Haydn: The Creation (Soli Dei Gloria, Idéale Audience, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Good Friday evening I looked for an appropriate video to show and found it in a box of clearance items I had bought a while back from ArkivMusic.com, including two DVD’s from a troupe called “Soli Dei Gloria” performing massive religious works. The one we watched last night was a 2010 performance of Haydn’s The Creation — though actually they performed it in the German version, Die Schöpfung (it seems a little less “immediate” that way — the original publication gave the text in both German and English and, though the first performance was given in Vienna in 1800 and was therefore presumably in German, Haydn’s inspiration was the oratorios of Handel, which were composed for a British audience and were therefore in English) — in a performance led by American-born conductor John Nelson in the Grote Kerk of Naarden, The Netherlands. The orchestra was the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic (containing a really cute violinist both Charles and I irreverently fell in lust with immediately!) — indicating that this was going to be a reading at least nodding towards historically informed performance (The Creation is one of those works that will work with small forces, but the sheer audacity and magnitude of the conception seems to demand more players and choral singers than Nelson had at his disposal). John Nelson is known primarily as a Berlioz conductor (his recordings include Roméo et Juliette, The Damnation of Faust, Béatrice et Bénédict and Les Troyens, the work on which Nelson “made his bones” at the Met) but he adapted well enough to Haydn’s idiom.

We watched both the main performance and the 25 minutes’ worth of rehearsal excerpts tacked on as a bonus item — and ironically the rehearsal hall had a more “open” acoustic than the church and made it easier to hear the internal dissonances in what is superficially a well-behaved “classical” work than it was in the rather cramped acoustics of the not-so-“Grote” Grote Kerk. I remember when I first heard The Creation (in an English-language telecast on PBS) I was astonished by the sheer imagination of the opening — Haydn really does evoke the idea of a universe “without form, and void” — though I felt Nelson was overstating the case when he said in an interview during the rehearsal segment that “nothing in Bach, Handel, Mozart or Beethoven” comes close to Haydn’s imagination here. (To me, the openings of Bach’s St. John Passion and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony have a surprisingly similar feeling to the opening of Haydn’s The Creation.) The Creation was written for orchestra, chorus and an oddly assorted set of five vocal soloists: the first two parts of the oratorio feature soloists delivering narration derived from the Book of Genesis and the third part ends with an extended duet for two other singers, cast as Adam and Eve. telling of the joys of life in the Garden of Eden with only few hints of the considerably darker turn (to say the least) the story takes just after Haydn and his librettist, Gottfried van Swieten, cut it off. (I found myself wishing that they’d gone ahead and done a sequel, Der Fall, but instead Haydn’s next — and last major — work was a secular oratorio called The Seasons.) The soloists in parts one and two have character names representing angels — Lisa Milne (identified as a soprano but she sounds more like a mezzo to me) as Gabriel, tenor Werner Güra as Uriel, and bass-baritone Matthew Rose as Raphaël — and though Haydn’s score allows the baritone and soprano to return for part three as Adam and Eve, Nelson cast different singers in these roles: Jonathan Beyer as Adam and Lucy Crowe as Eve.

Milne performed in an odd outfit that showed off more of her breasts than I would have wanted to see (and she probably wouldn’t have wanted the audience to see as much of her — especially given how close director Rhodri Huw got the cameras to her chest!) — in the rehearsal scenes, while just about everyone else was in casual clothes, Milne had a less revealing but equally impressive tunic and matching skirt that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the actual performance. I remember when I first heard The Creation the first two parts — part one deals with the first four days and the creation of the inanimate world and universe; part two deals with the creation of animals on day five and humans on day six — seemed more powerful and moving than the sometimes impressive and sometimes just silly duet for Adam and Eve in part three (when they referenced “savory fruit,” I wondered where those had come from), though Nelson made the piece sound like a better integrated work and made the third part seem worthy of the first two. The Creation is a remarkable piece that occupied much of Haydn’s attention in the 1790’s after he had left the job of leader of the court’s musicians to Prince Nicolaus Esterházy in Hungary (a position Nelson described with withering scorn as being something of a prison since Haydn couldn’t travel freely and accept opportunities in other locations — though most composers of the time would have considered it a great gig and would have done virtually anything to get a job like that: Mozart tried again and again, without success, to suck up to the various aristocrats of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to get a job like Haydn’s!), and it’s a remarkable piece for how forward-looking it is, how much dissonance and musical complexity he crowds into a piece while remaining at least ostensibly loyal to the Classical-era musical conventions. It was a lovely and suitably reverent piece to be hearing on Good Friday, and I’m hoping Charles and I will soon get to watch the other Soli Dei Gloria DVD I got in the same order, Nelson and company performing Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.