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It was an encounter with the sacred music of an illustrious predecessor that <\/strong>sowed the seeds of Jospeh Haydn’s most famous and enduring masterpiece: The Creation.<\/em> <\/p> At the 1791 Handel<\/a><\/strong> Festival in Westminster Abbey, London, the 59-year-old Haydn was overwhelmed by the monumental sublimity of the choruses in Handel’s Messiah<\/em> <\/strong><\/a>and Israel in Egypt<\/em>, performed by a gargantuan array of over 1,000 players and singers.<\/p> In the words of an early biographer, Giuseppe Carpani, Haydn<\/a><\/strong> ‘confessed that …he was struck as if he had been put back to the beginning of his studies and had known nothing up to that moment. He meditated on every note and drew from those most learned scores the essence of true musical grandeur’.<\/p>