Digital Sources for Nineteenth Century Music in Portugal: ‘A Long Way to Run’

Discussing music in Portugal in the nineteenth century, and the digital resources that the country makes available for musicological research on this historical period, requires, first of all, a clarification about the chronological boundaries that limit this temporal unit. One can naturally understand that the periodization to be adopted should be the most obvious, that is, the one that determines the dates 1801 and 1900 as the beginning and end of the century in question. But it is worth asking whether it would not be more appropriate to define a periodization based on the events that unequivocally determined the panorama of music in Portugal in that century.

For this more sensitive approach to periodization, it is necessary to understand that the Portuguese musical nineteenth century is marked by the supremacy of the Italian vocal tradition in its different aspects and by the persistence of institutional organization models with roots in the Ancien Régime. In this way, in spite of significant changes, especially during the 1830s and 1860s, this period has a close connection with its predecessors. The period is mainly conditioned by the activity of two Italian opera houses in the country's main cities: the S. Carlos in Lisbon, which opened in 1793 and the S. João in Porto, which opened in 1798. These two opera houses were the pillars of Portuguese musical life and the centres of a musical culture that in more or less direct ways covered the entire country. The period's terminus is marked by the great political and social change of the establishment of the Republic in 1910, which brought about profound changes in the structures of musical life in the capital, many of which had been traditionally linked to the royal court. In the previous year, 1909, the S. Carlos had premiered Der Ring des Nibelungen, the high point of a Wagnerian reception that had begun timidly in 1883 and that would profoundly mark the post-World War I period. It should be noted that throughout this period, and despite the existence of two large urban centres and the development of small theatrical and concert circuits in the provinces and in the archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores, Lisbon remained the country's main musical centre. A special relationship was also established with Brazil, first as a colony, then as an independent nation, open to immigration and emerging with great economic and cultural vigour. For music in Portugal, then, there is a ‘long’ nineteenth century, which begins at the end of the 1700s and ends at the dawn of the First World War, with the extinction of an old monarchy.¹

As the central heritage library, the National Library of Portugal (BNP) houses one of the most important musical collections in the country, with over 200,000 items dating from the thirteenth century to the present day, including scores, musical books and periodicals, librettos, programmes, posters, photographs, and personal and institutional archives. Since its creation in 1993, the BNP's Music Department has brought together musical collections that were scattered among various public and private institutions (including the Royal Conservatory in Lisbon and the Teatro S. Carlos). Still in Lisbon, the Ajuda Library holds the estate of the Portuguese royal household which, together with the materials kept in the Paço Ducal of Vila Viçosa (Alentejo), is rich in handwritten and printed scores from the nineteenth century, resulting mostly from gifts to the monarchs. Scattered throughout several cities in the country, the Municipal Public Libraries are also, in some cases, depositories of valuable musical collections.

The National Digital Library, created in 2002, aims to offer universal and free online access to digitized manuscript and printed content in the public domain belonging to the collections of the BNP, the Public Library of the city of Évora and, to a lesser extent, the Ajuda Library.² It also promotes and participates in the international dissemination of digital content from Portuguese libraries, through the RNOD (National Register of Digital Objects), which aggregates metadata from more than 40 institutions, disseminating it to international portals such as Europeana, the Ibero-American Heritage Digital Library, the Luso-Brazilian Digital Library and the World Digital Library.

Although we will start with the most important heritage library in the country, we will not limit ourselves to its holdings, but will try to embrace the various efforts that are underway (in continental Portugal and in the autonomous regions of Madeira and the Azores), by different bodies, to make available sources that directly or indirectly help musicologists interested in researching music in Portugal in the long nineteenth century.

Reference works and studies

The BN Digital provides digitized versions of a group of reference works published in Portugal during the second half of the nineteenth century. Two dictionaries of musicians are the most important of these publications: Os musicos portuguezes: biographia-bibliographia, by Joaquim de Vasconcelos (1870) and Diccionario biographico de musicos portuguezes: historia e bibliographia da musica em Portugal, by Ernesto Vieira (1900).³ Even though they are not exclusively dedicated to the nineteenth century, they remain indispensable tools for those who want to research music in Portugal in that period, given that, until today, no other reference work of this kind has been published.⁴ Other important sources include the first volume of O Real Theatro de S. Carlos de Lisboa desde a sua fundação em 1793 até á actualidade: estudo historico, by Francisco da Fonseca Benevides, a history and chronology covering the first 90 years of activity of a central institution for the study of musical life in nineteenth-century Lisbon,⁵ and the Cancioneiro de musicas populares, compiled by César das Neves and Gualdino de Campos, the first major repository of popular music, including many ballroom genres, hymns and patriotic songs, among several other genres.⁶

Scores

Unfortunately, the process of digitizing and making the BNP's musical collections available online is still far behind schedule. It is expected that between 2023 and 2024, after the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Plan for 2023, a digitization plan financed by the Portuguese government, this situation will begin to improve. Although quite limited, the number of digitized documents available in the Biblioteca Nacional Digital (just over 1,000 scores), constitutes a wealth of useful information. In fact, more than half of the scores made available online by the BND (652) fall within the study period we have defined (see Table 1).

Table 1 Available sources at BN Digital for the study of music in Portugal, 1793–1910

These scores include the works of the most important Portuguese composers of the nineteenth century. There are, for instance, 71 scores of Marcos Portugal (1762–1830), a prolific composer of opera and religious music, whose career was divided between Portugal, Italy, and Brazil;⁷ 27 scores of João Domingos Bomtempo (1775–1842), a composer and virtuoso pianist who lived in Paris and in London before settling permanently in Lisbon, and 70 scores of the great pianist José Viana da Mota (1868–1948), also a composer of merit, who lived between Germany and Portugal and whose extensive estate belongs to the BNP. The number of works by foreign authors is considerably less significant, which is due to both the incipient state of the BNP's digitalization project and the weakness of the publishing movement in Portugal during the nineteenth century. In the absence of a significant number of local editions, it was also not considered necessary to digitize materials that will certainly be available in other foreign repositories. Among the genres covered, there is much salon music, including fados, modinhas, and songs with piano accompaniment. It should be noted, however, that in the near future (2024), the number of items and genres available will increase, in accordance with the aforementioned ongoing digitization plan. The expansion will include the Fundo Conde de Redondo collection; the BNP's general collection of Music Manuscripts (M.M.); the Ivo Cruz Collection (C.I.C.), which belonged to a former director of the Lisbon National Conservatory; and the Collection of Choirbooks (Table 2).⁸ The first of these collections is one of the most relevant of the National Library holdings, totaling more than 3,000 scores and instrumental parts. It constitutes the estate of one of the main families of the Portuguese aristocracy, whose members included important amateur musicians and patrons of a wide range of professionals, especially those who, in the aftermath of the 1832–34 civil war between absolutists and liberals, had aligned themselves with the former faction, which was defeated, and therefore had difficulty in pursuing their careers in an adverse political environment.⁹

Table 2 Sources for the study of music in Portugal between 1793–1910 that will became available in BN Digital

The data presented in Table 2 indicates that the recent digitization programme mainly favoured the period of the late Ancien Régime. Thus, the possibilities of online access to materials for the study of music in Portugal in the 1800s will continue to be quite limited. The historical moment that preceded the departure of the Portuguese court to Brazil and the French invasions (1807) will be further reinforced by the online availability of the results of the MARCMUS – Music Paper and Handwriting Studies in Portugal (18th and 19th centuries): The Case Study of the Collection of the Count of Redondo – which will make available an extensive repository of watermarks, paper types and handwritings obtained through the analysis of a set of manuscripts from the Fundo Conde de Redondo.¹⁰ These databases will also become available at the Bernstein Project: The Memory of Paper.¹¹

To access the scores in the Biblioteca Nacional Digital portal, users must select the ‘Scores’ box (see Figs. 1 and 2; the site is available in both English and Portuguese),¹² which appears in various collections, and choose to conduct their search by century, author or title. It should be noted that the exact dating of many of the digitized items, especially the manuscripts, is unknown. On the other hand, a search by ‘Author’ yields the names of the creators of musical and poetic texts, as well as the arrangers, which may be of interest to those who wish to study the musical settings of texts by certain authors, who were not always contemporaries of the composers who made use of their work. Nevertheless, it is also possible to access the digitized documents without the mediation of this portal. All the royalty-free scores can be downloaded through the National Library of Portugal's own catalogue site, by selecting the ‘BND’ Table.¹³

Fig. 1 BN Digital homepage interface.

Fig. 2 Screen with the search results for the BN Digital score collection with the filters on the right.

Concentrated mainly on music for the theatre, the Archive Library of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II has a digital library that contains a collection of scores consisting of 437 handwritten and printed items from 1833 to 1992, more than 75 per cent of which belong to the nineteenth century.¹⁴ Although the vast majority of the scores in this collection are of stage music, there is also some ballroom music.¹⁵ Researchers interested in stage music should narrow their search by entering the genres they are looking for, using terms such as ‘comédie-vaudeville’, ‘comédia’, ‘drama’, ‘farça-lírica’, ‘mágica’, ‘ópera’, ‘zarzuela’, and ‘dança’. Since most of the works in this collection are related to the activity of the Teatro D. Maria II itself, most of them are in manuscript, unlike the scores of non-theatrical music, which are almost all in printed format. For the same reason, the composers with the largest number of scores are Joaquim Casimiro Júnior (1808–1862), with 47 works, and Francisco António Norberto dos Santos Pinto (1815–1860), with 35 works. Both composers were active as writers of stage music and the latter was actually the theatre's first musical director. The main composer of the part of the collection that does not consist of music for the theatre, which makes up roughly a quarter of the holdings, is Émile Waldteufel (1837–1915), with a set of 18 waltzes. The collection also includes several scores with no identification of the composer; but in some of these cases the author's field lists the names of the playwrights (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 TNDMII's Library-Archive catalogue interface. In the result shown only the playwrights are identified.

Periodicals

The periodical press is undoubtedly essential for the study of musical life in the nineteenth century. However, in nineteenth-century Portugal there was very little in the way of specialized musical presses. The first significant periodicals, such as A Arte Musical (a title which was used at least three times throughout the nineteenth century), date from the early 1870s.¹⁶ These were followed by Eco Musical (1873–74), Amphion (1884–1896), Gazeta Musical (1884–86) and Gazeta Musical de Lisboa (1890–97). Of these periodicals, the Gazeta Musical, the first to be published by a woman, the Austrian Josephine Amann (1848–1887), is available at BN Digital.¹⁷ Of the three publications with the title A Arte Musical, the third, which was edited by the maker and collector of musical instruments Michel'Angelo Lambertini (1862–1920), had the longest life, lasting from 1899 to 1915. Digital copies can be found at the site of the Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa, to which we return below.¹⁸

The daily newspapers of the major cities, Lisbon and Porto, published the announcements for all performances, other news about the comings and goings of musicians and also critical reviews. They are therefore fundamental for the study of nineteenth-century music. Unfortunately, the digitization of the main Portuguese newspapers, especially by the National Library of Portugal, has been a very slow process. At BN Digital, only A Revolução de Septembro (1840–1901) and O Jornal do Porto (1859–1892) are accessible, the first however with many flaws that often require a perusal of the microfilmed version in the library.¹⁹ To access these journals, follow the same steps as for consulting the sheet music collection, just click on the ‘Serials’ box on the homepage (see Fig. 1).

A research project funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology established an online site for the entire collection of the Portuguese government official newspaper, the Diário do Governo, between the Liberal Revolution of 1820 and the establishment of the Republic in 1910, making available nearly 30,000 issues.²⁰ This is a resource with some relevance in terms of announcements of spectacles in Lisbon and some critical reviews.

The Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa has made a very significant effort to make periodicals, many of them from the nineteenth century, digitally available.²¹ At present, 73 newspapers and 42 magazines dating from 1793 to 1910 are accessible. Titles from the first half of the century include O Jornal do Conservatório, organ of the Royal Conservatory of Lisbon, which is available only for the years 1839–40, and the Revista do Conservatório Real de Lisboa (1842 and 1902). In a more generalist context, one should mention the Revista Universal Lisbonense (1841–1853), where the most distinguished literary figures of Portuguese Romanticism collaborated, and which provides important information in terms of theatrical and music criticism.

The available periodicals can be accessed by the ‘títulos [titles]’, ‘autores [authors]’, ‘cronológico [chronological]’, ‘geográfico [geographical]’ or ‘géneros de imprensa [press genres]’ indexes located on the left of the Hemeroteca homepage (see Fig. 4). Once the desired periodical is found, its various scanned issues can be viewed in either HTML or PDF formats (see Fig. 5). In the case of A Arte Musical, OCR search within PDFs is already possible.

Fig. 4 Interface of the Hemeroteca Digital homepage. On the left you can find the indexes. No English version is available.

Fig. 5 Search result for Michel'Angelo Lambertini's A Arte Musical.

The newspapers and magazines that pioneered the inclusion of images, which number among the periodicals available online, are also important sources for the study of music in Portugal in the nineteenth century. Started in 1878, the bi-monthly magazine O Occidente (1878–1915) is considered to have played a central role in the introduction of iconographic journalism in Portugal. Its pages bear witness to the transition from woodcut to photomechanical engraving.²² The initial series of the political satirical periodical O António Maria ran from 1879 to 1885 and from 1891 to 1898. It may be considered an initiative of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro (1843–1905), a multitalented caricaturist and pioneer of illustrated journalism, decorator and ceramist who was a member of a well-known and well-established family of visual artists in Lisbon.²³ Both periodicals are rich sources of information and images about the musical life of Lisbon, in particular the activity of the Teatro S. Carlos.²⁴ Other periodicals illustrated by Bordalo also contribute to the study of musical life, including A Lanterna Mágica, O Binóculo, hebdomadario de caricaturas, espectaculos e literatura, which was published between October and December 1870 and considered the first periodical to be sold inside the theatres, as well as Os Teatros: jornal de crítica ilustrado (1895–97) and A Paródia (1900 and 1907). Unfortunately, OCR search is not yet possible on many of these scans.

The autonomous regions of Madeira and Azores have also recently started to put extensive documentary repositories online, including many periodicals from the nineteenth century. The Azoreana-Azores Digital Heritage website contains a reasonable number of periodical publications from 1831 to 1899 – a total of 2,963 images – that can be searched by decade.²⁵ It is possible to search these newspapers by OCR and to download them. Also of note is the availability of the estate of Francisco de Lacerda (1869–1934) – one of the most distinguished figures in the history of Portuguese music at the turn of the twentieth century, a native of the island of São Jorge, with an international career as composer and conductor, especially in France. These materials are available on the website of the Direcção Regional dos Assuntos Culturais of the Azores.²⁶ In addition to accessing informative texts about the composer and listening to some of his recorded works, one can consult a considerable number of objects that belonged to him, including scores, photographs, programmes and concert posters, which are kept at the Angra do Heroísmo Museum. As for Madeira, the Direcção Regional do Arquivo e Biblioteca has an online database.²⁷ Of particular interest for the study of the period in question is a set of about 30 photographs of musicians and scenes from the musical life of the island. In the educational scope, the Portal de Recursos para a Educação Artística of the Conservatório – Escola Profissional de Artes da Madeira Engenheiro Luiz Peter Clode offers a very small number of scores of Madeiran authors of the nineteenth century, in the ‘Partituras históricas [Historical scores]’ section.²⁸ The download of some of them requires registration on the site.

Other Sources

Two platforms, MatrizPix and MatrizNet, provide access to objects belonging to Portuguese museums, including the Museu Nacional da Música. Geared towards optimizing the process of requesting and lending images in the National Photographic Inventory to the public, MarizPix appears to be a particularly useful tool in the iconographic domain.²⁹ It currently contains hundreds of images, including musical instruments, portraits of music-related personalities, and sheet music belonging to the estate of Alfredo Keil (1850–1907), a multifaceted figure who was both a painter and composer and whose musical production deserves special mention for including the most relevant attempt to create a national opera (with his operas Dona Branca, Irene, and Serrana). Keil was also the author of the Portuguese national anthem and an important collector of musical instruments, many of which are currently in the collection of the Museu Nacional da Música. However, consulting his scores through MarizPix may require some time: since this site was designed to facilitate iconographic research, each of its pages is presented in separate records, which may make it more difficult for users to get an overview of the work they intend to study. One way to search, after entering MatrizPix, is to use the ‘Advanced search’, where you will first find a set of fields focused on the production of the image, i.e. its photographic record, where the user can identify its inventory number (image ID), type of photography and photographer, and then another set focused on its content (object) (see Figs 6a and 6b). There, among other options, you can select the institution/owner of the object you are looking for, as well as the time period you are interested in. If, for example, you choose the institution Museu Nacional da Música and enter in the ‘date period’ field the expression ‘século XIX’, you will be presented with 323 results. However, some of them will not correspond to the desired period, because, by default, all objects whose description includes the word ‘século’ will be listed. Similarly, if instead of entering ‘século XIX’ you fill in this field with a time interval such as ‘1790–1910’, only objects whose description mentions one of these dates will be shown, excluding from the search all those that are between these two dates. For this reason, if you do not know the exact date of each object you are looking for, this field can become an obstacle for the search. Nevertheless, the possibility of requesting the use of images through this platform from the Photographic Documentation Archive of the Direção-Geral do Património Cultural (Directorate General for Cultural Heritage) is particularly useful.

Fig. 6a Advanced search on MatrizPix – Image.

Fig. 6b Advanced Search on MatrizPix – Object.

The MatrizNet platform provides online access to objects from the collections of the museums under the central administration of the Portuguese government, in text, photography, video and sound formats.³⁰ On this site, it is possible, through the ‘oriented research’, to start a search by choosing a theme or date, with the help of a chronological bar. It is not possible however to coordinate these two aspects in this way, so it seems more practical to use the ‘advanced research’, selecting the ‘supercategory’ ‘Art’ and, then, in ‘category’, ‘Instrumentos Musicais (Art)’, ‘Instrumentos Musicais (Arqueologia)’, and ‘Instrumentos Musicais (Etnologia)’. After entering in the period field, in the ‘Years’ option, ‘1790 A.D.–1910 A. D.’, access will be given to 226 records, distributed among the Museu Nacional Machado de Castro, Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, Museu Nacional dos Coches, Museu da Música, Palácio Nacional de Mafra, Palácio Nacional da Pena and Palácio Nacional de Queluz. Of these objects 130 correspond to musical instruments or are scores related to some of these instruments. Special mention should be made of 89 music books with excerpts from opera and dance music for Gavioli & Cie's mechanical organs that belonged to the royal family and are now in the Ajuda Palace's collection.

***

We have offered an overview of various websites, spread throughout the country, that provide useful resources for the study of nineteenth-century music history in Portugal. It should be noted, however, that the vast majority of musical holdings, especially manuscript scores, both from the BNP and from other libraries and archives, have not received any attention of this kind. Although music publishing has never been a flourishing industry in Portugal, with the music trade having relied mainly on imports, there is also a significant number of nineteenth-century scores, especially piano salon music, awaiting digitization.³¹ In contrast, digitized periodicals are somewhat more abundant. Even so, given the intense relations between Portugal and Brazil throughout the nineteenth century, and taking into account the excellent work that the National Library of Rio de Janeiro has been carrying out regarding the digitization of periodicals, the researcher interested in the history of Portuguese music can and should complete his research by consulting the Brazilian digital resources.

The intense development of musicology in Portugal in the last 40 years – following the creation of the first degree course at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 1980, and, since the 1990s, the birth of two major research centres (INET-md and CESEM)³² – has not been accompanied by an investment in digital resources related to nineteenth-century music (or from other periods). As a matter of fact, a not insignificant number of the musical sources that have been made available online so far have been digitized thanks to the funding allocated to research projects, and it is possible that, still in 2023, other projects will help to fill the large gaps still existing in this area. On the part of the public authorities in charge of valuing and modernizing Portuguese heritage, digital promotion of the musical past is not yet a priority.

translated by Manuel Carlos de Brito