Viver ou Morrer

Joly Braga Santos’s first foray into the operatic genre was, in fact and as the composer would later acknowledge, via an “opera-oratorio” that was never staged. The absence of its “theatrical” dimension is largely due to its radio genesis. It was with radio in mind, specifically the Prix Italia, founded in 1948 by members of the European Broadcasting Union, that Viver ou Morrer was composed in 1952, with a libretto by João de Freitas Branco. The work, with a simple plot based on the play Bury the Dead by the American Irwin Shaw and using two narrators, a male chorus and solo voices, did not win the prize, which that year was awarded to Le joueur de flûte by Marius Constant (France) and Lord Inferno by Giorgio Federico Ghedini (Italy). But it allowed Braga Santos to expand his repertoire into the dramatic genre, seeking “to counter the crisis of contemporary opera, which would stem, about the musical language used, from the ‘disdain of a large part of modern composers for an entity necessary to every artist: the Public’,” as he would say in an interview.²

In 1956, a concert celebrating the coup d’état of May 28, 1926, which ended the First Republic, allowed Joly Braga Santos to revisit his radio opera, introducing significant differences to the score for its then public premiere in a concert version. The musicologist Edward Ayres de Abreu explains that “the differences from the version recorded in 1952 are substantial, starting with the libretto, which is considerably truncated, and which is close to a typescript version found in the estate of Joly Braga Santos’s heirs, dated 26 February 1952, in which the two declaimers – a male war reporter and a reflective female poetic voice – become just one – the female voice – thus losing the interest of the dialogues and the critical and ingenious characterisation of these participants.”³

Braga Santos also added, in the concert version, a symphonic overture, whose disproportionate length occupied almost a quarter of the entire opera. This overture, which would later disappear again in a radio broadcast, adds to the doubts about its definitive version. The reason for the changes is also not evident, especially since the work retains the narration and its original duration.

The premiere was well received by the public, despite some ambivalence from the critics. In aesthetic terms, the work is in line with Braga Santos’s earlier compositions, notably his first four symphonies, still under the strong influence of Freitas Branco and characterised by a modal idiom, with relatively simple and clear harmony, in contrast to the avant‑garde currents then being heard in the rest of Europe.

In 1959, Joly Braga Santos would again write for radio, again in the context of a proposal for the Prix Italia, composing A estação, based on a short story by Fialho de Almeida, which, unlike Viver ou Morrer, contains no sung parts and is for that reason designated by the composer as a “radio story”.