José Mauricio Nunes Garcia: Requiem: Chœur Mixte et Ensemble

Garcia, born in 1767 in Rio de Janeiro, and priest and music director at the cathedral there, is still hardly known. Among his spiritual works are four settings of the Mass for the Dead. The present „Missa dos Defunktos“ was commissioned by the Portuguese King Dom Joao VI in the memory of Queen Maria I, who died in 1816. The composition, in the key of D minor, shows parallels in several places to Mozart’s Requiem, which Garcia performed two years later [1819] for the first time in Brasil.