Tomás Luis de Victoria, Opera omnia (ed. F. Pedrell)

[pml]

Hi all,

someone who knew of my association with IMSLP mentioned to me that the pages for Victoria were a bit of a mess. I had a vague memory of cleaning up some of the pages for the twenty or so masses some years back, along with a number of the tenebrae responsories and antiphons — but the collection of scores from the two complete editions (Felipe Pedrell’s 1900s opera omnia in 8 volumes, and the Lilypond typeset transcriptions mainly by Nancho Alvarez) were quite hit and miss in terms of what had been uploaded from the two sources. The PDFs of the Pedrell from University Music Editions were often a bit horrible to look at (pages only half filled where previous works were cut off, grainy black and white scanning), while the Alvarez transcriptions were obviously first revisions which could use a bit more polishing.

Anyway, two things have happened since then
• we have scans of the full eight volumes of Pedrell scanned from Łódź University Library;
• Alvarez is re-issuing tidier, more scholarly transcriptions with improved Lilypond output.

So now seems to be a good time to go through the corpus of Victoria’s works and distribute all of the available Pedrell material, rather than having it sit around in eight colossal volumes, each between 45 and 90 MB; and to replace, where available, the initial versions of the Alvarez transcriptions with the new revised editions.

Seeing as Victoria did not have a composer composition list before, I constructed one last night, which was slightly telling in terms of missing works:

• Hymns — of the 36 hymns, there are only 11 work pages (i.e. 25 are missing, outside of the massive 80 MB tome). However, as these are such tiny works I’m leaning towards including the 32 hymns which were all repeatedly published together in 1581, 1600, and afterwards as a set; and the four other hymns with different provenance dealt with separately. (Creating 25 new pages would not be an issue either, of course!)

• Magnificats — none of the 18 Magnificats were available separately of the 45 MB tome from Łódź. These fall into a complete Magnificat cycle of 16 settings from 1581 (all eight tones, odd and even verses), plus two stand alone Mags (Primi toni 8vv, and Sexti toni 12vv). Thus I concluded this was the most obvious absence needing correction, and started by splitting up volume 3 of Pedrell. There are new pages for the cycle, and for the two stand-alone works from 1600, which each have the Pedrell settings available separately; and the Alvarez typesets newly added. 17 of 18 of the Mags in Alvarez’s collection are unrevised versions (the exception is the Sexti toni 4vv, odd verses).

• Motets — of the 48 motets, 8 are missing. Given how the motets are one of the major cornerstones of Victoria’s work, it seems rather amazing the missing works haven’t been noticed before now, especially when all of them are easily found on Alvarez’s website; all but about four of the motets have been revised by Alvarez.

• Psalms — most of the big 8 voice psalm settings and 8 voice sequences are missing too.

• Lamentatations and Tenebrae responses — none of the Lamentations are easily accessible outside of an 80 MB Pedrell volume; and the Thursday/Saturday sets of Tenebrae are available, but not the Good Friday set.

• Masses — eleven of the 20 masses have been revised so far by Alvarez; the Requiem of 1605 has been revised in the last three months, so he is gradually getting his way through these.

Anyway: of the 8 Pedrell volumes, volume 3 (Magnificats and Nunc dimittis) has been split. Volumes 2, 4, and 6 — consisting of the 20 masses, which are already all available on their separate pages — are not quite so urgent to address as other categories of works with large omissions. That leaves:
• volume 1 (the motets, and other motet-like works)
• volume 5 (hymns, and music for holy week)
• volume 7 (antiphons, psalms, sequences, and the litany)
• volume 8 (miscellaneous stuff)

Any suggestions on prioritising dealing with those four volumes, and then the three volumes of masses, will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers PML

[pml]

Next up:

Volume 5 downloaded — 34 hymns, and 37 works for Holy Week — this is one of the biggies. I’ll concentrate on the Holy Week works first, since these are justly famous and very frequently performed. The hymns… are not so frequently used. Splitting the hymns to 30 or so separate works pages is probably justified as we already have 10 existing pages.

Also, splitting this volume (unlike the Magnificat) will require page overlaps between files, because works often start in the middle of a page.

[Carolus]

Hi Philip,

Yes, this is a very important composer whose catalog needs work. Unlike the old days, we now have pages for both collections - whether the original 16th century volumes, Pedrell's massive undertaking, or assorted ones put together by others (provided the compiler is dead over 50 years if an original compilation), and for individual works. I think there might be some WIMA overload on some of the collection pages, so having new pages for individual works will prove to be helpful in that respect as well.

[pml]

Dear Carl,

(I actually dealt with the hymns from volume 5 first, since they were more standardised and less fiddly; the Holy Week collection is much more a collection of all sorts of different types of sacred music.)

Perhaps you can take a look at my recent submissions and see whether this meets how you want to organise the collections (since Pedrell is long dead, but Alvarez is very much alive — and long may he continue!):

Hymni totius anni

There are two facsimiles of the 1581 print. Was Dominici Basae an alternate name for Francesco Zanetti? I believe this work went through the press under the first name, since the second print from the BSB in München is in much better condition including the entire title page.

Below that, I’ve added the 32 hymns from the 1581 print in Pedrell’s edition, from the Łódź volume 5. (When I get to Volume 7, I can also add the 4 psalms for 8 voices on this page.)

And below that, I’ve added the 32 hymns in Alvarez’s newly revised version as a single file, plus the only one of the four psalms he’s so far revised (there are already initial versions of the other three psalms available, but I’d prefer to wait for the revised editions).

If the Pedrell complete edition is permissible to add to a collections page or a page for the facsimiles of the original print collections, what of Alvarez’s work, which is just as comprehensive as Pedrell? Arguably he is more comprehensive, having edited more of the miscellaneous stuff besides the authentic œuvre. Of about 278 expected separate works items, I think there are 87 still to be revised. Besides the 33 (out of 36) items for this collections page, I also submitted a compilation for all 33 motets in the 1572 Motecta collection.

PML

Other things; the list of works speculatively included in Volume 1 on the Opera omnia page is likely wrong, because it’s almost certainly sorted by increasing number of voices. Consider the list a placeholder, much like there are placeholders on the worklist while the info is compiled.

[Carolus]

I see no problem with having the Pedrell volume on the page for the Hymni because the contents match. Apparently the second edition of 1600 omitted the 4 psalms (at least that's what I gather from the RISM entries), while Pedrell's 5th volume duplicates the 1581 first edition. There are other cases where we'll likely have only part of a Pedrell volume which matches the content of the first editions. Since you already have a page with all 8 volumes of the Pedrell's edition in place, I don't see much point in creating additional collection pages for those Pedrell volumes which include the contents more than one - or selections - of the original issues (which number around 11 devoted solely to Victoria - not counting reissues).

Apparently Dominici Basae was an alternate name for Zanetti, or perhaps a partner (who's not mentioned nearly as often in any case). I linked the Hymni collection page to both the PSMD site (Printed Sacred Music) and to RISM (which at last is putting up the the printed items in decent number). I also put up our little collection page header to discourage the inevitable arrangements from being added there (they need to go onto the pages for the individual works instead). Alvarez editions can appear on both collection pages and on the individual pages (which is already the case of a number of Pedrell editions scanned by UME) for the contents of the Hymni).

Looking at Grove, I don't see any catalog numbers for Victoria, but they might not be much needed in his case as there does not appear to be much title duplication from the list I see, apart from a few settings of the same Latin text for different numbers of voices, which can be accounted for in the work-page title easily enough. At any rate, Hymni is looking quite fine now, so we'll at last be on our way to a decent Victoria section.

[pml]

Thanks again Carl for adding the |Page Type=Collection to the Officium Hebdomadæ Sanctæ — I had forgotten that that was the magic invocation. I spent the morning ensuring that all 37 work pages have links to the 36 separate Pedrell uploads (from Łódź), or the current 35 new editions by Alvarez (I have those 2 outstanding items on a list of works which I’m waiting for him to revise).

There’s still a few small consistency-related edits for the 37 work pages that hang off the Hebdomadæ, and then I can address the 32 hymns of the Hymni totius anni, since we only have 11 corresponding works pages. One of the annoying Pedrell things is that he refers to 1581a as 1581,B (and 1581b as 1581,A) which got me confused when I did the naming for the Pedrell hymn PDFs. Too late to fix now, alas.

Yes, RISM seems to think the 8vv psalms disappeared from the 1600 printing of the Hymni; by then his huge collection of all of his ‘big’ works for 8, 9, and 12 voices was going through the presses of the typographia regia in Madrid, so they didn’t need to be reprinted in that volume. (Incidentally, the 1600a volume of ‘big stuff’ in our collection is the organ part book – not a full score as such; and interestingly, it is occasionally independent of the choral voices, rather than merely doubling them.)

Anyway after the hymns, I think Pedrell’s volume 7 probably has more omissions than the motets of volume 1, such as all of those large psalm settings for double or triple choir. (Here Alvarez’s updates are again patchy.)

[pml]

Still slogging my way through the Hymni totius anni, and I discovered the weirdness that is the alternate Pedrell Ave maris stella (not the one published in 1581). Allegedly the version consisting of the odd verses was published 1600, except it doesn’t match up with either the 1600a or the 1600b facsimiles…

The Officium Hebdomadæ Sanctæ and the Hymni totius anni have templates to help navigate amongst the set (and in the case of the Officium, hopefully clarify the structure of how the pieces fit into the week’s liturgy).

Question. We have the entire set of masses in Álvarez’s old editions (mostly uploaded years back); should these be uploaded afresh along with retiring the old versions, or can this be done using the “Upload a new version of this file” method to go through and change the files over? (I probably won’t be able to do the latter, since I didn’t upload them in the first place — but it would seem the much less painful way of doing it. Otherwise, you get this — 1st edition, revised version, blah.)

[pml]

Having nearly used up my monthly internet quota I will have to go on the QT for a few days, before finishing off Victoria and Pedrell for the time being. Fortunately I have closed off all of the previous major repertoire gaps using the Pedrell and Álvarez editions:

Antiphons were already complete, but I added all of the settings from Pedrell volume 7 along with new Álvarez versions over the weekend. In one instance I decided I had erred by combining two different works onto the one page nearly five years ago, so undid the merger while adding new editions.

Magnificats (Pedrell volume 3) — completed a week or so back.

Motets (Pedrell volume 1) — of the eight or so motets not previously available here, I used the Álvarez revised motets as first choices, and used two Pedrell versions where Álvarez was deficient (I see little point in uploading more of his first edition work when it stands to be revised). This will require some more attention later, but the complete published works are essentially there.

Masses — only Pedrell volume 6 has been added to date, but 2 and 4 will be fairly simple to process (only 15 works). We already have scores for all 20 works. As mentioned there are newly revised Álvarez scores for 11 of them (a couple went up a few days back) and I’ll be adding the rest of these when the Pedrell versions go up.

Hymns, and music for holy week — (Pedrell volume 5) completed several days back and tidied up. Only 70 or so separate works in the one volume! The lamentations are the interesting work in terms of sources; they exist in a slightly different version from the published set, held in manuscript in the library of the Sistine Chapel. They’re obviously the same work, but if I had to guess, I would say the Sistine Chapel set is the first version of the work, and Victoria chose to revise and shorten them for publication in 1585. Several of the nine compositions include extra verses in manuscript, as well as there being sections of more or less the same polyphony which are more extensively elaborated.

So I had the choice of putting the alternate versions on nine separate pages or going with the existing pages, listing them as ‘extended versions’. I chose the latter. These were in Pedrell volume 8 along with much more miscellaneous stuff; four out of five things which are already uploaded from the UME scans.

Psalms, sequences, and litany (Pedrell volume 7) — new additions, added along with the antiphons over the weekend.

Works list and Opera Omnia page should now be more or less fully referenced and wiki linked.

[Carolus]

For the Alvarez old editions, I would think the best thing to do would be to replace the files with those of the new editions - assuming the editor is on board with this. I've been very impressed by the Lilypond work I've seen on these over and above the fine editorial work. There have been disparaging comments made by publishers to Edward at IAML conferences about the editions on IMSLP in the past. These are as good or better than many things coming out of places like Carus Verlag and Lilypond's look and feel as vastly improved over the older versions.

[pml]

Was the particular complaint from publishers the usual one about user-contributed typesets? That one’s been a bugbear since day one of the CPDL era. I spent an hour yesterday going through a printed copy of a CPDL typeset circa 2000 (the contributor shall not be named and shamed), to see if I would be able to justify re-using it or whether I should just junk it; a page full of errata generated from just 25 pages of typesetting quickly convinced me of the latter course! Would that every editor displayed the tenacity of Álvarez to go back and improve his work, when the opportunity to revise it presents itself.

The new Álvarez editions are superb and the Lilypond output doesn’t have the scratchy, underinked appearance when rendered on-screen, so I’ll be happy to try replacing the old editions when I get around to the rest of the worklist in a week’s time. Álvarez has also employed some sensible transpositions for performance of certain works which (while I may not always agree with all his choices) improves their utility greatly.

[pml]

My monthly quota being restored, I’ve added the 15 remaining masses from Pedrell volumes 2 and 4. (I am not particularly inclined to add the obviously spurious Missa Dominicalis from Pedrell’s volume 8 but I am willing to have my arm twisted.)

This leaves the motets in volume 1, most of which were already available in editions from UME. I’ve created a template works navbox for the motets which includes:
1) The 53 motets of the revised publication of Motecta (in Rome, 1583)
2) The 37 motets of the Motecta Festorum (in Rome, 1585)
Those two collections account for all but three of the published motets, so for completeness the template also includes:
3) The 3 motets published in other collections, and
4) The spurious and dubious motets, which if they are by Victoria, are definitely in his collection of third-rate works since he literally published everything that he thought valuable to preserve.

It’s probably on the overly large size, so I’m hesitant to include it on pages without starting in a ‘collapsed’ state. Thoughts?

[pml]

I’ve now gone through the motets, which should finish off the Łódź scans of Pedrell’s edition. I’ll revisit these pages again in a few months if Nancho Álvarez has contributed some new revisions of his work that can replace or add to the collection already here.

Finally, I have to report that the tagging for Victoria’s works is a mess, but this I have come to expect as situation normal given that the tagging team seems to lack people with expert knowledge of vocal ensemble music, and who constantly misidentify and mistag it. I have neither the patience nor willingness to fix this when in all likelihood, were I to go through the set of 166-odd works pages, over the following year or two the tags would be gradually put back to the parlous state they are currently in.

Edited to add: I thought the paragraph starting ‘Finally’ would be the last thing I have to say on the subject but I guess I would be wrong.

Someone has gone around following my edits to add (almost snarky) comments about the absence of continuo parts in RISM and Grove Music, including the fallacious assertion that none of Victoria’s works contain obbligato continuo parts.

Not to put too fine a point on it: This. Is. Wrong.

In RISM A/I/9, the organ part is referred to multiple times as P. — meaning Partitur. While it is written out in score format, it is actually an instrumental part for keyboard.

Screen Shot 2016-03-02 at 11.18.42.png (78.56 KiB) Viewed 62917 times

In the case of Grove Music, the information on Victoria’s organ parts is to be found in the lengthy article describing his musical works — but not in the worklist. I don’t have access to the online version of Grove so I won’t bother attempting to explain why they omit to mention it in the worklist and treat it as passim elsewhere; perhaps they regard it as being below their notice.

The facts of the matter are very simple. Between 1572 and 1592 Victoria published (and republished) 14 or so works for 8 or more voices, which are all intended for double (or in the case of the one exception, triple) choir*. After he had returned to Madrid, in 1600 he reissued all of these works, along with 10 new compositions for double or triple chorus in this publication; and one of the partbooks issued in the set was an organ part. The designation of this partbook explicitly states it is an organ part on the title page: “Hæc omnia sunt in hoc libro / ad pulsandum in organis” (which you can see transcribed in the screenshot from RISM, above). This organ part is even to be found in the IMSLP collection (though it hasn’t been identified correctly hitherto) — we have the copy scanned from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (D–Mbs).

The organ part normally consists of four staves in score layout, with semi-regular barring to help the organist synchronise the parts — Renaissance typesetters were yet to understand how to vertically align separate polyphonic parts for ease of playing. The parts chosen by Victoria to be supported by organ almost always correspond to the voices designated to be part of choir 1, though on rare occasions they are freely composed parts that are distinct from the vocal parts. It isn’t only the new works from 1600 that have optional keyboard accompaniment; Victoria added parts for all of his polychoral works previously published from 1572 onward.

If memory serves the last time I read the Grove Music article I think the author might have speculated that the organ part was optional to facilitate the works being sung with fewer voices, or to allow redeployment of voices to strengthen the singing, but that the ‘ideal’ mode of performance was a cappella. But there is no doubt that Victoria was responsible for the part, and that the care with which he ensured that all two dozen of his works for 8 or more voices were republished with optional accompaniment indicates that this wasn’t some mere whim on his part, but part of the calculated and systematic approach with which he represented all of his large-scale compositions.


* The only music for 8 voices not included here is the final refrain from the Lamentations published in the Officium Hebdomadæ Sanctæ of 1585, and the final Agnus Dei of the Missa Simile est regnum coelorum from 1576/1583; but these are works predominantly for fewer than 8 vocal parts.

[pml]

Tacet