Soares, António José

António José Soares (1783-1865) was an organist, composer, teacher and copyist. Born in Lisbon, he was admitted to the seminary in Vila Viçosa in 1796, studying with Joaquim Cordeiro Galão (b.1762) before receiving a dispensation from D. João VI to join the Seminário da Patriarcal in 1802 where his teachers were João José Baldi and António Leal Moreira (Alegria 1983, p. 269; Vieira 1900, ii, p. 238; Fernandes 2009, i, p. 244). He eventually became a master at the Seminário da Patriarcal in succession to Leal Moreira in 1819, initially offering to do so without salary on the condition that he be considered for the vacancy permanently. The exercise he submitted to the competition for this post appears to survive in the Fundo do Conde de Redondo (P-Ln, F.C.R. 205//11). Like Frei José Marques e Silva’s exercise for the same competition (P-Ln, F.C.R. 198//5), it is headed by the names of two senior figures, Eleutério Franco Leal and José Toti.

Vieira claimed to have owned ‘almost all the scores that he [i.e. Soares] wrote’, which numbered 120 in total and consisted mainly of sacred music, including a notable corpus intended for the organs at the Basilica of Mafra Palace; these manuscripts are today located at P-Ln.

José Augusto Alegria, História da Capela e Colégio dos Santos Reis de Vila Viçosa (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1983).

João M. B. de Azevedo, Biblioteca do Palácio Nacional de Mafra. Catálogo dos Fundos Musicais (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1985).

Cristina Fernandes, ‘O sistema produtivo da Música Sacra em Portugal no final do Antigo Regime: a Capela Real e a Patriarcal entre 1750 e 1807’, PhD thesis (Universidade de Évora, 2009).

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. 867.

Kate Elizabeth Pearson, ‘Three organ quartets by António Soares: a study in part distribution for the organs in the basilica of Mafra, Portugal’, Masters dissertation (Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, 2012).

Ernesto Vieira, Diccionario biographico de musicos portuguezes: historia e bibliographia da musica em Portugal, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Typographia Mattos Moreira & Pinheiro, 1900), ii, pp. 328-330.