Dixit Dominus
by Michael Haydn
SSA - Sheet Music

SSA choir, keyboard or strings (SSA choir)

SKU: AN.AMP-0280

Composed by Michael Haydn. Edited by Betsy Cook Weber. Octavo. Alliance Music Publications #AMP 0280. Published by Alliance Music Publications (AN.AMP-0280).

Haydn/Weber.

COMPOSER

Johann Michael Haydn (1737-1806) was the younger brother of the more famous Franz Joseph Haydn. Like his older brother, Haydn's training consisted almost entirely of his experiences as a choirboy at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. After his voice changed, Haydn was forced to rely on these skills in order to survive as a Free-lance musician. Except for a brief tenure in Hungary, Haydn spent his entire adult career as a composer, conductor,organist, and teacher for the musical establishment of the Archbishop in Salzburg. During this period, the Archbishop also employed Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart. During his lifetime, Michael Haydn was recognized as one of the area's most prominent musicians, particularly as a composer of sacred choral music. Numerous studies have demonstrated that Michael Haydn's music exerted a strong influence on that of the youngerMozart.

MUSIC

Michael Haydn particularly enjoyed working with the Salzburg Cathedral's fifteen choirboys who sang the treble parts of all the choral music performed in the Cathedral. The Dixit Dominus is the first movement of a completeVespers that he wrote for these boys in 1780. Like other works by this wonderful composer, the music is tuneful, energetic, and dance-like--qualities which were assuredly as appealing to 18th-century children as they are to those of today. Interestingly, Haydn's Vespers setting was written in the same year that Wolfgang Mozart, who was living and working in Salzburg at the same time, wrote his own beautiful Vesperae solennes de confessore, K. 321.