Darius Milhaud's La Création du monde - The Creation of the World - premiered in Paris in October 1923 as a ballet with choreography by Fernand Léger and scenario by Blaise Cendrars. The work drew its narrative from African cosmological myths compiled by Cendrars in his Anthologie Nègre, but Milhaud structured the musical arc of creation - from formless void to the emergence of human beings - in a sequence that closely parallels the progression of Genesis 1, making this the first major classical work to interpret the biblical creation narrative through African-American jazz idioms.
Milhaud had visited Harlem in 1922 and been captivated by jazz, which he heard in Harlem clubs with unmediated directness. He returned to Paris with a determination to use the jazz idiom - its blues harmonies, syncopated rhythms, and improvisatory feel - as a vehicle for serious composition. La Création du monde was the result: a seventeen-piece jazz ensemble scoring that uses saxophone, trumpet, trombone, and piano in ways derived directly from New Orleans jazz, while the formal structure reflects the classical French tradition.
Genesis 1:1-2 establishes the work's opening: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.' Milhaud's opening is dense and chaotic - a musical embodiment of tohu wabohu, the Hebrew phrase for formless void - before order gradually emerges through the successive creative acts. The blues-infused melodic material that represents the human beings (Genesis 1:26-27, 2:7) carries a particular emotional weight, the jazz language suggesting the dignity and vitality of the creature who bears the divine image.
The work's implicit theological statement was itself revolutionary. By using African-American musical forms as the vehicle for a creation narrative - by insisting that the jazz emerging from the churches and clubs of Black America was a legitimate language for the most fundamental story in the Western theological tradition - Milhaud was making a claim about the universality of Genesis 1:26's affirmation that all human beings are made in the image of God. If creation bears the divine image in all its human diversity, then its music should reflect that diversity.
The ballet was received with controversy in 1923 Paris - jazz was still associated with nightclubs and sexual license in the minds of many critics - but its musical quality was undeniable, and it quickly entered the orchestral repertoire as a concert piece. Its significance in music history lies at the intersection of three traditions: French classical composition, African-American jazz, and the biblical creation narrative that had shaped Western art since the Renaissance.
For scholars of biblical influence in culture, La Création du monde raises profound questions about the relationship between Genesis and cosmological narratives from other traditions. Cendrars's African myths share with Genesis the movement from chaos to order, from void to abundance, from dark to light - suggesting that Milhaud was not merely illustrating a borrowed narrative but discovering in the African cosmological tradition a resonance with the biblical one. Whether this represents an underlying human intuition about creation, or evidence of earlier contact between traditions, or simply the structuralist observation that all creation narratives share certain deep patterns, remains an open and fascinating question.