5 - ‘Shall we …? Affirm!’ The ironic and the sublime in The Mask of Time

Summary

The sublime and the ridiculous

Of all Tippett's works The Mask of Time (1980–2) seems to have provoked the most polarized critical reception. This is not just a matter of quibbling over nuances. When one commentator esteems the piece for its ‘extraordinarily heterogeneous coherence’ while another assigns it to the category of ‘eclectic lead balloons’; when summary evaluations have rated it on the one hand as ‘the climax and crown of Tippett's output’ and on the other as ‘an almost complete disaster on aesthetic grounds’, we may surmise instability as something essential to its makeup – an objective property, perhaps, to which the cleavage in the pattern of subjective judgement may not be unrelated.

One source of that instability could be the disparity between the grandeur of the work's ambition and the means the composer uses to realize it. ‘The Mask of Time’, he declares,

is explicitly concerned with the transcendental. It deals with those fundamental matters that bear on man, his relationship with Time, his place in the world as we know it and in the mysterious universe at large. But it subscribes to no particular liturgy or standard theory, Biblical or otherwise, about the creation of the world and the creation of mankind.

‘Inescapably’, then, Tippett

had to accommodate a plurality of co-existing viewpoints. At best, [the] composition offers fragments or scenes from a possible ‘epiphany’ for today. The forces used in each scene or fragment are heterogeneous: hence [the] description ‘for voices and instruments’.