Occasional Music slot extracts from The Creation (with CORRECT words)
This music slot is of extracts from Handel's Creation
It includes rare footage of "The Heavens are Telling" with the words the right way round.
The first major musical performance I ever took part in was Haydn's oratorio "The Creation" for which my school choir started rehearsals when I was 11. The first thing which the school's Director of Music, Simon Lindley, told us to do after issuing our copies of the Ivor Novello score was to put a line through each page of the chorus "The Heavens are telling" and paperclip those pages closed: he then issued us with a separate pamphlet version of this chorus.
I was curious enough at the time to compare the two versions and soon spotted the difference - the version we were singing has
"The Heavens are telling the Glory of God: the firmament displays His wondrous handiwork."
The version we were told to cross out had
"The Heavens are telling the Glory of God: the wonder of His work displays the firmament."
Which made no sense to me then and makes no sense to me now.
It's crystal clear from the bible which is right: this chorus is basically the opening of Psalm 19 set to music, and every version of the bible I have seen has the sky/firmament showing God's handiwork and not the other way around. For example. in the King James Bible Psalm 19:1 reads
"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."
The New International Version has
"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."
Somewhere in the course of what was appears to have been a double translation an idiotic mistake was made in the version which found its' way into the Ivor Novello edition of "The Creation" and, it seems, most other English language editions.
It's a bit like the joke about the person who had the proverb "Out of sight, Out of mind" translated into another language and back, and got "Invisible Idiot."
I began to get some idea what must have happened when I began learning German a year later. Haydn lived and worked in Austria where they speak German, and in that language you identify the subject and object of a sentence by the word endings for the appropriate case.
In English, however, the subject and object are identified by word order. (There is an amusing reference to this in one of the "Jennings" books when Venables is trying to explain subject and object to Jennings in the sentence "The teacher canes the boy," points out that "the object is the thing which suffers the action" and gets the right response for the wrong reason, "Oh, that'll be the boy then, he suffers a wizard sight more than the teacher." Not very politically correct, I know but this was written decades ago.)
When I learned that sentences in German often have the opposite word order to what would have been used in English, I realised that something like this must be what happened to 'The Heavens are Telling."
In fact the sequence of events appears to have been even more absurd as I first assumed because Haydn originally prepared the Oratorio in a bilingual edition, with the two languages being Italian and English. and it is based on an English libretto which was originally offered to Handel and then given to Haydn when Handel turned it down (apparently Handel thought the original version too long - it would have lasted four hours when set to music.)
As far as I can discover, Haydn asked the Baron van Swieten, a diplomat, librarian in charge of the imperial library, amateur musician, and patron of music and the arts, to recast the English libretto of The Creation in a German translation (Die Schöpfung) that Haydn could use to compose. It was then translated back into English and Italian.
So what may have happened is that Swieten made the error when he translated the libretto from English into German and back into English.
The most annoying aspect is that every performance of "The Heavens are Telling" in English which I have heard since uses this meaningless, brainless version, and it makes me increasingly irritated each successive time I hear another professional choir singing something which makes no sense and which contains an error for which a first year language student should have been put in detention. As Wikipedia puts it,
"Van Swieten was evidently not a fully fluent speaker of English."
Quite.
Out of interest I did a search for a performance of "The Heavens are Telling" with the words the right way round, and duly found one - and guess who I recognise, decades after I knew him, conducting the performance?
Yes, you probably got it - Simon Lindley, who left St Albans in 1975 to become Organist of what was then called Leeds Parish Church and still holds that position though the church is now called Leeds Minster.
Here the "St Peter's Singers from Leeds are performing extracts from Haydn's Creation during a lunchtime recital in 2009 in the Basilica de Sant Francesc, Palma de Mallorca. The recital formed part of the choir's acclaimed concert tour of Mallorca
Entirely typical of Simon that he obviously still likes things done correctly !!!
And something else which should be done correctly is to keep consultant-led maternity services at West Cumberland Hospital, so #SupportOption1 !
It includes rare footage of "The Heavens are Telling" with the words the right way round.
The first major musical performance I ever took part in was Haydn's oratorio "The Creation" for which my school choir started rehearsals when I was 11. The first thing which the school's Director of Music, Simon Lindley, told us to do after issuing our copies of the Ivor Novello score was to put a line through each page of the chorus "The Heavens are telling" and paperclip those pages closed: he then issued us with a separate pamphlet version of this chorus.
I was curious enough at the time to compare the two versions and soon spotted the difference - the version we were singing has
"The Heavens are telling the Glory of God: the firmament displays His wondrous handiwork."
The version we were told to cross out had
"The Heavens are telling the Glory of God: the wonder of His work displays the firmament."
Which made no sense to me then and makes no sense to me now.
It's crystal clear from the bible which is right: this chorus is basically the opening of Psalm 19 set to music, and every version of the bible I have seen has the sky/firmament showing God's handiwork and not the other way around. For example. in the King James Bible Psalm 19:1 reads
"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."
The New International Version has
"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."
Somewhere in the course of what was appears to have been a double translation an idiotic mistake was made in the version which found its' way into the Ivor Novello edition of "The Creation" and, it seems, most other English language editions.
It's a bit like the joke about the person who had the proverb "Out of sight, Out of mind" translated into another language and back, and got "Invisible Idiot."
I began to get some idea what must have happened when I began learning German a year later. Haydn lived and worked in Austria where they speak German, and in that language you identify the subject and object of a sentence by the word endings for the appropriate case.
In English, however, the subject and object are identified by word order. (There is an amusing reference to this in one of the "Jennings" books when Venables is trying to explain subject and object to Jennings in the sentence "The teacher canes the boy," points out that "the object is the thing which suffers the action" and gets the right response for the wrong reason, "Oh, that'll be the boy then, he suffers a wizard sight more than the teacher." Not very politically correct, I know but this was written decades ago.)
When I learned that sentences in German often have the opposite word order to what would have been used in English, I realised that something like this must be what happened to 'The Heavens are Telling."
In fact the sequence of events appears to have been even more absurd as I first assumed because Haydn originally prepared the Oratorio in a bilingual edition, with the two languages being Italian and English. and it is based on an English libretto which was originally offered to Handel and then given to Haydn when Handel turned it down (apparently Handel thought the original version too long - it would have lasted four hours when set to music.)
As far as I can discover, Haydn asked the Baron van Swieten, a diplomat, librarian in charge of the imperial library, amateur musician, and patron of music and the arts, to recast the English libretto of The Creation in a German translation (Die Schöpfung) that Haydn could use to compose. It was then translated back into English and Italian.
So what may have happened is that Swieten made the error when he translated the libretto from English into German and back into English.
The most annoying aspect is that every performance of "The Heavens are Telling" in English which I have heard since uses this meaningless, brainless version, and it makes me increasingly irritated each successive time I hear another professional choir singing something which makes no sense and which contains an error for which a first year language student should have been put in detention. As Wikipedia puts it,
"Van Swieten was evidently not a fully fluent speaker of English."
Quite.
Out of interest I did a search for a performance of "The Heavens are Telling" with the words the right way round, and duly found one - and guess who I recognise, decades after I knew him, conducting the performance?
Yes, you probably got it - Simon Lindley, who left St Albans in 1975 to become Organist of what was then called Leeds Parish Church and still holds that position though the church is now called Leeds Minster.
Here the "St Peter's Singers from Leeds are performing extracts from Haydn's Creation during a lunchtime recital in 2009 in the Basilica de Sant Francesc, Palma de Mallorca. The recital formed part of the choir's acclaimed concert tour of Mallorca
Entirely typical of Simon that he obviously still likes things done correctly !!!
And something else which should be done correctly is to keep consultant-led maternity services at West Cumberland Hospital, so #SupportOption1 !
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