Haydn, The Creation

Over het evenement

Em­ma­nuelle Haïm conducts the orchestra and chorus of Le Concert d’Astrée in a performance of Haydn's oratorio, The Creation, in Dijon.

“Haydn came to see me yesterday, and he has in mind a great oratorio that he plans to call The Creation and that he hopes to finish soon. He played for me a few excerpts and I think it will be very good.” Thus wrote, on 15 December 1796, the composer Johann Georg Albrechtsberger to his former student Beethoven. Vienna was then in full rediscovery of this genre through the great scores of Händel, such as The Resurrection or The Messiah — which you could have heard under the baton of Emmanuelle Haïm over the two last years. In the 18th century, these works were regularly performed under the patronage of the Gesellschaft der Associerten of the Baron van Swieten, the patron who introduced the works of Bach to Mozart and who commissioned the latter for an arrangement of the Messiah. He also adapted the libretto for The Creation from the first books of the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The Creation recounts the first moments of the world, the chaos turning to light, God’s creation of the Earth, of time, or life, and culminates in an apotheosis with the creation of Adam and Eve. It is a religious oratorio, but with a vision profoundly influenced by Masonic ideas in which man is no longer a sinful creature, humble and guilty under Lutheran canticles, but rather the earthly repository of the spark of divine light that is Reason.

As with Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Haydn invented with The Creation a profane spirituality that carried the hopes of a humanity that was free to grow and bloom.

Soloists:
Soprano, Camilla Tilling
Tenor, Benjamin Hulett
Bass, Christopher Purves