8 - Tippett's King Priam and ‘the tragic vision’

Summary

I

King Priam represents the culmination of a project which, like many of Tippett's artistic ventures, had a long genesis. As early as 1953, in the immediate wake of The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52), the composer can be seen ruminating in his essay ‘Drum, flute and zither’ on the twin themes of tragedy and transcendence. King Priam (1958–61) was eventually born from a conviction that these notions could once again be made into an authentic experience in the modern-day theatre. The realisation of such an ambitious proposition, however, would depend on two factors in particular: an aesthetic conception which would underwrite the contemporary legitimacy of the tragic principles employed, and the practical ability to execute that conception in operatic, that is, musico-dramatic terms. It is the intention of the present study to investigate Tippett's strategies on both these fronts, and that investigation will need to reflect the different kinds of thought processes represented by each. Accordingly, what follows will involve both an examination of key textual sources which informed the opera's dramatic conception, and an investigation of technical procedures applied in the music. While the discursive tenor of each of these inquiries must necessarily be different, these should be seen as complementary perspectives on the same set of issues, which ought ultimately to add up to more than the sum of the separate parts.