The Seasons (German: Die Jahreszeiten) is an oratorio by Joseph Haydn (H. 21/3).
Haydn was led to write The Seasons by the great success of his previous oratorio The Creation (1798), which had become very popular and was in the course of being performed all over Europe. The libretto for The Seasons was provided to Haydn, just as with The Creation, by Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an Austrian nobleman who had also exercised an important influence o...
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The Seasons (German: Die Jahreszeiten) is an oratorio by Joseph Haydn (H. 21/3).
Haydn was led to write The Seasons by the great success of his previous oratorio The Creation (1798), which had become very popular and was in the course of being performed all over Europe. The libretto for The Seasons was provided to Haydn, just as with The Creation, by Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an Austrian nobleman who had also exercised an important influence on the career of Mozart. Van Swieten's libretto was his own rendering into German of extracts from the long English poem "The Seasons" by James Thomson (1700–1748), which had been published in 1730.
The composition process was arduous for Haydn, in part because his health was gradually failing and partly because Haydn found van Swieten's libretto to be rather taxing. Haydn took two years to complete the work.
The premiere, in Vienna on April 24, 1801, was considered a clear success, but not a success comparable to that of The Creation. In the...
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