Marcos Portugal

Marcos António da Fonseca Portugal (24 March 1762 – 17 February 1830), known in Italy as Marco Portogallo, was a Portuguese and Brazilian classical composer, organist and music teacher. His comic operas were staged in Italy and across Europe during the 1790s and early nineteenth century. In Portugal and Brazil, his sacred music was more familiar than his stage works.

Portugal entered the Royal Patriarchal Music Seminary at the age of nine and was appointed organist of the Patriarchal Church in 1782. He wrote Portuguese-language comic theater for the Teatro do Salitre before leaving for Italy in 1792. Between 1793 and 1800 he composed twenty-one operas for Italian theaters. Back in Lisbon, he became a music director at the Teatro de São Carlos, taught at the Patriarchal Seminary and wrote for the royal household. Prince Regent John summoned him to Rio de Janeiro in 1811, where he served as Master and Composer of the Royal Chamber and taught the royal children. Portugal stayed in Rio after the king returned to Lisbon in 1821. He became a Brazilian citizen under the 1824 constitution and continued to serve Pedro I and the imperial family until his death.

His catalog contains more than seventy dramatic works, including about forty operas. He wrote short Portuguese comedies and intermezzos, followed by Italian comic operas and serious works for São Carlos. The comic operas circulated most widely, often in translated or altered versions, while singers carried individual arias into concerts. His sacred output runs from the Miserere he composed at fourteen to a Missa breve written for the Brazilian imperial household in 1824. Portugal also composed modinhas, music for dynastic and political occasions, and singing and keyboard exercises for his royal pupils.

Portugal's operas had largely left the repertory by the 1820s, but his church music continued in use into the early twentieth century. Nineteenth-century writers passed down errors about his life and cast him as the jealous Portuguese rival of the Brazilian composer José Maurício Nunes Garcia. Music at the Rio court was divided among the chapel, chamber and theater, and no evidence establishes a personal feud between the two men. Work in archives and new thematic catalogs has corrected errors passed down from those biographies. Critical editions and new productions have also brought some of Portugal's sacred and dramatic music back to concert halls and theaters.

Read more about this composer on Wikipedia.