These Duas Melodias are the work of one of the most important Portuguese composers of the last century, Luís de Freitas Branco. Written for the orchestra’s string section in 1909, they are pieces of great beauty that, despite their qualities, remained forgotten until recently. They were heard again in May 2006, performed by the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa under the baton of conductor Cesário Costa.
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As he entered adulthood, and still under the influence of his uncle João—playwright and essayist—Luís de Freitas Branco experimented with the creative appropriation of pre-existing, folk-based musical sources. This interest would bear fruit a decade later, in 1919, when he composed his Alentejana Suite No. 1. But it was in 1907 that his relative persuaded him to take the cante alentejano (the traditional polyphonic singing of the Alentejo region) and attempt something similar to what Edvard Grieg had done in the 1870s, when he drew inspiration from Scandinavian folk songs. Indeed, when listening to the Two Melodies composed in 1909, it is easy to be reminded of the Norwegian composer’s Two Elegiac Melodies. Both are written for string orchestra and unfold in a compassionate, mournful register. Less evident, however, is the imprint of Alentejo musical tradition. In this particular case, the young composer preferred to emphasise the contrapuntal interplay between the different instrumental parts, woven through persistent harmonic suspensions and broadly contoured melodic gestures.
Yet those years were above all marked by the spread of new modernist sonorities. In February 1910, Freitas Branco settled in Berlin, and the following year in Paris, with the aim of deepening and broadening his musical knowledge. The Romantic expressiveness of the Two Melodies thus gave way to more aesthetically daring experiments. It is therefore unsurprising that they remained forgotten in a drawer for so long—and equally unsurprising that they have now joined the ranks of his most frequently performed works.
Rui Campos Leitão