"In The Creation the angels speak and tell of God, but in The Seasons it's only Simon who talks." With these words Joseph Haydn is said to have explained to the Emperor Franz I the completely different character of his last oratorio after The Creation. It was a work very European in spirit that the 69-year-old composer presented to a Vienna audience in April 1801: an English didactic poem from the Enlightenment era in German translation, set to music by an Austrian composer in the spirit of the French ‘imitation aesthetics’. But the roots of Haydn’s wonderful score go back much farther-back to his childhood in the country.

AD NOTAM
A SUBJECT CLOSE TO HAYDN’S HEART
In 1727 the master coach-builder Matthias Haydn put up a low thatched cottage in the little market town of Rohrau in Lower Austria. Five years later his son Franz Joseph was born there, the child who was to become one of the greatest of all composers. When Beethoven was shown a picture of the Haydn family home as he lay on his deathbed in 1827, he cried "A simple peasant's hut where so great a man was born!". Strictly speaking, Haydn didn’t grow up in a genuinely rustic milieu: unlike fellow composer Dvořák a century later, he didn’t have to look after his father’s cows. But coach-builder Haydn senior also owned vineyards, fields and livestock in Rohrau. Thus little Franz Joseph grew up in agricultural surroundings, with his father doubtless telling him the odd story of his great-grandfather, who earned his living as a day labourer in the Burgenland.
These details of Haydn's youth are important for an understanding of his last oratorio. A composer born and raised in a town like Mozart, whose father was also a composer or the doctor’s son Handel, could never have written a work like The Seasons with such ardour and persuasive power. The genre pictures from the life of simple country folk that illustrate the changing seasons call for some knowledge of the rural environment, Haydn was speaking from the heart and from experience when he described ploughing and sowing in springtime or the grape harvest in the autumn. When he has his farmer Simon whistle a tune as he works in the field - the melody is the famous andante theme from his "Surprise" symphony -, he undoubtedly had a concrete image from his own youth in mind.
Haydn's direct identification with the text also relates to the oratorio's moral message, which is about the happiness of hard-working people. A simple peasant is rewarded by nature and Heaven alike for the wonders he coaxes forth frorn the soil with his skill and patience. With the Lord’s blessing, and assisted by the changing seasons, the country people enjoy the fruits of their labour. Haydn himself knew plenty about that: he was fond of remarking, in reference to his own humble beginnings, that "young people can see from my own example that you can make something out of nothing", adding that "I admittedly had talent in me, and thanks to this, combined with hard work, I gradually progressed". Even though Haydn scattered his seed on to manuscript paper rather than on the soil, he certainly appreciated the value of hard work. Otherwise he wouldn't have been able to write such an ardent song for his chorus praising the toil of an inventive person.
There is a third aspect of the oft-criticized libretto of The Seasons that probably touched the old master: the metaphor of the winter of life that is spread out before the listener in the fourth and final section. In addition to the seasons themselves, the oratorio also focuses on the different periods in our life. Man's life span progresses from the youthful light-heartedness of spring through the maturity of summer and the rich harvest of autumn to the rigidity of winter, when death is in the air. And it was precisely at this transition from the autumn to the winter of his own life that Haydn chose to write The Seasons.

THE HAPPINESS OF THE HARD-WORKING MAN
After he completed the work not without some difficulty - between1799 and 1801 he was struggling with his “growing weakness“, he didn’t immediately enjoy the fruits of his labours. The premiere on 24th April 1801 in Vienna’s Palais Schwarzenberg was certainly a succès d'estime, with waves of applause, but the first public performance a month later in the Großer Redoutensaal didn't bring the hoped-for breakthrough, and with only 700 paying guests, the takings were pretty meagre into the bargain. Only once the score went into print and Haydn’s publisher paid him 4,500 florins did he have cause to be content. The sum was four times the annual salary that Prince Esterházy had paid him and ten times as much as Mozart had received 15 years previously for Le nozze di Figaro.
For the son of a craftsman who always measured happiness in monetary terms, this handsome payment was just as great a triumph as the gradually growing popularity that the new oratorio enjoyed through repeat performances. At the Imperial court, in the Hofburgtheater, and in countless concert halls outside Vienna, The Seasons was given to resounding applause. Scarcely anyone had expected the work to step out of the shadow cast by The Creation so quickly, not even Gottfried van Swieten, the librettist who commissioned the work.
With Mozart’s help, the erstwhile diplomat and prefect of the imperial court Library had put on German versions of Handel oratorios at the end of the 1780’s in Vienna. The same aristocratic society that had arranged the Handel performances under van Swieten's aegis now commissioned performances of Haydn’s late oratorios as well. It was no coincidence that the scripts came from England. After Milton's Paradise Lost had served as the basis of The Creation, van Swieten chose the Scottish writer james Thomson’s didactic poem The Seasons, a bestseller of the early Enlightenment, for the new work. From the 4.000 plus verses, van Swieten selected those scenes that were most interesting from a musical point of view, translated them into German and gave them to Haydn, accompanied by detailed notes on the how best to set them to music!
Van Swieten’s ambition to give the great composer musical advice was in keeping with his inflated self-esteem as an author. The Haydn biographer Griesinger remarked laconically: "In his own products he fell victim to all the errors and shortcomings that he was wont to criticize in others". His ideas of tone painting caused him to fall out with Haydn. The composer found the librettist’s demands for "all manner of depictions or imitations irksome", and would have preferred the score to be "free of all this poppycock".
In van Swieten‘s eyes, however, The Seasons were as much his work as they were Haydn's, especially as he planned them to be the second part of a trilogy that was to culminate in an oratorio about the Last Judgment. But this was not to be: van Swieten died in 1803, by which time Haydn had given up composing anyway. Thus the collaboration between the two unequal talents remained confined to the two great oratorios, The Seasons were regarded thenceforth not so much as a continuation of The Creation as a contrast to their predecessor: one work was sacred in character, the other secular; The Creation was noble and sublime, The Seasons was more a collection of graphic genre pictures. Haydn himself apologized to his biographer Carpani for the later work with a simple explanation: "In one work the characters are angels, in the other they’re peasants". Be that as it may, the peasants in The Seasons nonetheless sing the praises of their Creator in sublime tones, too. This explains the almost contradictory diversity of the oratorio.

IMAGES OF EARTHLY HAPPINESS AND HEAVENLY BLISS
Hardly any other oratorio in the history of the genre arouses such a wide variety of feelings, alternating in rapid succession and apparently contradictory, as The Seasons. In his review of the première for the Allgemeine Masikalische Zeitung, the leading music journal of its day in Germany, Griesinger gave an apt description of the effect of these rapidly alternating scenes and emotions: "The work elicited silent reverence, astonishment and noisy enthusiasm in the audience one after the other... At one moment the listener is delighted by a song tune, the next moment the peace is shattered as if by a rushing river that bursts its banks - all the instruments come in together to tremendous effect; one minute, one is charmed by the simple expression, free of any artifice, then the next one finds oneself admiring the lavish lushness of rapid, bright chords. From beginning to end the spirit finds itself helplessly swept along from deeply touching moments to dreadful ones, from the utmost naivety to the utmost artifice, from the beautiful to the sublime."
When we think of The Seasons today, the first images that spring to mind are pictures of earthly happiness, what Griesinger referred to as the “naive” element. The old master introduces his main characters to us in infectious good humour. First on the scene is the tenant farmer Simon, who plods along behind his plough and improves his mood as he works by whistling the not entirely unfamiliar melody mentioned above, which the orchestra strikes up. Then we meet his daughter Hanne, who dallies with the young farmer Lukas as they stroll through the countryside together. Lukas is soon her devoted admirer, and in the middle of the autumn fruit harvest he sings the praises ofthe pretty country girls, "their colour as fresh as the fruit that they gather": ladies from town can’t hold a candle to their rural cousins. Simon, Hanne and Lukas: three happy souls going about their everyday work, each of them proud of his simple rural happiness.
In the choruses, the private happiness of the father; his daughter and her husband-to-be is expanded into a large-scale panorama of rural life. In the spring the farmers pray to the Lord for fine weather to help the seeds grow. In the summer they extol the sunrise - but only until the sunlight starts to get really hot. The sultry heat inevitably brings a thunderstorm that has man and beast alike diving for shelter: everyone scatters until the tolling of the vespers bell finds them assembled demurely in their homes again. As autumn arrives, the peasants let themselves go and enjoy some boisterous fun, be it as as helpers to the aristocratic huntsmen as they shoot pheasants, hares and deer, or be it at wine festival, which soon develops into a hedonistic orgy. And even winter, a dark, cold and menacing time, turns out to have its own quiet appeal: As they sit at their spinningwheels and sing, Hanne strikes up a ballad ridiculing the “fine” lord ofthe manor. The final choruses of each section are dedicated to the Creator in all cases: these are hymns telling of the heavenly bliss that increases our earthly happiness.

LOVE OF NATURE, OR "FRENCH RUBBISH"?
In painting these genre scenes in music, the aged Haydn once again used the entire palette of his genius, much to the surprise of his contemporaries. Where the act of Creation inspired him to ‘recreate’ in music all the creatures that began to stir on land and in the water at the Lord’s command, he now turned his attention to the result: to nature in all its infinite abundance and variety. Since Vivaldi's Four Seasons and the Musicalischer Instrumental-Calender of Haydn’s predecessor as Kapellmeister to Prince Esterházy, Gregor Joseph Werner, such depiction of the passing seasons was part of the standard skills of any self-respecting 18th century composer. And Haydn certainly made generous use of it in both his string quartets and his symphonies: there are examples aplenty in both genres, e.g. the “Hen” symphony, the “Bird” quartet or the “Lark” quartet-all nicknames inspired by onomatopoeic effects in the score. And nature idylls on the opera stage tired the composer's imagination to equal degree, as is evident from the garden ofthe sorceress Armida, or the dramatic powers of transformation that her colleague Alcina possesses in Orlando Paladino. In The Seasons, Haydn had the opportunity to display this facet of his genius in one last, grandiose panorama.
The ‘sound effects’ are contributed in all cases by the orchestra: they make their first appearance in the prelude to each of the four sections. Spring is preceded by a dark picture of winter storms that are not at all keen to give way to the "blissful moon". For although the score tells us that the introduction "represents the transition from winter to spring", after a brief idyllic section with birdsong, the gloomy G minor sounds of winter return once more, before they get bogged down at the end in chords ofliterally Beethovenian force. Not until the accompagnato recitative in the bass does the transition to spring finally take place and the raw winds hasten back to their caves "with a dreadful howling". Here, Haydn deliberately alternates the sequence of text and music: at one point the orchestra illustrates a line or a single word that has just been sung, while at another it anticipates a sentence not yet spoken, such as the first passage sung by the soprano. Here a bright spring day finally dawns, in musical terms as well, and a few bars after we hear spring establish itself in the orchestra, the chorus also sings its praises in the finest pastoral tones.
In the other three seasons, too, the introduction in each case leads into the first scene in similar manner, preceding the tableau of sumrner, autumn and winter respectively with a characteristic starting situation. In the second of the four parts, the introduction presents "dawn", the prelude to Autumn portrays "the farmer's happiness about the bountiful harvest", while the prelude to Winter depicts "the thick fogs that signal the beginning of winter".
As Haydn's portrayal of each season progresses, the orchestra doesn't miss any picturesque details that flora and fauna, the vagaries of the weather and the farmer's toil have to offer. In Spring we hear a musical picture of the dew that covers the meadows and the flowers poking up their heads from the grass. In Summer we hear the crickets chirping (C sharp against D in the high flutes!) and the frogs croaking. The summer’s day seems particularly long and rich in musical images: it begins in the twilight of a hazy daybreak, and comes to a first climax in a splendid sunrise, then reaching its second climax rn a thunderstorm. At the end of the day we hear the vespers bell chiming eight times. In Haydn's day, the country folk went to bed at 8 pm (admittedly not Central European summer time!).
In Autumn we hear a hunting dog prowling around once it has picked up the scent of a partridge, increasing speed until it suddenly stops - its master has got the prey in his sights. One shot brings the bird down: the dead partridge plummets to the ground. More drastic and graphic still is the chaos that breaks out as the frightened hares run hither and thither with the dogs hard on their heels, while the horns kick up a real din as they play a compendium of the best-known hunting signals.
The music at the onset of Winter is dull and gloomy, but before long these melancholy tones are dispelled by the above-mentioned scenes in the cozy parlour.
Every one of these details is depicted with disarming naivety and most vividly - there is no trace of the composer's irritations overthe things Baron van Swieten asked him to "stoop to". Notwithstanding annoyance about one or two points, Haydn was able to place his “Soli Deo Cloria“ at the bottom of a magnificent score. In this, his last monumental work for choir and orchestra, he achieves a wealth of orchestral texture beyond that in any of his previous compositions. As far as instrumentation and harmony is concerned, The Seasons possesses a quality nothing short of prophetic in the way it points far into the musical future, into the Romantic period.

PRAISE BE TO THE LORD!
In the choruses of The Seasons it is not the country folk alone that we hear. The composer himself also speaks to us in the spirit of a final, emphatic declaration of faith in his Creator. "Eternal, almighty, gracious God" is the line sung on the great key shift from D to B flat in the closing chorus of Spring. This is exclaimed not only by the farmers in the hope of clement weather to improve the harvest. Here, "Papa Haydn" is speaking himself, e.g, in the lines:

"The table of Thy bounty hast. Thou for us prepared.
And from Thy mercy's fountain, our thirsting souls restored!"

The abundance of the Lord's blessing in nature can be understood here as a reference to the Eucharist, where the faithful partake of the body and blood of Christ. In such moments, The Seasons are no longer a secular oratorio, but take on a sacred character. At every remarkable point when a hitherto unheard-of timbre suddenly appears, or a modulation takes the music in an unexpected direction, Haydn is using his genius to praise his Creator. It is "gracious God” who stands above all else in this work, and who blesses the farmers with the harvest in autumn:

"What spring, the various blossom’d
put in white promise forth,
What summer suns and showers
to ripe perfection brought,
rush boundless now to view,
gladdening the husbandman."

Even in his old age, Haydn once again displayed the full wealth of his own creative power in the late autumn of his career. In every bar of this last, arduous harvest, he gives heartfelt thanks to the Lord.
But it is not only solemnity and gratitude that hold sway in the choruses. They could even be described as subversive in places, although Haydn wrote a particularly large number of complex fugues here. One of these is the song in praise of hard work in Autumn. This piece is a busy, 'industrious' fugue such as one would expect to find in the Cum Sancto Spiritu section of a mass. Here, the venerable form serves to praise a new era and its spirit: hard work in this case stands for human ingenuity, full of enthusiasm and untiring-it is a machine that Haydn praises here, in all likelihood the steam engine that was such a source of fascination at the time.
Another of the oratorio’s fugues deliberately comes apart at the seams: for the conclusion of the wine festival Haydn wrote what he called "a drunken fugue". In this number, everyone intentionally comes in at the wrong moment, starts on the wrong note or makes embarassing chromatic slips. In a drunken stupor, even the good-natured farmer loses control, while the members of the chorus need to be fully alert if they are to perform all the deliberate hiccups as naturally as possible...
In this respect, each of the big choruses in The Seasons is a marvel of inspiration and a challenge for the interpreters. This applies to both the genre scenes like the hunt, the wine festival or the spinning room and to the natural spectacles: the sunrise, the scorching midsummer heat, the thunderstorm. In this oratorio, the soloists strike up a new tone as well. They emerge from the half-courtly, half-bourgeois concert halls of Viennese classicism into the fresh air - literally. In spite of their entirely urban singing skills, despite cantabile and coloratura, each of the three characters is first and foremost a simple and honest soul. That’s why Haydn wrote vocal numbers for Simon, Hanne and Lukas that don’t belong to genres familiar from opera and oratorio. The pieces that Haydn's three rural folk sing deal with bliss and abundance, with refreshment and grace, sometimes as pastoral scenes, sometimes as simple rustic dancing songs.

THE WINTER OF LIFE
Right at the end, one last dark shadow falls across the bright colours of Haydn's tone painting. It is not so much the actual winter that drives the wanderer down icy paths before it entices him back to his cozy fireplace. No, it is rather the admonishing forefinger that Thomson raises at the end of his ‘didactic poem’ to lend the seasons an allegorical meaning. In a solemn aria in E flat maior, Simon sings the decisive words of warning:

"Behold, o fond, deluded man,
in this thy pictured life behold!
Soon pass thy years of flowering Spring,
thy Summer's ardent strength declines.
Thy sober Autumn fades to age,
and pale concluding Winter comes
at last, and shuts the scene.
Where now are fled those dreams of greatness,
of happiness, those hopes?"

For both the authors, for Haydn and van Swieten alike, these verses had a very direct relevance. Yet Haydn placed them at a certain distance: he attached more importance to the triumphant promise of the final chorus than to the admonition of the aria: "Then the great morning dawns". After the Last Judgment, only the pious and godfearing will participate in this 'new existcnce'. All men will be redeemed who have led a virtuous life in keeping with the Sermon on the Mount and indeed with the maxims ofthe Enlightenment. Right up to its very last lines, The Seasons remains a 'didactic poem' set to music in the spirit of the European Enlightenment:

“But who shall dare to enter in?
The man who does the will of God.
And who shall mount the holy hill?
The pure in heart shall see their God.
And who may in that temple dwell?
The-merciful shall mercy find.
And who shall gain eternal peace?
Who maketh peace shall peace enioy."