Background
Luis de Freitas Branco was born into an aristocratic family who for centuries had had close ties to the royal family in Portugal.
Luis de Freitas Branco was born into an aristocratic family who for centuries had had close ties to the royal family in Portugal.
He had a cosmopolitan education, studied piano and violin beginning in childhood and began composing at a precocious age. He studied music in Berlin and Paris, where he worked with Engelbert Humperdinck and other composers.
He returned to Portugal and became professor of composition starting in 1916 at the Lisbon Conservatory of Music, where he became a leading force in restructuring musical education. There he taught, among many others, Joly Braga Santos. During the 1930s he increasingly encountered political difficulties with the authorities and was finally forced into retirement from his official duties in 1939.
He continued to compose, however, and to pursue his research into Portuguese early music, publishing several books and numerous articles
He was the brother of the Portuguese conductor Pedro de Freitas Branco. He had an illegitimate son by Maria Clara Dambert Filgueiras, of French descent: Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) by Manoel de Oliveira Wild Cattle (1934) Mistérios de Lisboa (2010) by Raúl Ruiz.