Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Alessandro Scarlatti’s St Cecilia Mass, two exemplary and uplifting sacred works written in Rome three centuries ago that mark a gathering point in their respective composer’s careers: in Handel’s case the culmination of a decade of study and extraordinary promise; for Scarlatti, in this tri-centenary year of his death, a late glimpse of future possibilities after a lifetime of prolific, musical creativity.
Details of Handel’s time in Italy are scant, but we know that in early 1707 the 22-year-old Handel, a Lutheran, was commissioned to compose psalm settings for the Catholic liturgy, maybe for a thanksgiving Vespers. These commissions resulted in one of Handel’s strongest and most flamboyant works, Dixit Dominus - Psalm 110. The writing is virtuosic for players and singers alike as key words from this messianic psalm are singled out and turned into torrents of melody or hammered out in music of unprecedented drama and choral bandwidth, establishing a model for future Handelian thrillers like the Hallelujah chorus. This is the earliest of his works to be regularly performed.
While Dixit is a young man’s music, the St Cecilia Mass of 1720 is an end-of-career work yet youthful in its sparkling solo passages and fast-paced choruses. Alessandro Scarlatti was 60 when he wrote it for Cardinal Acquaviva, benefactor of the Sta Cecilia Basilica in Rome, where the mass was first performed. It distils a lifetime of craft and experience. Less spectacular than Handel’s Dixit it can be heard as paving the way for the style of mass writing that would evolve through Mozart to Schubert.
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