Tomás Luis de Victoria's 'Officium Defunctorum' of 1605 - written for the funeral of the Dowager Empress María of Austria, in whose household Victoria had served as chaplain for over twenty years - is widely considered the greatest single sacred composition of the Spanish Renaissance and one of the supreme achievements of the entire polyphonic tradition. Victoria composed it when he was in his late fifties, having devoted his life to sacred music, and it bears the quality of a final statement: everything he had learned about how to set sacred text to music is present, and nothing extraneous remains.
The work is a setting of the complete Office for the Dead and Requiem Mass - the full liturgical apparatus through which the Catholic Church commends its departed to God. The texts range from the opening introit 'Requiem aeternam' (Grant them eternal rest, O Lord) through the Kyrie eleison, the gradual and tract, the sequence 'Dies Irae' (Day of Wrath), the Offertory, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Communio, to the responsory 'Libera me' (Deliver me, O Lord) that closes the office.
The 'Kyrie eleison' - Lord, have mercy - draws on Luke 18:38 where blind Bartimaeus cries out to Jesus: 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!' The beggar's petition, which models the fundamental posture of all Christian prayer, becomes in the Requiem the prayer of the entire Church for its departed: have mercy on those who, like every human being, approach the end of their lives as beggars before God's grace. Victoria set the Kyrie with a harmonic flexibility that gives the plea both urgency and trust.
The 'Libera me, Domine' responsory, which draws on Revelation 20:12 - 'And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened' - is the emotional climax of the entire office. The petition to be delivered from the day of judgment, from eternal death, from the trembling that will shake the heavens and earth, is set by Victoria with music of extraordinary dramatic power, moving between the still terror of facing divine judgment and the urgent plea for divine mercy.
Job 19:25-27 - 'I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God' - provides the confidence that underlies the entire Requiem's petition. The Communion chant, sung as the mourners receive the Eucharist, is the declaration that the light of resurrection is the goal toward which all the prayers and laments have been moving. Victoria's setting gives this final assurance a musical simplicity that follows the dramatic intensity of the 'Libera me' like dawn after a storm.
Victoria reportedly ceased composing after completing the Officium Defunctorum, considering it his definitive achievement. This is a credible artistic judgment: the work is complete in a way that suggests its composer had said everything he needed to say. His entire output - the masses, motets, hymns, and magnificats that constitute the corpus of Spanish Renaissance polyphony at its finest - culminates here, in a meditation on death, judgment, and resurrection that manages to be simultaneously terrifying in its honesty and consoling in its faith.
The work's continued performance at important state funerals, memorial services, and in concert performance worldwide testifies to its unique quality: it is music that takes death seriously without being morbid, that faces judgment honestly without being despairing, and that offers the hope of resurrection without sentimentalizing the suffering that precedes it.