Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 9, 2013

A Child of Our Time is a secular oratorio by the British composer Michael Tippett (1905–98). It was inspired by events in 1938 that had affected Tippett profoundly: the assassination of a German diplomat by a young Jewish refugee (Herschel Grynszpan, pictured) and the Nazi government's reaction in the form of the so-called Kristallnacht—a vicious pogrom against Germany's Jewish population on the night of 9–10 November. Tippett uses these incidents to represent the experiences of all oppressed peoples, in the context of a pacifist message of ultimate understanding and reconciliation. The text's recurrent themes of shadow and light reflect the Jungian psychoanalysis which Tippett underwent in the years immediately before writing the work. The oratorio's most original feature is the use of African American spirituals, which perform the function allocated in Bach's Passions to chorales; Tippett believed that these songs of oppression possess a universality absent from specifically Christian and other hymns. A Child of Our Time was well received on its first performance in 1944 at the Adelphi Theatre, London, and has since been performed all over the world in many languages. (Full article...)

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