Gone for 200 years but still influential

Joseph Haydn died a bicentennial ago —- in 1809 —- after an exceptionally fertile life of 77 years. Starting Feb. 22, it’s Haydn party week in Atlanta. Celebrate responsibly.

The Austrian composer gets two shows of rare interest: next Sunday, it’s the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra led by a nationally celebrated Haydn expert, John Hsu. They’ll perform three symphonies of “shocking originality.”

On Feb. 26 and 28, the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus offers a theatrical version of Haydn’s cosmic masterpiece “The Creation.”

Never undervalued, Haydn is nevertheless overshadowed —- at least in concert hall popularity —- by his younger colleague, Mozart, although they traded ideas, musical styles and compliments for each other’s work.

But in advancing the art, Haydn is the more significant creator. He didn’t actually invent the symphony and the string quartet, but he formalized and popularized the genres, so he’s called the father of both.

More essential, his core method of writing music —- breaking thematic material into small units of a few notes, like DNA, that can be repeated and developed and turned into an engine that drives the argument forward —- has been a standard method for more than two centuries.

There’s hardly a pop song on the radio that doesn’t employ this procedure. Beyonce and Coldplay owe much to old man Haydn.

ASO conductor Robert Spano says he marvels at composers like Haydn —- or Brahms, or Ravel —- whose musical personalities seem fixed from the start.

“It’s like Haydn had no larval stage,” Spano said. “There is change and growth, but not the dramatic, radical transformation of Stravinsky or Beethoven or John Adams. Haydn’s evolution across his long life isn’t as pronounced as Mozart’s in his short life.”

Unlike Mozart, Haydn isn’t a sexy composer: There’s very little turbulence in his personal life and, unlike his junior of almost 24 years, his music holds no sexual energy. It’s chaste.

Perhaps this “steady life-identity” —- Spano’s term —- helps explain why the genius Haydn gets less press, and fewer cult followers, than the composers with stormy creative lives. We never tire of learning about Beethoven’s moods and deafness and (secret) love life; Papa Haydn, in contrast, is pegged as sure, steady, predictable.

Haydn’s three eras

Not so fast, says Atlanta Baroque’s Hsu. The 77-year-old conductor, retired from Cornell University, is that unlikely bird: a performing-scholar who is esteemed at both endeavors. Because of health concerns, Sunday’s Atlanta Baroque concert will be his last as its artistic director.

He limns Haydn’s career into three untidy categories.

Sunday’s concert dwells in the earliest, which Hsu calls the “baryton trio” period. Lasting 14 years, Haydn’s duties included playing nightly chamber music on the now obscure instrument called a baryton with his boss, Prince Esterhazy.

“Life is not always led by who’s paying the bills, but that seems to be the case with Haydn,” Hsu said with a chuckle. “This is a significant period in the history of music, and as a composer he’s forced to think in terms of chamber voices and elegant counterpoint.

“Each of the three symphonies we’re going to play have moments of shocking originality, sometimes simple but wonderfully bold and profound things.”

The second, and least known, is what Hsu calls Haydn’s “opera” period, when he’s required to write lots of opera and his emphasis shifts toward melody with accompaniment.

The third stage —- the era that appeals to today’s values —- Hsu calls the “celebrity” period. In his senior years, Haydn was invited to Paris and London and feted as a star. He appeared in newspaper gossip columns. If anything, his creativity exploded. Paramount to this period is “The Creation.”

In the beginning

“The Creation” is an oratorio in three parts, depicting the six days of creation and with a text drawn from the Book of Genesis and John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

The show marks the Atlanta return of New York artist Anne Patterson, whose ASO credits include a theatrical production of another non-operatic narrative, Bach’s “St. John” Passion, in 2007.

For “Creation,” her designs include atmospheric lighting and three low ramps for the solo singers to stand on. Hanging at the back of the stage —- a Patterson signature device —- are giant “shards” of white board, suspended by wires. On these panels she’ll project visual images, from a flock of scarlet ibis birds to wildly colorful abstract paintings.

The shards themselves, like planetary bits hurtling into space, suggest an alternate creation mythology, of the Big Bang and modern science.

Perhaps inevitably, “The Creation” inspires reinterpretation.

Essayist Philip Kennicott, writing last year in a British magazine, finds the oratorio a parable for today’s threatening environmental calamity, of mass extinctions and global warming.

“The whole piece gains in impact because it’s written under the shadow of the Fall,” he concludes. “It’s a small consolation, but I do hope we always have Haydn to console us when we’ve been kicked out of the garden we fouled.”

For this show, Patterson is less concerned with bioethics and inconvenient truths than with, as she puts it, “making it seem too vanilla sweet.”

” ‘The Creation’ captures a moment when the world was perfect and sublime but, you know, when you’re always on vacation, even vacations get monotonous,” she said. “Bob [Spano] and I started with the idea that the visuals can’t distract from the music, and that extreme beauty is relative to something else.”

As with the “St. John” Passion, Patterson added, “we found that with the singers making a few simple movements and with clear images you can heighten the drama and make the audience a little more focused on the music and text.

“We’re not adding drama where it doesn’t belong, we’re underlining thematic elements to the narrative. Besides, it feels like Haydn wrote the happiest and most beautiful music in the world.”

A HAYDN CELEBRATION

> Atlanta Baroque Orchestra. 3 p.m. Feb. 22. $15-$25, children under 12 free. Peachtree Road United Methodist Church, 3180 Peachtree Road, in Buckhead. 770-537-3974, www.atlantabaroque.org

> Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. 8 p.m. Feb. 26 and 28. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., $10-$78. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org