The Seasons (Haydn) The Seasons (Haydn) The Seasons (German: "Die Jahreszeiten"), Hob. XXI:3), is an oratorio by Joseph Haydn, first performed in 1801. Haydn was led to write "The Seasons" by the great success of his previous oratorio "The Creation" (1798), which had become very popular and was in the course of being performed all over Europe. The libretto for "The Seasons" was prepared for Haydn, just as with "The Creation", by Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an Austrian nobleman who had also exercised an important influence on the career of Mozart (among other things commissioning Mozart's reorchestration of Handel's "Messiah"). Van Swieten's libretto
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,