Introduction

Welcome to this evening's concert at the Symphony Hall. If I had to choose one word to describe Haydn’s Creation, I think it would be ‘technicolour’.

My first experience of the piece came as a teenager when I took part in a performance in Bedford, my hometown. I sang with gusto in the choir, adored the bubbly joy of the soprano soloist and marvelled at the sounds being produced by the orchestra. Having sung it many times since then; as a choir member or as a soloist, in German or in English, even ‘With verdure clad’ as an audition aria for Ex Cathedra; I still seem to discover new delights every time, which is testament to how rich the score is. Each conductor and performer bring out different elements and I can’t wait to see what will surprise me this evening.

The colours come from the orchestration and the word-painting, of course. But more than that, from the very beginning in Haydn’s extraordinary opening, we feel him challenging the usual musical structures and conventional harmonies… deliberately creating confusion - we never quite know where we are. All swiftly followed by the mystery of God’s spirit, a brilliant goosebump moment (for me, at least), and there we have the first day.

Haydn seems to relish drawing the making of the world for us. Sun and moon; whales and worms; plants, birds, man and the garden of Eden all have their own special sound worlds. Every ‘extra’ instrument is somehow indispensable, whether it’s the third flute that joins us for Part Three, or the (with respect) giggle-inducing contrabassoon.

For me, it’s the sense of joy and wonder that makes ‘The Creation’ one of my favourite pieces to be a part of. So from Chaos to Amen and with all the colours in between, that is what I’m most looking forward to sharing with the audience tonight.

Carolyn Sampson
Soprano

Programme Notes

A regular visitor to London, Haydn was inspired to write a mighty oratorio after hearing performances of Handel’s choral works. He tackled the biggest subject in the Bible: the creation of everything. The music is suitably immense, for a big orchestra, chorus and soloists. Three fantastic singers take up the solo roles while Kazuki leads the CBSO and CBSO Chorus to bring out every detail of this epic work.

The Creation, Hob. XXI:2

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

An Austrian in London

When the 58-year old Joseph Haydn arrived in London on 1st January 1791, after a two-week journey from Vienna, he sparked a Georgian media-frenzy. Haydn was fascinated by Britain, enthusiastically noting down in a private notebook his reactions to everything from Royal Navy warships to Cockney slang. (A punch recipe served by the Prince of Wales – involving multiple bottles of burgundy and champagne – seems to have made a particular impression). In June 1792, he encountered one of the scientific wonders of the age. He recorded the occasion in his personal notebook:

"On 15th June I went from Windsor to Doctor Herschel, where I saw the great telescope. It is 40 feet long and 5 feet in diameter. The machinery is very big, but so ingenious that a single man can put it in motion with the greatest ease."

William Herschel’s telescope (actually, it seems likely that Haydn was welcomed and shown around by Herschel’s sister and fellow-astronomer Caroline) clearly made an impression upon him – an impact rivalled, perhaps, only by the massive Handel Commemoration Festival at Westminster Abbey in May 1791. Over 1000 performers were assembled, and an even larger audience heard performances of Handel’s Israel in Egypt, Messiah, Zadok the Priest and extracts from Saul, Judas Maccabeus and Deborah. The concerts were lively occasions, attracting all levels of society: one observer noticed that the audience munched on "hard boiled eggs, ham and roast meat" during the intervals. "One had almost to wade through a mass
of eggshells and other rubbish on the way out of the church", he noted.

At one of these the music-lover William Gardiner recorded that "Haydn was present at this performance, and by the aid of a telescope, planted on a stand near the kettle-drums, I saw the composer near the king’s box." Haydn seems to have been profoundly moved – both by the music, and the overwhelming communal response it inspired (a novel and stirring experience for a composer who had spent much of his career working for a closed circle of Hungarian aristocrats).

"He confessed" recounted one of his first biographers, Giuseppe Carpani, "that when he heard the compositions of Hendl [sic] in London, he was struck as if he had been put back to the beginning of his studies and had known nothing up to that moment". Haydn returned to Austria determined to create something with the same power and popularity. And he wanted it to be heard and enjoyed by his friends in Britain too.

Paradise Lost…and Found

Before leaving London for the last time in 1795, Haydn had been given an English libretto for an oratorio based on Milton's Paradise Lost, in which three angels and Adam and Eve retell the opening verses of the Book of Genesis. We don't know who wrote it, though Haydn was assured that it had originally been intended for Handel. Modest about his grasp of English, he hesitated to set it in the original, so he enlisted one of Vienna’s most knowledgeable music-lovers, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, who “resolved to clothe the poem in German garb”. Van Swieten’s translation is the text that Haydn set as Die Schöpfung – and which Haydn had translated back into English as The Creation. Completed in the autumn of 1797, Die Schöpfung / The Creation became the first work in musical history to be published bilingually. It would soon become almost as popular as Messiah in the English-speaking world.

But it was in Vienna that The Creation received its premiere, on 30th April 1798, at the Palais Schwarzenberg (the reaction was ecstatic). The reaction was ecstatic, and understandably - because no work gives us a bigger, warmer or more generous picture of Haydn as thinker, creative genius, and supremely loveable human being. Van Swieten’s libretto gave him ample opportunity to exercise his sense of humour, and nineteenth century critics, in particular, disapproved of his playful tone-painting (inspired directly by Handel): his musical portrayals of rain, hail, and snow; the sun and moon, the tiger, eagle and whale, and (of course) the humble earthworm.

Of course, they’d missed the point. The astonishing, tonally-ambiguous prelude to The Creation, the Representation of Chaos, is itself a radical masterpiece: music unbounded by notions of classical stability, representing a universe without form. But Haydn planned it as part of a far greater design. Chaos is defeated by the most dazzlingly powerful affirmation of tonality in all classical music - a mighty burst of C major (the brightest and simplest of keys) as God creates light. And throughout the whole work, passages of relaxation (the radiant soprano aria With Verdure Clad, the rosy dawn that opens Part Three), of playful humour (all those sound-effects, and a bubbly comic-opera duet for Adam and Eve) are balanced by music of visionary grandeur.

Light out of Darkness

Learning from Handel, Haydn structured his oratorio around big, stirring choruses. As thrilling to sing as they are to hear, Awake the Harp, The Heavens are Telling, and Achieved is the Glorious Work match Handel’s majesty with classical symphonic sweep. And then there are the moments where Haydn simply expresses Biblical ideas in some of the happiest music of the Age of Enlightenment - he freely admitted that he “was never so devout as when I was working on The Creation”. Yet his faith was as much about joy as awe: "Whenever I think of God" he famously remarked (according to Stendhal) "I can imagine only a Being infinitely great and infinitely good, and the idea of this latter attribute of the divine nature fills me with such confidence, such joy, that I should set even a miserere in tempo allegro.” Both worms and angels had their place in his universe.

Still, Haydn is emphatically not naïve. At Mozart's suggestion, Haydn had joined the Viennese Masonic lodge Zur wahren Eintracht (True Concord) in February 1785, and his personal library contained a range of banned philosophical texts. He didn't just take the Bible’s word for the splendour of the Universe – as we know, he’d used science to gaze deep into the heavens.

Similarly, in The Creation, the very noblest music celebrates the limitless potential of Creation's highest achievement - humanity. Haydn ends his story before the Fall of Man; his aim – in a Europe tormented by war and social turmoil – was to offer a hopeful vision of the world that a loving God had intended, not the mess that humanity had made of it Written three years before Beethoven's first symphony, the arias Now Heaven in FullestGlory Shone and In Native Worth are surely the crowning moment of the 18th century Enlightenment in classical music.

Haydn’s contemporaries felt it then, as we feel it today. Haydn’s final public appearance was at a performance of The Creation at the University of Vienna in honour of his 76th birthday, on 27th March 1808. Antonio Salieri was at the keyboard, and Haydn’s former pupil Beethoven was in the audience. (Afterwards, as Haydn left, he kneeled to kiss the old man’s hand). At the words And There Was Light the entire audience erupted into spontaneous applause. Haydn, no longer able to stand unaided, raised his arms to heaven and declared, as strongly as his weakened voice allowed, "Not from me – it all comes from above".

© Richard Bratby