Trilogia das Barcas

Premiered in 1970, A Trilogia das Barcas resulted from a commission from the Music Service of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, still in the aftermath of the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the playwright Gil Vicente, held in 1965. Conducted by the Italian maestro Gianfranco Rivoli, with staging by the Frenchman Jacques Luccioni, Joly Braga Santos’s opera was the first work to be performed at the XIV Gulbenkian Music Festival, on May 8, mobilising great attention from the national artistic milieu and the political elite. The critics of the time mention the presence of the President of the Republic, Américo Tomás, and his family.

“The verses of Gil Vicente, due to the richness of their vocabulary, the rhythm and sonority of the language, can determine a musical style of their own,” wrote the composer, who, after his experience with Garrett, sought in Gil Vicente a way to solve the problem of contemporary opera, leaving behind the “ ‘musico‑theatrical experiments’ of expressionism and impressionism, ‘which led to no way out for the future’.”¹

The score reflects the writing of a mature composer, at the height of his creative and expressive capacities, capable of a synthesis of the aesthetic concerns that normally divide his work into two periods. And, indeed, Braga Santos would come to consider A Trilogia das Barcas as his most important composition.

In addition to a high number of soloists and the orchestral forces (which had to be readjusted for a chamber orchestra), the work requires two choruses, one integrated into the orchestra pit, the other placed either offstage or in the scenic space itself, both playing a decisive role as a means of commentary and amplification of the drama. Already with the opera in rehearsal, the composer decided to add a concrete music prologue: an introduction on magnetic tape, about four minutes long, constructed from the manipulation of sound materials of orchestral origin.

Braga Santos would replace this prologue with an orchestral overture when the work was first presented at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in 1979, under his baton and with staging by Paolo Trevisi. In 1988, the work was revived again. And in 2024, the year in which the centenary of Braga Santos’s birth was celebrated, the work was again staged in a semi‑staged version, under the stage direction of Luca Aprea and orchestral direction of José Eduardo Gomes.