Performers
Programme
Joseph Haydn's oratorio The Seasons was written shortly after the first successful performances of its sister work, The Creation. The two works have a close spiritual relationship. While The Creation depicts the creation of the world in the course of the Genesis account, The Seasons is about the existence of the world in the course of the year, about the experience of divine creation in the cyclical growth and decay of nature.
Despite this similarity in content, Haydn found the Seasons rather difficult to compose. Haydn had his difficulties with the text, which was written by Baron van Swieten after The Seasons by the English author James Thomson. Setting 'frog croaking' or 'industriousness' to music did not appeal to him. On the other hand, he seems to have liked the lyrics of the final chorus: 'Juhhe! Juhhe! The wine is here!', which heralds the end of autumn, so literally that he must not have been completely sober when he composed it. That is why I call the last fugue the drunken fugue', he is said to have remarked.
The two great oratorios 'The Creation' and 'The Seasons' have one thing in common: they sing and celebrate not only the course of the world and of time, but also the preciousness of nature - and are therefore highly topical again today!
(Frankfurter Museums-Gesellschaft e.V.)