Augusto Machado

Augusto Machado was born in Lisbon on December 27, 1845, into a wealthy family of merchants, and revealed musical talent from an early age. He began his studies in Lisbon, where he learned piano with the brothers Emílio and João Guilherme Daddi and studied harmony with the composer Joaquim Casimiro Júnior. In 1867, he travelled to Paris as a member of the Portuguese expedition to the Universal Exposition and continued his training in the French capital with Albert Lavignac. Back in Lisbon, he manifested growing dissatisfaction with the strong Italian influence that dominated Portuguese musical life and, in 1873, returned to Paris, where he came into contact with composers such as Jules Massenet and Camille Saint-Saëns, whose aesthetic would prove decisive in defining his musical language¹.

Returning to Portugal, Augusto Machado sought to invest in the composition of dramatic music and to continue his work in the operetta genre, which he had begun with the presentation of O Sol de Navarra at the Teatro da Trindade in 1870. Throughout the 1870s, the composer refined his technique and premiered five more operettas at the same theatre: A Cruz de Ouro (1873), O Degelo (1875), Os Frutos de Ouro (1876), A Guitarra (1878) and Maria da Fonte (1879). Alongside this work, Machado sought to venture into larger projects: he began composing his first opera, Lauriane, in 1876, and wrote his first choral-symphonic work, the Ode Sinfónica Camões e os Lusíadas, in 1880. The latter was awarded a prize at the Milan Musical Exposition the following year, paving the way for Machado to premiere his opera at that city’s Grand Théâtre two years later³.

In the following decades, Machado alternated between composing operas for the Teatro de São Carlos and producing operettas for the Teatro da Trindade, the Teatro da Avenida and the Teatro D. Amélia⁴. After Lauriane, which demonstrated a clear French orientation, his new operas used Italian librettos. However, they “fully confirmed the modern orientation of their author […] where the divorce from Italian opera is complete, through their approach to lyric drama”⁵. I Doria, with a libretto by Ghislanzoni – author of the text for Verdi’s Aïda – was premiered at São Carlos on January 15, 1887; Mario Wetter, with a libretto by Leoncavallo, was presented on February 7, 1898; and La Borghesina was heard at the same theatre in 1909⁶.

A central figure in Portuguese musical life of his time, Augusto Machado held several important institutional positions. He was a singing teacher and director of the Conservatório Nacional between 1901 and 1910 – and again between 1918 and 1919 – as well as a counsellor at the Ministry of Education and government representative at the Teatro de São Carlos⁷. The composer died on March 26, 1924, leaving behind a body of work praised by several figures in the musical world, such as Fernando Lopes-Graça, who describes Machado as “the most gifted, most cultured, most experienced, most talented Portuguese composer of dramatic music, in a word, of recent times”⁸.