Dotting through the list of composers’ anniversaries in 2011, I was struck both by the number of people mentioned and by the utter lack of fame of almost all of them.
Dotting through the list of composers’ anniversaries in 2011, I was struck both by the number of people mentioned and by the utter lack of fame of almost all of them. Where on earth do the compilers of the Classical Composers Database find these people, most of whom are too dead to write in and represent themselves? But, like all lists, this one is not without interest. The first named is D. Dinis (1261–1325), King of Portugal, who apparently was the earliest troubadour in the Portuguese language. I wonder if his political opponents dubbed him ‘the minis’.
One or two household names do leap off the page. Franz Liszt was born in 1811. Bernard Herrmann, the great composer of film music, was born in 1911, which was the year Gustav Mahler died: no doubt every big summer festival is going to feature him, so we can all wait for that. At the other end of the spectrum there are significant deaths in the (very) early music market: Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361) and Johannes Ciconia (1335–1411). But towering above all these — and I hope of real interest to those same festivals — is the Spanish polyphonist Tomás Luis de Victoria, who died in 1611.
For me, Victoria’s output contains the most moving High Renaissance music that there is. Other composers of the period, especially Palestrina and Byrd, wrote music which is just as beautiful, and rather more of it, but there is in Victoria something so ordinary in a technical sense and yet so individual in expression that no one has been able to say quite how he did it. It is a kind of musical miracle. This year will no doubt bring many attempts at analysis of it, but if ever there was truth in the remark that music transcends words it should apply to Victoria. Not to all his writing, since he studied in Rome for 20 years and very evidently came under Palestrina’s influence, but to the music he wrote when he returned to Spain to work as a priest in the royal household, and most particularly to his six-voice Requiem.
This ineffable masterpiece will be the work of preference this year, inevitably, even though it was not written for his own death, but for that of the Dowager Empress Maria, who died in 1603. Those years around 1600 were a time of upheaval in musical style, so that it becomes quite easy to categorise composers of the time according to how willingly they took on the new baroque-isms: Monteverdi was obviously way ahead of the game, while the English generally look pretty old-fashioned.
Victoria’s Requiem somehow manages to avoid the whole issue. It doesn’t sound old-fashioned for 1603, since there is actually very little proper part-writing in it; nor does it sound ‘modern’, since it makes no reference to the seductive new harmonic language being explored just then in Venice. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to borrow the talk of those who habitually spend their days in a trance-like state, and say that it just ‘is’: static, searing to the soul, timeless.
Another way of putting it is to say that Victoria’s writing was the perfect musical expression of the mystical Catholicism that surrounded him in Spain. After all, he was born in Avila in 1548, a few years before St Teresa would found the convent there which was to be associated with all her teachings. He then studied at the school of San Gil, which the Jesuits had set up with the active support of Teresa. It is quite possible that Victoria met both Teresa and St Ignatius: either way their influence informs all his best work.
It might be thought from the above that he was not far off being an unsmiling fanatic, a priest who kept to his cell. Fortunately, there is good reason to think he wasn’t like that at all. Quite apart from the question of whether any such man could have created the feeling of inner contentment that he manages in his Requiem, one of his contemporaries paid tribute to his ‘sunny’ nature, insisting that he never ‘stayed downcast for long’. I even detect some quite worldly attributes in his music, and a sense of humour. His Missa pro Victoria not only seems to have been named after himself, but it also adopts its notably jaunty style because the new King of the moment, Philip III, was known to have the concentration span of an American teenager addicted to television. It couldn’t be further from the Requiem, and yet it is another strange sort of masterpiece.
All this and more should be on display this year, which, despite the deathly references, promises to be a happy one.
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