Symphony No. 2 (Tippett)

[1] The symphony is in four movements, marked as follows: In an insightful essay accompanying the first recording of the work, Tippett writes: About the time I was finishing 'The Midsummer Marriage' I was sitting one day in a small studio of Radio Lugano, looking out over the sunlit lake, listening to tapes of Vivaldi.

Some pounding cello and bass C's, as I remember them, suddenly threw me from Vivaldi's world into my own, and marked the exact moment of conception of the 2nd Symphony.

When the C's return at the end of the Symphony, we feel satisfied and the work completed, though the final chord which is directed to "let vibrate in the air," builds up from the bass C thus: C16 C8 G C4 D2 AC#E.

While other works were being written I pondered and prepared the Symphony's structure: a dramatic sonata allegro; a song-form slow movement; a mirror-form scherzo in additive rhythm; a fantasia for a finale.

[4] Its creative cycle resulted in one of Tippett's most accessible compositions, while the re-conceptualization of the form was the foundation for the archetypal division that functioned as the source of his most original and innovative designs.

It later transpired that the orchestra's leader, Paul Beard, had altered the bowing of the string parts to make them more readable, and so public criticism for the collapse was transferred to him and his modifications (critics included the conductor John Barbirolli, himself a string player, who approved the original notation of the parts and blamed Beard's rewrites for obliterating the natural off-beat phrasing that Tippett had carefully notated).

A detailed account of the unravelling of the first performance has been provided by Jonathan del Mar, using a tape recording of the concert made by his father Norman Del Mar.This analysis suggests that the cause of the collapse lay rather with the flute beginning a solo passage a bar too early; the woodwind section en masse proceeded to get a bar ahead of the strings.

When the horns (who were taking their cues from the woodwind parts) joined in the melee by coming in a bar too early also, Boult took the decision to halt the performance.

In a further irony (in view of the insistence of Barbirolli and Tippett that the original notation was preferable, and that rescoring would cause more problems than it would solve), the flute part (which had NOT been altered) was at the point of error written in the complex manner deemed by Beard as unnecessarily complicated for the violins.

A combination of correct and incorrect ensemble meant that the "whole thing was at sixes and sevens, and realising that this was now becoming a serious misrepresentation of the piece (Boult) threw in the towel.

The misfortunes of the premiere soured them further: the BBC Controller of Music insisted that the orchestra could not be blamed for the performance, since it was "equal to all reasonable demands" made by composers, implying that Tippett's demands were not reasonable; stung by this, Tippett made no attempt to defend the BBCSO from criticism, later using his autobiography to blame all involved except himself and his own writing (he had, he said, urged to Boult and Beard that the editorial changes would do more harm than good";and so it turned out").

[6] Despite the blame which still generally attaches to Beard for the mistake (e.g., in a 2005 British library exhibition), orchestras since have routinely played the piece using his editorial changes.