CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique
The Monteverdi Choir

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique
Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Artistic Director and Conductor
The Monteverdi Choir
Lucy Crowe, Soprano
James Gilchrist, Tenor
Matthew Rose, Bass

HAYDN Die Jahreszeiten, Hob. XXI:3 (The Seasons)

Program is approximately 2 hours, 45 minutes, including one intermission

Sponsored by Ernst & Young LLP

This concert and the Choral Classics series are made possible, in part, by an endowment fund for choral music established by S. Donald Sussman in memory of Judith Arron and Robert Shaw.

Program Notes:

JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809)

About the Composer
Joseph Haydn spent his career in the employ of the Esterházy, a leading aristocratic Hungarian family. He donned the blue-and-gold uniform of the court in 1761, and assumed responsibility for maintaining the music library and instruments; in addition, he gave lessons, performed as a soloist, and composed. Early on, he wrote instrumental works almost exclusively, all to be performed for—and even by—the Esterházy. When the Prince wanted more music to play on his favorite instrument, the long-forgotten baryton (a kind of viol that looks a bit like a cello crossed with a sitar), Haydn dutifully wrote baryton trios, some 126 in total. His responsibilities grew in 1766 to include sacred music as well as secular, and so he penned masses for the court chapel. That same year the Prince began to sponsor operatic performances at the new palace, built on reclaimed swamplands outside Vienna; thus Haydn wrote operas. By 1786, opera was performed well over 100 nights each year, although Haydn ceased writing new works of his own in 1783 and instead focused on preparing productions.

All the while, Haydn maintained ties in Vienna—the political and cultural capital of the Hapsburg realm—and promoted his music through publications that brought him genuine popularity and fame. But those ties stretched thin when the court was at the remote palace Esterháza, as it was some 10 months per year. With the death of Prince Nicolaus in 1790, however, musical life at the court greatly diminished, and Haydn was all but released from the service of the Esterházy family. He was free to quit the country palace, tour London, settle in Vienna, and compose what he wished (rather than what his employers wanted). He returned from two tours in London a true celebrity. With Mozart’s passing in 1791, Haydn was now the preeminent 18th-century composer.

In his later years, Haydn dedicated himself to writing dramatic sacred vocal music, adopting Handel’s oratorios as a model and taking Baron Gottfried van Swieten as his collaborator. Van Swieten supplied the German translation of the English-language libretto for Haydn’s wildly popular oratorio The Creation (1798), adapting texts from Genesis, the Psalms, and Milton’s Paradise Lost to tell the story of the birth of the world in six days and the joys of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. On the heels of that triumph, Haydn composed The Seasons (1801).

About Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons)
The Creation had brought Haydn his greatest success at home and across Europe; immediately after its public premiere in March 1799, Haydn and van Swieten began planning its sequel, calculated to offer audiences more of what they had so enthusiastically embraced: big choruses, evocative genre numbers, picturesque word-painting, efficient yet affective recitatives, and tuneful arias. As he fashioned the libretto of The Seasons from a poem of the same name by James Thomson, van Swieten impudently offered specific suggestions to the composer, such as using strings for lightning in the summer storm. (Haydn deployed flutes instead.) In addition, he built in opportunities for word painting, most famously croaking frogs, which Haydn, having clearly adopted a British worldview, dismissed as vulgar, Frenchified trash. Here there should be hooting owls, van Swieten demanded, there buzzing insects. To Haydn’s enduring credit, his pictorialisms—there are indeed birds and crickets in No. 20—never seem contrived.

The Seasons is a gloriously happy piece of music. As one contemporaneous reviewer remarked, it sings of the joy of existence. Yet it caused its composer no small amount of sorrow. While working on The Seasons, Haydn’s health began to fail: Not long after the performance of The Creation, he complained of a crushing malaise. Every day the world compliments me on the fire of my recent works, he wrote to his publisher, but no one will believe the strain and effort it costs me to produce them. Some days my enfeebled memory and the unstrung state of my nerves crush me to the earth to such an extent that I fall prey to the worst sort of depression, and am quite incapable of finding even a single idea for many days thereafter.

Nevertheless, he forged ahead, and The Seasons received its public premiere in May 1801 to much acclaim. Ultimately, however, the work has suffered (unfairly, perhaps) in comparison to The Creation, whose exalted narrative seems to lift the work above the earth-bound, worldly subject of The Seasons. The eminent musicologist James Webster takes the two together as a kind of diptych that represents the history of the world, from the beginning of time and the Creation of Light to the Day of Judgment and the end of time.

A Closer Listen
The Seasons falls, quite naturally, into four parts. We begin in springtime (Nos. 1–8), but hear in the overture the passage from winter to spring in moving from a gloomy minor key to the sunnier major mode for the first chorus (Komm, holder Lenz). Each of the four parts features such grand choruses along with recitatives and arias in various guises with reference to specific genres, both sacred and secular. The second chorus with trio (Sei nün gnädig) offers a hymn of praise; the closing chorus (No. 8) is a joyous celebration that opens with stunning choral unisons accompanied by triumphant trumpets and drums. After a more delicate interlude for soloists and a brief inflection in the minor mode, the chorus introduces a contrapuntal texture with staggered vocal entrances, from lowest bass to highest soprano. The rich, dense texture finds voices overlapping, echoing, and weaving around each other. This fugal texture is often used for climactic moments, as it bears a special trace of solemnity and learnedness. The layering of independent lines harkens back not only to Handel’s oratorios, but also to Bach’s great masses.

Summer opens at dawn, the oboe solo suggesting the rooster’s call. The slow build-up of forces and volume in the music mimics the rising sun. A raging choral storm breaks (No. 17, Ach! das Ungewitter naht!) in mid-summer—or, appropriately, late on a summer afternoon, as Haydn condenses the entire season into a single day from dawn to dusk. His word painting here is obvious yet still thrilling: Sharp bursts from the flutes depict lightning, the timpani rolls thunderclaps. Autumn features two genre pieces: a hunting chorus (Hort! hört das laute Geton) complete with actual horn calls, and a rollicking drinking chorus (Juhe, juhe! Der Wein ist da) that finds the text, replete with musical references, mirrored exactly in the music. The final chorus ushers us into heaven, in the words of musicologist James Webster. Nur Tugend bleibt! (Only virtue remains!), Simon sings, stretching out the note on remains—a final instance of word painting, and a fitting end to the year.


DID YOU KNOW?

From a review in 1828: In his Creation, Haydn sang of the first recognition of the spark of life in every creature of nature, and in his Seasons he sang of the joy of existence. And all of his sacred compositions are full of the most cheerful, childlike gratitude and delight in life so that more serious generations will hardly know how to unite it with the dignity of the church and the text of the mass and other prayers. His entire being is joy.

In his Aria (No. 4), Simon whistles a tune from Haydn’s own Surprise Symphony.


FOR FURTHER READING

Heartz, Daniel. Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Landon, H. C. Robbins. Haydn: The Years of the Creation, 1796–1800. Vol. 4, Haydn: Chronicle and Works. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976–.

Webster, James. The Sublime and the Pastoral in The Creation and The Seasons. The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, edited by Caryl Leslie Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

More Information:

An evening of warmth and humanity, as the most civilized of composers turns his attention to everyday life, celebrating the blessings of weather, country living, animals, and the kindly presence of God. Haydn’s second great oratorio is based on a text provided by one of Mozart’s royal patrons.