Tomás Luis de Victoria (c1548-1611): Missa Alma Redemptoris / 9 Motets - Video

00:00 Missa Alma Redemptoris: Kyrie - Gloria - Credo - Sanctus - Benedictus - Agnus Dei
16:59 O Vos Omnes
22:04 Sitientes, Venite Ad Aquas
25:26 Jesu, Dulcis Memoria
27:31 Pueri Hebraeorum
29:54 Estote Fortes In Bello
31:49 Hosanna Filio David
32:55 Jesum Tradidit Impius
36:19 Sepulto Domino Signatum Est Monumentum
40:12 Tanquam Ad Latronem Existis

The Montreal Bach Choir - George Little, director

Arte: detalle de La Coronación de la Virgen (hacia 1592), por El Greco (1541-1614)

The case of Victoria, Spain's greatest composer and the most impassioned musical spokesman of the Counter-Reformation, is inexhaustibly fascinating and extraordinary. To begin with, he is one of the very rare musical giants who wrote exclusively for the church and for voices: no secular or independent instrumental compositions of any kind are attributed to him; the organ accompaniments of some of his later, larger choral works merely double some of the vocal parts. Then, his whole career (like Dufay's, but quite unlike those of most other great composers) seems to have been untroubled by any lack of encouragement or of appreciatively helpful friends and influential patrons. Although his over-all creative output was relatively small by the standards of his time (only some 180 works in comparison with Palestrina's over 700 and Lassus' over 1200) probably no composer of any era demonstrated more magistral technical command in his very first works, maintained such craftsmanship more consistently, or transcended even it more impressively in a final opus magnum.

Widely published and admired during his own lifetime, his music never fell into complete neglect — even in the later Dark Ages of polyphonic music's depreciation, when he was known (outside his native country at least) only under the Italianized name of Vittoria and was considered a member of the Roman school, an "ape of Palestrina" indeed, instead of the quintessential Spaniard that he was and a composer whose influence on Palestrina and other Italian polyphonists was at least as vital as, if not more so than, theirs on him. The late nineteenth-century reassessment of his nature and stature, pioneered by Proske and Haberl in Germany, was crowned by his compatriot Pedrell's modern editions of the complete works in 1902-13. And since then Victoria's music has exerted an increasingly potent appeal to present day listeners, even though current performances and recordings have as yet made only a relatively small proportion of it generally accessible, and despite the lamentable fact that there still is no comprehensive biography or analytical study available in English.

Most significantly, Victoria seems unique today for the sheer intensity of feeling which he was somehow able to generate within a medium almost entirely lacking in what we now consider the primary means (wide dynamic and coloristic "expressive" resources) of emotional stimulation. He is the only composer of whom a modern critic could say: "In no other music, in hardly any other art whatever, do we feel such intense religious exaltation, such unearthly ecstasy, such white-hot incandescence of spirituality, such burning aspiration toward the infinite.” And if Cecil Gray may be over-fanciful in the analogy he goes on to draw of the "disturbing" effects of Victoria's “frenzied, exultant rhythms and soaring melodic line," he certainly gives a vivid impression of those effects’ potency: "[ Victoria sometimes] resembles that saint who, when celebrating mass, attained to such a pitch of ecstasy and illumination that he was often suddenly levitated to a considerable height above the ground, to the wonder and admiration of the onlookers, but somewhat to the detriment of the divine rite.”

Yet whatever miracles we may attribute to this other-worldly artist, the personality of the man himself remains a mystery to which the actual facts of his life —insofar as they are known to us — provide only the most indirect of clues.