Barbosa Machado was a Portuguese bibliographer. He was born Lisbon, 31 March 1682 and died there 9 August 1772. He matriculated in 1708 as a student of canon law at Coimbra University and on 2 July 1724 he was ordained a priest. On 4 November 1728 he became abad of the church of S Adrião at Cever in the diocese of Lamego. His life work was a four-volume bibliography of Portuguese authors, Bibliotheca lusitana, historica, critica, e cronologica, which is especially valuable to the music historian because he included 127 composers and theorists. Insofar as he could find them, he listed not only their published works but also their manuscripts, noting in which library they were located. Since he had access to the royal music library before its destruction in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, he listed numerous works now lost. In vol.iv, pp.593–6, he indexed musicians under ‘Musica’, thus making it simple for later writers to plagiarize his musical entries. Foreign reference works still copy Vasconcellos's Os musicos portuguezes without recognizing Barbosa Machado's work as the source of everything that he wrote on biographies. Barbosa Machado omitted Ayres Fernandes, Luis Moram, Pedro de Cristo, Pedro Esperança and several others connected with the priory of Santa Cruz at Coimbra. His most substantial error was listing Francisco Guerrero as a native of Beja, a mistake into which he was trapped by a pseudonymously issued forgery of 1734.
Barbosa Machado donated his superb library to King José I. João VI took the bulk of it to Brazil, where it formed the nucleus of the national library; it includes 13 important volumes of villancicos sung at Lisbon between 1640 and 1722. In 1825 Dibdin rightly classed Barbosa Machado's four volumes as ‘a work beyond all competition and beyond all praise … the great Oracle’, a judgment still valid.
Robert Stevenson
