Tomás Luis de Victoria was born in 1548 in Avila, birthplace of St Teresa. Just as she seems to personify the religious ethos of sixteenth-century Spain (the good side of it, at least), so Victoria came to embody the best of the Spanish character in music. As a youth he learnt his art as a chorister at the Cathedral of Avila. So promising was he that he was sent to Rome at seventeen years of age, patronized by Philip II and by the Church, to study at the Jesuit’s Collegium Germanicum.