The Seasons

“The Seasons has finished me off,” declared Haydn after completing his oratorio in 1801. “I should never have written it.” The 69-year-old composer had struggled for two years against illness and the demands of setting an often awkward German translation of James Thomson’s cycle of poems about country life and the divinely ordained turning year. His librettist, the Austrian diplomat Baron Gottfried van Swieten, faced the near-impossible task of compressing passages conceived in blank verse and making them work as the dramatic narrative of a secular oratorio. Haydn compensated for the shortcomings of Van Swieten’s Die Jahreszeiten with music of exceptional verve and energy, marked by his sympathetic feeling for rural toils and rustic delights. The work, retranslated into English as The Seasons to hook Haydn’s devoted British following, opens with a spirited orchestral introduction that announces spring’s return and a seductive sequence of recitatives and arias for the archetypal country folk Simon (bass), Lukas (tenor) and Hanne (soprano). It includes a thrilling hunting chorus with prominent orchestral horns, an intoxicating drinking chorus that follows soon after, and a closing fugal song of praise to heaven’s eternal spring.