Organ-making and organistic practice in Portugal in the 19h century: between tradition and modernity

The evolution of the Iberian organ – apart from the differences inherent in the Spanish and Portuguese organ traditions – shares a fairly common path between the 1730s and the 1780s, when the Portuguese organ ended up inexorably distancing itself from the Spanish organ-making tradition. Master organists such as António Xavier Machado e Cerveira (1756-1828) and Joaquim António Peres Fontanes (1750-1818) – and, still to be properly recognised, Manuel de Sá Couto (1768-1837) – were the main driving forces behind an unmistakably Portuguese way of conceiving the organ, influenced by some of the phonic and mechanical resources of the contemporary Italian organ, interpreted in Portugal in a genuinely autochthonous way, whether on the mainland, on the islands or in the Luso-American overseas territories. This organ orientation, the continuity of which was drastically interrupted in Lisbon with the death of Peres Fontanes, Machado, and Cerveira and the advent of the Liberal Wars, nevertheless persisted in the Azores and the north of the country, constituting an authentic organ school that remained in force until the end of the 1880s. The coeval organ repertoire, whose musical production showed a sharp decline from the 1830s onwards, was strongly supported by the modern Italian symphonic-operatic style, also evident in Spanish organ music. Based on philological, organological, iconographic and musical documentary sources, this project aims to study the art of organ making and organ practice in Portugal and, by extension, in Brazil, during the 19th century, focusing particularly on historically informed instrumental practice and its inseparable relationship with organ making, always in the light of a broader correlated context – whether Italian or Spanish – that can elucidate any gaps in the Portuguese tradition, with special attention to the northern Portuguese organ scene of the 19th century, which still lacks systematic research to match the relevance of the remaining instrumental corpus.