20th November 2010

Joseph Haydn The Seasons

Charlotte Newstead (soprano)
Rupert Charlesworth (tenor)
Philip Tebb (bass)
Paul Walton (continuo)

conducted by Steven Kings

at the Castle School, Thornbury at 7.30 p.m.

Haydn wrote The Seasons between 1798 and 1801 and in his own words “it broke my back”. Haydn took the writing of the work very seriously and the effort caused him considerable health problems including nervousness, headaches, a form of rheumatism and eyesight troubles.

The considerably effort meant that after the writing of The Seasons Haydn wrote no more major oratorio style works and this left him with a dislike of the work which he considered had been forced upon him by Baron Gottfried van Swieten who had written the libretto for The Creation for Haydn.

Van Swieten took as his text the poem by James Thomson, first published in 1726 but in translating it in to German removed a lot of the delicacy and subtlety of the original. The Thomson text has been retranslated from the German on a number of occasions, most notably by Edward Taylor in 1840 where he tried as much as possible to get back to the Thomson original, although the writing of the music to a German text precluded him fitting all the words to the music.

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 a stirring ode to toil ("industry" in some translations):

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 propitious, bounteous 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 ploughman 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.