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191 years after his death, and over 80 since Tovey dubbed him "The Inaccessible", Haydn remains a misunderstood and under-appreciated composer. Thanks to the renaissance in study and performance of his music since 1945, all of his major works are now frequently played and recorded, and few would seriously deny his stature as the equal of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. Yet misunderstanding of his style persists, and nowhere more than in relation to this work, "The Creation". The modern concert-goer relishes the epic psychological turmoil of a Mahler or the intricate polyphony of the renaissance. By comparison, Haydn’s robust melodic style, naďve pictorialism and seemingly irrepressible good spirits are hard to square with what we expect of a musical account of the creation of the Universe. This incomprehension still stands between the modern listener and full appreciation of "The Creation".

If we are to remove this barrier we must accept one fact; Haydn’s stylistic "naivety" was something profoundly sincere. As a man, he was far from naďve - a progressive and enlightened thinker, he possessed copies of numerous banned philosophical texts and, while in England, was a close friend of Thomas Holcroft - a radical political activist later arrested for his subversive views. And as a musician, he was the most accomplished symphonist of his day, a master-orchestrator who, furthermore, saw "The Creation" as the peak of his technical achievement. But beneath all this he possessed a simple and all-encompassing religious faith, and the candid, sincere nature of the Austrian peasant he had been born. Before composing he would invariably pray for inspiration, and, when writing sacred music could conceive of God only "…as a being infinitely great and infinitely good, and the idea of this latter attribute of the divine nature fills me with such confidence, such joy, that I should set even a miserere to cheerful music."

It is in this light that we should approach "The Creation". In producing his greatest and most ambitious work, Haydn let his inspiration pour from the simplest and profoundest feelings within him, realising the music that lay deepest in his nature - in the buoyant, melodious style of central-European folksong - with the most sophisticated technique of any 18th Century composer. This is why we never find in Haydn the unearthly serenity of Mozart’s greatest music, or Beethoven’s super-human strength, and this is the source of Haydn’s unique greatness. His music is always, fundamentally, that of simple humanity - firmly rooted amongst men, but constantly aspiring to be worthy of an infinitely benevolent God and His Creation. Through its profound and optimistic piety, its unaffected sincerity of expression and its true Enlightenment confidence in mankind’s potential for good, Joseph Haydn’s "Creation" comes as close to attaining this as any music ever can. He could have succeeded thus in no other way. Understanding this we can approach "The Creation" on its own terms and enjoy it, as audiences have for over 200 years, as "the greatest composer of his time at the very height of his powers, gathering al his resources to tackle the central mystery of our existence" and, above all, as "a statement of warm optimism about the world and our place in it, clothed in some of the most gorgeous music of music’s golden age".