with the American musical idiom, and uses in this opera themes from jazz, boogie-woogie, Leonard Bernstein, and We Shall Overcome, as well as Schubert...

...The vocal section is comprised of four songs, with texts by Tippett, in continuous sequence...

...The opera is equally demanding intellectually and emotionally and requires more than one hearing and a thorough study to appreciate the depths of its exploration of the human psyche...

...Or, for that matter, any other opera in a foreign language or English...

...But this hardly seems valid...

...Most of the audience were at least attentive if not wildly enthusiastic, and there were some cheers...

...They speak of sorrow and joy and love and sex...

...A production such as Northwestern's had an advantage over those of most opera companies in that preparation time can extend over months, as it did, instead of the usual two or three rehearsals...

...The audiences for the two evening performances were far more respectful, and quite enthusiastic, calling Tippett and Heather Harper back for several bows...

...Augustine, performed in Toronto), Chicago, Boston, and New York, with a concentration of performances in Chicago...

...We try to show that turbulence symbolically through the sets and the lighting...

...Many in this audience rudely walked out during the symphony performance, and most of those remaining rushed for the exits at the conclusion...

...The opera ends with the mending of the shaky marriage of Faber, a civil engineer, and his wife, Thea, a gardener...

...Tippett himself, who was reported to have been moved to tears at a rehearsal, was called to the stage, where he exchanged embraces with some of those involved in the production...

...Stephen Bishop, an impressive young pianist, was soloist for the concerto...

...During the play he has six patients assume roles from Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the analyst himself plays Prospero, the inward-directed ruler who used magical means to change his world...

...A Child of Our Time, an impassioned protest against the persecution by the fascist and Nazi movements on the continent...

...The entire opera is seen through a scrim, which gives a dream-like quality to the play...

...The Knot Garden is the first opera to deal directly with psychoanalysis...

...Then, several weeks later, Tippett returned to Chicago to conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a program of his own music...

...And the poet prays, "Ah, merciful God, if such there be . . ." There were three performances of the symphony in Chicago, on a program with Tippett's 1955 piano concerto...

...And Tippett could hardly have asked for a finer production...

...The Third Symphony, a long one, is divided into two parts, requiring fifty minutes for performance...

...Even with some amplification of the voice, though, it is somewhat overwhelmed by the power of the orchestra—even so rich a voice as that of Heather Harper, who generally sings this work, as she did in Chicago...

...Tippett's Third Symphony drew a great deal of critical, if not popular, acclaim in performances in Boston and New York, under Colin Davis's baton, and in Chicago, with the composer conducting...

...The use of young singers also can be an advantage, as it was here, in that they have not been, as Tippett put it, "Verdi-ized...

...The opera takes its title from Elizabethan knot gardens, made of small box hedges in intricate formal patterns, the setting for most of the action...

...In recent months, however, there has been a Tippett awakening, with a number of major performances which have created excitement among many critics and listeners...

...The Chicago matinee was largely wasted on its customary musically conservative audience of North Shore matrons who still want to lose their cares in the familiar classics while on a downtown shopping trip, just as their grandmothers did...

...Who, after all, even among the German-speaking, can understand all the words of "Gotterdammerung...

...Tippett, born in London in 1905, is a humanist and humanitarian...