CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Carnegie Hall Festival Chorus

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, February 14th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Carnegie Hall Festival Chorus
Orchestra of St. Luke's
Helmuth Rilling, Conductor
Heidi Grant Murphy, Soprano
Nicholas Phan, Tenor
Nathan Berg, Bass-Baritone
Kathy Saltzman Romey, Choral Preparation

HAYDN Die Schöpfung, Hob. XXI:2 (The Creation)

Celebrating Hungary is sponsored by Erste Group.

This concert is 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)Die Schöpfung, Hob. XXI:2 (The Creation)

Haydn returned to Vienna in the late summer of 1795 from his wildly successful tour in London as a cultural hero. Like Handel 50 years before, Haydn was exalted by a new, modern public whose character was more heterogeneous than it had ever been before. Haydn was asked by a group of Viennese nobles to write the music for the creation of the world (an oratorio loosely based on the book of Genesis). Public concerts had political as well as artistic purposes; and Haydn conceived The Creation as a statement of Germanic identity, in an atmosphere clouded with doubt from French Revolutionary wars. It must not be forgotten, however, that Haydn—and the public for that matter—had an emotional engagement with the themes of this oratorio. The Creation is, after all, the work of a very devout man who felt a personal, heartfelt connection to the Transcendent like never before.

The Creation is the first great oratorio since those of Handel written 50 years before. In England, Haydn had been acquainted these immensely popular oratorios, and that experience inspired the The Creation’s dimensions: the sizes of the orchestra and chorus alone were gigantic by even today’s standards (approximately 200 performers). Yet Haydn’s innovations have little to do with size; while the earlier aesthetic consisted in the contrasting of instrumental masses, Haydn reached dramatic expression in this oratorio by achieving an orchestration hitherto unknown. One would think that with his Symphony 104 Haydn would have said his last word on orchestral style, and that after so many works for that medium he had exhausted his possibilities. But no— the astonishing orchestral prelude depicting chaos shows that Haydn had one more thing to say.

The prelude entitled “Representation / Idea of Chaos” strikingly exhibits this extraordinary feeling of color: it is a representation of the disorder of the universe, achieved by superimposing ambiguous intervals to create the sensation of the absence of harmony. This ingenious portrayal is stupefying both sonically and symbolically, for the absence of harmonic identity or direction is like the absence of being itself. Not only is the prelude formally amorphous —no matter what some theorists declare—but it is also a tour-de-force of coloristic effects, with the woodwinds and heavy brass (three trombones) tearing the somber canvas with strident colors.

After the prelude, the archangel Raphael intones Genesis’s first words, and with “And then there was Light” the chorus explodes in a radiant C-major chord—the first real key of the piece. The chroniclers of the first performance reported that “when Light broke forth for the first time, the enchantment of the electrified Viennese was so profound that the performers could not proceed for some minutes.” It can be easily imagined what a profound impression—how ultra-modern in its day—this masterwork must have had on its first audience.

The first part of the oratorio focuses on the first to fourth days of creation (the conception of light, land and sea, heavenly bodies, and plant life). The work goes on to comprise a succession of a recitative using Genesis prose, a commentary set as an aria or ensemble, another recitative, and a choral hymn of praise. The third section (n. 3), presents different aspects of nature: flutes and clarinet depict lightning, and strings and drums, thunder; violins drop rain in triplet figures, ending in wintry snow. N. 4 follows this picturesque scene with a soprano solo and chorus praising the firmament’s stars and the second day. N. 5 depicts the separation of earth from water. A very dramatic solo bass aria in D minor follows (n. 6); the strings depict the turmoil of the mountains emerging from the ocean; as the plains and meadows are stretched, the tension eases and the aria ends placidly, introducing a pastoral character. N. 7 is a celebrated coloratura aria for the soprano who announces the delights of planting the earth’s green. Orchestral color is again a prominent feature in this aria, which has some exquisite woodwind writing accompanying the voice. The big chorus “Awaken the Harp” (n. 10) follows with some striking polyphonic effects: the basses begin a fugal theme, worked up through the voices until a pause followed by an ecstatic conclusion. Two more recitatives continue the creation story, with particular reference to the rising of the sun. The final chorus (n. 13), “The Heavens are telling the glory of God,” concludes the first part of the oratorio with all three soloists joining the chorus and orchestra in a glowing C-major chord, as if the whole remainder of the first part were a sort of reverberation of the initial “and then there was Light” chord.

The fifth and sixth days (the creation of animals, birds, fish, and man and woman) constitute Part II of the oratorio. The first aria (n. 15) reveals a beautiful example of tone painting regarding the awakening of bird life; the clarinet depicts a lark’s song, and the bassoon the cooing of the dove; the aria reaches its climax with the flute’s intonation of the nightingale’s song. (Musical tone painting is the outcome of inherent musical expression, and is not a poetic construct of its own—not, at least, in 18th-century music.) In n. 16, God himself speaks and commands that all creatures “be fruitful and multiply.” Scored solely for violas, cello, and bass, this accompanied recitative is astounding for its unprecedented orchestration, unmatched until the end of the 19th century. Haydn achieves the bronzed hues of the accompaniment by dividing parts for each of the lower string sections—a technique not to be exploited again until Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen! The next two trios (n. 18, 19) are further hymns in praise of God, while n. 23 and 24 describe the creation of the first man.

Part III abandons the Bible; this cantata, devoted to Adam and Eve, is introduced by a broad Largo set in the radiant key of E major (n. 29). Nothing could have been more happily conceived than the melody given to the flutes describing the young morning in the Garden of Eden. A short recitative expresses the wonders of paradise. Adam and Eve sing the following two duets (n. 30, 32) presenting an idyllic picture of perfect joy, the latter a melodically inspired duet of deep feeling. The conclusion of the oratorio is essentially a canticle in which the orchestral voices join in a gigantic fugue. The most virtuosic and brilliant chorus of The Creation fittingly occurs at the end of the work. Haydn counters the text (“The Lord is great, his praise shall last for eternity”) with melismatic passages on the word “Amen,” which, in turn, is woven into the fugal subject in the coda in countless rhythmical conduct. In striking contrast to the beginning of the work, the harmonic identity is firm, almost self-evident—to ground unequivocally the work’s subject of a primordial, undistinguishable mass to a new, volitional world.

—Cody Franchetti
© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation