Michael Tippett - A composer 'of our times'

Tippett conducted the Concerto’s premiere with a group of unemployed musicians in London on April 21, 1940, but he missed its first professional performance in 1943 as he was a conscientious objector to participation in World War II. He even refused the authorities' offers of peaceful activities as substitute for joining the armed services and was imprisoned for three months.

A Child of our Time, written between 1939 and 1941 is Tippett's most satisfying and creatively brilliant work and is one of his most recorded pieces. Written in traditional oratorio style but with a contemporary and symbolic twist, A Child of our Time was Tippett's response to the 1938 killing of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew (an event that sparked the Nazis' terrible slaughter of the Jews on November 9 that year the so-called Kristallnacht).

But it was more than that. The work also reflected Tippett's immersion in Jungian therapy. He had, through a friendship with Evelyn Maude, the wife of a senior civil servant, Sir John Maude, been introduced to the writings of Carl Jung and found in the man and his writings, with its emphasis on the primary importance of imagination and dreams, a capacity to unlock his creative spirit.

And then there is the role of TS Eliot in the work's gestation. Tippett and Eliot had known each other from the mid-1930s and when Tippett asked the poet to write a libretto for A Child of Our Time, Eliot asked to see a plan of the work. Tippett's drafts already well advanced and including texts from William Blake, Jung, the World War I poet Wilfred Owen and others impressed Eliot who told Tippett to continue to write the libretto himself.

A Child of Our Time uses negro spirituals placed in the oratorio setting where JS Bach had used parts of Christ's Passion. It is, for this reason, an extraordinarily moving and clever work. As Tippett explained it, these spirituals have turned and twisted the Bible's language into a modern dialect: the stories they tell of biblical Jews are used to comfort negroes in the bitterness of oppression. And in this sense they connect directly in this context with any group or individual that is rejected and cast out from the centre of society onto the fringes Jews in World War II, ghetto and slum dwellers.

Stephen Threlfall, the director of Manchester's Chethams School of Music, has observed of A Child of our Time, "Although the work arose out of the general situation in Europe before the Second World War, the composer knew that the work itself had to be one which could be embraced by all to reach the deepest levels of common humanity."

Tippett's libretto is acutely awake to the reality of the world in which suffering occurs. As the opening chorus sings:

The world turns on its dark side.
It is winter.

But Tippett was not content to be maudlin. The alto's aria in Part 111 speaks of hope and optimism. There is, so to speak, light at the end of Tippett's tunnel.

The soul of man
is impassioned like a woman.
She is old as the earth,
beyond good and evil,
the sensual garments.
Her face will be illumined like the sun.
Then is the time of his deliverance.

It is the capacity of the work to resonate with the suffering and reflection that a myriad of social disasters or tragedies generate which makes it such a fine contribution to the 20th century repertoire.

A Child of our Time seemed to provide Tippett with a confidence to tackle the dramatic genre opera. His operative output extended from The Midsummer Marriage which he composed between 1946 and 1953, to 1988, when New Year was first performed. The operatic medium seemed to suit Tippett and Eliot's seeming confidence in the composer's libretto technique led him to compose the words for each of his operas. Opera allowed Tippett to explore metaphysical and psychological themes and fantasies, even if musically and dramatically some of his efforts were uneven.