Luiz Costa: In Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of His Death

Christine Beirão,Henrique L Gomes De Araújo

doi:10.7559/citarj.v2i1.16

Abstract

This text is dedicated to the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the composer, pianist and teacher Luiz Costa (S. Pedro do Monte de Fralaes, 1879 – Porto, 1960). The preface begins by clarifying the meaning of commemoration as a ritual. The text is divided into two parts. The first, anthropologic in nature, undertakes the problems involved in the construction of the identity of Luiz Costa as a person and as an artist within the more general question of this construction emerging from the anthropological themes of birth, suffering, love and death. The second, musicological part demonstrates that events and circumstances in the life of an artist can leave their marks on his works. Some characteristic compositions of Luiz Costa are analysed with the intention to gain information about the mind and character of the man and the artist that he was.

Highlights

Sources about the Life and Personality of Luiz Costa The informations given in booklets of CDs containing works of Luiz Costa, or those about his life and work, seem to have been taken from one or two sources only
What is so amazing about the parallels between the two pieces is the fact that two composers who very probably did not know each other and each other’s compositions, [41] have found a similar and absolutely unusual way of musical expression in a situation of great distress at about the same time. (Messiaen had composed his work during the winter of 1941/42, being a prisoner of war in a Silesian camp.) While Messiaen gives the interpreters and listeners a hint of the contents of his composition by its poetic title, the slow movement in Luiz Costa’s Sonata is entitled ‘Adagio’
Music critics and writers who have been writing hitherto about the music of Luiz Costa, agree in the point that its character is bucolic, nostalgic or melancholic, explaining this fact with the composer’s love for the nature of the region where he was born, which he used as a source of inspiration

Summary

Introduction

Sources about the Life and Personality of Luiz Costa The informations given in booklets of CDs containing works of Luiz Costa, or those about his life and work, seem to have been taken from one or two sources only. [12] By which processes can the construction of the identity of a composer from Porto and the Baixo-Minho, as is the case of Luiz Costa in the first half of the twentieth century, be verified?

Results

Conclusion