Gazeta musical

Gazeta Musical was a small bimonthly music journal published for almost two years, between February 1884 and January 1886, for a total of 45 issues. It had a clean graphic image and strict structure of content with very few alterations throughout the entire run. Each issue had four pages with three columns, displaying a portrait of the artist or composer featured in the opening article of the journal and a set of scores. Some of the portraits were made by the painter Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro; the scores were primarily light music for piano (polkas, waltzes, marches, etc.) by nineteenth-century composers and music teachers probably less known today, such as Franz Abt, Franz Xaver Chwatal, Clemens Schultz, Franz Behr, or Albert Jungmann. It also published some transcriptions and arrangements of excepts of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Gluck, Chopin, and Mozart, and some works by Josephine Amann, including a galop with the curious title Gazette Musicale. Most of the scores were published in collaboration with the Litolff publishing house. During the second year the journal also published copies of manuscripts (scores and letters) of great composers as a gift to the readers.

Josephine Weinlich-Amann (1848-1887), editor of Gazeta Musical, was a pianist, conductor and composer. She conducted the New Viennese Ladies’ Orchestra, playing in several countries, and was the first women to conduct an orchestra professionally in Portugal. She resided in Lisbon with her husband Ebo Amann, a music impresario, and her sister Elise Weinlich, a cellist, after she become ill while travelling from Europe to the South America. In Lisbon, Weinlich-Amann was given the opportunity to conduct the orchestra of the Associação 24 de Junho, but was replaced after a few months, possibly due to the resistance of the male dominated music scene. She would then dedicate herself to teaching piano, a more feminine activity for the nineteenth-century mentality, and to composition of piano works that appeared in Gazeta Musical and in the magazine O Mundo Artístico. In the journal Gazeta Musical, financially supported by Ebo Amann, she was the music editor, probably responsible for the selection and edition of the scores that were published.

Higino Augusto da Costa Paulino (1868-1926) occupied the position of literary editor of Gazeta Musical. Little is known about this figure, or about his connection with the Amann couple. However, it appears that he had connections with the theatrical world, maybe as a writer, being mentioned in an article about the Teatro Taborda among other figures that appeared in that theatre (Olisipo, January 1960). He worked as engineer and would later migrate to Goa (India) around 1890, returning to Lisbon latter in life. He is credited as the principal writer of Gazeta Musical, signing the biographical articles (as “Gino”), music criticism (as “Delio”) and chronicles (as “Petrus” and “Petrus Senior”). The identification of the pseudonyms is revealed in the last issue.

The journal sections were organized around articles, opera reviews and news, with the addition of recreational sections: “Album” with poems, “Bijouterias” with curiosities and anecdotes, “Aguarellas” with small texts, and “Scentelhas” with a selection of phrases and thought attributed to writers, philosophers, artists, and other historical personalities. Each issue opened with the biographical note of composers and musicians, mostly contemporary singers and pianists (and also an obituary of the writer Victor Hugo), followed by the opera section with reviews of the opera season from the Teatro de São Carlos. The final pages were occupied by two similar sections, “Estrangeiro”, of news from several European music centres, taken from other journals or given by correspondents, and “Mosaico”, of short news about the musical and theatre activities from Europe and the American continent. The journal showed a particular interest in the careers of great stars of the time, such as the soprano Adelina Patti and the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and in the value of the salaries demanded by them for each performance, concerns close to a music impresario like Ebo Amann.

Gazeta Musical appeared in a time of transformation of the Portuguese musical life, with the growth of public concerts, the cultivation of chamber music and the symphonic culture, in connection to the creation of musical societies, such as the Orpheon Portuense (1881), and institutions like the Academia de Amadores de Música (1884). However, one questions why these are missing in the pages of the journal – for instance, it reviewed only two concerts of the Academia de Amadores de Música’s orchestra. Instead, it favoured the operatic field and the presence of opera companies and operetta in the Teatro de São Carlos, the Coliseu de Lisboa and the Recreios Whittoyne. Even Portuguese music isn’t prioritized by the journal, besides the review of the new opera by Augusto Machado or the ascending lyrical career of the brothers António de Andrade and Francisco de Andrade. Despite this, Gazeta Musical is a true example of the Portuguese music journalism of the second half of the nineteenth-century, open to the outside and interested in the musical activities from France, Italy, Germany and other countries, with anecdotes and biographical articles, and the distribution of scores for the musical practice of amateurs.

The RIPM Index was made from the copies digitized by the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.