Building a Library
Terry Blain navigates the gloom to shed light on the finest recordings of Haydn’s gloriously imaginative and enduringly popular oratorio
The finest recordings of Haydn’s Creation
The work
When Joseph Haydn first visited London in 1791, he saw something he had never seen before – grand performances of Handel’s oratorios in Westminster Abbey, some with 1,000 or more performers. The effect was electrifying. ‘He was struck as if he had been put back to the beginning of his studies,’ wrote an early biographer, ‘and had known nothing up to that moment.’
Could he do something similar? Although he was already a successful composer of over 90 symphonies, 50 string quartets and many other pieces, the thought stalked Haydn constantly in the period between his first visit to London and the second two years later. But what would the subject of a new oratorio be? During his second London visit Haydn fortuitously got an answer, when he was given the text of a libretto describing the creation of the universe. Haydn took it home to Vienna and showed it to Gottfried van Swieten, a patron of his music.
Swieten, in his own words, ‘recognised at once that such an exalted subject would give Haydn the opportunity I had long desired, to show the whole compass of his profound accomplishments.’ Enthused, Swieten translated the libretto into German, providing a parallel text in English based on the original text, with his own amendments.
The die was cast, and Haydn began setting the words of The Creation (Die Schöpfung in German) to music. Though a practising Catholic, there is evidence that Haydn was especially affected by the subject matter of his new composition. ‘I was never so pious as during the time I was working on The Creation,’ he wrote. ‘Daily I fell on my knees and asked God that He grant me the strength to bring this work to a successful conclusion.’
The text that Haydn set in The Creation is an amalgam of Biblical verses from Genesis and the Psalms, with passages from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost. Parts One and Two of the oratorio describe the first six days of creation in a sequence of recitatives, arias and choruses, with tenor, bass and soprano
The Creation’s reverence for the natural world chimes with our own ecological concerns
soloists playing the archangel narrators Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel. Part Three depicts the Garden of Eden on the seventh day, with Eve and Adam before their fall.
Musically, The Creation contains some of Haydn’s most vividly communicative music. The orchestral opening employs remarkably advanced harmonies to suggest primeval chaos. A lion, tiger, cattle, sheep, birds and swarms of insects are all depicted with brilliant musical onomatopoeia. And the grand choruses – ‘Awake the harp’, ‘The heavens are telling’, ‘Sing the Lord’ – explode with gratitude for the mysterious phenomenon of human existence.
A number of private performances of The Creation were given in Vienna before the oratorio’s public premiere in March 1799 at the city’s Burgtheater. The new work was a sensation, although one audience member recalled that conditions inside the crowded theatre were somewhat less than salubrious. ‘In my whole life I will not hear another piece of music as beautiful,’ he wrote. ‘And even if it had lasted three hours longer, and the stink and sweat-bath had been much worse, I would not have minded.’
A year later the score of The Creation was published, with texts in both German and English. The piece began conquering Europe, and was quickly premiered in an expectant London. Haydn himself reportedly judged The Creation to be his best of all his compositions. He unquestionably intended it as an expression of his Christian belief, and its praise of God as the progenitor of all we see on planet earth is heartfelt and genuine.
Yet in today’s more secularised environment, with organised religion increasingly eschewed or distrusted, it is fascinating to note how The Creation still packs a powerful contemporary message. Its reverence for the natural world chimes unmistakably with the ecological concerns of our current historical moment.
Haydn as an eco-warrior in music? It sounds an eccentric idea. But The Creation is in one sense an abiding call to arms for listeners who value life on earth, and its exuberantly inventive music glows with a profound attachment to the life around us that we increasingly see threatened.
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