Die Schopfung: Oratorium fur Solostimmen, Chor und Orchester, Hob. XXI: 2, and: Die Schopfung: Oratorium fur Solostimmen, Chor und Orchester, Hob. XXI: 2, piano reduction (review)

"The work is to appear ... in full score, so that on the one hand, the public may have the work in its entirety, and so that the connoisseur may see it in toto and thus better judge it; while on the other, it will be easier to prepare the parts, should one wish to perform the work anywhere." (Translation from H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle & Works, vol. 4, Haydn: The Years of "The Creation" 1796– 1800 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977; reprint, London: Thames & Hudson, 1994], 471.)

So read the announcement Haydn placed in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in June of 1799 to attract subscribers for his own edition of Die Schöpfung (The Creation). Viennese audiences had recently witnessed the private premiere of the oratorio on 30 April 1798, and the first public performance on 19 March 1799 at the Burgtheater with approximately 180 musicians conducted by Haydn. The composer was now ready to offer his work to an even wider audience with his self-published German and English edition issued in Vienna in late February 1800.

As the advertisement demonstrates, Haydn planned his edition for the public and the connoisseur, and only secondarily for the performer, as parts were not issued with the first edition. A. Peter Brown (Performing Haydn's The Creation: Reconstructing the Earliest Renditions [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986], 74) suggests that most of the 400 subscribers to the work would not have been interested in performance parts anyway. This was a presentation edition complete with an exclusive list of subscribers and a title page stamped and sealed by the composer himself —a volume intended for elite music collections across Europe.

Today, an exemplar of Haydn's original edition of The Creation is still a prized treasure for libraries and collections, and, despite the print's errors and incomplete or contradictory markings, it constitutes one of the most important sources for any new performing or scholarly edition of the work. In fact, even despite the lost autograph, any editor faces a crowded field of authentic sources for The Creation. In addition to the first edition and the engraver's fair copy used to prepare it, scores and parts from Haydn's estate as well as those originally in the possession of the Tonkünstler-Societät are extant. These materials feature markings from performances led by Haydn in the work's early years, thus reflecting a performance tradition largely absent from the 1800 edition.

Over the past two decades, new editions and scholarly studies of the authentic sources have afforded devotees of The Creation new insight into the work. Research by Nicholas Temperley ("New Light on the Libretto of The Creation," in Music in Eighteenth-Century England: Essays in Memory of Charles Cudworth, ed. Christopher Hogwood and Richard Luckett, 189–211 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983]) and Robbins Landon (The Creation and The Seasons: The Complete Authentic Sources for the Word-Books [Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1985]) on the much-maligned English text, for example, corrected misconceptions of Baron van Swieten's role in the text's production and has also introduced new theories about the provenance of the English libretto. Temperley later edited...