Program Notes

By Georgeanne Banker

Franz Joseph Haydn – The Seasons

When Joseph Haydn left London for Vienna in 1795, the impresario Johann Solomon sent the composer off with his best regards, and a weighty, unsung libretto about the creation of the universe. Purportedly written for Handel, in Haydn’s hands, the obscure text was soon brought to light as The Creation, with its German libretto supplied by Haydn’s longtime supporter, Baron Gottfried van Swieten.

Following The Creation’s triumphant premiere both in Vienna and across the (smaller) pond, the pair soon expanded the choral cosmos with a sequel of sorts, based on a 1730 pastoral poem by Scottish poet James Thomson called The Seasons and its 1745 German translation by Barthold Brockes. For their new oratorio, titled after Thomson’s work, the confident Baron crafted a bilingual libretto—wherein he doctored Brockes’ text and translated that back into English—and telescoped the florid, blank verse into pithy narratives from a chorus and three countryside residents, the soprano Hanne, tenor Lucas, and bass Simon.

Haydn, who collected landscape prints and noted the “beautiful wilderness” while in England, filled the score with lush strings, manifold brass, percussion, and winds bookended by the contrabassoon and piccolo (the latter of which, like in Beethoven’s “Pastoral,” makes just one cameo). The Seasons premiered in 1801, and as Haydn put it, was an “unparalleled success.”

The oratorio opens as winter thaws into Spring. An exercise in mindfulness, Haydn walks us through the orchestral fields in the chorus “O, what num'rous charm.” Jane, Lucas, and the young people with them notice all that stirs around them, with lambkins bounding about the woodwind section, fish darting in the reedy waves, bees buzzing across strings and winds, and just a few ruffled feathers from the birds. Emerging from the murky dusk, Summer’s sun rises with golden, virtuosic brilliance. From the summertime fields, Hanne sings “O what comfort to the senses,” alongside the oboe, the “warbling of the shepherd’s reed,” as she notices in the prior recitative, before the season closes with an electrifying, earth-shattering storm.

Autumn is here, the bounty is great, and the wine flows aplenty. The hunt is the spectacle of the season, as the luminous horns sound calls from the French cor de chasse tradition. The brass nimbly lead us through wood and plain, navigating a brambly modulation from D to E-flat major, before the party cries halali, the old French signal that the poor beast is vanquished. Haydn rounds out the season with a very merry drinking tune, complete with a tavern band (whose next gig was in Beethoven’s “Pastoral”) and plenty of toasting to the bountiful vintage. Haydn’s work cycles back to Winter with a final prayer of everlasting peace and joy.

If the “Pastoral” Symphony is “more the expression of feeling than a painting,” as Beethoven put it, Haydn’s Seasons is the delightful inverse. While some critics found the work too pictorial, that is exactly where the magic lies: shifting fluidly from brassy choruses to reverent arias, from the mundane to the sublime, Haydn’s work is a vivid celebration of all creation.

Nils Henrik Asheim - Muohta—The Language of Snow

Across the northern reaches of Scandinavia, the languages of the Indigenous Sámi peoples are filled with extensive vocabularies related to snow. Sámi scholar Inger Marie Gaup Eira notes in her thesis, The Silent Language of Snow, that the Northern Sámi language contains over 300 snow-related terms, crucial to reindeer herders, ranging from quantity to consistency, how the snowpack might bear a sled, how visible an animal’s tracks might be, and the way a bank melts when the sun emerges again.

When Norwegian composer Nils Henrik Asheim was asked to compose a work for a program that included Joseph Haydn’s The Seasons, “I began thinking about how I could write a modern commentary, or a response. Not really to Haydn, but to the worldview that The Seasons outlines,” Asheim said in a 2025 interview with Marte Fillan on the Norwegian Academy of Music’s website. To Asheim, Haydn’s work proffered a certain accord between humans and nature: “And then I thought—that’s actually no longer how it is.”

So Asheim looked to the Northern Sámi snow lexicon for his 2017 work Muohta—The Language of Snow. Scored for choir and string orchestra, the work is titled after the general Northern Sámi term for snow and nods to Eira’s work. Muohta was premiered by the Norwegian Soloists Choir, with Grete Pedersen at the podium.

Muohta sets eighteen single Northern Sámi snow-words as interconnected scenes. The work opens with the serene darkness of ulahat—a snow-covered winter road that is barely visible—as the strings, echoing Purcell’s “Cold Song” and Vivaldi’s Winter, shiver within blanket chords from the choir. Throughout Muohta, Asheim creates more of a feeling than a painting: “My childhood experiences of snow are very much about friction,” Asheim says in the same interview, “whether it was slippery or heavy or wet, and how that would feel. This kind of resistance can also be expressed with the voice. For example, by keeping the mouth closed, as if you have to struggle to get the sound out.” The choir parses each word into tones, fricatives, whistles, and whispers; at times, Asheim instructs the strings to play close to the bridge, “like icicles.” As a listener, you can almost see your breath.

The words also evoke the profound impact of climate change, particularly on Sámi and other northern Indigenous communities. Reflecting on his own experience, Asheim says, “Those of us who grew up in Eastern Norway 30 years ago remember that there was a lot of snow. But that’s changing—much faster than we had hoped. The seasons are beginning to shift. So in a way, the piece is a kind of requiem for the snow, which is not the same now as it once was.”