Events

• Prof. Dr Manuel Pedro Ferreira, President of the Committee (CESEM, NOVA FCSH)
• Prof. Dr Judith Ortega (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
• Prof. Dr Rui Vieira Nery (INET-md, NOVA FCSH)
• Prof. Dr João Pedro d'Alvarenga (CESEM, NOVA FCSH)
• Prof. Dr David Cranmer (CESEM, NOVA FCSH)
• Prof. Dr Vanda de Sá (CESEM, Universidade de Évora)
• Prof. Dr Elisa Lessa (CEHUM, Universidade do Minho)
• Dr Ricardo Bernardes (independent researcher)

António Tedeschi (Villa di Briano, Aversa 1702 – Lisbon, 1770) was a Neapolitan priest hired by the Royal and Patriarchal Chapel of John V of Portugal in 1733. He served this institution as a singer and composer. Shortly after his arrival in Portugal, he joined the Academia dos Aplicados, publishing neo-Latin and Italian poetry. He was also involved in the adaptation of operatic librettos imported from Vienna, at the request of Queen Maria Anna of Habsburg, as well as in the creation of original dramatic poetry, set to music by the composer Francisco António de Almeida in a fruitful collaboration. After the 1755 Earthquake he became one of the limited number of musicians assigned to the Ajuda Royal Chapel, for which he wrote most of his compositions. His surviving musical output includes eighty-two compositions, all of them vocal, sacred, and with organ/basso continuo accompaniment. Most of them are preserved in the Lisbon Cathedral Archive, but several others are held in various Portuguese and also Italian libraries and archives. Tedeschi left works in almost all liturgical genres in use at the time, and in the main compositional styles used in the Portuguese Royal Chapel, with particular emphasis on the stile concertato. Tedeschi deserved the recognition of his contemporaries, such as the theorist Francisco Inácio Solano, and several of his works were used at the Patriarchal Music School. Some of his compositions survive in multiple sources and remained in the repertoire until the middle of the 19th century, both at the Cathedral of Lisbon and at the circle of the Counts of Redondo. However, the memory of both composer and librettist ended up disappearing in the 20th century. This dissertation is the first academic work dedicated exclusively to him. It is divided into three parts: the first is a biographical sketch; the second lists and describes the musical sources; and the third constitutes a descriptive analysis of the totality of his musical work, in which the text-music relationship is prioritized from the perspective of musical rhetoric. A working (non-critical) edition of the music and a transcription of the most important archival documentation are given as appendices. This work reveals Tedeschi as a competent artist, who mastered his métier with certainty and inventiveness, through a coherent and meticulous approach to composition, particularly attentive to the relationship between text and music. He successfully handles a rich harmonic, melodic and rhetorical vocabulary. Tedeschi's career provides a good example of the intense cultural and artistic exchange between Portugal and Italy throughout much of the 18^th century, and underlines the collaborative role of this process among figures hitherto somewhat neglected, whether they be leading ones, such as queen Maria Anna, or secondary but no less essential actors, such as this author. This dissertation is, therefore, a case study, which seeks to describe and understand how a particular individual could actively contribute, on several fronts, to the establishment in Portugal of the innovative artistic model of an Italian and, above all, Roman matrix, according to the ambitious policies and aesthetic ideas of king John V, which inaugurated a new chapter in Portuguese cultural life.