It is hard not to associate the religious passion of Victoria's music with the dark clouds and elongated figures of El Greco's paintings or with the mystical flames lighting of the scorching pages of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. With Victoria and the other great Spanish composers of this period such as Francisco Guerrero and Cristobal Morales, we have a distinctively different flavor of the Renaissance polyphonic style from that of Palestrina. With Victoria, there is nothing of the troubled probing of future Romantic composers, but neither does his music often maintain the untroubled serenity of the Roman master.

Even when Victoria's musical lines have all the suppleness of untrammeled flames, there is a coiled intensity to them. They burn rather than float. Where Palestrina weaves a stable tapestry out of his polyphony, Victoria's tapestry is too dynamic to stay in place, although the counterpoint is equally disciplined with both composers. Perhaps it is a distant effect of the Spaniards' recent conquest of their own lands and re-establishment of their faith, but Victoria's music does not seem to take faith for granted. Rather than resting in faith, the music maintains faith by constant vigilance. The inner flame must be perpetually renewed.

The opening of the Requiem is a powerful example of this quality. The lower voices provide a background for the trebles' entrance. This line ebbs and flows with the tension I have been describing so that grief and fear of death are both expressed and yet both are consumed by the inner flame that drives this music. This opening line functions as a recurring head motif throughout the work and assures that an easy resolution will be in sight but not be reached.

Not surprisingly, this same inflamed expression of grief pervades that great masterpiece, the Responses for Tenebrae. In his Lamentations of Jeremiah, also part of the Holy Week liturgy, Palestrina expresses the pathos of Christ's suffering with a quiet dignity that rises above the sense of tragedy. Victoria's Tenebrae responses pierce the heart with Christ's suffering at its most acute. Especially powerful is the response O Vos Omnis, where Christ asks all who pass by if they have ever seen sorrow like unto his sorrow. This time, it is a descending line in the trebles that unfolds with anguish that only the music's beauty makes bearable.

One of Victoria's best-known and most celebrated works is the Christmas motet O Magnum Mysterium. The treble entrance, followed by the other voices in imitation, emerges out of the primordial silence at the dawn of creation. Time is still and only gradually is any sense of movement detectable. The opening counterpoint converges in a homophonic statement of the mystery of Christ's birth in hushed tones. The animals in the stable who witness this remarkable birth are brought in on a highly-charged motif by the lower voices which is taken to a subdued but none the less feverish climax by the upper voices. The homophonic figure returns to hail the virgin who gives birth to Christ, again freezing time. The choir then sings of the Virgin's worthiness to bear the Lord to an inversion of the motif used to for the pious animals. This highly contemplative motet is then capped off by a lively Alleluia to celebrate the miraculous birth. In his fine parody mass on this motet, Victoria picks up more on the mood of the coda than the hushed material of most of the work. While the contemplative music of the motet overwhelms its extrovert ending, it is the lively joy of the alleluias that overwhelms the contemplation in the Mass. As usual in a Renaissance Mass, especially a Christmas mass, the et in Incarnatus Est receives emphasis by means of a break in the music and a contrasting texture to the surrounding material. In this Mass, the harmony at these words is as cryptic as the mystery the choir sings about.

Like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Victoria could express a mystical eroticism with great fervor. The ideal vehicle for this expression was the Song of Songs and the liturgical texts were very much at hand. The Liturgical year was, and still is, populated with numerous feasts that celebrate the Blessed Mother of God. Many of the antiphons are taken from the Song of Songs and applied to Mary. Some of Victoria's most spectacular musical fireworks can be heard in the motet and its parody Mass Vidi Speciosam. Both are scored for six voices which allows ample opportunity for pairs of voices to spill over each other. There is one particularly ecstatic rising motif over which the voices climb over one another in a race to see which can be the first the reach the height of Heaven. A brief motif that consists of a drop of a half step and return to the first gets caught several times in the excitement, and this when the text says that the beloved's perfumes hung heavy in her garments. The motet opens with a programmatic motif to depict the beloved winging her way over the water like a dove and the second part has another floating motif to proclaim that the beloved was "as the flower of roses in the spring of the year." The mass extends this outburst of mystical of joy for another twenty minutes, although time ceases to be a factor in this realm.

Victoria showed himself to be a companion of Teresa by singing in the cathedral choir in Avila as a boy and, in his last years, serving Philip II's sister at her discalced convent, in the branch of Carmelites reformed by Teresa and her friend John of the Cross. Victoria's music shows him to be a companion of Teresa in the depths of his soul.