(This essay was published in the 2014 Salzburg Festival programme for a concert in which Bernard Haitink conducted the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. I reviewed the concert here.)
Joseph
Haydn (1732–1809)
Die Schöpfung Hob
XXI:2
The seeds of Die
Schöpfung were sown during Haydn’s visits to England in the early 1790s.
Though Haydn was acquainted with a surprisingly large number of Handel’s
oratorios through the Sunday morning performances given by his librettist,
Gottfried van Swieten, nothing had prepared Haydn for the Handel Festival ‘by
command and under the patronage of their Majesties’ held at Westminster Abbey
in 1791, which boasted over a thousand performers. Haydn resolved to write a
successor work at the first opportunity.
According to a letter from Swieten to the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung:
Now a few words on the poem that you choose to call my Creation. My part in the work, originally written in English, was certainly more than translation; but it was far from being […] my own. […The libretto] is by an unnamed author who had compiled it largely from Milton’s Paradise Lost and had intended it for Handel. What prevented the great man from making use of it is not known, but when Haydn was in London, it was sought out and handed over to him with the request that he set it to music. […] He then showed it to me and […] I recognized immediately that so exalted a subject would allow Haydn the opportunity […] to express the full power of his inexhaustible genius; I therefore encouraged him to take the work in hand and […] I resolved to clothe the English poem in German garb.
The ‘original’ author has never been identified. We can
certainly see, however, a fortunate similarity of outlook between mid-18th-century
England and later-century Austria, offering a splendid opportunity, wondrously
taken, both to reach summation in and, as war ravaged Europe, to bid farewell
to a vision of Enlightenment religion Swieten had long attempted to propagate.
That he did as Joseph II’s education minister – his policies often coming into
conflict with the Emperor’s more utilitarian concerns – as custodian of the
Imperial Library and as librettist for both of Haydn’s late oratorios, this and
Die Jahreszeiten (derived also from
an English source, James Thomson’s The
Seasons).
The opening ‘Vorstellung des Chaos’ is justly the most
celebrated number in the oratorio, its chromatic extremity approaching Wagner.
Sketches render clear Haydn’s unprecedented pains over its composition. ‘Chaos’
does not begin in C minor but with an emphatic unison C: length and tonality
indeterminate. Such is the earth ‘without form and void’ from which tonality
evolves and which the deed of Creation will change in the twinkling of an eye.
As Haydn’s musical conception develops, so do intimations of life. Such was
recognized in contemporary reviews, for example that in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung: ‘single
notes come forth, spawning others in turn. […] Movement begins. Powerful masses
grate against each other and begin to gestate. […] Unknown forces, swimming and
surging, […] bring tidings of order.’ As the Spirit of God moves upon the
waters, life figurations multiply and subdivide themselves, the seeds of order
sown before we return to the void, awaiting the first words of this sacred
drama.
Soon sotto voce
choral chanting of the chorus (‘Und der Geist Gottes schwebte auf der Fläche
der Wasser’) engenders a further, crucially verbal sense of expectation and
tension. A generation before the choral Finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,
we have impressed upon us the necessity of the word – and the Creator’s primal,
enlightening Word at that. The groundwork is thus prepared for Haydn’s greatest
coup de théâtre, ‘Und es ward Licht’
(And there was light). This conception of courageous simplicity, the famous
fortissimo C major chord, is entirely Haydn’s own: he ignored Swieten’s advice
that the darkness should ‘gradually disappear’. It is a passage whose stunning
effectiveness has never palled. Of the London premiere, on 28 March 1800,
Charles Burney observed that ‘the generality of the subscribers were unable to
disentangle the studied confusion in delineating chaos’. Yet ‘the composer’s
meaning was felt by the whole audience in this passage; there followed an
instant interruption of rapturous applause’. Light was a symbol that few in
Haydn’s first audiences would have failed to recognize at some level; it was
not simply a representation of the sublime, but also the quintessential symbol
of Enlightenment. Swieten had written in 1774 of the need for ‘light’ in
politics; a ‘blind’ people could readily be put to bad use. Haydn edified,
enlightened his audience through musical means.
Such splendour cedes to radiant A major in the second
number, ‘Nun schwanden vor dem heiligen Strahle’. Milton is not completely
expelled from this new (or old) heaven, the central section plunging us back
into distant, ‘chaotic’ C minor, an abrupt tonal wrench, as Hell’s spirits sink
into endless night. Yet unlike Paradise
Lost, that is the sole reference made in the work to the fallen angels; the
abiding memory is of restitution of unsullied A major: ‘Und eine neue Welt
entspringt auf Gottes Wort’ (A new created world springs up at God’s command).
Disorder once again yields to fair ‘order’, stressed throughout, as befits a
persistent Enlightenment preoccupation. ‘Order is Heav’n’s first law’,
Alexander Pope had written in his Essay
on Man; here it is firmly, eternally established. Milton returns, but to
evoke idyllic nature.
Such evocation takes up the bulk of the narrative passages,
as opposed to the great, neo-Handelian choruses of praise, prior to the
creation of man. The loving care with which Haydn depicts the ‘limpid brook’,
the ‘healing plant’, the ‘nightingale’s delightful notes’ and the ‘nimble stag’
possessed definite theological content for his audience. God’s Creation is
extolled, just as in ‘natural philosophy’, or what we should call ‘science’.
This naive tone painting, at odds with 19th-century sensibilities –
it made Berlioz ‘want to murder somebody’ – is no crowd-pleasing extra; it is
an integral part of the composition and its message. Haydn’s audience was to be
improved as well as entertained.
Without man, though, Creation would remain incomplete. For
however heavily the Augustinian tradition might weigh down upon the Church, it
had never been able to deny that ‘God created man in his own image’. The scene
is thus set for Uriel’s aria, ‘Mit Würd’ und Hoheit angetan’, in which God’s
quickening breath and man, the most astounding progeny of that breath, stand as
almost equally worthy of praise and wonder. One feature of Haydn’s setting is
particularly noteworthy in this context. Instead of returning conventionally
from the dominant, G major, as he had done the first time around, Haydn uses
the chord at the moment of God’s ‘breath’, as an augmented-sixth pivot to
modulate, quite breathtakingly, to the distant key of A flat major. Far from
coincidentally, this number is in C major, the key of Light. Having employed
this tonality extensively during Part I, it is the first and only example of
its use in Part II.
Having thus been created, it remains a human duty, indeed
the greatest such duty, to praise the Creator. Thus Adam and Eve, having
investigated the wonders of Paradise, join with the Heavenly Host in the great
hymn, ‘Heil dir, o Gott!’ (Hail, bounteous Lord!). For the final time, Haydn’s
long-range tonal plan has elevated the music to the key of Light, having
previously taken us as far away as possible, to G flat major, so as to heighten
the tonal drama and climax of restoration. Interestingly, this third and final
part of the oratorio no longer quotes from the Bible. Indeed the hymn’s
conclusion, chanting obeisance ceding to rapturous acclamation, harmonizes
remarkably well with various contemporary outlooks. We stand close to the
inhabitants of Voltaire’s Eldorado, who ‘have nothing to ask of God’, yet
nevertheless ‘thank Him unceasingly’ for everything He has given them and
‘worship God from morning till night’. We stand close to the mystical, Masonic
world of Die Zauberflöte. Yet we also
stand close to the world of Haydn’s late Te
Deum, also in C major. All those worlds and their concerns focus upon praise
for the Creator and His Creation.
But then the angels take their leave and we are left with
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This second half of Part III has often
elicited adverse criticism for providing an anti-climax. The somewhat dampened
tone is, however, an integral part of the drama. For the listener is
immediately plunged back to earth with the only recitativo secco of any length in the entire work. There follows a
lengthy duet: charming, yet definitely between mortals. To underline this, the
music falls to the key of E flat major. This is the world of commedia dell’arte – as Siegmund Levarie
has suggested, the hymn’s action is repeated in parody, the realm of Singspiel.
Indeed the opening horn duo of the final Allegro exchange exhibits almost every
characteristic of contemporary Viennese popular song. Phrases are symmetrical
groupings of four bars, in stark contrast to the hymn’s more complex phrase
structure. Horns and fiddling response are rustic. Rhythm is that of the écossaisse. Following a brief
recitative, pointing with haste, suggesting near embarrassment at the serpentine
temptation that is to come, Haydn concludes with a final chorus of praise in B flat
major.
But why, in a work whose overarching tonality is that of C
major? The central issue here is not, as in Milton, original sin, but man’s
distance from God. Man may possess attributes of the divine, yet falls far
short. That is made clear in Pope’s Essay,
itself most likely an important influence upon the ‘original’ libretto, as well
as a celebrated work in later-century Austria. The Heavenly Host has left the
scene, the final chorus of praise left to mortals. Soloists are not the
previous three archangels, but merely soprano, tenor and bass, joined for the
first and last time by an equally anonymous alto. Die Schöpfung ends as it does at least partly so as to emphasize
the enduring gulf between human and divine. Such is the lesson of the second
Biblical account of man’s creation (Genesis 2:ii–viii): God rested from His
works and created man that they might be perpetuated. Yet continue to create
though man may, the Creation would remain a unique event. Die Schöpfung remains perhaps its uniquely impressive musical
depiction.
(To read, and/or to download as a PDF, my essay published in the 2008 Austrian History Yearbook: 'Haydn's "Creation" and Enlightenment Theology, please click here.)
