Franz Joseph Haydn: The Seasons

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Image courtesy of Diario de Sevilla.

A successor of Handel in the oratorio genre, Franz Joseph Haydn was a symphonic choral master par excellence, and this piece and others written during the same period  represented a turning point between the legacy of Bach’s Baroque oratorio and a new, Romantic approach to composition. It, along with the works od Mendelssohn, was to take the genre to new heights.

Less well known than The Creation, The Seasons is a sumptuous, densely textured work that Haydn premiered at the palace of Prince Schwarzenberg in Vienna in 1801, by which time he was sixty-nine. As with his previous oratorio, he used texts by Gottfried van Swieten in all four parts of this magnificent work.

See it performed live at L’Auditori.

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