[Click on work and movement titles for sound-excerpts]

Part I

1. Chorus: The world turns on its dark side. It is winter.
2. The Argument (Alto solo): Man has measured the heavens with a telescope
   interludium (instrumental)
3. Scena (Chorus & Alto solo): Is evil then good? Is reason untrue?
   interludium (instrumental) -
   We are lost. We are seed before the wind.
4. The Narrator (Bass solo): Now in each nation there were some cast out by authority
5. Chorus of the Oppressed: When shall the usurer's city ceas?
6. Tenor Solo: I have no money for my bread
7. Soprano Solo: How can I cherish my man in such days or become a mother in a world of destruction?
8. A Spiritual (Chorus & Soloists): Steal away to Jesus

Part II

9. Chorus: A star rises in mid-winter. Behold the man! The scapegoat! The child of our time.
10. The Narrator (Bass solo): And the time in the continual persecution when one race stood for all
11. Double Chorus of Persecutors & Persecuted: Away with them! Curse them! Kill them!
12. The Narrator (Bass solo): Where they could they fled from the terror.
13. Chorus of the Self-righteous: We cannot have them in our Empire.
14. The Narrator (Bass solo): And the boy's mother wrote a letter, saying:
15. Scena: The Mother, the Uncle & Aunt, the Boy (Solo Quartet): O my son! In the dread terror, they have brought me near to death.
16. Spiritual (Chorus & Soloists): Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord
17. Scena (Bass & Alto soloists): The boy becomes desperate in his agony
18. The Narrator (Bass solo): They took a terrible vengeance.
19. The Terror (Chorus): Burn down their houses! Beat in their heads!
20. Narrator (Bass solo): Men was ashamed of what was done. There was bitterness and horror.
21. A Spiritual of Anger (Chorus & Bass solo): Go down, Moses
22. The Boy sings in his Prison (Tenor solo): My dreams are shattered in a ghastly reality.
23. The Mother (Solo soprano): What have I done to you, my son? What will become of us, now?
24. Alto solo: The dark forces rise like a flood.
25. A Spiritual (Chorus & soprano solo): O by and by, I'm going to lay down my heavy load.

Part III

26. Chorus: The cold deepens. The world descends into the icy waters.
27. Alto solo: The soul of man is impassioned like a woman.
28. Scena (Bass solo & Chorus): The words of wisdom are these: winter cold means inner warmth, the secret nursey of the seed
    Preludium (instrumental)
29. General Ensemble (Chorus & Soloists): I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole.
30. A Spiritual (Chorus & Soloists): Deep river, my home is over Jordan

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Tippett was approaching maturity as a composer, he also became aware of the social injustices caused by the Depression. For a period he went to work with unemployed miners in the North of England. For some years afterwards, he also conducted an orchestra of made up of theatre and cinema musicians thrown out of work with the arrival of 'talkies' (i.e. films with soundtracks). Tippett sensed, too, the likely consequences of the rise of Nazism in Central Europe and of Stalinism in Russia. His first instincts were to become politically involved. He took part in Labour party rallies and, briefly, joined the Communist party, leaving after he failed to convert his party branch to Trotskyism.

Gradually, he came to feel that he must at some stage express his solidarity with the deprived and the downtrodden through his work as a composer. At first he considered writing an opera based on the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland. This had potential for Easter symbolism - an avowal of hope for a new springtime. Soon, though, he realised that the work gestating inside him was one of contemplation, obviating the need for stage action.

In 1938, the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew, made desperate by the Nazi persecution of his race in general and his family in particular, led to one of the most terrible pogroms of Jews - the infamous Kristallnacht of 9 November. Tippett shared in the public horror which this aroused, feeling inwardly also that he must respond with a composition which, as it turned out, was to be his first major public statement as an artist.

Having become friendly with the poet T. S. Eliot, he asked him if he would write the libretto. Eliot agreed to consider the project on condition that Tippett prepared a scenario for him, showing the shape and character of each movement and sketching in his own ideas about the text. This the composer did, taking as his model the Bach Passions and Handel's Messiah. He thus laid out the basis for a three-part oratorio, using standard baroque methods, such as recitative for narration, and arias and ensembles culminating in negro spirituals. The spirituals were the best twentieth-century counterpart he could find to the Lutheran chorales of Bach's time, embodying texts and music of an inherently universal significance. Eliot studied the scenario in detail but then advised Tippett to write the text himself, as any words from Eliot would probably overwhelm the music. Tippett accepted his advice and, ever after, wrote his own libretti.

Tippett took his title for the work from a novel by the anti-Nazi writer, Odon von Horvath, Ein Kind unserer Zeit (1938), but nonetheless planned the work so that it would not be too tied to the specific events which had sparked it off. Thus, Part I of the work 'deals with the general state of oppression in our time. Part II presents the particular story of a young man's attempt to seek justice by violence and the catastrophic consequences; and Part III considers the moral to be drawn, if any." This progression from the general to the specific and back again is signalled by the naming of the soloists - who are just soprano, alto, tenor and bass in Parts I and III - as Mother, Aunt, Boy and Uncle in Part II.

The opening chorus and alto solo give us a view of the world as if from another planet, after the manner of the Prologue in Heaven from Goethe's Faust: though another influence upon this intial section was the film, Green Pastures (1936), where "De Lawd' is looking down from Heaven at the world he has created. Green Pastures also suggested the style of singing (its soundtrack featured the Hall Johnson Choir) necessary for the spirituals, which proved to be highly apposte in rounding off each section of the work. Seasons metaphors, too, play their part. 'The world turns on its dark side. It is winter." - at the start - is complemented by 'The moving waters renew the earth. It is spring'. - at the end.

Tippett began writing A Child of Our Time on the day war broke out - September 1939 - and completed it two years later. But its first performance was not until 1944, when it was conducted by Walter Goehr at Aldephi Theatre, London. Since then it has become a part of the choral repertory worldwide and there are six recordings* of it currently available.

Programme for the Zambian performance

Title music, movements 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 25 29, 30 Faye Robinson (soprano), Sarah Walker (mezzo-soprano), Jon Garrison (tenor) and John Cheek (baritone), City of Birmingham Chorus, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Michael Tippett
Collins Classics 13392

Movements 2, 5, 21 Jessye Norman (soprano), Janet Baker (mezzo-soprano), Richard Cassilly (tenor), John Shirley-Quirk (baritone), BBC Singers, BBC Choral Society, BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis
Philips 446 331-2 (double album with The Knot Garden)

Movements 6, 16 Sheila Armstrong (soprano), Felicity Palmer (mezzo-soprano), Philip Langridge (tenor), John Shirley-Quirk (baritone), Brighton Festival Chorus, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andre Previn
Carlton Classics 3036702052

© Meirion Bowen (1997)