A Child of Our Time is a secular oratorio by the British composer Michael Tippett, who also wrote the libretto. Composed between 1939 and 1941, it was first performed at the Adelphi Theatre, London, on 19 March 1944. The work was inspired by events that profoundly affected Tippett: the assassination of a German diplomat by a young Jewish refugee in 1938, and the Nazi government's reaction to the assassination which was in the form of a violent pogrom against Germany's Jewish population: Kristallnacht. Tippett's oratorio deals with these incidents in the context of the experiences of all oppressed people, and it carries a strongly pacifistic message of ultimate understanding and reconciliation. The text's recurrent themes of shadow and light reflect the Jungian psychoanalysis which Tippett underwent in the years immediately before he wrote the work.
The oratorio uses a traditional three-part format based on that of Handel's Messiah, and is structured in the manner of Bach's Passions. The work's most original feature is Tippett's use of African-American spirituals, which carry out the role allocated by Bach to chorales. Tippett justified this innovation on the grounds that these songs of oppression possess a universality absent from traditional hymns. A Child of Our Time was well received on its first performance, and has since been performed all over the world in many languages. A number of recorded versions are available, including one conducted by Tippett when he was 86 years old.
Background and conception
Michael Tippett was born in London in 1905, to well-to-do though unconventional parents. His father, a lawyer and businessman, was a freethinker, his mother a writer and suffragette. He received piano lessons as a child, but first showed his musical prowess while a pupil at Stamford School in Lincolnshire, between 1920 and 1922. Although the school's formal music curriculum was slight, Tippett received private piano tuition from Frances Tinkler, a noted local teacher whose most distinguished pupil had been Malcolm Sargent, himself a former pupil at Stamford. Tippett's chance purchase in a local bookshop of Stanford's book Musical Composition led to his determination to be a composer, and in April 1923 he was accepted as a student at the Royal College of Music (RCM).Kemp, pp. 8–13 Here he studied composition, first under Charles Wood (who died in 1926) and later, less successfully, with Charles Kitson. He also studied conducting, first under Sargent and later under Adrian Boult. He left the RCM in December 1928, but after two years spent unsuccessfully attempting to launch his career as a composer, he returned to the college in 1930 for a further period of study, principally under the professor of counterpoint, R. O. Morris.
In the economically depressed 1930s Tippett adopted a strongly left-wing political stance, and became increasingly involved with the unemployed, both through his participation in the North Yorkshire work camps, and as founder of the South London Orchestra made up of out-of-work musicians. He was briefly a member of the British Communist Party in 1935, but his sympathies were essentially Trotskyist, inimical to the Stalinist orientation of his local party, and he soon left.Kemp, p. 31–32 In 1935 he embraced pacifism, but by this time he was becoming overtaken by a range of emotional problems and uncertainties, largely triggered by the break-up of an intense relationship with the painter Wilfred Franks. In addition to these personal difficulties he became anxious that the political situation in Europe was leading inexorably towards war. After meeting the Jungian psychoanalyst John Layard, Tippett underwent a period of therapy which included self-analysis of his dreams.Kemp, pp. 36–37 According to Tippett's biographer Geraint Lewis, the outcome of this process was a "rebirth, confirming for Tippett the nature of his homosexuality while ... strengthening his destiny as a creative artist at the possible expense of personal relationships". The encounter with Layard led Tippett to a lifelong interest in the work and teaching of Carl Jung, an influence carried through into many of his subsequent compositions.Whittall, p. 32
In the mid-to-late 1930s several of Tippett's early works were published, including his String Quartet No. 1, Sonata No. 1 for piano, and Concerto for Double String Orchestra. Among his unpublished output in these years were two works for voice: the ballad opera Robin Hood, written for performance at the Yorkshire work camps, and A Song of Liberty based on William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell".Kemp, pp. 498–99 In 1937, after completing A Song of Liberty, Tippett immediately began planning a large choral work on Jungian concepts titled Nekyia, which was to explore the theme of acknowledging the presence of both shadow and light within the personal and collective unconscious; the work foreshadowed some of the concepts used later in A Child of Our Time, but it was never completed.Soden, pp. 194-95 As his self-confidence increased, Tippett felt increasingly driven to write a work of overt political protest. In his search for a subject he first considered the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916: he may have been aware that Benjamin Britten had written incidental music to Montagu Slater's play Easter 1916. However, events towards the end of 1938 turned his attention away from Irish matters.Whittall, p. 71 Tippett had made several visits to Germany, and had acquired a love for its literature and culture. He became increasingly distressed by reports of events in that country and, in particular the persecution of its Jewish population.Steinberg, pp. 284–85 In November 1938 the assassination in Paris of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee, precipitated the "Kristallnacht" pogrom across Germany. Over several days of violence synagogues were burned, Jewish homes and businesses attacked and destroyed, thousands of Jews were arrested, and some Jews were stoned or beaten to death.Kemp, pp. 150–51 Reports from Germany of these events affected Tippett profoundly, and became the inspiration for his first large-scale dramatic work.
Creation
Libretto
Having found his subject, Tippett sought advice on the preparation of the text from T. S. Eliot, whom he had met recently through a mutual friend, Francis Morley.Tippett 1994, pp. 50–51 The musicologist Michael Steinberg comments that, given his anti-Semitism, Eliot may have been an inappropriate choice of collaborator, though Tippett considered the poet his spiritual and artistic mentor, and felt that his counsel would be crucial. Tippett writes: "I plucked up courage and asked him if he would write it. Eliot said he would consider the matter as long as I provided him with a precise scheme of musical sections and an exact indication of the numbers and kinds of words for each stage". When Tippett produced his detailed draft, Eliot advised the composer to write his own libretto, suggesting that his own superior poetry would either distract attention from the music, or otherwise would be "swallowed up by it". Either way, there would be a mismatch. Tippett accepted this advice; henceforth, he records, he always wrote his own texts.
Tippett resolved that his work would be an oratorio rather than an opera. He chose the title from , a contemporary protest novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer, Ödön von Horváth. The text that Tippett prepared follows the three-part structure used in Handel's Messiah, in which Part I is prophetic and preparatory, Part II narrative and epic, Part III meditative and metaphysical. In A Child of Our Time the general condition of oppression is defined in the first part, the narrative elements are confined to the second part, while the third part contains interpretation and reflection on a possible healing.Kemp, p. 157 Tippett perceived the work as a general depiction of man's inhumanity to man, and wanted Grynszpan's tragedy to stand for the oppressed everywhere.Golding, Robin (1986). "A Child of Our Time: the darkness declares the glory of light". Notes on recording, Compact Disc CDRPO 7012, RPO Records. To preserve the universality of the work, Tippett avoids all use of proper names for people and places: thus, Paris is "a great city", Grynszpan becomes "the boy", the soprano is "the boy's mother", vom Rath is "the official".Kemp, p. 160 In addition to the broad themes of human oppression, Tippett's personal devastation at the end of his relationship with Wilfred Franks is woven into the libretto. At the time Tippett was writing the text, he was consumed by the break-up with Franks and felt "unable to come to terms with either the wretchedness of the separation or the emotional turmoil it let loose." As Tippett sought healing from his pain, Franks became a prominent figure in his Jungian dream analysis [during the first half of 1939] and the composer explained the image of Franks's shining face "appeared transformed in the alto aria in Part 3 of A Child of Our Time."
Commentators have identified numerous works as textual influences, including Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and Ash Wednesday, Goethe's Faust and Wilfred Owen's poem "The Seed".Gloag, pp. 10–14 Tippett's biographer Ian Kemp equates the ending of the oratorio to the closing pages of Part I of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which Christian and Hopeful end their journey by crossing a deep and wide river to reach their heavenly home. The influence of Jungian themes is evident in the recurrent images of darkness and light, and the recognition and balancing of opposites.Steinberg, p. 286 In a recent analysis of the work, Richard Rodda finds A Child of Our Time "rooted in the essential dialectic of human life that Tippett so prized in Jung's philosophy—winter/spring, darkness/light, evil/good, reason/pity, dreams/reality, loneliness/fellowship, the man of destiny/the child of our time".
Composition Tippett completed his Jungian psychoanalysis on 31 August 1939. Three days later, on the day that Britain declared war on Germany, he began composing A Child of Our Time. His grounding in the traditions of European music guided him instinctively towards the Passions of Bach as his basic musical model. Thus the building blocks of the work are familiar: recitatives, arias, choruses and ensembles, with a male soloist acting as a narrator and the chorus as full participants in the action. Tippett also introduced two other formal number types: the operatic scena and the orchestral interlude, the latter allowing time for reflection on significant events.Kemp, p. 168 Tippett wished to punctuate his work with an equivalent to the congregation chorales which recur in Bach's Passions; however, he wanted his work to speak to atheists, agnostics and Jews as well as to Christians. He considered briefly whether folk-songs, or even Jewish hymns, could provide an alternative, but rejected these because he felt that, like the chorales, they lacked universality. A solution was suggested to him when he heard on the radio a rendering of the spiritual "Steal away". In particular he was struck by the power of the words "The trumpet sounds within-a my soul". This led him to recognise spirituals as carrying an emotional significance far beyond their origin as slave songs in 19th-century America and as representing the oppressed everywhere.Kemp, p. 158