From Heavenly Harmony
Cantor of Seville
by Ken Myers
If there were a competition for such a thing, the award for Best-Known Choral Composer of the Renaissance would probably go to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594). For a host of good reasons, Palestrina is the closest thing we have to a sixteenth-century musical celebrity. His contemporary Tomás Luis de Victoria (c. 1548–1611) would probably come away with the silver medal in such a contest.
They were both towering talents and deserve the honors accorded them. But their stature has unfortunately tended to obscure the remarkable (and sometimes superior) work of many of their contemporaries and predecessors. In 1828, priest and composer Giuseppe Baini wrote a biography of Palestrina that launched a movement of hero worship that is still active: a 2009 film, Palestrina—Prince of Music, echoes the legend that Palestrina single-handedly rescued musical beauty from the repressive hands of the Council of Trent. A 2011 BBC program about Victoria's music—admirably sung by The Sixteen—was called God's Composer. Palestrina may have been a prince; Victoria should be understood as a prophet and priest.
Conductor Harry Christophers coined the phrase "God's composer," convinced that Victoria's religious commitment imbued his music with a distinctive spiritual intensity that found unique aesthetic expression. But Christophers has also been an enthusiastic champion of the music of one of Victoria's contemporaries and, not insignificantly, fellow Spaniards: Francisco Guerrero.
"Guerrero," Christophers writes, "is a quite astounding and varied composer with a wide expressive range. Heralded in the Renaissance as 'the most extraordinary of his time in the art of music,' he was more famous than Victoria." During his lifetime (1528–1599), Guerrero's work was published in France, Flanders, and Italy, and copies of his music made it to the New World, where it was enthusiastically sung in cathedrals in Mexico, Peru, and other Latin American colonies. But because of the unavailability of modern performance editions of his music, until relatively recently it was rarely recorded or performed, in concerts or in churches.
Mystery, Sobriety, Austerity
Guerrero was born in 1528 in Seville, and he spent most of his life there, much of it in the service of the grand musical establishment at the Seville Cathedral, where he was buried after his death in 1599. The choir books in the music collection at the Seville Cathedral included many works by the Franco-Flemish composers who were the undisputed masters of early Renaissance polyphony. That repository served the lavishly endowed musical establishment at Seville, which attracted some of Spain's most talented musicians. One of these, Cristobal Morales (c. 1500–1553), was the greatest of Spain's composers until his work was rivaled by two of his students, Victoria and Guerrero. After studying with Morales, Victoria went off to spend much of his career in Rome, but Guerrero stayed in Spain.
In his classic history Music in Western Civilization, published in 1941 (an ancient era before the emergence of hyper-sensitivity to ethnic generalizations), Columbia University's Paul Henry Langwrote that Spanish composers of the Renaissance "all shared the same ecstatic mysticism, the same sobriety and austerity, the same emotional fantasy of Spanish Catholicism that characterizes Spanish painters of the period." Some stereotypes—like well-executed caricatures—identify cultural attributes that deserve notice. Mystery, sobriety, austerity: just listen deeply to Morales, Victoria, Guerrero, and their brothers, and such nouns begin to form in your mind. One hears things in the Spanish masters that don't happen in music by English contemporaries such as John Sheppard or Thomas Tallis (and, of course, vice versa). I'm sure it has something to do with the qualities of Spanish piety, and possibly to the cross-fertilizing influence of the centuries-long Muslim presence in the Iberian peninsula, which sustained Middle Eastern musical idioms.
Twelve-Part Beauty
Sobriety and austerity are evident in Guerrero's only known work for twelve voices, his 1589 setting of Duo Seraphim. The text combines an oft-cited text from Isaiah with a less familiar assertion from 1 John:
The two Seraphim cried one to the other:
Holy, holy, holy,
Lord God of Hosts:
All the earth is full of his glory.
There are three who give testimony in heaven:
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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