Come and Sing Tippett Five Spirituals

Tom Appleton workshop leader and conductor

Explore and sing Michael Tippett’s Five Spirituals with the Come and Sing Company and a team of professional soloists.

The five spirituals form part of Tippett’s composition A Child of Our Time – an oratorio composed between 1939 and 1941. Immediately before he began the composition, Tippett was undergoing psychotherapy in order to come to terms with his sexuality and to address his self-worth as an artist. The work was also inspired by external events that affected the composer profoundly: the assassination in 1938 of a German diplomat by a young Jewish refugee, and the Nazi government’s reaction in the form of a violent pogrom against its Jewish population—called Kristallnacht.

A Child of Our Time was not only written to reflect the general turmoil of the period due to the onset of war, but also to shed light on Tippett’s own inner battles and conflicts. The oratorio was first performed at the Adelphi Theatre, London, on 19 March 1944. In between its composition and first performance, Tippett was imprisoned for three months (serving two) for being a conscientious objector.

Tippett’s oratorio deals with these incidents in the context of the experiences of oppressed people generally and carries a strongly pacifist message of ultimate understanding and reconciliation. The spirituals themselves are Tippett’s arrangements of well-known traditional African American songs, that not only imparted core Christian values, but also described the hardships and oppression of the slave trade.