Cycling across town yesterday I saw my first crocuses of the year. These together with the sunshine and other signs of early spring had me reflecting on the doctrine of Creation, and have led me a little predictably to this blog’s first repeat composer: I want to reflect a range of music, but Haydn’s oratorio on the creation is such a centrepiece that it is the obvious musical peg on which to hang some thoughts.

A late work of the composer’s, on a text translated from English – based on Milton, and turned down by Handel – the oratorio is most famous for its opening representation of chaos, in which harmonic devices proliferate to delay any tonic cadence for as long as seemingly possible within the classical idiom of Haydn’s music.

Certain musicologists have drawn parallels between Haydn’s understanding of the chaos in the beginning of Genesis with a scientific theory of his time in which a nebulous rarefied swirl of matter coalesced and condensed into the universe as now perceived. Obviously, science has developed increasingly extensive models for the processes by which the observable universe came to be and to develop; I find it telling that, if it is correct to believe that Haydn was representing the latest science of his day within a biblical-based oratorio, he saw no contradiction, in the way that modern minds often assume that there is.

However, there is a more important contradiction to consider, and that is that the early church spoke of creation ex nihilo – that is, out of nothing – and it is not obvious that Genesis is best read in that way; indeed the world being ‘without form’ is distinct from being without matter. Indeed, Haydn’s chaos gives a type of emptiness by opening with simple octaves rather than a full chord, but suggests a giving of order to chaos more than it does a beginning in which nothing became something.

Following the inspiration from Milton, one thing to observe is that narration in the oratorio is given by angels: in classic theology created beings that pre-date the creation of the world. So the observable and material universe was not necessarily the first thing created. Moreover, this is a clue that, despite over-simplified tellings of Christian creation theology, the opening chapters of Genesis are not the only, or even the most important, biblical texts that reveal the doctrine of creation. The prologue to John’s Gospel, which begins with the eternally existing Word must be deemed more central, but more extensively throughout the Hebrew prophets and writings, and echoed by St Paul, the claim that God is creator of heavens and earth is put in counterpoint not to materialist modern science but to idolatrous relationships with so-called ‘gods’ who did not so create.

It is the doctrine of the nature of God first and foremost that requires an acknowledgement of the dependency of all creation on God, and thence to an understanding of the nature of created beings as not only good – in Genesis’ terms – but also as gift; as meaningful because given to us who are ourselves gifts, and recipients of gifts beyond counting.

Perhaps that is why Haydn’s oratorio ends with a song of praise.