Michael Tippett’s output drew on multiple influences—Beethoven’s rhythmic power and aspirational humanity, the expressive word-setting of Purcell, and the intricate techniques of Elizabethan madrigal composers—to create a personal idiom unique in 20th-century English music. He was born in 1905 in Eastcote in northwest London; after graduating from the Royal College of Music, he conducted an amateur choir in Oxted in Surrey and taught French at a nearby school. He withdrew numerous works composed before his String Quartet No. 1 (1935), whose lyrical warmth and rhythmic freedom developed further in the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939). While director of music at London’s Morley College, Tippett completed his oratorio A Child of Our Time (1939-41), incorporating North American spirituals into the choral writing. A pacifist, in 1943 he served a two-month prison term as a wartime conscientious objector. Tippett’s first opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1946-52), was the radiant culmination of his earlier lyrical style. A harder-edged, modernist dynamism dominated in his second opera, King Priam (1958-61), and his music from then on blended both aspects. Major international commissions in later years included the Symphony No. 4 (1977) and the visionary cantata The Mask of Time (1980-82), written for the Chicago and Boston Symphony Orchestras, respectively. Tippett’s last major work, completed five years before his death in 1998, was The Rose Lake for orchestra, inspired by a visit to Lake Retba in Senegal.