Luís de Freitas Branco - Artificial Paradises (1910)

Luís de Freitas Branco

  (Lisbon, 12 October 1890 – Lisbon, 27 November 1955)

was a Portuguese composer, musicologist, and professor of music who played a pre-eminent part

in the development of Portuguese music in the first half of the 20th century.

Artificial Paradises (1910)

Luís de Freitas Branco was born in Lisbon in 1890 where he lived most of the time until his death in 1955. He was the dominant figure in Portuguese music in the first half of the twentieth century, and his four symphonies constitute the essence as well as the culmination of his musical development.

Born into an aristocratic family, with ties to the royal family over many centuries, Luís de Freitas Branco enjoyed a highly sophisticated education, which included studies both in Berlin and then in Paris, where he worked with composers such as Engelbert Humperdinck and Désiré Pâque. He started composing at a very early stage, and his early works reflect the influence of various musical styles which he tried out, until settling for what can be called a neo-classical-romantic style in his four symphonies. An extensive account of the musical environment he found in Lisbon at the beginning of the twentieth century as well as of the composer's career can be found in my notes to the preceding CD of this series. I therefore prefer to limit myself here to recalling the fact that he was active also as a leading force in the restructuring of musical education at the Lisbon Conservatory of Music, and played a significant role as a musicologist.

Artificial Paradises (1910) is generally considered by Portuguese musicians and musicologists as Freitas Branco's masterpiece, above all. Introducing modern music into Portugal for the first time, the work was inspired by the autobiographical essay by Thomas De Quincy (1785--1866) Confessions of an Opium Eater, partially translated into French by Baudelaire in 1860. Few explanations suffice to explain the structure of the work. The tempo is slow, from the beginning to the end. The initial bars played by the violins and pursued by the woodwind contain all musical elements on which the work is based, both in melodic and rhythmical features, as well as in terms of the harmonic exploitation of polytonality. This is achieved by the superimposition of different chords, as is clearly the case of the ending, where a C major chord in the high register is added to an A flat major chord in the lower.