Sir Michael Kemp Tippett
(1905-1998), ComposerSitter in 25 portraits
Tippett attended the Royal College of Music (1923-1928), and was recognised as one of Britain's leading composers with the premiere of his three-part oratorio A Child of our Time, at the Adelphi Theatre in 1944. He enjoyed a long career, composing choral works, symphonies, concertos, string quartets and operas; finding inspiration in Beethoven, Elizabethan madrigals, folk, jazz and blues. In the early 1940s, while director of music at Morley College, he became friends with Britten and Pears, going on to write Boyhood's End for them in 1943. Tippett composed a total of six operas, including the greatly successful King Priam (1962). Appointed a CBE in 1959, he was knighted in 1966.
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Related pages
- Artists and sitters
- Bill Brandt: Portraits 1982
- Only Connect
- Only Connect - Sir Michael Tippett <> Priaulx Rainier
- Only Connect - Sir Michael Tippett <> Ludwig van Beethoven
- Only Connect - Sir Michael Tippett <> Barbara Hepworth
- Only Connect - Sir Michael Tippett <> T.S. Eliot
- Only Connect - installation video
- Handlist of names in the Reference Collection