The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joseph Haydn · an oratorio in three parts, Hob. XXI:2 · thirty-four numbers for soprano, tenor and bass soloists, chorus and orchestra · German libretto by Gottfried van Swieten after Genesis, the Psalms and Milton’s Paradise Lost · composed 1796 to 1798, published by the composer in 1800
Mode
Oratorio of praise; Genesis told in recitative, made in the orchestra, answered by the chorus
Mythos
Chaos into cosmos; light from darkness; each creature made and named; the first pair in the garden, and the Fall declined
Phase
Three parts: the first four days; the fifth and sixth days and the work finished; the first morning in Eden; C minor to C major in the first number, B flat at the close
Presentation
Concert music; thirty-four numbers for three archangels, then Adam and Eve with Uriel, four-part chorus and orchestra, to van Swieten’s German, published in 1800 with an English text beside it
Register
From a bare unison C and muted strings to light in fortissimo, a lion in the trombones, a worm on the ground, a love duet and an Amen fugue
Scale
The whole natural order in six days; three angels and two human beings
Governing Proposition
Genesis is set as a week in which each day is announced in words, made by the orchestra and answered in praise. The work opens on a chaos that will not let a cadence land until light breaks on a single word, and ends in a garden where the first pair give thanks and are warned against knowing more. Its wager is that order heard coming into being is itself the meaning; its cost is a vision without a shadow.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Creation begins on a bare unison C. The movement it opens is headed Die Vorstellung des Chaos, the representation of chaos: a Largo in C minor, with muted strings, whose harmony moves without arriving. It feels for a key it does not have, and it avoids the cadence that would let it rest. A slow introduction of Haydn’s symphonies prepares a fast movement; this one prepares nothing the ear can yet name. The listener waits, and the waiting is the subject. Formlessness is not painted as noise. It is order not yet given, heard as harmony that has not found its ground.
Then the bass, the archangel Raphael, speaks the first verses of Genesis in recitative, and the chorus enters pianissimo on the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. The voices are hushed; the orchestra holds back. The command comes, Es werde Licht, and on the word “Licht” the C major chord sounds fortissimo. It is the most famous bar in the work and its thesis. The light is heard as the arrival of the key the Chaos withheld, and the ear knows it as light because the ear has been kept in the dark. Nothing in the rest of the oratorio is more compressed, and nothing else is so often remembered alone.
The second number spends the work’s whole stock of evil at once. Uriel, the tenor, sings the fall of hell’s spirits, and the chorus takes their despair as they drop into the pit; then the music turns, and a new world rises in its place. That is the last darkness The Creation admits. From here to the end every number builds or praises. The shape is already clear: an orchestra that makes, a voice that names, a chorus that answers, and a world whose single disorder has been dismissed in its first minutes.
Movement II
The plan is a week. Part I holds the first four days in thirteen numbers, Part II the fifth and sixth in fifteen, and Part III, six numbers long, the first morning in Eden. Ten of the thirty-four numbers have chorus, and each of the six days closes on one of them. The days are unequal: two numbers each for the first two, six for the third, three for the fourth, six for the fifth and nine for the sixth, on which the human being is made. Sixteen numbers are plain recitative, nearly half the count and far less of the time. Three archangels narrate the days, Gabriel a soprano, Uriel a tenor and Raphael a bass. The orchestra has three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings, with keyboard continuo under the recitatives. Van Swieten made the German from an English libretto Haydn brought back from London; it draws on the first two chapters of Genesis, on the Psalms, and on Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Each day keeps one shape. A secco recitative gives the word of Genesis; an accompanied recitative or an aria makes the thing in sound; a chorus answers in praise. On the second day Raphael’s recitative brings storm, lightning, thunder, rain, hail and snow, each painted by the orchestra before or as it is named. On the third, Rollend in schäumenden Wellen moves from D minor to D major as the sea gives way to mountains, rivers and at last a brook. The day ends on the chorus Stimmt an die Saiten, a fugal close. The work’s argument is in this order of word, deed and praise, and the music keeps it.
The fourth day carries the second great height. No. 12 makes the sunrise from one line rising in D major and a long crescendo, slow enough that the light is felt to arrive by degrees; then the moon. Part I closes on Die Himmel erzählen, in C major, Psalm 19 set for a trio of soloists and the full chorus, the heavens telling the glory of God. The C major of the first light returns as praise, and the first part ends where the Chaos ended, in the key that the darkness was looking for.
Movement III
Part II fills the made world with life. Gabriel’s aria for the fifth day gives the birds one by one: the eagle, the lark, the doves, the nightingale. The whales follow in the next number, and the day closes, as the days do, with trio and chorus. The writing is pictorial, and pictorial by design. Each creature has a sound, and the delight it gives is part of what the work means: everything made is good in its kind and can be known by the senses.
The sixth day turns the order of the work inside out. In Gleich öffnet sich the beasts arrive, and each is sounded by the orchestra before its line is sung: the lion in trombones and bassoons, the tiger, the stag, the horse, the cattle, the insects, and last the worm along the ground. Here the instruments create and the voice can only name what is already there. The perception precedes the word. It is the work’s clearest piece of thought in sound, and the one most often smiled at; it can be both.
Then the human being. Mit Würd’ und Hoheit, in C major, makes man upright, endowed with dignity and reason, and the work’s week reaches its crown. The close of the sixth day runs to three numbers, chorus, trio and chorus, on the work completed; the second chorus repeats the words of the first. Here the schema shows. The pattern that gave each day its form is set out again without development, and a liturgy that rightly repeats begins to repeat what it has already said.
Movement IV
Part III leaves the week. The first morning in Eden is a separate world in keys of its own, and the archangels give way to Adam, a bass, and Eve, a soprano, with Uriel to frame them. Aus Rosenwolken bricht opens it in E major, the morning breaking through rose-coloured clouds, and the pair answer with a hymn of thanks in which the chorus joins. The created order has become conscious of itself, and its first act is to give thanks.
Then the work becomes something it has not been: a love duet. Holde Gattin, in E flat, is operatic in its shape and galant in its manner, a long exchange of tenderness between husband and wife, and it is often shortened in performance without loss to the argument. Eve’s part in it, and in the whole of Part III, is subordination sung as joy. That is a document of the work’s age, and the work presents it as the order of nature. The pastoral is beautiful and lower in register than the days that came before.
Before the end Uriel turns to the pair with a warning. They are happy, and he warns them against wishing for more, against seeking mehr zu wissen than they should. That is all the work says of the Fall. Milton made the Fall his subject; here it is present only as the thing the oratorio declines to sing. The restraint is the work’s measure and its limit. A creation that holds no loss is easier to praise than to believe, and The Creation asks for praise.
Movement V
The last number, Singt dem Herren, is a chorus in B flat with a quartet of soloists, ending in an Amen fugue. It does not return to C, where the work began. The light of the first number turned C minor into C major; the garden stands in E major, E flat and B flat; and the work closes away from its opening key. The frame is held by praise rather than by tonality. The same voices that answered each day now answer the whole, and the whole is good.
Haydn wrote it between 1796 and 1798, after his years in London, and it was first heard privately at the Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna at the end of April 1798, under the sponsorship of the society of noblemen that van Swieten led. The first public performance was at the Burgtheater on 19 March 1799. In 1800 Haydn published the score himself, by subscription, with the German and English texts printed together. That year it was heard in London, and on 24 December 1800 in Paris, on the night a bomb exploded in the rue Saint-Nicaise on Napoleon’s way to the performance.
On 27 March 1808 it was given in the hall of the university in Vienna under Salieri, and Haydn’s presence there was his last public appearance. It has been performed without a break from its first year, the choral societies of Germany and England taking it up beside Messiah, and Haydn’s own Die Jahreszeiten followed in its line. On this desk it stands at 8.6, below Messiah and A German Requiem at 8.9 and Mozart’s Requiem at 8.8, level with Milton’s Paradise Regained, and well below Paradise Lost and the Sistine Chapel Ceiling at 9.5, the other great tellings of Genesis on the desk: the same myth received and praised here, built and contested there.
Act III · The Twelve
The six days give the work a spine no part can leave. Each day is announced from Genesis in recitative, enacted in the orchestra and answered in praise, and all six close on a number with chorus. Take out a day and the week is broken; take out the Chaos and the work loses its subject, which is the passage from it to light. The subtractive test still finds give. The pattern is repeated more than developed: trio and chorus follow in the same order in nos. 18 and 19 and again in nos. 27 and 28, and no. 28 repeats the words of no. 26. Gabriel’s two arias are separable, and Part III’s second duet is often shortened without loss. The scale is permitted by the schema more often than compelled by it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the world is an order brought out of formlessness, each thing good in its kind and known by the senses, and the human being is its crown and witness, upright, given reason, and bound by a limit on knowledge. The music discloses more than the words. The Chaos makes order audible as emergence, harmony feeling for a key it does not yet have, and in Gleich öffnet sich each creature is heard before it is named, so that perception comes before the word. That is a meaning, not a mood. What holds it down: the vision has no shadow. Evil is a rout of spirits in no. 2 and a single warning in no. 33; suffering, death and the Fall lie outside the frame, and Eve’s part is subordination sung as joy. The work states a creed of its age more than it uncovers a condition.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Height reaches the top of the repertoire at least twice. The first is the light: after the Chaos has made the ear wait without a cadence and the chorus has sung pianissimo, the C major fortissimo on “Licht” is among the most famous elevations in music. The second is the sunrise of no. 12, one rising line in D major and a long crescendo. Frequency is high through Parts I and II: the storm of no. 3, the sea of Rollend in schäumenden Wellen, Die Himmel erzählen building through its trio to the full chorus, Mit Würd’ und Hoheit, the closing fugues. Off the top: the pictorial writing rises to delight by design, and Part III is pastoral beauty in a lower register. Below the Ninth’s 9.7 on height and on the share of time spent elevated.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The archetype is built and load-bearing: the oldest of stories, chaos into cosmos, light from darkness, the creature named, the first pair in the garden. The first number does not illustrate it; it enacts it, a world forming out of unresolved sound. Each day’s shape, word, deed and praise, is the liturgical shape of the myth. Particulars keep their weight in the orchestra: the lion, the worm on the ground, the dove, the whales. Part III builds the tension the story needs, for the pair are happy and Uriel warns them against wishing to know more, so the Fall is present as the thing the work declines to sing. What holds it lower is that the archetype is received whole from Genesis and Milton rather than made from new particulars, and that the three archangels and two humans are figures, not persons.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is Handel’s English oratorio and the Viennese symphony Haydn had himself brought to its height. The departures are real. The Chaos is a representation written as harmony withholding resolution, and it looks forward to the nineteenth century. The oratorio is built on orchestral tone-painting at a density no one had used, the orchestra announcing each creature before the singer. And it is a German oratorio for a public concert, published in two languages. The stake was moderate. The work was commissioned and underwritten by van Swieten’s society of noblemen, came after Haydn’s triumphs in London, and spoke the Viennese classical style at its most assured. It is a great synthesis more than a turn.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and much of what the work knows is lost. Its claim is that creation is an order given in sequence, a word followed by a deed, and the form makes the claim: the secco recitative gives the word of Genesis, the accompanied recitative or aria realises it in sound, and the chorus answers in praise. In Gleich öffnet sich the order is reversed, and the music makes the beast before the voice names it. The Chaos is the strongest case: as a symphonic introduction its lack of cadence would be a style, but as the first thing in a creation it is the knowledge itself. Recast as a cantata of praise it would lose the days; as an opera, the angels’ distance. Charged: Part III leaves the law of word and deed for operatic duet, and the repeated trio and chorus of Part II is container more than instrument.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over two centuries, uneven in depth. The Chaos has drawn sustained analysis, in Schenker’s essay in Das Meisterwerk in der Musik and Tovey’s in the Essays in Musical Analysis among others. The whole work has H. C. Robbins Landon’s documentary volume of Haydn: Chronicle and Works, given to the years of this oratorio, and Nicholas Temperley’s Cambridge handbook of 1991. Open questions remain: the authority of the English text and the two versions of a bilingual work; whether its theology is Enlightenment natural religion or Catholic devotion; Eve; the size of the forces. But much of the work is transparent by intention and yields its meaning on first hearing. Outside the Chaos and the sunrise, return gives pleasure more than new knowledge, and that holds the figure.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real: the work made the oratorio a concert genre of the Viennese style and a German public institution, joined Handel’s choral weight to the symphonic orchestra, and in the Chaos reorganised what an introduction could do. Its influence on composition beyond the genre is narrower than the Ninth’s: the tone-painting was both imitated and mocked. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a few years the work was heard across Europe, in London in 1800 and in Paris that December; with Messiah it became a founding work of the amateur choral society and the music festival in the German lands and in England through the nineteenth century; and it stood behind the oratorios that followed, Haydn’s own Die Jahreszeiten and Beethoven’s Christus am Ölberge among them.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over more than two centuries, the text whole and performed. The score has been in print since 1800, published by its maker, and the work has been performed without a break since 1798, never needing revival, a rare case among the oratorios of its century, Messiah the other. It is a staple of choral societies and orchestras in German, in English and in other languages, and it has been recorded continually. The surface fixed to its moment is larger than the Ninth’s: the English text of 1800 is stiff and has been revised, the pictorialism was judged naive in the nineteenth century and is now heard as period charm, and Eve’s place beside Adam is a document of its age. None of these interrupted performance. The figure sits below the Ninth and Winterreise for that surface, and for a presence more ceremonial and choral than central to concert life.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The making is the late Haydn at full command. The harmony of the Chaos is controlled at every bar while seeming to lack control. The orchestration is the work’s instrument: three flutes, contrabassoon and three trombones used for meaning, not mass; the sunrise built from one rising line and a crescendo; each creature in Gleich öffnet sich drawn in a few bars. The choral fugues of nos. 10, 13, 28 and 34 are sure and festive, and the trios are balanced with a symphonist’s ear. The cost is in the words, which are part of the work. Van Swieten’s German verse is serviceable and often flat, its stretches of Milton paraphrase are wordy, the secco recitatives are conventional, and Part III’s duets fall into a galant manner beneath the rest. On the music alone the figure would stand higher.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the Chaos and the love duet Holde Gattin. One law reaches both: whatever is made is ordered, good and answered with praise, and the pair in Eden are that order become conscious of itself and giving thanks. The worm and the sunrise obey it too; the smallest thing and the greatest are each made and named. The tension is real. The key frame does not close, opening in C and ending in B flat; Part III moves from the angels’ narration to a human pastoral in another idiom; and the comedy of the pictorial writing sits at a distance from the seriousness of the Chaos. The law holds, but it is a law of praise more than of form, wide in nature and narrow in feeling: after no. 2 no darkness asks it to stretch.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The natural order is held almost entire: light, weather, sea and land, plants, sun, moon and stars, birds, fish, beasts, insects and the worm, each in its place and its sound. The sacred holds it all, in the archangels, the Creator known from what is made, and the hymn. Humanity enters in its dignity at Mit Würd’ und Hoheit, in its reason, in marriage and the first household, and in its moral limit at Uriel’s warning. The week integrates these; it does not list them. What holds the axis at the work’s lowest figure is what the week leaves out: history, the state, labour (the pair are given a garden to tend and are not shown working), society beyond the couple, suffering and death.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3, The Made at 9.1 and The Sublime at 9.0. A score in print since its maker published it in 1800 and a work performed without a break since 1798; an orchestra used for meaning, with the Chaos controlled at every bar; and the light and the sunrise at the top of the repertoire.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: the natural order held almost entire, the human orders thin, with no history, no state, no labour, no society beyond the couple, and no suffering or death. Among the gated axes, The Unconcealment at 8.2, a creed of its age that has no shadow, and The Swerve at 8.3, a great synthesis on a proven path, hold the work below the summit; The Inevitable, also at 8.3, charges a schema repeated more than developed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.7 and The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep clears it by a tenth at 8.6, but The Unconcealment at 8.2 and The Swerve at 8.3 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. The aggregate of 8.6 stands below the summit in any case.
Basis · the score of Die Schöpfung (The Creation), Hob. XXI:2, in its standard performing version: the oratorio as Haydn published it in 1800, in three parts and thirty-four numbers in the common modern numbering (some editions number differently), read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music. No score, wordbook or recording was in hand; the number plan was counted from that knowledge, and nothing was measured on a score or a sound. The oratorio is scored as one work; its numbers are not scored separately, and no performance is the object. Gottfried van Swieten’s German libretto is part of the work and is the text scored. The English text printed beside it in the first edition, published by Haydn and van Swieten and singable to Haydn’s rhythms, is a version of the work, not the work; it is the best available English for singing and is weighed only where it bears on The Made and The Imperishable. For sense, the German was read through a close modern prose translation of the kind printed with recordings. The shortfalls of either translation are not charged to the work. The German is quoted only in titles and fragments of four words or fewer where the words are certain. Left out as unverified: the exact date of the private first performance, the origin and authorship of the English libretto, the running time, the keys of most inner numbers, particular uses of the contrabassoon and third flute, remarks attributed to Haydn by his early biographers, and the scenes reported at the performance of 1808. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.