The Pre-history of 'The Midsummer Marriage'

Narratives and Speculations
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-0-367-24316-6
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 142 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 322 g

Reihe: Royal Musical Association Monographs

The Pre-history of ‘The Midsummer Marriage’ examines the early collaborative phase (1943 to 1946) in the making of Michael Tippett’s first mature opera and charts the developments that grew out of that phase.

Drawing on a fascinating group of Tippett’s sketchbooks and a lengthy sequence of his letters to Douglas Newton, it helps construct a narrative of the Tippett-Newton collaboration and provides insights into the devising of the opera’s plot, both in that early phase and in the phase from 1946 onwards when Tippett went on with the project alone.

The book asks: who was Newton, and what kind of collaboration did he have—then cease to have— with Tippett?

What were the origins of and shaping factors behind the original scenario and libretto-drafts?

How far did the narrative and controlling concepts of Midsummer Marriage in its final form tally with—and how far did they move away from—those that had been set up in the years of the two men’s collaboration, the ‘pre-historic’ years?

The book will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers in opera studies and twentieth-century music.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Savage, Roger

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Opernmusik
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Einzelne Komponisten und Musiker

Inhaltsverzeichnis

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgements

I. Michael Tippett and Douglas Newton to 1943

II. Plotting a Masque: ‘Refashioning the Traditions’

III. Collaboration on the Masque, 1943-44

IV. The Act II Scenario, circa February 1944

V. Friends’ Reactions and Progress of the Collaboration, 1944-46

VI. New Directions (Newton solus)

VII. Fresh Beginnings and Continuities (Tippett solus)

VIII. Echoes and Foreshadowings

IX. Afterlives

Appendix I. Four poems by Douglas Newton

II. Newton, Bibliography to 1956

III. Tippett, the British Library Sketchbooks

Select Bibliography

Index of Names

Über Autor(innen)

Roger Savage is an Honorary Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is also the author of Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage (2014).