Dare forma all’informe: Milton, Haydn e la natura ambigua del Caos

Milton´s Creation does not arise de nihilo. At the origin of the world there is one shapeless and increate first matter, a wild and unfathomable abyss: Chaos. The investigation about the elusive and ambiguous nature of the first matter extends beyond the boundaries of Book VII of Paradise Lost and get to be one of the crucial and unsolved objectives of the poem. This point constitutes a cognitive challenge for Milton, but, above all, it poses a problem of representation: how to depict and shape, how to re-create in poetry a matter that has no shape nor boundaries? More than a century later F. J. Haydn, drawing on the Miltonian source, faced a similar challenge during the composition of his Oratorio Die Schöpfung, which opens with the famous prologue devoted to the representation of Chaos. By the key-concepts of Chaos and Light, we aim to show how the two authors, in different cultural and historical contexts and in their own artistic languages, both succeeded to overcome, in poetry and music, the challenge of Creation.