Imagining Enlightenment
Composed in 1796, Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (Die Schöpfung) opens with an “Ouverture” (as it is called in a draft for the libretto) inscribed “Vorstellung des Chaos” (translation is treacherous here, but “Representation of Chaos” will do for now): the world before the World, so to say. Haydn’s music for this scenario provoked critical response even before its first performance in 1798. Early critics heard in it a Bosch-like landscape of what Chaos might have looked like: Haydn as painter. More recently, theorists and critics have sought to read formal coherence and “rational” design in a work whose surface suggests the contrary. I’ve convinced myself that the way to grasp Haydn’s meaning is to enter into a process of mind—to imagine Haydn putting himself in the mind of a Creator in the throes of imagination—imagining, that is, the Prime Mover exercising the spontaneity of creation in a meta-improvisation. I’ll want further to suggest that Haydn’s project is not so different from the imaginings by Herder (and Rousseau, and other Enlightenment thinkers) of the origins of language. “The metaphor of the Beginning was the urge to speak,” in Herder’s piercing phrase.
Modest assignment: Listen to a recording of a performance of the opening “numbers” of The Creation: the “Representation of Chaos” and the following recitative and chorus (“In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth”), with an ear to what happens at the words [“and God said: Let there by Light] and there was Light.”
For some background on this work, you might (entirely at your pleasure) consult any of a number of recent works, though my talk may refer only to some of them and only fleetingly.
H. C. Robbins-Landon. Haydn: The Years of ‘The Creation’ 1796-1800, which is volume 4 of his magisterial Haydn: Chronicle and Works. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press (1977).
Nicholas Temperley. Haydn: “The Creation.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Bruce MacIntyre. Haydn: “The Creation.” New York: Schirmer Books, 1998.
A few highly specialized readings:
A. Peter Brown, “Haydn’s Chaos: Genesis and Genre,” The Musical Quarterly, 73 (1989): 18-59.
Lawrence Kramer, “Haydn’s Chaos, Schenker’s Order; or, Hermeneutics and Musical Analysis: Can They Mix?” 19th Century Music, 16 (1992): 3-17.
