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 the assassination in 1938 of a German diplomat by a young Jewish refugee, and the Nazi government’s reaction.
About A Child of Our Time in brief
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 the assassination in 1938 of a German diplomat by a young Jewish refugee, and the Nazi government’s reaction in the form of a violent pogrom against its Jewish population. It carries a strongly pacifist message of ultimate understanding and reconciliation. The text’s recurrent themes of shadow and light reflect the Jungian psychoanalysis which Tippet underwent in the years immediately before writing the work. 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 Tipett when he was 86 years old. The most original feature is the use of African-American spirituals, which carry out the role allocated by Bach to chorales. In his search for a subject he first considered the Easter Rising of 1916: he may have been aware that Benjamin Britten had written incidental music to play at Easter 1916. However he felt increasingly driven to write a work of overt political protest. 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.
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 the economically depressed 1930s he 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 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. He died in London in 1961, at the age of 86. He is survived by his wife, two daughters and a son, and a daughter-in-law, all of whom are still living in the UK. He also leaves behind a wife and two step-daughters, who live in the United States and a step-son, who lives in New York. He had no children of his own, but had a son with a partner, who is now married and has a daughter with whom he has a son. He wrote his first piece of music, A Song of Liberty, based on William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for a performance at the Montagu Theatre, Montagu, Yorkshire, in 1968. He later wrote his String Quartet No. 1 for piano and Concerto for Double String Orchestra.
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This page is based on the article A Child of Our Time published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
