For some strange reason, in reality not so strange, of all Creation, a good part of the comments focus on the first few minutes -The Representation of Chaos. The oratorio lasts more than an hour, the central theme is the celebration -it is celebration – the creation of the world, but it is what happens before the creation, which seems more relevant.
In the end, this is all due to a bad conscience that we have with the classics. Ours is an era whose aesthetic is, ultimately and fundamentally, romantic. And then, what are we to do with a work that at the same time is clearly of high quality and clearly classic? Focus on the part that the more you can zoom in to the romance at the end (*).
In fact, we will do it in such a way that what happens in the Representation is lost, and will focus on the boldness, the modernity, in looking towards the future, in the dissonance of the topic: Where is the drama of the confusion and chromatic chords inresueltos (to copy sentences from a review in the New York Times about a performance of the play). Let’s say, it is good because it might be a part of the work of the next period.
Now, that one finds the issue is in fact a representation of something without shape, without too much direction, that has not been created and ordered, but it is not a mass of discordant sounds, as one might think to hear and read those comments. Remains a piece of magnificent music, but it is not because it is ‘advanced’ and something that goes beyond the aesthetic classicism.
And in all this discussion, sometimes we forget the most powerful moment of the play. That comes immediately after: the moment at which Haydn represents, not the chaos, but the creation, the first creation of light. And to listen to the most magnificent and glorious use of a chord in c major -the most basic of all chords, for that same reason quite appropriate to represent the birth of the light, we -as always – the good Youtube:
Not the best of versions, but hey, nothing is perfect. Well, almost nothing: the das Licht is the picture of perfection and fullness.
(*) What can be done to note for example reading the notes of any CD that has a work in a minor key by Mozart. It seems that these works are particularly good and powerful because they are different, more romantic, more deep, more close to the terrible realities of the human experience and any cliché romantic that one would want to use. Part of the basic argument: what is good is when it is about the romance. And therefore, one of the highest praise of a work of mozart, under that argument, that is to say, who announces to Beethoven or Schubert, or even -and this is already the most – to Wagner. By the way, citicar the argument that Mozart is good because auncie to others, is not to criticize those other announced. Its quality is independent, and not dependent on future advertising or from the past that you inherited.
That is the good thing of Haydn. Of the classical authors, the only one that is virtually impossible to be co-opted by a romantic aesthetic. And a few more times of course in the Creation, which is a celebration of the magnificence of the world, and the place of human beings in it (the Stations also is, roughly, the same, a celebration of the man in the natural world). Another thing is that you will never be at the height of the celebration, and we have turned the world into something difficult to celebrate. But that’s nothing to remove him from the creation, as the Creation is responsible so brightly show.