Historical Context and Genesis
Michael Tippett (1905-1998) began composing A Child of Our Time in 1939, immediately following the events of Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938), when Nazi mobs destroyed Jewish synagogues, businesses, and homes across Germany and Austria, killing dozens and arresting tens of thousands. The immediate trigger of Kristallnacht was the assassination of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, in Paris on November 7 by Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jewish refugee whose family had just been expelled from Germany. Grynszpan's act of desperation - a young man using the only power available to him to protest against the deportation of his family - became the pretext for state-organized pogrom.
Tippett, a committed pacifist and socialist who was later imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II, was gripped by the story of Grynszpan as a mythic figure - the innocent victim whose individual act of violence becomes the catalyst for collective atrocity. He wrote the oratorio's libretto himself, rejecting T. S. Eliot's offer to write it, and composed the work over five years, completing it in 1941. It received its premiere in London on 19 March 1944 under Walter Goehr.
Structure and Handel's Shadow
The oratorio is explicitly modeled on Handel's Messiah and Bach's passions in its three-part structure: Part 1 establishes the world of oppression and the protagonist's situation; Part 2 depicts the protagonist's crisis - his act of political violence and its consequences; Part 3 moves toward understanding, acceptance, and the qualified hope of reconciliation. Like Handel, Tippett uses soloists, chorus, and narrator in the baroque oratorio tradition, but replaces Bach's and Handel's biblical texts with his own libretto and substitutes African American spirituals for Bach's Lutheran chorales.
The decision to use spirituals as the emotional and structural spine of the oratorio is one of the most inspired choices in twentieth-century music. Tippett had encountered the spirituals through their use in the American labor and civil rights movements of the 1930s, and he recognized in them a musical tradition that had emerged from systematic racial oppression - making them the exact counterpart to the situation he was depicting in 1930s Europe. The spirituals that structure A Child of Our Time ('Steal Away,' 'Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen,' 'Go Down, Moses,' 'O by and by,' 'Deep River,' 'Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?') are not decorative additions but the oratorio's theological anchors.
Biblical Texts: Zechariah 9 and Job
The primary biblical text is Zechariah 9:11 - 'As for you, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit.' This verse from Zechariah's messianic oracle speaks of liberation through the covenant blood - the same image that the New Testament applies to Christ's atoning death. Tippett uses this text to frame the oratorio's hope: the liberation of the oppressed is grounded not in political possibility but in divine covenant obligation. The 'waterless pit' of Zechariah becomes the pit of twentieth-century persecution, and the blood of the covenant is the ground on which liberation is promised.
Job provides the archetypal figure of innocent suffering: Job 1:1's 'blameless and upright' man who suffers without explanation is the template for Herschel Grynszpan and for all innocent victims of systemic evil. The oratorio's narrator explicitly invokes Job's framework in addressing the audience: 'A man was born into the world and the world turned against him.' Job's suffering was not explained by his sin, and neither is the suffering of the oratorio's protagonist - the atrocity is not a response to wrongdoing but an exercise of arbitrary power.
Isaiah and the Redemption of Darkness
Isaiah 53:3 - 'He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain' - connects the Servant of Isaiah to both the individual victim (Grynszpan) and the collective victim (the Jewish people of Europe). The suffering servant who bears the iniquities of others becomes in Tippett's vision a figure through whom the world's darkness is acknowledged and ultimately transformed.
The oratorio's final words - 'I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole' - are Tippett's synthesis: the path to wholeness is not the denial of suffering or the suppression of darkness but the acknowledgment of both shadow and light in full consciousness. This Jungian psychological framework (Tippett was a reader of Carl Jung) is given biblical grounding by Isaiah's theology of redemption through suffering - the conviction that darkness is not the final word but is absorbed into a larger divine purpose.
The Spirituals as Theology
Each spiritual that Tippett uses is placed at a structural turning point in the oratorio, functioning as Bach's chorales function in the Passions: as the community's response to the narrative, the moment when the audience/congregation enters the story with their own voice. 'Go Down, Moses' appears at the point of the protagonist's desperate act; 'Deep River' at the point of exile; 'Were You There?' at the point of cruciform suffering. The spirituals do not comment on the narrative from outside; they participate in it, bringing with them all the historical weight of the communities that created them.
Tippett's use of the spirituals was both an artistic choice and a political one: by associating the suffering of European Jews with the suffering of enslaved African Americans, he was making a claim about the universal structure of racial oppression and the universal resource of singing faith that survives it. The oratorio insists that the responses developed by the enslaved community - the hope, the lament, the solidarity - are resources available to all who suffer from the same structures of power.