Tippett A Child of Our Time

On November 7th 1938, Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, was assassinated in Paris by a 17-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan. The Nazi’s response was the Kristallnacht pogrom. Jews had their homes and businesses ransacked. Many were attacked and beaten to death.

For the 33-year-old Michael Tippett, a confirmed pacifist, the horror of what was happening provided the catalyst for the large-scale choral work he had been wanting to write for some time. He saw the teenager Grynszpan as a symbolic scapegoat, ‘a child of our time…the protagonist of a modern Passion story.’ On T.S. Eliot’s advice, Tippett wrote his own text and three days after Britain declared war on Germany, he began to compose the music.

The three-part structure of A Child of Our Time is directly based on Handel’s oratorio Messiah. In both works Part 1 is a prophesy, Part 2 is the story, and Part 3 reflects on what happened. Tippett explains this in more detail:

Part I: The general state of affairs in the world today as it affects all individuals, minorities, classes or races that are felt to be outside the ruling conventions. Man at odds with his Shadow (i.e. the dark side of personality).

Part II: The ‘Child of Our Time’ appears, enmeshed in the drama of his personal fate and the elemental social forces of our day. The drama is because the forces which drive the young man prove stronger than the good advice of his uncle and aunt, as it always was and always will be.

Part III: The significance of this drama and the possible healing that would come from Man’s acceptance of his Shadow in relation to his Light.

Despite the specific events that inspired the work, Tippett was keen to emphasise the subject’s timelessness. He wanted it to represent humanity’s capability for inhumanity and support oppressed people wherever they are. He avoided real names of people or places, and most significantly inserted five traditional Negro Spirituals at key moments along the way. Tippett sought to emulate how Bach had used Lutheran chorales in his Passions to unite the performers, the public, and the story. But Tippett felt these chorales were too Christian. He wanted the music to resonate with atheists and agnostics too. One day ‘Steal Away’ came on to the radio he was listening to, and he realised immediately that spirituals offered the universality he was looking for.

On paper, placing them in the context of Tippett’s own contemporary language should not work. But it does, incredibly movingly, because at the very deepest level, our appreciation of these songs shows that we are all fundamentally equal. We share far more than separates us. The music reveals this connection, and unites the diversity of musical styles that Tippett enjoys as well as all of us who are listening. Tippett’s inspiration was realising that the spirituals convey a significance beyond their origin as 19th-century American slave songs, and that their music transcends time and place to poignantly unite the two extremes of the human condition: desolation and hope.

‘When I wrote the work,’ Tippett said, ‘I was so engulfed in the actions of the period, I never considered its prophetic quality. But it seems that the growing violence springing out of divisions of nation, race, religion, status, colour, or even just rich and poor is possibly the deepest present threat to the social fabric of all human society.’ These words feel very contemporary and the reason A Child of Our Time is Tippett’s most frequently performed piece may well be as much for the timelessness of its message, as for the energy and beauty of the music itself.

A Child of Our Time urges us to feel empathy for everyone, expressing the need for us to try to understand humankind’s ability to be selfish, prejudiced and mean, without losing faith in our limitless potential to be considerate, compassionate and loving. Tippett challenges us to understand those who disagree with us if we want to change their minds: ‘I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole.’ Despite war raging around him as he composed, this pacifist work of understanding and reconciliation ends in hopeful affirmation. Having begun with a melancholic chorus ‘The world turns on its dark side. It is winter’, it concludes with ‘Here is no final grieving but an abiding hope. The moving waters renew the earth. It is spring.’ Tippett’s sense of hope is introverted and subdued, but it is there. As he wrote: ‘It is spring, but spring with an ache in it.’

Spring, with an ache. What better description of hope can there be? And if we can engage in spring, summer will not be far behind.

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