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Josef Haydn's
The Creation Oratorio |  |
Haydn was led to think of writing a large choral work chiefly as the
result of frequently hearing Handel's oratorios during his visits
to the metropolis. The credit of suggesting The Creation to
Haydn is indeed assigned to Salomon, but it is more than probable
that the matter had already been occupying his thoughts. It has
been explicitly stated that, being greatly impressed
with the effect produced by The Messiah, Haydn intimated to his
friend Barthelemon his desire to compose a work of the same kind.
He asked Barthelemon what subject he would advise for such a
purpose, and Barthelemon, pointing to a copy of the Bible,
replied: "There! take that, and begin at the beginning." This
story is told on apparently good authority. But it hardly fits in
with the statements of biographers. According to the biographers,
Salomon handed the composer a libretto originally selected for
Handel from Genesis and Paradise Lost by Mr Lidley or Liddell.
That this was the libretto used by Haydn is certain, and we may
therefore accept it as a fact that Haydn's most notable
achievement in choral music was due in great measure to the man
who had brought him to London, and had drawn from him the finest
of his instrumental works.
Before proceeding further we may deal finally with the libretto
of The Creation. The "unintelligible jargon" which disfigures
Haydn's immortal work has often formed the subject of comment; and
assuredly nothing that can be said of it can well be too severe.
"The Creation" libretto stands to the present day as an example of
all that is jejune and incongruous in words for music. The theme
has in itself so many elements of inspiration that it is a matter
for wonder how, for more than a century, English-speaking audiences
have listened to the arrant nonsense with which Haydn's music is
associated. As has been well observed, "the suburban love-making of
our first parents, and the lengthy references to the habits of the
worm and the leviathan are almost more than modern flesh and blood
can endure." Many years ago a leading musical critic wrote that
there ought to be enough value, monetarily speaking, in The
Creation to make it worth while preparing a fresh libretto; for,
said he, "the present one seems only fit for the nursery, to use in
connection with Noah's ark." At the Norwich Festival performance of
the oratorio in 1872, the words were, in fact, altered, but in all
the published editions of the work the text remains as it was. It
is usual to credit the composer's friend, Baron van Swieten, with
the "unintelligible jargon." The baron certainly had a considerable
hand in the adaptation of the text. But in reality it owes its very
uncouth verbiage largely to the circumstance that it was first
translated from English into German, and then re-translated back
into English; the words, with the exception of the first chorus,
being adapted to the music. Considering the ways of translators,
the best libretto in the world could not but have suffered under
such transformations, and it is doing a real injustice to the
memory of Baron Swieten, the good friend of more than one composer,
to hold him up needlessly to ridicule.
Haydn set to work on The Creation with all the ardour of a first
love. Naumann suggests that his high spirits were due to the
"enthusiastic plaudits of the English people," and that the birth
of both The Creation and The Seasons was "unquestionably owing
to the new man he felt within himself after his visit to England."
There was now, in short, burning within his breast, "a spirit of
conscious strength which he knew not he possessed, or knowing, was
unaware of its true worth." This is somewhat exaggerated. Handel
wrote The Messiah in twenty-four days; it took Haydn the best part
of eighteen months to complete The Creation, from which we may
infer that "the sad laws of time" had not stopped their operation
simply because he had been to London. No doubt, as we have already
more than hinted, he was roused and stimulated by the new scenes
and the unfamiliar modes of life which he saw and experienced in
England. His temporary release from the fetters of official life
had also an exhilarating influence. So much we learn indeed from
himself. Thus, writing from London to Frau von Genzinger, he says:
"Oh, my dear, good lady, how sweet is some degree of liberty! I had
a kind prince, but was obliged at times to be dependent on base
souls. I often sighed for freedom, and now I have it in some
measure. I am quite sensible of this benefit, though my mind is
burdened with more work. The consciousness of being no longer a
bond-servant sweetens all my toils." If this liberty, this contact
with new people and new forms of existence, had come to Haydn twenty
years earlier, it might have altered the whole current of his
career. But it did not help him much in the actual composition
of The Creation, which he found rather a tax, alike on his
inspiration and his physical powers. Writing to Breitkopf &
Hartel on June 12, 1799, he says: "The world daily pays me many
compliments, even on the fire of my last works; but no one could
believe the strain and effort it costs me to produce these,
inasmuch as many a day my feeble memory and the unstrung state of
my nerves so completely crush me to the earth, that I fall into the
most melancholy condition, so much so that for days afterwards I am
incapable of finding one single idea, till at length my heart is
revived by Providence, when I seat myself at the piano and begin
once more to hammer away at it. Then all goes well again, God be
praised!"
In the same letter he remarks that, "as for myself, now an old
man, I hope the critics may not handle my Creation with too
great severity, and be too hard on it. They may perhaps find the
musical orthography faulty in various passages, and perhaps other
things also which I have for so many years been accustomed to
consider as minor points; but the genuine connoisseur will see
the real cause as readily as I do, and will willingly cast aside
such stumbling blocks." It is impossible to miss the significance
of all this.
Certainly it ought to be taken into account in any critical
estimate of The Creation; for when a man admits his own
shortcomings it is ungracious, to say the least, for an outsider
to insist upon them. It is obvious at any rate that Haydn
undertook the composition of the oratorio in no light-hearted
spirit. "Never was I so pious," he says, "as when composing The
Creation. I felt myself so penetrated with religious feeling
that before I sat down to the pianoforte I prayed to God with
earnestness that He would enable me to praise Him worthily." In
the lives of the great composers there is only one parallel to
this frame of mind--the religious fervour in which Handel
composed The Messiah.
The first performance of The Creation was of a purely private
nature. It took place at the Schwartzenburg Palace, Vienna, on
the 29th of April 1798, the performers being a body of
dilettanti, with Haydn presiding over the orchestra. Van Swieten
had been exerting himself to raise a guarantee fund for the
composer, and the entire proceeds of the performance, amounting
to 350 pounds, were paid over to him. Haydn was unable to describe
his sensations during the progress of the work. "One moment," he
says, "I was as cold as ice, the next I seemed on fire; more than
once I thought I should have a fit." A year later, on the 19th of
March 1799, to give the exact date, the oratorio was first heard
publicly at the National Theatre in Vienna, when it produced the
greatest effect. The play-bill announcing the performance had a very ornamental border, and was, of course, in
German.
Next year the score was published by Breitkopf & Hartel, and no
fewer than 510 copies, nearly half the number subscribed for,
came to England. The title-page was printed both in German and
English, the latter reading as follows: The Creation: an
Oratorio composed by Joseph Haydn, Doctor of Musik, and member of
the Royal Society of Musik, in Sweden, in actuel (sic) service of
His Highness the Prince of Esterhazy, Vienna, 1800." Clementi had
just set up a musical establishment in London, and on August 22,
1800, we find Haydn writing to his publishers to complain that
he was in some danger of losing 2000 gulden by Clementi's
non-receipt of a consignment of copies.
Salomon, strangely enough, had threatened Haydn with penalties
for pirating his text, but he thought better of the matter, and
now wrote to the composer for a copy of the score, so that he
might produce the oratorio in London. He was, however,
forestalled by Ashley, who was at that time giving performances
of oratorio at Covent Garden Theatre, and who brought forward the
new work on the 28th of March (1800). An amusing anecdote is told
in this connection. The score arrived by a King's messenger from
Vienna on Saturday, March 22, at nine o'clock in the evening. It
was handed to Thomas Goodwin, the copyist of the theatre, who
immediately had the parts copied out for 120 performers. The
performance was on the Friday evening following, and when Mr
Harris, the proprietor of the theatre, complimented all parties
concerned on their expedition, Goodwin, with ready wit, replied:
"Sir, we have humbly emulated a great example; it is not the
first time that the Creation has been completed in six days."
Salomon followed on the 21st of April with a performance at the
King's Theatre, Mara and Dussek taking the principal parts. Mara
remarked that it was the first time she had accompanied an
orchestra!
Strange to say--for oratorio has never been much at home in
France--The Creation was received with immense enthusiasm in
Paris when it was first performed there in the summer of this
same year. Indeed, the applause was so great that the artists, in
a fit of transport, and to show their personal regard for the
composer, resolved to present him with a large gold medal. The
medal was designed by the famous engraver, Gateaux. It was
adorned on one side with a likeness of Haydn, and on the other
side with an ancient lyre, over which a flame flickered in the
midst of a circle of stars. The inscription ran: "Homage a Haydn
par les Musiciens qui ont execute l'oratorio de la Creation du
Monde au Theatre des Arts l'au ix de la Republique Francais ou
MDCCC." The medal was accompanied by a eulogistic address, to
which the recipient duly replied in a rather flowery epistle. "I
have often," he wrote, "doubted whether my name would survive me,
but your goodness inspires me with confidence, and the token of
esteem with which you have honoured me perhaps justifies my hope
that I shall not wholly die. Yes, gentlemen, you have crowned my
gray hairs, and strewn flowers on the brink of my grave." Seven
years after this Haydn received another medal from Paris--from
the Societe Academique des Enfants d'Apollon, who had elected him
an honorary member.
A second performance of The Creation took place in the French
capital on December 24, 1800, when Napoleon I. escaped the
infernal machine in the Rue Nicaise. It was, however, in England,
the home of oratorio, that the work naturally took firmest root.
It was performed at the Worcester Festival of 1800, at the
Hereford Festival of the following year, and at Gloucester in
1802. Within a few years it had taken its place by the side of
Handel's best works of the kind, and its popularity remained
untouched until Mendelssohn's Elijah was heard at Birmingham in
1847. Even now, although it has lost something of its old-time
vogue, it is still to be found in the repertory of our leading
choral societies. It is said that when a friend urged Haydn to
hurry the completion of the oratorio, he replied: "I spend much
time over it because I intend it to last a long time." How
delighted he would have been could he have foreseen that it would
still be sung and listened to with pleasure in the early years of
the twentieth century.
No one thinks of dealing critically with the music of "The
Messiah"; and it seems almost as thankless a task to take the
music of The Creation to pieces. Schiller called it a
"meaningless hotch-potch"; and even Beethoven, though he was not
quite innocent of the same thing himself, had his sardonic laugh
over its imitations of beasts and birds. Critics of the oratorio
seldom fail to point out these "natural history effects"--to
remark on "the sinuous motion of the worm," "the graceful
gamboling of the leviathan," the orchestral imitations of the
bellowing of the "heavy beasts," and such like. It is probably
indefensible on purely artistic grounds. But Handel did it in
"Israel in Egypt" and elsewhere. And is there not a crowing cock
in Bach's "St Matthew Passion"? Haydn only followed the example
of his predecessors.
Of course, the dispassionate critic cannot help observing that
there is in The Creation a good deal of music which is
finicking and something which is trumpery. But there is also much
that is first-rate. The instrumental representation of chaos, for
example, is excellent, and nothing in all the range of oratorio
produces a finer effect than the soft voices at the words, "And
the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Even the
fortissimo C major chord on the word "light," coming abruptly
after the piano and mezzoforte minor chords, is as dazzling to-day
as it was when first sung. It has been said that the work is
singularly deficient in sustained choruses. That is true, if we
are comparing it with the choruses of Handel's oratorios. But
Haydn's style is entirely different from that of Handel. His
choruses are designed on a much less imposing scale. They are
more reflective or descriptive, much less dramatic. It was not in
his way "to strike like a thunderbolt," as Mozart said of Handel.
The descriptive effects which he desired to introduce into his
orchestration made it necessary that he should throw the vocal
element into a simpler mould. Allowance must be made for these
differences. Haydn could never have written The Messiah, but,
on the other hand, Handel could never have written "The
Creation."
The chief beauty of Haydn's work lies in its airs for the solo
voices. While never giving consummate expression to real and deep
emotion, much less sustained thought, they are never wanting in
sincerity, and the melody and the style are as pure and good as
those of the best Italian writing for the stage. With all our
advance it is impossible to resist the freshness of "With verdure
clad," and the tender charm of such settings as that of "Softly
purling, glides on, thro' silent vales, the limpid brook." On the
whole, however, it is difficult to sum up a work like The
Creation, unless, as has been cynically remarked, one is
prepared to call it great and never go to hear it. It is not
sublime, but neither is it dull.
Josef Haydn Facts and Information
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