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Michael Tippett photographed in Wiltshire, in 1972.
We ignore him at our peril.... Michael Tippett, photographed in Wiltshire, in 1972. Photograph: Mike Evans/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Mike Evans/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis
We ignore him at our peril.... Michael Tippett, photographed in Wiltshire, in 1972. Photograph: Mike Evans/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Mike Evans/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis

Tippett's The Ice Break – time to take it out of cold storage

This article is more than 8 years old

Unloved and unstaged in the UK since its 1977 premiere, a new production by Birmingham Opera Company is just what Tippett’s The Ice Break needs to rehabilitate a work of quality and resonance

Michael Tippett made the great mistake of dying only seven years before what would have been his 100th birthday. And what with the classical-music world’s current obsession with fetishising anniversaries to the point of overload, while simultaneously consigning composers to a seemingly mandatory period of neglect after their death, Tippett’s reputation has blown hot and cold with alarming frequency. Some admirable attempts at Tippett feasts notwithstanding, we’re currently in a period of famine. And the truth universally acknowledged about Tippett’s music is that, after a noticeable change of style in the early 1960s, it became distinctly variable in quality, his operas hampered by his stubborn insistence on writing his own, dreadful, librettos.

It’s time for a rethink.

Birmingham Opera Company, and its artistic director Graham Vick, obviously like a challenge. In 2013 they produced one of the greatest opera productions I’ve ever seen: a riveting staging of Stockhausen’s supposedly unstageable Mittwoch. This year, the company is mounting Tippett’s fourth opera, The Ice Break, which hasn’t been produced in the UK since its premiere in 1977.

The Ice Break, with its use of electric guitars and American slang, its depictions of race riots and psychedelic trips, is to some the nadir of Tippett’s attempts to be contemporary. If anyone can prove its quality and its resonance, it will be Birmingham Opera Company, whose previous productions, involving community performers, staged promenade-style in non-traditional opera venues, have removed the proscenium arch as if taking off a belt squeezed round operas’ middle. The Ice Break should be no exception – it will be getting the type of staging that Tippett’s operas have been waiting for. Tippett is one of the great dramatic innovators of 20th-century opera, and The Ice Break, which moves fluidly from airport to street-riot to hospital with barely a note of scene-change music in between, poses huge and exhilarating challenges to its production team.

But it has come in for more than its fair share of criticism, mainly aimed at the libretto. Unjustified, in my opinion. All told, Tippett, on the advice of TS Eliot, wrote his own words for an oratorio, three song-cycles, and five operas. What his operas needed, he realised, were not the self-sufficient words of a poet, but something sparer, simpler: a text which would flower only when set to music.

The story of The Ice Break is, very roughly, as follows. Lev has been released from 20 years’ prison and exile in what might have been a Soviet labour camp. The opera opens in an airport, where his wife Nadia and son Yuri, who have emigrated to a country that might be America, await his arrival. Meanwhile Yuri’s girlfriend, Gayle, is also waiting to greet the athlete, Olympion, to whom she and a group of friends are slavishly devoted, and with whom she flirts outrageously, causing Yuri to attack Olympion. Events spiral out of control and gang rivalries between blacks and whites explode into a fatal mob riot.

Ta’u Pupu’a as Olympion and Chrystal E Williams as Hannah, rehearsing Tippett’s Ice Break for Birmingham Opera Company. Photograph: Adam Fradgley/Exposure

As in his famous oratorio A Child of Our Time, based around the events of Kristallnacht, Tippett shows how one act of intolerance can lead to mass brutality. Tippett’s first and arguably more optimistic opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1955), ends with a couplet from WB Yeats: “All things fall and are built again/ And those that build them again are gay.” The Ice Break ends with Goethe: “Yet you will always be brought forth again … and likewise be maimed, wounded afresh, from within or without.” This is the Yeats turned inside out – all things are built again but fall. Tippett said that the subject of the opera was, in part, “whether or not we can be reborn from the stereotypes we live in”.

But how to portray stereotypes unstereotypically? The text contains an odd sort of quasi-American slang which has provoked in critics an almost intemperate ire, though maybe Birmingham’s audiences will take the phrase “you motherfucking bastard” more in their stride than the first-nighters of 1977.

But the effect of the slang (which is specifically used by only two characters and makes up about 10% of the libretto) is entirely deliberate. “What’s bugging you, man? Cool and jivey once; Now, touchy and tight” – that’s a purposefully ridiculous line, never quite in-date so never really out-of-date either: just the embarrassing sight of white, middle-class Gayle trying to sound “cool” and learn the lingo of the gang to which she clings for some sense of identity.

Later in the opera the dangerously fickle chorus will also learn the perils of hero-worship. Blindly following Astron, a “psychedelic messenger”, they are greeted with his “highly ironic … falsetto” riposte: “Saviour?! Hero?! Me!! You must be joking.” It’s a moment that can veer dangerously close to Monty Python’s “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” – but Tippett’s point, put across with unnerving wit, is serious. And the text also contains magical moments such as Nadia singing her own swansong, conjuring memories of her childhood: “They sleep; I wake. Dark in the little room before dawn. The night-light for us younger children has gone out.”

Then there’s the music, teeming with startling invention, and worlds away from the exhilarating counterpoint and lush beauty of The Midsummer Marriage (1955), or the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939). Tippett sought constantly to reinvent himself musically – it’s a shock to think The Ice Break is the work of a man in his 70s. Its orchestration is jangled with electric guitars and percussion, with frighteningly out-of-control hoe-downs, electric distortion and amplification, KKK hymns and gang chants. Then there’s the riot itself, with kicking, screaming and gunshots built into the score.

The opera begins with a low blare of brass: ‘The frightening but exhilarating sound of the ice breaking on the great northern rivers in the spring.’ Here is Tippett’s primary metaphor – how the cycle of human behaviour freezes and thaws, and freezes again. How the ice might be broken in human relationships.

What’s hard to escape is the sheer visceral dramatic and musical excitement of the opera, its whirling, unstoppable, inexorable momentum (the three acts run for not much over an hour). But it is punctuated by a number of brave still pools of beauty, necessarily hard-won: a long, soberly beautiful aria at its centre for the black nurse, Hannah, who sees the truth of things more deeply than anyone; a threnody for those killed in the riot, magically scored for cello, violin, brass, and electric and bass guitars. It is hard to imagine later 20th-century operas – particularly the riot scene in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek – without The Ice Break.

But it’s a disconcertingly centreless work. Yuri undergoes the physical and mental cycle of renewal common to many of Tippett’s “heroes” but doesn’t boast an aria to his name. But that is precisely Tippett’s point – society has made of his characters a peculiarly flat bunch, desperately in search of an identity, a religion, a clique. In the 1970s these cliques were flower-power hippiedom and the make-love-not-war counterculture. Today’s opera productions are often obsessed with “relevance”, and we are too quick to accuse a work which seems rooted to its own time of having “aged badly”. (It will be interesting to see how Richard Thomas’s text to Turnage’s Anna Nicole stands the test of time; or whether the technology of Nico Muhly’s much praised Two Boys will soon seem as hopelessly anachronistic as Tippett’s references to a “video” or a “cassette” in his final opera New Year.) But what The Ice Break needs nevertheless is to be released from the flared trousers and infamous Moonraker-type laser-beams (never stipulated in score or libretto) of its original production. Its philosophy, and its compassionate but harshly realistic worldview, need a new space in which to breathe.

In 2005, two days of riots erupted on the streets of Birmingham, after racial tension between communities – a 23-year-old man was fatally stabbed. Our quests for ways to live, for leaders to follow, for faux-heroes who will make all well, are as desperate as ever. Censorship and suppression are alive and kicking in Russia. Immigration will be one of the defining factors of the forthcoming election. Such topics should not be barred from the world of opera. Tippett, like Astron, shied away from any saviour status; he questions more than he answers. But we ignore him at our peril.

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