A Child of our Time

Inspired by the news on 9 November 1938 of Kristallnacht, the notorious Nazi-endorsed attack on Jews and their property in Germany, A Child of Our Time was truly drawn from “today’s headlines”. However, the composer Michael Tippett—having failed to find a librettist for his oratorio (he first approached T. S. Eliot as a possible writer)—was forced to create his own text; by the time he started composing the actual music, the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had reluctantly declared war against Hitler’s Germany, and, though completed in 1941, the work was not premiered until 1944. A one-time committed Trotskyist revolutionary, Tippett had started on A Child of Our Time having only recently renounced violence after a course of Jungian therapy. In depicting the despair of the Jewish refugee and his mother on one side, and the brutal mob who attack their community on the other, Tippett took inspiration from the anguished solos and furious choruses of Bach’s “Passions”. Like those works, A Child of Our Time is punctuated with chorale-style episodes that reflect upon and universalise the significance of the events the oratorio portrays. For these chorale episodes, Tippett had the ingenious idea of using spirituals, those songs of hope and aspiration originally created by African slaves in North America, now all the more apposite for having been stigmatized and banned by the Nazi regime. The resulting work is one full of pathos, empathy, and direct and deeply affecting emotion.