Review of Haydn: The Creation at Cambridge Music Festival
Daniel Hyde (Conductor) with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the combined choirs of King’s College Cambridge and New College Oxford presented Haydn’s The Creation in King’s College Chapel last Friday as part of this Autumn’s Cambridge Music Festival.
The Creation (1796-98) is considered one of Haydn’s greatest works and tells the story of the origin of things. Milton’s poem Paradise Lost (1667) written more than a century before the Haydn oratorio is a comparable narrative about man’s Fall and Redemption, and one of its sources.
Both master works existed on the cusp of developing theories of creation as during the Enlightenment new materialist accounts of how everything came into being were implying no specific divine intervention, pointing instead to an unstable and continually evolving universe.
That Paradise Lost could be written at all in its own changing times suggests that the poet had a persisting confidence in the authority of Scripture. It’s always possible when reading the poem to distinguish between what Milton believes as revealed truth and what, for him, is simply fanciful. And in considering, as readers, his engagement with the essential elements of the biblical story alongside those passages where he is simply writing allegorically, we experience two very different kinds of ‘reality’.
The C18th progressively advanced the progress of all the sciences. Not least of its theories in connection with Haydn’s Creation was the work of the astronomer William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus and of infra-red rays.
A huge telescope that Herschel had erected at Slough was one of the great tourist attractions of the reign of George III, encouraging in visitors an enquiring attitude towards the nature of creation. Haydn’s subject was especially topical in the years of his own composition as scientific investigation was suggesting things unimaginably older than had been previously thought.
By the end of the C18th, when The Creation was composed, scepticism had taken hold of many prominent Romantic figures. Although Lord Byron, for instance, never completely emerged from his religious (Calvinist) upbringing, he has the eponymous hero of his verse drama Cain (1821), faced with the infinite space and time of modern cosmology, murder his brother Abel as his way of striking out at God in protest at being made to feel alone and insignificant in a vast indifferent universe.
Byron was one among many, including Haydn, who journeyed to take a look through Herschel’s telescope. Haydn said that his own visit to the telescope had helped him to compose The Creation.
Just as Milton had written his poem about eternal verities in such a way for ‘after times that they should not willingly let it die’, Haydn expresses an equally strong affirmation of divine truth from the outset of his oratorio. His continuing belief in a benevolent creator of the universe comes at the conclusion of its opening overture where the representation of primal chaos and darkness is startlingly broken upon by the great crash of the scriptural ‘Let there be light: and there was light’, prelude to the joyful celebration of everything created that follows on.
In Friday’s presentation 3 outstanding soloists in their roles of the Archangels Gabriel (Sally Matthews, soprano), Raphael (James Platt, bass) and Uriel (Robert Murray, tenor) shouldered the formidable task of carrying the narrative, while the Philharmonia Orchestra under Daniel Hyde, with the joint forces of the choristers of King’s Cambridge and New College Oxford, gave inspired performances, ranging from the descending subtle tones of Satan’s ‘rapid fall’ and beautifully rendered passages (sunrise and moonlight-Day 4), to choric conclusions delivered with tremendous power and precision, as in ‘the heavens are telling . .’(Day 1).
Sally Matthews’ exquisite voice, particularly where a soaring register was required, hit the sky in passages such as the ‘heav’nly hierarchy’ aria (Day 2), ‘uplifted soars the eagle’ (day 5) and ‘With thee is every joy enhanced’ (Adam and Eve in Eden). She was also peerless in evoking the ‘charming sight’ enhanced by the lovely melody of ‘With verdure clad’ (Day3).
James Platt’s bass gave his words an authority and credibility throughout. His presentation was masterful in communicating a sense of depth to ‘limpid brook’, the undulations to ‘creeping thing[s]’ and to the sinuous trace of the ‘worm’ (a word he sustained for at least 5 seconds}. His ‘ground . . trod’ by heavy beasts had humorous assistance from the bass trombone.
Robert Murray’s tenor was the perfect counterpart. His aria ‘In native worth and honour clad’ was delightfully and elegantly sequenced, and the lovely duo he performed with Sally Matthews (‘On thee each living soul awaits’) did more than justice to the heavenly prospects held out by the promise of Edenic joy which we see in the third part’s fulfilment of them.
The assurance and seemingly effortless agency of King’s Music Director, Daniel Hyde, was notably present throughout this memorable event, and Daniel invited former King’s organ scholar Robert Quinney (now Choir Director at New College Oxford) to share in the lengthy applause.
Haydn, himself a one-time visitor (1791) to King’s College Chapel, would no doubt have appreciated listening to such a performance of his own ‘creation’ and in the very setting he had so admired more than 230 years ago.
Appropriately we, too, were invited by King’s Fellow Dr Stephen Cherry, in his opening remarks, to reflect on the creation as we listened, and just as equally perhaps to reflect on ‘where it is going’.
JOHN GILROY
