Die Sch�pfung (The Creation) Hob.XXI:2

Haydn began writing the oratorio "Die Sch�pfung" (The Creation) in 1795; it was given its first performance at the palace of Prince Schwarzenberg in Vienna in 1798. Haydn's life's work reached its climax and its conclusion in The Creation and in the oratorio The Seasons, written in 1801. Shortly before his death in 1808, Haydn attended another gala performance of The Creation which was received by the audience with wild enthusiasm. Leonard Bernstein's recording of this work was made at the Benedictine Abbey of Ottobeuren in 1986 with the chorus and Symphony Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio with soloists Judith Blegen, Thomas Moser, Kurt Moll, Lucia Popp and Kurt Ollmann. Bernstein himself said of The Creation: "In the beginning of this awesome musical version, Haydn created one of the supreme music dramatizations of all time: the depiction of chaos, as he entitled it - that pre-terrestrial chaos depicted in Genesis by the single line: 'And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the Deep'. This musical depiction is of a beauty almost frightening in its chromatic and dissonant texture - something outside of Time, and certainly outside of the 1790s, when it was written. ... Haydn's The Creation gives us time to remember - and rejoice in - the purity and grace and fortitude of Nature, to saunter blissfully through that Garden of Gardens along with Adam and Eve; to restore our souls, to recover our moral strength, and to rediscover our power to praise."