Imprisoned pacifist who composed music for Prince was secret Trotskyist traitor
HE WAS one of the greatest British composers of the 20th century, a staunch pacifist who wrote the antiwar masterpiece A Child of Our Time and who was imprisoned for 61 nights as a conscientious objector to the Second World War.
But Sir Michael Tippett hid a secret past as an active Trotskyist trying to bring about violent revolution in Britain, according to research. A forthcoming biography reveals that Tippett had extensive involvement with Trotskyist parties in the Thirties – a decade before he was to compose a birthday suite for the Prince of Wales.
In a previously unpublished letter, he wrote: “I am not a pacifist but a military enthusiast … and war to the knife, to the death if need be.”
Oliver Soden, who has written a new book on Tippett, told The Sunday Telegraph: “Everyone thinks of Tippett as this benign creature who went to prison for his pacifism. And yet here he was saying entirely the opposite.” In researching the first major biography of Tippett, he has uncovered the composer’s “strange journey from national traitor to national treasure”.
Soden said: “He’d turn up on Terry Wogan chat shows, was beloved by the Royal Opera House, and considered for the role of Master of the Queen’s Music.
“He stopped the news when he died. Yet this knighted composer at the heart of the British establishment had this hidden violent anti-establishment past.” He delved into 70 archives and was given access to private material, including letters. He pored over MI5 papers for the Communist Party and the papers of Marxist parties.
There had been fleeting references to Tippett’s Trotskyist sympathies in the past. Soden found evidence that Tippett was at the centre of the Militant Group, raising funds for Trotskyist parties during the Spanish Civil War. Tippett died in 1998, aged 93. Soden is developing a television documentary on Tippett and has curated an exhibition on him at The Red House in Aldeburgh. His book, Michael Tippett: The Biography, is published on April 18.
Meirion Bowen, Tippett’s life partner of 40 years. told The Sunday Telegraph: “Soden’s research into [Tippett’s] early life and political involvement … uncovers information that is new even to the composer’s closest friends.”