1868–1948 · Portugal
José Vianna da Motta (1868–1948) was a Portuguese pianist, composer and teacher, among the final students to work with Franz Liszt. He toured widely abroad and ran the conservatoire in Lisbon until 1938. The site holds eight of his editions for piano, all at the upper-intermediate level.
José Vianna da Motta was born on 22 April on the island of São Tomé, then a Portuguese territory. His father, the pharmacist José António da Motta, a native of Lisbon, opened a pharmacy on the island and was himself a keen amateur musician; his mother, Inês Joaquina de Almeida Vianna, was born on São Tomé. The family later moved to mainland Portugal and settled at Colares, not far from Sintra. The boy soon showed unusual gifts: he played the piano and wrote pieces for it himself.
He wrote his first piece, 'Primeira inspiração musical' ('First Musical Inspiration'), in 1873. Over the years of childhood, until 1883, he produced more than fifty works, chiefly for solo piano: ballroom pieces, marches, variations and fantasies on popular operatic themes.
In 1874 his father took him to court. King Ferdinand II and his wife, the Countess of Edla, agreed to pay for his education. Until 1882 the young pianist appeared many times, at private evenings and at public concerts alike, among them in the Salão da Trindade. He studied at the Lisbon Conservatoire and finished there in 1882.
After finishing in 1882, Vianna da Motta travelled to Berlin at the expense of the same royal patron. He entered the Scharwenka conservatoire. Xaver Scharwenka taught him the piano, and Xaver's brother Philipp taught him composition. At the same time he studied with Carl Schaeffer, a member of the Wagner Society who, judging by Vianna da Motta's diaries, influenced him greatly.
In the summer of 1885 he took Franz Liszt's piano course in Weimar and became one of the Hungarian master's last pupils. He later wrote about that experience in his books on Liszt and on German music.
In 1887 he attended Hans von Bülow's performance course in Frankfurt am Main, and he described those lessons in his letters. In 1896 he published a supplement to Bülow's lectures as written down by Theodor Pfeiffer.
Vianna da Motta's professional career lasted until 1945. In 1888 he made his first tour of Europe: in Copenhagen and Helsinki he accompanied the violinist Pablo de Sarasate, and in Moscow and St Petersburg the violinist Tivadar Nachéz.
In 1892 he crossed the Atlantic for the first time, and in New York he got to know Ferruccio Busoni. In 1896 he played in Brazil for the first time, on a tour alongside the violinist Bernardo Moreira de Sá. Further tours took him back to South America, and Buenos Aires was one of the cities where he performed most often.
In all he gave more than a thousand concerts, in Germany, Portugal, France, Spain, England, Italy, Denmark, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, Morocco and Russia. He played before presidents, kings and emperors. The press and the critics singled out his performances of Bach, Beethoven and Liszt for praise.
Vianna da Motta was known as a virtuoso, yet he took Bach and Beethoven very seriously. In 1927, for the centenary of Beethoven's death, he played a series of concerts in Lisbon that included all 32 of the piano sonatas. He gave the first Portuguese performances of many works, both long-established ones and ones by his contemporaries.
He also put lesser-known composers into his programmes. In 1903, at Wigmore Hall in London, he played works by Charles-Valentin Alkan, and he arranged Alkan's pieces for the pedalier for two hands.
He and Busoni became close friends. For Busoni's series of piano-concerto concerts in Berlin, Vianna da Motta wrote the programme notes. On 31 July 1900 in Weimar the two gave a concert of Liszt's music, playing Liszt's arrangement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on two pianos.
He played alongside Pablo de Sarasate, Guilhermina Suggia, Alice Barbi, Tivadar Nachéz, Enrique Fernández Arbós, Bernardo Moreira de Sá and Eugène Ysaÿe. Besides Busoni, a close friend of his was Isidor Philipp, and he was also in contact with Alfred Cortot.
On 25 October 1906 he made ten piano rolls for the Welte-Mignon system, three of them carrying his own compositions.
Around the turn of the twentieth century he taught in Berlin. The outbreak of the First World War forced him to leave his Berlin home: in 1915 he settled in Geneva and ran a class in virtuoso technique there until 1917. In 1917 he returned to Portugal for good.
In Lisbon he founded the Concert Society (Sociedade de Concertos) and became its first artistic director. From 1918 to 1920 he was music director of the Lisbon Symphony Orchestra.
He directed the Lisbon Conservatoire until 1938. In his first year in the post, together with Luís de Freitas Branco, he reorganised the teaching of music there, modernising the programmes and teaching methods. He did not stop giving concerts in the meantime.
His pupils included the pianist Sequeira Costa, the musicologist João de Freitas Branco and the composer Fernando Lopes-Graça. He regularly published articles on piano technique and performance in German and Portuguese music journals, along with studies of the music of Wagner and Liszt. He contributed to the journals 'A Arte Musical' (1898–1915) and 'Lusitânia' (1924–1927).
In his last years he brought out two books in Portuguese: 'Vida de Liszt' (1945), about Liszt, and the two-volume 'Música e músicos alemães' (1947), 'Music and Musicians of Germany'.
In Germany he was given the title of court pianist by Carl Eduard of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In Portugal he became a Grand Officer of the Order of Saint James of the Sword in 1920 and of the Order of Christ in 1930, and in 1938 he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint James of the Sword.
Vianna da Motta married three times. His first wife, Margarethe Marie Lemke, died in Leipzig in 1900. In 1902 he married his second wife, the concert singer Anna Harden, who came from Hungary, in Charlottenburg (Berlin); they divorced in 1911. These two marriages produced no children. His third marriage, to the actress Berta de Bivar, took place in Lisbon in 1912, and they had two daughters, Inês and Leonor Micaela. The couple divorced in 1923.
José Vianna da Motta died in Lisbon in 1948. He spent his last years in the home of his daughter Inês. He was buried in the Alto de São João cemetery, and on 1 October 2016 his remains were moved to a new tomb in the Prazeres cemetery.
In 1957 a music competition bearing his name was founded in his honour.
The first period of Vianna da Motta's output covers his childhood: from 1873 to 1883 he wrote ballroom pieces, marches, variations and fantasies on operatic themes. Among them are 'Resignação', Op. 39 (1880), a piece for the left hand, and 'Three Romances without Words', Op. 51 (1882). The second period, roughly 1884 to 1895, coincided with his studies in Germany and shows German influence: he wrote piano pieces, concertante works, chamber music and songs. To these years belong the Piano Concerto in A major (1886–1887), the Trio in B minor (1888–1889) and the Sonata in B flat major for violin and piano (1894).
The third period is tied to Portuguese traditional song. It began soon after the British Ultimatum of 1890 with the First Portuguese Rhapsody, inspired by fados and dedicated to King Carlos. Five Portuguese Rhapsodies for piano followed (1891 to about 1895), as did the 'Portuguese Songs', Op. 10, for voice and piano (1893–1895). From 1908 Vianna da Motta almost gave up composing.
The most telling works are the symphony 'À Pátria' ('To the Homeland', 1895) and the choral cantata on Camões's poem 'The Lusiads'. In them German Romantic aesthetics merged with a new Portuguese nationalism. The symphony is regarded as his most important work: in it he applied Liszt's idea of programme music and, it seems, was the first in Portugal to use genuine folk themes in a symphony. Most of his music was written abroad, before he returned to Portugal. His piano works also include 'Two Piano Pieces after A. Böcklin' (1891) and the Ballade, Op. 16 (1905), on two Portuguese melodies. He also wrote songs for voice and piano.
Vianna da Motta holds a special place in the history of Portuguese music: he was the first to set out consciously to seek and create a national 'serious' music for his country. The symphony, his piano works and his songs for voice and piano bear witness to this. His other works include a chamber work with piano, the Quartet in A minor for violin, viola and cello (1889, unfinished) and a String Quartet in E flat major (1887–1888). He composed in childhood and later too, but from 1908 he wrote almost nothing, while his work as performer, teacher and musicologist went on throughout his life.