Casimiro Júnior, Joaquim

Joaquim Casimiro Júnior (1808-1862), the first son of Joaquim Casimiro da Silva the music copyist and musician of the S. Carlos theatre, was an organist and prolific composer of dramatic and sacred music. According to the composer’s autobiographical reflection (1860), published by Vieira (1900), he was commanded by D. João VI to study with Frei José Marques e Silva. Vieira possessed the lost autograph score of his first significant sacred work, Matinas de S. Antão, composed aged 18, observing that Casimiro Júnior imitated the handwriting of the older master in this manuscript, though examples of his mature hand show that it eventually became somewhat different. The composer states he was imprisoned during the Civil War, and that for a short time after was obliged to emigrate, returning to Portugal only in 1837, though Vieira disputes that he left the country at this time. During the 1840s and 1850s he was a leading composer of stage music. He was also organist of the Sé Patriarcal at a monthly salary of 14$400 réis, before becoming Mestre de Capela (Chapel Master) there in 1860 with a salary of 30$000 réis. Vieira (1900, i, p. 239) opined that he had no equal among Portuguese composers of the nineteenth century (‘nenhum outro dos tempos modernos o egualou’). 

Ernesto Vieira, Diccionario biographico de musicos portuguezes: historia e bibliographia da musica em Portugal, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Typographia Mattos Moreira & Pinheiro, 1900), i, pp. 239-272, ii, pp. 424-6.

António Jorge Marques, A obra religiosa de Marcos António Portugal (1762-1830): catálogo temático, crítica de fontes e de texto, proposta de cronologia (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, 2012), p. 807.