Sunday music spot: Haydn's Creation from "In the beginning" to "The Heavens are telling"

Here is a performance of the opening of the oratorio "The Creation" by Haydn, from "In the Beginning" to "The heavens are telling the glory of God."

And this performance has the CORRECT words.




Unlike almost every other performance of "The heavens are telling" you will ever hear, the conductor, Simon Lindley, has used the version, which is available but hardly anyone else bothers to use, which avoids an egregious translation error in the second line of Psalm 19.

I will confess that I am not great with languages other than English. So when someone makes a mistake in translating anything which even I can spot, it usually means it's a really bad one.

Simon Lindley conducted a performance of "The Messiah" by a school choir which I sang in when I was a boy, and he made us all cross out and then staple up the version of "The Heavens are telling" in the books we were using for the rest of the oratorio, and issued a separate version of that chorus.

Being incorrigibly curious, I looked through it first to see what the difference was. In the version which Mr Lindley told us to cross out, the second line of the anthem is sung as 

"The wonder of his work displays the firmament."  

In the version he gave us to sing, it is "The firmament displays his wondrous handiwork."

Then it hit me: this is the opening of Psalm 19, I thought, and some translator who has made an error which even I can spot must have mis-translated the second line from the German in which Haydn wrote into English, confusing the subject and object and coming up with something that makes no sense at all.

Well I was nearly right. It is indeed Psalm 19, which in the King James bible has the following first verse.

"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."

Apparently "The Creation" was originally written as a proposal to Handel for an oratorio, but he wasn't interested. An Austrian diplomat and amateur linguist, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, then translated it into German and offered it to Haydn, who did use it.

It seems to have been Baron van Sweiten who mucked up the translation of Psalm 19.

It always ruins my enjoyment of the music when I hear it sung as "the wonder of his work displays the firmament" as it is such an obvious and egregious error. 

Never mind, this performance usese the right words!

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