AT the Royal Philharmonic Society's concert on March 23rd Sir
Thomas Beecham conducted the Luton Choral Society and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of Haydn's The Creation. It is a very strange reflection that this work can ever have been mentioned in the same breath with Handel's Messiah or even remotely rivalled it in popularity. Apart from some moments of grandeur near the beginning, the music very seldom transcends the limitations of the text, which are also thosq of the later eighteenth century. A conflation of the first chapter of Genesis and Paradise Lost Book VII, translated into German (and then back into English, for our benefit) naturally retains all that is weakest in Milton and loses all his poetry. Haydn approaches his tremendous subject naïvely, quite unaware of the scale required and of those intellectual implications which Milton never for a moment forgets.
Haydn writes almost like a "primitive " and the God of The Creation seems to be little more than a magic carpenter making the contents and decor for a large-scale Noah's Ark. He only speaks once, through the mouth of Raphael, when He bids the " winged " and " finny tribes " to be fruitful and multiply ; and His utterance, though given the musical trappings of solemnity, is quite un-awful. Raphael, Uriel and Gabriel are so many lay figures whose sole reason for existing is to tell each other the story. But it is Adam and Eve who, shorn of Milton's intellectuality and sensuality alike, stand most denuded of interest or vitality, so that they are in the greatest need of the figleaf of Haydn's music. It is not much more, for it leaves large expanses of their dullness quite uncovered.
It is astonishing that exactly one decade separated the first performance of The Creation from that of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The nature whose creation is sung by Haydn is wholly that of.. the eighteenth century—formal, generalised, fundamentally bookish and virtually uninhabited except by beings equally con- ventional. That was 1798, when Haydn was sixty-six. Compare his " softly purling " brook with the stream which flows through the slow movement of Beethoven's symphony in i8o8, or Adam and Eve's interminable sentiments with the human beings who dance and exult in Beethoven's last two movements. And yet there were only twenty-eight years, a generation, between the two composers, and Beethoven's " nature " is still felt with a sensibility whose forma- tion and training were those of the old century. But Haydn's text was forty years old when he set it, and there was no tradition of oratorio in Austria. Little wonder then that The Creation only occasionally gives us a glimpse of the great Haydn of the op. 76 string quartets and the Salomon symphonies, all works composed in the same decade.
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The New Era Concert Society combined Brahms' Requiem with two more modern works at their Albert Hall concert on March 25th.
In Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain Gonzalo Soriano played the solo part, and showed himself a sensitive musician as well as a fine pianist. But vast and echoing spaces of the Albert Hall destroy half the effect of this music—subtle, evocative and best heard in a small hall where every note and phrase makes its point clear at once. Tippett's concerto for double string orchestra, very well played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Richard Austin, stood up much better to its surroundings. Certainly the buoyant rhythms and easy melody of the first and last movements were very effective, though many a nice point of phrasing and interlocking between the two bodies of strings was inevitably lost. The slow movement, beautiful in itself, never seems to me quite to belong to the other two, and it certainly needs a very much smaller hall for the intimate lyrical quality of the solo passages to make itself felt.
MARTIN COOPER.
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