The text of Haydn’s “The Creation”

Description

The text of Haydn’s “The Creation”

New Sources and a possible Librettist

By Neil Jenkins

ISBN-978-0-09954997-9-9

DESCRIPTION

The success of Haydn’s “Creation” has always depended to a large extent upon the language in which it was being performed, and what the audience thought of the quality of the text. Within a few years of its first performances in both Vienna and London this was being attacked as far inferior to the quality of the music that Haydn had provided for it. Both the original German and English versions suffered this early criticism.
Haydn’s great oratorio never entirely lost its appeal for choirs, even when his symphonies fell from favour in the early part of the 20th century. But it was evident that the text was once more becoming a significant issue when the work began to be performed more and more frequently in German in the post-war years. This was the period that saw a re-evaluation of all pre-nineteenth century music. Bach and Handel were ‘rediscovered’, and the baroque revival put lesser-known composers from Monteverdi onwards back on the musical map. Haydn had his own revival, leading to a situation where choirs found his Masses as rewarding to perform as those of Mozart. The leading baroque performers were not slow to prepare ‘period’ performances and recordings of The Creation. But in nearly every case they chose to perform it in German, considering that to be the more ‘original’ version. The libretto written for Handel sometime in the 1740s had become a ghostly, shadowy presence: merely an unattainable and unrecoverable source.
And so the time had come, I felt, to subject the libretto of The Creation to a thorough investigation: to compare the existing original German and English texts of the 1800 full-score with the known sources; and to try and find further sources for those portions which, for lack of other evidence, have been attributed either to the ur-librettist or to Gottfried van Swieten himself. If this could possibly lead to an identification of the original English librettist then, I felt, this would be of great service to the ongoing state of Haydn research, which has been silent on the subject for many years now. Neil Jenkins

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Origins of the libretto
3. The original librettist
4. Charles Jennens as librettist
5. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” set to music
6. Other sources: filling the gaps in the libretto
7. Thomson’s “The Seasons” – a missing source
8. Further instances of “The Seasons” as source material
9. The minor poems as sources
10. A further important source identified
11. The original input of the ur-librettist and Swieten
12. Swieten’s re-translation back into English
A) The Psalms
13. Swieten’s re-translation back into English
B) Milton texts
14. Possible original structure of the ur-libretto
15. Possible structure of Part 3 in the ur-libretto
16. The 1800 edition and the London word-books
17. Stillingfleet’s Adam and Eve scenes
18. Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s letter to the AMZ
Line by line analysis of the libretto’s sources