The English conductor Andrew Davis, musical director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1975 to 1988, who died on April 20 of leukemia, recorded the oratorio in May 2023 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. A Child of Our Time, by Michael Tippett (1905-1998), leaving us a doubly moving testament, on a musical and spiritual level.
“The world is turning its dark side. It’s winter. » The first chorus of the oratorio A Child of Our Time announces the color. The work was composed between 1939 and 1941 in London. Tippett would sometimes compose while listening to the sound of German bombers overhead. Benjamin Britten fought to have the score created in 1944 by his friend, a pacifist and conscientious objector like himself.
A lineage
The resonance, the news ofA Child of our Time is hot. If the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten is seen today as the pacifist work par excellence, we forget that this masterpiece is the third link in a lineage which finds its source during the Great War, in 1916, while the very underestimated Frederick Delius (1862-1934) composed a Requiem of 30 minutes explicitly dedicated “to the memory of young artists who fell in the war”.
Delius, a pessimistic atheist, was very daring in his remarks, which encompassed everything that harms humans during their time on earth: unnecessary conflicts and even more so, in Delius’s eyes, religion. This ” Requiem profane” warns against religious fanaticism going so far as to mix the imprecations “Alleluia” and “Allah” at the center of the work.
While Delius, the atheist, denounces in a Requiem conflicts and religious fanaticism during the First War, Tippett chose to start from a historical event to compose an oratorio modeled on the Passions by Bach and The Messiah by Handel during the Second. The spark was the murder of embassy attaché Ernst vom Rath at the German embassy in Paris by a 17-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, on November 7, 1938. This event, fueled by Joseph Goebbels, offered the Nazis the pretext for the sinister “Kristallnacht” in the following days.
The dark side
A Child of Our Time bears the epigraph “Darkness proclaims the glory of light”. As noted by musicologist Harry Halbreich, Grynszpan’s gesture is placed by Tippett in “the perspective of Jungian psychoanalysis: each of us has a dark alter ego, which we must know and accept.” Hence a key sentence in his text: “ I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole » (knowing my shadow and my light, I will be entirely myself). But for Tippett the subsequent question is: “What happens to this man as confusion grows and collective forces become more and more unjust?” What happens when seemingly justified acts of protest trigger colossal disasters? »…
The oratorio adopts Messiah the structure in three parts: preparation (here, the oppression) — narrative (the historical act) — meditation and commentary. Of the Passions of Bach he copies the recitative models, arias and choirs, but above all the moral breathing by chorales here replaced by a brilliant idea: the interpolation of Spiritualsincluding the famous “ Deep River » which closes the work. These five Spiritualswhich replace the chorales of Passions by Bach, avoid connoting the oratorio to a specific religious rite and can illustrate, more than any other source, a song shared by all.
The remarkable record note, written by Mervyn Cooke, is also illuminating on the role of TS Eliot, friend of Tippett, who was approached for the libretto, but who, faced with the precision of the composer’s ideas, convinced him to write it himself. even the said libretto, a habit that Tippett kept until the end of his life in his operas.
Andrew Davis and a committed choir give body and soul to the defense of this score forged in the blood of the suffering of the oppressed and advocating the vital need for tolerance. Only hope is the source of life (final note of the work) after so much darkness, fights and nostalgia.
The disc is an echo of concerts given at the Barbican in London in May 2023. Andrew Davis covered the work in August at the Edinburgh Festival, then conducting seated. The mother superbly played by Pumeza Matshikiza blends with vibrant emotion into the spiritual “ Steal Away “. Joshua Stewart (the young boy) is driven by his role and destiny, while Sarah Connolly and Ashley Riches play the aunt and uncle who try to dissuade their nephew with great nobility.
What a testament! In our time…