MÁRIO EMÍLIO DE MORAIS SACRAMENTO

Mário Emílio De Morais Sacramento (July 7, 1920 - March 27, 1969) was a Portuguese physician and essayist that became famous for his antifascist activities against the dictatorial regime led by Oliveira Salazar in Portugal.

Mário Sacramento was born in Ílhavo, in the Aveiro District and studied medicine in Coimbra, Lisbon, Porto and finally graduated in Paris. He started his writing activity very soon and became a regular contributor to several newspapers and magazines, such as "O Diabo" (The Devil), "Sol Nascente" (Rising Sun), "Vértice" or the "Diário de Lisboa" (Lisbon Daily).

Sacramento also published several essays about Eça de Queiroz, Moniz Barreto, Cesário Verde, Fernando Namora or Fernando Pessoa, which made him become a very respected person among the Portuguese intellectuals.

Due to his intellectual activities and Anti-fascist and democratic feelings, Sacramento soon developed connections to the Portuguese Communist Party, at the time, the only organized resistance movement against the dictatorship. For that reason he became a member of the Central Commission of the youth wing of the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), the only opposition movement "allowed" by the regime, and which congregated almost all those who were against the dictatorship. There, he developed his political activities and became famous among the democratic resistance. He was one of the main organizers of the 1st and 2nd Republican Congresses in Aveiro, congresses that in a somewhat secret way, traced important guidelines to the anti-fascist struggle, and was honoured in the 3rd, only carried out after his death.

Sacramento was arrested for 5 times by the political polie, PIDE, the first time in 1938, when he was a member of the students’ union in a high school of Aveiro.

 As a result of a long election process he was chosen as the patron of our school. After the agreement of the City Hall authorities, his name was finally given to the school, on the 27^th March, 2002.

One of his most remarkable sentences was:

“Make a better world, do you hear me? Don’t force me to come back!”

FERNANDO LOPES GRAÇA

Born in Tomar on the 17th December 1906.

In 1923, he attends the  Curso Superior do Conservatório of  Lisbon.

In 1928 he would also attend the Course of  Historical and Philosophical Science in the University of Lisbon, but he ends up by abandoning it in 1931, as a protest against the repression  on students during an academic strike.

In 1932, the day he, with the highest marks, finished the examinations to become a teacher of solfeggio and piano in the National Conservatory, he is arrested by the political police, is sent to jail and finally moved to Alpiarça.

In 1934 he applies for a scholarship in the music area, in Paris. He wins the contest but the decision of the jury is annulled by order of the political police. In September 1935 he is arrested one more time, and sent to the Forte of Caxias, the prison where political dissidents were kept.

 He is liberated in 1937 and goes to Paris, where he studies Composition and Orchestration with Koechlin.

 He returns to Portugal in 1939, after having refused the French nationality.

In 1945 he becomes a member of the MUD  (Movement of Democratic Unity)  creating  the Choir of the Grupo Dramático Lisbonense, later the Coro da Academia dos Amadores de Música.

His ‘Portuguese Regional Songs’ and ‘Heroic Songs’ are sung by the choir all over the country.

At that period he becomes a member of the Portuguese Communist Party.  The repression by the fascist regime grows and becomes more evident.

In the fifties, national orchestras are forbidden to play works by Fernando Lopes Graça, his copyrights as an author are denied to him and his teaching certificate is annulled.

He is the author of a vast literary work with reflexions on Portuguese and contemporary music, but the most important is his musical heritage, with concerts for piano and orchestra, choral pieces of national folkloric inspiration, his ‘Requiem for the Victims of Fascism’ (1979).  Fernando Lopes Graça died in Cascais, on the 27th November 1994.