Hebrew and Christian scholars alike have long debated the intent, and the very propriety of the "Song of Solomon." Various interpretations read the texts as an allegory of the love of Yahweh for His people Israel, of Christ for His bride the Church, or of the Father for the Blessed Virgin; on the surface, they comprise a luscious series of love poems traditionally associated with a wedding of King Solomon the wise. The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance tended strongly to follow the thinking of Origen and the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux by reading the Song of Songs as allegorical, and assigning its texts to Marian feasts. Tomas Luis de Victoria apparently intended such liturgical use for his six-voiced motet on the text Nigra sum, sed formosa, published in 1576, when the Spaniard was serving in Rome. The published rubric assigns the motet "de Beata Virgine," and the specific liturgical context in Roman usage is as an Antiphon for Second Vespers of the major Marian Feasts, just before the hymn "Ave maris stella."

The text as set by Victoria conflates the opening and closing of the antiphon text, comprising Song of Solomon 1:4a, 1:3 (adapted), and 2:10-12a. Despite the potential heaviness of a six-voiced texture, the composer spins out a setting which is often madrigalian in ethos and gesture. The opening measures, for instance, contain the most overt example of Augenmusik ("eye music") anywhere in Victoria: the notation chosen to print the first phrase of text, "I am black, but beautiful," presents only black note heads until the final syllable. Other noted examples of text-painting in the piece include a famous rising melisma on "surge" ("Arise!"), which traverses with quick minims in each voice a distance up to a melodic ninth, and the gracefully bouncing homophony which follows at the text "flores apparuerunt" ("the flowers appear").

And yet the stylistic stamp of this particular composer remains evident. In comparison with his contemporary Palestrina's setting of the same text, Victoria calls for more than half again as many accidental inflections in the same number of measures. And the burst of frenetic contrapuntal activity in the closing of this motet, with a text which proclaims the coming of harvest time, allows every voice to exchange his most characteristic melodic gesture, a diminished fourth with accidentals. The harvest "pruning" for Victoria is no mere pastoral activity, but rather an act of passion.



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