Sir Michael Tippett, the celebrated British composer and pacifist, remained under scrutiny by MI5 into the 1960s, newly released files at the National Archives reveal.
The papers document the security service’s monitoring of Tippett from the 1930s onwards, detailing his involvement with communist and Trotskyist organisations, which continued to cast a shadow over his career. As late as 1959, he was prevented from taking up a Foreign Office-sponsored lectureship in Germany because of his political past.
Intercepted letters show the difficulties Tippett faced combining his political commitments with the duties of music teaching. In one letter, written from his home in Oxted, he complains, “It’s quite impossible for me to get to a cell meeting owing to my evening class work,” adding that Reigate or Croydon would be more practical locations.
“My new professional work seems to be going to lie among Leagues of Labour Youth & Co-operative Choirs & so forth, so that I shall do my best to spread the party net to these same people,” he adds. He hopes his correspondent would explain to his central cell leader that he was “not going to be lazy, but as active as I can manage”.
In a second intercepted letter, Tippett describes a growing enthusiasm for political organising, writing that local working people were “already set to the extent of wanting to work at once on Party lines”. He adds, “Being rather keen myself, it all comes rather more rapidly than I expected.”
Tippett, who became one of the most distinctive British composers of the 20th century, is best remembered for works including A Child of Our Time, his oratorio responding to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. His pacifism led to imprisonment during the Second World War, after he refused to comply with the conditions of his registration as a conscientious objector.
Yet his early political commitments were more militant than his later public reputation suggested. Research by biographer Oliver Soden uncovered evidence that Tippett had worked at the centre of the Militant Group, a leading British Trotskyist organisation, and raised funds for revolutionary parties during the Spanish Civil War.
Tippett remained under observation through the 1950s, as a vocal member of the Peace Pledge Union, as well as other groups including the Musicians’ Organisation for Peace – which Special Branch characterised as a “Communist penetrated organisation”.
By then, Tippett’s musical career was flourishing, with his opera The Midsummer Marriage premiering at Covent Garden in 1955. Special Branch took an interest in the opera too, thinking it an indictment of his politics: “the opera with which Tippett has gained so much publicity reflects to a considerable degree his political tendencies. The ‘villain’ is one King Fisher, described as ‘a tycoon, a Manchester School materialist, and a composite of left-wing cliches’”.
Despite continuing interest from the security service, Tippett gained a prominent position in British public life, accepting a CBE in 1959, and came close to being appointed Master of the Queen’s Music. He was knighted in 1966 for services to music and died in 1998 aged 93.
The newly released documents form part of a wider collection of MI5 records spanning the 1930s to the 1970s. Other files concern Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS, whose associations with communists were monitored for decades, including while a member of the post-war Labour government.
