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. He 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
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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. He 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..
Although originally created for four (4) voices (SATB),
I created this Interpretation of the "Missa Quarti
toni" (Mass of quarter tones) for Woodwind Quartet
(Flute, Oboe, English Horn & Bassoon).