Behind the Musik: Double Dixit

Program

INTERMISSION

Program Notes

By Kate Helsen

George Frideric Handel is rarely considered an exchange student, but in 1706 that is exactly what he was. At 21, he left Germany for the first time, heading to Italy to immerse himself in the musical world he had heard so much about.

It makes sense to think of Italy as the scene of Handel’s “graduate studies,” following three years in Hamburg’s opera world. The lively atmosphere and opportunity for creativity at the Oper am Gänsemarkt had tempted the young composer away from his hometown of Halle, wanting more than a life as a regular church organist with a law degree. Hamburg had offered Handel a challenge, and he rose to it, becoming a major figure on Hamburg’s opera scene. Upon meeting him, the visiting Prince of Tuscany, Gian Gastone de’ Medici, offered to fund the teenager’s travels to learn from the Italian musical tradition immediately. At that time, however, Handel had refused, wanting to get there on his own dime. Three years of work at the Gänsemarktfinally made that possible and now, he was off!

We don’t know where Handel travelled first in Italy, but by the spring of the following year he was in Rome, and was already a known quantity in the Italian musical world. He was itching to prove he had absorbed the Italian style, and the “Eternal City” soon supplied the perfect opportunity: the annual celebration of devotion to the Virgin Mary (as the Lady of Mount Carmel) on July 16. Sponsored by Cardinal Carlo Colonna, the opulent celebration included a procession, a mass, and, most important for our “exchange student,” an elaborate choral Vespers. Since Monteverdi’s great setting a century before, the dramatic potential of the Vespers psalms, with their vivid imagery, had attracted the more “operatic” composers. This was Handel’s chance to synthesize everything he had learned about the Italian style with the deep understanding of counterpoint and harmony taught to him in Germany. He delivered, not only with the spectacular setting of the Dixit Dominus (the first Vespers psalm, Psalm 110), but also Laudate pueri (Psalm 112) and Nisi Dominus (Psalm 126), all psalms normally sung at Vespers. The young German showed the world that he could out-Italian the Italians in their own home!

What might Handel have been doing in Italy before turning up in Rome with his Vespers offerings? The first pages of the Dixit Dominus manuscript hold a clue: they are Venetian paper. And it makes sense that he would have headed to Venice, which was not only the heart of the Italian opera scene, but also the residence of the musical contacts he had made while in Hamburg. In Venice it is inconceivable that he did not meet the Italian composer almost 20 years his senior and recently appointed First Organist at St. Mark’s Basilica: Antonio Lotti.

Although Lotti was born in Venice, Handel’s Germanness would not have been entirely foreign: Lotti’s father, a musician, moved to Hanover shortly after Antonio’s birth. When Lotti was 13 his father died in Germany, ensuring his continued education in Venice, where he studied with the maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s, Giovanni Legrenzi, and rose over the following decades to the position in which Handel met him. Lotti must have recognized something of himself in the foreign student. We imagine Lotti and Handel talking about opera and sharing counterpoint tips. (Handel’s later reuse of Lotti’s opera libretti suggests this exchange really did occur.) Lotti, though older and established, had serious respect for German expertise, once writing: “My compatriots are clever, but not composers. One finds true composition in Germany.”

This Italian/German musical exchange had a long history. Agostino Steffani, composer of the first piece on the program (Triduanas a Domino, associated with the Feast of Saint Cecilia), moved from Venice to Munich at the age of 13 to study composition, having been a boy singer in Venetian opera houses. He became a Court Musician and Composer to the Elector of Bavaria, who funded his education. Six years later, he was sent back to Italy to finish his studies under Ercole Bernabei, maestro di cappella at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He returned to Munich at age 20 as court organist. In later years, he turned from composing to involvement in the Church as a bishop, and finally, to international relations as a diplomat. His career eventually led him to Hanover, where he wrote popular operas whose scores were taken to England in 1714 when the Elector became King George I. (Handel, whose employer was that same elector-turned-king, was of course another important musical import!)

We now turn to the fascinating connections between Lotti’s Dixit Dominus (1706) and Handel’s setting a year later, as our concert offers the rare chance to hear them back-to-back. This comparison allows us to focus on Handel’s well-known tendency to “liberate” musical ideas from other composers’ scores. In this case, we can hear how Lotti’s ideas were not so much directly copied as specifically inspired by the older composer’s setting. Several aspects connect the two pieces; some will register as more subtle than others.

Perhaps most musically striking is Lotti and Handel’s use of “terraced” entries, where vocal lines build in layers: the basses enter and hold their note, then tenors come in higher with the same text, followed by the altos, creating a harmonic platform for the sopranos to add the highest pitches in the chord. Listen for this in Lotti’s setting on “Judicabit” (“he will judge”), and in Handel’s on “conquasabit” (“he will scatter”). Handel’s setting is also similar to Lotti’s in some instances of rhythmic text-setting. For example, on “Et in saecula saeculorum,” the rhythm stretches out with longer notes for the first two words before quickening as the singers reach “saecula saeculorum.” In another section, both composers call dramatic words out of the texture by beginning them with a rest, inserting a slice of silence on the strong beat to focus attention on the sentiment that follows. Listen for this in both settings of “implevit ruinas” (“filling with destruction”) and “scabellum” (“footstool”).

Imagine how Lotti and Handel would have felt knowing their Dixit Dominus settings would be presented together over 300 years later on another continent and in a city that did not yet exist! Perhaps the two now sit with Steffani in a heavenly Italian café, raising a glass of Amarone to today’s musicians and audiences who are keeping their works alive for the next generation of musical exchange students.

For tickets, visit: tafelmusik.org/doubledixit

The text comes from the fifth-century text “Acts of St. Cecilia.” It recounts that Cecilia was condemned to death, but that the executioner failed to decapitate her after three blows. She lived for three more days. St Cecilia came to be venerated as the Patron Saint of Music. 

Dixit Dominus (Psalm 110)