The day I met Sir Michael Tippett

In this deeply personal essay, Emre Aracı recounts the unforgettable day he met Sir Michael Tippett in the mist-veiled Wiltshire countryside—an encounter that bridges past and present, music and memory. Through evocative reflections on Tippett’s life, legacy, and lost correspondence with the Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, Aracı weaves a poignant narrative of friendship, artistic vision, and the quiet radiance of a composer who sought, above all, to reconcile light and shadow within the human soul.

Paddington Station in London is far more than a mere point of departure; even its name stirs within me a deep sense of romance, an inexpressible longing. From this historic terminus, trains set off towards the rarefied academic realm of Oxford, nestled among spired towers that echo with the sound of bells; or else they journey southwestwards to Cornwall, the so-called Riviera of England — towards the horizons illumined by Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the rugged coastline of Fowey where Daphne du Maurier once lived, or to Agatha Christie’s Devon, adorned with palms and mystery.

Paddington Station in the 1950s

Though the old trains — The Cornish Riviera Express or the fabled Night Riviera, with their dining cars laid in white linen and heraldic porcelain teacups — have long since yielded to faster, sleeker successors, the faint, indescribable scent of the past still rises from between the tracks. Travelling these lines, one may yet breathe an air redolent of an age in which time moved with unhurried elegance.

It was on the morning of Friday, the 15th of March 1996 — nearly thirty years ago now — that I stepped into this station, unaware that I was not, on this occasion, embarking upon so aesthetic a journey. And yet I was filled with a quiet thrill, for I was en route to the home of one of Britain’s great musical figures — a man who had journeyed these lines countless times, a true artist steeped in the refined traditions of English music. Beneath the vaulted arches of the station that morning, my footsteps echoed with the silent traces of both past and future. Meeting Meirion Bowen at Paddington — the very person who had made so singular an encounter possible — was among the first steps of our journey. 

For that day, we were bound for the Wiltshire home of one of the greatest living figures in British contemporary music: the ninety-one-year-old Sir Michael Tippett, with whom we were to take luncheon.

Bowen was not only Tippett’s long-time assistant, biographer, and musical confidant, but also a gracious and trustworthy friend whose refined conversation had gently nourished my thoughts and deepened my interest in the English musical tradition. As the train moved silently westward, the pastoral landscape that unfolded beyond the window — in all its thousand shades of green, its elegant stone houses — offered a sweet counterpoint to the quiet thrill within me. The hushed solemnity of the carriage seemed to heighten the sense of occasion towards which we were steadily drawing.

Sir Michael Tippett

After a journey of some ninety minutes, we arrived at Chippenham Station on a Wiltshire morning shrouded in mist. We were met there by Sir Michael Tippett’s driver, who guided us through narrow lanes that wound gently through the countryside, leading us to Nocketts Hill Farm in the village of Corsham — a place known for its tranquil beauty and old stone dwellings.

The mist enfolded us like a ghost drifting between bare trees, and the landscape, veiled in that spectral stillness, pressed itself deep into my memory. That very evening, upon returning home, I wrote to my family in Istanbul to recount the day’s events. My words were these: “We arrived at a house of remarkable beauty. Sadly, the weather was misty — otherwise, the view would have been even more enchanting. Inside the house, I felt as though I already knew it; I had seen it on television. At last we climbed the stairs and entered the room where Sir Michael was seated. I introduced myself. Though he is ninety-one, he appeared astonishingly alert, with a face full of youthful energy. His eyesight, unfortunately, is quite poor. Gradually, we began to converse. He remembers [Adnan] Saygun very well — though, alas, that is as far as his memory goes. As I read him passages from their correspondence, he was visibly taken aback”.

Sir Michael Tippett (1905–1998) occupies a singular place in the musical history of twentieth-century Britain — not solely as a composer, but also as a thinker, a moral philosopher, and a public intellectual. His life, much like his music, resembled a fugue poised between opposing poles: a refined bridge between the worldly and the spiritual, the intellectual and the emotional, tradition and revolution. His biography is not merely a chronicle of musical notes, but a polyphonic narrative in which ideas, ideals, and the frailties of the human condition are intricately interwoven. Born on the morning of 2 January 1905 in the town of Eastcote, Middlesex, Tippett spent his formative years in the stillness of pastoral England. His family, unconstrained by convention, were open to progressive thought and unorthodox ways of living. His education at the historic Stamford School in Lincolnshire not only nurtured his introverted temperament but also marked the beginning of his journey as an independent thinker.

Although the classical training he received at the Royal College of Music instilled in him a certain discipline, the true contours of his artistic path were ultimately charted on a map of his own intuitive design. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tippett came to artistic maturity later in life — yet this lateness lent his music a singular profundity, one that resisted the ordinary and imparted to every phrase a sense of timeless resonance. Indeed, his oratorio A Child of Our Time, first performed in 1944, marked not only a musical but a philosophical turning point. Tippett himself penned both words and music, drawing inspiration from T. S. Eliot and from the harrowing events leading up to the Second World War — in particular, the infamous Kristallnacht. In its final movement, Tippett wrote: “I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole.” These words would come to epitomise his moral vision — one that embraced the totality of human experience, both light and dark, in the pursuit of integrity and compassion.

Tippett greeted me that afternoon with a radiant smile and unmistakable cheerfulness — a kind of effusive warmth that was intrinsic to his character: natural, sincere, and full of quiet refinement. 

He showed little interest in revisiting the past; his gaze was fixed steadily on the future. With youthful enthusiasm, he told me of his plans to move to London, to begin anew, to turn the page on a fresh chapter of life. And yet, in his voice, in his manner, there lingered the subtle air of a bygone age — an echo, perhaps, of E. M. Forster’s elegance or T. S. Eliot’s restraint. Before me sat not only a friend, but a figure touched by time itself. He spoke not with the detachment of the sage, but with the immediacy of one who meets you eye-to-eye — not from above, but from beside.

Ahmed Adnan Saygun

It was, in fact, a lost friendship that had brought me to Tippett’s table that day in Chippenham — a correspondence that had already formed the subject of several of my articles: the exchange of letters between Tippett and the Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun. More precisely, these were the letters Tippett had written to Saygun — letters which Saygun, over the years, had carefully preserved. Tippett, by contrast, had not kept Saygun’s replies; archival fastidiousness was never among his habits.

I first came across Tippett’s letters during the course of my doctoral research on Saygun’s life and works at the University of Edinburgh. At that time, Saygun’s papers were still housed in his family home in Ulus, and had not yet been transferred to Bilkent University. Even after the archive was relocated to Ankara, I had further occasion to consult those letters; (See: Emre Aracı, “Michael Tippett’tan Adnan Saygun’a Mektuplar” Toplumsal Tarih, issue 53, May 1998, pp. 47–50).

The correspondence between Adnan Saygun and Michael Tippett extended, at intervals, over a span of some thirteen years, from 1946 to 1959 — after which, contact between the two composers ceased entirely. Of the seventeen letters and one postcard that Tippett wrote to Saygun, the majority were composed between 1946 and 1948, with a handful of further exchanges occurring in 1955 and 1959. Saygun first met Tippett in 1946, during a visit to London as a guest of the British Council. Their initial meeting took place over luncheon on Monday, 21 October, in Grosvenor Square. Shortly thereafter, Saygun would record his impression in his diary: “Tippett appears sincere, somewhat exuberant in temperament, and not overly concerned with formalities”.

Half a century later, as I sat across from the composer at his table at Nocketts Hill, that early observation came vividly to mind, and I smiled inwardly at its uncanny accuracy. Following their introduction, Tippett had invited Saygun to attend a rehearsal of the amateur choir he conducted at Morley College, where he was then teaching. They agreed to meet at five o’clock that same afternoon at the historic premises of Schott’s music publishers, at 48 Great Marlborough Street — one of the oldest music publishers in Britain.

Tippett invited Saygun to Schott’s music publishers at 48 Great Marlborough Street

At the Morley College rehearsal, Tippett handed Saygun the bass part and invited him to sing along. Among the works rehearsed were Purcell’s Ode to St Cecilia and Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb. Saygun found the choir commendable, though he did remark — not without gentle irony — “I imagine I should be somewhat more fastidious”. These words made me both smile and reflect. For I, too, had studied at Morley College, prior to my years in Edinburgh, and knew those classrooms well. Time, place, and music — how delicately they brushed against one another. Most of the ensuing correspondence between Saygun and Tippett took place after Saygun had travelled on to France to conduct his Yunus Emre Oratorio in Paris. Tippett, at the time, was living in the countryside near Oxted, south of London, in a modest cottage surrounded by fields.

Oxted in Surrey was an idyllic country retreat for Tippett

From there, on 24 November 1946, he wrote to Saygun: “Your visit here moved me greatly, dear friend” — a touching recollection of their recent encounter. In subsequent letters, he spoke of his growing admiration for the Yunus Emre Oratorio, expressing particular interest in its Parisian performance. In one letter, he asked for the exact date of the concert and mentioned having tried, while in Cornwall, to catch the broadcast on the radio — alas, without success. Yet his letter concluded with encouraging news:

“I am wondering whether I might conduct your oratorio next year, in March or May 1948, at a concert here in London”.

At that modest table at Nocketts Hill — modest, yes, but for me richly steeped in history — I had endeavoured to remind him of all these things. But the young-faced man of ninety-one, with his gentle smile, seemed to have long since buried the traces of the past deep within the recesses of memory.  And yet, it was he who had undertaken, in 1987, the journey he later referred to as “The Final Dream” — a voyage to Turkey, described in his autobiography Those Twentieth Century Blues. This journey, stretching to the silent shores of Lake Van, to the ancient solitude of Mount Nemrut, and through the mystical landscapes of the East, was no ordinary tour. It was an interior pilgrimage, shaped and charged with inspiration.

The sounds and sights he encountered during this odyssey would find their way, years later, into the second act of his final opera, New Year — like fragments of a travel diary set to music. In his autobiography, Tippett recalled: “On the last morning there, I woke to the sound of dawn muezzin — three signals coming from different locations in the town and reaching me at different times; another sound-memory stored up and later recalled for the main ensemble in Act 2 of New Year”. This, however, was far more than a composer’s quest for musical colour; it was a meditative journey woven from the threads of history, a search for vanished civilisations — pursued with an instinct that reached beyond music into something altogether more timeless.

Michael Tippett, "The Gramophone", March 1945

Was it not this same instinct that had drawn me, too, to Tippett’s table? As I departed Chippenham that day, a quiet yearning stirred within me — 

How deeply I wished that Saygun’s Yunus Emre Oratorio, itself born of the same contemplative spirit, might once have found voice in London under Tippett’s baton. 

The day I met Sir Michael Tippett holds, for me, a still deeper meaning. I witnessed in him a rare truth: that the highest human virtue lies in coming to know one’s shadow and one’s light — and thus, at last, to become whole...

Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Sir Michael Tippett ile Tanıştığım Gün’ in the June 2025 issue (No. 224) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

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