Well, duh. From the Bible, of course. We all know that. But when a pieces becomes so familiar, so ingrained in our consciousness, we forget sometimes that they’re actually about something–that the composers started with an idea, a nugget of truth, a theme.
Let’s first look a selection from Franz Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation: “The Heavens Are Telling,” is not from the first chapter of Genesis as you might have expected. Instead, it’s from Psalm 19, the first verse of which is: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. (King James Version, thus the strange spelling of “sheweth” and “handywork.”)