About this Piece

Georg Handel, barber-surgeon of some renown in the small German city of Halle, admonished his son George Frideric against pursuing a career in music. After the elder Handel’s death, the younger continued to follow his father’s advice, enrolling in law school at the University of Halle. However, an organist post at the local Calvinist church—coupled with a musical inclination present since childhood—appears to have swayed George Frideric from the law for good. He spent time in Berlin, where he acquired a taste for opera (after meeting Antonio Maria Bononcini and other Italian opera composers) and moved to Hamburg, where he wrote a couple of operas himself in German, though only fragments remain of those early works. 

In 1706, Handel’s love of this fast-spreading new genre of opera led him to Italy. In Rome, a papal ban on the public performance of opera appears to have only fueled the flames, leading to a prohibition era of sorts. In the guise of oratorios and cantatas, operatic vocal music found its way into the Catholic Church, where several of its leaders, such as Cardinals Pamphili, Ottoboni, and Colonna, became patrons of composers working in this vein. Thus, the palazzos of these wealthy clergymen became the operatic speakeasies of Rome, and the leading composers of the day (such as Alessandro Scarlatti, Bononcini, and Handel) wrote for the private stages of the upper echelons of the Roman Church. The year 1707 saw Handel’s first oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, and three Psalm settings for Vespers: Laudate pueri, Nisi Dominus, and the Dixit Dominus premiered within this context. 

The Dixit Dominus is Handel’s first autograph manuscript. His only experience in the world of Italian-style opera (and its close cousins) up to that point amounted to Florindo and Daphne, two operas written in Hamburg prior to his Italian study-abroad trip. As such, the Dixit is a transparent synthesis of styles Handel had absorbed in the early years of the 18th century. From its high-flying leaps and stentorian range in the “Gloria Patri” section to the quasi-patter song of the “Tu es sacerdos” to the elegant corrente of the “Tecum principium” to the ferocious word painting of the “Conquassabit,” the work features a complete balance of virtuosity and poise, harmonic adventure and contained form. 

Italian composers from Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) onward placed text on a high dais. By the time of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), whose operas and hundreds of cantatas had placed him at the forefront of Italian music, musical forms of stricter constructs had been established, including a clear-cut structure of movements alternating between chorus and soloists. Still, the text remained at the center of the composition. The Dixit Dominus is a psalm of judgment; the violent poetry therein is a perfect catalyst for the theatrical nature of 1707 Rome’s opera-hungry music scene to express itself and its favorite techniques. 

The opening chorus emphasizes the word “dixit” (said), which, using a two-quaver figure, punctuates the movement in a forceful fashion. The second half uses the word “scabellum” (footstool) to convey God’s mightiness over his enemies, which is also featured in a chant-like line echoed throughout the voices. Likewise, the “Conquassabit” chorus makes full use of its name—the “crushing” of the heads over many lands can be heard in the pulsating, energetic homophony of the chorus and the orchestra.  

The sweeter movements are reserved for soloists. “De torrente in via bibet” (He shall drink of the brook in the way) is gently set for a soprano duet, with the tenors and basses forming a soft chorus in the background. “Virgam virtutis tuae,” the verse in which the addressee is directed to rule even in the face of the enemy, is a declamatory aria for alto (which would likely have been sung by a castrato in 1707 Rome). 

As a continuation of Renaissance humanism, the Italian Baroque saw the rise of virtuosity extended through both vocal and instrumental genres. Handel composed for the complete ranges of all the voices (the basses even have multiple high F’s), and the divisions require great agility from the musicians. The orchestral parts provide a powerful, brilliant, and almost angular complement to the vocal writing. The instrumentation (strings and continuo) is atypical in that it includes two violas, thus creating a five-part texture (two violins, two violas, and bass) to match the five-part writing in the voices (two sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass). As such, much of the writing features equal dialogue within the voices and instruments as well as between them. 

In many ways, the Dixit Dominus is the stunning result of years of musical inebriation on the part of the composer. All of the ideas that the 22-year-old Handel absorbed from his teachers and contemporaries are fused together and instantly manifest in a half hour of fluid, seemingly perpetual motion. The Dixit Dominus is a highly detailed portrait of a young buck ready to prove himself in a world to which he desperately wanted to belong. —Vicente Chavarría