The oratorio 'A Child of Our Time' was Tippett's artistic and emotional response to the events that led to the 'Kristallnacht' pogrom of November 1938. For his oratorio Tippett used as his formal and historical models the Bach Passions and Handel's Messiah which share with this contemporary morality the subject of the death of an individual set against the universal background of human suffering. Tippett's use of the spiritual as a contemporary equivalent for the Lutheran chorale of the Bach settings draws his audience more closely into the drama through the spirituals' 'unique verbal and musical metaphor'.