One of the most significant post-war English composers, Michael Tippett was both ground-breaking and a traditionalist, open to a wide range of influences from the Baroque to jazz and blues. He illustrates this range fully in The Knot Garden, his third opera, which is cleverly paced and full of surprising twists and turns. Deeply affected by world events, Tippett’s works often reflect his protests, opposition to tyranny and suffering and longing for peace. He visited America for the first time in 1965 when he was sixty and immediately felt himself released into an open polyglot society.   This was to have an effect on everything he wrote afterwards.  The Knot Garden was the first fruit of that stimulus.
The Knot Garden, with a libretto by the composer, has a typically enigmatic title. The elaborate Elizabethan Knot Garden often resembled a maze - and the reference to Shakespeare’s time is underlined by numerous references to The Tempest. The enchantment and isolation, which are such powerful themes in Shakespeare’s play, are put into a late twentieth-century context by Tippett. To this is added a web of psychological disturbance - where the maze of the garden becomes a metaphor for the labyrinth of human thoughts and relationships.

The Knot Garden will be performed at the XXX Festival of Montepulciano

Dates:

22 and 24 July 2005

Venue:   Montepulciano   (SI)

Teatro Poliziano

Information:

Comune Montepulciano, tel. 0578 7121
segreteria@comune.montepulciano.si.it