Staging of choral work tips scales into bleakness
Written at the beginning of the second world war, Michael Tippett's popular oratorio, A Child of Our Time, was never meant to be staged. But last week at London's Coliseum, Jonathan Kent presented a dramatised version as part of the English National Opera's contribution to Tippett's 100th birthday celebrations.
The staging of the oratorio was also in tune with current commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which is being marked by events including a concert at the former concentration camp, with performances by violinist Maxim Vengerov and pianist Emmanuel Ax.
The libretto for A Child of Our Time was written by Tippett and was inspired by the story of Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jewish boy whose killing of a German diplomat in 1938 Paris was used by the Nazis as an excuse to launch Kristallnacht - the brutal assault on German Jews that began the Nazi pogrom.
Tippett modelled his three-part oratorio on Bach's Passions, with arias alternating with choruses, but using Negro spirituals instead of Lutheran hymns. The first part is set in winter, 'pogroms in the east, lynchings in the west; Europe brooding on a war of starvation'. The second is an impressionistic narrative of the teenage killer - 'the child of our time' - while the third offers tentative hope with the return of spring.
The narrative in Tippett's libretto is obscure and Kent has commented on what he calls the dramatic inertness of the piece. He tried to overcome this with a movement from darkness to light and through the direct simplicity of 'a woodcut or mystery play'. On a raked stage overhung with small lights the chorus changed from being the oppressed to the oppressor, with soloists emerging from the crowd.
Tenor Timothy Robinson sang with a controlled passion that gave the performance its essential voice of youthful indignation. At times he was also the actual voice of the boy, standing or sitting next to the vulnerable, luminous, near-naked body of the actor silently playing the role.
The production had moments of real beauty, with the loose, gangling body of the dead boy draped across his mother's lap in a stunning pieta, and his burial beneath a bare tree that later burst into flames in a symbol of spring and regeneration.
The musical highlights were the spirituals that emerged seamlessly out of Tippett's framing score and carried the high points of suffering and spirituality, such as when soprano Susan Gritton's tortured, 'How can I comfort my children when I am dead?' flowed into Steal Away as the lights above the silhouetted chorus turned into stars.
Although Kent's unfussy direction couldn't be faulted, there was a heaviness that hung over the evening, the message and tone being unremittingly bleak and portentous. Whereas agony in opera is bearable because of our involvement with characters in a structured drama, the lack of any real characterisation and narrative in Tippett's oratorio meant an hour and a quarter of symbolic angst that became wearing.
