Porto, António Felizardo

António Felizardo Porto (1796-1863) was a bass singer, music director, theatre manager, teacher and music copyist. In 1806, aged 9 or 10, he was selected by D. João VI among children of the Vila Viçosa royal chapel to enter the Real Seminário de Música da Patriarcal de Lisboa. In 1810 or earlier he was in Rio de Janeiro with the exiled royal court, on one occasion performing as a soloist in a revised version of Marcos Portugal’s Matinas de Sexta Feira Santa (MarP 03.15) (Marques 2012, pp. 213, 575). For health reasons he was retired in 1821 by D. Pedro, who cited his ‘good services’. Upon his return to Portugal in 1822 he became associated with the S. Carlos theatre but as a liberal was persecuted under D. Miguel (1828-1834), serving in this period as a music teacher to the future D. Maria II in London. He was appointed as a singing teacher at the music conservatory (Conservatório de Música) established in 1835. In later years he travelled to Italy to recruit singers for the S. Carlos theatre, and, in the 1850s, was briefly active in Brazil once more to manage the Lyrico Fluminense theatre in Rio de Janeiro.

Alberto Pacheco and Cristina Fernandes, ‘Porto, António Felizardo’, Dicionário Biográfico do Núcleo Caravelas do CESEM/NOVA FCSH (2020), António Felizardo’ [https://dicionario-biografico.caravelas.fcsh.unl.pt/node/144].

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).

Pieter Van Tichelen, ‘The Mandolin in Portugal (ca. 1770-1830)’, Vantichelen.Name. Musicological & plucked strings gibberish (2021) [https://www.vantichelen.name/2021/05/02/the-mandolin-in-portugal-ca-1770-1830/].

Ernesto Vieira, Diccionario biographico de musicos portuguezes: historia e bibliographia da musica em Portugal, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Typographia Mattos Moreira & Pinheiro, 1900), ii, pp. 188-189.