Haydn and the Big Bang

Composer Joseph Haydn's music is, in its own way, as descriptive of the moment of creation as the words of physicists could ever be

THERE'S no mistaking the bang in the opening recitative chorus of Haydn's oratorio The Creation. First comes a baritone, singing so slowly and softly that his voice is eerily attenuated. When the chorus takes over the music becomes even more translucent - it seems to hover almost motionless, suspended in space in time. And then, with "oh-my-God-what-was-that?" suddenness, there is an explosion as an entire orchestra and a massive choir bursts into action on a single note. A single word, too. "Light."

So it's a bang - but is it the Big Bang? An 18th-century choral work is an unlikely place to find 21st-century cosmology. We now believe that the Big Bang happened in darkness; light, physicists tell us, came later in the story of the infant universe. Even so, that tumultuous moment in Haydn's oratorio - the moment which marks his setting of the words, "And God said, 'Let there be light' - and there was light", from the book of Genesis, has become iconic for its bold musical portrayal of an event which 21st-century physics has not yet been able to describe or even, really, imagine.

Whether this is because of the musical effect Haydn creates, or because he touches some spiritual chord deep in the human psyche, has been a matter of argument among scientists and scholars ever since. The Haydn expert James Webster declares the composer's spectacular special effect to be "based locally on the simplest contrasts: soft and loud, minor versus major, unison versus full harmony, dry pizzicato versus full orchestra".

For the Viennese physicist and one-time director of the CERN high-energy physics laboratory in Switzerland, Victor Weisskopf, however, there was no doubt about it: Haydn's music is, in its own way, as descriptive of Big Bang theory as the words of physicists could ever be. He used to play a recording of the passage when giving public lectures about cosmology in the 1960s.

The wow factor certainly wasn't lost on the audience at the premiere of The Creationin Vienna in 1798. It was a glittering affair at the Palais Schwarzenberg, with Haydn conducting and Antonio Salieri, no less, on keyboards. Nobody knew what was coming because nobody - not even the man who wrote the libretto, Baron Gottfried van Swieten - had been allowed to see the page of the score which described the birth of light. A friend of the composer's recalled in his diary that as the chorus began to sing about the spirit of God hovering upon the face of the waters, "Haydn had the expression of someone who is thinking of biting his lips, either to hide his embarrassment or to conceal a secret".

When light broke out in the music, pandemonium broke out in the well-heeled audience. "The enchantment of the electrified Viennese was so general," the diarist noted wryly, "that the orchestra could not proceed for some minutes." Audiences nowadays are more restrained, but the effect of the work as a whole is extraordinarily energising. As an oratorio, The Creationappears to tick all the boxes: the choruses are glorious, the solo numbers virtuosic, the orchestral part a triumph of imaginative scoring. The overture is justly famous for its evocation of primordial chaos; later, as God gleefully pulls one creation after another from His apparently bottomless celestial hat, Haydn merrily produces a musical bestiary which ranges from buzzing insects through roaring lions to ponderous humans. There are thunderous waves and gently trickling brooks. There is an exquisite pen-picture of dawn in the Garden of Eden. And at the end, Adam and Eve - having sung a love-duet as passionate as any in Italian opera - wander off happily ever after, hand in hand, along the yellow-brick road.

What's not to like? And yet The Creationhas never acquired the massive mainstream popularity of, say, Handel's Messiah. This despite the fact that it was written after Haydn visited England and heard oratorios by Handel; that it was designed to be sung in English; that it's based on texts which are familiar to anyone raised in an even vaguely Judaeo-Christian culture; that the final chorus, with its great planetary shout of joy, could knock Handel's Hallelujahs into a cocked hat any day of the week.

Perhaps Christian audiences dislike the absence of a sternly moralistic God to give Adam a good dressing down before chucking the hapless humans out of paradise. Maybe it's the absence of God altogether, in the shape of Jesus, who isn't even mentioned - although Christian commentators have performed athletic feats of interpretation in order to hoosh these New Testament elements into the overwhelmingly Old Testament narrative. It's probably going too far to claim The Creationas a Messiahfor a secular society. In Haydn's own time, though, his church music was frowned upon in certain religious quarters, being considered rather too witty - and rather too au faitwith dodgy Enlightenment ideas - to be seriously good for the faithful.

Haydn's God was a happy deity. "At the thought of God my heart leaps for joy, and I cannot help my music doing the same," was how he responded to his critics. There's a wonderful quality of wide-eyed wonder about the oratorio which many claim is Haydn's masterpiece. It's also, one need hardly add, environmentally sound from start to finish. "Haydn seems to be having the time of his life," writes the Haydn scholar James Keller of The Creation, "truly celebrating the mystery of creation, translating it into the most human of terms, infusing it with grace, delight, wit, and humour." Oh, and the music is pretty good, too.

• Haydn's The Creationwill be performed at The National Concert Hall tomorrow, with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gerhard Markson, the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir (chorus master: Mark Duley) and soloists Ailish Tynan, soprano, Finnur Bjarnason, tenor and Johannes Mannov, bass-baritone. Gerard Gillen will give a pre-concert talk at 6.45pm.