The Seasons (Haydn)

For the similarly titled work by Antonio Vivaldi, see The Four Seasons (Vivaldi).

Title page of the first edition. Translated into English it reads, "The Seasons, after Thomson, set to music by Joseph Haydn. / Score / Original edition / [published by] Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig

The Seasons (German: Die Jahreszeiten) is an oratorio by Joseph Haydn (H. 21/3).

Composition, premiere, and reception

Haydn was led to write The Seasons by the great success of his previous oratorio The Creation (1798), which had become very popular and was in the course of being performed all over Europe. The libretto for The Seasons was provided to Haydn, just as with The Creation, by Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an Austrian nobleman who had also exercised an important influence on the career of Mozart. Van Swieten's libretto was his own rendering into German of extracts from the long English poem "The Seasons" by James Thomson (1700–1748), which had been published in 1730.

The composition process was arduous for Haydn, in part because his health was gradually failing and partly because Haydn found van Swieten's libretto to be rather taxing. Haydn took two years to complete the work.

The premiere, in Vienna on April 24, 1801, was considered a clear success, but not a success comparable to that of The Creation. In the years that followed, Haydn continued to lead oratorio performances for charitable causes, but it was usually The Creation that he led, not The Seasons.

Like The Creation, The Seasons is a bilingual work. Since Haydn was very popular in England (particularly following his visits there in 1791–1792 and 1794–1795), he wished the work to be performable in English as well as German. Van Swieten therefore retranslated the Thomson original back into English, fitting it to the rhythm of the music. The resulting English text has not always proven satisfying to listeners; for example, one critic writes, "Clinging to [the] retranslation, however, is the heavy-handed imagery of Haydn's sincere, if officious, patron. Gone is the bloom of Thomson's original."^[1]

Forces

The Seasons is written for a fairly large late-Classical orchestra, a chorus singing mostly in four parts, and three vocal soloists, representing archetypal country folk: Simon (bass), Lucas (tenor), and Hanne (soprano). The solo voices are thus the same three as in The Creation.

The orchestral parts are for 2 flutes (1st doubling on piccolo in one aria), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 tenor trombones and bass trombone, timpani, percussion, and strings.

In addition, a fortepiano usually plays in recitatives, with or without other instruments from the orchestra.

Musical content

The oratorio is divided into four parts, corresponding to Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, with the usual recitatives, arias, choruses, and ensemble numbers.

Among the more rousing choruses are a hunting song with horn calls, a wine celebration with dancing peasants (foreshadowing the third movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony), a loud thunderstorm (akin to Beethoven's fourth movement), and an absurdly stirring ode to toil:

The huts that shelter us,

The wool that covers us,

The food that nourishes us,

All is thy grant, thy gift,

O noble toil.

Haydn remarked that while he had been industrious his whole life long, this was the first occasion he had ever been asked to write a chorus in praise of industry.

Some especially lyrical passages are the choral prayer for a bountiful harvest, "Sei nun gnädig, milder Himmel" (Be thou gracious, O kind heaven), the gentle nightfall that follows the storm, and Hanne's cavatina on Winter.

The work is filled with the "tone-painting" that also characterized The Creation: a plowman whistles as he works (in fact, he whistles the well-known theme from Haydn's own Surprise Symphony), a bird shot by a hunter falls from the sky, there is a sunrise (evoking the one in The Creation), and so on.

The "French trash" episode

There is some evidence that Haydn himself was not happy with van Swieten's libretto, at least one particular aspect of tone-painting it required, namely the portrayal of the croaking of frogs, which is found during the serene movement that concludes Part II, "Summer". The version of the anecdote given below is from the work of Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon.

In 1801, August Eberhard Müller (1767–1817) prepared a piano version of the oratorio's orchestra part, for purposes of rehearsal and informal performance. Haydn, whose health was in decline, did not take on this task himself, but he did look over a draft of Müller's work and wrote some suggested changes in the margins. Amid these changes appeared an off-the-cuff complaint about van Swieten's libretto:

NB! This whole passage, with its imitation of the frogs, was not my idea: I was forced to write this Frenchified trash. This wretched idea disappears rather soon when the whole orchestra is playing, but it simply cannot be included in the pianoforte reduction.^[2]

Robbins Landon continues the story as follows:

Müller foolishly showed the passage in the enclosed sheet, quoted above, to the editor of the Zeitung fur die elegante Welt,^[3] who promptly included it in support of his criticism of Swieten's wretched^[4] libretto. Swieten was enraged, and [Haydn's friend] Griesinger reported that His Excellency "intends to rub into Haydn's skin, with salt and pepper, the assertion that he [Haydn] was forced into composing the croaking frogs."^[5]

A later letter of Griesinger's indicates that the rift thus created was not permanent.

The term "Frenchified trash" was almost certainly not a gesture of contempt for France or French people; Haydn in fact had friendly relationships with French musicians (see, e.g. Paris symphonies). Rather, Haydn was probably referring to an earlier attempt by van Swieten to persuade him to set the croaking of the frogs by showing him a work by the French composer André Grétry that likewise included frog-croaking.^[6]

Critical reception

Although the work has always attracted far less attention than The Creation, it nonetheless has been strongly appreciated by critics. Charles Rosen calls both oratorios "among the greatest works of the century", but judges The Seasons to be the musically more successful of the two.^[7] Daniel Heartz, writing near the end of a massive three-volume account of the Classical era, writes "The Hunting and Drinking choruses first led me to study Haydn's music more extensively beginning some forty years ago ... no music has elated me more in old age then The Seasons.^[8] Michael Steinberg wrote in program notes that the work "ensure[s] Haydn's premiere place with Titian, Michelangelo, and Turner, Mann and Goethe, Verdi and Stravinsky, as one of the rare artists to whom old age brings the gift of ever bolder invention."^[9]

Notes

1. ^ Bernard Holland, writing in the New York Times, January 23, 1988.
2. ^ Cited from Robbins Landon (1959, 197)
3. ^ German: "Journal for the elegant world"
4. ^ It is not clear whether this is Robbins Landon's opinion or the journal editor's.
5. ^ Robbins Landon (1959, 197)
6. ^ Dies (1810, 187)
7. ^ Rosen (1971, 370)
8. ^ Heartz (2009:644 fn.)
9. ^ Quoted in Heartz (2009:644)

References

• Dies, Albert Christoph (1810) Biographical Accounts of Joseph Haydn, Vienna. English translation by Vernon Gotwals, in Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Heartz, Daniel (2009)Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven: 1781-1802. New York: Norton.
• Robbins Landon, H. C. (1959) The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn. London: Barrie and Rockliff.
• Rosen, Charles (1971) The Classical Style. New York: Norton.