A flawed Creation awaits redemption

Showtime

What: Haydn’s The Creation

Who: Howard Dyck and the Bach Elgar Choir

When: Saturday, May 3 at 8 p.m.

Where: Melrose United Church, 86 Homewood Ave.

Cost: $30, senior $25, student $15

Call: 905-527-5995

Howard Dyck can count music history’s greatest chords on the fingers of one hand. There’s the yearning ‘Tristan’ chord in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. There’s Beethoven’s harmonic coup de théâtre at the words “vor Gott” in his Ninth Symphony. And then there’s Haydn’s luminously white C major chord on the last word in the phrase “and there was Light” in his 1798 oratorio, The Creation.

“To the Enlightenment mind, C major was the ultimate Enlightenment key,” explained Dyck. “There was nothing cluttering it. No sharps, no flats. It represented reason, and clarity of thought. That moment is as much a philosophical statement as it is a religious one.”

Yet, Haydn’s philosophical-religious statement isn’t heard as often as it once was. In the first decade of the 1800s, The Creation was a staple during London's Lent oratorio season as well as the Advent and Lent seasons in Vienna where it was sung in German as Die Schöpfung. Since then, its popularity has waxed and waned. From his vantage point as the host of CBC Radio Two’s Choral Concert and announcer of that program’s Choral Billboard, Dyck estimates that The Creation gets all of a dozen Canadian performances per year, a pittance when compared to Handel’s Messiah. Dyck himself has conducted the work about a dozen times over his career, roughly one-tenth the times he’s done Messiah.

Dyck is somewhat baffled why there are relatively so few performances when so many consider The Creation the acme of Haydn’s creative output. “One reason just might be is that it’s pretty challenging for the orchestra,” offered Dyck. “It’s much harder for the orchestra than it is for the choir…The piece is sort of incurably optimistic, and maybe that’s kind of out of step with our time. We have a fairly ‘noir’ outlook on life. But I’m not sure.”

Noir or not, there’s a current flurry of Creations in the Golden Horseshoe. The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir sang it last night. The Toronto Classical Singers sing it on Sunday. And Dyck’s Bach Elgar Choir will perform it with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, and soloists Charlene Pauls, Mark DuBois, and Bruce Kelly this Saturday at 8 p.m. in Melrose United. For the continuo part, Dyck will use organ and cello. "I'd really love to have a fortepiano for it," said Dyck, who had used this period instrument when he directed the work with the Grand Philharmonic Choir a few years back in Kitchener. "I don't like the haprsichord for it. It's a kind of dated sound." will

“It’s funny to see how these pieces have a kind of a cycle, and how many of us quite unconsciously fit into that cycle,” said Dyck. “A few years ago, everyone was doing (Carl Orff’s) Carmina Burana, and then all of a sudden something else comes along.”

The Creation was the first large-scale musical work to be published with a bilingual text (German and English). Its libretto draws on the creation story found in the Book of Genesis plus Psalms 19 and 104 in the King James Bible, as well as John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It largely skirts the issue of the Fall. Haydn had the original English libretto at hand as he composed, though he worked predominantly with the German translation and adaptation made by his friend, Gottfried van Swieten. No one knows for sure who penned the original English libretto, but it has long been criticized. “It’s a little patchwork in places,” admits Dyck. Patchwork? There are inept epithets such as “dreary, wasteful hail,” "expanded boughs," and “closed wood.” So too, the imitator’s line, “See flashing through the wet, in thronged swarms the fry, on thousand ways around” lacks Milton’s masterly touch when compared to “Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay, with frie innumerable swarme, and shoales of fish that with their finns and shining scales glide under the green wave.” Further, Haydn’s English was sketchy at best, and so, Swieten, whose Endligh was but a bit better, did the English text underlay. But there too, the results were flawed.

In an attempt to redeem that situation, Dyck has made some changes, drawing on Robert Shaw and Alice Parker’s revisions to the English text underlay published in 1957.

Textual dilemmas aside, Dyck lauds the work. “It’s such a terrific piece,” raved Dyck. “Every time I do it, I just love it.”