In late June 1809, as war raged in the Iberian Peninsula, Marcos Portugal wrote an eloquent self-portrait describing his career and output. It took the form of a list of compositions. The autograph vanished around the late nineteenth century, but not before its contents were transcribed and published (‘Marcos e José Mauricio. Catalogo de suas composições musicaes’, Revista Trimensal do Instituto Historico Geographico e Ethnographico do Brasil 22 (1859), 487–506). The document lists the works he composed ‘since HRH the Prince Regent decided to employ him in his Royal Service, specifying compositions for the Church, both with instruments and a cappella, and theatre music both in Lisbon and Italy, where the said composer went twice with explicit licence’ from the king (488; my translation). Although the list reflects the composer's retrospective look at his work shortly before joining the royal family in Rio de Janeiro, it does not include the totality of his compositions up to that date. Moreover, Portugal continued to work on it after moving to Brazil, notating entries up to 1816. This document has subsequently informed three essential works on this Portuguese composer, the first one being the forty-page entry on Marcos Portugal in Ernesto Vieira, Diccionario Biographico de Musicos Portuguezes (Lisbon: Mattos Moreira & Pinheiro, 1900, volume 2, 191–230), which also contains a transcription of the list. In 1910, Manoel Carvalhaes published Marcos Portugal na sua Música Dramática (Lisbon: Castro Irmão; a supplement was published in 1916), a study of his theatrical music that remains unmatched. This was the area that brought international, albeit short-lived, recognition to Marcos Portugal. This book also consolidated the perception that he was above all an opera composer, reflected in virtually all dictionary entries and reference articles on the musician produced in the past century. Carvalhaes's book was followed by a handful of essays of diverse length and quality, but it took a hundred years for another landmark publication to appear, now addressing systematically the composer's sacred music. In his monumental A obra religiosa de Marcos António Portugal António Jorge Marques reveals that religious music constituted the largest portion of the composer's output, brought him social relevance and royal support, and provided him with well-paid jobs. Unlike his theatrical works, religious music by Portugal maintained its functionality well beyond his death, continuing to be performed, copied and adapted until the early twentieth century.
Marques's more than one-thousand-page book contains three main sections: (i) a 379-page thematic catalogue of the religious music, (ii) a 341-page musicological narrative, offering insights on history, methods and source criticism, and (iii) 327 pages of reference material. This nearly symmetrical elegance is broken by two factors, the first being that the catalogue does not consist of a section by itself, but is sandwiched between chapters four and six of the musicological narrative. The second factor is that the 243 pages of appendices are not printed in the book, but included on an enclosed CD-ROM. This turns out to be an excellent feature, as it provides researchers with access to colour photographs in fairly good definition and in a portable format.
Each section of the catalogue corresponds to one or more genres of religious music, often reflecting the organization of the composer's autograph list: (1) masses, (2) vespers/psalms/Magnificat, (3) matins/responsories, (4) thanksgiving ceremonies/hymns, (5) religious varia and (RE) doubtful/spurious/contrafacta. That the abbreviation ‘RE’ stands for ‘religious’ and not ‘refused’ is implied by a footnote in which Marques suggests ‘PR’ for a similar section on ‘profane’ music in a hypothetical extension of the catalogue. Within each section works are arranged in alphabetical order and after that, when necessary, by key signature. The author uses a multi-level numbering system in which the first number refers to the section/genre and the second number to the specific work. A third number may also be added, referring to the individual sections of a given work. A similar system is found in Michael F. Robinson, Giovanni Paisiello: A Thematic Catalogue of His Works (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1991–1994) and also in Christine D. de Catanzaro and Werner Rainer, Anton Cajetan Adlgasser (1729–1777): A Thematic Catalogue of His Works (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2000). This system allows a great deal of flexibility, with the possibility of adding new works and sections. The only caveat is that if new works are added, the existing order of the respective sections or entries is likely to be disrupted.
Each entry contains a variety of data including, but not restricted to, complete title, liturgical placement or religious feast, authorship and features of each version, date of composition or first performance, commission and dedication, voices, characters, instrumentation and location of each source. Most entries also provide paper dimensions and watermarks. For each work or version of a work by Portugal there is an incipit on one or two staves as well as informative historical and philological notes, ranging from a few lines to more than two pages. The narrative portion of the book is framed by a literature review in lieu of introduction (chapter 1) and a conclusion offering pointers for future research (chapter 7). One of the internal divisions (chapter 5) is the catalogue discussed above, while the other four are historical and methodological essays. Chapter 2 consists of a biographical sketch that clarifies many of the doubts and misunderstandings that pervade the literature on the composer. Chapter 3 examines the composer's autograph list of works as a first step towards organizing his catalogue. Two essays of a more technical nature complete this portion of the book. Chapter 4 is a critical analysis of the primary sources, with useful information on archives, autograph manuscripts, copyists, papermaking, watermarks, and the composer's calligraphy and signatures, as well as a general view of the many versions and variants. This last aspect is developed in Chapter 6, which concentrates on the dissemination and reception of two of Portugal's most popular works.
One of the most gratifying aspects of the book is the quality of the reference material. Luso-Brazilian music scholars, particularly those working with archival research, will benefit immensely from the appendices when studying the calligraphy and paper used by copyists who worked in Portugal and Brazil during the late eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth. Marques has been generous enough to organize and disclose his working tools as PDF files so that we can all carry them on our laptops and other portable devices while doing archival research. Given such a display of generosity, it would be churlish to observe that a copy of the catalogue could have been included on the same disk.
Marques is not shy about his opinion that Portugal's religious music is ‘much superior to the operatic’ (721, note 8; my translation). He even suggests that a complete catalogue of Portugal's music should include one single section for the totality of his theatrical music (including opere serie and buffe, entremezes, farças and cantatas), as opposed to the five sections reserved for religious works (313, note 13). Rather than partiality, these passages reflect how focused he is on his research, which is also corroborated by the multiplicity of skills from different disciplines that Marques has had to master in order to deal competently with issues of authenticity, origin, chronology and functionality raised by the 788 specimens of religious music, from 91 institutions in 12 countries, which he has catalogued in this work.
A obra religiosa de Marcos António Portugal is now an indispensable work for any musicologist working with Portuguese and Brazilian music from the 1770s to the 1850s. Performers and editors of the music of this composer will certainly check this catalogue for contextual information on the origin and reception of his works. Scholars of musical manuscripts who are interested in southern Europe and Latin America during this period may also benefit from the wealth of methodological considerations and information on papermaking, watermarks and music copying.
