Handel completed his setting of Psalm 109, Dixit Dominus (HWV232) in Rome, he produced two stylistically similar psalm compositions: Laudate pueri Dominum in D major (HWV237) and a double choir setting of Nisi Dominus (HWV238). The autograph was probably destroyed in a fire but the auction catalogue shows Handel’s signature and it is dated the 13th July, 1707. Both psalm settings were probably intended for the annual feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel solemnly celebrated on the 16th July 1707 in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria in Montesanto, located on the Piazza del Popolo.

Nisi Dominus is a large-scale setting of the Latin text for the Catholic Psalm 127 (Vulgate 126) and it is thought to have been Cardinal Carlo Colonna, one of Handel’s earliest patrons, who commissioned this vesper psalm. Cardinal Colonna was the patron of this Marian Festival and had financed the music for a while as he held traditional family ties with the Carmelites.

Handel’s writing was particularly prolific during the first part of 1707 and he made huge advances in his compositional style and choral writing especially for Latin sacred music. A survey of his compositions at this time highlights a formative period as Handel masters the melodic Italian manner. His style becomes more fluent and melody-driven than previously in Germany and he had become a fully armed and accomplished composer of concert music for choir and orchestra, despite not yet having had the chance to hear English church music. His music contains traces of more supple, polished and energetic string writing and influences of Corelli as well as the flexibility, eloquence and vocal finesse of Alessandro Scarlatti.

As Handel was a Lutheran and wrote for the Catholic Church, his works naturally reflected the views of others such as his patrons and librettists. Nisi Dominus is based on Roman ideals and is baroque in form and idiom. It has a sequence of coups-de-theatre and poetical lines of text and word painting. In Sicut sagittae, arrows are depicted by scalic flourishes with the strong bass voice depicting the mighty one, ‘As arrows in the hands of the mighty: thus are the children of outcasts’.

In the concluding doxology, Handel writes for eight voices ending antiphonally in a double chorus (concertato and ripieno) and (uniquely in his output) a double string orchestra scored for strings and continuo. This work also includes ideas later revisited and developed in his English works such as Zadok the Priest.

from notes by Bridget Cunningham © 2016