As anni mirabiles go, 1605 was an exceptional one for the printing of masterpieces in Madrid. Mid-winter saw the minting of Miguel de Cervantes's El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha at Juan de la Cuesta's print shop and late summer witnessed the emergence of Tomás Luis de Victoria's Officium defunctorum from the Royal Press. But if Cervantes's knight errant and his illiterate sidekick immediately entered the popular imagination, thereby initiating an uninterrupted and insistent demand for reprints (not to mention movies, musicals and merchandise) that is still being met, Victoria's Requiem was born comatose. The composer's ‘Krone aller Werke unsers Meisters’, to borrow the epithet coined (in 1853) by the Cecilian movement's Karl Proske (1794–1861), would have to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century for its awakening and eventual elevation to the chef d’oeuvre status that it now enjoys. In his wide-ranging and masterful study, Owen Rees examines Victoria's Requiem as both text and icon. He does so with a scholar's nose for forensic minutiae, an analyst's eye for the telling detail, and a choral director's ear for precision and rigour. His study is a model of its kind.

Sandwiched between an Introduction and an Epilogue – entitled respectively, and interrogatively, ‘“Requiem for an Age”?’ and ‘Requiem for Our Age?’ – stand five chapters that systematically consider Victoria's rôle as chaplain of the Empress María, the wider contexts of the exequies celebrated in the wake of her demise, the printing of the Officium defunctorum two years after her death, a close analysis of the Requiem's compositional devices and strategies, and a commentary on the work's reception since its nineteenth-century revival. An online appendix offers Rees's new transcription of the work, another appendix presents fresh translations by Leofranc Holford-Strevens of the 1605 publication's paratextual material, and a third is devoted to a valuable and unprecedented census of Requiem masses by Italian composers printed between 1560 and 1650.

Of the fourteen titles thus far published in Cambridge University Press's series Music in Context, only half a dozen focus on a specific work, and this is the only one concerned with a work from the Renaissance. While Rees's study is informed by recent critical discourse concerning the ‘work-concept’ and possibly anachronistic assumptions reliant on modern contexts of performance, authorship and title, it fills an aching gap in the close reading and analysis of important early modern pieces. If monographs dedicated to a single Renaissance work remain thin on the ground, this one stands strongly in defence of their value.

In the wake of the brace of studies that attended the 400th anniversary (in 2011) of Victoria's death, Rees's first task was the critical examination of the intractable accretions that have stubbornly attached themselves to received notions concerning both the composer and his last known work. With the patience of a Benedictine scribe, Rees carefully traces, and then peels away, one Victorian cliché after another: the Spanish priest-composer exclusively devoted to orthodox Counter-Reformation spirituality through sacred Latin polyphony, the native of Avila who in his youth – as Henri Collet imagined – breathed the same mystic Castilian air as did St Teresa of Avila (1515–82), the embodiment of a uniquely Spanish passionate intensity that combined dignity, austerity and a fascination with death. The Requiem, too, has come a long way from its status as an occasional work that was probably first heard in 1603 and then shelved for centuries. It has been seen as the quintessence of Spanish sacred music of the Golden Age, and more broadly as the pathos-laden soundtrack accompanying Renaissance music's final exit from the stage of Western music history: a last glorious gasp of classical polyphony at the dawn of the Baroque. And, of course, it has been seen as a manifestation of ‘late style’ as it takes its place among the myth-laden final works – mostly Requiems – of the great canonic composers.Footnote ¹

We need a new biography of Victoria and if some of Rees's work here is frustrated by the relatively poor state of our current knowledge, he nevertheless makes important contributions to our understanding of Victoria's last twenty-five years. These are the years during which he served the Habsburgs in the nascent Castilian capital of Madrid. And sixteen of these years, 1587–1603, were spent in the service of the Empress María as her chaplain. The contours of Victoria's life have too often been shoehorned into a paradigm that is concisely yet misleadingly expressed in the title of Stevenson's still authoritative Spanish Cathedral Music in the Golden Age.Footnote ² Victoria was never employed in a cathedral, letalone a Spanish cathedral, he spent at least two decades of his formative years in Rome, and the slender documentary trail that he left supports a biography that remains skeletal. Rees's contribution is not so much the uncovering of new archival material as the gathering together and intense scrutiny of the material that we already have. He builds a finely nuanced picture of the composer's employment in an idiosyncratic institution that combined dynastic, courtly, monastic and ceremonial functions.

The royal convent of Las Descalzas was founded in 1559 by Juana of Austria (1535–73). No one who has visited Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and devoted a moment to contemplating the arresting portrait of this extraordinary personality by Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) could doubt her determination, dignity or aristocratic bearing. She was the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the sister of Philip II, the widow (he died soon after her 19th birthday) of Prince João of Portugal and mother of the future Portuguese king Sebastian. She acted as regent of Spain twice in the period 1554 to 1559 and was the only woman ever admitted to the Society of Jesus (though always shrouded in a strict secrecy that Jesuits maintained by referring to her as ‘Mateo Sánchez’). Indeed, one of her closest advisers was Francisco de Borgia (1510–72) who, in 1565, was elected third Superior General of the Order.Footnote ³ Although Juana's unfulfilled desire was to populate her convent with a female branch of the Jesuits, she was persuaded by Borgia to accept a small community of Clarist (Franciscan) nuns from the monastery of Santa Clara in Gandía. Like the monastery-palace of the Escorial, founded a few years later (in 1563) by Philip II, the Descalzas embodied a peculiarly Spanish amalgam: it functioned as royal residence, monastery, hospital and college. It never shared, however, the Escorial's eventual function as a dynastic mausoleum. Yet as the decades unfolded, Las Descalzas developed a personality that in many ways contrasted with the Escorial's. For the Habsburgs, piety, politics and dynasty were always inseparable.Footnote ⁴

With the arrival in 1583 of the Empress María (1528–1603), who took up residence in royal apartments attached to Las Descalzas, the convent not only came to complement the political, dynastic and religious functions of the Escorial, but also established itself as a counterbalancing platform for feminine political agency and an instrument of advocacy for the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs. María was, after all, the widow of the Emperor Maximilian II and the mother of Emperors Rudolf II and Matthias. These interests were consolidated in the following year, 1584, with the profession in Las Descalzas of the Dowager Empress's daughter, the Archduchess Margaret (1567–1633), as Sor Margarita de la Cruz. She, of course, was the dedicatee of the 1605 Officium defunctorum, the third of Victoria's publications (excluding reprints) to have emerged from his Madrid period. All three books were dedicated to Habsburgs, but only one to a female member of that dynasty. No other publication of Victoria's was dedicated to a woman.

While the sources, both primary and secondary, that underpin Rees's examination of Victoria's quarter century at Las Descalzas are well known to scholars, they have seldom been subjected to such intense interrogation and such careful correlation. They include royal chronicles, notarial records, the composer's dedicatory epistles and other letters, royal charters and payment documents. Yet despite Rees's meticulous examination of the documentary record, a precise picture of Victoria's duties at the Descalzas remains elusive. After a detailed summary of the documentary record, Rees somewhat disappointingly concludes (p. 27): ‘the body of evidence is sufficient to suggest once again that Victoria did indeed undertake at least some of the duties of maestro at the Descalzas, and over the course of many years’. Clearly, more work awaits scholars with a penchant for uninterrupted hours in Spanish archives.

Rees's second chapter plunges us into the frenzy that swept through court circles at the death, on 26 February 1603, of the Dowager Empress. While on the one hand the well-rehearsed mechanisms of a highly regulated royal protocol were rapidly set into motion, on the other, powerful interests – both individual and dynastic – intervened. And with the liturgical calendar urging the celebration of both burial and exequies before Holy Week (beginning on 23 March 1603), there was no time to lose. In what is the most thorough and engaging treatment to date, Rees's narrative takes us from the Empress María's terminal illness to the exequies held at Las Descalzas (18/19 March), the civic ceremonies organised by city officials (19/20 March), and thence to the memorial celebrated at the Jesuit Imperial College of SS Peter and Paul (21/22 April). Despite the fact that no unequivocal document has yet been uncovered to assure us that Victoria's Requiem was in fact heard at any of these events, our author is quick – perhaps a little too quick – to dismiss the various arguments that have been deployed to suggest that Victoria's music remains unmentioned in the documentary record precisely because it was not heard.Footnote ⁵ Until conclusive evidence in support of one side or the other is adduced, the answer must remain another of the many lacunae in our knowledge of Victoria's life and work.

In this fascinating and painstakingly researched chapter, Rees examines four categories of documents: the diary of Hans Khevenhüller (Imperial Ambassador to the Spanish court), a variety of correspondence (especially that between Juan de Borja and the Duke of Lerma), printed and manuscript chronicles, and a selection of panegyric biographies of María that long post-date the events they portray. Most of these sources have been ignored or only superficially plumbed by musicologists. The gathering together and cross-referencing of these documents is one of Rees's great gifts to future scholarship and while his publishers should be thanked for allowing so much quotation, one is still left wanting more and longer citations from the many, often inaccessible, sources that the author has so assiduously corralled. Is it too much to hope that one day an anthology of document transcriptions analogous to Alfonso de Vicente's admirable collections will attract the attention of an enterprising publisher?Footnote ⁶

It is often overlooked that German was sometimes spoken at Las Descalzas, at least between Margaret of Austria (the daughter of Archduchess Maria of Bavaria and Karl of Styria, and who married Philip III in 1599) and Margarita de la Cruz. That their use of German did not please Philip III's powerful and ambitious favourite, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas (1553–1625), the first Duke of Lerma, is a subject developed elsewhere but it does have tangential relevance to the printing of Victoria's Requiem.Footnote ⁷ And Rees's mining of Khevenhüller's diary is thorough; never before has the context of Victoria's Requiem been so comprehensively examined and explained. Yet, as the author is forced to admit: ‘while Borja and Khevenhüller provide details regarding María's burial ceremonies, they do not mention the musical element’. Nevertheless, Rees finds suggestive evidence that Victoria's 1605 Libera me responsory was indeed heard at the burial ceremonies: it is, after all, the only piece from the 1605 collection in which Victoria repurposes, note for note, a section from his 1583 Missa pro defunctis. In this case, the three-voice verse Tremens factus sum ego appears not too comfortably wedged into otherwise new six-voice music with mismatched cleffing. Yet if haste might excuse such an expedient for the burial service in 1603, it hardly explains why Victoria the perfectionist would, two years later, allow the responsory, complete with its ill-fitting recycled interpolation, into print. At the very least, this prompts questions about Victoria's reputation as a fastidious reviser of his own works. And it raises other questions about the 1605 publication itself.

In his third chapter, Rees offers the most complete critical study to date of the printing of the Officium defunctorum (Madrid: Juan Flamenco, 1605) [= RISM V1436]. He examines its multiple functions, he places it within the larger context of contemporary Iberian printing of polyphony, and he considers its dissemination. As an artefact of material culture that both transmits a musical text and conveys a congeries of cultural meanings, the Officium defunctorum is unprecedented and possibly unique. It is also puzzling; its grandiose title is misleading. In marked contrast to his Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae (Rome: Alessandro Gardano, 1585) [= RISM V1432], which does provide music for most of the Holy Week Office, the Officium defunctorum sets one mass, one responsory and only one Office item. Rees rightly sees Victoria's Officium defunctorum as a ‘highly original publication project’ that was extraordinary, singular and unusual. Blinded perhaps by the radiance of its music, other scholars have nevertheless overlooked many of its less attractive and atypical features. Whereas Filippi characterised the typography as ‘elegantissima nella sua mise en page ariosa’,Footnote ⁸ Rees judges the presswork as ‘incompetent in significant respects’ and the book as ‘printed in a strikingly less sumptuous manner than other choirbooks from the Royal Press’. As a volume containing a multi-movement work so specifically tied to a particular event, it enjoys neither precedent nor successor in the printed repertory of Iberian polyphony, though Rees is well aware of the (most likely unrelated) singleton Mass prints that emerged from the Ballard press in Paris, the Phalèse firm in Leuven, and the Plantin shop in Antwerp. And if the Officium defunctorum was intended as a kind of commemorative publication analogous, for example, to the Book of Honours that was printed in 1603 to record for posterity the elaborate Jesuit ceremonies on the death of their imperial patron, then it pales by comparison.Footnote ⁹ Rees is the first to reveal that its title page is dominated by a woodcut depicting not the marital arms that María employed at the time of her death – the same arms that appear prominently displayed in the Jesuit-sponsored Book of Honours – but the arms of Charles V. And this is no isolated blunder. The book's ligatures are poorly, and sometimes wrongly, printed. Black Roman majuscules appear without decorative frames, and two historiated initials of the letter ‘R’ – initials that seem to refer incongruously (Filippi's exegetical somersaults notwithstanding) to a passage from the Song of Songs – appear at the beginning of the second tenor and bass voices on the first opening.Footnote ¹⁰ Too many folios are numbered incorrectly, there is often insufficient space for a large initial that would signal the beginning of a new movement, and at least one modern editor was seriously (and astonishingly) led astray by the unconventional yet space-saving laying out of the plainsong verse ‘In memoria aeterna’ across the two pages of one opening (fols. 7^v–8^r).Footnote ¹¹

At a mere thirty folios this is a slim tome – one that the composer himself described with the diminutive ‘librito’. No paper or ink is squandered on a separate table of contents. Rather, it appears squeezed into a mere three lines in two columns above the colophon on fol. 28^v. Moreover, the book is printed on paper that is of smaller size and inferior quality when compared with that used in the choirbook-format mass books of Rogier and Lobo produced by Flamenco and the Royal Press in 1598 and 1602 respectively.Footnote ¹² Within a smaller printing area dictated by the smaller paper size, the music type was unsuitably large, and the compositor was forced into accommodating four- and (predominantly) six-voice music into pages of only nine staves. The resulting appearance could not have been other than crowded, an impression that is exacerbated by the printer's decision to avoid beginning new movements on a new page when cramming their openings into the staves remaining at the end of a previous movement presented itself as a clumsy possibility. As Rees points out (p. 98), we know from Victoria's copy-editing of a manuscript of psalm settings prepared by Francisco Soto in Rome that the composer was fastidious in correcting and marking up copy for his printer. Are we to conclude, then, that the composer was not given the opportunity to correct the Officium defunctorum as it issued from Flamenco's press?Footnote ¹³

In the absence of such documentation as a printing contract we are left to speculate when accounting for this state of affairs: Was the job rushed? Were funds in short supply? Were those of Juan Flamenco's journeymen-printers who worked on the Officium defunctorum shoddier craftsmen than those who produced Rogier's superb book in 1598 or Victoria's much more typographically challenging 1600 partbooks? Least convincing is Rees's suggestion that perhaps ‘the Officium defunctorum was intended decorously to reflect in its relative unostentatiousness the famed tempering of majesty with sobriety and modesty which was so heavily emphasised in the hagiographical accounts of María's life, death, and burial’ (p. 91). This is special pleading indeed, and it misunderstands the aesthetics of Habsburg image-projection in the age of Philip II. In the estilo desornamentado promoted by Philip II at the Escorial through his architect Juan de Herrera (1530–97), abstraction, severity and detachment were always achieved through the use of precious materials that were beautifully worked. A single visit to the sumptuously decorated royal apartments of Las Descalzas should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that a poorly executed artefact could ever be admitted into such a rarified milieu on the pretext of representing sobriety or modesty.

It was not until the 1590s that Philip II seriously set about establishing a Royal Press by inviting Julio Junti Modesti to move his print shop from Salamanca to Madrid.Footnote ¹⁴ Its initial operations were beset by a variety of economic woes that were intensified by Philip III's disruptive decision, at the Duke of Lerma's behest, to move the entire court to Valladolid for the period 1601 to 1606. Both the dates and Lerma's wishes were decisive. The Empress María's death occurred at a time when the Duke, determined to become the sole influence upon the inexperienced and impressionable Philip III, sought to remove the newly-crowned king and his court from both the suffocating legacy of his recently deceased father at the Escorial and the countervailing influence of the Habsburg women at the Descalzas with their Austrian-branch sympathies and their conversations in German. The economic impact on Madrid was immediate and devastating, and it was felt by Madrid's printers. Based on the date of Victoria's dedicatory epistle (13 June 1605) and the fact that copies of the newly-minted Officium defunctorum were in the composer's hands by 25 August 1605, Rees concludes (p. 107) that ‘the printing took no more than ten weeks’. In all likelihood, its thirty folios would have been printed much more rapidly than that.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet until further evidence emerges, it will not be possible for us to explain, with any degree of certainty, the decidedly inferior quality of the source of ‘the crowning glory’ of Victoria's art.

We know nothing of the book's print run and, as Rees points out (p. 78), the Officium defunctorum ‘may have been one of the least widely known of Victoria's published collections’. Today, only four copies are extant: three in Rome and one in Spain's Segorbe cathedral. From such documents as inventories, letters, cathedral chapter acts and payment records we know that at least nine copies were sent to Spanish cathedrals and other institutions. As Rees states, the contrast with the dissemination of the three earlier polyphonic choirbooks printed by the Royal Press in Madrid is stark: we have seventeen (recte eighteen) extant copies of Rogier's Missae sex,Footnote ¹⁶ twenty-two extant exemplars of Lobo's Liber primus, and at least twelve archives own one or more of the partbooks of Victoria's Missae, magnificat, motecta (1600). And manuscript copies, whose existence might attest to the replacement of worn-out printed volumes, are equally rare. Rees has carefully examined all of the sources and his descriptions are peppered with perceptive observations that often suggest further avenues for exploration.

Unconvincing, however, is Rees's bold and unwarranted claim (p. 86) that the ‘commemorative function of the Officium defunctorum aligns it to some extent with the libros de exequias’, a class of documents that he considers in his second chapter. There is a legitimate taxonomical argument to be had concerning the relationship of the genre of the libro de las honras and the larger category of relaciones de sucesos, but the introduction of a musical score – a very different kind of beast – into either one of these categories demands arguments more robust than those we are offered. Rees asserts (p. 86) that the Officium defunctorum ‘rendered the ephemeral musical element of María's exequies durable and allowed it to be perused, admired, and emulated, just as libros de exequias permitted readers (whether or not they had been present at the exequies concerned) to consider at leisure the fine points of the ephemeral decoration and its rich symbolic content, and to use them as exemplars for future exequies’. Quoting John Butt, who in turn cites Lorenzo Bianconi,Footnote ¹⁷ Rees draws a parallel between owners of the 1609 or 1615 editions of Monteverdi's Orfeo and the end-users and owners of Victoria's Officium defunctorum. Rees here (p. 88) sees a ‘balance between the two functions – as souvenir and as means of performance’. Perhaps this is a step too far: he does not place enough weight on the characteristics that distinguish between the genres of music score and commemorative chronicle with their separate purposes, functions, formats and readerships. To propose just three of the many and obvious ways in which they differ: a music score is surely of no use to the musically illiterate, choirbook format is much more expensive to produce than the smaller text and image formats that were used for chronicles, and the music score of a Requiem is a poor vehicle indeed for the religious indoctrination and state-sponsored propaganda that is the unstated raison d’être for most libros de exequias. Furthermore, all of the text, whether liturgical or paratextual, in Victoria's Officium defunctorum is in Latin whereas libros de exequias are universally printed in the vernacular. As, indeed, was the libretto of Orfeo. Rees continues: ‘the two functions are not only compatible but are crucially linked here: the performances of María's exequial music in Spain and beyond which were made possible through its printing sustained and increased the commemorative devotions for her’. Yet surely some of this would have been undermined by the poor quality of the paper and printing that Rees goes to such pains to emphasise? In returning to the question (p. 116), our author appears reluctant to acknowledge that perhaps his case is weak: ‘We have seen that the Officium defunctorum of 1605 represented an experiment in how to preserve widely in memory and for posterity the exequial music for a patron, as if it were a musical correlate of the libro de exequias … As far as we can tell, the experiment remained an isolated and uninfluential one.’ Perhaps there was no experiment at all.

The chapter devoted to a close reading of the Requiem, entitled ‘Fashioning the Requiem’, is genuinely revelatory, brimming with insight and dense. While some of the lexical density might have been relieved by more musical examples, one assumes that the publishers were less than keen to accommodate more of them. Rees takes as his point of departure the six-voice motet Versa est in luctum and convincingly argues for Victoria's use of a specific contrapuntal module as a ‘signature’ element throughout the entire Officium defunctorum. Before leading us through the work, Rees nudges gently against the discourse of recent decades that has discouraged reliance on ideas of unity in analyses of Renaissance music. And he distances Victoria's Requiem from the conclusions Andrew Kirkman draws concerning cyclic masses.Footnote ¹⁸ When Victoria's music is viewed within the context of the larger theatre that Habsburg exequies no doubt were – a theatre that is described in colourful detail by the various chroniclers – it emerges as polyphony that shares in the thematic repetitiveness that is a characteristic of iconographical schemes, ritual gestures and even the Requiem Mass's Proper texts themselves. Rees's arrow goes directly to what he sees as the heart of the Requiem (p. 117): a series of remarkable gestures that constitute ‘a concentrated epitome of an employment of harmonic and tonal chiaroscuro that marks the music published in that volume as a whole’. Victoria is revealed as a composer whose approach to crafting a polyphonic Requiem is idiosyncratic. Its recurrent and distinctive harmonic gestures impart a thematic unity to the work that nevertheless allows for moments of utter surprise and intense grief.

The electrifying gestures to which Rees first directs our attention occur on words drawn from the Book of Job: ‘vocem flentium’ (‘the voice of those that weep’) and the phrase ‘parce mihi, Domine nihil enim sunt dies mei’ (‘spare me, O Lord, for my days are as nothing’). Rees the analyst exposes the precise mechanisms employed by Victoria in the service of a sophisticated musical rhetoric that expresses the reversal and transformation of ‘organum meum’ into ‘vocem flentium’. It was Noel O’Regan who first identified the opening of Victoria's Versa est as based on the exordium of Marenzio's madrigal Dolorosi martir.Footnote ¹⁹ Marenzio's opening is characterised by the repeated use of a syncopated cadential figure that twice involves the consonant fourth and once the consonant fourth and a suspended seventh. Far from merely quoting Marenzio, Victoria transforms the Italian's five-voice opening into a strikingly dissonant expression of the transformation of Job's ‘music’ into ‘weeping’. In addition, Rees isolates and analyses a device that he refers to as ‘the 6+5 module’ and that he observes as occurring no fewer than nineteen times throughout all but two movements of the Officium defunctorum. Fascinatingly, the bassizans part of the module outlines the immediately recognisable four-note salutation motif of the plainsong Salve Regina (solemn tone) and thus personalises the entire work so that simultaneously both María the Virgin and María the deceased Empress would, indistinguishably, be evoked, recognised and acknowledged.

In this rich chapter, Rees skilfully and patiently unveils the innovative techniques employed by Victoria in endowing his Officium defunctorum with a strong sense of coherence and internal integration. And it does appear that the cornerstone is the motet Versa est in luctum. In addition to the unifying function of consistent scoring and cleffing, Rees discusses tonalities, chiaroscuro and the relationship of polyphony and chant. And he offers a perceptive critique of previous writings on the ‘Spanish tradition’ of chant use. No one has contrasted Victoria's Requiem with other similar works as systematically as has Rees. Although he draws comparable works from a wider geographical area than Iberia and Italy, it is works from those regions – especially those drawn from the huge yet largely unstudied Italian repertory – that lead to the most interesting conclusions. And those conclusions not only offer a more complex picture than the one we are used to, but they also go a long way towards weakening any sense of Spanish exceptionalism. In the process, Rees rejects any assertion that Victoria's second Missa pro defunctis was ‘based in significant part’ on his 1583 four-voice Missa pro defunctis.

Chapter 5 traces the life of Victoria's Requiem from its ‘discovery’ by Padre Martini (1706–84) in mid-eighteenth-century Bologna to its status today as a mainstay of choral programming on concert platforms and recording agendas throughout the world. The chapter is entitled ‘The Crowning Work of a Great Genius’ and within it Rees uncovers an historical treasury of regal headwear as he traces the ‘crown’ epithet from its first appearance in Proske's Musica Divina I (1853) through a procession of writers on Victoria and his Requiem: Franz Xaver Haberl, Felipe Pedrell, J. R. Milne (in the first edition of Grove's dictionary), Ferreol Hernández, Robert Stevenson, David Wulstan and Paul Henry Lang.Footnote ²⁰ Although John Hawkins and Charles Burney both mention the Requiem (without, however, alluding to crowns), their knowledge of it was clearly second-hand and it was not until the nineteenth-century Cecilian movement in Germany that the work entered the modern choral repertory, yet still then very much under the Roman Catholic liturgical umbrella. If our modern reception of Bach's St Matthew Passion can be traced to Mendelssohn's 1829 performance, then it was Haberl (1840–1910) and the choir of Regensburg Cathedral in the 1870s who were responsible for the revival of Victoria's Requiem. Indeed, Haberl's 1874 transcription was the first edition since 1605 to be published. Rees leads us from Haberl's Regensburg to the Paris of Charles Bordes (1863–1909) and his Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais before venturing on to England and Ireland. And it seems that we can trace the precise moment in which the work crossed from the world of cathedral choirs into the modern secular concert hall. It was a 1950 performance by the Schola Polyphonica, directed by Henry Washington, that reached a wide international audience through its broadcast on the BBC Third Programme.

It is not just crowns, however, that Rees traces from one commentator to another. His eagle-eye tracks errors in transcription – including wrong notes – that still find their way into recordings and performances. In a characteristically meticulous piece of detective work, he shows how mistakes in José Perpiñán's 1897 transcription from Segorbe cathedral's exemplar were left uncorrected by Pedrell in his 1909 Opera omnia and were subsequently reproduced or imperfectly emended by a slew of modern editors.Footnote ²¹ Any doubts that assail performers of the Requiem as they struggle with errors in seemingly otherwise authoritative editions will be immediately resolved by reference to Rees's helpful comments. In fact, this book is full of finely observed details. Those that have previously been reported are often given new significance and the reader will find others enlightening. Meanwhile, the impassioned pleas for a new critical edition of Victoria's complete works uttered by Higini Anglès in 1940, and echoed by Stevenson in 1961, remain unanswered.Footnote ²²

In a brief, somewhat half-hearted, epilogue our author considers the Requiem's reception since the 1980s. Perhaps some readers will miss the opportunity here for a more critical engagement with paragraphs quoted from CD booklet notes. And the statement that concert performances of the Requiem (p. 231) represent ‘immersive and transporting escapism of a kind deeply attractive to modern sensibilities’ seems uncharacteristically and bafflingly reductive. It is remarkable, however, that an early seventeenth-century work by a Spanish priest-composer for the funeral of a retired Habsburg empress has become staple fodder for the international choral concert repertory in the early twenty-first century and that is certainly a subject worthy of serious enquiry. Perhaps, though, we are still too close to the phenomenon to be able to understand what it means.

While it seems that Rees's superb study has left no stone unturned, its publication offers an opportunity to define potential avenues for future enquiry. First, there is the question of Victoria as exegete, a subject raised obliquely by Rees when, in considering Victoria's citation of the opening of Marenzio's Dolorosi martir, he asks (p. 136): ‘How might such allusion and recognition have inflected the meaning and interpretation of the motet?’ Kerry McCarthy, with close reference to what Byrd calls his ‘swan song’, has shown how, especially in the Gradualia – the first book of which was published in the same year as was Victoria's Requiem – the recusant Englishman composed musical settings of sacred texts as a deliberate and purposeful act of thoughtful exegesis.Footnote ²³ In his 1603 setting, Victoria appears to treat the text of the Missa pro defunctis in a manner that is much more like that found in his motets and much less like the way he treated the same text in his single other setting of the Missa pro defunctis (1583).

A related question concerns Victoria's relationship with the Jesuits. Although Alfonso de Vicente has recently demolished, on chronological grounds, Stevenson's assertion that it was at the Jesuit Colegio de San Gil in Avila where ‘in all probability Victoria began his classical studies’, it is clear that the composer was indeed associated with the Order from at least his arrival in about 1565 as a convittore, or fee-paying student, at the Jesuit Collegium Germanicum in Rome.Footnote ²⁴ That Victoria was proud to recall his status as ‘el primer maestro de ese colegio’ is attested in a letter accompanying a copy of the Officium defunctorum that he sent to the College from Madrid in February 1606.Footnote ²⁵ The post he held there – Musicae moderator – was prominently trumpeted on the title page of Victoria's second publication, the Liber Primus (Venice: Angelo Gardano, 1576) [= RISM V1427]. And in a letter of December 1583 to the great Milanese reformist Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), Victoria makes a point of stating that much of his eighteen-year sojourn in Rome had been spent at the Germanicum teaching music. In fact Borromeo, as part of an energetically pursued reformist agenda, modelled his Milanese Collegio de’ Nobili at Porta Nuova after the Germanicum and entrusted it to the Jesuits.Footnote ²⁶ As David Crook has shown, Matthias Schrick's unpublished biography of Michele Lauretano, rector of the Germanicum from 1573 to 1587, reports that ‘musicians employed by the college composed motets on texts that the rector himself has chosen expressly for that purpose’.Footnote ²⁷ Might not this lively exegetical milieu suggest fruitful ground for systematically extending Rees's close analytical approach to Victoria's entire repertory? Certainly, recent work by Noel O’Regan has opened fresh interpretative pathways for a deeper understanding of Victoria's musical rhetoric and its potential relationship to, among other varied influences, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. O’Regan's analysis also raises the prospect of a more nuanced understanding of Victoria's use of, and allusion to, the music of other composers, and his employment of self-quotation.Footnote ²⁸

Other potentially interesting avenues for investigation into both Victoria's biography and his musical style include the composer's relationship with St Philip Neri (1515–95), Victoria's converso lineage, and his relationship to the relatively unstudied feminine ambience at Las Descalzas during his years in the service of the Dowager Empress. We know from Victoria's correspondence that he was in direct contact with Philip Neri and, although this relationship has been studied by Filippi, there is perhaps even more to be learned.Footnote ²⁹ As for Victoria's converso heritage on his maternal side, recently traced and documented by Eduardo Tejero, there is surely more here than meets the eye.Footnote ³⁰ Recent work by Robert Maryks has demonstrated the important leadership rôle played by Christians with Jewish family backgrounds within the Society of Jesus in the period 1540 to 1593, a period that coincides with Victoria's employment by the Jesuits in Rome and in Madrid as chaplain to the Dowager Empress, one of the Jesuits’ most generous patrons.Footnote ³¹ Victoria's converso status would go a long way to explaining his failure, despite various apparent overtures, to secure the coveted position of maestro de capilla at Toledo cathedral (and, by extension, any other cathedral), where the notorious purity-of-blood statutes were introduced (against formidable opposition from the cathedral chapter) in 1547 by Juan Martínez Guijarro (1477–1557), Inquisitor General of Spain and Archbishop of Toledo. And in terms of an exegetical approach to liturgical texts most obviously redolent of relationships between Jews and Christians, we might ask what it means when a converso like Victoria sets to music such texts as the responsories for Tenebrae or the Good Friday Improperia.

Finally, as I write, art-loving Madrid is abuzz with two exhibitions that, simultaneously though in different ways, focus on early modern women. The Prado has mounted an exhibition of sixty-five paintings and other works by Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614), and Madrid's Royal Palace is hosting an exhibition, intriguingly entitled ‘The other court’, concerned with Habsburg women in the royal monasteries of Las Descalzas and La Encarnación. With the very recent publication of a collection of nineteen essays edited by María Leticia Sánchez, we find ourselves discovering a new frontier in early modern Madrid, the same one in which Victoria flourished.Footnote ³² If Victoria really is Spain's greatest composer, as is so often claimed, then a deeper understanding of the cultural and political influence exerted by such powerful figures as the Dowager Empress, for whom Victoria's ‘crowning work’ was composed, and her daughter Margarita, to whom the Officium defunctorum was dedicated, will surely enhance our understanding of his art. In the meantime, one wonders if either Cervantes or Victoria, each beating a path to their respective printers in the Madrid of 1605, could have imagined that their works would routinely reach a wider public in the twenty-first century than was possible, or even thinkable, in their own day. Without a doubt, Rees's study of Victoria's Officium defunctorum will help bring us closer to an understanding of this astonishing work as a Requiem for a Habsburg empress and as a Requiem for us.