The Creation (Die Schöpfung), Oratorio in three parts
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. He conceived The Creation (Die Schöpfung) at the end of 1795 and wrote the piece between early 1796 and early 1798 for performances organized by Baron Gottfried van Swieten for the Gesellschaft der Associierten (“Society of Associates”). He received a massive fee of 500 ducats. The German text is by van Swieten, based on an English-language libretto that had been given to Haydn during his second trip to England (1794-95). The original English text, possibly by one Thomas Linley, does not survive. Van Swieten himself suggested it was based on John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The Creation was first performed in Vienna on April 29 and 30, 1798, at the palace of Prince Joseph Schwarzenberg. The first public performance took place at Vienna’s Burgtheater on March 19, 1799, and the first English performance in March 1800, following the publication of the German/English libretto, with the English re-translated or adapted where necessary to fit Haydn’s music.
The score for The Creation calls for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists, mixed (SATB) chorus, and an orchestra of 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, fortepiano (for the recitatives), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). In his Performing Haydn’s “The Creation”: Reconstructing the Earliest Editions, musicologist A. Peter Brown determined that the forces used by Haydn in many of the early Creation performances far eclipsed those of the standard published score, numbering to 200 or more and including additional wind bands with extra contingents of strings for balance.
By the 1790s Joseph Haydn had come to be called the greatest composer of his time. It had been a long path to that summit. After years of struggle in his youth, he had been taken into the Hungarian court of Esterházy, where he spent nearly 30 years as a liveried servant, composing prolifically in all the genres of the time. As he later recalled, “My prince was content with all my works…. I was set apart from the world, there was nobody in my vicinity to confuse and annoy me in my course, and so I had to be original.” In those decades he grew steadily and transformed everything he touched, above all the string quartet and the symphony.
There is an asterisk to all that, however. For one thing, though Haydn had a healthy pride in his reputation, he did not consider himself the greatest composer alive. There was his younger friend and colleague whose gift he considered far above his own: Wolfgang Amadè Mozart. Beyond that, while Haydn was in his own time called father of the symphony and string quartet, and while his late symphonies, written during sojourns in London, raised the genre to the king of instrumental music, he considered his late sacred vocal music to be his most important work. After his London years (1791-92; 1794-95) he wrote no more symphonies and spent most of his time writing masses and oratorios.
The superiority of vocal over instrumental music was a long-established tradition, partly because big vocal works were largely religious and thus considered weighty and serious, while instrumental music was more a matter of entertainment. Haydn began to challenge that tradition, and it would be his one-time student Beethoven who completed the process of raising instrumental music to the equal of vocal. The climax of the great Baroque tradition of sacred music had been the work of Bach and Handel, both of whom died in Haydn’s lifetime. It was the musical meeting of Handel and Haydn that gave rise to Haydn’s magnum opus, The Creation.
It should be remembered that in Haydn’s time there was no standing concert repertoire. Most music played had always been current works, and composers were not expected to outlive their times. That pattern changed with Handel. He was the first composer to remain more or less at full force in musical life after he died, that mainly because of his oratorios—above all Messiah. (Beethoven was the first composer fully to view his own music in the light of posterity, and Handel the only composer he considered his superior.)
One can imagine what kind of revelation Haydn experienced at the 1791 Handel Commemoration at Westminster Abbey, where Handel’s oratorios were performed with huge forces. After being pensioned off by the Esterházy court, Haydn had been brought to England to be lionized and write symphonies. In Handel he found something he had never imagined, not only incomparable music but work that seemed to be addressed to the world and to the ages. He was stunned by the magnificence and indefatigable imagination of Messiah, and by the vivid word-painting of Israel in Egypt, where the music conjures everything from plagues of frogs and flies to a river of blood. Haydn had written plenty of vocal music sacred and secular, but nothing of this kind of scope and ambition. Now Handelian oratorio became his ideal and model of sacred vocal music. In that he set a pattern for a century and more to come: from Beethoven to Brahms to Elgar and beyond, Handel was going to be the abiding influence in large choral works. (Bach never had the kind of wide celebrity Handel enjoyed, and his major works were not heard until long after he died.)
At just the right moment, an old oratorio libretto by an unknown author (see above) fell into Haydn’s hands—one that, it was said, had been intended for Handel. Based in part on the first chapter of Genesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and other Bible passages, it was called The Creation. Haydn took the libretto back to Vienna and gave it to his friend Gottfried van Swieten, who prepared versions both in German and English. Van Swieten was a singular character, among other things passionately interested in “old” music—that mainly meaning works of the previous couple of generations, above all Handel and Bach. It was van Swieten who introduced Handel’s music to Mozart, who went on to do updated versions of Messiah and other oratorios, making the orchestra part more suited to Classical tastes.
In 1796 Haydn got to work on The Creation. For his whole career he had been extraordinarily prolific, one example being his over 100 symphonies. Now he was 64 and had in hand what he considered his crowning work, moreover one that encompassed his deeply held Christian faith. That faith was not heavy but light, a source of joy and hope. As always but now with more intensity, he prayed daily for inspiration. The piece took him two years, and both fulfilled and exhausted him.
Handel loomed over it all as a guide and inspiration, but Haydn was not going to write imitation Handel. The scope and ambition and occasional passages would be Handelian, but the voice Haydn: his imagination, humor, love of nature, optimism, and his singular kind of clarity, all of which had been central in the evolution of what came to be called the Classical style. Both Haydn and Mozart were products of the Enlightenment, which valued lucidity in all things, and in art a kind of populism: works of broad appeal, art that hides its artistry. Both Haydn and Mozart used the term natural for their goal: music that sounds familiar even if it is new, that seems almost to have written itself. Haydn’s melodies in particular have a remarkable quality of something not created but found, as if they were always there.
Haydn composed his oratorio with all the skill and experience accumulated in his long career of voluminous creation. Earlier he had written a number of operas, and at that point considered himself mainly an opera composer—until Mozart turned up, upon which Haydn mostly stopped writing opera. But he retained an operatic sense of expressing emotions, drama, and images. He was going to write a Viennese oratorio, which means one that in tone and to a degree layout was highly operatic, a mingling of recitative, solos, ensembles, and choruses, though there would be more of the latter than in an opera. The piece would be held together by Classical formal models and tonal relations.
As the premiere of The Creation approached there was a tremendous buzz in Vienna, crowds on the streets looking for tickets. The first performance at the Schwarzenberg Palace in April 1798, however, was private, by invitation only. It had been mounted by van Swieten, using the group he created to perform older choral music. The invitees included government officials, assorted nobility, and prominent musicians probably including Beethoven. Outside the hall, the excluded crowd got so rowdy that they had to be corralled by police. The public premiere came in March 1799 at the Burgtheater. Tickets were sold out months ahead. It was the biggest musical event in Viennese history.
So the tone and atmosphere of The Creation had to do with Haydn being Haydn, and part of that was his faith. Unlike Beethoven, who was nominally Catholic but preferred to deal with God man to man, Haydn was fervently religious and, again unlike Beethoven, probably a Biblical literalist. He not only believed that God created heaven and earth in seven days, he felt and saw it. And he saw it most intensely in that moment in Genesis when God beholds primal darkness and declares: Let there be light!
His response to that image was to create a musical coup that would resound through centuries. First, he had to portray the primal chaos before creation. Given who he was, it had to be a Classical chaos. He uses traditional harmonies, but they don’t move in traditional ways: again and again you hear a resolution about to happen, then it lands where you don’t expect. As the music drifts harmonically and rhythmically, voices enter with words from Genesis: In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
Haydn was a master psychologist in tones. He always knew what he was doing to his listener, especially in setting up expectations, sometimes fulfilling them and sometimes not. That included carefully administered shocks, as in the Surprise Symphony with its famous explosive chord out of nowhere. In The Creation the surprise became cosmic: chaos sinks to silence, there is a quiet pizzicato, and the choir proclaims, “Let there be light!” On that word the music explodes into C-major fortissimo, the orchestra blazing with light and joy. Before the premiere Haydn had kept that moment a close secret, not even telling van Swieten. From its first hearing, it would become one of the most celebrated gestures in music. That first time, the audience responded with wild applause that stopped the performance for several minutes.
The Creation unfolds in three sections going through the week of creation, the whole taking nearly two hours: Part 1 the first four days and the creation of the heavens and earth; Part 2 days 5 and 6 with the creation of animals and humankind; Part 3 Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Often the music has an almost childlike sense of wonder, innocence, and optimism. It is the Enlightenment vision of a perfect, rational universe, with little hint of hell and damnation and no mention of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden. The orchestra is the full Classical contingent of paired winds and brass and strings, plus timpani and trombones. The primary narrators in Parts 1 and 2 are three archangels: Gabriel (soprano), Uriel (tenor), and Raphael (bass). The piece is usually sung in German; much of van Swieten’s English version is awkward and sometimes incomprehensible.
The great coup of the first movement is followed by Uriel’s aria telling of the expulsion of Satan’s host from heaven. In tone it could be an operatic tenor hailing a fine day, though there’s a bit of the demonic eventually. There follow the recitatives, ensembles, and choruses, most of the movements short. Rather than Handelian grandeur, the choruses tend to be more intimate and straightforward, though there are some neo-Baroque fugal episodes. Every image is pictured in the orchestra: robust sounds for the creation of the sun, delicate strings for the appearance of his bride the moon. The most famous chorus is “The Heavens are Telling the Glory of God,” a grand movement recalling Handel and ending with a driving fugue glorying in the divine handiwork.
There are celebrated passages where Haydn delights in portraying the creation of animals: the proud eagle, the loving pair of doves (he dwells on the word Liebe, love, in wonderfully ingenuous passages), the song of the nightingale. Later he will wryly conjure lions and tigers, dashing deer, rustling insects, and finally the worm. His handling of the orchestra is constantly inventive, expressive, often strikingly beautiful—for example, the trio of flutes that conjure clouds on a beautiful morning. Adam and Eve have a duet like lovers in a Mozart opera. The oratorio ends joyously with “Sing to the Lord,” the work’s most Handelian movement.
The Creation went on to dozens of performances around Europe and finally the world. As it set the tradition of Handel’s influence on choral music, it created its own influence: The Creation fueled Beethoven’s oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives; its portrayal of nature led to Beethoven’s vacation in the country, the Pastoral Symphony; its chaos was the model for the whispering haze that begins Beethoven’s Ninth, and after him similar beginnings in Bruckner, Mahler, and many others. Even if Haydn usually viewed his work as something for his own age, he said of The Creation, “I spent much time over it because I expect it to last for a long time.” That kind of ambition came from Handel, and indeed it has lasted.
Jan Swafford
Jan Swafford is a prizewinning composer and writer whose acclaimed books include Mozart: The Reign of Love, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, and Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music. He is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied composition.
The first American performance of The Creation was of selections performed by the Moravian Choir with an orchestra of fifteen in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1811; the same choir under the direction of Charles Hupfeld gave the full work (in German) in Bethlehem on May 18, 1823. The oratorio was introduced to Boston serially by the Handel and Haydn Society, the three parts being sung on April 1, 3, and 4, 1817, respectively; the entire work was first heard at a single concert in Boylston Hall, Boston, on February 16, 1819, Benjamin Holt conducting. The chorus on that occasion consisted of ninety men and six women.
Beginning in November 1882, performances in BSO concerts of music from The Creation consisted of solo vocal and chorus excerpts before Koussevitzky led the orchestra-only “Representation of Chaos” in December 1925. The complete Creation entered the BSO repertoire only in February 1968, when Erich Leinsdorf led performances with Beverly Sills, John McCollum, Ara Berberian, and the New England Conservatory Chorus, Lorna Cooke deVaron, conductor. Seiji Ozawa led the BSO's first Tanglewood performance of The Creation in July 1973, with Benita Valente, Seth McCoy, Thomas Stewart, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and Tanglewood Choir, John Oliver, conductor.