The Creation

Click above to listen to the Director's Notes

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

After spending most of his adult life ensconced comfortably as head of music at the grand palace court at Esterházy, Franz Josef Haydn, at 68, began a new chapter of his career. The music-loving Prince Nikolaus died and was succeeded by his son, Anton. Haydn’s duties were greatly curtailed. Comfortably situated with a pension and the freedom to travel, he was more a free agent than he had ever been. He accepted an offer to travel to London from the savvy impresario Johann Peter Salomon. In London, Haydn not only had the opportunity to compose for large orchestras and create his most mature, developed symphonies but also to behold choral music making in its most grandiose form. By that point, some thirty years after his death, Handel had been lionized and embraced as a national treasure, his oratorios and ceremonial works performed frequently, beefed up to gargantuan proportions the likes of which Haydn had never experienced. Haydn returned to Austria and settled in Vienna, where his friend, mentor, and librettist, the Baron Von Swieten tried to entice him to try his hand at oratorio. When Haydn embarked on his second trip to London (August 1795), he was toting a libretto in English on the subject of the Creation story, which Salomon had given to him. Von Swieten supplied the English-shy composer with an amended version in German. Haydn started writing in early 1796 and finished in 1798. A version of the oratorio with both English and German text was published in 1800.

Structurally, The Creation operates as many oratorios do, combining solo recitatives, solo arias, and chorus, all accompanied by orchestra in a series of movements, divided into large sections. The story is told in the first two parts, by three archangels who appear in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Raphael (bass), Uriel (tenor), and Gabriel (soprano). In the description of each day, the music tends to come first, pre-describing what the soloists will outline. As each day unfolds, they describe what’s happened and then wax poetically, with quotes from the Book of Genesis and lyrical glosses on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The chorus vociferously cheers on each step along the way with grand paeans and psalm paraphrases. In the first four days, we see the formless void of chaos take on shape and yield to order. God delineates light and darkness, sky and earth, sea and land, sun and the moon, and sets spinning the cycles and seasons underpinning the tempo of all life. Plentitudes of flora spring from the earth. The fifth and sixth days see the creation of Earth’s animals and humankind itself, in the form of Adam and Eve.

Musically, The Creation is assured and splendid. The score—instantly a success—showcases a seasoned composer, more than one hundred symphonies under his belt, at the height of his powers. It’s quintessentially Classical, reflecting the beautiful balance of form and filigree so characteristic of the architecture and formal gardens of that period, but featuring in lieu of symmetrical eaves or square planted plots with tendrils of vines, pleasingly proportioned musical phrases and a sonic brocade embroidered with quick moving melismas, decorated with trills and turns. Music is sound, of course, but Haydn does his utmost to evoke the splendor of fields and flowers, verdant and fragrant, and the diverse delights of the creatures that swim the seas, soar through the sky, and gallop and creep across earth’s surface—a menagerie in music. Haydn, by all accounts, held a straightforward, cheerful faith (he, as Bach did, signed all his scores solo dei gloria). One wants to believe he found deep joy in the world around him, which his God created.

Conceptually, The Creation is conspicuously prelapsarian: all of its action takes place before “the fall,” before Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve begin happily, walking hand in hand unashamedly naked, tending to (not toiling in) their beautiful, bountiful garden, feasting on its fruits. But it’s impossible, for me at least, not to think about the missing, more consequential second half of the story. The sanguine, blissful account stands in sharp relief to those who currently feel neither blissful nor sanguine. After their transgression, they’re driven out of Eden. The ground is cursed to bear thorns and thistles and provide them food only through the sweat of their brow. Childbirth will be painful. And most consequentially, they will now know death, and return to the dust from which they were made. It’s right there, in the title of the Milton poem that’s a source for the oratorio’s libretto: paradise, lost. What paradises have we lost? How far, how fast, have we fallen?

The majority of The Creation comprises revelry in the splendor of the natural world. Have we lost that paradise? Though the Book of Genesis recounts the world’s creation in six days, the cosmos has unfolded on a timescale whose units of measure—eons, eras, millennia—our brains can barely comprehend. And so most read the story reconciling the six “days” with the four or five billion years the earth has been around and the hundreds of millions of years it’s been home to animals, during which a variety of processes, some moving glacially, some in eruptive fits and starts, have shaped the planet that the modern humans writing and reading the Bible inhabit. Almost as hard to comprehend as those eons is the accelerated change seen in the Anthropocene, as humankind’s attempts to find or regain earthly and economic Edens have altered the world itself.

In Genesis 1, God beckons the earth bring forth all living things. In the very next breath, he bids his newly created humans “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion . . . over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The Creation’s libretto heralds “man, the lord and king of nature all.” At the end of the story, Adam and Eve are banished from their pristine paradise and told that they and all of mankind will have a laborious relationship to the land. Famine and privation animate ancient biblical stories and today’s headlines alike. Those who can afford it emulate the perpetual fecundity of Eden. Consumers enjoy an unnatural always-in-season bounty, but at great, hidden, cost. Rainforests bulldozed into factory farms and palm oil plantations. Sub-tropical cash crops sprouting from the deserts of the southwest, gulping the remaining dribbles of diverted and dammed rivers. Our attempts to recreate our own latter-day Edens, too, are not without cost. The stately rolling hills, grand stands of trees, and perfected vistas of some of the most celebrated estates of the 18th and early 19th century necessitated the razing of small villages, felling of forests, and clearing of “wastes,” the vast wealth required for such decades-long efforts extracted via the enslaving of Africans in trans-Atlantic colonies. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, tracts of modern McMansions arise from lot after lot of manicured monoculture lawn. The reality of “every living thing,” too, has changed. The 2022 Living Planet Report from the World Wildlife Fund documents a devastating 69% drop on average in monitored populations of vertebrates globally since 1970.

And yet Haydn’s Creation, and its solos especially, reflect and rekindle our unshakable connection to Earth and some innate understanding of our symbiotic relationship to it. We haven’t lost the sense of wonder Creation captures. Darwinian-era botanists’ taxonomies evoke that pesky notion of “dominion.” But the endless litanies of Latin names betray a pride of place—canadensis, cambrigeiensis, virginicum—and enumerate the bewildering variety of plants in our world. When I stand amidst my own quarter-acre garden, I’m awestruck by shades, textures, and shapes. The plants aim merely to photosynthesize and, if they’re lucky, reproduce, but they do so with an almost lurid variety of enticements. The lacy delicacy of wild carrots’ bruise-mauve flowers. The perfect, pointy radial symmetry of dahlia petals. The sword-shaped leaves of irises guarding the coquettish curve and flop of their blossoms. Foxgloves’ towers of peach and pink bells. Lavender, its foliage starchy and scratchy, its scent powdery and soft. Refocus your eyes and you’ll see, everywhere, gluttonous bees supping on the sweetness of it all. Turn the earth, and a squirming shovelful reminds you that more than 95% of the described animal species on earth are invertebrates (they’ll outlive us all). I’m certain I’m not the only one who cherishes how much of earth’s paradise remains to us. Through the eyes of an infant newly able to waddle through it, the natural world is a paradise of novel sensory inputs. Attendance at National Parks is at an all-time high. Thousands throng to New York City’s own Olmsted-designed Eden, Central Park. During the first spring of the Covid pandemic lockdown, the Burpee company reported its highest sale of seeds ever, and Instagram feeds filled with photos of newly cherished houseplants.

The latter parts of Haydn’s Creation depict the harmonious relationship of Adam and Eve, to each other, and to God. Does that original human relationship represent a certain perfection from which we have fallen away? The politics of paradise in Genesis have long played a role in the way humans cultivate their relationships among themselves and govern. In Genesis, God chastises Adam and Eve for the choice they made to eat the forbidden fruit. The very first line of Milton’s Paradise Lost sets the terms explicitly: “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe.” At issue here is God’s gift of sovereignty and free will, and the tug of war between obedience and autonomy. Princeton University’s historian of early Christianity, Elaine Pagels, wonders: “Are human beings capable of governing themselves? [In the first three centuries of Christianity] defiant Christians hounded as criminals by the Roman government emphatically answered yes. But in the fourth and fifth centuries, after the emperors themselves became patrons of Christianity, the majority of Christians came to say no.” In those first few centuries, converts and emperor-defying martyrs, and writers such as St. John Chrysostom saw in the notion of “in God’s own image” a God-given moral freedom to rule oneself and saw “imperial rule,” with its force and coercion,  “[epitomizing] the social consequences of sin.” In the late fourth and early fifth century, the church father Augustine gleans from the same story human bondage to sin. Pagels paints the bigger picture: “Early Christian spokesmen, like Jews before them and the American colonists long after, had claimed to find in the biblical creation account divine sanction for declaring their independence from governments they considered corrupt and arbitrary.”

Milton himself had supported the creation of an English republic in the mid-1600s, arguing in his prose against tyranny and state-sanctioned religion, advocating for the abolition of the Church of England. In the space of little more than a decade, a king was beheaded, a Commonwealth was piloted, and a new king was coronated. After the restoration of the monarchy, he feared for his safety. At the very same time that Haydn was visiting London and composing The Creation, a group of men across the Atlantic in America were two decades deep into their daring experiment in free will and sovereignty (for some), even as Napoleon was putting an end to the French revolutionary experiment in liberté, fraternité et egalité. In the mid 19th century, as industrialization swept England and the US and workers increasingly moved from work in nature to work in factories, a preponderance of utopian, communal living experiments came and went, and newly imagined utopian political systems took form. In upstate New York’s so-called “burned over district” preachers portended creation’s counterpart in the end of days. The United States saw recurring cycles of boom and bust, perennial rebirth every so many decades. At the time of writing these thoughts down, the American presidential election is still a few days away, looming large in my thoughts. Some claim our country is failing, after the fall, and seek to make the country “great again;” others hopefully seek “a new way forward.” With any luck, by the time we gather on November 10, there will be a definitive result. But this won’t be our last election; every four years we dare to consider what paradise of self-government we could cultivate, as we take the chance to alter the political landscape.

At the very end of Paradise Lost, an angel leads Adam and Eve out of the garden. They turn around and see its gate guarded by angels and an array of flaming swords, shed a tear, and move on. In Milton’s poetry:

In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappeared.
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

The author Olivia Laing, in The Garden Against Time, notes:

Milton used the model of horticultural cultivation as a way of considering good government, right relationship between different kinds of beings. Eden runs on very different principles to the autocratic rule of heaven. If God lays down laws and punishes transgressions, Adam and Eve practice a style of custodianship that is understated and benign. When they prop a rose or twist a vine into an elm, they are active collaborators in an interconnected ecology, subtly stage-managing processes that are already underway in order to maximize abundance and pleasure. That this blissful state of affairs comes to an end doesn’t drain it of its power. Despite its title, Paradise Lost is not exactly nostalgic. The garden serves as a kind of lodestar, an experience of nurture and richness that cannot be dismantled and might in future be recreated.

Who among us doesn’t have some lost paradise of our own—a sepia-toned childhood memory, a past youthful love, a cherished home now far away in time or place, a period in our lives when everything seemed to be swimming along? Perhaps the potency of paradise as a concept is its impossibility, its utility its precariousness. Perhaps we’re drawn to it because we feel so acutely in our own lives the way our most cherished practices and places—our marriages, our friendships, our gardens—must be tended. The final four lines of Milton’s poem are pregnant with possibility and remind us that life is lived in the pursuit of a paradise that reflects the best version of it we can dream of.

I’m biased, to be sure, but the longer I pursue my life’s work in music, the more fervently I have faith that what we’re doing when we partake in concerts is its own kind of paradise and pursuit of possibilities. Like all large-scale major choral-orchestral works, Haydn’s Creation as it exists as a permanent piece of art—as a score—isn’t so much a creation as it is a blueprint for one. To bring it into being and live within it, musicians and audience must create it anew each time with their materials, sound and space. This process of re-cultivation demands cooperative labor, careful listening, compassion, and trust. Music might just offer the best template for recapturing paradise in our own time. Harmony is the antonym of discord; unison, the absence of division; synchronization, the antithesis of disintegration. Even if it lasts for just an hour or two, we can dwell together in that paradise. It is in regathering this community, and re-sounding this musical idea into a fleeting reality, that our music making reminds us that creation is always possible. As winter sets in and the results of our quadrennial election become clear, let us be reminded that our gardens can always be regrown, through our own mindful, loving, cooperative cultivation.