António Leal Moreira

António Leal Moreira was a figure of particular significance in Portuguese musical life in the second half of the 18th century. He was born in Abrantes on June 3, 1758, and at the age of eight began his studies with the composer João de Sousa Carvalho at the Patriarchal Seminary, alongside Marcos Portugal. In 1775, after completing his training, Leal Moreira became a teacher and organist at the same institution, beginning a compositional career that encompassed both sacred and dramatic music¹.

Alongside his pedagogical activity, Leal Moreira composed several works for the Portuguese court, being particularly close to the reign of Queen Maria I. In 1777, he wrote a Missa do Espírito Santo for the queen’s acclamation ceremony and, in 1816, he assumed musical direction and composed some of the works produced for the monarch’s funeral rites at the Estrela Basilica². Between these two ceremonies, throughout the reign of Queen Maria I, Leal Moreira produced several court serenatas — a genre much cultivated in this period and close to opera, which did not require staging and was associated with the commemoration of specific dynastic events, whose protagonists are directly or indirectly mentioned in the libretto³.

From the 1790s onwards, following the queen’s incapacitation, the composer turned his attention to activities outside the court sphere. In 1790, he assumed the direction of the Teatro da Rua dos Condes and, three years later, became the first musical director of the newly inaugurated Teatro Nacional de São Carlos⁴. During his time at the Teatro da Rua dos Condes, he was responsible for the musical direction of comic operas and was thus in direct contact with the dramatic repertoire of some of the most renowned Italian composers of his time, such as Giovanni Paisiello and Domenico Cimarosa⁵. Later, at the helm of São Carlos, he continued the work he had developed at the Rua dos Condes, primarily promoting the performance of Italian comic operas. There, he saw several dramatic compositions of his own presented, namely two farces in Portuguese, with texts by Domingos Caldas Barbosa — A saloia namorada (1793) and A vingança da cigana (1794) — as well as the opera L’eroina lusitana, of which only the overture in piano reduction and the libretto, signed by Gaetano Martinelli, survive⁶.

When Marcos Portugal returned to the country in 1799, Leal Moreira ceded his position as director of the Teatro de São Carlos to him and began to devote himself almost exclusively to teaching at the Patriarchal Seminary and to composing sacred music⁷. Among the works from this final period of activity, two masses written for the Basilica of Mafra in 1807 stand out, in which the six organs then in operation are used. Shortly afterwards, between 1808 and 1810, Leal Moreira was called upon to participate in the Peninsular Wars provoked by the French invasions, an experience that caused him health problems and likely contributed to a decline in his artistic output; the composer died in 1819⁸.