The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603)

Owen Rees

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781107054424
• eBook ISBN: 9781108687522
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Victoria's Requiem is among the best-loved and most-performed musical works of the Renaissance, and is often held to be 'a Requiem for an age', representing the summation of golden-age Spanish polyphony. Yet it has been the focus of surprisingly little research. Owen Rees's multifaceted study brings together the historical and ritual contexts for the work's genesis, the first detailed musical analysis of the Requiem itself, and the long story of its circulation and reception. Victoria composed this music in 1603 for the exequies of María of Austria, and oversaw its publication two years later. A rich variety of contemporary documentation allows these events - and the nature of music in Habsburg exequies - to be reconstructed vividly. Rees then locates Victoria's music within the context of a vast international repertory of Requiems, much of it previously unstudied, and identifies the techniques which render this work so powerfully distinctive and coherent.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Note
• Note on the Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘Requiem for an Age’?
• 1 Chaplain of the Empress
• 2 María’s Exequies in Context
• 3 Publishing the Officium defunctorum
• 4 Fashioning the Requiem
• 5 ‘The Crowning Work of a Great Genius’
• Epilogue: Requiem for Our Age?
• Appendix 1: Officium defunctorum: Texts and Translations of the Paratextual Material
• Appendix 2: Requiem Masses by Italian Composers Printed between 1560 and 1650
• Select Bibliography
• Discography
• Index