CD149   TomÁs Luis de Victoria: Requiem & Reproaches

Tomás Luis de Victoria: Requiem & Reproaches The Choir of The Church of the Advent, Boston Edith Ho, Director of Music Notes by Nicholas Altenbernd Complete texts and translations 70'08" total playing time CD149    $15.95 Add to cart

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Agnus Dei from Missa pro defunctis cum sex vocibus by Tomás Luis de Victoria

Tomás Luis de Victoria

The music of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) represents the culmination of Spanish Renaissance choral composition. He was born into a large and wealthy family that had favorable connections with the nobility and the church. He and his family made good use of these connections to afford himself the best best possible education and experience during his student and journeyman years. He finally settled into an extremely advantageous clerical position, which permitted him the use of an extraordinarily fine choir and liturgy for the inspiration and realization of his music.

Victoria finished his education in Rome, where he came into contact with people from all over Europe. He was educated in, and later taught at the collegium Germanicum, a school founded by Loyala devoted to training young clerics to missionize Germany. He was organist and choirmaster in several Spanish churches in Rome. Between March and August of 1575 he was admitted to orders, a lector and exorcist, then sub-deacon, deacon and priest. His ordaining bishop was the last pre-Reformation English bishop, exiled to Rome and functioning in the English church of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

Because of his family income and a number of clerical benefices granted to him in Spain, Victoria could afford to publish most of his music, and send it across the breadth of Europe and the Spanish New World. In 1583, he issued his second book of masses. In the dedication to Philip II he solicited consideration for a position in his homeland, where he could quietly function as priest and composer. His request was granted, probably in 1587. He was appointed personal chaplain to the king's sister, the Dowager Empress Maria. She was the wife of the Emperor Maximilian II, daughter of an emperor, and she numbered two emperors among her fifteen children. Following her husband's death, she chose to retire to a comvent. The Monasterio de las Descalzas de Santa Clara de la Villa de Madrid (Convent of Barefoot Nuns of Saint Clare) had been founded in 1564, and its clergy and patrons had connections to the highest Spanish nobility. Its endowment was very large, and the music was especially well looked after.

In addtion to his duties as the Empress's personal chaplain, Victoria was appointed chapel master for life. He had at his disposal a choir composed (by royal decree) of twelve priests trained as singers and having no other offices or duties, and four boys. Mass was sung twice daily. Within this serene, well-regulated environment, Victoria passed the rest of his life.

In 1603, the Empress Maria died, leaving Victoria an endowed chaplaincy in the convent. In 1605, Victoria mortgaged several of his incomes in order to publish his Officium defunctorum, written in her memory. In addition to the Missa pro defunctis in six voices, it contains the respond from the Burial Office, Libera me (heard on this CD), and settings of texts from Job, used in the Burial Office. The Mass is appropriately a bit archaic in the context of Victoria's other mass settings. With one exception, these are "paraphrase" masses - that is, they use a pre-existent motet as a point of departure, elaborating freely on it's harmonic progressions and melodic material. In the Missa pro defunctis, however, the Gregorian chant for the Mass of the Dead functions as a cantus firmus throughout, mostly in the second soprano part. Except for some slight alterations to accomodate cadences, it is quoted verbatim.

The portions of the text set for the Missa pro defunctis fo 1605 aare almost identical to those in the Missa pro defunctis in four voices, of 1583. For those portions not set polyphonically, Victoria usually prescribed interpolations of chant to complete the appointed text. In one section - "Tremens factus" in the Libera me - the music is identical to both masses. And in both requiems Victoria follows the more ancient practice of using the chant as a strict cantus firmus. The chant sections published in Victoria's Opera Omnia of 1902-13 do not conform twith the Liber Usualis. The latter versions are used here.

-Nicholas Altenbernd

Every year on Good Friday, The Church of the Advent in Boston, like countless other churches worldwide, recalls the suffering of Christ on the Cross through the ancient liturgy of the Catholic Church. A series of chants, known as the Improperia or "Reproaches," are integral to this liturgy and are performed at what is perhaps the most solemn part of the service - the Veneration of the Cross. The Reproaches were sung as plainchant for centuries, but during the Renaissance composers began to set portions of the chant texts polyphonically. Victoria's is one of the most beloved of these settings, and the Choir of The Church of the Advent has sung his version of the Reproaches for decades.

Victoria's music for Holy Week, Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae, was published in 1585, a full twenty years before his six-voice Requiem. Even so, this collection, like the Requiem, displays a particularly personal and Spanish stamp. The collection comprises nine Lamentations, two Passions, eighteen responsories, and several other pieces including a setting of the Reproaches. The Reproaches express the ideas of God's generosity and willingness to forgive man, on the one hand, and man's ingratitude, on the other. These ideas appear side by side in each of the chants, with the image of Christ's suffering serving as an overarching theme.

Victoria's is not the earliest polyphonic setting of these chants. Indeed, a tradition of setting the chants to polyphony developed at the Sistine Chapel in the sixteenth century, and Victoria followed the lead of several earlier composers. Palestrina set the Reproaches in a falsobordone style (a simple, improvisational style) which seems to have reflected the Capella Sistina's performance practice at the time. Victoria's setting is different, however, in that he alternates a fully-realized, newly-composed (i.e. non-chant based) polyphonic style with the chants themselves. The polyphony is almost exclusively homophonic and syllabic, treating the text in as starkly simple a manner as possible. The simplicity of the setting is marvelously evocative of the poignant pleading of the text.

The Reproaches texts and the music to which the chants were set have an interesting and intricate history, melding western and eastern chant traditions. Victoria's setting is best understood with reference to this history, for although he strays entirely from the musical material of the Reproaches chants, he adheres unwaveringly to the form of the chant texts. Scholars have identified three chant traditions in the medieval manuscript sources for the Reproaches: 1) the Greater Reproaches, 2) the Trisagion, and 3) the Lesser Reproaches. The Greater Reproaches and the Trisagion ("three times holy") seem to reflect an earlier tradition, while the Lesser Reproaches are documented for the first time in Italian manuscripts from the early eleventh century.

The Greater Reproaches consist of a series of texts, "Popole meus...," "Quia eduxi te de terra...,""Quia eduxi te per desertum...," and finally "Quid ultra debui facere tibi..." which constitutes a series of questions posed by Christ to his people. All four of these texts are musically related in their chant forms; Victoria sets only one, "Popule meus...," to polyphony, leaving the other three texts as chant. These Greater Reproaches are traditionally sung in alternation with the Greek text of the Trisagion, a prayer for God's mercy, set to a chant generally thought to be of Byzantine origin. Victoria sets the Trisagion to polyphony, alternating this text with the second, third, and fourth texts of the Greater Reproaches. Victoria's setting of the Trisagion involves two separate choirs: the first chorus sings the Greek text, while a second chorus echoes the first with a Latin translation of the Greek. In our performance the second chorus is a solo quartet that is physically distanced from the larger group, giving the Latin portions of the text an ethereal echo-like quality.

The Lesser Reproaches, a series of shorter questions that adhere to the textural and musical patterns established in the Greater Reproaches, follow the three statements of the combined Trisagion and Greater Reproaches. The nine chant verses of the Lesser Reproaches alternate with the polyphonic popule meus, the first text of the Greater Reproaches.

The overall form of Victoria's Reproaches follows this pattern:
    Greater Reproaches: Popule meus (polyphony)
    Greater Reproaches: Quia eduxi te de terra (chant)
    Trisagion: (polyphony with alternating choirs)
    Greater Reproaches: Quia eduxi te per desertum (chant)
    Trisagion: (polyphony with alternating choirs)
    Greater Reproaches: Quid ultra debui facere tibi (chant)
    Trisagion: (polyphony with alternating choirs)
    Lesser Reproaches: (chant alternating with polyphony)

Two versions of the Greater Reproaches and Trisagion appear on this recording. The first version presents the texts in their original Latin and Greek, while the second offers an English translation of the Latin portions but retains the Greek of the Trisagion. This second version is heard annually at the Church of the Advent. On this recording the Lesser Reproaches are sung in English, again reflecting standard practice at the Church of the Advent.

The plain, homophonic style of Victoria's setting is markedly different from the more freely-moving melismatic polyphonic style of most of his other works. The deliberate simplicity of the polyphony perfectly complements the stark beauty and repetition of the chants. For anyone listening to Victoria's Reproaches at the time that they were written, the polyphonic sections must have struck the ear with a touchingly personal newness. Although his setting is now centuries old, it retains an immediacy that perfectly evokes the raw emotion of these most painful of Holy Week texts.

--Noël Bisson, Ph.D.

The Church of the Advent

The Parish of the Advent in Boston was founded in 1844, to bring to America a practical realization of the reforms of the Oxford Movement. The Parish has always been a leader in the development of Anglo-Catholic ministry and liturgical practice.

Since its founding, the Parish of the Advent has always supported a choir of the highest quality, principally for the ornamentation of its worship services. At a time when Episcopal church music and liturgy were of notoriously low quality, the Advent was founded to set a finer example. The psalms have always been read from the most literate translations, and chanted to the ancient tones, occasionally ornamented by polyphonic formulas ("Anglican chant").

The Advent's music program, under Edith Ho, strives to maintain the highest standard of performance, informed insofar as possible current scholarly research. Anglican practice has always been able to borrow and subsume an almost irreconcilably various range of liturgical musics: Jewish, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant. The Church of the Advent continues this catholic tradition, maintaining one of the finest music programs in the Anglican Communion.

-Nicholas Altenbernd

The Advent Choir on ARSIS recordings:

• ARSIS CD 113: Music by Francisco Guerrero (a Mass, several motets)
• ARSIS CD 118: Music bu Guillaume Dufay (two Masses, Magnificat setting)
• ARSIS CD 136: Music by Thomas Crecquillon, Volume I (a Mass and several motets)
• ARSIS CD 146: Music by Thomas Crecquillon, Volume II (another Mass, motets)
• ARSIS CD 149: Music by Tomás Luis de Victoria (Requiem & Reproaches)
• ARSIS CD160: Music by Jacobus Clemens non Papa
• ARSIS CD 165: Hieronymous Prætorius: Sacred Music for Double Chorus
• ARSIS SACD 400 Music by Pierre de Manchicourt, Volume I (a Mass, motets)
• ARSIS SACD 406 Music by Pierre de Manchicourt, Volume II (Requiem, motets)