RECALLING THE SUBLIME: THE LOGIC OF CREATION IN HAYDN’S CREATION

Abstract

In its opening representation of chaos and subsequent depiction of the creation of light, Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation famously begins with two forays into the musical sublime. But the work thereafter devotes itself to recalling the sublime, in the double sense of rescinding the sublime and of making it a matter of memory rather than of practice. This process is already under way in the depiction of light; its progressive advance may be measured in such ensuing episodes as the depictions of the first sun- and moonrise and Adam and Eve’s climactic hymn of praise, ‘Von deiner Güt’’. The withdrawal of the sublime gradually becomes coextensive with the creation itself and the place of humanity in the order of creation, reflecting (and refashioning) a historically specific understanding not only of the sublime but also, and more weightily, of the conditions of possibility for knowing the world and defining the human. Despite its forceful articulation in The Creation, however, this was an understanding already well on its way to becoming obsolete by the end of the eighteenth century.