Since its introduction to Dublin audiences in 1742, George Frideric Handel’s famous oratorio Messiah has been heard annually across the world. While no other musical composition can boast its auspicious record, an oratorio of comparable accomplishment debuted a half century later in 1799: Franz Joseph Haydn’s Creation (Die Schöpfung). Musicians widely view Creation as Haydn’s crowning achievement, and a work justly described as “some of the most lovable and life-affirming music ever composed.”¹

Both oratorios share much in common, despite the fact that neither followed the typical pattern of portraying victorious Old Testament or Apocryphal heroes. For instance, while the hero of an oratorio must sing, Christ, the subject in Messiah, never sings a single note. Also, neither Messiah nor Creation has that strong sense of conflict and resolution that English audiences expected. Messiah is composed primarily of biblical references to Jesus, and Creation is essentially a series of self-contained tableaux depicting the primordial chaos, the fall of demons, the six days of creation, and the first couple’s marital bliss.

In addition to the oratorios’ musical connections, these two great works shared a similar function that explains their formal distinctions within their genre. That is, their librettos had a noble theological purpose: both Messiah and Creation were most likely apologetic in nature. Their mid-eighteenth century, English origin situates them in a time when the Anglican church was engaged in an intense theological battle with Deism. The librettists responded to this conflict with texts designed to undergird their audience’s understanding of two significant theological doctrines: Christology and creation.

Messiah remains well known to this day, but Creation is less familiar. This oratorio, a musical counterpart to Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” in the Sistine Chapel, is Western Classical music’s greatest declaration of biblical creationism. Given the modern rejection of the doctrine of creation, the apologetic nature of Creation’s libretto makes it as valuable for contemporary audiences as for its original audience.

Creation’s Unknown Librettist

By the eighteenth-century, the rise of Deism challenged orthodox Christianity by subtracting from the divinity of Christ and discounting the presence of divine intervention in the human experience. Thus, a rigorous defense of orthodox Christology was paramount to faithful clergy.² No less so to Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens. Jennens, a devout Anglican, meticulously compiled and organized biblical texts that affirmed the full divinity and full humanity of the second person of the Trinity. These declarations in Messiah were unequivocal.

The origins of Creation’s carefully curated libretto are not so well established. Written in Georgian England from 1733 to 1752, it originated during the same period as Messiah.³ While possible that Jennens also compiled Creation’s text, scholars are uncertain. Handel apparently declined to set this text, perhaps for its unusual structure and its dissimilarity to the more sensationally biblical heroes that he preferred such as Moses, Samson, or Esther. In fact, the narrative and dramatic structure are so distant from typical, lucrative oratorios of Handel’s time that a plausible explanation is warranted; contextually, the Anglican response to Deism is the most logical reason.

Haydn visited London in the 1790s and acquired the libretto during his travels. After being enraptured by Handel’s Israel in Egypt and Messiah, Haydn began studying large-scale oratorios–a genre he never fully explored at the provincial Esterhazy estate where he was employed for a large part of his career. An impresario in London, Johann Peter Saloman, likely acquired the Creation libretto in its original form from a musician named Thomas Linley, Sr., and provided a copy to Haydn.

The libretto excerpted passages from Milton’s epic and interspersed them with biblical texts including much of Genesis 1 and sections from Psalm 19. The final version known today employs an effective structure: a recitative from Genesis followed by a corresponding passage adapted from Milton’s Paradise Lost. In keeping with traditional operatic procedures, the passages from Genesis comprise the recitations, followed by a corresponding interpretation–a Milton-inspired accompanied recitative, aria, ensemble, or choral piece.

What we know for certain is that an important figure in 18th-century Viennese musical culture, Gottfried van Swieten, collaborated with Haydn to create the final version. A government figure and patron of the arts, van Swieten translated the English text into German and highlighted certain Enlightenment ideals in conjunction with a musical journey of each day of creation. He translated the German back into English–German for Austrian audiences, and English for the oratorio-loving English. Haydn composed with both languages in front of him, and this process afforded Creation the distinction as the first major musical work in history to be published in bilingual format.

As one might imagine, van Swieten faltered in his retranslation of the German text into English. He retained the King James Version of Scripture in the recitatives, but the Miltonian text suffered in the retranslation phase. H. C. Landon Robbins noted the “infelicities of syntax” in van Swieten’s translation.⁴ An unsigned review from 1834 at the Royal Musical Festival in Westminster Abbey spoke of the text as “ludicrous and vulgar…so stupid, so monstrous.”⁵ While many phrases from Milton can still be detected, many awkward expressions weaken the text: “The heavens declare the firmament,” or, “The large and arched front sublime of wisdom deep declares the seat.” English choirs either opt to perform in German or doctor the text, as in Robert Shaw’s edition. Nevertheless, the music’s high quality typically overcomes these issues.

One cannot overlook an important fact about Haydn’s own faith in relation to his composing Creation. Haydn composed Creation from the perspective of a proselyte, a Roman Catholic. As he progressed in age, so also did his faith. By the time Haydn composed this oratorio, he was at the peak of his craft,coupled with an established faith in God. The eminent Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon explains:

Overlaying the content of both oratorios [Creation and The Seasons], and of paramount importance to Haydn, was the element of rapturous wonder at the workings of the universe. To a man who habitually prefaced his scores ‘In nomine Domine’ and concluded them ‘Laus Deo,’ and who found easy and unconscious stimulus in the repeatedly setting the text of the mass, the attraction of the two oratorio librettos, larger and less constricting than that of the mass, was without precedent.⁶

Thus Haydn’s music arose from his own faith, shaped by a craft at the height of its compositional power.

Deism and the Anglican Response

The organization and content in Creation’s libretto suggests that the original librettist combated Deism⁷ while celebrating the biblical view of creation by wielding two magnificent weapons in the English-speaking world, the King James Bible and the definitive English-language epic poem, Milton’s Paradise Lost. No other texts would have the rhetorical gravitas needed in the battle against Deism.

Even with Enlightenment and natural law influences in Anglicanism, the Church was staunchly committed to its historically orthodox Christology and creationism. The debate was nowhere more evident than in Joseph Butler’s The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. This 1736 text, preceding Messiah by five years, proved to be a compelling and enduring apologetic against Deism and general disbelief. The opening advertisement assures any “reasonable man” that his spiritual doubts can be assuaged:

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many Persons, that Christianity is not so much as a Subject of Inquiry; but that it is, now at length, discovered to be fictitious… On the contrary, thus much, at least, will be here found, not taken for granted, but proved, that any reasonable Man, who will thoroughly consider the Matter, may be as much assured, as he is of his own Being, that, however, it is not so clear a Case, that there is nothing in it.⁸

Though Haydn was only four years old when Butler published The Analogy of Religion, the debate about creation persisted. Philosophers such as David Hume challenged many accepted notions about creation as they questioned the epistemological foundation – the testimony of Scripture – that the Church had embraced for centuries. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson famously excised all of Christ’s miracles from his own controversial translation of the Bible.

Tracts and books against skeptical Deists continued. Only two years after British audiences first heard Creation, William Paley’s influential Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity appeared. This monograph popularized the watchmaker analogy, a teleological argument for creation that presupposes a creator, a book with which Charles Darwin himself wrestled.

It may be surprising that the late 18th-century Sitz im Leben actually assumed the necessity of a creator. This is due to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on scientific method, combined with Greek aesthetic principles that governed successful artistic expressions, specifically balance and order. Stephen Waldman issued this correction against any misconceptions: “Most of the Enlightenment leaders … argued that the laws of science actually proved the existence of God, if one knew how to look at it the right way.”⁹ In this context, Creation seems well situated.

J Haydn’s Setting of Creation

The opening movement, “Representation of Chaos,” captures the instability of the primordial world, yet it has unmistakable structural unity in its harmony, motives, and ethos. Few composers could so successfully depict chaos within the constraints of classicism.

The subsequent Miltonian picture of the falling angels is appropriately marked by a dramatic fugue – the most learned musical technique – marked by a descending, chromatic motive imbued with relentless intensity. The program notes from a Handel and Haydn Society performance captures its essence:

The fateful angels describe, in a fugued passage, the rage of Satan and his accomplices, precipitated into an abyss of torment by the hand of Him whom they hate. Here Milton has a rival. Here Haydn employs profusely all that is disagreeable in the enharmonic genus; horrible discords, strange modulations; while the harshness of the words further increases the horror of the chorus.¹⁰

The music’s complexity, affirming the demonic spiritual forces, contradicts the Deistic doubts about the spiritual realm. The gravity of Haydn’s setting corresponds with the reality of Satan’s fall.

Much later in the oratorio, on Day 6, God creates Adam and Eve (Gen. 1:26-27). Uriel’s aria, taken from Paradise Lost, depicts the first couple using well defined gender roles that also typified the Enlightenment period. This modified strophic aria, in the noble key of C major, celebrates man and woman:

In native worth and honor clad,
With beauty, courage, strength adorn’d,
To heav’n erect and tall,
He stands a man, the Lord and King of nature all.

The large and arched front sublime,
Of wisdom deep declares the seat.
And in his eyes with brightness shines
The soul, the breath and image of his God.

With fondness leans upon his breast
A partner for him form’d,
A woman fair and graceful spouse.

Her softly smiling virgin looks,
Of flow’ry spring the mirror,
Bespeak him love,
love, and joy, and bliss.

Like Milton’s poem, Haydn’s musical text is generous in the sources from which he draws for inspiration. The musical text always employs the Greek topoi (rhetorical conventions or styles) that corresponds with natural phenomena. And it is with these types of Classical aesthetic principles in play, a vociferous Anglican movement against Deism, and certain favorable Enlightenment ideals, that Haydn seized upon the opportunity for a compelling musical expression of Creation.

Darwin and the Need for Contemporary Apologetics

Chorales regularly performed the oratorio throughout the nineteenth century, but its meaning has changed. As Romantic, nineteenth-century artists evolved into Promethean figures charged with bringing divine revelation, religious musical works became more like museum pieces curating the religious life of yesteryear rather than vibrant expressions of faith. This development even occurred despite the Mendelssohnian Bach revival during the 1840s and Handel’s sustained popularity in England.

But one cannot wonder whether another seismic historical event began to affect Haydn’s reception: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This work that introduces evolutionary theory appeared sixty years after Haydn’s Creation. Its influence, particularly in academic and scientific circles, is now pervasive. The majority of scientists now affirm a Darwinian explanation to life rather than a biblical one.

Perhaps such a disposition makes performing Creation more politically incorrect than Messiah–particularly upon college campuses, where large choral works are often performed. For centuries, artists of all types have (wrongly) reinterpreted Jesus in their own image, but re-interpreting creation without denying it altogether is more difficult. Perhaps in Darwin’s wake, the content may seem too mythological, too passe. Thus the question arises whenever Creation is performed: Is this oratorio an expression of faith, or a museum piece?

For the classical Christian student, Milton’s, and subsequently Haydn’s, views of creation are useful for engaging modern echoes of Deism. An anemic view of God’s providence and omniscience in popular Christianity is somewhat akin to Deism, though it probably originates from a place of biblical illiteracy rather than theological conviction.

Perhaps more importantly, thoughtful students can use Creation to augment a Miltonian imagination about the creation to reinforce the biblical narrative, and thus combat Darwinism. The emphasis on God’s word bringing forth life, imbuing creation with purpose, and celebrating man and woman contradicts a Darwinian worldview.

No longer an apologetic for Deism exclusively, Haydn’s Creation reinforces the notion that God speaks all things into existence. That creation was dramatic and exhilarating. That the animals did not evolve from an amoeba. That man and woman were created specifically by God with certain attributes that both crowned them and distinguished them from one another. That the God who created this world loves it, delights in it, and still takes pleasure in it to this day.

Philosophers since Plato have treated music as an innately powerful agent to affect moral change. In Haydn’s hands, the story of creation possesses this capacity. With Milton’s imagination and God’s Word, together in the musical cosmos of Franz Joseph Haydn, modern audiences still have a potent apologetic to proclaim, catechise, and persuade others of our good, created world, one that is imbued with meaning from its creator.

Notes