Haydn began writing the oratorio "Die Schöpfung" (The Creation) in 1795;
it was given its first performance at the palace of Prince Schwarzenberg in
Vienna in 1798. Haydn's life's work reached its climax and its conclusion
in The Creation and in the oratorio The Seasons, written in 1801. Shortly
before his death in 1808, Haydn attended another gala performance of
The Creation which was received by the audience with wild enthusiasm.
Leonard Bernstein's recording of this work was made at the Benedictine
Abbey of Ottobeuren in 1986 with the chorus and Symphony Orchestra of the
Bavarian Radio with soloists Judith Blegen, Thomas Moser, Kurt Moll,
Lucia Popp and Kurt Ollmann. Bernstein himself said of The Creation: "In
the beginning of this awesome musical version, Haydn created one of the
supreme music dramatizations of all time: the depiction of chaos, as he
entitled it - that pre-terrestrial chaos depicted in Genesis by the single
line: 'And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the
face of the Deep'. This musical depiction is of a beauty almost frightening
in its chromatic and dissonant texture - something outside of Time, and
certainly outside of the 1790s, when it was written. ...
Haydn's The Creation gives us time to remember - and rejoice in - the
purity and grace and fortitude of Nature, to saunter blissfully through
that Garden of Gardens along with Adam and Eve; to restore our souls, to
recover our moral strength, and to rediscover our power to praise."
