"Nun beut die Flur" from Haydn's Die Schoepfung

“Nun beut die Flur” is one of the angel Gabriel’s several arias from Haydn’s Die Schoepfung (The Creation). Die Schoepfung is Haydn’s epic oratorio combining the Book of Genesis from the Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The oratorio includes many arias sung by three angels, Raphael, Uriel, and Gabriel, who sing the praises of God and tell of the creation of the world during the first six days. “Nun beut die Flur” is about the third day, when God created plants, fruit, and flowers.

The text in Gabriel’s opening recitative comes straight from the Bible. It is important to note that all recitative that deals with the first six days begins the same way: “And God said …” just like the Bible. Haydn scored the Bible text in the exact same way for each aria and recitative – the recitative melody is the same for each aria. This creates a kind of uniformity to all of the arias. Also, it could be interpreted as Haydn’s belief that it would be impossible to do justice in scoring Bible text, as it is the Word of God. By creating uniformity, he brings the listener’s focus to the holy words of the text, not on the notes themselves. The recitative opens in C Major and modulates to Bb Major, the key of the aria.

The text for the aria comes from Paradise Lost. The entire aria is written in Da Capo form, ABA, to suggest a cycle. The A sections discuss the grass, flowers, and plants. The B section, although it stands on its own, could be seen as developmental. It moves from Bb Major to the relative minor key of g minor to d flat minor to Ab Major and back to Bb major. Although this section is obviously tonally unstable, I still see it as its own independent section. Unlike rounded binary form, it is not dependent on the following A section. The final A section is almost exactly the same as the first time through, except that some of the cadenzas are different.

I found it interesting that Haydn put nearly all the cadenzas on the word, “Heil” which means “healing” or “medicinal” as in “healing plant” or “herb.” His reason for doing so couldn’t be as simple as the fact that “Heil” is a nice vowel sound to sing a cadenza on. I think that Haydn wanted to glorify the wonders of God as seen through Gabriel. The entire oratorio serves to praise God, and it makes sense that he would stress the word “healing” to show how wonderful God was in creating herbs that could be used for medicine, to miraculously heal the sick.

The orchestrations are light - mostly strings and some woodwinds. All of Gabriel's pieces are peaceful sounding. The character is sung by a soprano, who ironically enough, also sings Eve in the second half.