Radical Movements (1912-1941) In Their Own Words: 20th Century Composers

As the 20th century dawned over Europe,

concert halls were a haven of tradition and emotional expression.

The operas of Wagner and Puccini,

the symphonies of Brahms and Beethoven,

and both the pomp and circumstance of Elgar were delighting audiences

who knew where they were with classical music.

But all that was soon to change.

In a series of shocking advances,

classical music was transformed beyond recognition,

mirroring the violence of world events

and innovation of the technological age.

In this series, we will unlock the BBC archives

to reawaken the voices of some of the century's greatest composers.

Dee-dee, da-ba, da-da, da-ba.

It should crackle with sharpness.

Together, they give a first-hand account of a revolution in sound.

You're getting louder already. Do keep it quiet, please.

Absolute hush.

Four o'clock in the BLEEP morning I was up doing this.

Why don't they deliver, these messengers?

In this first episode,

we encounter some of those musical giants who dared

to take on centuries of tradition, teaching us to hear in a new way.

And with the rise of fascism and communism,

we'll see how music was dragged out of the concert halls

and onto the streets into a battle ground

where nobody could refuse to take sides.

The music is a very extraordinary art

and at this period it's become, you know, perhaps the art of our time.

Paris in the early 20th century -

a city of top hats, parasols and pagodas.

But a revolution was stirring.

Picasso and his fellow cubists were shaking up the art world.

Proust was reinventing the novel.

And impresario Sergei Diaghilev was modernising ballet

with his company, the Ballets Russes,

using the scores of a young Russian composer called Igor Stravinsky.

What he did with Diaghilev and Nijinsky was to blow it up,

rather than to gradually develop things.

It was like throwing everything that had existed up in the air

and it lands back, not randomly,

but in a brilliantly new pattern that no-one had ever seen before.

Stravinsky, seen here in rare early footage,

may only have been five foot three, but he was a giant of modernism.

His provocative spirit was stirring in his early works for Diaghilev,

but it was Stravinsky's third ballet score that set the world alight.

DRAMATIC STRING MUSIC

Rooted in Russian folklore,

The Rite Of Spring depicts the ritual dance to death

of a sacrificial virgin as the Earth cracks open

at the end of the harsh winter.

He changed the approach to music for all composers after him

by writing The Rite Of Spring.

It's the rhythm that got people,

that's the thing that really shocked people, I think.

The concentration on rhythm above all things.

Repetitive rhythm, irregular rhythm, harsh rhythms, superimposed rhythms.

Rhythms which seemed to be in different tempi,

put on top of each other.

This sort of glorification of time, physical time,

because it was a ballet, was absolutely striking

and overwhelming, I think, for the audience when they first heard it.

Remarkably, Stravinsky was captured on film in old age,

reminiscing about those ground-breaking rhythms

I like very much this chord.

It was a rather new chord, you know?

Eight-notes chord.

The accents were even more new.

And the accents were really the foundation of the whole thing.

The young Stravinsky knew he was onto something,

but Diaghilev was less than impressed.

And I composed the first part of it,

Diaghilev invited me to Venice and I started to play him this chord.

59 times, the same chord. He was a little bit surprised.

He asked me only one thing, which was very offending.

He asked me, "Will it last a very long time this way?"

And I said, "To the end, my dear."

And he was silent,

because he understood that the answer was serious.

The funny thing is actually when you listen to Stravinsky now,

take something like The Rite Of Spring, still there's something

about it which has a punch and a bite that grips you

and he really, really knows how to draw his audience in

and then slap them round the face.

The Rite Of Spring premiered at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees

in Paris in 1913.

The audience was so shocked by the music and choreography,

that a riot broke out.

Stravinsky returned to that very theatre later in life,

and was caught on film reliving

one of the most notorious nights in music history.

It was full.

A very noisy public.

I went up, I said, "Go to hell. Excuse me."

They were very shocked.

They were very naive and stupid people.

It's nothing to do with the art.

He exuded confidence, knew exactly what he was doing,

and didn't suffer fools gladly.

If you know his music, that's also the way it is.

It's brittle and it's precise.

Stravinsky was completely confident. Slightly naughty twinkle in the eye.

Wicked, actually, I would say.

I am never seasick. Never.

I am sea-drunk. Quite different.

This helps.

And I went and saw The Rite Of Spring with Stravinsky conducting.

The minute I heard that, I thought "This is unbelievable."

This has gone straight to the core of me.

It was the piece that made me want to be a composer.

When Stravinsky wrote The Rite Of Spring,

it was just a piece of music.

But by the time he died, it was a movement, it was a statement,

it was a complete change in the face of music...

throughout the world.

While Paris was in the grip of Stravinsky's radical rhythms,

over in Vienna, another musical breakthrough was taking place.

Like Paris, Vienna was a hotbed of artistic upheaval -

the home of Gustav Klimt and Sigmund Freud.

And it was here that the other giant of musical modernism

began his career.

The self-taught son of an emigre shoemaker,

Arnold Schoenberg started out orchestrating operettas.

But his own music was far more unconventional.

Schoenberg saw music as imprisoned by the set of chords

composers had used for centuries.

He wanted to change the very sound of music itself.

The earliest atonal pieces of Schoenberg...

..created a massive effect on the revolution of music.

He really investigated the language of music,

and his Austro-Germanic heritage.

And he didn't turn it on its head, but he just made it

evolve in an unpredictable and a very extreme direction.

One of his early breakthroughs came with the melodramatic

Pierrot Lunaire which, even today, has the power to shock.

It's an absolutely unique work and it remains one.

Pierrot Lunaire, written in 1912,

you can't believe, because it still sounds so radical, so fresh.

It's written uniquely for Sprechstimme,

which is a sort of halfway house between speaking and singing.

Schoenberg's instructions are rather confusing.

He reckoned that you should touch the note

and then glide away from it. That's all very well,

but when the next note is not very far away at all, where do you go?

Cos you ruin the contours, you see.

O alter Duft aus Marchenzeit

Berauschest wieder meine Sinne.

You can hear me struggling - trying not to sing.

As with Stravinsky,

many of Schoenberg's bold early pieces outraged audiences.

But, as Schoenberg explained in a lecture on Radio Frankfurt in 1931,

that reaction was almost a badge of honour.

To organise his atonal sounds,

Schoenberg invented a radical new framework in which to compose music,

called the twelve-tone technique, also known as serialism.

He wanted to write music which was pure music.

And in a way he felt bogged down by tonality,

by the fact that something might be in D major.

So he decided to get rid of that.

And he wrote music which instead of being...

Used all of the 12 tones.

But not in any preconceived order.

In other words, for each piece, he created a new system, so it might go...

Funnily enough, I actually see a beauty in the angularity of that.

I've just made that up straightaway.

But I was using notes that were not related in a tonal sense.

And what you have to do is to forget about tonality.

You have to let this sort of sound sculpture waft over you.

The creation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique

coincided with the birth of radio.

For the first time, music was plucked from the concert halls

and relayed to a public hungry for this revolution in broadcasting.

But the music they wanted was distinctly less challenging

than what Schoenberg had to offer

This is Henry Hall speaking.

BBC Dance Orchestra is going to play to you Piccadilly Rye.

I think Schoenberg is probably the most important

composer of the 20th century,

and that's not to say he was the best,

or necessarily the most influential in terms of his actual music,

but simply the invention of serialism,

and the bravery to explore that was something that has gone on to give

licence to composers to do something that has never been done before.

And I think that's what marks the 20th century out in terms of music.

This hugely-influential figure

was caught on camera in home-movie footage that shows him

relaxing with his wife and friends and even playing tennis.

He liked sports a lot, he liked tennis,

he was interested both in playing and watching.

He was interested in almost anything.

It's surprising for people to hear that it was a normal family,

that Arnold Schoenberg was also a normal father.

And we really, at least for my part,

and I'm sure for Larry's, too, had no idea who our father was...

until after he died, which...

I can remember asking him, "How famous are you?"

"Are you the greatest composer?"

I think my mother took over and she said,

"Yes, he is the greatest composer." I think she answered it for him.

Under the giants of Stravinsky and Schoenberg,

the fabric of music was transformed.

But this new music was difficult

and prone to alienating baffled audiences.

One man wanted to popularise the new classical music of the 1920s.

And he came not from old Europe, but the brave new world of America.

The son of a Brooklyn shopkeeper,

Aaron Copland was the pioneer who made modern music easier on the ear.

The New York City of the 1920s danced to the beat

of jazz and show tunes.

The young Copland was as fascinated by these popular sounds

as the work of his hero, Stravinsky.

He saw no reason why the two shouldn't meet in his music.

Decades later, he recalled just how controversial

this approach made his early work.

Mr Copland, today, the jazz idiom is perfectly acceptable

in modern music. Has it always been so?

Oh, heavens, no. I can remember in the early '20s when I first made

use of jazz in a serious symphonic way that everyone was quite shocked.

I think it was mostly... The shock came from such a thing being played

in Carnegie Hall or in our big symphonic halls in America.

Jazz seemed to have its place and serious music its place.

But you weren't supposed to combine the two.

Copland would ultimately become known for works such as

the ballet Appalachian Spring and Fanfare For The Common Man,

which captured the American spirit and inspired a nation.

However, the man who made classical music sound American

had a European pedigree.

Mr Copland, as a man who is exactly the same age as the century,

you were in your 20s in the 1920s, and in Paris at that.

That must have been a marvellous time. I think it was, yes.

Having come sort of cold from Brooklyn, New York,

I didn't really know what I was going to meet up with in Paris.

I didn't know who I was going to study with,

but I knew I wanted to go on with my musical studies

in France for a while.

Be in touch with the latest thing that was going on in music then.

And it was a good idea.

You see, the older generation of American composers

had all continued their studies in Germany.

That was Beethoven, Bach's country.

But this was just after the First World War,

and Germany was not very popular in our minds.

And anyhow, I heard that Stravinsky was living in Paris,

and I thought, "Well, if Stravinsky's there, things are going to happen."

Flight 810 from Paris.

On-board is Aaron Copland, America's leading composer,

arriving to conduct the world premiere of his latest composition -

Music For A Great City.

One of the earliest editions of the BBC's arts series Workshop

featured Copland rehearsing and performing the premiere

of his Music For A Great City in London in 1964.

We were opening up new frontiers, as it were, for music lovers.

One of the things we wanted to do was to get to the question of process -

how music was made, which wasn't being covered at all by television.

They had a few concerts. Music was still a bit of a mystique,

and I wanted to break down that mystique and show musicians

were fascinating people, but that you could get at them.

Yes, that's very good.

You see, that's the part where the audience

might think we're playing wrong notes,

so it has to be absolutely right.

And so we got an outside broadcast camera,

and we went down to the town hall in Walthamstow.

Watched Copland teaching his music to the orchestra.

Can you make those chords just as sharp and short as you possibly can

when get to the fifth of 94.

Dee-dee, da-ba, da-da, da-ba.

It should crackle with sharpness and precision.

94, please.

I'm going to make a little accelerando

from 94 to the five measures later.

Aaron Copland was a wonderful subject to use,

because he had been a broadcaster since the 1930s.

That was part of his equipment as a composer, was to be able to

talk about music to music lovers who weren't necessary academics.

What was musical life like in the 1930s in America?

The thing that I remember best about the '30s was the...

..sudden need for our music, more than had been true in the '20s.

It's as if in the '20s we were writing our music,

though nobody asked us to or expected us to write any.

But somehow in the '30s,

music became more democratic in the United States.

I suppose it was the invention of TV.

I suppose the recording of serious music for the first time,

full-length symphonies, helped a great deal.

The radio helped a great deal

to make a great mass public aware of serious music in a way that had never

been true before in the world's history.

Boy, that's an enthusiastic house.

God, they played that well.

What an orchestra!

While Copland was shaking up the stuffiness

of American classical music,

something similar was happening in Britain.

Lancashire lad William Walton wasn't yet 21 when he wrote

his first significant work,

Facade, which he can be seen here conducting, at the age of 75.

# When Don Pasquito arrived at the seaside

# Where the donkey's hide tide brayed, he

# Saw the banditto Jo in a black cape

# Whose slack shape waved like the sea

# Thetis wrote a treatise noting wheat is silver like the sea

# The lovely cheat is sweet as foam Erotis notices that she... #

Facade was inspired by the dance music Walton was hearing

in the nightclubs of 1920s London,

where he lived with the literary Sitwell siblings.

The Sitwells hoped Walton could create a musical scandal

that would earn them notoriety.

When Facade came out, it caused a bit of a stir.

I think the Sitwells wanted it to be a scandal,

to set aside the scandal surrounding The Rite Of Spring ten years earlier.

A lot of press came to mock - gossip columnists came.

So the Sitwells were celebrities

and Walton became a celebrity through his connection with them.

Interviewing Walton was a good excuse for a jolly to his home

on the Italian island of Ischia.

But interviewers had to work hard when they got there,

as this composer was a distinctly reluctant interviewee.

The year before Walton died, Russell Harty coaxed him into reminiscing

about the first performance of Facade back in 1922.

If there is anybody in the world who has never heard of Facade,

maybe we could just explain to them that it's your music,

and Dame Edith Sitwell's poetry.

And she, on the first occasion, shouted through something,

didn't she? Yes, she had a megaphone.

So they had this curtain with a big hole for the megaphone.

And everybody was behind this curtain - the players, everybody.

Where were you? Also behind.

Were you conducting? I was conducting.

And the first performance was in a little...

It was in a little drawing room in Chelsea in Carlyle Square.

Now's time to listen to a piece of Facade. It's not...

The poetry is not delivered in this case by Dame Edith Sitwell,

who is now behind that great curtain in the sky,

but by Fenella Fielding, and this is called Popular Song.

# Lily O'Grady, silly and shady Longing to be a lazy lady

# Walked by the cupolas gables in the Lake's Georgian stables

# In a fairy tale like the heat intense

# And the mist in the woods when across the fence... #

'Facade, for me, was a...'

I didn't really think anything about it at all, to be quite honest.

And I was rather against doing it.

And of course then one happens to do something very good by mistake...

..which I think was the best way of doing things, really.

Part of Facade even became the theme tune of a 1970s TV quiz.

But Walton was still unimpressed by the work

that launched his career.

Do you ever turn to Facade again?

Not if I can help it, but...

LAUGHTER

But you must be pleased that it gives such a lot of pleasure.

Well, it keeps me.

LAUGHTER

You're able to maintain a facade! That's it.

"Fay-sade", they call it in America.

I don't think what you see in this screen

is really the real William Walton.

He projected an angry old man, and when you ask about Facade

and he says, "Well, I didn't really think anything of it at the time,"

I simply don't believe that he thought nothing of it at the time.

The idea that it was all somehow flowing over him

and he didn't care one way or the other - quite wrong.

Walton followed Facade with more conventional pieces

including his Viola Concerto of 1929, and the huge choral cantata

Belshazzar's Feast in 1931.

In the ten years since his outrageous debut,

Walton had gone from playboy provocateur

to Britain's number one composer.

Indeed, following the death of Elgar,

it was Walton who was commissioned to write the coronation march

for George VI in 1937.

That was the first of your coronation marches, Crown Imperial,

wasn't it? Yes. Wasn't that rather difficult, a composer like yourself,

associated very much with sardonic, anti-Establishment,

humour-poking, sticking fingers in people's eyes, to swing round

with a march like that and to come in on the side of the Establishment.

It was very difficult to do, I thought.

It took me a lot of trouble, at least a fortnight.

By the end of the 1930s, Walton was a household name.

The same could not be said of his close friend and contemporary,

Elisabeth Lutyens.

But, then, she was a woman trying to make it in a man's world.

Lutyens, the daughter of architect Sir Edwin Lutyens,

changed the sound of British classical music.

Her Chamber Concerto of 1939

is one of the most innovatory works of the period.

She started to teach me when I was 16,

and she was frightening.

I mean, she did something that perhaps we couldn't

say to our students today -

she said, "You've got no talent, so we'll have to find some."

I think it was very difficult for her.

She always said, and there was some truth in this, that at first

she was too avant-garde, and then she was old hat.

She said, "I've never been in step."

But the great works, and they are great works,

are very individual and are supreme.

They're intellectually superb but they're emotionally wonderful.

I think it's only now being realised

what an important composer Lutyens was.

And I think she had a lot of opposition in her time.

She was radical, she was ahead of her time.

As the frivolity of the 1920s gave way to the gravely-serious times

of the 1930s, the magnitude of world events forced

its way into music and composers had no choice but to politicise.

In a 1976 edition of Omnibus,

Lutyens recalled the turning point when music and politics collided.

The '30s cast a gloom over the whole country.

This misery.

And I think then in '33

there was the rumble of Hitler,

and what really had an effect on the whole of my generation

was the Spanish Civil War,

because it was the clearest-cut issue of my lifetime.

An elected government overthrown by a military regime

who calls on other powers to bomb his own innocent fellow citizens.

And that changed us overnight to a politically aware generation,

because it's no longer a question of the British Empire,

this was a question of just...

right versus wrong.

MUSIC: "Chamber Concerto - Aria - Adagio" by Elisabeth Lutyens

In 1938, Lutyens met BBC music programmer Edward Clark,

who ultimately became her second husband.

She was in love and about to make her international debut,

but the Second World War was only months away.

It was the best of times and the worst of times

for Elisabeth Lutyens.

I had my first international performance

at the Festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music

at Warsaw, Krakow in 1939.

It was a very poignant time, cos going through Berlin,

one saw all the flags going up for Hitler's birthday.

Then we were really waiting for war, hourly, daily, weekly.

I mean, it was obviously inevitable.

Therefore, it added something of such anguish, and yet it was, I think,

about the happiest time of my life because it was sort of my honeymoon.

Four months later, war was declared.

All musicians were instantly thrown out of work.

I have the original cutting from the Daily Express.

It says, "There is no such thing as culture in wartime."

Which, of course, in the event proved wrong.

Lutyens continued writing during the war

and she experienced her first air raid

at the premiere of her Three Symphonic Preludes.

We came down and up to London for a few days,

especially for the rehearsals and performances.

When the performance took place, which was on a Saturday night

and it was sold out, we couldn't understand it -

we were suddenly pushed off the streets by the Air Raid Wardens.

We saw these little, tiny silver planes up in the sky,

looking too beautiful. We didn't know what it was.

Finally, we went because you can't be late to a concert.

The orchestra turned up, but only half the audience.

Then we couldn't go out in the interval.

The whole sky was blood red.

But none of us knew what it was.

Lutyens battled marginalisation as a female composer,

whilst also having to fulfil her traditional duties

as wife and mother.

And it was a period of enormous exhaustion.

The feeling of total lack of sleep,

because there's four children under seven.

I'd been spoiled in my upbringing.

I'd never peeled a potato or been allowed near a kitchen.

My mother quickly sent me a cookery book and she wrote,

"Say if you want to do an Indian curry,

"it's not necessary to have an Indian living in the house."

Which is absolutely no help

for bringing up four children with rationing.

One of my daughters feels I didn't give her a cultural background.

Considering that in six years she didn't know what hunger

and fear was on ?5 a week in a world war, I mean,

we were just wanting to stay alive one more day.

MUSIC: "Also Sprach Zarathustra - Opening" by Richard Strauss

CHANTING

As the nations of the world squared up for total war,

music was engulfed by the conflict

and composers were forced to pick sides.

This saw some musicians ushered into a problematic place

in musical history.

Richard Strauss was the most important German composer

of the early 20th century,

with works like Salome, Der Rosenkavalier

and Also Sprach Zarathustra to his name.

When Hitler took power in 1933, he harnessed Strauss's reputation,

making the 69-year-old composer

the president of the Reich Music Chamber.

Strauss was captured on film as the face of Nazi music,

addressing the crowds in 1934.

Richard Strauss was born into, and always was,

a high-bourgeois German, in fact.

He loved German culture and German music.

I don't think that Richard Strauss particularly had any sympathy

with the Nazis.

His obsession was clearly with the perpetuation

of the German opera house and, particularly,

his operas being performed.

At first, Strauss embraced his ambassadorial role

and even socialised with Hitler.

However, by the time war broke out,

he had been removed from his position.

He had defied anti-Semitic orders

by continuing to work with Jewish musicians.

He definitely did help, or try to help, his daughter-in-law,

who was Jewish.

He even drove to the gates of Theresienstadt to plead

with them to release her.

He didn't actively collaborate, he didn't do anything wrong.

I think that we see him as someone who was morally weak,

because he was more concerned about his own status than really

trying to understand what was going on around him.

Home movie footage reveals a different side

to the giant of German music,

as Strauss enjoys private moments with his grandchildren.

MUSIC: "Horn Concerto No. 2" by Richard Strauss

Like his opponent Hitler,

Stalin used the power of music as part of his wartime arsenal.

MUSIC: "Symphony No. 7 - IV. Allegro Non Troppo" by Dimitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich was the greatest living Russian composer,

so was the natural choice for Stalin

to become the dictator's musical puppet.

Born a year after the Russian Revolution of 1905,

Shostakovich spent his early 20s playing piano at a Leningrad cinema,

before becoming a celebrated composer.

In the Second World War,

Shostakovich served as a volunteer firefighter,

but his most famous wartime contribution

was his seventh symphony.

The defiant piece boosted the morale of a nation on its knees

during the Nazi invasion.

In this remarkable, though obviously staged, footage,

Shostakovich is seen apparently composing his seventh symphony

in blockaded Leningrad.

It was performed there during this terrible siege by an orchestra

that was originally only 15 people.

People were starving, people dying in doorways.

The orchestra, I believe, were tempted by extra rations to turn up.

This ragbag orchestra was actually got together.

The performance was given, and it was broadcast, or blasted,

through loudspeaker not only to residents of Leningrad

during this terrifying siege, but also to the German troops.

So it was used as a political weapon, a propaganda weapon,

to try and make the Germans demoralised.

So, I mean, this is an extraordinary use of a piece of music.

It's probably unique in the history of Western music.

To write his music, Shostakovich had to contend with

not only the horrors of war,

but also the tyranny of the Soviet machine.

Stalin controlled art with such terror

that artists lived in fear of death,

should their work not meet with his approval.

Shostakovich felt constrained from writing anything that could be

construed as critical, and yet he definitely wanted to be critical.

So he developed this way of writing music which was sort of codified.

He used his own letters - D, S, C, H.

If you use the way, in music, we use those letters,

cos obviously there isn't an S, that's what it turns out.

Variations of that turn up in everything - in the Cello Concerto.

He uses variations of that as a kind of signature tune,

as a way of saying, "You will never stop me.

"I am here in my music."

MUSIC: "Symphony No. 5" by Dimitri Shostakovich

In 1974, an edition of Omnibus

followed the 68-year-old Shostakovich

as he supervised rehearsals of his fifth symphony,

conducted by his son Maxim.

In the film, Shostakovich discussed the impact

world events had on his work

and explained why he dedicated his eighth string quartet

to the victims of Fascism and war.

While music was being used as a weapon on the battlefields

by Hitler and Stalin, in one German prisoner of war camp,

it would prove a lifeline for survival.

Before the Second World War, Olivier Messiaen was a composer,

teacher and church organist.

When the Nazis invaded France in 1940,

the 31-year-old Messiaen was serving as a medical orderly.

He was captured and interned in Stalag VIII-A, where he wrote

Quartet For The End Of Time.

At the age of 77, Messiaen relived the astonishing circumstances

that led to the creation of his most iconic work.

Messiaen was released from the camp

a few months after the first performance of

Quartet For The End Of Time,

when a music-loving guard conspired to forge the necessary documents.

Messiaen became an influential teacher of many key composers

of the post-war period, including British composer George Benjamin,

seen here with Messiaen in 1987.

I think one has to remember that when he was there

he didn't know that he was going to be freed,

and, of course, people in 1940-41 had no idea the war would come to an end.

And so in these terrible circumstances,

in great loneliness and suffering, I think,

he conceived this remarkable, unique chamber piece.

Quartet For The End Of Time marks the first time Messiaen

incorporated the sound of birdsong into his music.

As if returning again and again to the time of his internment,

Messiaen wrote birdsong into most of his subsequent work.

The keen ornithologist and his wife were filmed in 1973

for the BBC's Full House,

roaming woods near Cardiff in search of rare bird sounds.

His music rings with a form of generous,

visionary joy that is completely unique in the 20th century.

What's strange is that he was a religious composer

but also a radical composer, so he changed the direction of music.

By his teaching he influenced generations of composers.

The Second World War had co-opted music as a tool of ideology

and used it both as a weapon and a means of resistance.

But one of the most celebrated pieces of the period was

a work of protest from a composer who refused to take sides at all.

Michael Tippett was the son of a suffragette

who grew up in rural Suffolk.

He used music as an expression of his deeply-held pacifist beliefs.

Appalled by Britain's retaliation in response to the rise of Nazism,

Tippett resisted conscription as a conscientious objector,

ultimately going to prison for a few months

for refusing to comply with the conditions.

Tippet's musical response to the war was A Child Of Our Time.

He used his major oratorio to explore the theme of

the individual's fate under the forces of social oppression.

# The world turns

# On its dark... #

Introducing a performance of the work in 1977,

Tippett revealed how it was inspired by real-life events that led to war.

The story that forms the centre of A Child Of Our Time

was based on a real event of 1938.

A young refugee, hiding in a great city,

shot and killed a high-ranking diplomat in an embassy

in protest against what was happening to his mother.

This act of personal vengeance

precipitated a public vengeance of such horror

that the only answer, if that's the right word,

was a third and total vengeance, the war itself.

# My home is over Jordan... #

It asks the question,

"What happens when individual acts of apparently righteous protest

"produce ensuing and colossal catastrophes?"

A Child Of Our Time, I feel, offers no clear answers,

yet moments of release, perhaps even of comfort.

These moments are the five spirituals

that come at special places in the score.

Moments when the performers and the viewers could,

metaphorically at least, sing together.

# Oh, don't you want to go

# To the Gospel feast

# That promised land...? #

A Child Of Our Time premiered in London in March 1944.

The piece was a sensation, and established Tippett

as one of the most important composers of his generation.

'Mankind has perpetrated unimaginable horrors,

'giving us very little ground for optimism.'

'Can I, in my music, remake that dream?'

Deep river, my home is over Jordan.

I want to cross over into campground, Lord.

I want to cross over into campground.

Clearly when he's writing a work like A Child Of Our Time,

he's making a plea for peace, for compassion,

for anything other than war.

A Child Of Our Time in some ways is the most clear-cut piece of

political music that any British composer has written, I think.

HE PLAYS PIANO AND VOCALISES

For the whole of my life, my creative work has been determined

by what is happening in the world outside,

and by what is happening in the world inside, that is inside me.

Michael would have got on very well with Bono.

They both try to do the same thing with music,

and use their platform, you know, to make political statements

and to try and stop appalling hardship around the world.

So he had a huge social conscience.

Determined to spread his message as far and wide as possible,

Tippett embraced broadcasting

as a way of reaching an audience beyond the concert hall.

For a 1964 edition of Workshop, Tippett got his hands dirty with

the business of actually directing a televised performance of his work.

Good evening, I'm the producer of Workshop, and before we get going

with this programme, I'd just like to tell you something about it.

It's based on the music which you can see and hear

being played behind me,

the Concerto for Double String Orchestra by Michael Tippett.

Michael Tippett is upstairs somewhere...

'That was one of the first Workshop programmes I did,

'was to show Michael looking at how cameras photograph music

'and getting the very best for his own work, the Double Concerto.

My feeling as a composer at that moment is that what is

happening is that it's been all built up from these cellos -

# Taw-dee, taw-dee, taw-dee-daw, taw-dee... #

And it's a feeling of growing from the cello line,

and not a feeling of anything cross-ways, you see.

Although that's an exciting shot,

I think we'll have to let it go. Yes, I think so too...

'The very fact that he was in a studio allowing us

'to film him talking about how to film his music showed

'just how committed he was to the democratic...

'In a sense, rather like Copland,

'he saw that television was a medium for good.'

The cellos lifting the music

until they're suddenly quite electric by the time they reach there.

I think his music is, at its best,

as deeply moving as anything ever written by an Englishman.

MUSIC: "Concerto for Double String Orchestra"

And four! 64...

Well done, chaps.

And fade.

# With a click, with a shock

# Phone'll jingle door will knock... #

No.

In the next and final episode

of 20th Century Composers In Their Own Words,

we hear from the generation of composers who came of age

amid the devastation of post-war Europe and America.

HANDS CLAP

Theirs was the challenge of reclaiming music

from the dictators who had hijacked their art,

and wiping the musical slate clean of any reminders of the past.

RAPID PIANO AND PERCUSSION

Amid the popular culture explosion of the post-war world,

these composers created a groundbreaking new musical language

which took music to its very limits,

before being brought back to the mainstream

to the point where, to many,

it felt like contemporary classical music ceased to exist at all.

Using all of these, we can build up any sound

we can possibly imagine, almost.

But not the sort of melody

that people would perhaps hum in the bath.

There's a sort of inner humming.