William Kent, ‘Summer’, engraved by Nicolas Henri Tardieu (1674–1749). Frontispiece to James Thomson, The Seasons (London, 1730).
1. Origins
The London music scene that Haydn experienced during his two triumphant visits in 1791–2 and 1793–4 was very different from that which had dominated his professional life in Austria up to that point. To take one example, concert culture in Vienna was, broadly speaking, private and exclusive, with music being performed in palatial residences for select audiences made up of aristocrats, courtiers and other members of the upper classes. By contrast, music-making in London was driven by market forces, with concerts organised by canny entrepreneurs who turned a profit by staging events that appealed to the prosperous middle classes. More generally accessible and certainly more commercial, music in London was also managed on an altogether larger scale. To quote one basic fact, London in the 1790s had a population of about a million, nearly four times that of Vienna, which was home to approximately 270,000 people. In an upwardly mobile mercantile society the English urban middle classes had money to spend and they demanded to be entertained.
Haydn felt these cultural contrasts acutely in May 1791, five or so months after his arrival in England in January of that year, when he attended the Handel Festival in Westminster Abbey. More than a thousand musicians (1,068 to be precise), including the foremost singers and instrumentalists of the time, gathered to perform Israel in Egypt, ‘Zadok the Priest’, Messiah and numerous extracts from Handel’s other works. The latest in a series of festivals that had taken place annually since the groundbreaking Handel Commemoration of 1784, this was a markedly national occasion, patronised by George III, who regarded Handel’s music as a ‘dynastic soundtrack’ (to quote Matthew Head). Its roots stretched back to the benefit performances of Messiah in the Foundling Hospital that Handel himself staged every year from 1749 until his death in 1759.
Edward Edwards (1738–1806), Interior View of Westminster Abbey on the Commemoration of Handel, Taken from the Manager’s Box, c.1790.
Haydn was deeply affected by what he heard and saw, both as a musician and also as a patriot who was able to witness at first hand the immensely powerful role music could play in the life of a nation. As one early biographer records: “when he heard the music of Handel in London, he was struck as if he had been put back to the beginning of his studies and had known nothing up to that moment. He meditated on every note and drew from those most learned scores the essence of true musical grandeur.”
The sacred oratorios current in Haydn’s Vienna were nothing like Handel’s Messiah. Employing Italian libretti, and originally designed to be performed during Lent, when the opera houses were closed, these were essentially unstaged opera seria (operas on serious subjects) with biblical plots. As in eighteenth-century Italian operas more generally, the main musical interest of these aristocratic entertainments lay in the virtuoso solos, framed by recitatives; the role of the chorus was consequently much reduced. Haydn’s own two-part Il ritorno di Tobia (1775), with a narrative derived from the Book of Tobit, is typical: it has only three choruses (two more were added in 1784), just one duet, lots of lengthy recitatives and a great deal of ornate coloratura.
The contrast with Handel’s English oratorios could hardly be greater. Feeling the lack of virtuoso Italian singers, Handel turned a potential weakness into a monumental strength by developing a genre that exploited the accomplished English choral training available in the cathedral schools. In the process, he also supplied a market primed to consume musical works that were unabashedly nationalistic and populist in tone, an aim that was aided by the choice of Old Testament subjects capable of sustaining contemporary political meanings. The ironies are manifold! Here was a German composer, writing music interpreted by the Hanoverian royals as their very own ‘dynastic soundtrack’, which was otherwise universally regarded as the quintessence of Englishness.
This combination moved Haydn greatly and left him with the desire to write a work on a comparable scale, charged with similarly comprehensive emotional power. The glimmer of an opportunity arose in August 1795. As he was leaving London at the end of his second visit, an English libretto was thrust into the composer’s hands by Johann Peter Salomon, the impresario whose blandishments had tempted Haydn to visit England in the first place. This was the text that was shortly afterwards bilingually reworked to form the basis of The Creation.
This is the first part of a four-part programme note: 1. Origins, 2. The Words, 3. Ethos, 4. The First Performance. To read the full note please click here.
Bernardo Bellotto, View of Vienna from the Belvedere, c.1760. The domed church on the left is the Karlskirche; the large building to the right of that, facing the lake, is the Palais Schwarzenberg; central, in the distance, is St Stephen’s Cathedral; at the end of the alley to the right of the lake is the Lower Belvedere; the building with the domed tower on the extreme right of the picture is the Convent Church of the Salesians.