Tomás Luis de Victoria

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(b Avila, 1548; d Madrid, 20 Aug 1611). Spanish composer. He was a choirboy at Avila Cathedral; when his voice broke he was sent to the Jesuit Collegio Germanico, Rome (c1565), where he may have studied under Palestrina. He was a singer and organist at S Maria di Monserrato (1569- at least 1574) and from 1571 to 1576-7 he taught at the Collegio Germanico (maestro from 1575). He became a priest and joined the Oratory of S Filippo Neri. In the 1580s he returned to Spain as chaplain to Philip II's sister the Dowager Empress Maria, at the Descalzas Reales convent, Madrid, from 1587 until her death in 1603; he remained there as organist until his death, apart from a visit to Rome (1592-5), when he attended Palestrina's funeral.

The greatest Spanish Renaissance composer, and among the greatest in Europe in his day, he wrote exclusively Latin sacred music. Most was printed in his lifetime; in 1600 a sumptuous collection of 32 of his most popular masses, Magnificats, psalms and motets appeared in Madrid. Though his output ranged widely through the liturgy, he is chiefly remembered for his masses and motets, which include well-known pieces (Missa Ave regina caelorum, Missa pro victoria, O magnum mysterium, O quam gloriosum, O vos omnes). Like Palestrina, he wrote in a serious, devotional style, often responding emotionally to the texts with dramatic word-painting. Some of his more poignant pieces are characterized by a religious, almost mystical fervour.

works:
Sacred vocal music,

• c20 masses
• Officium defunctorum (1605)
• 18 Magnificats
• music for Holy Week (2 Passions, Lamentations, responsories etc) (1585)
• c50 motets
• over 30 hymns
• 13 antiphons
• 8 psalms
• 3 sequences
• litany

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Tomás Luis de Victoria (ca. 1548-1611) was the most renowned Spanish Renaissance polyphonist. His works are characterized by mystical fervor and nobility of musical concepts.

Tomás Luis de Victoria was the seventh child of 11 born in Ávila to Francisco Luis de Victoria and Francisca Suárez de la Concha. His father's death in 1557 left the family in the care of an uncle who was a priest. Victoria spent several years as a choirboy in Ávila Cathedral.

In 1565 (or 1563) Victoria entered the German College at Rome. This was a Jesuit school lavishly supported by Philip II and Otto von Truchsess von Waldburg, the cardinal archbishop of Augsburg. Victoria served as organist at the Aragonese church of S. Maria di Monserrato in Rome from 1569 to 1574. In 1571 the German College hired him to teach music to the young boys. He was ordained on Aug. 28, 1575. From that year to 1577 he directed the German College choir singing at the church of S. Apollinare in Rome; from 1578 to 1585 he held a chaplaincy at S. Girolamo della Carità, the church of the newly founded Oratorians at Rome.

Victoria returned to Spain in 1587 and until 1603 served as chapelmaster of the Descalzas Reales convent in Madrid, where Philip II's sister, the Dowager Empress Maria, and her daughter, Princess Margaret, resided. From 1604 until his death on Aug. 27, 1611, he was also the organist at the convent.

In 1572 Victoria dedicated his first, and still most famous, publication to Cardinal Truchsess, a great connoisseur of church music. The 33 motecta ranging from four to eight voices in this collection include the sensuous Vere languores and O vos omnes, which to this day form the bedrock of Victoria's reputation with the broad public that knows nothing of his Magnificats, hymns, sequences, psalms, antiphons, and 20 Masses - five of which appeared in 1576, four more in 1583, seven in 1592, and the rest in 1600 and 1605.

In his 1572 motets Victoria closely followed the detail technique of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, evincing a commanding mastery of Palestrina's dissonance treatment. Personal contact with Palestrina and perhaps even lessons probably explain Victoria's absorption of the technique. From 1566 to 1571 Palestrina served as chapelmaster at the Roman College near the German College. What distinguishes Victoria's personal manner in 1572 from Palestrina's is the younger composer's frequent recourse to printed accidentals, his fondness for what would now be called melodic minor motion (sharps ascending, naturals descending), and the anticipation of 19th-century functional harmony.

Throughout his career, even when writing Missa Quarti toni (1592), Victoria always succeeded in sounding like a "major-minor" rather than a truly "modal" composer. For him Quarti toni meant A minor cadencing on the dominant. In 1600 he published Missae, Magnificat, motecta, psalmi, & alia, which consists very largely of organ-accompanied F-major music. True, he reverted to unaccompanied minor keys in the Officium defunctorum, published in 1605 as a tribute to his patroness, the Dowager Empress Maria, but this was funeral music. In none of Palestrina's publications did he specify organ accompaniments. Victoria did - even publishing organ parts in 1592 and 1600.

Victoria's miscellany of 1600 includes a Missa pro Victoria modeled on Clément Janequin's famous battle chanson. Philip III liked this ebullient nine-voice Mass founded on a secular model more than any of Victoria's other works, but it contravenes every quality endearing Victoria to his modern public. However, it does at least prove him to have been more versatile emotionally and technically than his admirers will admit. Philip III's partiality for it served as a sales gambit when Victoria sought funds from its publication to bail his youngest brother out of prison.

Further Reading

A biography of Victoria is sketched in Robert Stevenson, Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age (1961). For historical background see the New Oxford History of Music, vol. 4: The Age of Humanism, 1540-1630 (1968), chapter 7.

Victoria, Tomás Luis De (1548–1611), preeminent composer of the Spanish Renaissance. Rivaled only by Giovanni da Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso among his European contemporaries, Victoria produced an important body of work that was widely distributed, often reprinted, and highly praised from his time to ours. He is not only the most famous of the sixteenth-century Spaniards such as Cristóbal de Morales and Francisco Guerrero, but is arguably the most famous Spanish composer of all time.

An apparently proud Ávilan, who appended his name with "Abulense" in his publications, Victoria received his early musical training as a choirboy at Ávila Cathedral under Gerónimo de Espinar and Bernardino de Ribera. He may have known the illustrious organist Antonio de Cabezón during his Ávilan residence. With the help of his patron Cardinal Otto von Truchess of Augsburg, he went to Rome to study music and theology at the Collegium Germanicum in 1565. Four years later, he took charge of music at the Aragonese Church of Santa Maria di Monserrato, and soon afterward he took up positions at the two Jesuit colleges: the Collegium Germanicum (1571) and the Collegium Romanum (1573, where he succeeded Palestrina, whom he knew and with whom he possibly studied), thus situating him at the intellectual and artistic heart of Jesuit activity during the height of the spiritual renewal sparked by the Council of Trent (1545–1563). His compositional and directorial activities in Rome and his association with Palestrina have led many historians to classify him as a "Roman School" composer, while others have emphasized his Spanish identity.

In 1572, Victoria published a collection of motets that would establish his fame, including "O magnum mysterium," "O vos omnes," and "Vere languores." His early motets were reprinted several times in his own lifetime. Ordained to the priesthood in 1575, he joined the Congregazione dei Preti dell'Oratorio (Congregation of the Oratory), and from 1578 to 1585 served as chaplain of S. Girolamo della Carità, where, free from the demands of a musical position and supported by lucrative Spanish benefices provided by Pope Gregory XII, he published several important collections of music while living in daily contact with Rome's great pastor, St. Philip Neri, for five years.

Victoria returned to Spain in 1587 to take up the position of chaplain to the Dowager Empress Maria at the Monasterio de las Descalzas de Santa Clara de la Cruz in Madrid, to which he was appointed by Philip II. He spent the rest of his life at the monastery, first as maestro di capilla and, after Maria's death in 1603, as organist. His return to his Castilian homeland saw him turn down prestigious positions at Spanish cathedrals in favor of his position at the royal monastery, where his music was performed by an expert choir and where he was allowed to oversee his publications abroad. He died in Madrid in 1611.

Victoria's reputation is based mostly on a somber collection of motets, a collection of music for Holy Week, and his Office for the Dead. These paint an unfairly morose picture of the composer whom some would regard as typically Spanish. His Masses paint a very different picture, being mostly based on motets with exultant texts. His cycle of sixteen Magnificats puts him in league with other Spaniards, such as Morales, Guerrero, and Alonso Lobo, who were unmatched in their attention to the Canticle of Mary. His Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae (Office of Holy Week) was the first of its kind, and the Passions of Saints Matthew and John it contained were in constant use by the papal chapel into modern times. It also included his well-known Lamentations of Jeremiah and eighteen responsories for Tenebrae.

Like Claudio Monteverdi, Victoria stands at the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the baroque period. His writing contains (indeed, exemplifies) much of the traditional church polyphony, consisting of several melodies that intertwine in a complex, harmonious web, but he also wrote simple psalm settings in the falsobordone style (such as Psalm 50 in the Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae) and polychoral works such as the Missa Pro Victoria (for double choir), which show the emergence of the baroque style with its emphasis on pitting parts of the ensemble against other parts. Beginning in 1600, he became the first significant composer to write independent keyboard accompaniments, anticipating the publications of the Venetian Giovanni Gabrieli by fifteen years. His later progressive compositions never achieved the fame of his early works, with the exception of the beloved Officium Defunctorum (Office of the dead, 1605), written upon the death of Empress Maria.

A genuinely religious man, Victoria wrote only sacred works. His output, while often understood as reflecting the mystical spirituality of El Greco and his fellow Ávilan St. Teresa de la Cruz, might be better understood in relation to the popular devotional spirituality of Neri and the Council of Trent's program of spiritual renewal, which was promoted with special zeal by the Jesuits who were responsible for his intellectual and musical formation.

Bibliography

Cramer, Eugene Casjen. "Some Elements of the Early Baroque in the Music of Victoria." In De Musica Hispana et Aliis. Vol 1, pp. 501–538. Santiago de Compostela, 1990.

——. Studies in the Music of Tomás Luis de Victoria. Aldershot, U.K., 2001.

Stevenson, Robert. Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961.

—LEE MATTHEW ESCANDON

• Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)
• Born: 1548 in Avila, Spain
• Died: August 20, 1611 in Madrid, Spain
• Genres: Choral Music, Miscellaneous Music

Biography

The dominating figure of sixteenth century Spanish music, Tomás Luis de Victoria was born in Avila. He was sent to Rome to study, possibly for a time under Palestrina during the latter's years at the Roman Seminary. In 1571 he succeeded Palestrina there as choirmaster, a post he also subsequently occupied at the Jesuit Order's German College. Later he became active as a priest, working at St. Girolamo della Carità. Following his return to Spain in 1585, Victoria served the Empress Maria and her daughter as teacher, organist, and choirmaster until his death in 1611.

By the time Victoria arrived in Rome, the conservative ecclesiastical establishment and the Council of Trent had ensured that any musical hint of the "lascivious or the impure" was largely banished (Palestrina was even moved to dismiss his publication of secular madrigals as a youthful peccadillo). It is therefore not surprising to find that Victoria's output consists solely of religious music that eschews even the use of secular cantus firmus, and that displays the formal perfection and the well-smoothed vocal writing of the Palestrina style. What is surprising is that despite his Roman training and years of service in the city, Victoria so strongly retained his Spanish roots. Some of his finest works were composed after his return home, and many of them contain features that seem to epitomize the deeply mystical approach of so much Spanish Renaissance music. Comparison with Palestrina reveals a greater emphasis on chromatic color and use of dynamic contrast; Victoria's block harmonies and multiple choirs look forward to the Baroque. His response to words is acute and highly personal, a characteristic particularly suited to the comparatively dynamic and plastic form of the motet and to other texts which allow full rein to subjective treatment. Of Victoria's 44 motets, the early four-part O quam gloriosum can perhaps be allowed a special mention, since it is pervaded by a youthful vigor and joyous radiance that gives lie to the understandable impression that Spanish Renaissance composers were preoccupied with somber religious subjects. His widely performed Christmas motet, O magnum mysterium, exudes a quiet sense of wonder. Victoria's fame as a motet composer has tended to overshadow his masses, yet at their finest, as in the lovely Missa Ave maris stella, they are not inferior to those of Palestrina.

To discover Victoria at his greatest, however, one must ultimately return to the darker side, and in particular to the two works by which he is best known, the Tenebrae Responsories (first published in 1585) and the Requiem of 1605, a work of timeless serenity. The former is a setting of 18 pieces that adhere to the traditional form of the responsory, with its alternation of verse and refrain. The work takes us through the Passion story in music that relies not so much on the drama of the events themselves as on a quite extraordinarily direct and profound response to the text, a response frequently achieved by means of the greatest simplicity, or, perhaps more accurately, apparent simplicity. ~ Brian Robins, All Music Guide