Oxford and Cambridge Musical Club

A Child of Our Time

The oratorio was composed between 1938 and 1942 and received its first performance 61 years ago in March 1944. The work’s restricted proportions and very sparseness of treatment might appear to belie its great importance. It lasts just over an hour and much of the significant writing, both musically and poetically speaking, is performed, over and done with so quickly that, without concentrated attention, an audience can well miss the power of the message.

That message says that man’s inhumanity to man is all but overwhelming, but that finally there is hope. The message is a universal one, though one particular tragedy is cited to make it all graphic. Like “Messiah” the oratorio is in three parts. The first sets the (tragic) scene; there are dark forces abroad in the world (“pogroms in the east, lynching in the west”); men’s moral thinking is perverted (“Is evil then good? Is reason untrue?”). The presentation, in both words and music, is spare, the thought almost elliptical.

Part II (as with “Messiah”) is a narration of a particular historical incident symbolising the general horror and misery in a world of oppressors and oppressed. The incident: as a result of the Nazi persecution, in 1938 one young Jewish boy (Herschl Grynzpan) exiled in Paris, takes vengeance for cruelties inflicted on his mother back in Germany, by shooting and killing a German diplomat (von Rath). The boy’s action only makes things worse and the Nazi reprisals increase the horror. All that remains is a yearning ache for peace.

Part III (again as with “Messiah”) reflects; here the thought is upon the implications of human brutality, but offers ultimate hope of good arising out of such suffering and evil.

The world of nature forms a back-drop to the oratorio. At the beginning, “It is winter”; “We are as seed before the wind”; “When shall famine depart….?” At the end, “The moving waters renew the earth. It is spring.”

Tippett had written to his friend T.S.Eliot asking him to provide a text on this theme. Initially Eliot agreed, provided that some indications were forthcoming on what Tippett wanted. Then, when the composer furnished as a guide examples of the kind of text of which he was thinking, Eliot replied that the text was already coming into being from Tippett’s own mind and he voiced his approval so strongly that he persuaded the composer to be his own librettist. So Tippett wrote it himself.

Those who are not attuned sensitively to the composer’s poetic, metaphysical and philosophical thinking may find some difficulty in fully comprehending this text, but the words repay thoughtful study. If this is so with the words, it is certainly also the case with the music. Conventional conceptions of what should be musical sounds and harmonies will not do – partly because the idiom is further advanced in the process of musical evolution than many people are as yet accustomed to, partly because the subject matter often brings out in Tippett, in his uncompromisingly pacifist protest against violence, the more abrasive outbursts in the range and options of musical expression. For some therefore the music in general is difficult to apprehend and appreciate, especially at first hearing. Like the text it repays repeated, careful listening. Contrasting relief however comes to such difficulties at five points in the work; the oratorio’s message is high-lighted in five negro spirituals – recognisable tunes and readily understood but masterly arrangements, most moving episodes. The use of the negro spiritual was Tippett’s solution, in a spiritual work that was not a conventionally religious one, to the problem of finding a substitute for the reflective chorale, so well known from Bach. The choice of the negro spiritual, the out-pourings of an oppressed people, was a stroke of genius.

AUBREY MORLEY