The Creation. An Oratorio...Adapted for Voices and Piano Forte by Muzio Clementi

London: Clementi, Bangor, Hyde, Collard and Davis. [ca. 1800]. Upright folio (34 cm). 201 pp. Engraved throughout. No PN. A good wide-margined copy, bound in simple brown paper boards, spine covering mostly perished, endpages loose.

One of the highpoints of the Western musical canon, the Oratorio with a libretto by Gottfried von Swieten, was recognized from its earliest performances as a masterwork of the first order (see New Grove, 8: 346, 347, 358). First performed at the Palais Schwarzenburg in Vienna on April 29th and 30th, 1798, though not performed publicly until the following year, when it was heard at the Burghteater in Vienna on March 19th.


"There is hardly any doubt in the mind of the average music-lover that Haydn's Oratorio The Creation is, tutto sommato, his greatest single accomplishment, and certainly ranks as one of the greatest products of any eighteenth-century mind. It occupies a central position in choral literature and its composition and first performances were the dominant features of Haydn's life in the late 1890s." (Robbins Landon: Haydn Chronicle and Works Vol. IV: Haydn The Years of 'The Creation' 1796-1800, p. 12) (13045)

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