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Renowned experts profile prominent figures that have contributed in a decisive way to the advancement of Spanish culture.
Welcome to Major Figures in Spanish Culture. A podcast produced by Fundacion Juan March. In each episode, we invite renowned experts to sit down and share stories about some of Spain's most distinguished figures, who have greatly influenced and contributed to the advancement and richness of Spanish culture. Thomas Luis de Victoria is widely considered one of the most important composers of sacred music in the history of Western music. As a true Renaissance man, Victoria was also a Catholic priest, an accomplished organist, and a singer.
Speaker 1:His compositions, full of emotional intensity, and his mastery of counterpoint would lead him to become the most significant composer of the Counter Reformation in Spain. Owen l Rees, director of music and organist at The Queen's College, University of Oxford, is here to tell us more.
Speaker 2:Thomas Luis de Victoria is, by some margin, the most famous composer of the Spanish golden age. Indeed, his music is seen as epitomizing the characteristics of Spanish sacred music of that age. These include intense expressiveness and ardent religious fervor. Victoria's origins in Avila have made it natural to place his name alongside that of Saint Teresa when emphasizing the qualities of mysticism seen to be embodied in his works. And the fact that he was a priest has heightened the emphasis on his religiosity as a composer.
Speaker 2:Victoria's status as the paragon of Spanish expressiveness in music has been further reinforced through the widespread habit of comparing him to Palestrina and of arguing that Victoria responded to the texts he was setting in more vivid and colorful ways than was Palestrina's custom. But the linkage with Palestrina has another element. The outputs of both composers are viewed as manifestations through music of the values and aims of the Counter Reformation, reflecting the fact that both of them were active in Rome in the early decades of the implementation of reforms following the Council of Trent. The picture of Vittoria that I've just outlined became established about a century ago. It survives in its essentials, but opportunities and incentives to refashion it have emerged in more recent times as we have gained new information about the composer's life, activities, and connections.
Speaker 2:In terms of his career, Vittoria followed a path which was far from typical of the principal composers of sacred music in golden age Spain. He did not enter the circuit of cathedral chapel master posts as did the likes of his acquaintance, Francisco Guerrero, or Victoria's close contemporaries, Alonso Lobo and Sebastian de Bivancro. Instead, he went to Rome in 15/65 when in his late teens. There, he studied at the German college run by the Jesuits, and he remained in Rome for about 20 years. It was during this period that he exploited the flourishing music printing trade in Venice and Rome to issue a series of published collections of his works.
Speaker 2:Through these collections, he rather methodically supplied polyphonic music for the principal sites in the church's year and for those liturgies where such polyphony was most frequently needed. These publications both reflected and fed the proliferating practice of polyphony in, for example, Roman churches. Much of this music can be performed with just a few singers. It suited the needs of those churches where a handful of professional musicians would be hired for particular occasions. Victoria's published output is exquisitely fashioned, and we know from the annotated instructions about publication on a Roman manuscript of his Psalm setting that he had exacting standards when it came to the printing of his music.
Speaker 2:But the repertory which these printed books contain is modest in size, far smaller, for example, than the outputs of Palestrina or Lassus. Victoria was in the habit of publishing works more than once, and he often took the opportunity to refine and polish them through small. These published collections of Victoria's Roman years are impeccably well fitted to the context in which they were conceived. This was the immediate aftermath of the Council of Trent, which had concluded in 15/63. While the council's final decrees said very little specifically about music, it had provided a prominent forum for the renewal of existing and fierce debates about whether polyphonic music had a place in church.
Speaker 2:Some argued that it was at best a distraction and at worst sinful, a vehicle for the vain display of composers' and musicians' skills. It was also argued that such music with its often elaborate textures obscured the sacred texts that were sung. A musician such as Victoria working in Rome in the years that followed the end of the council would have been acutely aware of the widespread desire for the text to be audible in polyphony. More than this, the music should serve to project the text's meaning in a rhetorically powerful manner using techniques partly akin to those employed by preachers of the period. Victoria likewise witnessed at close hands the papacy's promulgation of reformed versions of the Roman liturgies.
Speaker 2:In a drive towards liturgical unification, these liturgies were to be used throughout the Catholic world. With all this in mind, Victoria's approach within his first publication makes perfect sense. This publication was a book of motets, which appeared in 15/72. At the start of the book is a table of contents, but the first column in that table does not show the opening words of the text of each motet as we might expect. Instead, it shows the feast day to which that motet text is appropriate.
Speaker 2:Furthermore, Victoria organized the motets according to the dates of these feast days in the church's calendar starting at the beginning of the church's year or saints day. In this way, Victoria signaled clearly that the motet, which historically had had a highly flexible function in relation to the liturgy, was here firmly tied to the calendar and liturgy as set out in the new Roman liturgical books issued during the few years before his motet book appeared. He was, in other words, demonstrating in the face of the historic criticisms that I mentioned, the potential service of polyphony to the liturgy and its integral role in the performance of liturgy. But the works themselves in this collection also demonstrate music's ability to enhance liturgical acts rather than merely fitting well within them. Victoria here catered to the strong desire that the sung texts be audible to the listener.
Speaker 2:The opening moments of the piece to which he gave pride of place in the collection, o quam gloriosum, serve as a striking testament to this priority of Victoria's. It was still normal practice at this time for a motet to begin with so called imitation. This is where the voices enter one after another in turn so that they build up a complex polyphonic web where each voice is typically singing a different word at a particular moment. Instead, Victoria's debut work commences with bold chordal declamation with text clarity to the fore as the voices deliver the text simultaneously. In the years that followed this debut collection, Victoria issued further compilations, which quite systematically provided music for the principal types of liturgical contexts in which polyphony was used and which it could enhance.
Speaker 2:He published collections of masses in 15761583, music for the important afternoon service of vespers in a pair of publications in 15/81, and in 1585, a great anthology of music for the high point of the church's year, Holy Week. These publications were highly popular with Roman churches and with the religious associations called confraternities, but Victoria was also active in promoting his music in Spain and elsewhere. He engaged energetically in a practice employed by various Spanish composers of the period, sending copies of a newly printed collection to cathedrals and other great churches and also to potential ecclesiastical, noble, and royal patrons. These copies were ostensibly sent as a gift from the composer. But, actually, this was done in the hope and expectation that the relevant cathedral chapter or patron would grant a financial reward for the book.
Speaker 2:The majority of Victoria's surviving letters belong to this type. For example, in 1582, Victoria wrote to the chapter of Seville Cathedral in closing with the letter copies of his two collections of music for Vespers published in Rome the year before. In the letter, Victoria is keen to reassure the canons of Seville of the usefulness of these publications. He highlights that their print size is sufficiently large to allow even a choir as numerous as that of Seville Cathedral to perform from this single copy of the book, with all the singers of the cabilla standing around it at a great music stand. He is also bold enough in the letter to express his disappointment that the cathedral chapter has not sent him any acknowledgment or recompense for the book of masses which he had sent them some 2 years previously.
Speaker 2:Clearly, Vittoria was a determined musical businessman as well as an active promoter of his own works. During his Roman years and alongside his publication efforts, Vittoria's activities and institutional connections were multiple overlapping and varied. This variety in part reflected the fact that he was a priest as well as a professional musician. In a musical capacity, he worked variously as a singer, an organist, a musical director, and a teacher. The institutions he served musically included the German college where he had studied and its associated church of San Apollinare, the Aragonese Catalan Church of Santa Maria di Monterato, and the Castilian Church of San Giacomo delle Espanoli.
Speaker 2:He was ordained priest in 15/75. And in terms of charitable work, he belonged to the arch confraternity of the resurrection and the Compania dell'Accarita, and he served as a chaplain at the church of San Geronamo dell'Accarita. In 15/83, he used a letter addressed to King Philip of Spain within a collection of masses to ask the king to grant his desire to return to his native Spain and to pursue a quieter life focused on his duties as a priest. 5 years later, in September 15, 87, this wish was granted. He was installed as one of the household chaplains of the dowager empress Maria of Austria, who lived in retirement within the royal apartments attached to the convent of the Descartes Realis in Madrid.
Speaker 2:Victoria remained in Maria's service until her death in 16/03, and he continued his attachment to the convent until his own death 8 years later. While Victoria was not part of the king's household in Madrid nor a member of the royal chapel choir, he was, nevertheless, positioned very close to the center of Spanish Habsburg power. The Descafes Realis Convent and Maria's Apartments effectively constituted an extension of the royal court. The connections which this facilitated were clearly useful to Victoria as a composer, and in 1605, he commented that the favors which he had received from the house of Habsburg had provided him with the leisure to compose. The strong patron client relationship which Victoria maintained with the king is reflected in Victoria's penultimate publication, which he dedicated to Philip the third and issued via the royal press in Madrid.
Speaker 2:This is a grandiose collection of music for multiple choirs and organ. It evokes and exploits the splendor of the king's royal chapel choir as well as the skills of the choir maintained at the Descartes of the Aeales convent under the patronage of the king. One of the masses in this collection, the strikingly entitled Misapro Victoria, has caused some disquiet among those modern writers on Victoria who set great store by the fact that his output was unsullied by secular elements or works. Their disquiet results from the fact that this mass is based on a secular chanson, La guerre by Clement Janacaine, also known as La Bataille. This is a vivid and lively portrayal of battle and its sounds, and it gave rise to a whole subgenre of masses based on its musical material, including one by Victoria's friend, Francisco Guerrero.
Speaker 2:In fact, the modern guardians of Victoria's musical piety need not have worried too much. This is because it's fair to presume that the theme of battle is, in this mass, transferred to the sacred realm. It reflects the nature of the Eucharist as a commemoration and celebration of Christ's victory over death. But Victoria's work can, at the same time, be viewed as honoring the status of the Spanish Habsburgs, their status as soldiers of Christ and defenders of the faith. In other words, the victoria of the masses title is a salute to and prayer for Habsburg victory over the enemies of the Catholic faith.
Speaker 2:In a letter to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, with which he enclosed a copy of this printed collection, Victoria proudly mentioned that the mise politolia in particular was well liked by King Philip the 3rd. Here is the conclusion of the Anus Dei, the last movement of the mass, where the repeated note battle fanfares of Janacin's chanson are transformed into the plea for peace, Dona Nobi's planchet. Victoria's faithful service to the Habsburgs is most explicitly represented by his next printed music, the Requiem for Six Voices composed in 16/03 and published 2 years later. This work achieved a remarkable prominence in writings about Victoria. It was highlighted in accounts of Victoria that can be traced back at least as far as 17/11, a century after Victoria's death, when Andrea Adami highlighted the requiem as one of the composer's finest pieces.
Speaker 2:Nowadays, the requiem has risen to be among the most renowned works of Renaissance music. And beyond that, it has been granted special status as a symbol of the end of Spain's musical golden age, a requiem for that age, if you like. But the work's origins were highly functional. Vittoria composed this music in some haste for the execreese of his patroness, Maria of Austria, at the Discardes Royalis convent in Madrid. Such Habsburg execues were extremely lavish liturgical ceremonies lasting 2 days for which a vast amount of ephemeral art and decoration were produced and installed in the space where the funeral took place.
Speaker 2:They were typically held some weeks after the death and burial of the person concerned. Victoria had only two and a half weeks to produce the music of his requiem, and one can in fact detect signs of this tight schedule in a couple of minor technical lapses of a kind which are completely absent in the rest of his output. His need for haste is also reflected in his decision to borrow one section from his own earlier requiem for 4 voices. But the work as a whole is a remarkable dramatic and telling the unified conception, and Victoria bound it together in ways that were unusual in requiem of that period using devices such as a memorable cadential fingerprint recurring throughout the work. This figure, in fact, honors the Empress Maria for whose execution the piece was written.
Speaker 2:This figure, in fact, honors the empress Maria for whose exequees the piece was written since it's built upon perhaps the most familiar of all plainchant motives for listeners of Victoria's time, the opening of the antiphon Salvare Regina in honor of the blessed Virgin Mary. Through this device, Victoria highlights the connection between Maria of Austria and the blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, a connection which features in contemporary accounts of Maria of Austria. This musical figure first appears near the opening of Telet Anniman Meham, the initial item sung within the performance of Victoria's music from Maria's Exequate in 16/03. And you can hear the cadential figure at the end of this extract. Although Victoria fashioned a distinctive musical dialect for his repremnant, the work also represents a marriage of tradition and imaginative innovation which is characteristic of his output.
Speaker 2:Here, tradition is represented by incorporating the plainchant melodies and also by the fact that Victoria follows a particularly Iberian custom of assigning contrasting types of writing, effectively involving different speeds of musical progress, to particular movements of the requiem. If we turn to Victoria's 6 voice setting of the salvia Regina, the prayer to Mary, which I mentioned a moment ago, we see him signaling his membership of a more specific and venerable compositional lineage. In this case, he is aiming these signals at only the most perceptive listeners and performers, at admirers of the traditional skills of polyphonic craftsmanship. He here uses ostinato, that is the periodic repetition of a short motto assigned to one voice. He deploys it in this piece in a way that ties his setting to the famous Salve Regina by Josquin Despre, a towering international figure of the earlier musical renaissance.
Speaker 2:However, Victoria does not simply honor Josquin here, but pointedly outdoes him in the technical challenges he sets himself and solves. He constructed a musical jigsaw which is a tour de force of virtuosity by multiplying the number of ostinato mottos simultaneously in play and the pitch relationships between them. But almost all listeners, then and now, are blissfully unaware of this tour de force, hearing instead shapely and emotionally charged polyphony. Nowadays, Victoria is best known for those parts of his output such as the holy week music and the requiem, which fit well with the picture of the composer as musical mystic. This was a picture largely formulated in the early 20th century by Henri Collet and others.
Speaker 2:It is a portrait of Victoria as the consummation of Spanish musical mysticism, as the composer of works that balance passionate intensity with dignified sobriety and which reflect a supposedly distinctive Spanish early modern concern with death. In fact, of course, Victoria's music runs the whole gamut of emotions. It had to. This was an era when music was increasingly regarded above all else as an art of persuasive communication. Victoria's music needed to reinforce and project the character of each text he was setting from celebratory and festal to penitential and lamenting, from Christmas, the resurrection, and the ascension to the crucifixion and prayers for the dead.
Speaker 2:Victoria's art was to heighten the particular effective qualities of the words sung through exploitation of all the musical parameters available to him. The palette available to Victoria in achieving these goals was a broad one, which he exploited fully. Polyphony allowed subtle and nuanced control of the interactions between many aspects of the musical texture, while the centuries old system of the church modes permitted a wide range of tonal color. And Victoria mustered this and his supremely coherent crafting of harmony to the service of text articulation and expressive power. Alongside all its technical craft, resourcefulness, and polish, victorious is music of humanity, clarity, and immediacy.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us on major figures in Spanish culture. See you next time.