The Creation (Haydn) of Eve is usually sung by the same soloist who sings Gabriel. This was the practice Haydn followed, but some conductors prefer to cast each of the five roles with a different soloist. The choral singers are employed in a series of monumental choruses, several of them celebrating the end of one particular day of creation. The orchestra often plays alone, notably in the episodes of tone painting: the appearance of the sun, the creation of various beasts, and above all in the overture, the famous depiction of the Chaos before the creation. The oratorio is structured in three parts.
The Seasons (Haydn) was based on extracts from the long English poem "The Seasons" by James Thomson (1700–1748), which had been published in 1730. Whereas in "The Creation" Swieten was able to limit himself to rendering an existing (anonymous) libretto into German, for "The Seasons" he had a much more demanding task. Olleson writes, "Even when Thomson's images were retained, they required abbreviation and adaptation to such an extent that usually no more than faint echoes of them can be discerned, and the libretto often loses all touch with the poem which was its starting point. Increasingly during the course of the oratorio,