Another week at Berkshire Choral Festival. The last concert remains my favorite, but last night’s concert was also very nice. The concert opened with one of Henry Purcell’s odes written for the birthday of Queen Mary, the one I know best, although it may or may not be the most commonly performed, “Come, Ye Sons of Art, Away”, which was cheerful, beautiful and generally well performed.
It was really an excellent opening piece.
The main work of the evening was Tippett’s “A Child of Our Time”. An interesting aspect of the performance was that yesterday was the 60th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and the concert was sung, at least partly, in tribute to those who died that day.
We were informed in the program notes and the lecture that Tippet wrote this piece of his own volition, there was no commission, no call for a choral work. He wrote the work out of his own desire to write a work with a political theme and his desire to deal with and address the events going on the world which were also causing him great inner turmoil.
This is to some extent visible in the music as it is deeply personal, at times it seems like a pastiche, blending specific vignettes of the events which prompted the work with more personal and diverse accounts of human suffering and touches of philosophy or Jungian analysis attempting to universalize and humanize the events and the feelings involved. It is an ambitious goal and Tippet is not always successful. Tippet is a masterful composer and one can get caught up in the emotional tenor of the music, which successfully balances spare modernity with warm traditional music and themes. At the same time, if one listens to the text and follows along, there passages and themes that make no sense, that become almost unintelligible, not that any individual section is nonsense, just that the plan of the work seems to follow the fragmentary lines of mental turmoil rather than a progressively reasoned course.
The narrative is vivid and very focused, no names or given or specific references to actual events, although the reference and the actions are clear. Far more time is devoted to the “why” that drives the action than the terrible acts themselves. The murder is underplayed. The Nazi Pogrom is a very short, strict and filled with menace. It is filled with the group frenzy of mass hysteria and strong Biblical overtones recalling religious hysteria. The combination is quite unsettling.
After the shocking clash of human suffering, emotion, and horror in the first two movements, the third comes as something of a shock. Here philosophy seems to play a stronger role and the answers are somewhat surprising. Despite the strong references to the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the use of spirituals, this is most definitely not a religious work although it is strongly pacifist. The boy, the “child of our time” is not uplifted. “What of the boy, then?” He presumed to judge as if he were God, he presumed to take a life “his manhood broken in the clash of powers. God overpowered him”.
Tippet’s answer is that the solution and salvation, if one can call it that, lies within ourselves. “I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole”. This is a humanist solution, a pacifist solution, but not necessarily a religious one. There is no hand of God holding up the cause of the righteous here, but the quiet spring of self-realization. Remember, in 1940 this was not the popular path. If one wishes to be roused up and justified, this is not the work one should seek out.
I was particularly interested in the roles the 5 spirituals played in the work. I am not usually a fan of gussied up spirituals but I believe that Tippet does a masterful job with them here. They are definitely enhanced and rearranged, but they do not lose their essential character, perhaps their power is enhanced because the ornateness of the music surrounding the spirituals contrasts strongly with the spare necessity of much of the music in the other sections of the oratorio. The rich music and the warmth of the Spirituals themselves provide a very warm, human contrast and response to the darker aspects of human nature and this work.
The spirituals are very well timed. Each one serves to bring the listener in to the music, to become a participant as one recognizes the sound and wants to sing along, even only mentally. They break up the work, drawing the listener in, embracing the emotions evoked by each spiritual and tying together the various threads of the oratorio. This work to me seems to be one of the more successful juxtapositions of popular and sophisticated taste.