“PERHAPS NO OTHER PIECE OF GREAT MUSIC HAS EVER ENJOYED SUCH IMMEDIATE AND UNIVERSAL ACCEPTANCE”: HAYDN’S CREATION

HAYDN, [Franz] Joseph. Die Schoepfung: Ein Oratorium, in Musik Gesetzt von Joseph Haydn… The Creation. An Oratorio. Vienna: [printed for the composer], 1800. Folio, period-style full green morocco gilt, elaborately gilt-decorated spine and covers, raised bands, marbled endpapers.    $11,000.

First edition of the full score, privately printed for Haydn, fully engraved, beautifully bound in period-style morocco-gilt.

Haydn’s oratorio The Creation “is a masterwork in the special sense that it has no weak point, nothing that could be changed or omitted” (New Grove). “The text, combining parts of Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost, had originally been prepared by Liddell for Handel. Only because Handel had turned it down was it eventually brought to the attention of Haydn… Haydn seized upon it, for he had always nursed the ambition to write an oratorio in the Handel manner and the text provided him with the necessary stimulus” (Cross, I: 383). Haydn feared that the oratorio “might be too unusual for his Viennese audiences, but in fact it was an unprecedented success… Perhaps no other piece of great music has ever enjoyed such immediate and universal acceptance.” Text in English and German. On the title is the circular stamp used by Haydn’s printers to designate authorized editions of his works. Without subscriber’s list. Hoboken xxi.2, 36. RISM, H2521. Fuld, 271. Two ink-stamps from New York music publishers T. Goodwin. Owner signature. A few manuscript annotations.

Interior generally clean. A beautifully bound copy.