The Seasons (Haydn) - Musical Content

Musical Content

The oratorio is divided into four parts, corresponding to Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, with the usual recitatives, arias, choruses, and ensemble numbers.

Among the more rousing choruses are a hunting song with horn calls, a wine celebration with dancing peasants (foreshadowing the third movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony), a loud thunderstorm (ditto for Beethoven's fourth movement), and an absurdly stirring ode to toil:

The huts that shelter us,

The wool that covers us,

The food that nourishes us,

All is thy grant, thy gift,

O noble toil.

Haydn remarked that while he had been industrious his whole life long, this was the first occasion he had ever been asked to write a chorus in praise of industry.

Some especially lyrical passages are the choral prayer for a bountiful harvest, "Sei nun gnädig, milder Himmel" (Be thou gracious, O kind heaven), the gentle nightfall that follows the storm, and Hanne's cavatina on Winter.

The work is filled with the "tone-painting" that also characterized The Creation: a plowman whistles as he works (in fact, he whistles the well-known theme from Haydn's own Surprise Symphony), a bird shot by a hunter falls from the sky, there is a sunrise (evoking the one in The Creation), and so on.