I Have Landed (41 page)

All cultures generate creation myths, and such stories play a part in the drama of human life far different from the role that we grant to the fascination and utility of factual discoveries made by science. With this perspective, I can summarize my case for Haydn's text in a paragraph: The Book of Genesis presents two entirely different creation myths, told in chapters 1 and 2.1 find two aspects of the second myth morally troubling, whereas (with one exception) I
rejoice in the meanings and implications of the first story. Interestingly, Haydn's text uses only the first story, and explicitly deletes the one theme (human hegemony over the rest of God's creation) that disturbs me (and has troubled so much of human history as well). I do not think that these textual decisions were accidental, and I therefore regard Haydn's
Creation
as an affirmation of all the themes that a wise and maximally useful creation myth should stress—joy, generosity, optimism—while not forgetting the dark side and our resulting capacity to make a horrid mess out of such promise.

The second creation myth of Genesis 2—the text that Haydn did
not
set—emphasizes two themes that I find less than inspiring: God's order (by fiat and not by explanation) that we not seek certain kinds of knowledge, and an anatomical rationale for the subjugation of women. We tend to forget the profound differences between the two stories of Genesis, and we usually amalgamate parts of this second tale with out primary memory of the first story (see essay 7 for a very different context, but longer analysis, of these two distinct creation myths). In Genesis 2, God creates Adam first, and then builds the Garden of Eden. To assuage Adam's loneliness, he then creates the animals and permits
Adam to assign their names. But Adam is still lonely, so God creates Eve from his rib. (Genesis 1, Haydn's text, says nothing about forbidden fruits, and describes the simultaneous creation of man and woman: “So God created man in his own image . . . male and female created he them.”)

Creation of Adam and Eve,
Flemish school, seventeenth century
.

The theme of forbidden access to knowledge occurs only in Genesis 2. (I recognize, of course, that some exegetes can and have suggested a benign meaning for these passages in terms of moral restraint upon our darker capacities. But most people, throughout Western history, have read these words as a divine indiction against questioning certain forms of authority and seeking certain forms of knowledge—injunctions that cannot be congenial to any scientist.) “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17).

Similarly, no statement in Genesis 1 speaks about inequality between the sexes, but Adam uses Eve's status as both subsequent and partial to hint at such a claim in Genesis 2: “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23).

Haydn's text divides the creation myth of Genesis 1 into three sensible and dramatic units. We usually view the six-day sequence as a story of successive additions, but I think that such a reading seriously mistakes the form of this particular myth (see essay 20 for a detailed development of this argument). Creation myths, based on limits of our mental powers, and also on the structural possibilities of material objects, can only “go” in a few basic ways—and Genesis 1 invokes the primary theme of successive differentiation from initial chaos, not sequential addition. The universe begins in undefined confusion (“without form and void”). God then constructs a series of separations and divisions to mark the first four days. On day one, he divides light from darkness. Haydn's amazing overture violates many contemporary musical traditions of tonality and structure in order to depict this initial chaos. He then, at the end of the first chorus, describes the creation of light with a device both amazingly simple and (to this day) startlingly evocative: a series of crashing chords in bright and utterly unsophisticated C major. (A virtual cliché among statements in the history of classical music designates this passage—but so truly—as the most stunningly effective C-major chords ever written.)

On day two, God divides the waters of earth and sky; on day three, he separates the earth into water and land (and also allows the land to bring forth plants). On day four, he returns to the heavens to concentrate the diffuse light
into two great sources, the sun and the moon (“he made the stars also” as an afterthought). Soloists describe the work of each day, and each sequence finishes with a wonderful chorus. Part 1 therefore ends with Haydn's most famous ensemble: “The heavens are telling the glory of God”—the heavens, that is, because no animals have yet been formed!

Creation of the Stars and Planets,
from the Sistine ceiling, by Michelangelo, sixteenth century
.

Part 2 describes the work of days five and six, the creation of animals: creatures of the water and air on day five, and of the earth, including humans, on day six. Soloists and chorus alternate as in Part 1. Haydn's music exudes beauty, power, exaltation, etc., but he can also be whimsical, earthy, and ordinary—a combination that captures the essence of the humanistic (or should I say naturalistic) spirit by acknowledging that glory and fascination lie as much in the little foibles as in the grand overarchings. Haydn shows this bumptious and quotidian side of totality in describing the creation of animals. First, the soprano soloist, in a charming and idyllic aria, describes the birds—the noble eagle, the cooing dove, the merry lark, and the nightingale, who had not yet learned (but, alas, soon will) to sing an unhappy note: “No grief affected yet her breast, Nor to a mournful tale were tuned her soft enchanting lays.” The bass soloist, alternating between the bucolic and the simply funny, then describes the tawny lion, the flexible tiger, the nimble stag, and, finally, “in long dimension, creeps with sinuous trace the worm” (usually ending, if the bass soloist can, and ours could, on a low D—actually set an octave higher by Haydn, but taken down by soloists as a traditional bass license corresponding to those annoying high C's that tenors forever interpolate).

The shorter Part 3 then uses Milton's style (if not exactly his words) for two long and rapturous duets between Adam and Eve, interlaced with choral praises and culminating in a paean of thanks with a final musical device that always thrills me as a singer (and, I hope, pleases the audience as well). The final expostulation of joy for the glorious diversity of the earth and its life—“praise the Lord, utter thanks, Amen”—runs twice, first as an alternation of passages for a quartet of soloists and the full chorus, and then, even louder, for the full chorus alone. This acceleration or promotion—more an emotional device than a compositional beauty per se (but mastery of such devices also marks a composer's skill)—always leaves me feeling that we should mount even higher, thus allowing the performance to reverberate beyond its formal ending (which can only be deemed quite grand enough already!).

Haydn's text stands revealed as a great document of optimism and humanism as much for its omissions as for its inclusions. Interestingly, although nearly the entire text of Genesis 1 enters the narrative, one long passage has been conspicuously (and, I assume, consciously) omitted—the set of “objectionable” (to me at least) statements about divinely ordained human domination over nature: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth. . . . And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26 and 28).

Instead, following the creation of land animals, Haydn's text, in a nonbiblical interpolation, suggests an entirely different reason for the creation of men and women. In Genesis 1, God fashions us to have dominion over everything else. But in Haydn's text, God creates humans simply because the living world remains unfulfilled, even a bit sad, after such effort in making everything up to the tawny lion and the sinuous worm. In nearly six full days of hard work, God has stuffed the earth with a glorious series of diverse and wonderful objects. But he then realizes that one omission precludes the fulfillment of this greatest architectural task ever set to music (far exceeding the accomplishments of Fasolt and Fafnir in building Valhalla). Not a single item in his creation has enough mental power to appreciate the beauty and glory of these optimal surroundings. God has to make men and women—so that some creature can know and praise the grandeur of existence. And so Raphael, just following his low D for the sinuous worm, exclaims: “But all the work was not complete; there wanted yet that wondrous being; that, grateful, could God's power admire, with heart and voice his goodness praise.”

I don't want to make either this recitation, or Haydn's text, sound too saccharine or devoid of complexity. The humanistic tradition does not deny the dark side, but chooses to use these themes as warnings for potential correction, rather than statements about innate depravity. Thus, Haydn does not entirely neglect the common biblical subject (so prominent in Genesis 2) of dangers inherent in knowing too much. But he certainly reduces the point to a barest possible minimum. Just before the final chorus, the tenor soloist sings a quick passage in the least impassioned narrational style of “dry recitative” (with only keyboard and continuo as accompaniment): “O happy pair and happy still might be if not misled by false conceit, ye strive at more than is granted and desire to know more than you should know.” Modern listeners might also be discomfited by Eve's promises of obedience to Adam in their second duet (from Milton, not from Genesis 1)—even though her inspiration follows Adam's promise to “pour new delights” and “show wonders everywhere” with every step they take together upon this newly created world. We can't, after all, impose the sensibilities of 2000 upon 1798. And who would want to defend 2000 before any truly just court of universal righteousness?

But while we identify Haydn's text as a creation myth in the most expansive and optimistic spirit of love and wonder for all works of earth and life, we must also confront a historical puzzle. Haydn began his work in 1794, and the first performance took place in 1798 (with Haydn conducting and none other than Antonio Salieri, the unfairly maligned villain of
Amadeus
, at the harpsichord). Such an expansively optimistic text seems entirely out of keeping with the conservative gloom that spread throughout Europe after the excesses of the French Revolution, culminating in the guillotining of the guillotiner Robespierre in 1794. Moreover, the spread of romanticism in music and art, for all its virtues, scarcely sanctioned such old-fashioned joy in the objective material world.

The apparent solution to this problem rests upon an interesting twist. Haydn wrote
The Creation
as a result of inspiration received during trips to London, particularly in 1791, when he heard (and felt overwhelmed by) the power of Handel's oratorios. This source has always been recognized, and the pleasure of singing Haydn's
Creation
lies at least partly in the wonderful Handelian anachronisms included amid the lush classical and near-romantic orchestration. But Handel's posthumous influence may have run far deeper. The source of Haydn's text has always presented a mystery. Who wrote it, and how did Haydn obtain the goods and the rights? (We know that Haydn's friend, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, translated the text into German from an English original—but whence the original?) Latest scholarship indicates that the text may have been written for Handel more than forty years earlier
(Handel died in 1759), but never set by the greatest master of the oratorio, and therefore still available for Haydn two generations later.