The Greatest Composers You really Never Heard Of . . .

In today’s political climate of white supremacy and racial animosities, it’s painful to read about past ages that were even worse than we are at treating “people of color” with respect and dignity.  In the Brazil of the early nineteenth century, even the Catholic Church was on the racist bandwagon.  Classist too.  Its rules for those who wished to be ordained to the priesthood included requirements that the candidate be firmly in the Catholic faith (his parents as well), and that he be an “estate owner” (meaning, apparently, that he had to have at least a house of his own) – and that he be free from “any color defect” (that one needing no further explanation).  Brazil, like the US at the time, was a slave-society, and the slaves were, like ours, black Africans.  They could sometimes achieve freedom, but the prejudice against them from the white Portuguese elite remained intractable.

In 1767, in Rio de Janeiro, to two freed slaves of mixed racial heritage (probably children of their former masters),  Vitoria Maria da Cruz and Apolinaria Nunes Garcia, was born in 1767 a son called Jose’ Mauricio, who was of a precocious musical talent.  His father being a tailor, there was some little money to give the boy a bit of musical education.  He joined the Cathedral’s choir as a soprano, and there learned to read music, Latin and Greek.  He was said to have a beautiful voice and, like Mozart and many another child prodigy, could reproduce everything he heard.  He began to teach music when he was only 12, and later attended public lectures on history, geography, philosophy and rhetoric.

 Since the choir was a sort of farm-team for the local seminary, Jose’ eventually took the examinations for that office and passed.  He was given a house in the city by the rich father of one of his students, and requested an exemption to the “color” requirement – which, surprisingly, was granted, perhaps because he had already gained a certain standing in society with his teaching and compositions.  These were almost exclusively religious in nature,  being masses, settings of canticles like the Magnificat and the Te Deum, a funeral service, motets, antiphons.  He also attempted a few popular works, several songs and two “overtures’, one to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and one called Zemira.  Despite being the Master of the Chapel Royal during the residence of Portuguese royalty in Brazil (while war was going on back home), he was not allowed to play in public because of his “visible defect” – but was honored nonetheless by both the king and the public for his gorgeous music and prolific output.

 Although a priest and later a brother of the Order of Our Lady of the Rosary (whose church functioned as the Cathedral) , Nunes Garcia did not live a celibate life, and he and his common-law wife (another free mixed-race person) had five children, the oldest of whom, named for his father, became his musical heir.  He died in 1830, attended by this son and one of his own slaves, in a bed on the first floor of his house, where he had himself moved “so as not to bother anyone”.   After his death his many compositions remained in the repertoire of the Cathedral, several local monasteries, and eventually spread throughout Brazil.  In the ensuing centuries his reputation has only grown; and when one of his pupils composed the Brazilian national anthem, he was inspired  by a characteristic motif from Nunes Garcia’s own sacred anthems.

 So the former slave was not forgotten in his homeland, and he left a legacy of beautifully-composed classical music in the forms known and loved in his time and beyond.  In recent years, as our culture attempts to retrieve “black history”, Nunes Garcia has taken his place as one of the New World’s musical treasures.  In our concert on September 15, the PIP will play his overture to The Tempest – a fitting introduction to another great composer most of us have never heard of – but will now!