Masterworks 8: Let There Be Light!

Franz Joseph Haydn

Born: March 31, 1732, Rohrau, Austria.
Died: May 31, 1809, Vienna, Austria

The Creation

• Composed: 1795-98.
• Premiere: The first performance took place at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna on April 30, 1798, under the direction of the composer.
• Duration: 100:00 with an intermission midway through Part II

Background

By the 1790s, Haydn was well-established as the Grand Old Man of Viennese musical society. His international reputation was secure, and he was living in semi-retirement as an employee of the Esterházy family he had served for four decades. The last of Haydn’s Esterházy patrons, Prince Nikolaus II (r. 1794-1833), made few demands on Haydn aside from producing a Mass each year as a name-day present for the Princess. Haydn otherwise had almost total freedom to compose and travel. Johann Peter Salomon, a London impresario, wasted no time engaging Haydn for his spring concert series. After some initial hesitation (which was overcome by Salomon’s promise of 200 pounds), Haydn agreed to come to England. His first English tour in 1791-92 was wildly successful, and he contracted with Salomon for a second trip to London in 1794-95. Not only were these tours the impetus for his great “London” symphonies—Nos. 93-104—they also led to the composition of The Creation, an oratorio that Haydn himself considered to be his greatest achievement.

Haydn and the Oratorio

Though the oratorio as a form dates from the 17th century, it was George Frideric Handel who truly popularized it in the 1730s and 1740s, when he borrowed musical forms from Italian opera to create large-scale English oratorios. Handel’s oratorios were mostly musical versions of familiar Biblical stories told through dramatic recitatives, arias, ensembles, and choruses. It was also a fairly well-known form in Vienna in the 1790s. Haydn himself had written an Italian oratorio, Il ritorno di Tobia (The Return of Tobias, based upon a story from the Apocrypha) in 1775, for the Tonkünstler-Societät (Musicians’ Society), a musician’s benefit organization. In addition to his many Mass settings, Haydn also completed two huge sacred pieces prior to The Creation: his Stabat Mater (1767) and The Seven Last Words of Christ (originally an instrumental work, but recast in 1796 to include vocal soloists and chorus). Neither of these pieces is truly an oratorio, but they clearly show Haydn’s interest in large-scale sacred forms. The great patron of oratorio in Vienna was Baron Gottfried von Swieten, an admirer of J. S. Bach and Handel. He was closely connected with the Tönkustler-Societät and had provided a German translation of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus for one of their concerts in 1779. During the 1780s and early 1790s, von Swieten arranged for dozens of Viennese performances of Handel oratorios in Vienna.

If the oratorio was an item of polite interest in Vienna, it had reached cult status in England. In 1784, the first great Handel Festival was held in Westminster Abbey under the patronage of King George III. Increasingly enormous performances, sometimes including hundreds of singers, were held annually. Haydn heard a festival performance of Messiah in May of 1791 and was profoundly moved, reportedly bursting into tears during the “Hallelujah” chorus. Though Haydn’s visits to London are known today primarily for the symphonies he composed for Salomon, his choral music was also widely appreciated, particularly a novelty piece called The Storm and some of the choruses from Tobia. It is not surprising that Salomon pressed Haydn to create an oratorio, and when he returned to Vienna in 1795, after a second stay in London, Haydn brought back a libretto for an oratorio on The Creation.

Creating The Creation

According to Salomon, the libretto Haydn received in 1795 was once offered to Handel. In fact, in a 2005 article, British musicologist Neil Jenkins made a compelling case for Charles Jennens—the librettist of Messiah—as the author of The Creation. The libretto was probably passed on to Salomon by Thomas Linley, one of the directors of the successful Drury Lane oratorio concerts in the 1790s. When Haydn returned to Vienna, he turned the libretto over to Baron von Swieten. At about the same time, von Swieten prepared the text for Haydn’s Seven Last Words, and he was largely responsible for recasting the English libretto of The Creation in a German translation (Die Schöpfung) that Haydn could use to compose. As he later wrote, he had “adorned the English text in German clothes.” He also made suggestions to Haydn regarding the setting of individual numbers

The original libretto told the creation story through a series of quotations from the “Authorised Version” (or “King James Version”) of the Bible: the first two chapters of Genesis and the Psalms. Interspersed with these Bible verses are passages adapted from Milton’s Paradise Lost. As recast by von Swieten, the oratorio has a clear three-part form. Parts I and II tell the story of the first six days of creation, as narrated by Milton’s angels, while Part III is set in the Garden of Eden. There are distinct characters who take the solo and ensemble numbers: the angels Gabriel (soprano), Uriel (tenor), and Raphael (bass), and in Part III, Adam (bass) and Eve (soprano). As in Handel’s oratorios, the chorus plays the central role, and it is the choruses that remain the most familiar moments from The Creation.

With a workable libretto in hand, Haydn set down to work. The Creation occupied him for nearly two years, the longest time he ever spent on a single composition. He wrote on one occasion that he expended special care on this oratorio because he considered it a composition for posterity. It was also quite obviously an act of faith for this deeply religious man, who appended the words “praise to God” to the end of every completed composition. He later remarked: “I was never so devout as when I was at work on The Creation; I fell on my knees each day and begged God to give me the strength to finish the work.”

The first performance and The Creation’s legacy

Salomon probably encouraged Haydn to create an oratorio with the idea that Haydn himself would return to London to lead the first performance. Haydn may have been unsure about whether to perform the new work in England or Austria, but von Swieten clearly had a Viennese premiere in mind from the start, and eventually, plans were made to perform Die Schöpfung at a private concert at Prince Schwarzenberg’s palace, during the Lenten season in 1798. The performance was sponsored by a group of noble citizens, who paid Haydn handsomely for the right to stage the premiere. The performance was delayed until late April, but the oratorio was rehearsed before a full audience on April 29. The first performance the next day was a private affair, but hundreds of people crowded into the street around the Schwarzenberg Palace to hear this eagerly anticipated work.

The first public performance in Vienna a year later was sold out far in advance, and Die Schöpfung was performed nearly forty more times in Vienna during his lifetime. The last performance Haydn attended occurred on March 27, 1808, just a year before he died: the aged and ill Haydn was carried in with great honor on an armchair. According to one account, the audience broke into spontaneous applause at “Let there be light,” and Haydn, in a typical gesture, pointed upwards and said: “Not from me—everything comes from up there!” Remarkably, The Creation was also performed more than forty times outside Vienna during his lifetime: elsewhere in Austria and Germany, throughout England, and in Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Russia, and the United States. In the 19th century, The Creation was matched in popularity as a sacred work only by Handel’s Messiah. As with Messiah, it was common to perform the work with enormous forces: one 1837 Creation at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna featured over a thousand performers! It was one of the great favorites of amateur choral societies and church choirs throughout the early 20th century. 

What You’ll Hear

If the overall structure of the oratorio was determined by von Swieten’s libretto, the musical accomplishment of The Creation is Haydn’s own. A fine example of the drama of his setting comes at the very beginning. The overture, Representation of Chaos, is one of his finest orchestral pieces. Though it is hardly “chaotic,” it manages to convey an unsettled sense of brooding and expectation that continues through Raphael’s recitative “In the beginning…” and is suddenly cast aside when the chorus triumphantly reaches the word “light.”

Describing the entire piece in a number-by-number commentary is unnecessary, but a few general comments may be helpful. Haydn, of course, wrote the piece with the German text in mind, and the English version, in a language that he only barely understood, has many awkward moments of text-setting. However, these are almost always quietly fixed in modern performances. The formal structure is rather old-fashioned by the standards of 1798, with distinct numbers—recitatives, arias, ensembles, and choruses—clearly divided. Some of Haydn’s secco recitatives (“sung speech” with a simple harpsichord continuo) would probably have sounded perfectly at home in a Handel oratorio four decades earlier. However, a clear, dramatic flow from section to section smoothes over what might otherwise be a stiff and formal structure. The care that Haydn lavished on this piece is also apparent in countless small details. In Gabriel’s famous “bird aria” (“On mighty pens uplifted, soars the eagle”), for example, each bird described (eagle, lark, dove, and nightingale) receives its own characteristic call and orchestration.

The choral writing in The Creation is simply magnificent, and many of the choruses have long since taken on a life of their own: surely anyone who has ever been in a church choir will have sung Achieved is the glorious work. These choruses, culminating with the great fugue Sing the Lord ye voices all, are some of the most stirring moments in the work, but some of most subtle writing comes when the chorus is combined with the soloists. In the lengthy duet in Part III (By Thee with bliss), the chorus interjects constantly, sometimes echoing, and sometimes quietly underlaying the passionate duet between Adam and Eve.

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Program notes ©2024 by J. Michael Allsen