bits of the worm and the leviathan are almost more than modern
flesh and blood can endure." Many years ago a leading musical critic
wrote that there ought to be enough value, monetarily speaking, in "The
Creation" to make it worth while preparing a fresh libretto; for,
said he, "the present one seems only fit for the nursery, to use in
connection with Noah's ark." At the Norwich Festival performance of
the oratorio in 1872, the words were, in fact, altered, but in all the
published editions of the work the text remains as it was. It is
usual to credit the composer's friend, Baron van Swieten, with the
"unintelligible jargon." The baron certainly had a considerable hand
in the adaptation of the text. But in reality it owes its very uncouth
verbiage largely to the circumstance that it was first translated from
English into German, and then re-translated back into English; the
words, with the exception of the first chorus, being adapted to the
music. Considering the ways of translators, the best libretto in the
world could not but have suffered under such transformations, and it is
doing a real injustice to the memory of Baron Swieten, the good friend
of more than one composer, to hold him up needlessly to ridicule. [In
one of George Thomson's letters to Mrs Hunter we read: "It it is not
the first time that your muse and Haydn's have met, as we see from the
beautiful canzonets. Would he had been directed by you about the words
to 'The Creation'! It is lamentable to see such divine music joined with
such miserable broken English. He (Haydn) wrote me lately that in three
years, by the performance of 'The Creation' and 'The Seasons' at Vienna,
40,000 florins had been raised for the poor families of musicians."]

The Stimulus of London

Haydn set to work on "The Creation" with all the ardour of a first love.
Naumann suggests that his high spirits were due to the "enthusiastic
plaudits of the English people," and that the birth of both "The
Creation" and "The Seasons" was "unquestionably owing to the new man
he felt within himself after his visit to England." There was now, in
short, burning within his breast, "a spirit of conscious strength which
he knew not he possessed, or knowing, was unaware of its true worth."
This is somewhat exaggerated. Handel wrote "The Messiah" in twenty-four
days; it took Haydn the best part of eighteen months to complete "The
Creation," from which we may infer that "the sad laws of time" had not
s