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On 27 January, 1955, London was in the grip of a thick pea-souper fog - but the great and the good were still making their way to the Opera House at Covent Garden for the premiere of a long awaited new stage work by Michael Tippett.

Tippett had been working on the piece, off and on, for 15 years: a mystical psycho-drama in which a young couple cannot get married until they鈥檙e able to recognise the light and the shadows of their own and each other鈥檚 deepest psyches. The theme preoccupied Tippett; he鈥檇 already explored it in his wartime oratorio A Child of Our Time, and he was convinced that a failure to acknowledge the shadows had been the cause for the war itself.

The Midsummer Marriage is a swirling amalgam of Jungian psychoanalysis, earth energies and mating rituals. It deals with love and sex in ways that are stylised and opaque; not so much a story as a series of vignettes connected obliquely, as if by hazy cinematic cross-fades. Tippett wrote the libretto himself, using phrases like 鈥渕alefic magic and perverted power鈥� and 鈥渘ow is this nonsense at its noon.鈥� There are multiple influences in the mix: WH Auden, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Shakespeare... but the most obvious influence is Mozart's The Magic Flute. Instead of Pamino and Pamina, we get Mark and Jenifer, and instead of Papageno and Papagena, we get Jack the mechanic and Bella the secretary.

The opera baffled many of its original cast, and many in its first audience. The critics reached for their hatchets: one called it 鈥渙ne of the worst [libretti] in the 350 year old history of opera鈥�. Maybe British tastes had moved on since the fashion for hazy, surrealist symbolism that had inspired Tippett 15 years earlier. And yet this was no failure. News of the dappled beauty of the music spread rapidly via word of mouth. Tippett said that 鈥渕ost moving of all was young people, in their 20s, who tried to pour out their sense of excitement. Obviously it鈥檚 quite carried them away into some incalculable magic world.鈥� The opera, he predicted, would 鈥済row in esteem gradually.鈥� He was right.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by 麻豆社 Radio 3鈥檚 Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a 麻豆社 season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This archive recording features the 麻豆社 Scottish Symphony Orchestra with conductor Thomas Dausgaard.

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