Francisco Guerrero has often been described as one of the three greatest Spanish composers of the sixteenth century. Yet, somehow, he has been treated, rather unfairly, as not having achieved the emotional power of Morales (a generation older) or of Victoria (twenty years his junior). It is said that Guerrero’s music lacks the rugged strength of Morales’ and lacks the concise perfection of expressive phrases, the sharply etched drama and the balance of vocal lines with clearly directed harmony that make Victoria’s music so great. In these comparisons, Guerrero is labelled as gentle and sweet, his melodic writing as poetic and flowing, but with the implication that his music has less character. Perhaps Guerrero lacks the ultimate discipline and consistency, coupled with intense drama, that makes Victoria’s set of eighteen Responsories for Tenebræ the work of overwhelming genius that it is. Yet, Guerrero is lovable. As Pacheco wrote in 1599: “He was the most extraordinary of his time in the art of music … his music is of excellent sound and pleasing workmanship … he composed an In exitu Israel de ægypto which those who are best informed declare he must have composed in a state of the highest contemplation. He published many motets which by reason of their excellent form and sound will be eternally esteemed … who could equal him in creating a sense of devotion in the hymn Pange lingua?” (Libro de verdaderos retratos, Sevilla, 1599).

Is this just the loyal hyperbole of a compatriot, a friend, another Sevillano? I think not.

This article is a rather personal assessment of Guerrero’s work, but certain facts are indisputable. If one had asked the question, say in 1590, who is the best known and most loved composer in Spain? —the answer would have been Francisco Guerrero. Morales, though revered, was treated even by Bermudo, a friend and admirer, as almost a foreigner, his best work done in Rome in a style deeply indebted to Franco-Flemish methods, an inheritance of the Papal Chapel. Victoria, back in Spain in the mid-1580s, never in charge of a Spanish cathedral’s music, was admired, but less known, and was sometimes referred to as “the chapelmaster at Rome”. Guerrero dominated Spanish cathedral music in the late sixteenth century and his works were diffused in print and in manuscript copies throughout Spain and Portugal, and in the New World from Mexico and Guatemala to Lima and Cuzco. Many remained in use during more than two centuries after his death. Masses were written upon his motets during his later lifetime and even eighty years into the next century his Ave virgo sanctissima still served as a model for new compositions. His Magnificats not only circulated throughout the hispanic world but served as the ideal upon which Vivanco’s eighteen and Aguilera de Heredia’s thirty-six are based. Certainly, the Mexican Francisco López y Capillas, a century after Guerrero’s 1563 publication, must have modelled his own on the Sevillian master’s exemplary set. Guerrero had created a paradigm, crystallising the form and chant-based methods that had been evolved by Morales and Costanzo Festa in Rome. Both Palestrina and Victoria were similar inheritors in their cycles of the Canticle of the Virgin. Guerrero was foremost in both Old and New Spain. Indeed, the term “paradigm” has been applied by Josep Llorens to Guerrero’s other major cycle of liturgical music for Vespers, his settings of alternate verses of the Office Hymns of which the melodies were often the plainchants or mensural chants indigenous to Spain. These too were copied and adapted to changes in liturgical texts or to new saints’ days for at least a century and a half after Guerrero’s death.