Josef Haydn’s "The Seasons" will mark Woking Choral Society’s first performance of their 2000/2001 season. The concert will be held on Saturday 25 November at 7.30 PM in the HG Wells Conference & Events Centre, Woking.
Haydn was 67 and feeling his age when, somewhat reluctantly, he began work on The Seasons in 1799. He took two years to complete it. The project was the brainchild of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an elderly Viennese nobleman who had provided the libretto for The Creation several years earlier. The Baron was anxious to repeat the success of The Creation and felt that an oratorio on this subject would give full rein to Haydn’s skill in evocative scene-painting and imaginative depiction of mood and character.
Van Swieten took as his starting point the epic poem, The Seasons, written in 1726, by a Scotsman, James Thomson, who had settled in London. The work had a wide vogue throughout the 18th century, and was translated into several languages including German. Thomson had set out, using classical models, to describe in moralistic terms "the influence of nature on country life" and "to concern himself with the reflections which nature evokes in the countryman". To provide a suitable libretto, however, it was necessary to prune and rearrange the original, and it was also Van Swieten‘s idea to introduce three rustic characters, Simon (a farmer), Jane (his daughter), and Lucas (her suitor), to act as commentators.
The result was a skilful and effective libretto though Haydn found work on it unexpectedly difficult. Van Swieten was Court Librarian and considered himself an authority on literary and artistic matters. Haydn was intensely irritated by the Baron’s insistence on dictating how certain passages should be set, and as the son of a poor rural craftsman he may also have been out of sympathy with the rather idealised picture of country life and work contained in van Swieten’s verses. None of this, however, is apparent in the result.
When the work was complete it was van Swieten himself who translated it back into English (not always very idiomatically) for the first English edition. The standard Novello English text which we use removes some of the Baron’s infelicities, but is nevertheless a "fourth remove" from Thomson’s original. This may be one reason why the work has tended to remain just outside the mainstream of the choral repertory. This is a tragedy because The Seasons, despite what it cost the ageing composer in health and strength, contains some of Haydn‘s freshest, and most inspired and original music. And where else in choral music can you find depicted a bacchanalian drinking scene, a highly realistic stag hunt, and partridge being shot?
We are proud to announce that the soloists who will be performing for us on this occasion are, Jenny Saunders (soprano), Alastair Thompson (tenor), and Edward Caswell (baritone). We will be singing, as usual, under the baton of Nicholas Steinitz accompanied by the Cantata Orchestra..