Even some of the more enthusiastic reviews after the first performance of The Knot Garden were rather perplexed by its structure: it is a short opera, but its three acts are divided into 23 scenes, often brief and abruptly juxtaposed. It may just be that I haven't heard the work for a while (my copies of the original LPs are practically worn out) and that it has been maturing in some recess at the back of my mind – Tippett's works have a way of doing that – but the form of the piece now strikes me as admirably clear, musically strong and ideally appropriate to the subject. The Knot Garden, is not so much a narrative as an examination of a set of relationships; the structure is a device to bring about confrontations. Thus, the First Act introduces six of the seven characters, briefly demonstrates their problems and then introduces a catalyst in the person of Denise, the freedom-fighter disfigured by torture. She sings an updated version of an ancient operatic form – the virtuoso display aria, here brilliantly put to new purposes – which in turn prompts an ensemble-finale in the again updated form of a blues with a fast boogie-woogie middle section.
The Second Act, apparently still more labyrinthine (its subtitle is ''Labyrinth''), contains the opera's most violent cross-cuttings – the technique is cinematic – but it has two scenes of stillness, both of them very beautiful (fantasias respectively on We shall overcome and Schubert's Die liebe Farbe) which together allow a vision of healed relationships, crystallizing (Mozartian or even Verdian practice again) in a concluding aria of belief in love and beauty.
It is full, that aria, of Tippett's (some would say) notorious colloquialisms. In this opera they go along with musical colloquialisms (the blues, the electric guitar) to convey a tough but vulnerable urban poetry that it would have been hard to evoke without their use. At times the same seems to be true of Tippett's words: in 1972 I winced a bit at ''Play it cool'' and ''A man is for real'', but I wonder now whether they are not the equivalent of his unerringly-used electric guitar; that 'aria' would be diminished without its cries of ''Oh boy!''.
The Knot Garden is a classic of its period, I think, and a central work in its composer's output, As an opera about relationships it needs particularly sensitive handling by the singers, and the cast (that of the first performance) is outstanding. Tear gives his character (''a homosexual in pink socks!'', sneered one reviewer) real charm and pathos as well as singing his uncommonly difficult lines with great flair. Barstow is even finer: an electric presence with a visionary intensity to her aria of remembered anguish. Minton and Herincx are both excellent, Gomez touchingly vulnerable, while Hemsley's immaculate diction and gentlemanly tones are perfect for Mangus, the psychiatrist Prospero who ''puts them all to rights''.
Davis is as eloquently urgent in the opera as in the oratorio, A Child of Our Time, which, in a generally fine, rather opera-scaled reading, makes an ideal coupling: two complementary aspects of Tippett the maker of healing images. In the opera the voices sound a little further forward than I recall from the LPs, the sound a bit harder-edged; the oratorio, appropriately, is placed in a warmer acoustic. R1 '9509135'