When Joseph Haydn completed his fourth and final oratorio at the beginning of 1801 the 69-year-old composer was famous throughout Europe. Born in 1732 as the son of a humble wheelwright, Haydn grew up in a rural, peasant environment. That such a child should make his way eventually to the position of court composer was an extremely rare occurrence. Even in his days at royal courts, however, Haydn still felt a close and intimate attachment to Nature and to life in the countryside. When Baron Gottfried van Swieten, then, presented to Hadyn a libretto on the theme of The Seasons, he found in the old composer a worthy partner in his own veneration for Nature. Besides being a prominent patron of late-18th- Century composers and musicians - earning himself the nickname of "the Patriarch of l\/lusic" - van Swieten was also a gifted and admired connoisseur ofthe European literature of his age. Born in Holland, he developed, in the course of his career as a diplomat, an enthusiasm not only for North German literature but also, and quite especially, for the literature of England. John Milton’s Paradise Lost signified for the Baron, as indeed it did for many poets in England and in Germany as well, a milestone which established a whole new genre of poetic writing. The form of religious-didactic poetry practiced by Milton was an art placed in the service of a pious vision of God and the world which deeply revered both the sublime and the idyllic aspects of created Nature. Another contemporary inspiration to Van Swieten in this regard was the British poet Henry Home, who also wrote, besides about the dignity and grace of Man, also about the sublimity and grace of Nature, seeing the moment of God's "Let there be light!" as the holiest of all moments and the highpoint of the process of Creation.
A third kindred spirit here was the Scottish poet James Thomson. Thomson's poem cycle The Seasons was extremely popular in the German-speaking world in the second half of the 18th Century and it was this cycle of poems that was eventually to form the basis of the libretto of Haydn's Seasons. Van Swieten, indeed, not only took over the basic structure of Thomson's poem-cycle but also borrowed certain formulations almost word-for-word. In other passages, however, he embellished, lending much greater emphasis than Thomson originally had to various images of Nature and idyllic scenes. This tendencyto hyperbole on van Swieten's part was one of the few causes of disharmony between librettist and composer. Haydn - who had, in contrast to the city-raised nobleman, an unromantic conception of Nature based on long direct experience - described certain passages that van Swieten offered him as "Frenchified tosh". The positive veneration of Nature in which the highly-cultured van Swieten took delight seemed, at times, to be more affectation than poetry to the court composer raised among struggling peasants. For all that, though, van Swieten's and Haydn's collaboration was mostly harmonious and mutually enriching. Van Swieten even sometimes added to the texts he passed on to Haydn extensive and precise notes on how he felt certain passages should be set to music; even more astonishingly, Hadyn accepted these suggestions - not always, perhaps, but often and gratefully. In its basic conception, Haydn's Seasons can be considered as a counterpartto The Creation, the libretto for which was also written by van Swieten. Whereas The Creation describes how God made the world and the first man, The Seasons tells of how Man lives in Nature, under the natural laws that God imposed upon the world. But according to the religious view favoured by van Swieten - typical of a deistic theology modified by the influences of the 18th-Century Enlightenment - Man can only live in harmony with Nature if he earns his right to natural existence by hard work and virtuous conduct. In this we see the specific form of piety in the face of created Nature which is peculiarly characteristic of the libretto. Those natural cycles which unfold to the rhythm of the seasons can be been seen here also as metaphors for the birth and mortality of Man himself. The Seasons, then, is very much a work of the Enlightenment period in that Man stands at its very centre. Earthly human existence also comes very concretely to expression within the text through the description of various individual castes within rural society: "Simon, a tenant farmer", "Luke, a young peasant", "some peasant folk", or "hunters".
"In The Creation the angels told stories of God, but in The Seasons it's just Simon speaking" (Haydn). This remark expresses the most basic principle which governed Haydn's setting to music of van Swieten's text. Whereas The Creation sets about trying to find an adequate form of representation for what is transcendent, heavenly, The Seasons is the decidedly earthly counterpart to the earlier "heavenly" oratorio. In this context the music Haydn wrote for this later work was also of a markedly more "secular" character. Both van Swieten's textual accounts of Nature and Haydn's redescriptions of these in music emerge still, indeed, from a certain context of spiritual faith and understanding (that of the "deism" typical of a certain Enlightenment and favoured by van Swieten in particular). But thanks to its unfolding, through music, of the day-to-day lived experience of the farmer and the peasant the score of The Seasons also comprises elements that cling as close to hard material reality as any product of a more purely materialist vision of the world might have done. It was surely the desire to do full justice to these highly concrete and material elements of the libretto he was working with that prompted Haydn to make of the score of The Seasons a prime example of so-called "programme music" and to apply without reservation the technique which has come to be known as "tone painting". He attempts, for instance, to give direct musical accounts of the presence of various animals: the cry of the quail or the chirping ofthe grasshoppers. Already Van Swieten, indeed, had urged Haydn in his notes to include "sound effects" of the greatest possible realism in the passages evoking scenes of hunting or herding. These suggestions of the Baron's sometimes resulted in strange formal and musical oddities. As for example in the "storm scene" which anticipates, in its rhythmic but harmonic dynamism, the famous fourth movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. So as to lend extra emphasis to different descriptions and events, Haydn also made use of a special type of formal musical dynamics, fusing various partial formstogetherto create larger complexes. For example, in the joining of recitative and final chorus to form a single great scene in the aria See here, o foolish Man. As he had already done in The Creation, Haydn draws much of his inspiration also in The Seasons from the musical style of Handel, who succeeded in synthesizing sacred music with aria and Lied structures drawn from the secular realm. This is nowhere clearer than in the so-called Spinning Song from the Winter part, and the fugue "in praise of industry" (Oh toil! Oh honest toil!) from the Autumn part of the oratorio. These passages are (very unusually for the oratorio form) composed in a popular style with comic and ironic undertones. The Spinning Song is a piece of social criticism once again very much in the spirit of the 18th-Century Enlightenment (the peasant girl fools the nobleman) and this message is comically emphasized by the music it is set to. And the inherent irony of the Honest toil! fugue is pointed up clearly enough by Haydn's alternative description of it as "the drunken fugue" - a satirical intention underscored, here too, by the music: a deliberate muddle and confusion of competing voices. Perhaps it was just this close juxtaposition of contrapuntal sophistication and Lied-like simplicity - that is to say, Haydn's synthesis of academic and "folk-music" styles - that made it difficult for contemporary audiences at the piece's first performances to receive it with the enthusiasm with which they had received The Creation. And yet in the end, not least because of the librettist they share, it is hard to consider the two works as separate and independent of one another.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt is also of this opinion: "There can be no question but that these are complementary works [...] Once he had composed The Creation, Haydn had no choice but to compose The Seasons." Harnoncourt is not only a conductor but also a passionate researcher into the history of music. In addition to his conducting and playing, he has also been active as a musicologist, publishing works on the theory and philosophy of music. His analyses still count today as standard works in the field of historically informed performance of classical music. After studies at the Vienna Music Academy he became a cellist with the Vienna Symphony. In 1953 he founded, together with his wife Alice, the orchestra "Concentus Musicus Wien", with whom he has, for many years, been attempting to reproduce as closely as possible, using original instruments, the musical performance practices of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Along with his numerous concert appearances in Europe, Nicolaus Harnoncourt has also made a name for himself as an opera conductor. In March 2012 he was also nominated an officer of the French Legion d'Honneur. His many appearances have made him particularly well known for his contribution to the revival of the historically informed performance of older music.