When the planes hit the Twin Towers in September 2001, it was to Michael Tippett that the world turned. Music from his masterpiece, A Child of Our Time , was played at memorial concerts all over the world, including the Last Night of the Proms in London. During his lifetime Tippett was acclaimed as Britain's greatest composer, and undoubtedly his music - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time , four symphonies, five operas, and many other game-changing and era-defining works - exerted an indelible influence on the world. Oliver Soden's masterful biography, while telling for the first time the fascinating full story of the composer's life and work, also situates Tippett within the century's wider musical, social and political narrative. There is almost no other artistic figure whose life so neatly spanned the twentieth century, and whose thought and work was so inextricably bound up with its events. Tippett's is a dramatic story, from his mother's imprisonment as a suffragette, and Tippett's own time at Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector; his active involvement in left-wing political activities of the 1930s; his traumatic experiences during two world wars, following an often turbulent childhood; his passionate relationships with men and women, and his work's bravely open portrayal of homosexuality at a time when it remained illegal, putting the first ever homosexual kiss on a London stage; his travels and huge popularity in America during the decades of Cold War and the space race; and his old age, as he managed ill-health and near-blindness yet developed a keen interest in television and popular culture. His was a life at the centre of twentieth-century intellectual and cultural life, with Barbara Hepworth, T.S.

Eliot, W.H. Auden, Edith Sitwell, Benjamin Britten and members of the Bloomsbury Group among his close friends and colleagues. Woven through his life is the intriguing story of Tippett's ever-evolving compositions - his struggles to attain a mature compositional voice and his never-to-be-forgotten idea of including African-American spirituals in A Child of Our Time . We follow his shift from the lush lyricism of his first opera to the angular patchwork of his second, and on to the challenging soundworlds of his age-defying final decades. The composer that emerges is a man of passionate views and eclectic intellect. Soden portrays Tippett as a composer of fiery and challenging vision, one of the century's greatest: a 'child of his time', but also a cultural pioneer, whose work can speak to our century.