Customer Reviews

The Creation in Full Score (Dover Miniature Music Scores)

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4 star:		(1)
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Dover deserves praise for making the score of Haydn's masterpiece available at such a low price. Naturally, what you get is not the most recent scholarship, but rather a reproduction of an old out-of-copyright edition (C. F. Peters, Leipzig, 19th century). At the price, this is fair.

The text is legible, but not outstandingly so. I would guess that Dover reduced a full-size conductor's score slightly, to piano-music size. But the result is far more legible than a miniature score of the kind sold by Eulenberg would be.

Note that this score is for the purpose of study and following along while you listen. For actual performances, a choral singer would need a normal choral part (various publishers) with a piano reduction, as the previous reviewer noted. This Dover score would involve too many page turns for a singer, and in addition the tenor part is given in an old musical clef that would cause most tenors trouble in reading.

The words are in German with an English version directly underneath. This reflects the composer's original intention: since he had a enthusiastic following in both Austria and England, Haydn insisted that his librettist (Gottfried van Swieten) provide a metrical translation of the German words into English for the first edition. Van Swieten, though not a fluent English speaker, gamely complied, and the occasionally-amusing result is reproduced here.

It is what it is. It's a score of Haydn't Creation. Nothing more, nothing less. It serves the purpose that it intends to.