Enrique Manuel Villaverde Redondo

Enrique Manuel Villaverde Redondo (Cañizar, Guadalajara, 1702 – Oviedo, 1774) was a Spanish composer whose career was spent almost entirely at Oviedo Cathedral, where he served as maestro de capilla for close to half a century. His sacred output, in Latin and in Castilian, allows us to trace Spanish church music of the first half and middle of the eighteenth century beyond the major court centres.

He was trained at Toledo Cathedral, where between 1714 and 1724 he sang with the group of boy choristers known as the seises. There he was a pupil of Miguel de Ambiela and, probably, of some of the cathedral's organists, whose names are not known with certainty. On 24 May 1724 he was appointed maestro de capilla at Oviedo, a post he held during a period of intense religious and creative activity that some sources describe as a golden age for the church. In April 1735 he was ordained a priest.

The chapter records of 1751, 1755 and 1757 note his refusal to adapt to local taste two masses and a set of vespers brought from Italy by the cathedral's precentor. This has led scholars to suppose that he harboured a certain anti-Italian sentiment, although this remains a possibility rather than a proven fact.

179 works are attributed to him in various inventories, but only fourteen survive, preserved in the cathedrals of Oviedo, Astorga and Zamora and in the parish church of Piedrahita, in Ávila. These pieces combine diverse styles: a cappella polyphony, music with basso continuo, works for one or two choirs with instrumental accompaniment, and lamentations for solo voice, which are more technically advanced, with ornamented melodies and galant features. Some of his works in Castilian employ four sopranos in unison.

His legacy is preserved mainly in Asturias, and his music was published in 1986 in the collection of the Principality of Asturias, which has made it possible to recover a composer of considerable interest for understanding musical life in Spain under the Ancien Régime.