The Seasons (Haydn)

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 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, 1 alto trombone, 1 tenor trombone and 1 bass trombone, timpani, percussion (triangle, bass drum, cymbals) and strings (violins, violas, cellos, basses).

However, some of the key early performances at the Tonkünstler Society in Vienna were for much larger forces (as was the fashion at the time); Haydn led performances for both large and small ensembles. Material surviving from these large-scale Viennese performances indicates the use of tripled wind (arranged into three separate groups, each one similar to the Harmonie wind ensembles of the time), doubled brass and as many as ten horn players, backed up by at least eighty string players and similar numbers of singers.[9]

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

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[10] (foreshadowing the third movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony), a loud thunderstorm (ditto for 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, 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.

There is some evidence that Haydn himself was not happy with van Swieten's libretto, or 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.[11]

Robbins Landon continues the story as follows:

Müller foolishly showed the passage in the enclosed sheet, quoted above, to the editor of the Zeitung für die elegante Welt,[12] who promptly included it in support of his criticism of Swieten's wretched[13] 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."[14]

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.[15]

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.[16] 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 than The Seasons."[17] Michael Steinberg writes 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."[18] Opinions vary as to the nature of the relationship between The Creation and The Seasons – whether they are two separate works or an enormous religious diptych. Van Swieten, at any rate, was certainly keen to follow up on the former's success with another large-scale pictorial work in a similar vein,[19] and some authors have seen the two oratorios as constituting the first and second act of a metaphorical 'vast sacred opera'.[20]

• Clark, Caryl (2005) The Cambridge Companion to Haydn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 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.
• Humphreys, David (2009) "Fugue," article in David Wyn Jones, ed., Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Jones, David Wyn (2009) "Breitkopf & Härtel," article in David Wyn Jones, ed., Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Olleson, Edward (2009) "Seasons, The", article in David Wyn Jones, ed., Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 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.

• Haydn: The Seasons - complete recording from the Internet_Archive
• Scores on IMSLP
• German libretto.
• English translation.
• Robins, Brian "Haydn's Late Oratorios - The Creation and The Seasons