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“The Dew-Dropping Morn … Miserere nobis”: Haydn's Worst Joke Reconsidered

The famous self-quotation from The Creation in the so-called Schöpfungsmesse may easily be Haydn's least appreciated joke, with some scholars going as far as to question its intentionality. By contrast, I argue that Haydn's association of his rather profane melody with “miserere” is a deeply felt intertextual gesture meant as his personal plea for forgiveness, in particular for the sins he committed against chastity. In this light, I re-examine the two supposed apologies the composer related to his early biographers about the quotation, and conclude that Albert Christoph Dies was mistaken in referring to the Schöpfungsmesse in the much-quoted anecdote about the composer “giving vent to his happy spirits”; in fact, the composer seems to have been referring to the Heiligmesse.