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It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
Since I'm playing Mozart's Requiem next week, I thought it'd be worthwhile to highlight a similar requiem by a lesser-known contemporary, the Brazilian composer José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830).
Like Mozart, Nunes Garcia was a child prodigy. He was born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of free mulattos. Both of his parents were the children of Portuguese colonists and African slaves. He was found to be a precocious singer with a sharp musical memory, and his mother and aunt, with some sacrifice, hired a music teacher to give him formal training. (His father had died when he was very young.) He eventually joined the boys' choir at the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, then the seat of the diocese; the choirboys were enrolled as students at the São Joaquim seminary, and while there Nunes Garcia is said to have taught himself to play the harpsichord and guitar. By the age of 12, he was teaching piano and harpsichord himself, both at the seminary and to society ladies in their homes. By the time he entered the priesthood in 1792, he was considered Rio de Janeiro's leading teacher of piano and guitar, and had become locally famous as a composer for his first symphony and a number of sacred works; a few years later he was the diocese's chapel master.
In 1808, when the Portuguese royal family moved to Rio de Janeiro, the Prince Regent (the future King João VI) requested the celebration of a Te Deum in thanksgiving for the safe voyage from Europe. Nunes Garcia conducted a local orchestra and choir in his own Te Deum written in 1799; the Prince Regent was evidently impressed by the music but not by the players. He moved the court orchestra to Rio de Janeiro, but, over the objections of both the Portuguese priests and the Portuguese musicians, named Nunes Garcia music master of the Royal Chapel. This lifted Nunes Garcia to the peak of his prestige.
Because of pressure put on the Prince Regent by the Portuguese musicians, Nunes Garcia did not hold the position long. Beginning in 1811, he had to share the position with the Portuguese royal family's previous court composer, Marcos Portugal. But the new situation appears to have been financially advantageous for Nunes Garcia. Despite his professed celibacy, he had secretly married and had four children by this time (he would eventually acknowledge his "nephews" and "nieces" as his children two years before his death); while his stipend was more than sufficient to provide for himself as a supposedly celibate priest, he had other mouths to feed, and was deeply in debt. Evidently he welcomed his new-found free time to supplement his income with commissions from outside the royal court and the diocese. The extra income allowed him to pay off his debts by the end of 1811, and the next decade was his most productive period as a composer.
Nunes Garcia's Missa de Mortos comes from this period. The third of four settings of the Requiem Mass that Nunes Garcia produced during his lifetime, it was composed in 1816 as a requiem for Queen Maria I. Two separate funeral masses were celebrated, a private one at the Royal Chapel with a Requiem composed by Marcos Portugal, and a public one for which the Requiem was commissioned from Nunes Garcia. Nunes Garcia evidently had a greater motivation in addition to the commission: his mother had passed away on the same day as the Queen, and was given the same Requiem at her funeral. Stylistically, it bears much in common with Mozart's Requiem and might even be easily mistaken for Mozart, though it could not have been influenced directly by Mozart's final work, the score of which had not yet reached Brazil at the time. This should be rather unsurprising; Nunes Garcia conducted the first Brazilian performances of many of Haydn's and Mozart's works (including the Mozart Requiem in 1819), and while Beethoven had begun to usher in the Romantic period, his music still had limited influence outside Vienna in 1816.
Since I'm playing Mozart's Requiem next week, I thought it'd be worthwhile to highlight a similar requiem by a lesser-known contemporary, the Brazilian composer José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830).
Like Mozart, Nunes Garcia was a child prodigy. He was born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of free mulattos. Both of his parents were the children of Portuguese colonists and African slaves. He was found to be a precocious singer with a sharp musical memory, and his mother and aunt, with some sacrifice, hired a music teacher to give him formal training. (His father had died when he was very young.) He eventually joined the boys' choir at the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, then the seat of the diocese; the choirboys were enrolled as students at the São Joaquim seminary, and while there Nunes Garcia is said to have taught himself to play the harpsichord and guitar. By the age of 12, he was teaching piano and harpsichord himself, both at the seminary and to society ladies in their homes. By the time he entered the priesthood in 1792, he was considered Rio de Janeiro's leading teacher of piano and guitar, and had become locally famous as a composer for his first symphony and a number of sacred works; a few years later he was the diocese's chapel master.
In 1808, when the Portuguese royal family moved to Rio de Janeiro, the Prince Regent (the future King João VI) requested the celebration of a Te Deum in thanksgiving for the safe voyage from Europe. Nunes Garcia conducted a local orchestra and choir in his own Te Deum written in 1799; the Prince Regent was evidently impressed by the music but not by the players. He moved the court orchestra to Rio de Janeiro, but, over the objections of both the Portuguese priests and the Portuguese musicians, named Nunes Garcia music master of the Royal Chapel. This lifted Nunes Garcia to the peak of his prestige.
Because of pressure put on the Prince Regent by the Portuguese musicians, Nunes Garcia did not hold the position long. Beginning in 1811, he had to share the position with the Portuguese royal family's previous court composer, Marcos Portugal. But the new situation appears to have been financially advantageous for Nunes Garcia. Despite his professed celibacy, he had secretly married and had four children by this time (he would eventually acknowledge his "nephews" and "nieces" as his children two years before his death); while his stipend was more than sufficient to provide for himself as a supposedly celibate priest, he had other mouths to feed, and was deeply in debt. Evidently he welcomed his new-found free time to supplement his income with commissions from outside the royal court and the diocese. The extra income allowed him to pay off his debts by the end of 1811, and the next decade was his most productive period as a composer.
Nunes Garcia's Missa de Mortos comes from this period. The third of four settings of the Requiem Mass that Nunes Garcia produced during his lifetime, it was composed in 1816 as a requiem for Queen Maria I. Two separate funeral masses were celebrated, a private one at the Royal Chapel with a Requiem composed by Marcos Portugal, and a public one for which the Requiem was commissioned from Nunes Garcia. Nunes Garcia evidently had a greater motivation in addition to the commission: his mother had passed away on the same day as the Queen, and was given the same Requiem at her funeral. Stylistically, it bears much in common with Mozart's Requiem and might even be easily mistaken for Mozart, though it could not have been influenced directly by Mozart's final work, the score of which had not yet reached Brazil at the time. This should be rather unsurprising; Nunes Garcia conducted the first Brazilian performances of many of Haydn's and Mozart's works (including the Mozart Requiem in 1819), and while Beethoven had begun to usher in the Romantic period, his music still had limited influence outside Vienna in 1816.