Program Notes: Haydn The Creation

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN 
The Creation 
BORN: March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Austria 
DIED: May 31, 1809, in Vienna, Austria 
WORK COMPOSED: 1797–1798 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 29, 1798, in Vienna, conducted by the composer.

What To Listen For: 

• It’s unsurprising that a work meant to tell the biblical story of creation would evoke the sounds of nature. The most notable moments here come at the start, where the music suggests a sense of primeval darkness and nothingness that gives way to a dazzling burst of sonic light. Later, we hear a magnificent musical sunrise, a precursor to the impressionistic one in Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé. Additional onomatopoetic music in The Creation conveys waves, a storm and other phenomena. 

It’s unsurprising that a work meant to tell the biblical story of creation would evoke the sounds of nature. The most notable moments here come at the start, where the music suggests a sense of primeval darkness and nothingness that gives way to a dazzling burst of sonic light. Later, we hear a magnificent musical sunrise, a precursor to the impressionistic one in Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé. Additional onomatopoetic music in The Creation conveys waves, a storm and other phenomena. 

Franz Joseph Haydn sustained a long and consistently fruitful career. No child prodigy, he spent the first half of his life in relative obscurity, developing his skill as a composer and gradually producing an ever more accomplished and inventive body of music. As his compositions began to circulate throughout Europe, Haydn acquired an international reputation, one that he cemented with two auspicious visits to London in the 1790s. The composer produced his greatest work during his final decade of productivity, when he was well past the age of 60. Several spectacular public triumphs crowned his last years, the greatest spurred by his oratorio, The Creation. 

Haydn completed this work in 1798, but the story of how he came to write it begins earlier and involves two people who played important roles in the latter part of his career. The first of these was a violinist and impresario named Johann Peter Salomon, who arranged the composer’s two visits to England (and Haydn’s phenomenally successful concerts there) from 1791–1792 and again from 1794–1795. His principal offerings at these concerts in the English capital were symphonies, a number of which he composed expressly for his London audiences. Salomon, however, was aware of the strong English predilection for choral music, and for oratorio in particular. There, the popularity of large-scale dramatic compositions based on the bible or other serious subjects had been established earlier in the century by Handel, also a German musician working in London. Handel’s oratorios were still frequently performed and widely admired in the capital when Haydn arrived there. In fact, Haydn heard Handel’s Messiah and Israel in Egypt during his first trip to England and was deeply moved. 

During Haydn’s second visit to England, Salomon encouraged him to write an oratorio and gave him a libretto based on the creation story from the Book of Genesis that was apparently written years earlier for Handel’s use by an English poet named Lidley. While Haydn considered setting it, he felt his English wasn’t strong enough to do it justice. However, he took the libretto back to Austria with him in August 1795.

In Vienna, Baron Gottfried van Swieten took over the task of guiding Haydn toward oratorio. An Austrian nobleman, diplomat and music enthusiast who was an important figure in the lives of both Haydn and Mozart, van Swieten was passionately devoted to Baroque music, especially in the style of Bach and Handel. Every Sunday, he invited a select group of musicians, including Haydn and Mozart, to his home to read Bach’s fugues and Handel’s fugal choruses, largely unknown in Austria at the time. 

Van Swieten later founded a society to sponsor private performances of oratorios, especially Handel’s. It was for this society's concerts that Haydn added vocal parts to his orchestral piece The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross, transforming it into a quasi-oratorio. Van Swieten created the text for that work, and when Haydn showed him Lidley’s “Creation” libretto, the baron set about translating it into German. Though Haydn was not particularly enthralled with the translation, he spent much of 1797 setting it to music. 

Die Schöpfung, or The Creation, was performed for the first time on April 29, 1798, at the palatial residence of Prince Josef Schwarzenberg, one of the Viennese aristocrats who supported van Swieten’s oratorio society. A witness wrote of the event: “[I] can assure you that I never saw anything like it in my life. The flower of cultivated society, both national and foreign, was gathered there. The best possible orchestra; Haydn himself at their head; the most perfect silence; and the most scrupulous attention; a favorable hall; the greatest precision on the part of the performers; an atmosphere of devotion and respect on the part of the entire assembly ...” 

That reverent audience was all but unanimous in its acclaim of the excellence of The Creation. It soon became the most popular and famous of the composer’s works, performed frequently during the last decade of Haydn’s life. Each presentation brought new laurels. Musical societies across Europe presented the composer gold medallions honoring, as the letter accompanying one such gift stated, “that musical masterwork, everywhere celebrated ... your Creation.” 

But undoubtedly the most moving tribute Haydn received came with a performance of The Creation given in Vienna in March of 1808, when the aged and now frail composer was carried into the hall on an armchair. His entrance, one observer reported, was signaled by trumpets and timpani, and he was “received by the numerous assemblage and greeted with the joyful cry, ‘Long live Haydn!’” This demonstration brought the composer to tears. 

* * * 

In The Creation, excerpts from the first chapter of Genesis alternate with verses drawn from Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Psalms. (Milton’s contribution alone is a strong argument for singing the work in English, as we hear in this performance.) The juxtaposition of these different textual sources is reflected in the broad musical structure of the work. Haydn presents the biblical account of earth’s creation almost entirely in recitatives, which lie almost between speech and singing, for solo soprano, tenor or bass. Van Swieten, following Milton’s example, gave these parts the names of the archangels Gabriel, Urie and Raphael, but they serve simply as narrators. The only actual dramatis personae in the text are Adam and Eve, who appear in the last of the oratorio’s three sections. Interspersed between the verses of Genesis, excerpts from Paradise Lost and the Psalms provide gloss and commentary on the comparatively terse biblical narrative. The more colorful language of these interpolations invites more elaborate musical treatment, and Haydn provides this through a wealth of melodic ideas and musical textures. 

The oratorio opens with an orchestral prologue, the “Representation of Chaos.” It is one of the most remarkable passages by Haydn or any other 18th-century composer, with strange and unsettled harmonies, irregular phrase lengths, abrupt shifts in volume and a lack of melodic continuity combining to depict primordial disorder. This is, however, not actual chaos but only a musical portrayal of it, and the music is wrought with consummate skill and control. 

This prelude establishes a premise that Haydn pursues during many of the vocal numbers that follow: the use of suggestive musical figuration to “illustrate” various aspects of the text, the type of composing often described by the term “tone painting.” A striking instance occurs in the initial recitative. Here Haydn suggests primeval darkness with hushed voices and somber harmonies, but God’s creation of light brings a burst of aural radiance. Further examples can be heard throughout the oratorio: in the brief storm music during the second bass recitative; in a magnificent orchestral sunrise; in passages suggesting billowing waves, a roaring lion, galloping horses and other details. Of course, Haydn’s music is not merely illustrative. Rather, its descriptive details are embedded in a fabric of melody, harmony, counterpoint and compositional design that command admiration quite apart from any pictorial purpose. 

All this pertains to the first two parts of The Creation. The third portion, however, is a bit different. Here, there is no narration from Genesis and practically none of the “tone painting” we have heard thus far. Instead, Haydn imagines a stylized tableau of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Much of this portion of the composition is cast as duets for these characters, as they commend both the beauty of the world God has made and the bliss of matrimony. The choir affirms their sentiments in choruses of joyous praise, the last of which closes the work. 

The Creation is surely the most refreshing of the great oratorios. Its tone is generally pastoral and content, its few dark moments fleeting and incidental. There is no serpent in Haydn’s Eden. The error of knowledge and mankind’s resultant fall from grace are mentioned only in passing, and as a dim possibility rather than terrible reality. Distinguished Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon noted that the work’s optimistic outlook mirrored that of its composer’s era. “Haydn is the true son of the Enlightenment,” Landon wrote, “[because he expresses] the idea that things will end well. The Creation was such a great success in the 1790s because it confirmed what that century had been saying all along.” He might have added that it speaks still to our sense that the world was once, and might yet be, a place of purity, beauty and harmony. 

Paul Schiavo © 2025