elected him an
honorary member.

A second performance of "The Creation" took place in the French capital
on December 24, 1800, when Napoleon I. escaped the infernal machine in
the Rue Nicaise. It was, however, in England, the home of oratorio, that
the work naturally took firmest root. It was performed at the Worcester
Festival of 1800, at the Hereford Festival of the following year, and
at Gloucester in 1802. Within a few years it had taken its place by the
side of Handel's best works of the kind, and its popularity remained
untouched until Mendelssohn's "Elijah" was heard at Birmingham in 1847.
Even now, although it has lost something of its old-time vogue, it is
still to be found in the repertory of our leading choral societies. It
is said that when a friend urged Haydn to hurry the completion of the
oratorio, he replied: "I spend much time over it because I intend it
to last a long time." How delighted he would have been could he have
foreseen that it would still be sung and listened to with pleasure in
the early years of the twentieth century.

"The Creation" criticized

No one thinks of dealing critically with the music of "The Messiah"; and
it seems almost as thankless a task to take the music of "The Creation"
to pieces. Schiller called it a "meaningless hotch-potch"; and even
Beethoven, though he was not quite innocent of the same thing himself,
had his sardonic laugh over its imitations of beasts and birds.
Critics of the oratorio seldom fail to point out these "natural history
effects"--to remark on "the sinuous motion of the worm," "the graceful
gamboling of the leviathan," the orchestral imitations of the bellowing
of the "heavy beasts," and such like. It is probably indefensible on
purely artistic grounds. But Handel did it in "Israel in Egypt" and
elsewhere. And is there not a crowing cock in Bach's "St Matthew
Passion"? Haydn only followed the example of his predecessors.

Of course, the dispassionate critic cannot help observing that there is
in "The Creation" a good deal of music which is finicking and something
which is trumpery. But there is also much that is first-rate. The
instrumental representation of chaos, for example, is excellent, and
nothing in all the range of oratorio produces a finer effect than the
soft voices at the words, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face
of the waters." Even the fortissimo C major chord on the word "light,"
coming abruptly after the piano and mezzoforte m