There it was right in front of me: an 1803 edition of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. Our hosts, the owners of a private collection of 18th-century music, were pulling out treasure after treasure, piling the volumes on every available corner of the table.  Every item was important, historic, gorgeous.

But two things stopped my heart: a first edition of C.P.E. Bach’s Prussian Sonatas and an 1803 edition of Haydn’s ground-breaking oratorio The Creation.

Those of you who have taken, or will take, Discovering Music know that both of these works show the radical creativity of two top masters who forecast, or even launched, new styles.  In the case of the Haydn, I asked the first question (always), namely “May I open it?”  I then went straight to the moment in the score.  It’s one you’ll remember from the course.

“And God said . . . ‘Let there be light’ . . . and . . . there . . . was . . .”

I traced the exquisitely engraved page with its bilingual text (German and English) down to the end of the final measures, bottom right.  And then my eyes shot open.

You’ve got to turn the page at that point!  Our hosts smiled and said: “That’s right, it’s the biggest page turn in music history.”

From the slender lines of recitative with their delicate accompaniment, and the infamous string pizzicato (the electric spark of creation?), swoosh, turn the page, and pow: the full blaring of the glory of “Light.”

Blaring, of course, is relative.  It was 1798 when Haydn wrote The Creation. The world of 105 orchestra players and 200-person choruses was decades in the future. But in that quieter 18th-century world, Haydn’s full complement of strings and brass, timpani and chorus, made a magnificent blast.

All marked by a page turn.

We can know a lot from books, recordings, and historical study.  But when someone puts the real thing in our hands, a different type of learning takes place.  The academic preparation makes all the difference.  But nothing replaces the experience.  At least, as close as we can get to the experience, until we figure out how to time-travel back to Haydn’s world.