"Surely He has Himself borne our weaknesses and carried our sorrows," begins a famous passage in Isaiah 53, part of the "Song of the Suffering Servant." The Catholic Church appropriates the text in relation to the atoning death of Jesus the Messiah. And thus it becomes associated with the liturgy of Good Friday, the commemoration of the day of crucifixion, as the opening text for "Vere languores," a motet in adoratione Crucis. This indicates a special moment in the Good Friday celebration of the Mass, after the recitation of the Passion according to St. John, when the priest briefly removes the black veil which has lain on the altar cross, and a series of texts are chanted and sung to memorialize the instrument and means of Christ's death. Communion is offered, and then the altar is stripped, an act symbolic of the rupture caused by the perishing of the Son of God. It is for such a solemn and terrible occasion that Tomas Luis de Victoria's setting of the motet text was apparently intended.

The text of the motet, after quoting Isaiah 53:4 and paraphrasing 53:5, proceeds to quote part of a hymn for the feast of the Finding of the True Cross, which begins "Dulce lignum, dulces clavos:" "O sweet wood, sweet nails." Victoria's motet was fist published in Rome in 1572, in his first printed collection of motets, but was reissued (with this liturgical assignment) as part of the monumental collection of Holy Week music published in 1585 under the title Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae. The setting breathes his musical personality in every measure, and it has been in the twentieth century one of Victoria's "top hits."

Placed in the fairly common mode of D-Dorian (D-mode with no flats in the key signature), many of this motet's principal cadences use accidentals to partake of a languorous Phrygian feel, using the power of half steps to move from chords of B-flat (with suspension) to A major (with sharps). Closely linked to this harmonic feature is the characteristic and poignant melodic gesture of the diminished fourth, as in the Soprano's descent from F-natural to C-sharp in the third phrase ("et dolores nostros"). Also characteristic are the fluid shifts from imitative writing (apparently learned by Victoria in his early Roman training) to sheer passionate homophony which allows more crucial elements of the text to be heard. In one such passage, he even quotes his own music: the text to "sustinere Regem" ("[Cross which] bore the King") appears set to a transposition of the passage "O beata Virgo" from his 1572 Christmas motet O magnum mysterium.



© All Music Guide