What is A Child of Our Time?
'''''A Child of Our Time''''' is an [[oratorio]] by [[Michael Tippett]]. It was composed between [[1939]] and [[1941]]. ==Why Tippett wrote this oratorio== Tippett composed this oratorio at the beginning of [[World War II]]. He had already lived through [[World War I]] and he was very upset about all the [[evil]] in this world. He wanted to write a musical work about it. He did it by taking the story of the beginning of World War II as a basis of the oratorio, but he also made the work speak in general about the evil of this world. In [[1938]] a 17 year old [[Jew]]ish boy Hershel Grynspan, who lived in [[Paris]], desperately wanted to attack the [[Nazi]]s because of the cruel way his parents in [[Germany]] had been treated. He therefore murdered a Nazi [[diplomat]] in France. The Nazi’s in Germany were so furious that they attacked and murdered lots of Jews in Germany. This terrible attack became known as the ''[[Kristallnacht]]''. This series of events can be found in the words of Tippett’s oratorio. Tippett wrote the words himself. The title comes from Ödön von Horváth’s [[novel]], ''Ein Kind unserer Zeit'' (A Child of Our Time), written in 1938 and published in English in 1939. Tippett began composing it on [[5 September]] [[1939]], two days after Britain declared war against Germany. In [[1958]] Tippett arranged the five negro spirituals so that they could be sung by unaccompanied chorus. They are often performed like that, separately from the oratorio. Tippett uses a similar structure to the [[Passion cantata|Passions]] of [[Johann Sebastian Bach|Bach]]. This meant that he used a narrator (like the [[evangelist]] in Bach’s Passions) who tells the story. Instead of Bach’s [[Luther]]an [[chorale]]s he adds five [[negro spiritual]]s which add an emotional comment to the events. The music of these spirituals blend very cleverly into the style of Tippett’s music. The whole oratorio, which lasts a little over one hour, has three parts. This idea is based on the three parts of [[Handel]]'s ''[[