Maestro Antonio de Figueiredo  

by Ben Antao

Last year when I read on The Goan Forum that August 20, 2003 marked the birth centennial of Maestro Antonio de Figueiredo, my mind flashed back to 1963 in Panjim  where I had interviewed him for the Navhind Times. I remember being touched by the music maestro’s gesture to teach me free of charge how to play the cello. 

During the course of the interview, I had mentioned how as a teenager in Margao I had wanted to learn to play the violin, but for some reason my tarvotti father had to sell the violin he had bought for me. The wavy-haired director of the Goa Academy of Music stood up and, after examining my hands and the tips of my fingers, said, “You have to learn to play the violin when you’re a baba, not when you’ve acquired the barba.”  

His play on words made me chuckle and I nodded in appreciation of his wit. “The instrument for your age is the cello,” he said. Then he walked across the large drawing room, fetched a cello from a corner, and proceeded to instruct me on the mechanics of how to sit and hold the bass instrument, “slightly leaning away from you, like this,” and strike the bow.   

“Come to my house once a week and I’ll teach you to play the cello in six months. No charge,” he said.  

I was bowled over by his magnanimous offer, a 28-year-old who had met him just that morning for the first time. Later when I mentioned this to Editor Lambert Mascarenhas, he let out a hearty laugh. After mulling over the offer for a few days, I decided that the maestro was probably right about the “barba” and let it go at that.  

Being curious since last August to read that interview, I seized the opportunity during my visit to Goa earlier this year to read what I had written in the bound 1963 volume of the NT in the Central Library in Panjim.       

A couple of months ago, I was reading Goa A Daughter’s Story by Maria Aurora Couto, who floats the intriguing implication that her father, Dr. Francisco de Figueiredo (Chico) descended into heavy drinking over his frustration at losing the professorship of music at the Panjim Lyceum to the Maestro who had returned with higher qualifications from Portugal.

The following appeared in my Round & About Goa column on August 18, 1963 under the headline Maestro Figueiredo.

Next to culinary art, music ranks high in the domain of Goan life. If the famous Mangesh has provided India with a nightingale of the Indian screen, Lata Mangeshkar, paddy-rich Loutolim has produced a great exponent of Western classical music. He is the wavy-haired Antonio de Figueiredo, 60, Director of the Goa Academy of Music.

An accomplished musician, Figueiredo has conducted orchestras in Lisbon, Paris, Siena, Florence and Bombay. On the occasion of the Prime Minister’s visit to Goa in May last, he had adapted the Goan “manddo” to orchestral music in the concert presented by the Goa Academy of Music. Mr. Nehru and Mrs. Indira Gandhi were reported to be greatly impressed at this performance. The Prime Minister also expressed his appreciation of the maestro’s arrangement of the Jana Gana Mana.

 Like all school children of his day, Figueiredo learned the ABC of music in the parochial school of his village. But unlike many, he did not allow his passion for music to lie dormant and could play the violin when still a child of nine. Wanting to express himself in music soon became an obsession with him. At the fifth year at the lyceum he sold his bicycle, which he said he loved the most, to buy a music book and a stand.

In 1927 he proceeded to Lisbon, where he underwent a course at the Conservatorio de Musica, studying the musical science, composition and the history of music. On his return to Goa in 1933, he was appointed professor of music at the Lyceum school where he still teaches.

In 1947 he went to Portugal again and while there secured a scholarship for higher study of music, including conducting of orchestras, at the Conservatoire de Paris.

Figueiredo organized the Symphony Orchestra of Goa in 1952 and conducted its first concerto at the time of the Exposition of St. Francis Xavier. The following year he founded the Goa Academy of Music and has been its director till today.

He believes that Goans have a flair for music. His parochial schools of old were the nurseries of music and many outstanding musicians of today had learnt the elements of music there. But in the present day, Figueiredo said, the teaching of music was neglected, if not totally absent in the primary schools.

Music needs to be taught at a young age, he emphasized, adding in Portuguese that “estuda-se musica com baba e Latin com barba.” 

Ben Antao
Toronto, Canada
August 17, 2004

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