Tomás Luis de Victoria

The leading Spanish composer of the 16th century, and one of the greatest of the Renaissance, Victoria was an ordained priest who composed exclusively for the church. Born in Avila in 1548, he spent the first part of his career in Rome as an organist, choirmaster, and composer; by the 1580s he was one of the most respected musicians in the city. But this success did not lessen his love for Spain, and by 1587 he had returned home as director of music at the chapel of Philip II’s sister, Empress Maria, in Madrid. Victoria achieved the rare goal of publishing virtually all the music he thought worthy of him during his lifetime (he died in 1611). His output was modest: 20 masses and 50 or so motets, often distinguished by a harmonic richness and expressive intensity created—as in the paintings of El Greco and Velázquez—with the simplest of technical means. Although he is best known today for his final work, the moving Requiem for Empress Maria (1605), his contemporaries celebrated him as a composer of joyfulness epitomized in the ringing refrains of his motet “Vidi speciosam” and the vigorous rhythms of his battle-mass, the “Missa pro victoria.”