Eurico Thomaz de Lima and Brazil: Transatlantic musical interactions in the first half of 20th Century

Abstract

In the course of his career as a pianist, composer and pedagogue, Eurico Thomaz de Lima (1908–1989) crossed the Atlantic to Brazil twice – in 1949 and 1952 – promoting works by leading figures in early 20^th-century Portuguese classical music and establishing professional and personal relationships with prominent names in the Brazilian music scene, such as Villa-Lobos, Waldemar Henrique, Camargo Guarnieri, Barrozo Netto, Najla Jabôr, and Carmen Vasconcelos. These trips and contacts had an impact on Thomaz de Lima’s piano output, but also on the process of spreading Brazilian classical music in Portugal, both through concerts with works by these composers and through his activities as a teacher. Testimonies of this cultural interchange can be identified in scores given to the pianist-composer, or which he himself acquired in Brazil, in his exchanges of letters, through the musician’s own photographic records, in concert programmes and various news items published in Brazilian and Portuguese periodicals. An analysis of sources related to his first tour (1949), based particularly on the Eurico Thomaz de Lima archive held by the Department of Music of the University of Minho, enables us to reconstitute these processes of interchange, their impact, the social networks that he established and the reasons that motivated the second tour, as well as offering new biographical information about this Portuguese musician.