Victoria, Tomás Luis de (1548–1611)

Spanish composer. He wrote only sacred music, including 20 Masses, 52 motets, and many other liturgical pieces, and is noted for his expressive settings of the Mass (for example, Ave regina caelorum) and other Latin texts.

Victoria sang as a boy at the cathedral of his native Ávila. In 1565 he received a grant from Philip II and went to Rome, where he became a priest and singer at the German College. From 1569 he was employed at the Roman Church of Santa Maria di Monserrato; from 1571 he taught music at the German College, and was choirmaster there from 1573 to about 1577. He was a chaplain at San Girolamo della Carità 1578–85. From 1587 to 1603 he was chaplain to the dowager empress María, Philip II's sister and the widow of Maximilian II, at the convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, where the empress lived and her daughter, the Infanta Margaret, became a nun. On the death of the empress in 1603 he wrote an Officium defunctorum (Requiem Mass) for six voices. Victoria is as great a master of polyphony in the Spanish school as his contemporaries Palestrina, Lassus, and Byrd were in the Italian, Flemish, and English.

Works Church music 20 Masses (including two Requiems), 18 Magnificats, 1 Nunc dimittis, 9 Lamentations, 25 responsories, 13 antiphons, 8 polychoral psalms, 52 motets, 36 hymns, 1 Litany, and 2 Passions, 3 Sequences.