Joly Braga Santos

“Mad? No, absent-minded!”¹ — This was the title chosen by journalist João Aguiar for an interview with Joly Braga Santos, published in the newspaper O País on April 30, 1982. In it, we discover that, despite a natural talent for being run over (by then, nine such incidents were counted), the composer’s incorrigible absent-mindedness was, in fact, a defence mechanism: a way to avoid everyday worries, to access a sonic world that perhaps helps explain the precocity and profuseness of his musical genius. Or, at least, it contributes to the mythological construction of one who is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century, especially in symphonic and operatic production.
Born on May 14, 1924, in Lisbon, Joly Braga Santos’s relationship with music began from an early age and in the domestic sphere, thanks to his father, an accountant and amateur musician. It was he who offered him a violin, to which the young Joly would pay more attention than to any toy. By the time José Manuel Joly Braga Santos finished primary school, no one doubted that music was what the boy should dedicate his studies to.
He entered the Conservatório Nacional in 1936, where he began by studying violin and then piano. At the same institution, he enrolled in 1941 in the Higher Composition Course, where he showed himself particularly virtuosic from an early age. It was also there that he met Luís de Freitas Branco, with whom he would have private lessons in composition and musical sciences; a figure who would become his “master” and exert a great influence on Braga Santos’s aesthetic and musical thinking.
In 1947, after the premiere of his Abertura Sinfónica I at the Teatro Nacional São Carlos, he was invited to join the Gabinete de Estudos Musicais of the Emissora Nacional (EN), where he remained until the department was abolished in 1954. The following year, he was among the founders of the Juventude Musical Portuguesa, alongside Humberto d’Ávila, João de Freitas Branco, Maria Elvira Barroso, Filipe de Sousa and Nuno Barreiros, among others.
Meanwhile, in 1948, he received a scholarship from the Instituto de Alta Cultura to take an International Conducting Course with Hermann Scherchen in Venice, where he met, for example, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono. In the following decade, he would receive another scholarship, moving temporarily to Rome, where he studied with Virgilio Mortari, Gioacchino Pasquali and again with Scherchen, this time in Switzerland.
At the age of 26, he had already composed his first four symphonies and was preparing to compose his first opera: Viver ou Morrer (1952), a radio work composed with a libretto by João de Freitas Branco to compete for the Prix Italia prize, which would premiere at the TNSC in 1956.
Later, in Italy, he began writing a new opera, Mérope, based on the play of the same name by Almeida Garrett, which would again premiere at the TNSC in 1959. This moment already corresponds to a more conscious interest in the musical-theatrical genre, seeking in the classically inspired story foundations for the construction of an operatic expression that would be simultaneously modern and timeless.
His masterpiece, in terms of the operatic genre, would only arrive, however, at the end of the following decade, in 1970: A Trilogia das Barcas, based on Gil Vicente. It corresponds to the evolution in his writing that occurs especially from the 1960s onwards, in which, without abandoning internal clarity and formal structure, the composer abandons traditional tonal centres in favour of polymodalism and symmetrical harmonies, developing melodies using chromaticism and diatonicism. From this phase comes the 5th Symphony, which earned Joly Braga Santos the UNESCO International Composition Prize (1969).
Joly Braga Santos assumed the role of assistant recording conductor at the Emissora Nacional, where he worked closely with conductors Silva Pereira and Álvaro Cassuto (one of the main figures responsible for the dissemination and discographic recording of Joly Braga Santos’s work); as a conductor, he was responsible for promoting avant-garde music such as that of Krzysztof Penderecki and Jorge Peixinho; he was a critic in magazines such as Arte Musical and newspapers such as O Século and Diário de Manhã, a lecturer and pedagogue; he oversaw the reformulation of the musical training discipline at the Conservatório Nacional, where he taught between 1972-76 and 1987-88.