As music history buffs know, the Baroque era of composition is considered to have started around the time of Victoria’s composition, and yet de Lienas’ work, composed during what music history defines as the Baroque era, is very much in the Renaissance style. One can attribute this to two facts: the Catholic Church in its conservatism favored the Renaissance style long after composers were working in the more modern Baroque style; and de Lienas, as a native of the region, might be expected to be unaware of more modern trends in Europe, since one may presume that developments in musical composition took a while to arrive from overseas. What little we know of his life comes from the two manuscripts that contain his works, both associated with the convent connected to the cathedral in Mexico City where he worked, and both containing the works you hear tonight, the Lamentations and the Salve Regina. We open our program with these two works.

In religious orders, Salve Regina was sung daily at the end of Compline, the last service of the day, from Pentecost to Advent* as one of four Marian Antiphons used at specific times of the church year. The poem beseeches Mary to intercede on our behalf with her son Jesus. You will notice that lines of plainchant* alternate with de Lienas’ composition; this stems from the fact that he did not set the other verses in the Antiphon—a practice not uncommon in settings of this poem by Spanish composers of that era. With the exception of the first movement’s initial line, de Lienas does not use the chant* as a basis for his melodic lines; rather, he free composes them. The higher register* of the voices in the second section provides variety to the sound. I particularly like the fourth section, in which the long melismas* setting Mary’s attributes clemens and pia embody to my ear her maternal, beneficent grace and comfort.

The Christian church adopted the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, in which the prophet laments the destruction of Jerusalem, for services on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday of Holy Week, the night of the Last Supper and the day of Jesus’ Crucifixion respectively. De Lienas set the first two lines of the first reading for Maundy Thursday, keeping as customary the Hebrew letters Aleph and Beth that start each verse and ending with the line that closed each of the six readings: Jerusalem, return to the Lord thy God. For the second half of the second line he expands the number of voices from four to five, thereby creating a richer and denser texture. This also allows him to create more variety in his writing; he opens the section with the juxtaposition of pairs of voices in imitative duets, and he starts the last section with three voices in homophony* as the other two vocal lines weave among them in faster note values. He devotes more musical development to the final phrase Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum than to any other line in the text, thereby musically representing insistence to the exhortation. He gives even more urgency to the plea by having the only iteration of convertere be the only instance in which all five voices move homophonically.*

Victoria may have written his Requiem á 6 in 1605 as a memorial to his patroness, the Spanish Dowager Empress Maria, but it is also likely the last music he wrote. Certainly his sense of his own mortality infuses and informs this music; in fact he referred to it as his swan song. Many consider it to be his masterpiece, as well as the epitome of Renaissance style and one of the great works in Western choral music. He had set the Requiem, the Mass for the Dead, for four voices earlier in his life, and he used parts of that earlier work in this one. He did not set some parts of the Mass, such as the Absolve, Domine, indicating that they should be chanted with the original chant* from the Liber usualis.* He gave no indication that the offertory, Hostias et preces tibi, should be chanted, nor did he set it, and we therefore omit it in tonight’s performance. But we precede the Mass with his motet Taedet animam meam, a setting of the second lesson in the Mass for the Dead. His homophonic* setting imitates that of his Spanish predecessor Cristobal Morales. The text, taken from Job, expresses the bitterness of the faithful to whom only misfortune has befallen. Despite the simplicity of the chordal setting, you will notice several times that the cadence of a section goes in an extremely unexpected harmonic direction.

Most of the movements in the Requiem begin with a unison intonation of the first line of original chant* from the Liber usualis*, and then the voice part that intones them continues the chant* in far slower note values while the other voices move around it in free composition. For that reason, the treble* voices intone the chant* rather than a tenor or baritone, as is more common in Renaissance settings of the Mass. Sometimes Victoria manipulates the chant* a bit, as exemplified in the continuation of the chant* in the Dies irae. If you are familiar with that chant,* used often by composers throughout the ages in setting that text, the initial line of the chant* rises a minor second and then falls a minor third for dies illa, which Victoria uses. But then, instead of using the original version of the chant,* which rises a whole step up initially to end on the same note as illa for irae, Victoria, perhaps to conform with his modality,* raises the first tone only a half-step before moving it down a minor third for dies, while then reiterating that tone for illa. This alteration of the chant allows him to set the text powerfully as described in the next paragraph.

There are many masterful moments of achingly beautiful music and masterful word painting throughout the work. Listen to the suspensions* of the first soprano line in the second Kyrie; its juxtaposition with the falling scalar line of the chant in the second soprano creates a series of dissonances,* resolving only to become dissonant again. In the Offertory, Victoria makes a musical representation of pain to set the text de poenis inferni—the pains of hell. Both outer voices are on a C, and while the first soprano remains there, the bass moves up a half step while singing poenis, creating a dissonance* of a major seventh, a ‘painful’ interval to the ears, especially in that era. In the Communion, the close imitation among the voices and copious repetition of the phrase setting et lux perpetua create a musical representation of the perpetual light. Victoria’s homophonic* long note values setting Dies illa, dies irae in the Respond emphasize the dire warning of the text as a musical embodiment of that day of judgment, while numerous suspensions* setting the final phrase allude to the extreme bitterness felt by those found wanting.

Two movements that are part of this Requiem do not appear to my knowledge in other Masses for the Dead by Victoria’s contemporaries or those who come after him: Versa est in luctum, a funeral motet Victoria placed after Communion; and a reiteration of the Kyrie eleison at the end of the Mass, set to different music from the Kyrie that occurs earlier in the work. In the case of the motet, the text is again from Job, but Victoria provides some respite from the mournful text by providing lovely triple rhythms in referring to the musical instruments. The presence of the final Kyrie forms part of the Rite of Absolution that follows a Requiem Mass and is performed over the casket of the deceased. Its presence constitutes a plea that the deceased be granted salvation and eternal life.

Because ethnomusicology—the study of non-Western indigenous music—did not become a discipline until the twentieth century, we have no record of the music de Lienas might have created outside of the Western tradition.** We do know, however, that he readily assimilated the Renaissance style to succeed in his new world of Spanish rule. Although we may never know the former, we can appreciate the latter, just as we can be thankful for the survival of the music of one of the Western canon’s most accomplished composers.▣

(To hear some of the music native to Mexico today, check out Los Folkloristas, a very well known group performing traditional and indigenous music.)

© 2023 Mary Beekman. All rights reserved. No portion of this document may be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission.