Part 9 (2/2)
The Stimulus of London
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, G.o.d be praised!”
Self-Criticism
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 pa.s.sages, 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.
[At this point in the original book, a facsimile of a letter regarding ”The Creation” takes up the entire next page.]
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 G.o.d 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.”
First Performance of the Oratorio
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 (see next page) had a very ornamental border, and was, of course, in German.
[At this point in the original book, a facsimile of the first play-bill for ”The Creation” takes up the entire next page.]
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 t.i.tle-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.
London Performances
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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 princ.i.p.al parts. Mara remarked that it was the first time she had accompanied an orchestra!
French Enthusiasm
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.
”The Creation” criticized
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 c.o.c.k in Bach's ”St Matthew Pa.s.sion”? Haydn only followed the example of his predecessors.
Of course, the dispa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d 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.”
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